THE ORIGIN OF VALUE IN A

TRANSCENDENT FUNCTION

Table of Contents

 Title [8.1K]
o Signature Page
o Copyright
o Dedication
o Preface (1985)
 Preface (1997) [7.4K]
 Abstract
 Table of Modes of Necessity
 INTRODUCTION [70.3 K]
o §1 The Nature of This Project
o §2 Non-Intuitive Immediate Knowledge
o §3 The Argument and Division of the Subject
 THE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS OR IMMANENCE
o Part One: UNDERSTANDING [53.6 K]
 §1 Remark
 §2 Understanding
 §3 The Simultaneity of Understanding
 §4 Memory
 §5 Act and Potential in Understanding
 §6 Concepts
 §7 The Object of Conception
 §8 Understanding in Language
 §9 Perception and Understanding
 §10 Conculusion
o Part Two: KNOWLEDGE AND NECESSITY [70.6K]
 §1 Remark
 §2 Kant: The Unity of Consciousness
 §3 Kant: Synthesis
 §4 Kant: Activity and Passivity
 §5 Subject and Object
 §6 Intuition and the Immanent Object
 §7 Necessity: Formal and Synthetic
  §8 Necessity: Material
 §9 Conclusion
 THE THEORY OF EXISTENCE OR NEGATIVE TRANSCENDENCE [43.5 K]
o §1 Negative Transcendence
o §2 Internal and External
o §3 Space
o §4 Time and Causation
o §5 Will
o §6 Conclusion
 THE THEORY OF VALUE OR POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE [20.8K]
o Remark
o Part One: CONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE
 §1 Sensation and the Sensible Plenum
 §2 Caused Value
o Part Two: UNCONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE AS
PURPOSIVE VALUE [47.8K]
 §1 Remark
 §2 Schopenhauer
 §3 Jung
 §4 The Friesian Tradition in Otto
 §5 Purpose
 §6 The Varieties of Purposive Value [34.4K]
 §7 Love and Hate
 §8 Right and Wrong
 §9 Good and Evil
 §10 Beauty and Ugliness
 §11 Happiness and Unhappiness
o Part Three: UNCONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE AS
ABSOLUTE TRANSCENDENCE [47.1K]
 §1 Absolute Transcendence
 §2 The Problem of Evil
 §3 Numinosity
 §4 Conclusion
 Notes and References [56.7K]
 Bibliography [7.2K]
 Vita (1985) [1.5K]
PREFACE

This dissertation presents a theory of the metaphysical foundation of

knowledge of value. In doing so it continues and develops a type of theory
that is characteristic both of the work of Immanuel Kant and of that of two
particular post-Kantian traditions which started with the near contemporaries
Jakob Fries and Arthur Schopenhauer. The Friesian tradition is best
represented by its principal recent exponents, Leonard Nelson and Rudolf
Otto. These two traditions and the direct influence of Kant may all be seen to
come together, in a suggestive though non-rigorous and even non-philosophic
way, in the psychological theory of Carl Gustav Jung. All these perspectives
provide important clues for the solutions that will be offered for the problems
of the ontology and epistemology of value.

The motivation and purpose of this dissertation follow from a conviction that
the humanistic enterprise of philosophy always comes down to two things: to
discover what is worthwhile in life and to discover what to do about it. In the
strongest Socratic sense, therefore, what is important in philosophy is ethics. I
find, however, that my concern in this direction is perennially distracted by
the meta-questions of reality, of knowledge, and of justification upon which
the very meaningfulness of ethics as a philosophic enterprise hangs. Since
Plato, empires and civilizations have risen and fallen while we continue to
await a decision or a consensus on those questions; and my primary concern
herein, therefore, is less with the positive content of morals, ethics, aesthetics,
or religion than with the framework of epistemology, ontology, and logic
within which the former may lay claim to their own proper importance, origin,
and autonomy.

Philosophy, from a practical point of view, may seem a poor thing, with little
to recommend it, in the face of millennial dilemmas of value, meaning, and
knowledge. Philosophy certainly commonly addresses itself to problems of
value and of the meaning of life, but answering those questions to the
satisfaction of more than a few partisans of some philosophic school is
another matter. The epochal challenge for philosophy is to come up with
something better than that, something that can both enter into the theater of
historical change, as did Stoicism or Marxism, and at the same time provide a
genuine alternative to a hopeless historical oscillation between an essentially
sterile scientific universe of atoms and the void and crackdowns of religious
reaction and repression (whether traditionally religious or quasi-religious
ideology). If what is lacking in the scientific worldview is the dimension of
value, and if what constitutes religious oppression is the imposition of a
dogmatic system of value, then clearly what philosophy must originate, what
philosophy must claim as peculiarly its own, is a positive, constructive
[erratum corrected] discipline of value theory.
Whether philosophy is equal to this is not an abstract puzzle for a distracted
few; for philosophy itself is more than just a tradition, a training, or any
peculiar doctrine: it is what any human being does, in however inarticulate a
manner, when reflection gives rise to fundamental questions about our very
existence and purpose in life. Nor is such reflection often idle curiosity: I
suspect that most come to it, not through the traditional awe and wonder, but
out of the perplexity and pain that inevitably disillusion us with the innocent
confidence in the world we so often begin life by having. And so for me these
pages represent not so much something done for philosophy as for my own
solitary unhappiness with the blank mystery, the cruel gods, the tragic good
intentions, and the bittersweet beauty that I find in the world. Out of these
feelings I trust that I will not be, at the least, complacent. Whether others will
share this motivation, I cannot say. One need not look for a way when one
does not feel that the way has been lost: just as in Socratic philosophy the
beginning is in the self-discovery of doubt and ignorance.

The title of the dissertation calls for some explanation. The term "transcendent
function" has been borrowed from Jung, who speaks of it as the relation
between consciousness and the unconscious, where the latter introduces novel
contents into the former [1]. Here the question is also of novel contents
introduced into consciousness, whether we say it is from the unconscious,
from Being, or from positive transcendence (as this will be defined). By the
"origin of value" in this transcendent function, we are looking at the origin in
time of two things, first of value as an objective presence in immediate
knowledge, which is an occasion or manifestation of positive transcendence,
and second of value as our awareness and understanding of the former. The
special technical meanings of all these terms, and their theoretical contexts,
will of course be set forth in the text. "Origin" also will mean first the place of
origin, i.e. the ontological ground which is the source and basis of the value,
and second the occasion of origin, i.e. the circumstances which effect the
presence, in immediate knowledge, of value in time. Naturally, "transcendent
function" also suggests the Platonic relation between Being and Becoming, or
the Kantian between noumena and phenomena, both of which are important
antecedents for this theory.

I would like to acknowledge my debt to Dr. Douglas Browning for his great
patience and forbearance in supervising this dissertation. Without those
qualities, together with his ultimate sympathy, the natural growth of the
systematic idea would not have been possible. My thanks are also due to Dr.
Robert Kane for his criticisms and suggestions when they were most needed
and to Dr. James Bieri for encouraging words at a time when they were the
most needed and welcome. Patience, too, I must credit to my parents, who can
only have entertained the most grave doubts about the odd and unprofitable
profession that their son chose. Their personal support has always made it
possible for me to devote my attention to these things.
Further, and less direct, acknowledgements must be made to the Leonard
Nelson Foundation and L.H. Grunebaum, whose efforts at publishing Nelson
in this country first brought him to my attention. It is a great tribute to Nelson
that the personal devotion to his memory of his students should have resulted
in the perpetuation of his enterprise in the Foundation, the Philosophisch-
Politischen Akademie of Kassel, and the journal Ratio (as a continuation of
the Abhandlungen der Fries'schen Schule). It is a great disappointment to me
that the novel insights of the Friesian tradition have continued to have so little
impact in contemporary philosophy.

PREFACE, 1997

My doctoral dissertation was not the preferred kind of dissertation for

philosophy departments. Unsympathetic professors had called my work
"Weltanschauung mongering" or "a fishing expedition," the former because I
was interested in comprehensive theories, not in dissociated fragments on
specific philosophical "problems," the latter because the dissertation proposal
may have sounded like random wandering rather than a prospectus for a
systematic theory. I was certainly guilty of "Weltanschauung mongering." I
think other kinds of philosophy are irrelevant and schizophrenic. I was not
guilty of a "fishing expedition," though what I ended up with was not in detail
what I could have anticipated at the beginning. And it had been hard to get
going with it.

As a kind of summa, covering territory that it took Kant three Critiques to do,
the project of the dissertation was bad enough, but the drafts initially got up to
400 and then 500 pages -- vastly larger than the preferred 150 pages for a
philosophy dissertation. One might have reasonably been excused for
regarding the whole business as out of control. Nevertheless, Doug Browning,
my dissertation committee chairman, calmly and systematically went through
the thing, indicating where he thought it could be improved, and what could
simply be cut. I am still grateful to him for the nature of his advice and the
manner of his delivering it. As it happened, I cut even more than he
recommended; and he got back a mere 250 pages: so miraculous a reduction
that I think he was ready to sign off on the thing right away. Even if not, he
thought it could go to the rest of the committee. From there it went to my
Defense. Some recommendations from the whole committee at the Defense
led to some extra material; but even at that, the whole work eventually came
in at only 306 pages. One of my wife's dissertation committee members later
supervised a dissertation of 1300 pages -- her own was over 600 -- so mine
wasn't so bad, as these things go.

I am still generally pleased with the dissertation. I don't disagree with

anything in it. One area where I might revise it now is in relation to the theory
of understanding. I wasn't familiar with recent discussions about hermeneutics
at the time, and much of that kind of material might profitably be added to the
theory -- though, of course, the "deconstruction" side of hermeneutics is
worthless and would not have been mentioned except for criticism. Another
area for addition or revision is in relation to the object language systems of
value: These are merely sketched in the dissertation, and the substantive
content of morality was assigned to the jussive modality. Now I would return
substantive morality to the imperative and use the jussive for historically
evolved rules of private property and law. Nevertheless, this was just as well,
since a real effort to describe the content of morality or to lay out the
principles of and the arguments for capitalism would have burdened the
dissertation with material that it did not need and would have added further to
the problem of its size.

Otherwise, the dissertation sketches principles that I still think are true. The
philosophy of science and philosophy of religion issues, let alone ethics and
political economy, are vastly expanded in the materials at the Proceedings of
the Friesian School website. These are direct expansions and developments of
the ideas in the dissertation. More may be done in epistemology and
metaphysics, especially in the metaphysics that underlies the theory of the
modes of necessity.

The idea of the modes of necessity had originally come to me while sitting in
a class about Martin Heidegger at the University of Hawaii in 1973. One
might say that my mind was wandering, as Professor Mehta explained away
Heidegger's participation in the Nazi Party. Now the metaphor I would use is
that Being is like a pousse-café, a layering of liqueurs according to specific
gravity: The apparent surface is phenomenal existence, while under the
surface are the increasingly diffuse but concrete modes of necessity, the strong
imperative of morality at the surface, down to the comprehensive but non-
contradiction-violating mode of numinosity at the bottom. I think this is as
striking and evocative a worldview as anything in the history of philosophy
since Plato. Unlike Plato, it is not a world-denying view of absolute
transcendence, but only a view of relative transcendence, like Kant, in which
transcendence is an internal aspect of immanent objects. Being, indeed, in an
important sense, is what materialists always thought of as matter. Parmenides
still trumps Democritus.

As I wrote the dissertation, I often found myself listening to Brahms's Fourth

Symphony (the RCA Red Seal recording of Arturo Toscanini with the NBC
Symphony Orchestra, played in background when file loaded). The mood of
the symphony is a kind of "autumnal melancholy." My typewriter was rather
loud, and I wore earphones draped across the room from my record-
player/tape deck. The melancholy seemed appropriate since I had little
realistic prospect of a job after finishing the dissertation. As it happened, I was
unemployed for two years afterwards. Many philosophy Ph.D.'s have ended
up driving taxicabs. I had associated important events in my life with an
"autumnal melancholy": my birth, in October; my first marriage, in
September, 1973, a subject of deep and enduring grief; and the dissertation
itself, as it happened, since my defense was in November, 1984, after I had
had about the worst cold and sinus infection of my life. Happily, things later
turned out not so bad: I got hired, thanks to Harold Ravitch at LA Valley
College; and my next marriage was in a June, under an extraordinary triple
conjunction of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, in 1991. But I am, as might be said,
suspicious of happiness. Solon may have been right -- I could not count my
life truly happy until it is over and the misadventures of suffering are finally
banished.

When my dissertation was finished, indeed, I felt that I had accomplished

what I set out to do, even if there was literally nothing else in my life.
Fortunately, there has been more in my life, both for me personally (which I
don't mind at all), and for the cause of truth and freedom that I have always
embraced. What I did not know was that the latter would actually lead me into
(gasp!) politics, especially a lunatic fringe politics that quixotically wants to
actually restore Constitutional Government. But, you never know. And at
least it enables me to love the principles of my country, the United States of
America, even while detesting the vicious, tyrannical demagogues and the
credulity of the people that dominate it now.

