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Ayn Rand. Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Читать онлайн.Название Ayn Rand
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isbn 9780271063744
Автор произведения Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Жанр Философия
Издательство Ingram
The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (2)
Whereas some would criticize this formulation as a rejection of Aristotle’s law of identity, Lossky argued that the Hegelian dialectic posited an “interpenetration between different and even opposite processes (inner and outer) … not an identity of opposites, but only their unity.” For Lossky, the identity of opposites is a meaningless phrase, because nothing can violate the law of contradiction. Lossky thought it far more likely that every change embodied a unity of opposing movements.28 Hence, just as motion is not a contradiction of identity, so too, we must grasp that “both movement and rest belong to the body in different respects” (Lossky 1951, 288).
LOSSKY’S EPISTEMOLOGY
In his theory of knowledge, Lossky carried on the Aristotelian and Hegelian revolt against partial or one-sided perspectives. But his attempts to transcend dualities were also fully within the Russian tradition of philosophical synthesis. In The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge (1906), Lossky’s first major book on epistemology, there is a sustained polemic against rationalism and empiricism. Lossky argued that empiricism must inevitably dissolve into sensationalism and subjectivism. Though rationalism and empiricism are “diametrically opposed,” they share a commonality, “the supposition that subject and object are isolated from one another” (Lossky [1906] 1919, 68). In Lossky’s view, epistemology
must relinquish the assumption made by both rationalists and empiricists that subject and object are isolated from one another, that the object lies outside the boundaries of knowledge, and that what can be known of it is either its effect or its copy innate in the subject. The new theory of knowledge must destroy the barriers thus erected between subject and object, recognise their fundamental unity, and in this manner bring about their reconciliation. (69)
Both rationalism and empiricism lead to one-sidedness, such that they exaggerate the importance of one subjective activity or another. Whereas empiricism emphasizes the subject’s sensory data, and rationalism stresses the subject’s reason, Kant’s critical philosophy attempted to resolve the opposition by accentuating “the structure of the cognitive faculty as a whole (sensibility, understanding and reason)” (Lossky [1906] 1919, 402). In effect, however, Kant’s resolution is equally one-sided and subjectivist. Kant’s approach attempts to connect phenomenal reality with the cognitive process, but this is achieved “at the expense of subordinating existence to knowledge … by resolving phenomena, or the world of our experience, into processes of knowledge.” Kant put forth an unsubstantiated assertion that the relations in the world were constructed by the mind, and not inherent in the structure of reality. Likewise, post-Kantian Idealists reconciled knowledge (i.e., consciousness) and existence in a similarly rationalistic manner by suggesting “that existence is nothing else than an evolution of thought.” Thus in each case, the rationalist, empiricist, and Kantian critical alternatives “institute an impassable gulf between knowledge and existence” (403).
Lossky’s intuitivism (or “intuitionalism”) aimed not to discard the old systems, but to “free them from the old exclusiveness, and so prepare a way for their reconciliation and union” (402). He refused to collapse the polarity of knowledge and existence by adopting a rationalist or empiricist perspective. His intuitivism challenged the basis of the dispute by exposing its fallacious premises, showing that each school is both “partly right and partly wrong.” Lossky rejected any “antitheses between knowledge and existence, the rational and the non-rational, the a priori and the a posteriori, the universal and the particular, the analytic and the synthetic” (403).
Though Lossky repudiated dualism, he argued that the subject and the object are independent of each other, and that in reality, there is no subordination of either to the other. Their existence is objective. Their relation is one of coordination. Lossky proposed that the subject and object be reconciled by an “epistemological coordination,” such that “although each retains its independence in respect of the other, they yet form an indissoluble unity” (69).
Citing the influence of Leibniz, Schelling, Hegel, Solovyov, and S. N. Trubetskoy, Lossky viewed this coordinating process as a “union of opposed principles … an act of fertilisation” (221). In Lossky’s view, knowledge emerged through relational comparison, “a process of differentiating the real world by means of comparison” (226). Investigation of reality requires careful differentiation, a process in which the individual abstracts “a fresh aspect” from reality in order to make the world humanly knowable (231).
Knowledge, then, is neither copy, nor symbol, nor appearance of reality, but “reality itself,” a part momentarily abstracted from the whole, but retaining its organic existential validity. Phenomena are neither “mere presentations” nor distorted copies of reality. The relations we perceive are not the artificial constructions of human cognition. They are real. According to Lossky’s intuitivism, “the relation of the phenomenal to the real is … a metaphysical and not an epistemological question” (404). Thinking is not metaphysically creative (409). Knowledge “contains” reality, it “does not create real existence.” For Lossky, the “known object is immanent in the process of cognition” (225).
This “immanent interpenetration” of the subject and the object leads to a “coordination” between them.29 Epistemological coordination links the object, the act of knowing, and the content of knowledge. Though the act of knowing is “subjective,” in that it is performed by the subject, Lossky argues that the object and the content of knowledge are “objective,” not constructed or distorted by the cognitive faculty.30 What we perceive is in the object, not a construction of our imagination. “Greenness,” like shape and density, is an aspect of the object, an aspect singled out through our mental analysis. Unlike Kant, Lossky ([1906] 1919) attempted to defend epistemological objectivity by insisting that knowledge consists of “elements of the real world. The cognitive activity merely subjects this content to a process of discrimination and comparison; it does not introduce any qualitatively new elements into the content known. It neither creates nor reproduces the real world” (405).
Lossky’s struggle against Kantian subjectivism was not merely an assertion of the objectivity of knowledge but also a defense of the necessity for a metaphysical foundation for philosophy. For Lossky, “Metaphysics is the science about the world as a whole, containing the knowledge of things as they are in themselves.” Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy had denied that such a metaphysical science was possible. For Kant, the subject could only apprehend “the objects immanent in his consciousness.” These objects are subjective presentations, “they are things, as they seem to me, but not things as they are in themselves.” Thus Kant claimed that “a science of things as they are in themselves is impossible” and epistemologically illegitimate. In Lossky’s view (1934c), Kant erroneously equated immanence in the consciousness of the subject with immanence in the subject of consciousness (265).
The specifically human component of the cognitive process then is abstraction and differentiation. The act of knowing does not alter the character of the object. The act of differentiating does not create distinctions; it merely detects “such peculiarities as already exist” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 11). But abstraction presupposes a real, complex whole. Copleston (1986) writes: “According to Lossky, the whole is prior to its parts, not constructed out of them. We can designate points in a line, but a line does not consist of juxtaposed points. If it is objected, for example, that a given atom is certainly different from any other atom, Lossky’s reply is that neither can exist apart from the system of atoms” (364).
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