Reading Notes: January 9th, 2022

“F.H. Bradley’s Presuppositions of Critical History, a work to which Collingwood later appealed, had been written in 1874 to show that the positivist criteria failed, that history was the history of mind, the criterion of history the historian.” (Patrick, The Magdalen Metaphysicals, 41) 

“Kant had shown that the ordinary contrast between a priori and a posteriori, according to which experience was something given upon which thought had to work, was untenable. He did so by showing that thought enters into the very constitution of all we call experience….It meant, as we have seen, that thought was operative from the first, containing in itself and developing from itself at once the distinction and unity of subject and object. But it was impossible to leave the matter there, for this in turn meant that underlying all our experience there was an ideal principle at work under the pressure of which the mind could never cease from the endeavor to realize a form of experience in which all differences should be seen as necessary elements in one coherent system of truth….Having gone so far, it might have been expected that Kant should have gone one step further and shown that while in the most elementary forms of experience we can in a real sense be said to know objects, we know them only imperfectly so long as they fail to exhibit themselves as parts or necessary elements in the ideal whole to which reason points….[However], instead of holding that reflective experience, as it develops…is an ever closer approximation to knowledge of objects as they are in reality, he takes the contrary line, and, for the very reason that these objects are mixed up with thought, maintains that we fail of real knowledge of them. Instead of taking the distinction of appearance and reality as one that holds within knowledge and applying it to different stages of knowledge, he takes it as a distinction between our knowledge of “objects,” as they appear to us who know them, and “things, as they are in themselves.” Instead of condemning experience at any particular stage because it fails to correspond to its own idea, he condemns it at every stage because it involves an element of the ideal in it.” (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 279) 

“Self-consciousness, to Caird, is our normal consciousness developed into the form in which we are first fully aware of what we really are. This, of course, is an ideal to which individual consciousness approximates in various degrees, but we can realize enough of it to be able to analyze its contents. Of these the first and most obvious is the consciousness of something opposed, something given and so far independent of us—the so-called object. But along with this there is involved the consciousness of a subject in contact with and reacting upon the object. Subject and object may thus be thought of as opposite poles between which the field of experience lies. But this is a simplification which requires to be corrected by further analysis. For, along with the consciousness of opposition between subject and object, there goes a consciousness of their essential relation to each other. As the deepest element in consciousness we have the sense that they are not simply opposed to each other, but that the subject sees its own fact only as reflected in the object, and vice versa that the object reveals its true nature only as it is apprehended by a subject. It is for this reason that to contemplate our world from either aspect must end in throwing a new light on the other and raising it to a higher power. “To contemplate our experience as inner experience is simply to enrich our outer experience by bringing in the thought of its relation to feeling in ourselves as sensitive subjects”. Vice versa, to contemplate it as outer experience is to enrich our inner experience by bringing in the thought of its relation to a real objective world of which it is the revelation in and to us.” (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 281) 

“It is in the light of this movement of conscious experience, from object to subject and thence to the unity of the two, that we must read Caird’s constant insistence that consciousness of self is not a consciousness we realize by withdrawing from all objects as into a solitude out of which nothing can come, but that it is the “transparent unity-in-difference” which “contains all the keys by which we may unlock the secrets of the world…the brief abstract of the whole process of knowledge and so of all knowable reality; for as it is the first unity out of which all the principles of knowledge must be developed, so it is itself the final unity in which they are summed up and brought to completion”. (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 282) 

“In the first place we have the doctrine that man's conscious life is dominated by the assumption or the ideal of a unity in which the elements of experience are related to one another as organic parts of a systematic, ultimately logical, whole….[Caird’s aim] was to cut the ground under [an] ultimate dualism that Caird constantly returned to the point that this antithesis [between Subject and Object is] itself is one that only holds within a wider unity by whatever name we call it, thought, or spirit, self-consciousness or feeling.” (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 284-285) 

“It need hardly be said that [Caird] did not mean that subject and object were merely verbal correlatives, though this fallacy has often been attributed to him. He does not, as he has been accused of doing, begin by defining a subject as that to which an object is presented, and an object as that which is presented to a subject, and then proceed, on the ground of this question-begging definition, to proclaim that these two exist in essential and indissoluble connection with each other. What he taught was the precise opposite of this. It was that the antithesis between subject and object emerged at a certain stage in the development of experience and was bound up with its very nature. Subject and object are correlatives in language because they are correlatives in reality. We do not go from a relation we establish in our thinking to the assertion of a relation in reality, but from the relation in reality to a relation in our thought. We not only cannot think object apart from subject, subject apart from object, but we cannot think at all except upon the assumption of an identity underlying the difference. The unity which is the ideal of knowledge and the ultimate test of reality cannot, any more than the unity which is our ideal of love, be one in which all the difference between subject and object, self and other, has disappeared. The difference is as essential as the unity: it is essential to the unity. For the unity, of which we are in search, is the unity of an individuality that maintains itself, not only in spite of difference, but in and through the difference. To give up this ideal, or to use it as a means of cutting away the ground on which all self-conscious experience rests, is to give up everything.” (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 285-287) 

“It is our self-consciousness that puts the standard or test of organic unity into our hands, and the test is a deadly one if it only cuts the hand that uses it. What it is necessary to emphasize…is the positive character of the relationship between self and object that underlies the negative and is the logical prius of it. Each stands opposed to the other, yet each contains the secret of the other’s life. “Objects can be recognized as real only if, and so far as they have that unity in difference, that permanence in change, that intelligible individuality, which are the essential characteristics of mind”. Vice versa, it is only as subjects realize in themselves that which is permanent amid change, that which is one in the many, that they attain unity with themselves and rise to a sense of their own individuality and permanence. It is this reciprocity of relation between knowledge and reality that has been the central light of all the seeing of idealistic writers since Plato, and that flashes out in all their deepest utterances. It is implied in Plato’s theory in the Meno that the soul in knowing anything may be said to know all things, seeing that “all things are akin,” and that in knowing it participates in the being of things. It is still more explicitly contained in Aristotle’s doctrine that the reason in a true sense is all things that it knows. It is implied, however little he realized its full significance, in Kant’s doctrine that the Self, instead of being as he sometimes seems to think, an empty-form that recedes from its relation to the object into itself, is a centre of activity whose nature it is to go out of itself to objects and other selves, and to return thence with a new consciousness of itself and of that which is other than itself.” (Jones, The Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird, 287-288)