Reading Notes: December 23rd, 2021

“You cannot think anything at all without adding in thought your Ego as self-conscious; you cannot abstract from your self-consciousness.” (Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 71) 

“Even in regard to the realm of thought and knowledge many writers are fond of dwelling upon the idea that each of us lives in a little world of his own, in which things are arranged in a way not quite identical with the mental cosmos of any other individual….Such exaggerations of the subjective aspect of our consciousness have their value, and even their necessity, at particular stages in the life of the individual or the race. But they contain only one side of the truth, and if they tempt us to obliterate the other side, and to entrench ourselves in a theory of subjective idealism (such as is commonly attributed to Berkeley), they become self-contradictory and contain their own refutation. The consciousness of self, it must be again pointed out, is always primarily and immediately a return upon self from objects; and though this return involves a kind of opposition between the self and that from which the return is made upon it, yet it should be remembered that a negative relation is still a relation, and, in this case at least, a necessary relation. If there is no consciousness of the object except in relation to the subject, as little is there a consciousness of the subject which is not mediated by a consciousness of the object….Hence, the idea of a pure consciousness of self, shut up in itself without any knowledge of objects, is the abstraction of one element in our life, which, in losing all relation to the other elements, loses all its own meaning….The conception of the individual subject as at any time alone with himself, conscious of nothing but his own states, and seeking nothing but his own pleasures—or, at best, seeking only the realisation of a purely subjective law—is a fiction which, logically, is as fatal to self-consciousness as it is to the consciousness of the objective world. The Berkeleian Idealism—if this view of the pure subjectivity of consciousness is to be attributed to Berkeley—rests on a confusion between the truth, that all objects are objects for a subject, and the error that the only possible objects are, or at least direct objects, for such a subject are its own states. The truth is that we are conscious of our own states as such only in distinction from, and in relation to, the objects to which we refer them; but neither these states nor anything else can be known except in relation to a subject….And a theory which speaks of inner experience as one thing and outer experience as another and totally different thing, might as well, to employ a homely illustration which Professor Ferrier was fond of using, speak of a stick with one end only. It is as absurd in the realm of spirit as in the realm of matter to suppose that we can have an inside without an outside, or an outside without an inside.” (Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 129-133) 

“Book II of [Stout’s God and Nature] continues with a criticism of Russell’s pluralism which Stout regards as based wholly on his distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. To know about X, we must have prior knowledge of X. Description involves relations and universals. Acquaintance is with particulars. It is inexpressible and neither true nor false. These particulars, thus directly known, free from all relations, constitute Russell’s pluralistic universe. Stout attacks this epistemology effectively….There is no reason to suppose that the X we know by acquaintance is self-complete, for this presupposes without justification that we know its whole nature by acquaintance. From the fact that a relation is not part of a thing we cannot conclude that this thing could exist not so related. (Relation to the inside of something is not part of the surface, but the surface could not exist without the inside.) Knowledge by acquaintance, as Russell defines it, cannot be knowledge at all; for there can be no knowledge where nothing is known about the object and where there is no truth….Stout thinks that the same dangerous distinction between knowing X and knowing about X led Locke to his puzzles about substance.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525) 

“The only solution for the difficulties both of Locke and Russell is to maintain that all knowledge of X is knowledge about X; and consequently that “X itself” is simply the group of its intrinsic characteristics united in a special form of unity. But this means all its characteristics. The problem then arises how we can claim to have direct awareness of X when we certainly do not know directly all the characteristics of X. It was Russell’s awareness of this problem which drove him to his views that the particulars we know by acquaintance are self-complete and are fully known by acquaintance. Such knowledge, he held, cannot include any knowledge of relations between characteristics which are immediately experienced and those that are not. Stout maintains on the contrary…that we can know a whole without knowing all its parts severally, that what we know directly is known in that very experience to be partial and incomplete, that in knowing some characteristics of X directly we know something about X as a whole, and that in knowing X as a whole we know something about the wider whole to which X belongs. In memory, for example, we have an immediate experience which points beyond itself to the past. The past is not immediately known, nor is it inferred.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 525-526) 

“Sensa are continuous with and akin to physical objects and are therefore material not mental in character. They are parts of matter but not parts of physical objects; they are the parts of matter directly presented to mind….Stout holds, in agreement with Berkeley and against Alexander and an early view of Moore, that no sensum could exist unperceived. For some sensa (organic) cannot exist unperceived and no line can easily be drawn between them and the others, especially if we accept Ward’s view that all sensa arise from differentiation of a relatively homogenous presentational-continuum. All sensa then are mind-dependent. But sensa are parts of matter, so matter is mind-dependent also. (This conclusion is fortified by the argument of Mind and Matter that mind cannot be matter-dependent but can be derived only from mind).” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 529) 

“The last sections of [Stout’s God and Nature] argue that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe. This is argued first in connection with cognition. The unity of the mind in knowing presupposes the systematic unity of the universe known. This Kantian argument is combined…with the non-Kantian view that the knowing mind does not determine the structure of what is known. The argument is that ignorance is always partial. What we do not know we always to some extent do know as connected with what we know already. If there were two experiences between which there could be no knowable relation this would be equivalent to saying the two experiences must belong to different minds. For experience to be related, their objects must be related too. If I were aware of two universes between which there were no intelligible relations, I should not be a single cognitive self….Thus, for me to have achieved a (relatively) unified cognitive self I must know a (partially) unified universe. And so far as my ignorance itself is, as it must be, the partial awareness of other conditions intelligibly linked with what I know already, I have (potentially) a fully unified cognitive mind, but this potentiality presupposes a fully unified universe.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 533) 

“Knowing and being then are essentially and inseparably united aspects of the whole universe. [Stout is here, I think, converting the proposition, which he has so far proved, that the unity of the mind implies the unity of the universe, and suggesting that the unity of the universe implies a single universal mind. But this conversion is undefended.] It follows that there must always have been knowing minds or mind.” (Mabbott, Review of Stout’s “God and Nature”, 534)