Reading Notes: December 18th, 2021

“The [objective component of experience is the] component of the not-self within my center of experience on which I especially concentrate my attention in doing so….When I see an object, the objective component, the relevant given part of the not-self, possesses shape and color, and perhaps “suggested” qualities such as a degree of felt warmth or coolness. Likewise, it normally possesses as part of its inherent character qualities pertaining to the thing’s recognized or actualized use value and its cultural significance….The given shape of what lies within experience is essentially perspectival, [and] depend[s] upon the position of the perceiver….And, of course, there are all the facts about the way in which the sensible character of the objective component of experience depends, as very little learning shows us, on the…varying states of [ourselves].The aesthetic aspect of every form and quality of the objective component, the perspectival character of every shape found there, and the manner in which the particular uses we envisage or utilize in the thing bite into every aspect of the given object’s inherent being, all make nonsense of the idea that anything resembling it in anything but the most abstract of ways could exist outside consciousness. These facts make nonsense too of the more naïve kind of representational realism according to which the objective component is a close likeness of the thing we perceive by way of it. Naïve realism is incoherent, then, so long as it includes the idea that the thing perceived has, or could have, a being outside all consciousness.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 42-44) 

“If the material thing is a concrete universal, there must be a particular type of concrete relation which links its instances, and there must be an abstract universal present in these instances thus concretely related….Roughly speaking, the concrete relations are a matter of the way in which the whole set of present versions of the material thing have been generated by a previous such set to the shared character of which the present shared character is peculiarly due, and the way in which this present set’s shared character is in process of determining the shared character of the set to follow. That a certain set of perspectival versions of a physical thing are instances of one single physical thing as it is at a moment turns on their being different determinations of a certain common character (that common character which qua being exemplified by them is the thing at that moment), on their occurring within actual or possible sensory fields which are likewise different determinations of a certain common character (that of the environment) and on their having been generated by, and themselves being in process of generating, a further set of perspectival variants on a common theme having a qualitative continuity with their common theme such that these momentary common themes are themselves variations on a still more generic common theme which passes through these variations with a certain lawfulness. Putting it more loosely still, and treating the various perspectival versions as continuants in their own right, we might say that they are different perspectival versions of the same thing because they all shift their character together.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 70-71) 

“The claim that the different perspectival versions of a thing are instances of a single abstract universal, concretized by this set, may seem to exaggerate the element of identity in their character. But I think the identity is usually much greater than we may be inclined to recognize in the abstract, and that even where it is lacking, they are still susceptible of interpretation as adumbrations of perspectives which really would be variations on the identical. The extent to which one’s different perspectival presentations of an object possess characters which are as genuinely alternative specifications of an identical generic form of being as are the different sorts of triangularity, the different shades of red, or the character of different performances of (say) Beethoven's fifth symphony, increases with one’s growing knowledge of the object or its type. The fully common theme is a kind of ideal towards which our varied experiences of the same object move as our knowledge qualifies the immediate quality of the presented version by a sense of how the thing would appear from different perspectives on it...” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 71) 

“The material object in its fullness…is the common theme, the concretized abstract universal, which would be present to such an idea observer. His various “presentations” of the object would be particulars actualizing specific or determinate versions of that abstract universal….The presentation, without being a concrete universal in our present sense, is, none the less, that universal which is its total character tied down to a particular locus. In such a situation, the material object would be literally an immanent component with the center of experience, since…a universal is there wherever it is actualized. On the other hand, its ability to be different from itself in different versions is explained as a case of the general fact that a generic universal is wholly and identically there in each actualized differentiation of itself, but as different from itself in another.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 72-73) 

“Since we do not normally or ever perceive objects with the kind of maximal knowledge of our ideal observer, it seems that what is present of the object, qua concrete universal, in our consciousness is some universal which can function as adumbration of the total universal theme, which, as concretized, is the thing perceived itself. That can be expressed properly, and in a way suggestive of how we ordinarily think ourselves related to the real thing, by saying that this real material thing is present in our consciousness in a manner less than completely full, via an adumbration of it. That it is that actualized form of being rather than another of which it is the adumbration, consists partly in the intrinsic way in which that would be its fulfilment of its own nature, and partly in the fact that it is that which would enter our consciousness in its full being if appropriate enquiry, triggered by that adumbrating form, and continuing through harmoniously enriching presentations developing the theme vaguely suggested, and without kinaesthesias as of travel away therefrom, reached some ideal terminus. Thus, as we come to know an object better, our perceptual awareness of it involves direction on a component of experience in which it is more and more fully present.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 73-74) 

“[The identity theory holds] that every state and element of consciousness is, in truth, synthetically identical with some element, state or process in the brain….The crucial thing, of course, on which the identity theorists insists is that A and B may be identical, although the expressions “A” and “B” may single them out in such different ways that it is an empirical discovery that they are so. We may have known of the existence of something answering to each expression without knowing that we are dealing with the same thing in each case, or have known of the existence of something answering to the first expression without realising that there was such a very different way of specifying that same thing as is represented by the other expression. We have the old example of the morning and evening star, and more significant examples such as that of the identity of a lightning flash with a certain discharge of electrons. In every version of the identity theory proper, it is contended that every particular mental event is identical with some particular brain event….We must never allow ourselves to think of identity as some kind of correlation between two closely related things….[Identity theorists] base their position, in effect, upon the possibility, which certainly exists, of one and the same thing answering to two different definite descriptions, not equivalent in meaning to each other. The placing of a sign of identity between the two such descriptions, or between singular terms which refer in virtue of the satisfaction of these descriptions by their referents, will produce a synthetic identity truth. There is also, perhaps, the possibility of a synthetic identity truth where there is a label, like what used to be called a logically proper name, on the one side, and a definite description, or singular term of the kind just indicated, on the other.” (Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, 97-98)