AN AAI8527639

AU Ross, Kelley Lee.

TI THE ORIGIN OF VALUE IN A TRANSCENDENT FUNCTION

(METAPHYSICS, EPISTEMOLOGY, ETHICS, MIND, RELIGION).

IN Thesis (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, 1985,

307p.

DD Order Number: AAI8527639.

SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 46-10, Section: A, page:
3058.

AB A theory is presented of the ontological ground and the epistemology of

value. The theory continues and develops a type of theory that is characteristic
both of the work of Immanuel Kant and of that of two particular post-Kantian
traditions. Those traditions began with the near contemporaries Jakob Fries
and Arthur Schopenhauer. In this century, the Friesian tradition is represented
by Leonard Nelson and Rudolf Otto, while themes from Kant, Schopenhauer,
and the Friesians are seen to come together in the suggestive psychological
theories of Carl Gustav Jung.

This theory follows the precedent of Plato and Kant in distinguishing the
cognitive grounds of factual and evaluative knowledge on the basis of a
certain ontological dualism. That dualism is established by the use of the
concept of intentionality to distinguish between a relative, or phenomenal,
existence within consciousness and existence as such. Existence as such is
further divided into existence as emptiness, contrasted with the phenomenal
content of experience, and existence as the plenum of Eleatic Being. These
divisions are set out in the Theories of Immanence, of Negative
Transcendence, and of Positive Transcendence. The cognition of value is
approached by a general theory of change, which may be applied to both
causal change determined by natural law and purposive change determined by
acts of will. Value is said to occur intuitively in causal occasions of pleasure
and pain and non-intuitively, or unconsciously, as the purposive occasions of
acts of free will, the cognitive content of which can then be recovered,
Socratically, by reflection on the deeds. Following Nelson, then, the theory of
knowledge is Platonic, that knowledge of value is in our possession and is
used by us without our being immediately aware of it.

In metaphysics, in epistemology, and in topics relevant to philosophy of mind,

philosophy of science, and other philosophic disciplines, the result of the
theory is to provide and account for the possibility of a variety of given kinds
of value, the moral, the ethical, the aesthetic, and the religious.

DE Philosophy.

UP 9400. Revised: 931008.

This table summarizes for convenient reference the results of various
discussions in the text on necessity and contingency. See especially §§
"Necessity: Formal and Synthetic," Necessity: Material," "Time and
Causation," "The Varieties of Purposive Value," and the sections on
individual value object languages, such as "Love and Hate."

INTRODUCTION

§1 The Nature of This Project

In this section I will introduce the perspective and the program of this
dissertation in terms of their ultimate historical antecedents and their broadest
conceptual principles. First of all, that will mean a look at Plato and Kant and
then a positing and discussion of a number of explicit principles which will be
employed, clarified, and developed throughout the text.

The program of this treatise is to set out a theory in answer to certain meta-
questions in the theory of value. The meta-questions may be characterized as
concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of value. This is a project that
goes back to Plato, who remains its first and primary exemplar; and so it is
fitting that we should speak of the Platonic meta-questions: how it is that
matters of value are known and what sort of existence, if any, objects of value
possess in reality.

Plato's answer to his own meta-questions was the theory of knowledge

through "recollection" with its ontological presuppositions of the reincarnation
of an immortal soul and the vast theory of Forms. While such an epistemology
and ontology of value does not provide for any specific content of ethical or
political theory, it is noteworthy that the specifics are inevitably colored by
the meta-theory. In that respect the shortcomings of this world of Becoming --
that true goodness and justice and beauty are possible in it, if at all, only for
the briefest of periods -- cannot fail to have an effect on Plato's ethical,
political, and historical expectations. Since the principal expectation is of
decay, which is virtually synonymous with change, Plato often presents an
incongruous and inappropriate spectacle of preoccupation with how to prevent
change in a non-existent ideal state, to the means of whose establishment
Plato has correspondingly devoted no theory whatsoever. Thus Plato
gratuitously tars himself with an authoritarianism that serves merely to
obscure the openness and humanism of the Socratic kernel of his own thought:
that each person, merely by accommodating himself to reason, has the same
access to knowledge of value as anyone else. This great principle is fully and
adequately enshrined, despite the various other shortcomings of the doctrine,
in the theory of Forms. A true theory of authoritarianism is to be found more
in doctrines where value is based in which is external and actual -- a sphere
wherein accidents of birth, education, position, and history are sanctified as
the living and tangible exemplars of value.

Thus, through all the chaff, there is in Plato an abiding principle of moral
epistemology which has the most profound consequences. This very same
principle appears in even greater force, mutatis mutandis, in Kant, where,
amid all the typical Kantian clutter, it is simply embodied in Kant's conception
of the ontological status and moral epistemological role of reason itself. The
categorical imperative is a creation of the faculty of reason which, in its
unconditioned employment, according to Kant, demands a universality and
limitlessness such as can possibly hold only among things in themselves [2].
Thus the practical employment of reason does what the unconditioned
theoretical employment of reason, which only results in antinomies and
paradoxes, cannot do. In Kant the dualism between phenomena and things in
themselves, or between the conditioned and the unconditioned, serves
precisely the same function as Plato's more poetic dualism of Being and
Becoming. The connection between the two poles of the dualism is through
the lonely consciousness of the individual. At his most poetic Kant puts the
matter just right: the starry heavens above and the moral law within [3].

Kant calls his principle that of moral autonomy [4], and no more suitable a
term than "self-law" could be found for this notion. In its native land, the mind
of Plato, the principle was unfortunately without much honor. Where it is
actually absent, where the principle is more one of heteronomy than
autonomy, then we will always find some source of authority posited, beyond
the reasoning and reckoning of the individual, that will seek to govern, to
inculcate, to train, and to control self-determination. For the purpose of this
introductory discussion, autonomy is a particularly fitting notion in that it is
essentially an epistemological conception of how value is known.
Furthermore, Platonic and Kantian autonomy is typically associated with an
ontological dualism, which serves to remove value from what is actual,
external, and empirical and, preserving its objectivity, to place it where it is
privately accessible to each individual. In addition, despite its meta-theoretical
character, the concept of autonomy provides an essential framework for the
positive content of moral knowledge: certainly Kant believed that the moral
law virtually equates wrong with a violating of freely exercised autonomy, i.e.
violently, coercively, or fraudulently preventing another from innocently
exercising his own choices and preferences. A reasonable expectation of
answering the Platonic meta-questions is therefore that the terms of questions
of value will thereby be so illuminated that the solution to the actual puzzles
of value will be much clearer.

The interconnection between ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, so well

[erratum corrected] illustrated in Plato's Republic, was soon obscured by
systematic divisions of philosophy into various disciplines, which has had the
effect of leaving ethics detached and isolated. The paradigm for the formal
treatment of the question here is the development and progression in Kant's
Critical Philosophy from "pure reason" to "practical reason" and finally to
"judgment," [5] which represents an ambitious and classic undoing of the
historical fragmentation of disciplines. Unfortunately, although the
cumulative, interconnected necessity of Kant's system is unavoidable in any
kind of complete treatment, the specialist who is accustomed to detaching
ethics from epistemology and metaphysics can still simply abstract "practical
reason" from its theoretical context and treat the purely ethical issues therein
in a familiar dissociated setting. This weakens our awareness of the
underlying theory that unites the parts of the system; and while it is not
necessarily an error if the concern is simply with the object language of ethics
and not any sort of meta-questions, we would be properly sceptical if we
happen to think that only minimal progress can be expected in the object
language with the meta-questions left unsettled. It is in Kant's more
Platonizing successors that the connections between the disciplines are fully
appreciated, which is to say in the treatments of Arthur Schopenhauer and the
school founded by Jakob Fries [6]. Thus when we come to the Friesian
Leonard Nelson in this century, all three Kantian Critiques have been
collapsed into one, Nelson's own Critique of Practical Reason, which treats
all cross-disciplinary questions in a unified way and which is followed by
separate works presenting object language systems of ethics, jurisprudence,
politics, and pedagogy [7].

What distinguishes the metaphysics and epistemology of value in Kant and his
Platonizing successors will be formulated here as a number of explicit
principles. The Platonic meta-questions of value and the principle of
autonomy may be taken as two parts of this specification already. The next
will be called the principle of epistemological priority. Epistemological
priority represents the great Cartesian-Kantian foundation of modern
philosophy. It is the thesis that questions of knowing are logically prior to
questions of being, in the sense that ontological conclusions must await an
analysis or theory of our ability to justifiably draw such conclusions. Little
enough in the tradition of modern philosophy has actually obeyed this
principle, and it is largely thanks to the successes of scientific method rather
than an application of epistemological priority that confident new systems of
dogmatic metaphysics, innocent of any critical perspective, have almost
entirely ceased to appear. The feeling has tended to become that in the
presence of science and its demonstrable achievements metaphysics is entirely
meaningless. In that kind of climate epistemology itself tends to be absorbed
into philosophy of science, further and further removed from ethics.
Epistemological priority will acquire a much more specific meaning in terms
of the principle of the dual nature of representation, below.

The next general principle for this inquiry is that of epistemology as

an introspective psychological metalanguage. In each of its terms, although
some modification will be made in their meaning here, this is a peculiarly and
distinctively Friesian notion [8], one that is founded on Kant's method in the
"Subjective Deduction" of the Critique of Pure Reason [9]. There are two sets
of considerations to take into account in explaining the meaning of the
principle. First is the more purely Friesian viewpoint of epistemology as a
psychological metalanguage. The argument for that conception begins with
two observations: 1) that questions of the form "Is knowledge possible?" are
unanswerable [10]; and 2) that epistemology, in order to be in fact different
from metaphysics or ethics or whatever, cannot be engaged in the proof of
propositions in those various systems. These two observations bear on each
other and on the nature of epistemological priority in the following way. As
we address ourselves to a critique of metaphysics on the principle of
epistemological priority, we are of course asking in the first place whether
metaphysics is possible at all, whether it does actually or even possibly belong
to knowledge. In order for this procedure to avoid circularity, the critique
must not itself belong to the object language of metaphysics. If the critique is
already part of metaphysics, then we have already supposed that metaphysics
is possible just by engaging in the critique. Making epistemology a general
metalanguage for the critique of many systems of knowledge is fine, but
generalizing epistemology opens the way to a further possible circularity: for
if epistemology is to certify that all knowledge is possible, it can only do so
by assuming that possibility of its own knowledge, which begs the questions.
The situation becomes more acute in terms of Kant's epochal division of
propositions into the analytic, and synthetic a posteriori, and the synthetic a
priori. While this division will come in for reanalysis later, it can be well
taken now that it puts epistemology into a terrible identity problem; for if
metaphysics is simply defined as the system of synthetic propositions a priori,
then epistemology would have to be either analytic or merely a posteriori and
empirical. Neither alternative sounds quite right.

The characteristic Friesian answer to this Kantian division is to say that

epistemology (or Kantian critique) is empirical and a posteriori, in particular a
part of empirical psychology [11]. Such a move saves epistemology from
various kinds of circularity, but at a cost. Here, then, we have the
"psychological metalanguage," but now must come the second set of
considerations which will make this specifically "introspective"; for the cost
of the Friesian move, a cost that grows greater with time, is that psychology,
which down to Nelson's time still largely belonged to philosophy, is now an
independent experimental science. Consequently, if the spirit of the Friesian
answer is to be maintained, the answer itself must be somewhat modified.
This may be done simply enough with a recognition of the special status
enjoyed by the object of Friesian psychology: it is the entire world taken as a
content of consciousness and so as a unique and distinct internal
object. Introspective psychology is truly not very conformable to experimental
psychology, whose logical extreme is, very properly, behaviorism and
neurophysiology. Thus epistemology has a safe empirical field within
philosophy, one where the object is in a sense the same as the world but
simultaneously so different as to be removed from the realm of direct
scientific observation. This also establishes a very strong relationship between
epistemology and philosophy of mind.

Introducing this introspective modification, or clarification, into Friesian

doctrine is to trade on another fundamental and formative Cartesian-Kantian
principle of modern philosophy, which has been called by Robert Paul Wolff
the "dual nature of representation" [12]. To hold to such a principle is simply
to say that the sum of our immediate conscious contents is all at once and
completely both a presentation of the external, intersubjective world and an
internal, private, and subjective mental content. That duality is in the same
way the basis for Descartes' doubt of the reality of the external world and for
Hume's observation that there is nothing in representation to be identified as a
substantial soul. In most philosophers there is a powerful tendency to prefer
either the internal or the external perspective, taking one pole of the dual
nature of representation as real and dismissing the other as an epiphenomenon
or an illusion. But there is no overt warrant in consciousness itself for any
such preference. Jung incorporates the preference for an internal or external
perspective into his typology of personality as the mental orientation
of introverts, who prefer the subject, and extroverts, who prefer the object
[13]. Here we may go so far as to establish the balance between internal and
external as a special principle that will further define our original meaning for
the principle of epistemological priority. This may then be called the principle
of ontological undecidability, that we are given, as knowledge,
the relation between internal and external and so cannot decide, without
violence to that given, whether representation is "really" internal in existence
or external. Our naive impression is always that it is external, while Cartesian
sophistication inevitably reduces it to internal existence, with the connection
to what is external in existence left hanging as the "problem of knowledge."
Ontological undecidability is rarely encountered in any form in philosophy. In
this project an attempt will be made to resolve the paradox it represents, but
only after the consequences of the paradox have been fully explored.

