Reading Notes: April 6th, 2022

“As in every relation, two correlates can be found here. The one correlate is the act of consciousness, the other is that upon which it is directed…the two correlates are only distinctionally separable from one another.” (Brentano, Descriptive Psychology, 21-24) 

“What could it mean to be, “a process which takes place on the very confines of the mental,” and yet not part of the mental? Does getting the object very close to the mental make intentionality any easier to explain how the mind grasps objects? Are the problems of perception alleviated in the slightest if I can touch the object in question to my eye? George Berkeley’s strategy for eliminating every possible epistemological and ontological gap wherein skepticism might root was to demonstrate that it was impossible for anything to exist without either being perceived or a perceiver. Berkeley found a way to secure a necessary connection between sensations and objects, and between concepts and perceptions. However, in doing so, Berkeley also eliminated the intentionality of the mental. [For Berkeley] ideas do not intend objects; they are the objects.” (Jesson, The Ontological and the Intentional Status of Fregean Senses, 73-74) 

“The lasting value of Frege’s contribution to the issue of intentionality rests in his insistence on drawing the distinction between the psychological and the objective. Where he fell short was in explaining how the objective can be made present within the subjective while maintaining the absolute distinction between the two. Ironically, it was Frege’s relentless quest to undermine psychologism that led him to separate the Thought content from the mental act and ultimately this makes his account incapable of linking the act to a mind-independent object. After all, external content is just as external as the objects that Frege sought to reach. Frege’s failure to take subjectivity seriously in that he could not account for the intentional capacities of mental acts ultimately makes his case for objectivity untenable….Husserl attempted to overcome these problems by stressing the explanatory importance of the mental act. He provided grounding for intersubjectivity by treating Senses as universals present in mental acts as properties of those acts.” (Jesson, The Ontological and the Intentional Status of Fregean Senses, 77) 

“The Absolute exists, because the idea of the Absolute is not the Absolute itself. The Absolute reveals itself through the negativity, through the breakdown of any human effort to form an adequate conception. The only adequate conception is a negative conception, which declares that it is not that which it pretended to think, namely a “being greater than which nothing can be conceived.” The human idea of the Absolute is transcending itself by negating itself as an absolute idea. The Absolute is that being which cannot be conceived to be identical with any human subjective notion in anybody’s head. Its briefest notation is the paradox: A is not A. This logic of the dialectical paradox is the logic of the Absolute. It is the shadow of the Absolute. The absolute Being is that which is not identical with any one of its many and opposite creations in which it appears as this ground. It is that which it is not. But dialectically it is also and likewise the negation of this negation, it is not outside and apart from the many transitive reflections and notions, which the creature forms of it. As Being in its absolute and fully concrete sense it exists precisely in those transitive processes, in whose breakdown and transitivity its absoluteness is revealed. It is not what becomes visible as its empirical or ideal manifestation, and it is not allowing them to stay in themselves as if they were absolute themselves. It negates this negation of itself and takes it back to itself….For this dialectical reason, the idea of the absolute is the only idea whose thinking involves reality. If Absolute Being “greater than which nothing can be conceived” were only an “idea in my head.” It would not be the idea which we pretended to think and to understand, since an “idea in my head” is not that “Being greater than which nothing can be conceived.” (Mueller, The Shadow of the Absolute, 52) 

“The brilliant newcomer who has just entered the lists with “A Defense of Idealism” appears to have reckoned it part of her task to meet the realist’s question, Why should there be nothing not experience? with a direct answer. And in so far as it is an answer, to show that all we know is within our experience, she does it with great skill. She gets a fulcrum for her lever in what is still regarded as mental; for not everything has been extruded from the self by the New Realists, or at least not by all of them; and she shows how inevitably the mental, if the Realist allows it at all, expands till it spreads over the limits within which he has tried to confine it.” (Scott, Review of “The New Realism” in “The Quarterly Review,” 133) 

