Reading Notes: June 6th, 2022

“For, as we have more than once insisted, there is manifestly a great deal more in my own experience than what is at any time present as the object of conscious cognition. Or, as Mr. Bradley is found of putting it, there is always more in my mind than before it. I am never fully aware at any moment even of the full nature of my own purposes and feelings….The object of knowledge has always a character of which only a fragment is ever presented to my perception or reflection in any cognitive state. Every cognitive state refers to or stands for a great deal more than it directly means to me.” (Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, 82) 

“The terms Subject and Object (Subjective and Objective) denote complimentary “moments” of a concrete fact—“moments” which necessarily emerge as correlated opposites within any and every “actual” cognizant experience when that is raised (or raises itself) to the reflective level; or when (as I expressed it less accurately before) it is subjected to philosophical (“critical”) analysis. The terms mean nothing, except when applied to “moments” within their “concrete fact”—within some specific form or individual type of “actual” knowledge; and, when thus applied, each means precisely that which, within the concretum, is not (is the contrasted correlative of) that which is meant by the other. Nothing, in short, is a subject or subjective, an object or objective, as such and per se. There is no activity of knowing—no act or process, for example, of perceiving, judging, or inferring—which when abstracted from the concrete fact of knowledge (from, for example, the perception, judgment, inference) has any character at all. The activity of knowing (perceiving, judging, inferring, &c.) is one of two “moments” inseparable within, and presupposing, a concretum; and, within that concretum, both “moments” deserve, and receive, their respective appellations (viz. subjective and objective) precisely because the one is not, and can never be or become, the other.” (Joachim, Logical Studies, 151-152) 

“A closed circle, however limited it may be in its content, is yet in a very real sense infinite. It has determinateness, but it has no end. Now, if the infinity of God in space and time be taken in the sense here indicated, no objection need be raised against it. Even the human consciousness is, in a manner, unlimited with respect to space and time. The mind of man is never fixed to the here and now, but is always ready to wander through eternity; and we can easily think of a completed consciousness, to which all time and space should appear as present. Such a consciousness would be infinite in a very real sense, but a sense utterly different from that in which a mathematical series is infinite. Its content would still be definite and limited, but it would also be perfect and complete. Now this I take to be the essential point in the positive conception of infinity which Hegel seeks to substitute for what he describes as the “bad infinite.” The true infinite is without end, not because it goes on indefinitely, but because, like a circle, it returns into itself.” (Mackenzie, The Infinite and the Perfect, 369) 

“Throughout all the continuities of consciousness that pertain to the legitimation and, in favourable cases, terminate in an evidence, there runs an identity of the supposed and eventually legitimated existent—the same that, from first to last, is an intentional pole of identity: There is no conceivable place where the life of consciousness is broken through, or could be broken through, and we might come upon a transcendency that possibly had any sense other than that of an intentional unity making its appearance in the subjectivity itself of consciousness.” (Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 235-236)