The principles I have now set down serve to identify a tradition of philosophic
development and an avenue of philosophic thought, well beyond the Platonic
paradigm and even beyond the specific principles of Kantian and Friesian
traditions, and to indicate the orientation and procedural foundation of this
dissertation. In this the precedents of the tradition are not something to be
passively revered or minutely dissected and systematized without
modification. The tradition is something to be creatively advanced. In an
important way that has already happened merely in the identification of the
constitute principles of the tradition. On the basis of the (1) Platonic meta-
questions of value and the principles of (2) moral autonomy, (3)
epistemological priority, (4) the introspective psychological nature of
epistemology, (5) the dual nature of representation, and (6) ontological
undecidability, I have taken the members of the tradition for the purpose here
to be Kant, Fries, Nelson, Rudolf Otto, and C.G. Jung. The novelty of that
juxtaposition speaks for itself. Merely to present the thought of any one of
these individuals as complete in itself would be to seriously distort the
constitute principles. It is especially noteworthy that Jung, who stands last in
time and who actually draws together the views of Kant, Schopenhauer, and
the Friesian Otto in his considerations, providing the precedent for the
identification of this tradition, is usually little interested in casting his thought
in purely philosophic form. Very properly as a psychologist, he is more
interested in what people happen to believe than in whether those beliefs are
true or false. Similarly, Jung's orientation usually does not bring him to a
philosophic level of generality. Where Jung's technique becomes important to
us is in the sphere of religious beliefs where, like Fries, we will still be left
with a residue of Kantian agnosticism: and where, all the same, value will still
be accessible to us in terms of the Friesian Ahndung [14], a non-cognitive
relation.
The final principle is always the open-endedness of the project. The constant
truth of introspective awareness is that belief and desire inevitably overrun
knowledge and reasonable expectations. The inevitable errors of our own
understanding, while cause for occasional mortification, should be seen more
as an opportunity for better understanding in the future. However persuasive
our own philosophic system, it is death to be too satisfied with it.

§2 Non-Intuitive Immediate Knowledge

At this point it will be helpful and appropriate to take up one of the most
pivotal doctrines of the Friesian tradition. This is more in the way of historical
background than an organic part of the theory here; but the notion of non-
intuitive immediate knowledge is presupposed by everything, and its
profoundly paradoxical nature, which is at variance with contemporary
notions of immediate knowledge and intuition, warrants that special notice
and treatment be devoted to it. Because of the shortcomings of the Friesian
theory, principally in that it is negatively formulated, i.e. non-intuitive
immediate knowledge is not this and not that, this discussion best belong to
the introduction, to be set down and then usefully compared with the positive
theory presented later. In the text I will be more concerned with answers, both
to Kantian problems, which are matters of general knowledge, and to the
Friesian problems, which are not.

Non-intuitive immediate knowledge is the category to which Fries and Nelson

assign the knowledge that belongs to the object language systems of
metaphysics and ethics, as opposed to the empirical category to which they
see epistemology itself belonging [15]. Here "intuition" is used for the
German Anschauung as used by Kant and the Friesians, and it does not mean
"intuition" either in the ordinary sense of a spontaneous belief or in the similar
philosophic sense. In Kant the notion of intuition originally seems to be the
equivalent of perception and perceptual knowledge [16]. The conception
becomes confused, however, when Kant himself appears to conclude that
perception cannot be knowledge, or even perception, without the mental
activity of synthesis. The conclusion would reduce "intuition" to no more than
a pre-conscious receptivity of the senses. Intuition as "immediate" knowledge
would also thus become impossible, since knowledge would require
the mediation of the intellect to become knowledge. Friesian theory accepts
Kant's earlier notion of intuition as being immediate knowledge, albeit not
conceptually articulated in any way. Nelson's point in that regard [17] is that
not all knowledge can be mediate, or conceptual, because all conceptual
propositions, except tautologies and contradictions, are essentially arbitrary
and must, for their truth or falsity to be determine, be referred to some
external ground. The "external ground" then for perceptual knowledge is
immediate knowledge in perceptual intuition, which as such cannot be any
kind of belief or thought. In this respect the Friesian theory of truth [18] is a
combination of traditional correspondence and coherence theories [19]:
coherence in that the conceptual expression and the immediate knowledge
both belong to consciousness, and must merely be made to conform to one
another; and correspondence because immediate knowledge is a
representation of the external world and so, on the principle of the dual nature
of representation, the external world itself, requiring that the purely mental
entity, the belief or the propositional representation, corresponding to the
world, must be mediately constructed. By the principles of the dual nature of
representation and of ontological undecidability we may consider the Friesian
doctrine of truth to be the equivalent of the strongest traditional
correspondence theory, that there is an isomorphism between truth in internal
representation and states of affairs in the external world.

The difference between intuition and immediate knowledge is that the concept
of intuition contains the added feature of immediate awareness -- that the
intuitive ground is explicitly present to consciousness. The intuition that we
have is perception, and the objects of perception are empirical objects. Since
we are ordinarily strongly inclined to believe that knowledge implies
awareness of knowledge, it is a very powerful tendency to equate our intuition
with our immediate knowledge as such. That gives rise to what Nelson calls
[20] a "dogmatic disjunction" in the attempt to formulate the nature of the
ground of metaphysical knowledge: that any knowledge is either from
intuition or from reflection. This is to say that any case of knowledge is either
mediate, involving concepts and thought, where through reflection new
knowledge can be generated, or immediate, where all immediate knowledge is
intuitive.

Given the "dogmatic disjunction" as the starting point, Nelson sets out a
simple axiomatic system to demonstrate the various epistemological
approaches to metaphysics [21]. If one accepts (1) the disjunction and also
accepts (2) that metaphysical knowledge is possible and that (3) our intuition
is empirical, then the only possible conclusion is that the source of
metaphysical knowledge is in reflection. For Nelson that is the nature of the
traditional system of "dogmatic" or speculative metaphysics. Those systems
may be relatively naive, relying on Euclidean sorts of proofs and "self-
evident" premises whose self-evidence remains an unexamined claim, or they
may be relatively sophisticated with peculiar doctrines of logic (as with
Hegel) to account for the manner in which thought generates new knowledge.
Dogmatic metaphysics is untenable, however, once it is realized that reflection
cannot generate knowledge that is not already implicit in its datum. Logical
derivations and analytic truths are no more than rearrangements of what is
given. The speculative generation of scientific hypotheses escapes the failing
of dogmatic metaphysics because scientific method looks to the empirical
verification or falsification of the hypotheses. That way is not open, by
definition, to metaphysics.

With a new premise that reflection is essentially empty of any new ground or
source of knowledge, we cannot accept all of the original three premises of
dogmatic metaphysics. Rejecting premise (2) that metaphysical knowledge is
possible results in the conclusion of empiricism that all synthetic knowledge is
ultimately grounded in empirical intuition. Rejecting premise (3) that all our
intuition is empirical results in the conclusion of mysticism that metaphysical
knowledge is possible because we possess, or can possess, a special intuitive
ground for it. That final alternative, which Nelson calls "Criticism," is to
reject premise (1), that "dogmatic disjunction," and conclude that there is a
third source of knowledge besides intuition and reflection. Since a division
into mediate and immediate is logically exhaustive and we already accept that
mediate knowledge, or reflection is empty, then there must be immediate
knowledge which is not intuitive. This must actually mean that we
are unconscious of the non-intuitive immediate ground. The knowledge itself
is neither believed nor thought, as such, and it is not explicitly present to us as
the table or chair is perceptually.

The "Critical" conclusion tells us nothing positive or definite about what non-
intuitive immediate knowledge must be. Even to be legitimately forced to a
conclusion that some immediate knowledge is not intuitive obviously does not
tell us what it is, and so I characterize this as a merely "negative" theory
which must remain inadequate for that reason -- as we are left to wonder what
kind of knowledge we could possibly possess without being aware of it. The
conception is by no means new, however, for it corresponds to one of the most
characteristic and important doctrines of Plato: namely that what we think we
know is only opinion and what we really know we actually don't know that we
know. Plato's explanation for that condition was also characteristic, and
paradoxical, not fitting precisely into either the dogmatic or the mystical
categories of Nelson's analysis; for Plato held that our metaphysical
knowledge is a momentarily forgotten memory of a prenatal intuition. This is
ultimately an appeal to intuition, but in present time it is only an appeal to
memory. In his own way Plato thus approximates, with a positive doctrine, the
conditions of non-intuitive immediate knowledge: that it is known but not a[t]
first known consciously.

The first questions about non-intuitive immediate knowledge would be how it

comes to be consciously known, having been unconsciously known, and then
how we know that it is what we think it is. In Kant's classic terms those are
the questions of the quid facti and the quid juris [22]. The quid facti, the
conscious possession of the non-intuitive knowledge, is obtained by
reflection, specifically by taking our ordinary native acts of judgment as
objects and then by abstracting from them the forms or presuppositions they
had unconsciously employed [23]. Since the presence and focus of
consciousness is in its object, the forms or rules by which the object is known,
or generated, are themselves not perceived; but taking consciousness itself as
an object can easily bring those presupposed forms into the objective focus,
making possible their entry as such into consciousness.

One of the nicest examples, from outside philosophy, of the quid facti is the
recognition of grammatical rules of language -- a case that will be discussed in
more detail in the theory of consciousness. Language as an elaboration of
consciousness by which objects are conceptually articulated contains many
forms that are not intuitively known; and there is no more conspicuous a
contrast than in a child between the fearful complexity of rules that are so
easily manipulated with respect to their objects yet so securely hidden in
themselves. Another sort of conspicuous contrast is when a language teacher
insists on the correctness of palpable grammatical archaisms yet usually
entirely fails to employ them in ordinary speech. Obtaining the quid facti is
simple in principle, but in practice reflection is never as easy as it seems it
should be.

The quid juris is a much larger question and naturally draws in again the
discussion above concerning epistemology. One thing that we expect of
epistemology is that it will describe the ground of the justification of
propositions. In Friesian theory a proposition can be grounded or justified in
one of three ways [24]: 1) Proof, which is justification by logical derivation.
Tautologies, analytic propositions, can be proven, given the rules of logic, by
themselves; all other proofs require premises, which outside of logical are
ultimately going to be synthetic. 2) Demonstration, which is justification by
the display of an intuitive ground. In daily life this is the most conspicuous
means (apart from arguments from authority), not just of the justification of
belief, but of the origin of ordinary knowledge. And 3) Deduction (in Kant's
legalistic sense [25]), which is justification by means of a description of the
non-intuitive ground of the belief or proposition. "Deduction" is the peculiar
Kantian vehicle for dealing with non-intuitive immediate knowledge, and it is
the theoretical heart of Friesian introspective empirical epistemology. "Proof,"
"demonstration," and "deduction" are terms that all traditionally mean proof;
but Demonstration and Deduction in these new Friesian sense are in no way
logical derivations in the object language. Demonstration is merely a showing
of the obvious. Where the obvious is no longer present or escapes the nature
of our perceptions, then other considerations come into play. Deduction is a
showing of the unobvious, but still importantly a showing. Deduction cannot
logically prove the propositions in question [erratum corrected] any more than
the demonstration of an intuitive ground can. But the cognitive force of each
is the same.
Nelson's conception of Deduction seems to be that it is sufficient to show that
the ground of the object language propositions must be non-intuitive [26].
That would seem to be only half the answer, however, having said what the
ground is not while leaving the question unanswered what the ground is,
providing no general theory of the ontology of the non-intuitive ground of
various object languages. A consequence of that is that the various object
languages, once identified as such, remain isolated from each other, each a
solitary universe of thought maintained solely by Nelson's "self-confidence of
reason" [27]. The ontological ground of the difference, for the Friesians,
seems to be lost in the unknown qualities of things in themselves.

In this dissertation the emphasis is very different from Nelson's; for the
concern here is a positive and constructive theory of the interconnected
system of non-intuitive grounds, in particular what it is that distinguishes
theoretical from practical consciousness or what it is that supplies the peculiar
force of "ought" to moral commands. In Friesian theory such things must be
shelved as inexplicable givens. Of course explanation can never mean
replacing the immediate, practical force of moral value with some sort of
theoretical understanding that will have the same effect. Explanation is
descriptive, especially explanation in this case as Kantian Deduction, and it
will be only descriptive of a certain ontological articulation that in the end will
be crystallized in the various modes of theoretical and practical necessity. This
may result in more metaphysics than Kant might have liked, but it will by no
means eliminate the limitations of our rational knowledge.