“Another writer goes so far as to declare that “sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real.” But Mr. Bradley’s phrase is much the most comprehensive, for it is immediately defined by him in this more expanded form: “Feeling, thought, and volition (any groups under which we class psychic phenomena) are all the material of existence.” Such a declaration as this must be accepted as final if we may be allowed to give it in the following shape: In cognitive experience all we can mean by reality is implicated.” (Ladd, A Theory of Reality, 114) 

“So-called “states of consciousness” are not, that is to say, independent entities; they are states of a subject, modes in which that subject lives and acts. And so-called “contents of consciousness,” though not necessarily actions or affections of a subject, must be contents for a subject.” (Hicks, Professor Ward’s Psychological Principles, 5) 

“We may note first of all that the phrase “internal sense” is a complete misnomer, save where reference is intended solely to what is internal to the organism. But here “internal” is meant to distinguish what occurs “in the mind” from what occurs out of the body, and involves a correlation of “in” and “not in,” i.e., “out of,” which is as absurd as contrasting what occurs in a given day with what occurs outside of a given door.” (Ward, The Principles of Psychology, 15) 

“The so-called operations and states of consciousness are not mere modes in vacuo: they imply an active and affectible subject, and it can only conduce to clearness to make this fact as explicit as possible. The so-called contents of consciousness again, though not necessarily actions or affections of the subject, are never objects per se: to be contents of consciousness they must be objects for a subject. The form of consciousness cannot, then, be expressed by contrasting consciousness with unconsciousness in respect of intensity; nor by contrasting psychical phenomena with physical, the inextended with the extended, no indeed by any single term which does not recognize the duality of subject and object. The one term that does recognize this duality most simply is experience.” (Ward, The Principles of Psychology, 24) 

“Subjective modifications no doubt are always one constituent of individual experience, but always as correlative—directly or remotely—to objective modifications or changes—present or prospect—in the objective continuum. If experience were throughout subjective, not merely would the term “subjective” itself be meaningless, not merely would the conception of the objective never arise, but the entirely impersonal and intransitive process that remained, though it might be described as “absolute becoming,” could not be called even solipsism, least of all real experience. Wherever experience is inferred, Common Sense, then, is right in positing a real agent answering to what we know as Self and interacting with another reality answering to what each of us knows as the World. It is further right in regarding the world which each of us immediately knows as a coloured, sounding, tangible world—more exactly as a world of sensible qualities.” (Ward, The Principles of Psychology, 30) 

“It would, however, be a mistake to seek to explain the individuality of the psychological subject by reference to the individuality of the organism. Yet this mistake has been made by those who represent the individual “mind” as a complex of faculties which work cosentiently like the organs of the body, and are sometimes active and sometimes quiescent. As an animal has legs whether it is walking or not, so they suppose a mind has a memory, whether it is remembering or not. But the analogy is false. If we find anything among the facts of psychology corresponding to the parts of organs of the animal body, these would rather be the ideas, objects or presentations which constitute the “contents of consciousness.” In the unity of this content at any moment and its continuity from moment to moment we have indeed a certain counterpart to the unity and continuity of the body. Still this unity and continuity of the contents of consciousness is not what we mean by the psychological subject; on the contrary, we look to the psychological subject for an explanation of that unity. And we may have to look for it too for an explanation of the unity of the organism.” (Ward, The Principles of Psychology, 36) 

“It is impossible to express “being aware of” by one term as it is to express an equation or any other relation by one term: what knows can no more be identical with what is known than a weight with what it weighs. If a series of “feelings” is what is known or presented, then what knows, what the series is presented to, cannot be itself that series of feelings…The question is not in the first instance one of time or substance at all: it turns simply upon the fact that knowledge or consciousness is unmeaning except as it implies something knowing, or conscious of, something. But it may be replied: Granted that the formula for consciousness is something doing something, to put it generally; still, if the two somethings are the same when I touch myself or when I see myself, why may not agent and object be the same when the action is knowing or being aware of; why may I not know myself—in fact, do I not know myself? Certainly not; agent and object never are the same in the act; such terms as self-caused; self-moved, self-known, et id genus omne, either connote the incomprehensible or are abbreviated expressions as e.g. when we talk of touching oneself when one’s right hand touches one’s left.” (Ward, The Principles of Psychology, 37-38)