LITMIR.BIZ

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apprehension or awareness. Overlooking, and afterward denying, that things and qualities are present to most men most of the time as things and qualities in situations of prizing and aversion, of seeking and finding, of converse, enjoyment and suffering, of production and employment, of manipulation and destruction, he thinks of things as either totally absent from experience or else there as objects of "consciousness" or knowing. This habit is a tribute to the importance of reflection and of the knowledge which accrues from it. But a discussion of knowledge perverted at the outset by such a misconception is not likely to proceed prosperously.

      All this is not to deny that some element of reflection or inference may be required in any situation to which the term "experience" is applicable in any way which contrasts with, say, the "experience" of an oyster or a growing bean vine. Men experience illness. What they experience is certainly something very different from an object of apprehension, yet it is quite possible that what makes an illness into a conscious experience is precisely the intellectual elements which intervene—a certain taking of some things as representative of other things. My thesis about the primary character of non-reflectional experience is not intended to preclude this hypothesis—which appears to me a highly plausible one. But it is indispensable to note that, even in such cases, the intellectual element is set in a context which is non-cognitive and which holds within it in suspense a vast complex of other qualities and things that in the experience itself are objects of esteem or aversion, of decision, of use, of suffering, of endeavor and revolt, not of knowledge. When, in a subsequent reflective experience, we look back and find these things and qualities (quales would be a better word, or values, if the latter word were not so open to misconstruction), we are only too prone to suppose that they were then what they are now—objects of a cognitive regard, themes of an intellectual gesture. Hence, the erroneous conclusion that things are either just out of experience, or else are (more or less badly) known objects.

      In any case the best way to study the character of those cognitional factors which are merely incidental in so many of our experiences is to study them in the type of experience where they are most prominent, where they dominate; where knowing, in short, is the prime concern. Such study will also, by a reflex reference, throw into greater relief the contrasted characteristic traits of the non-reflectional types of experience. In such contrast the significant traits of the latter are seen to be internal organization: (1) the factors and qualities hang together; there is a great variety of them but they are saturated with a pervasive quality. Being ill with the grippe is an experience which includes an immense diversity of factors, but none the less is the one qualitatively unique experience which it is. Philosophers in their exclusively intellectual preoccupation with analytic knowing are only too much given to overlooking the primary import of the term "thing": namely, res, an affair, an occupation, a "cause"; something which is similar to having the grippe, or conducting a political campaign, or getting rid of an overstock of canned tomatoes, or going to school, or paying attention to a young woman:—in short, just what is meant in non-philosophic discourse by "an experience." Noting things only as if they were objects—that is, objects of knowledge—continuity is rendered a mystery; qualitative, pervasive unity is too often regarded as a subjective state injected into an object which does not possess it, as a mental "construct," or else as a trait of being to be attained to only by recourse to some curious organ of knowledge termed intuition. In like fashion, organization is thought of as the achieved outcome of a highly scientific knowledge, or as the result of transcendental rational synthesis, or as a fiction superinduced by association, upon elements each of which in its own right "is a separate existence." One advantage of an excursion by one who philosophizes upon knowledge into primary non-reflectional experience is that the excursion serves to remind him that every empirical situation has its own organization of a direct, non-logical character.

      (2) Another trait of every res is that it has focus and context: brilliancy and obscurity, conspicuousness or apparency, and concealment or reserve, with a constant movement of redistribution. Movement about an axis persists, but what is in focus constantly changes. "Consciousness," in other words, is only a very small and shifting portion of experience. The scope and content of the focused apparency have immediate dynamic connections with portions of experience not at the time obvious. The word which I have just written is momentarily focal; around it there shade off into vagueness my typewriter, the desk, the room, the building, the campus, the town, and so on. In the experience, and in it in such a way as to qualify even what is shiningly apparent, are all the physical features of the environment extending out into space no one can say how far, and all the habits and interests extending backward and forward in time, of the organism which uses the typewriter and which notes the written form of the word only as temporary focus in a vast and changing scene. I shall not dwell upon the import of this fact in its critical bearings upon theories of experience which have been current. I shall only point out that when the word "experience" is employed in the text it means just such an immense and operative world of diverse and interacting elements.

      It might seem wiser, in view of the fact that the term "experience" is so frequently used by philosophers to denote something very different from such a world, to use an acknowledgedly objective term: to talk about the typewriter, for example. But experience in ordinary usage (as distinct from its technical use in psychology and philosophy) expressly denotes something which a specific term like "typewriter" does not designate: namely, the indefinite range of context in which the typewriter is actually set, its spatial and temporal environment, including the habitudes, plans, and activities of its operator. And if we are asked why not then use a general objective term like "world," or "environment," the answer is that the word "experience" suggests something indispensable which these terms omit: namely, an actual focusing of the world at one point in a focus of immediate shining apparency. In other words, in its ordinary human usage, the term "experience" was invented and employed previously because of the necessity of having some way to refer peremptorily to what is indicated in only a roundabout and divided way by such terms as "organism" and "environment," "subject" and "object," "persons" and "things," "mind" and "nature," and so on.[1]

II

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      Had this background of the essays been more explicitly depicted, I do not know whether they would have met with more acceptance, but it is likely that they would not have met with so many misunderstandings. But the essays, save for slight incidental references, took this background for granted in the allusions to the universe of non-reflectional experience of our doings, sufferings, enjoyments of the world and of one another. It was their purpose to point out that reflection (and, hence, knowledge having logical properties) arises because of the appearance of incompatible factors within the empirical situation just pointed at: incompatible not in a mere structural or static sense, but in an active and progressive sense. Then opposed responses are provoked which cannot be taken simultaneously in overt action, and which accordingly can be dealt with, whether simultaneously or successively, only after they have been brought into a plan of organized action by means of analytic resolution and synthetic imaginative conspectus; in short, by means of being taken cognizance of. In other words, reflection appears as the dominant trait of a situation when there is something seriously the matter, some trouble, due to active discordance, dissentiency, conflict among the factors of a prior non-intellectual experience; when, in the phraseology of the essays, a situation becomes tensional.[2]

      Given such a situation, it is obvious that the meaning of the situation as a whole is uncertain. Through calling out two opposed modes of behavior, it presents itself as meaning two incompatible things. The only way out is through careful inspection of the situation, involving resolution into elements, and a going out beyond what is found upon such inspection to be given, to something else to get a leverage for understanding it. That is, we have (a) to locate the difficulty, and (b) to devise a method of coping with it. Any such way of looking at thinking demands moreover that the difficulty be located in the situation in question (very literally in question). Knowing always has a particular purpose, and its solution must be a function of its conditions in connection with additional ones which are brought to bear.

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