§3 The Argument and Division of the Subject

The argument of the dissertation represents a logical progression that may be

characterized, for want to a better term, as "dialectical." This should be taken
first of all in an Aristotelian sense as meaning that the argument is neither a
deductive geometrica demonstratio nor an inductive generalization [28]. It
may be further taken in a limited Hegelian sense as involving a theoretical
progression of thought independent of modern scientific hypothesis and
experimentation. One of the most distinctive theses of the argument,
moreover, is that propositions of fact and propositions of value belong to
axiomatically independent systems, and this makes it obviously and
immediately of essential concern how any such argument, without special
principles of logic after the manner of Hegel's dialectic, is to progress, as good
Aristotelian science should, from the more evident truths of matters of fact to
the less evident truths of matters of value.

The simple, elegant, and powerful answer to the dilemma, derived from Jakob
Fries, [29] is that the dialectical argument is a metalanguage, independent
from both the object languages of empirical fact and the object languages of
value. The connection between the axiomatically independent object
languages of fact and value becomes the objective connection between their
respective ontological cognitive grounds. A simple metaphor for this is that,
as we walk around a building, describing its various aspects, we have a sense
that there is a unity and coherence to our account, not because of any
deductive or other internal connection between our statements, but because of
the unity and independent coherence in the object. Furthermore, while it may
be an obviously arbitrary matter, from a logical standpoint, where the
description of the building begins, we may also say that there is a certain
priority of coherence in any procedure of description: that the front of the
building should be described before the sides, or that the outside should be
described before the inside. That kind of priority also depends on the special
nature of the structure of the object. In this the terms of Friesian theory must
be kept in mind. The object language systems are givens and cannot be proven
in the metalanguage; and although this is a Kantian-like argument and is
similar to Kant's argument from the "principle of the possibility of
experience," it is not an inference dependent on the truth of the object
languages, as Kant's argument can be construed to be [30]. Instead, as an
introspective psychological metalanguage, the dialectical argument has its
own special object, the world as mental content, and that is its primary datum
independent of the content of all object languages.

To the dialectical argument, the cognitive ground of propositions of fact and

value is in the real objects of the world, the Aristotelian prÿoctai ousÿiaai,
"primary substances." The fundamental distinction between the cognitive
ground of fact and value corresponds, after the manner of Plato or Kant, to an
ontological distinction, namely the Kantian one between (1) objects in so far
as they appear to us with a dependent and relative reality and (2) objects in so
far as their appearance represents an independent existence separate from our
own. In these terms it is helpful to formulate an explicit ontological "principle
of separability," for the most important and distinctive difference between
attribute and substance or, in the Kant analogue, between phenomena and
things in themselves, is that the former cannot be separated from and exist
independently of the latter, while substances or things in themselves are fully
independent and separable from each other. Thus, phenomena as the relative
reality of external objects in perception are wholly dependent on the
substantial existence of the perceiver, while objects in their own right can be
removed from the perception or presence of the perceiver yet retain their own
characteristic reality. The paradox of the principle of ontological
undecidability is precisely that we must regard phenomenal objects
as both separable and inseparable, independent and dependent.

As in the case of approaching the outside and the front of a building to begin
its description, the ontological description, with more compelling reason,
begins with what is concrete, evident, and intuitive: the immanent reality of
phenomenal matters of fact in consciousness -- where "immanent" and
"phenomenal" are virtually synonymous. There, in the most familiar context,
the ontological and epistemological issues that determine the nature of the
theory of value are introduced, debated, and given their characteristic
answers. There the dialectical argument comes to depend already on one
fundamental observation: that the sensible material content of experience may
with equal force and equal justice be attributed either to external objects as the
content of their real character or to the internal self as the content of a
perceptual mental state. This is just another aspect of the principle of
ontological undecidability, and in it ontological and epistemological issues
come together. The ontological distinction between external and internal is
purely formal; and it may be identified as the primitive instance of the form of
intentionality as described by Brentano, Husserl, and other Phenomenologists
[31]. Thus internal means the existence of, or the dependence on the existence
of, the subject, as the external is the existence of, or the dependence on the
existence of, the objects that appear in perception. The formality of this
distinction is to be contrasted with the materiality of the sensations, forming
the material content of perception, which may be attributed to either the
internal or the external. A sensation as such is unavailable to us, for even
something as minimal as a "patch of blue" must be perceived or conceived in
relation to a subject and an object. The difference that must be posited here
with Phenomenological intentionality is that for us the form is not taken to be
subjective in immediate knowledge: the matter is stated as the principle of the
dual nature of representation or that of ontological undecidability, that we are
primitively given the relation of knowledge between external and internal, or
between subject and object, and that there is not sufficient reason to assign
priority to one pole of the relation or the other.

The relation of intentionality is not, indeed, entirely symmetrical. In our naive

and intuitive relation to the world it is the external pole of the form that is
given. The internal pole waits to be appreciated through reflection. The
external relation -- the attribution of the material contents of perception to
external objects -- is compelling in its immediacy, and every sense of naive
realism or assurance in the existence of the external world rests on the
intuitive force of that relation. Similarly, once the internal perspective is
appreciated fully, as it was in Descartes, then we are ever in danger of
becoming trapped by the logic of solipsism -- even when we persist in
rejecting the conclusion. In the history of modern philosophy it has been a
continual struggle to decide which competing claim will be acknowledged or,
what is worse, how the one claim to priority being conceded the other can be
sustained thereafter in any credible way. And if, at the logical extremes, our
choice is merely between solipsism and materialism, then the inner
perspective has really already lost the practical contest. But in fact neither
claim can be given exclusive legitimacy, and to do so is inevitably to lose half
the significance of reality.

The pernicious dilemma of the "problem of knowledge" in Descartes may be

said to follow from two simple, and reasonable, errors. First, he believed that
because the material content of consciousness, namely sensation as it
constitutes perception, depends for its existence on the existence of the subject
(it has internal existence) and is only causally related to external objects, then
internal existence must be known as external existence is not. The soft version
of that is doubt about the character of external objects; the hard version is
doubt about the reality of external existence.It was not until Hume that
recognition came that the existence of the subject, internal existence, actually
offers no more for our inspection than does external existence, so that doubt
about one should logically become doubt about the other also. The problem
that everyone has stumbled over may be well enough understood by taking to
heart Husserl's definition of consciousness (and intentionality) as
being consciousness of [32]. Thus we should say that whatever
is in consciousness does not intend consciousness but instead refers those
contents of consciousness to something else. Thus we are bound to admit that
the existence of consciousness is not itself known when all of its cognitive
contents are referred elsewhere. When consciousness is referred to by itself, it
can only do so by constructing a similitude of an external object -- a process
which Descartes mistook for an immediate and intuitive self-certain
perception. The essential feature of the situation, then, is the material unity of
the contents of consciousness, which is an epiphenomenon that is shared by
perceptual external existence and reflective internal existence.

Descartes' second error, related to the first, was that internal existence, which
he presumed to be immediately known by the contents of consciousness, is a
separate, distinct, and radically different substance from external existence.
Thus external existence meant material substance, an extended plenum; and
since, on reflection, he did not find any internal space analogous to external
space, he characterized the soul as an unextended, conscious substance.
Descartes is led into this sort of dualism because he has hastily stated the
matter in traditional ontological terms (although refined to the crisp opposition
of substances by his own insights, and hasty only in terms of his own self-
professed caution and scepticism) and has dropped out the relation which is
the epistemological given, the relation of intentionality without which subject
and object could not be distinguished and so without which there would be no
possible ground for drawing the sort of ontological conclusions that seem to
make the relation itself impossible.

Given the indifference with which the sensible material content of experience
may be ascribed to either pole of the relation of intentionality, we are then left
with the poles themselves as such as no more than empty abstractions. This
emptiness is significant, for it stands as the place-holder for the transcendence
over consciousness or the existence which external objects and the internal
self possess. This leads to a distinction that may be borrowed from Heidegger,
[33] that the material content of experience gives us the whatness, the positive
predicates, of the ÿoanta, the beings, of the world, while the empty dual poles
of intentionality give us the pure existence, the eînai or Being, the thatness, of
the objects that exist. This distinction gives the first two major divisions of the
dialectical argument and of the dissertation, between the theory of immanence
or consciousness and the theory of negative transcendence or existence. Here
"negative transcendence" signifies the negative fashion in which
transcendence has been defined, as no more than a privative term, the non-
immanent or non-phenomenal. The privation, indeed, is of the material
content that ontological undecidability removes from both internal and
external existence. This privation will mean two things to us, however, first as
a permanent presence of emptiness, like the void of the Atomists, and second
as no more than as a logical receptacle that we expect to fill as soon as the
paradox of ontological undecidability is resolved. The privative term,
therefore, has a positive meaning as an ontological emptiness and
a negative meaning as no more than a placeholder for something else.

If we are not simply to resolve ontological undecidability by choosing one of

the traditional alternatives -- ending up back where we started -- then a certain
revolution in perspective is required to fill the receptacle of negative
transcendence. This change may be described as a continuation of Kant's
"Copernican Revolution," whereby the theory of positive
transcendence reexamines sensation, first of all, as itself the content of
existence, the Parmenidean plenum of Being, and comes to consider the form
of intentionality and its abstract poles as belonging properly to the immanent
in the place of sensation -- hence the Copernican transposition, so that the
Cartesian substances vanish as no more than perspectives within positive
transcendence. The dialectical argument thus breaks into halves, first
immanence and negative transcendence, second positive transcendence, which
we shall see is the theory of value proper.

The principal task of the theory of immanence is as a theory of

knowledge according to which value may later be easily subsumed as an
object of knowledge. At the same time related ontological and psychological
problems can be dealt with. As a general theory of knowledge, the range of
issues is of course potentially very extensive, and it will be necessary both to
treat the matter summarily, to avoid the extensive and interesting but essential
tangential digressions, and to indicate firmly the points of divergence with
more familiar and accepted forms of contemporary epistemology. The
psychological aspect of Friesian theory of knowledge is especially prominent
in the first project of the theory, a clarification of the meaning
of understanding. In the theory of understanding it is argued that in general
conscious judgment or the possibly arbitrary decisions inherent in explicit
linguistic expression are actually secondary displays in consciousness,
subordinate to the understanding which belongs more to the (Freudian)
preconscious [34] than to consciousness. Knowledge of value shares these
very same characteristics and differs from understanding only in
being immediate, i.e. lacking the presence of belief and the power of mediate
expression. The theory of understanding thus removes us from the deceptive
presence of judgment and statement, where propositions of value are formally
identical to propositions of fact, to the inarticulate source underlying
consciousness, where in the distinctions of existence value and fact are
radically different.

The second major project of the theory of consciousness is the sense in

which necessity belongs to all knowledge properly so called. This is a Platonic
thesis and is of course closely related to Kant's concern with synthetic
necessary truth a priori. In the dialectical argument, there are various modes
of necessity, of fact and value, distinguished according to their ontological
ground. The modes of necessity amount to eight in the end (with an additional
special non-cognitive mode, numinosity), but for the theory of consciousness
only three are germane. In the argument for those three, however, the major
barrier must be overcome of the nearly overpowering sense, derived from
logic, that there is only one mode of necessity, the analytic. The second mode
of necessity, then, is similar to Kant's synthetic necessity, while the third is the
result of a renewed consideration of the problem of future contingency in
Aristotle's On Interpretation. The net effect, therefore, is to provide for the
possibility of the necessary grounds for knowledge of value in the theory of
positive transcendence and to indicate how such grounds may be articulated.

Where the main task of the theory of immanence was to establish the
epistemological conditions for a theory of value, that of the theory of negative
transcendence bears more on the ontological problems. This ontological
concern, in turn, and with a clear increase in Realism with respect to Kant,
falls under two divisions, the questions of space and of time. Theoretical
knowledge presents a static picture of the world, even when it describes
change -- which is to say, it presents a series of states of reality, which it
supplements with rules to account for the transition of one to the other. In the
theory of negative transcendence, the first issue, the nature of space, is
basically one of state and so continues the theoretical perspective from the
theory of consciousness. There are two major perspectives in the theory of
space. First there is the positive ontological argument of space as the presence
of Being in the full Eleatic sense. This, in turn, in the theory of positive
transcendence, will correspond to the real presence of value together with the
phenomenal and factual attributes of objects. Eleatic space is also still
the principium individuationis of Schopenhauer, [35] and the salient meaning
of that is as the embodiment of the previous principle of the separability of
substance, such that space is the real nexus of separation between real things,
which is no more than how we ordinarily envision the matter. The reality of
individuation, which Schopenhauer considered to be an illusion, then becomes
the ontological basis for the articulation of the various modes of value in the
theory of positive transcendence.

The second perspective in the theory of space is that the abstract emptiness of
negative transcendence is in fact a concrete presence also: that the emptiness
of space is a reality of experience, as it is the nemesis of theories of space
from the Eleatic-Atomist dialectic [36] to the ether-curved-space theories in
modern physics. This perspective serves to keep in place the more traditional
and Eleatic first perspective on space; for negative transcendence remains a
paradoxical duality, a genuine presence of emptiness and a placeholding
receptacle for positive transcendence.

The theory of time begins to open the practical field of value. The theory of
time is the theory of change, and change expresses itself in the dual necessities
of causal change and purposive change. In this the sense of the dynamic and
the practical takes over from that of the static and theoretical, while the
transcendent ceases to be something that is a removed abstraction or a
receptive emptiness and becomes the powerful presence of the future pressing
down on the immanent states of the present. In the theory of negative
transcendence itself, both theories of change, causal and purposive, have
something of an Ideal existence in Kant's sense, as necessities of thought
whose material ground is not available for our inspection [37]. This limitation
is resolved for the problems of purpose and free will in the theory of positive
transcendence. For causal change, however, the external ground of the
necessity of natural law never becomes available for our inspection. It is
evident, however, that by the technique of hypothesis and experiment the
character of this ground can be inferred. The success of such inference is
manifest in the modern technological sense of "practicality" that signifies the
manipulation and control of the forces of nature -- the Pragmatic justification
that "It works" derives its character both from the hiddenness of the real
ground and from our practical success at approximating it.

In the theory of time, the fundamental distinction between cause and purpose
is that the occasion of change, the immediate conditions and circumstances
that initiate it, is given by the contents of past and future, respectively. In this,
purpose temporarily retains a wholly Ideal character in that the future remains
for negative transcendence as empty and characterless as space, while cause
finds its theoretical culmination in the circumstance that the material contents
of the immanent serve as the causal occasion of change. The content of the
past (or, more properly, the perfect aspect, after the evaluation of the problem
of future contingency mentioned above) is at once the occasion for present
change and shares the character of the hidden ground of causal necessity in
that the occasions of the past become matters of inference -- whose character,
unlike the ground of necessity, may become entirely and permanently lost
even to inference.

The boundary between the problems of space and time in the theory of
negative transcendence is the major watershed between the overall foci of
matters of fact and matters of value. Once in the theory of positive
transcendence, the Cartesian paradox of the cognitive connection between
internal and external is resolved by the dissolution of the dualism of negative
transcendence into the unity of positive transcendence, mirror-imaging the
unity of the immanent relation. The extension of Kant's "Copernican
Revolution" is that the very thing that constitutes the immanence of the
immanent relation -- the material content of sensation -- and which remains in
Kant as the special contribution of the object (after the forms of objectivity
have been removed from the object and given to the synthetic power of the
subject) is the proper solution to the notion of the thing in itself in Kant and
Schopenhauer. Where before the sensible content was the characteristic of the
immanent while the empty poles of the relation of internal and external were
characteristic of the transcendent, now, in the mirror-image, the sensible
content is the reality of existence within which the form of intentionality
establishes a relation.

Sensation assumes a dual character: on the one hand as a causal product in the
immanent context, subjective and abstracted from any external object; on the
other hand as the plenum of positive transcendence, the very way that we
naively take colors, texture, and solidity as belonging to all the objects of our
experience. Sensation also assumed an additional dual character: just the same
as the distinction between static and dynamic, theoretical and practical, fact
and value. In that dichotomy the first treatment of value is as sensation in its
immanent causal context: pleasure and pain are divorced from their objects
(i.e. causes), causally determined, and overwhelmingly immediate and
intuitive. The category of pleasure and pain occurs because, even though
positive transcendence means that the transcendent content of all objects of
experience is available to us, it is only our own existence and transcendence
that are present to us identically and inseparably. Thus we do not suffer the
pains or experience the joys of other objects, even though we may derive
pleasure from their presence or their beauty. Despite the minor place that
pleasure and pain find in the whole theory, the arguments of hedonism may be
well taken in the sense that pleasure is the good in so far as we exist ourselves
and are not merely disembodied spectators on objective, purposive value --
though of course the meaning of "good" is ontologically more fundamental
than this, and we must not think that "good" can be defined as pleasure when
the general meaning is so greatly restricted by the specified limitation. As the
natural and causative reflex of positive transcendence, pleasure as the good
does not merit the distrust or outright rejection with which it has been
regarded by Plato and various subsequent traditions of ascetic and world-
denying philosophy and religion. Pleasure is clearly vulnerable to the causes
of the world in ways that often seem to hopelessly couple it to inevitable pain
and suffering, but evil in thought and spirit is no less strongly coupled to its
corresponding goods, as religions at their best tend to recognize. In the end,
the theory of positive transcendence must hold that innocent pleasure, of any
type, is as fully worthy a mode of value as any degree of ethical goodness or
spiritual beauty.

Since Aristotle very little serious creative thought seems to have been given to
the meaning of purpose -- at first because the Aristotelian treatment seemed
adequate, later because the task at hand was to rid empirical science of
anthropomorphic purposiveness. When psychological behaviorists then turn
around and attempt to rid psychological analysis of purposiveness, it should
be evident that a very peculiar failure of theory has taken place. The scientific
preference for causal explanation, while appropriate in its context, is on a
broader perspective a serious distortion of reality, equivalent and conformable
to a preference for one or the other of the internal and external perspectives
that are equated by the principle of epistemological priority. In the theory of
positive transcendence, purposive change is the inversion of causal change,
meaning that where the occasion of causal change is a specific state of
external conditions, immanent and factual, the occasion of purposive change
is dynamic and transcendent: to be variously characterized as will, reflecting a
pure and empty potential as negative transcendence, or as value, signifying the
plenum of positive transcendence as a hidden but suddenly uncovered reality
of the Platonic Forms, Kantian thing in itself, or Ideas of Schopenhauer.

The conception of value is reminiscent of the apparent doctrines of Nietzsche

and some Existentialists whereby value is created by acts of will, or again of
Heidegger where periodic uncoverings of Being dispense new versions of
truth [38]. Each of these, however, comes down with force on the side of
value as essentially arbitrary and subjective -- a doctrine which, however
transparently supportive and comforting to beliefs we may have concerning
individual responsibility, self-determination, and cosmic freedom (which is
the appeal I take it to have in this era), becomes virtually meaningless on the
meta-level of denying to forces contrary to our ideals their right to carry out
their various intolerant programs. I take the subjectivist views to be equivalent
to the relativism of Protagoras, which I take to have been decisively refuted by
the "turning the tables" argument in Plato's Theaetetus [39].

The question for the dialectical argument is still the Socratic one: that true
knowledge of value seems to exist both without being explicitly known and
together with various conscious opinions that may contradict it. The Platonic
program of philosophy is thus always to seek to discover if and how such a
situation could be true and if so then how value enters into conscious action
and how it may be brought to light from that context. An act of will is thus to
be taken always to embody an implicit purpose which is an act of non-
intuitive immediate knowledge of value, an occasion of positive
transcendence. To reflect on our own acts is consequently the essence of
Socratic ethics: as we form grammatical sentences in the natural languages we
speak with only the dimmest awareness of the many rules we employ
governing well formed and intelligible statements, so do we usually pay little
attention to the rules of value that our deeds reflect. And, as in the language
again, the profound inquiry is not into the transient rules of time, place, and
culture, but into the "universal grammar" [40] which governs discourse,
governs indeed the formation of specific linguistic rules, whatever the terms
or conditions.

There is a great variety in the articulation of purposive value. As "purpose,"

the point of view on value is always from the ego and the personal will. In
those terms, the formative distinctions concern whether the will acts upon
what are merely objects, what are actually other conscious selves, or some
combination of these. In this the critical ontological state is clearly the
occurrence of internal existence -- the object languages of value are
differentiated according to the possible relationships between internal and
external existence. There is also the condition that, while value is in general
that which occupies or engages the will, this occupation need not result in any
over act. An important aspect of the theory of value thus covers the inner
occasion where change does not occur, in the same way that physical theory
must cover conditions of equilibrium. The equilibrium of will is here
identified as aesthetic value. This is to use "aesthetic" first of all in its sense as
"perception," and the relation to the object of the self as a passive one. In the
category of aesthetic value, the object is taken as good or evil in itself, with an
inner integrity and independence of value, so that the value is coupled to the
substantial and separate existence of the object. This may be called, in terms
of a convenient token label, the category of the beautiful and the ugly, though
for the purposes of the dialectical argument, it need not be specified whether
beauty is actually coextensive with the good-in-itself or only a subset.

The category of good and evil, namely good-for-some-end apart from or in

addition to any good-in-itself, represents the ends of willing for the ego, with
the will actively engaged, where other selves may or may not be relevant to
specific ends. Here is "purpose" in its fullest sense, namely the intentional
realization of objects in time through the agency of will. Given the relation of
the ego to others selves, regardless of ends, the category of moral value,
conveniently labeled that of "right and wrong," comes into consideration. That
is the field of deontological value, and it is restrictive, as a necessary
condition, on any acts that pursue any ends. Here the fundamental insight is
the limitation of the will in the acknowledgement of the existence of other
selves; and from this conceptions of individual rights and dignity, distributive
justice, and retributive justice all come into consideration.

The sense of the object language of the good is that various ends are worthy of
being realized. The sense of the object language of the right, on the other
hand, is that while various goods may, in general, be worth realizing, there are
cases where they must not be because some individual other than the ego will
suffer evil instead of good. Morality is the protection of the individual, and it
takes precedence over the mere requirements of the good end. Ethical systems
can be characterized according to whether the two object languages are kept
separate or confused, and if confused whether one is merely absorbed into the
other and its requirements subordinated to it. Thus Kant can be taken to
assimilate everything to the formality and strict obligation of morality, while
G.E. Moore seems to erase the special qualities of morality by defining it in
terms of merely willing the greatest good [41]. Similarly, the basic thesis of
Utilitarianism is properly disturbing because the good end of pleasure and
numbers does not reserve any special dignity, value, or rights for the
individual. Here the axiomatic independence of the object languages is
recognized, which is to say that the synthetic first principles, or axioms, of
each object language are not only logically independent of each other but are
also cognitively distinct according to their ontological grounds, with a
different quality or force of value thereby expressed. Thus, while morality is
strictly and absolutely incumbent upon the will, the object language of the
good, as such, is directed to objects that are morally supererogatory. Another
cause for confusion in this, however, is that morality is itself a good and so
can, without losing its peculiar force, be subsumed under the more general
category. Indeed, with the Greeks we can call all these
things good and beautiful and subsume all the categories of value under the
most general and morally weakest, the aesthetic.

The final category of value concerns the ego itself, whose character in positive
transcendence is the inner assent to either good or evil, corresponding to the
Kantian good will or lack of it. The convenient label for this category is that of
love or hate, meaning, not the active emotions, [42] but whether the inner
readiness of the ego is positive and constructive towards the world and others
or negative and destructive. In this way Zoroastrianism saw life as determined
by an inner choice between the good religion (i.e. Zoroastrianism) and the evil
religion, which was equivalent to a choice between life and death, to nurture
life and live or to cause death and die [43]. Where beauty and its opposite is
the most concrete and, in a sense, the weakest category of value, since beauty
can never be more than morally accidental or a happy addition to
goodness, good will is the most abstractly general category and the most
powerfully obligatory mode of value. As it expresses the strongest necessity,
good will comes first in the course of the exposition below.
The progress of the dialectical argument is a step by step unpacking of reality.
As Plato postulated a sort of ultimate object, the Good, at the ontological
summit of his inquiries, responsible for all of fact and value, the dialectic, in
its own descriptive way, culminates with a certain order of value -- as
coextensive with sensation as the others -- the numinous. This does not
represent any unique or separate object but a quality that occurs with any
other kind of value or phenomenal object. As Rudolf Otto's term [44] for the
special quality of holiness or power that religious objects or experiences
possess, the "numinous" refers to an aspect of reality, an ultimate aspect,
towards which all matters of fact and value tend and from which they
emanate. Because of that religions tend to assimilate all modes of value to the
numinous, giving to it a cognitive content it does not justifiably have and
obscuring the rational contents of morality, etc., with a cloud of dogmatic
authority.

The ontological ground for numinous value is different from that of the
previous categories of value, and the effect is different. In the Copernican
Revolution of positive transcendence and the resolution of the paradox of
ontological undecidability, we were free to say that Being belongs equally and
indifferently either to both subject and object or to neither subject nor object.
In the categories of purposive value, which exist relative to phenomenal
reality, we naturally take positive transcendence to belong to both subject and
object. When we imagine the ego in relation to its own non-existence,
however, we imagine the transcendent absolutely, without either subject or
object. This has a very definite meaning phenomenologically since we are
aware that our self comes to be at a definite, or within a definite range of,
time, that it passes away wholly or largely for extended periods of sleep every
day, and that we face the prospect of its annihilation with death. Birth and
death raise for most people the most profound questions about the value and
meaning of our existence, the implications of the duality between good and
evil, and the ends, if any, that the world and its history of suffering serve.
Thus, although "absolute transcendence" cannot, by definition, be experienced
and there is no, strictly speaking, cognitive content to be associated with it, it
means something very definite and of profound importance to us.

The quality of numinosity attaches itself to immanent objects, experiences, or

to special doctrines that may or may not concern phenomenal reality, and
these are the contents of religion. By an examination of the internal
inconsistencies and external contradictions between religious doctrines and
religions, we become aware both of the impossibility of producing a body of
transcendent knowledge of the numinous and of the kinds of concerns and
problems that religion has always sought to answer. High on the list of
concerns is the problem of evil, and this may even be considered
independently of the more characteristic objects of numinosity since it can be
formulated merely with reference to the polarity of value. While the final
treatment deals with the open-ended problems peculiar to religion, concerning
the soul, gods or God, immortality, miracles, etc., the treatment of the problem
good and evil is the place of the final and most fundamental conclusions about
value, namely that value and existence are at root identical and that they differ
for us only because of the curious dissociation of being that our personal
existence as intentional consciousness creates.

In the end, the impression and the suggestion of the dialectical argument is
that religion, while it may contain doctrines about a separate transcendent
reality or beings, is most importantly about immanent and phenomenal events,
specifically the progress and triumph of the good, knowledge, and life, as
expressed in the apocalyptic doctrines of many religions. The sense of these is
the overcoming of the dissociation of being in which our personal existence is
embodied and an elimination of the threat of death and suffering, the threat
that we will be carried back to the oblivion and nothingness which, while the
original and fundamental being of all things, have become for us, in our
intentional distinction between subject and object, the full meaning of not-
being. It is the essential, but unprovable, hope at the heart of numinous feeling
that the tragic dilemma of our existence, caught between life and death, will in
time be resolved to the best end.

THE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS OR IMMANENCE

PART ONE: UNDERSTANDING

§1 Remark

The theory of understanding is an investigation of the relation between

thought and perception, concept and proposition, meaning and referent, but
finally and especially between consciousness and the unconscious. The
function of the theory of understanding for the theory of consciousness is to
show that much of what is effective and functional in consciousness is not
actually present to consciousness. In this the vagueness and elusiveness of
thoughts and concepts as introspective objects, in paradoxical contrast to their
clarity and precision as instruments of knowledge, is explained by their actual
removal from the field of consciousness. This move will prohibit the
ontological dualism of this treatise from being construed as a traditional
dualism, as in Kant, between the "higher" powers of thought and concept and
the "lower" powers of sensation and perception. This is the major benefit.
Next, in removing the stuff of thought to the hidden side of the mind, we
should be less inclined to see the unconscious as essentially bestial -- the
remorseless, violent, incoherent, dangerous source of desire that we might
expect from reading Schopenhauer or Freud. Instead, it becomes possible to
expect something better, and in the theories of will and purpose, there will be
something better.

§2 Understanding

One of the fundamental distinctions for the theory of consciousness is that

between perception and thought. In the philosophic tradition such a distinction
has always been a source of much trouble and controversy. The approaches to
it have either been reductionistic, making perception a kind of thought
(Leibniz) or thought a kind of perception (Hume),[45] or have inflated the
division into an opposition between spirit and matter, soul and body, or the
like. The rarefied, abstract, insubstantial, and non-spatial nature of thought has
even at times been taken as proof of the immateriality and immortality of the
soul.

Basic to the unity of the relation between perception and thought is the
function of understanding. Once the nature of understanding is clear, not only
are thought and perception united but consciousness itself as a whole is first
brought into a substantive relation with what does not belong to
consciousness, the contents of the unconscious. Since the transcendent is
essentially equivalent to the unconscious, as the immanent is to the conscious,
the theory of understanding carries the functions of intellect into the sphere
where, as we will see, the cognitive source of value is to be found.

The traditional technical uses of the term "understanding" must be seriously

reconsidered. Schopenhauer castigates Kant for unnecessarily using the term
in an unusual sense,[46] and certainly by the time Hegel comes on the
scene, Verstand bears little enough resemblance to any ordinary meaning of
the word. While such new usages may be considered necessary or convenient,
it is also possible that the philosophers thus avoid the need to explain aspects
of the original meaning that may not fit particularly well into their theories.
That may have been done consciously, since for many words philosophers
explicitly reject some ordinary connotations because they hold them to be
false or meaningless. It is worth remembering, however, that persistent usages
in ordinary speech may provide the best critique for philosophic redefinitions-
daily usage makes its own rules and is not, in the long run, well disciplined or
well instructed. With the term "understanding" this circumstance is especially
striking, for the word in ordinary speech does not seem to mean, for instance
after the manner of Kant's analysis, "to judge" or "to make a judgment."[47] It
is true that understanding can be expressed in judgments, but we tend to speak
as though understanding is something that precedes judgments and makes
them possible. William James, with his notion of "feelings of tendency,"
comes very close to this.[48]

The problem with this ordinary meaning of understanding is that while

judgments are at least something tangible, something with physical expression
in speech and writing, whatever must precede them is not. Kant has
considerably simplified things by ignoring this, but anyone would be greatly
mistaken to think that he somehow proves that it should be ignored. But Kant
was on the right track in one respect. In traditional Aristotelian logic, there is a
function of thought that precedes judgment, and that is the "simple
apprehension" of concepts.[49] It is tempting to call that an understanding of
the meaning of concepts; but while that is true so far as it goes, it is too
narrow and is not what is often, or even generally, meant by "understanding."

Understanding does have an essential connection with judgment. When

someone says that they understand a remark or an explanation, they express
an apprehension or feeling that the meaning of the matter has been somehow
taken up or grasped. In gaining such a feeling of understanding, it is not
necessary that a person run through any internal statements elucidating the
meaning. On the other hand, a "feeling" is essentially something vague and
inarticulate; and if someone is called upon to demonstrate their understanding
or should they wish to do so simply out of an uncertainty over the adequacy of
their understanding, they will then make explicit statements and judgments to
set out the contents of the understanding. After the demonstration, anyone else
who understands the matter, if they have understood the statements, will be
able to pronounce whether an understanding was or was not demonstrated.

One of the hallmarks of explicit demonstrations of understanding, whether in

a classroom situation or in less formal circumstances, is that the judgments
used to effect the demonstration should not be the same judgments as those
found in an original remark or explanation the understanding of which may be
in question. If a demonstration of understanding is not considered sufficient,
then even more judgments are called for. The only time when we look for a
verbatim reproduction is simply when the question is whether the original
statements have been correctly heard-naturally many misunderstandings are
resolved on this level. What all this reveals, then, is that whatever underlies
and precedes judgment is far from being identical with any particular
judgmental expression. If someone is unable to express a thought in different
terms, we usually strongly suspect that they have only a poor, if any,
understanding of what they are attempting to say.

There are cases where someone is simply unable to express an understanding

that they actually have in a very adequate way. The classic example would be
the bad classroom teacher. Even a good teacher may now and then fail to
come up with a very clear explanation of what is quite familiar and
transparent to him, while the bad teacher is somehow permanently unable to
explain any subject very well. While these failings bear on judgments about
teaching ability, and while they ordinarily would be prima facie evidence of
lack of understanding, it is also true that understanding may all the same
contrast with degrees of inability to convey it.

In various areas there may be ways of testing a person's or a teacher's

understanding that are quite different from tests of an ability to convey
understanding. This holds wherever understanding is of a technique or set of
rules whose application is not necessarily verbal. For instance in mathematics,
a teacher may be able to demonstrate a profound grasp of the strategies and
rules of the subject by doing proofs and solving problems that would foil even
some we might wish to admit are far better teachers. Where no such practical
demonstration is possible, an inability to convey the contents of understanding
can be an extraordinarily frustrating experience. Most people at one time or
another have felt that for their part they possessed a quite clear understanding
of a matter but found themselves totally at a loss to express that understanding
in a way sufficient to convey it to others. At the same time, that subjective
certainty may be completely, hopelessly, mistaken.

§3 The Simultaneity of Understanding

Simply distinguishing understanding from articulate judgment is not enough,

for all parts of a statement or of a line of reasoning are not simultaneously
present in explicit form in thought or in speech. "Explicit form" means the
linguistic expression of a thought, the series of words that we generate in
sequence either in actual speech or in silent thought. As a sentence is orally
generated, it never exists all at once at the same time, yet the speaker at the
beginning tends to have some grasp of what it is he is going to say and then
knows at the end what he has said. A listener, of course, does not know,
normally, what another is going to say; and so it is only in the silence that
follows speech that the listener can evaluate the entire expression and derive
an understanding of it. At the beginning of his thought a person need not in
fact be at all clear just what it is that he is going to say in order to express
what he has "in mind": struggling in mid-sentence to complete a thought and
clarify a vague intention is a common experience. Likewise, we may discover
at the end of a thought that the sentence generated wasn't quite what we
wanted. In this the written expression of language has been misleading, for
seeing a sentence displayed in writing seems to lead us to think that it
somehow exists that way already before it is generated in speech. In the
theories of generative and transformational grammar in linguistics there seems
to be a similar impression or assumption that whole sentences are produced all
at once and that certain rules only operate by taking sentences as wholes.[50]
The illusion that we produce whole sentences at once is believable because of
the quality that I will call the simultaneity of understanding. Also, in contrast
to discursive understanding (which will mean understanding articulated in
Judgments, and not, as in Kant,[51] the opposite of intuitive understanding),
understanding may also be characterized as "instantaneous." Although the two
terms will be used interchangeably here, "simultaneous" places the emphasis
on the different parts of a sentence occurring at the same time in
understanding, while "instantaneous" emphasizes that the understanding itself
occurs without extension in time. What these notions are meant to express is
that while we may acquire understanding over time and can only display it
verbally over time, once we have it we have it all at once and are aware all at
once that we have it. It takes no time to understand something that we
understand. Understanding is an achieved state of mind. Judgments or any
explicit linguistic expressions are activities that may follow, and actually are
made possible by, the original state of understanding.

Understanding must precede every linguistic expression, but the expressions it

generates will be quite varied even for one speaker of one language (though
there will be characteristic ways of putting things both for speakers and for
languages). Indeed, as noted above, it is necessary for a proper demonstration
of understanding, or for an attempt to convey novel insights, that different
judgments be generated. It is never the judgment or the linguistic expression
that is the main thing, and no single expression can adequately convey the
understanding that underlies a great many possible, perhaps an infinitely
possible, number of expressions. As a sentence is generated, then, in speech or
in thought, it is the same understanding that is present all at once in each act,
while the extended sentence is only present one part at a time. Thus, even as
speech may only be forming one phoneme of one word, we retain in mind
what that whole word will mean and what the whole sentence will mean --
should we, by chance, decide to complete the thought as we originally
intended.

§4 Memory

Instantaneous understanding displays strong similarities to the phenomena of

memory, and so we will approach the problem of the relation of understanding
to consciousness by way of the somewhat more familiar and striking problem
of memory.

Once a sentence has been completed in speech and we understand its

meaning, we are still strongly aware of the explicit expression of that
sentence, despite the fact that it is not then explicitly displayed either
physically or in thought. The sentence at that point may be said to be stored in
what Freud called the "preconscious." In short order our awareness moves on
to other matters and that sentence is lost to our consciousness. Later it may
occur to us to recall the explicit form of that sentence, and in fact we may find
that we are unable to do so. The sentence, having become temporarily lost to
consciousness, thus may become permanently lost. Our point in this, then,
must be that the storage of memory, being outside of consciousness, may
become lost, in varying degrees, to the reckoning of consciousness. The level
of memory storage where a memory may, insensibly, pass beyond our powers
of recall, deserves to be called the "subconscious," and it is especially telling
to contrast the indifferent oblivion of so many of our memories with the
inarticulate frustration we feel at an inability to produce a memory that we are
sure we possessed at one time. That frustration seems to signify a conflict
between a preconscious sense that the memory is available and an actual
powerlessness to bring it to consciousness.

Remembering a sentence that I have spoken or heard is not the same as

understanding that sentence, nor the same as understanding what the sentence
was intended to express. Our awareness that we possess certain memories is
similar to understanding in one extremely important respect, however, in that
the awareness of the possession of memories is as little involved in the actual
recall of them as the understanding of something actually is in spelling out
that understanding in explicit judgments. If I believe that I am able to
remember something and call to consciousness the general and vague
awareness that gives me the confidence of that belief, which should mean that
the contents are immediately accessible in the preconscious, some salient
aspect of the memory may enter explicit consciousness, perhaps as an image;
but my belief is clearly that I remember and can recall far more than that
abstracted feature. I may be wrong, and in recounting the memory I may
discover that some things have escaped me that I thought I remembered, or
again that some things are clear that I might have expected to be long gone.
Whether the link between my superficial awareness and the depths of my
memory is strong or weak, it is clear that my abilities with respect to memory
are subtle and obscure and that this aspect of my mind and mental life does
not exist in Cartesian explicitness and clarity. The essentially conscious
Cartesian soul should have a storage of memories as present and evident to it
as the books on our library shelves are to our sight. But this is not so.

In terms of computers what is needed in order to recall some content from

memory is the "address" of the location (or perhaps the complex of locations)
in memory where the content is stored. Should the address be misplaced or
lost, only an exhaustive search would eventually turn up the memory. As far
as we can tell introspectively, we have no actual techniques for an exhaustive
search. Similarly, we have no explicit awareness of the "address" for
individual memory contents. We try to remember things all the time, but the
mechanisms of such searches are entirely hidden from us, as they still are to
neurophysiology and psychology. The best we can do, if difficulties are
encountered, is to try to recall an associated memory that may spark the
desired recall. Sometimes this results in an infuriating regress of failures.
Once we realize that we have found some complex memory, however, our
feelings are much as though an "address" has been found, since the memory
itself often takes some considerable time to unpack in detail. For some
memories recovered with difficulty, we may have no idea how much of the
memory is recallable until we actually set about doing so.

Whether memories are localized in certain parts of the brain or not, or any
similar problem, is superfluous here: for while consciousness may visualize
space and locate objects in it, even to visualize the brain and locate regions in
it, consciousness cannot visualize itself, let alone its functions with respect to
the subconscious, in the same way. If a memory is lost, it is not because the
ego has carelessly left it in an obscure part of the brain, even though, in fact,
the brain's operating system may have done just that. This distinction should
speak volumes about the difference between an internal and introspective
viewpoint, which is based on the limits of consciousness, and an external
perspective, which is free to treat both contents of consciousness and the
contents of the subconscious as equally epiphenomena of brain activity. To
the internal perspective, with the problems of the dual nature of representation
and the principle of ontological undecidability, it is not self-evident that the
meaning and reality of the subconscious aspects of the mind are exhausted by
a reference to neurophysiology. Thus, we set aside too much consideration of
the latter and continue with what we can glean introspectively. Indeed, it is
a paradoxical philosophy of mind that sets aside the internal perspective and
relies on an external viewpoint that inevitably reduces mind to brain and limits
the ontology of our existence to little more than what can be studied by
scientific method.

So far the significant introspective lesson is how little our inner awareness
reveals to us the fundamental workings and formative mechanisms of our
conscious existence. We are like players at a video game of consciousness, to
whom not only is the basic mechanical hard wiring of the machine a total
mystery but even the step by step program software of the game is absolutely
alien and unfathomed.[52] This kind of realization may easily be taken as
exposing the poverty of introspective knowledge; but that is a rather pointless
conclusion, since consciousness is going to continue operating in the same
way regardless-the video game is going to play pretty much the same whether
we understand how the machine works or not. Thus, while the significance of
what ultimately may be learned should not be carelessly underestimated, for
most of the purposes of this discussion, a simple working analogy for
memory, e.g. motion picture film running through a projector and displayed in
the theater of consciousness, should be more than sufficient. What is really
relevant here is simply that there is some structure which belongs to the
subconscious, preserves memory, and enables us to reproduce in imagination
or speech some analogue of our previous experience.

Our awareness that we are able to generate sentences to reflect our

understanding is profoundly dependent on memory, not just because in the
past we have generated sentences but because for the future every word and
structure we use is a matter of recollection. The understanding that underlies
all the sentences, however, may or may not be a matter of recollection, for by
using the same words and the same structures that have appeared in countless
sentences, we are able to formulate new expressions that may embody a
totally novel and unfamiliar understanding. Naturally such sentences are the
most difficult for others to understand, and a novel understanding must
therefore be embodied in as many clear and expressive sentences as possible.
Even then it may take time for others to hit upon the understanding that
enables them to generate the same sentences with some confidence, which is
the first evidence that they have grasped the original thought.

Our interest in memory, finally, is just that moment of inarticulate certainty

when we feel the presence of those contents in what I have called the
preconscious, for this is completely analogous with the similar confident
feeling we have in our moments of understanding.

§5 Act and Potential in Understanding

It would be unfair to Kant to belabor him very harshly for avoiding an

explanation of ordinary understanding, as though he did so intentionally or
maliciously. In fact Kant represents an advance over the traditional views; for
his doctrine of the understanding as the "faculty of judgment" is closer to the
truth than the traditional view of the priority of conception and "simple
apprehension" over judgment. We must note the truth in each perspective: in a
sense the traditional simple apprehension of the meaning of a concept is prior
to judgment because it is an act of instantaneous understanding. On the other
hand, Kant has clearly grasped that understanding is only
adequately articulated in judgments. Isolated concepts do not express
complete thoughts, apart from common conventions of ellipsis. The
propositional display of thought may thus be called discursive
understanding to highlight its correspondence to the simple inner state of
consciousness. We even expect that the meaning of a concept is something
that can be properly displayed only through discourse -- hence the equivalence
of a definition to a simple concept.

In all this Kant simply shares in the error of grasping onto and following too
closely the tangible expression of thought in the forms of language. The secret
of the mystery is the intangible presence of understanding, which we may, for
convenience, locate in something we have chosen to call the "preconscious."
But the preconscious is a paradoxical compromise; for it combines the
vagueness, the inarticulateness, the elusiveness, and the quality of
obscure feeling that accompanies contents rising from the subconscious that
are not yet explicitly part of consciousness, with the precision, the clarity, the
definiteness and concreteness that accompanies perceptions and images in
consciousness. The connection between these profoundly opposed
impressions is that the feeling of awareness that we have when we know that
we understand something or are able to remember something
concerns potential contents of consciousness. As Aristotle originally explored
for us, power or potential doesn't seem to be anything in itself in separation
from actual contents or material; and in precisely this way the preconscious
doesn't seem to be anything in itself apart from consciousness. The proof of
the feeling of understanding or memory is that conscious contents can indeed
be produced at will; and so the vague feeling of power stands for very many
tangible contents that can be explicitly generated. The proof of the potential is
always in the act.

We have a certain feeling about familiar surroundings because we have the

power to recall having seen them before. This feeling is what makes ordinary
circumstances ordinary, and it only really becomes noticeable when we find
ourselves in unfamiliar surroundings: the lack is felt most acutely.
Understanding or recognizing any unfamiliar object means that we become
aware of an ability to generate an explicit account of it, while even familiar
objects in unfamiliar settings produce an uneasiness that understanding alone
cannot overcome. Only experience, like a shallow sea laying down strata of
sediment, can establish the sense of stability and security that comes from a
store of memory recognition.

Recognition is an occurrence of instantaneous understanding. Recognition can

mean that we identify an object as being something we've experienced before
or that in an unfamiliar object we understand what kind of thing it is or what
kind of function it has. Each such kind of recognition is still simply a power,
still only a potential for an elaboration of discursive understanding in
judgments. We come to have "something to say" about the object, A
recognition can come in a "flash" and may leave us a little awestruck even
before we are able to think out or say what it is we have understood (like a
memory which, having defeated our efforts at recall, suddenly and
spontaneously comes to a blank mind). As often happens in life, adding to the
rich variety of comic situations, we may discover by actually thinking or
discussing the matter through that we actually didn't understand or recognize
what we thought we did.
Understanding and recognition are subject to the same tests of truth as their
explicit discursive elaborations. The meaning of the implicit understanding is,
or at least should be in adequate discourse, the same as that of the external
expression. The difference is the difference between power and act; and it is
perfectly natural for us to pass immediately from the power to an expression,
"What I mean is that...." while then perhaps encountering some trouble
formulating the explicit expression of our understanding. The moment worth
noting in every case is that between the mental state of implicit understanding
and the state that preceded it, equally implicit, but without the power, the
feeling, and the subjective awareness, even certainty, of understanding. As the
proof of understanding is in the discourse, the proof of non-understanding is
in the silence, the confusion, the perplexity, the frustration, and the inability of
discourse.

§6 Concepts

An instantaneous feeling of understanding or recollection does not exist in

isolation but is to be found associated with a perceptual or imaginative content
of consciousness. The tangible perceptual content of thought or conception is
ordinarily found in words. The concept, whatever it may be in itself, exists in
the preconscious. As such the concept is, for consciousness, the power to
generate conscious contents, either images characteristic of the concept or a
verbal account giving further conceptual articulations. The word, generated in
speech or passing through the auditory imagination, is accompanied by the
awareness of that power to generate various representations of the content of
the concept.

That in an important sense the stuff of thought itself should be hidden from
the spotlight of consciousness, and not just, so far, from the hard apparatus of
the laboratory, seems astonishing when from Plato to Descartes and from the
beginning of philosophy to the beginning of science the very first principle of
inquiry is that thought and concepts are illuminating, revealing, unhidden, etc.
The ethereal and indefinite nature of thought as an introspective object,
however, repeatedly drove Mediaeval Aristotelian and later Cartesian and
other Rationalist philosophers into the dead end of the immaterial "simple
substance" of the soul, where the morally edifying implications easily made
up for the failure of anything to be explained thereby. Kant really advanced
beyond this when he realized that concepts should not be thought of as things,
material, spiritual, or otherwise. Instead he described them as rules.[53]

The way to Kant lay through Empiricists to whom a concept, or an "idea," was
a dim and less lively reproduction of a perceptual image. To them this
certainly represented a common sense and down-to-earth evaluation of what is
actually to be found in consciousness; and as far as that goes their exposure of
the emptiness of the Rationalist conceptions may be well taken. Kant
reintroduces the proper generality of conception without returning to the old
notions with his analysis of concepts as rules. An image, then, while a
characteristic concrete expression of a concept, is only one possible image and
one possible kind of product of the generative rule of the concept. Even this
helpful retrenchment, however, gives too much to consciousness, for Kant's
theory does not address the fact that we do not seem to use such rules in
thought the way we would use the rules of baseball in playing baseball. The
rule of a concept is more like the rule of a computer program hidden from us
as we play the video game of consciousness.

Constructing the image of a person does not mean that first of all in some
conscious explicit way we consult the rule for making the image and then
apply it -- using the image material ready at hand for such tasks. The image
comes up to consciousness spontaneously. The same thing occurs with the
generation of grammatical sentences in a language or even of phonetically
acceptable words in a language. The phonetic rules of word formation may be
discovered, after some thought and investigation, but this does not mean that
any individual speaker of the language is liable to know just what the rules
are, even though he is able to effortlessly generate phonetically acceptable
words -- and in fact is likely to be unable to generate words of other languages
that violate the rules of his own.

Being able to speak a language, we discover the rules according to which

sentences in that language can be generated only by examining the product.
Our own introspective research can only focus on what we say, never on the
generative process or the formative rules themselves. The generative process
is hidden in the "black box" of the preconscious, and we are even left guessing
about whether the rules we are able to formulate even have any relation to the
actual processes in the "black box." In considering concepts as rules the
situation is even more difficult, for it is not just the linguistic rules of words
that we must consider but the typical images that we easily generate in
association with words -- or understandings or sentences for that matter --
necessarily drawing in processes of the subconscious that are entirely outside
our reckoning.

To our introspection, images and most of the rule-directed products of thought

and conception are produced spontaneously. What appears as spontaneous
certainly should not be taken to be so just because the true mechanisms must
be hidden from consciousness. Introspectively we may make inferences about
such mechanisms: some of those will be important and relevant; others may
be isolated and unproductive speculation. The rule for usefulness is whether
the inferred structures or processes are absolutely outside of consciousness
and have no counterparts within it or whether we infer or describe processes
and rules that manifestly operate within consciousness also. We are free to
speculate, for instance, about the operation of the rules of language in the
preconscious as linguistic expressions are generated, but the rules we
formulate are important in themselves since we can, to an extent, assume
generative functions consciously and even attempt to program computers to
duplicate acts of language usage. The study of the rules is therefore useful
even without the speculative aspect. Thus the Kantian notion of concepts as
rules, even though necessarily speculative when transferred to the
preconscious, retains explanatory power with respect to consciousness. It is
also clear that consciously formulated rules can be assimilated by the
preconscious to produce novel activities carried out with facility and
spontaneity. This whole aspect of the matter is of great significance here when
we consider that moral rules and moral spontaneity of act and belief are
conformable to this treatment and raise many of the same questions.

§7 The Object of Conception

In dealing with concepts it is often very confusing that, on the one hand, we
must treat them as functions or objects in their own right inside the head, or
the mind, while, on the other hand, they are useful and meaningful to us only
in so far as they refer to things outside of the mind and independent of any
particular individual consciousness. In many traditional divisions of the
meaning of concepts, into denotation and connotation, extension and
intension, reference and sense, etc., it is natural to think of the one aspect as
involving external things while the other is thought of as something, a
psychological entity, in the subject. The difficulties with this often involve the
problem that what is assigned to the subject often possesses qualities that
seem to be objective and important, making it odd to construe it as merely
subjective. In Frege's theory of senses[54] or in the general requirements of a
positivistic extensional logic, the traditional sounding dualism is construed as
objective on both sides; but the result is also very odd in that the subjective
side is paradoxically eliminated and some very peculiar metaphysical entities
may seem to be posited.

Physically, a concept can be said to have three aspects, the spoken or written
word, the objects in the world that are denoted, and the brain and other
subjective perceptual apparatus that serve to process the linguistic statements.
To deny the subjective aspect and analyze all of meaning and language in
terms of objects and words must tend to subvert the meaning in ordinary
language of the word "meaning," which I take to commonly signify what is
understood on the subjective side apart from both the things referred to in the
world and the words used. Indeed, what is understood is not something
opaquely subjective but itself concerns the objective qualities of things, just as
with the problem of non-existent objects we must consider things that to
common sense must be said to depend entirely on the imagination of the
subject yet seem to possess a cognitive independence that conflicts with
dependence on a subject. Frege's move was to hold that just as a subject or
singular term referred to an individual in the world, a predicate or general
term referred to a concept: making "concept" sound like some sort of
substantial form or independently existing Platonic entity. The way around
that would be to say that predicates refer to sets of individuals. The only
problem with such a remedy is that all empty sets are identical, leaving us still
with the need for concepts having meaning over and above what individuals
may be denoted by them. The most straightforward solution should be simply
to return both "meaning" and "concept" to the subjective side of the relation of
intentionality, making meaning and conceptual content independent of
whatever denoted entities may or may not exist in the world.

The representations of knowledge exist as such by virtue of the existence of

the subject. What is understood in meaning and concept is part of such
representations of knowledge. We may say, however, that the form of
intentionality always posits an imaginary reference to any conceptual
representations that we may have, whether or not individuals exist in the
world to be subsumed under such concepts. Similarly, any real object in effect
posits an imaginary subject: for whichever side of the relationship is
imaginary or real, the principle of the dual nature of representation is
inescapable; so that the mere existence of an object not only implies, in
general, a corresponding, even if non-existent, subject, it also implies its own
imaginary objective counterpart in the representation of the implied subject.
Thus to say that there is a problem with non-existent objects is already a
distortion, for the problem must be equally one of non-existent subjects; and
recognizing that is itself the key to the solution.

For convenience a distinction could be made between the denotation of a

concept and the extension of the concept: where the denotation consists of
individuals in the world and thus is ontologically independent and separable
from the subject of knowledge. The extension, on the other hand, is a property
of the concept and of the subject; and in this usage the traditional maxim that
intension varies inversely with extension," may be well taken.[55] Similarly,
the traditional notion that logical quantification involves no existential
implications may also be admitted as holding for extension.[56]

Denotation and extension do not touch, however, on the main feature of what
is understood in conception. The intension, connotation, or comprehension of
a concept is distinguished by its abstractness, which means that in reference
to its denoted objects only certain attributes or characteristics of the objects
are relevant. Denoted or imagined objects of a concept are
characteristically concrete, meaning that no set of abstract attributes is
sufficient to specify the object. The essential feature of a concrete object is its
substantial and separable individuality, in comparison to which even an
indefinitely large specification of attributes is inadequate. We might say that
concreteness is a feature of existence and so is different in kind from
qualitative attributes. No real or imagined object conveys quite the same thing
as the abstractly apprehended meaning of a concept -- and vice versa. Indeed,
after the manner of Plato or Frege or Realist Aristotelianism the objective
referent of a concept is a special constellation of abstract qualities.

A state of abstract apprehension, like any state of understanding, is

subjectively the awareness of a power to speak or act in ways that reflect the
distinction in the object. A concept in its simplest form is the memory of an
act of abstract apprehension. The concept is created with the first awareness
that one feature in an object may be distinguished from another. Something of
the sort must be what Kant had in mind when he spoke of the spontaneity of
the mind in the creation of concepts[57] (although he may have been
mistakenly reiterating the traditional Aristotelian notion that a complex
conventional concept is spontaneously created by the abstraction of the
substantial form of an object). But a concept in this sense is a very mundane
sort of thing, simply a kind of memory. That certain features tend to be
associated in certain objects becomes a matter of recollection, recognition, and
expectation also; and in time the patterns of expectation become regularized
and conventionalized into the public vocabulary of a language.

The Platonic Form (eîdos) is largely a mystical and metaphorical object: and
all the metaphors are of seeing (as the term eîdos itself, and idéa, are from the
Indo-European root *wid-, "see"[58]). Abstract meaning, however, cannot be
seen or imagined, only thought and understood. Aristotle demysticized the
Forms but continued with the seeing metaphor by putting
the eîdos (subsequently species in Latin) into the object of perception. What is
essential in the concept thus becomes what is substantial in the object.

To the Platonic-like question, "Where is the objective concept?" the best

answer might really be "Nowhere." But the objective concept does belong, in
a sense, in the external objects, after the manner of the Aristotelian species, as
the objective reflex of a subjective content of representation. The difference is
that just because we have recognized a constellation of features in the object,
this does not mean that the features themselves in the object have the same
kind of essential connection to each other, rendering all the other
characteristics of the real object "inessential." Where the Aristotelian
terminology of species and genera is now most familiar, in biology, it may be
said on the basis of contemporary science that the association of specific
characteristics really is determined from within the object by means of the
genetic code in the DNA of the particular organism. The physical necessity of
that connection, however, is entirely separate from the connection in the
concept: the coincidence of the two unities is no accident, but the conceptual
unity can easily contain an element of the physically arbitrary and accidental.

The external existence of the objective concept is an illusion, but it is an

illusion that is an unavoidable ontological reflex upon which rests all thought
and understanding. The reflex is not a deception, and in truth the illusion of
objective thought is no more an illusion than is perception, which depends for
its existence, like concepts, on the subject. But in perception is the
phenomenal object itself, on the basis of ontological undecidability, and so the
concept inhabits the same object in the same way. Mediaeval and ancient
thought, lacking any intimation of the physical mechanisms of biology, could
only attribute to the "substantial form" a physical efficacy in the object such
as was felt to belong to the concept in the mind. The illusory coincidence of
the objective concept and the physical object makes that conclusion natural
enough, and in that case the illusion functions as a guide, if nothing more, to
search out the physical functions of unity that we infer from, and that may be
the reason for, the unity of our concepts. With human artifacts, the sole
unifying factor is, of course, the concept itself.

Like non-existent objects, the objective concept is curiously dependent on the

subject in that we tend to think that without a subject, there would be no such
thing. But at the same time it too has an objective quality and a cognitive
dignity that forbids us from reducing it to something that is "merely"
subjective. Indeed, in both cases we become tangled in the paradox that
subject and object are ontological reflexes of each other, so that no coherent
theory of knowledge, thought, or conception can be construed without taking
the relation, the connection, and the equality of both into account.

§8 Understanding in Language

In linguistic theory instantaneous understanding corresponds to the ultimate or

primitive "deep structure" of sentences.[59] The deep structure is presumed to
be free of the arbitrary grammatical rules of any particular language, reflecting
nothing more than the genuine, pure objective meaning of the thought. Much
effort in linguistics is put into formulating a "semantic representation," a form
of sentence that can reflect the pure deep structure of meaning without
introducing any grammatical prejudgments.[60]

Such an enterprise is profoundly misconceived. The notion that has made it

seem plausible is the longstanding belief in logic that natural languages are
poor vehicles for the communication of knowledge: poorly structured,
ambiguous, imprecise, etc. The logical Ideal, dating at least
[erratum corrected] from Leibniz, is the "perfect" language. Latin having
failed in that regard, we now have the mythos of symbolic logic as the native
language of knowledge and science.

In linguistics this notion has been snapped up as making possible a pure

semantic representation without the messy complications of the complex and
not entirely understood grammatical rules that so muddle natural languages. In
all good conscience, however, artificial languages must be regarded as just as
arbitrary as natural languages. For instance, natural languages almost
universally distinguish between nouns and verbs, and between these and
adjectives and adverbs. But in Maori[61] words that would be adjectives in
English are actually verbs, while any noun or verb can be used in an
attributive position as, functionally, an adjective or adverb. And while
adjectives can be used as nouns in Greek or Arabic, they cannot be in English.
There are natural languages, such as Navajo, with very peculiar grammars, but
they are arguably derived from more familiar types. An attested case of that is
Egyptian, in whose classical form the function of verbs was almost entirely
replaced by the use of participles.[62] In time, however, those very participles
became the verb system of Coptic.[63] In these natural languages it appears
that the same distinctions, with different preferences of form and function,
gave rise to very different systems of grammatical rules. In symbolic logic,
however, perhaps to avoid the obvious arbitrariness of choosing a Maori, say,
grammar over a Greek one, all these distinctions are swept away and replaced
with the common concept of the predicate. This, however, is unlike any
natural language; and the effect is that a great many decisions have to be made
in order to create a functional equivalent of the natural languages. In many
ways, including the use of placeholders (variables) and the system of
quantification, symbolic logic then introduces forms that exist in no natural
languages and which may even prevent many propositions in natural
languages from being properly represented. These introductions are clearly
not the only way that these things can be done; and although arguments exist
for the use of certain forms, they are hardly matters of self-evidence. Arbitrary
choices, indeed, are made. But while many of these can be weeded out, as
linguists come to be more seriously concerned with the semantics of natural
languages,[64] the real problem is that a pure semantic representation is a
contradiction in terms: the very notion of semantics is deeply prejudiced by
persistent beliefs concerning the superiority of symbolic logic.

Every linguistic expression, in natural languages, or otherwise, is a

representation of understood meaning: a pure semantic representation would
somehow have to convey the meaning without conveying it. Any use of a
linguistic expression to convey meaning automatically puts the matter on the
same terms as natural linguistic expressions. Pure meaning, meaning in
understanding, cannot be represented as such. Between understanding and
communication comes language, and all languages function the same in their
attempts to embody discursively the contents of understanding. As is the
custom to say in logic, we make a translation from a natural language to
symbolic representations, just as one natural language is translated to another.
We are free to explore the forms of meaning and the ways that languages tend
to convey the same thing in different ways; but it is only truth that is
privileged, not some particular way that the same truth is represented.

§9 Perception and Understanding

In the following chapter perception will be one of the principal topics of

concern. Here, however, it remains to remark on the ultimate connection
between perception and thought. Where those two are in some ways
absolutely sundered, as for instance if the content of thought is attributed to
some immaterial substrate (the soul), perception really tends to be detached
from what we might want to characterize as the most "human" in mental life.
Even Kant seems to have believed that perception, through the forms of space
and time, was inessential to rational beings as such.[65] Instead, however,
perception and thought, the concrete and the abstract, should be seen to
overlap in the most profound way.

As the structure of instantaneous understanding coexists with perception, it is

not unreasonable to expect that, apart from merely signifying the power to
generate judgments or imaginative images, this structure may be reflected in
the concurrent perception. Whatever the structures and contents of the
preconscious may be, there is no reason or benefit in imagining the
preconscious mind as some radically different realm of being from the
conscious field. Consciousness may be seen as ebbing and flowing, covering
more, then less, of the contents of the preconscious, regularly to withdraw
altogether in deep sleep. In this way the structure of the preconscious may
even be thought of as identical to the special structure or Gestalt that is
present in perception. Since the preconscious as such is closed to
consciousness and to our direct inquiry, it is important and helpful that we see
as much as possible already present in the conscious field. There are
limitations in that direction, but in this case it is especially illuminating to
associate the preconscious powers of understanding with the immanent
structures of perception.

The Gestalt of perception that involves recognition and understanding is very

different from that which does not. Perception entirely without understanding
would be in the very strongest sense unfamiliar and strange -- appearances to
a blank mind, if not actually blank in themselves. The Gestalt of
understanding looms very large in our ordinary regard for perception; but the
complication in that, the epistemological pitfall, follows from the fact that a
state of understanding is cognitively equivalent to the proposition that
discursively expresses it and so is just as much true or false as that
proposition. It is thus possible for understanding in perception to actually
contradict the cognitively immediate substrate of perception -- a situation that
would seem to require inattention, self-deception, or both, but which is not so
uncommon. We know the difference between an attitude towards experience
which seeks to discover what is really there and that which seeks merely to
find something already familiar, even at the risk of truth.

What it is we think we are seeing in our perceptions profoundly affects the

nature of our experience. Unfamiliar circumstances are liable to leave any of
us very uncertain and confused about what we have seen; later we might
discover that we failed to notice things that hardly seem capable of being
missed. The difference between an unfamiliar and perplexing scene and one
that is easily grasped, assimilated, and remembered is just that in the latter an
understanding is present that is not with the former. The understanding is
based on recognition of the objects present, and of course this in turn depends
on the kinds of objects we are accustomed to deal with. Considered as bare
intuition, a perception does not tell us what to make of it. On a foggy night we
may really be able to make nothing of a perception: the vague shapes are
unrecognizeable -- except as vague shapes.[66] In that case we are frustrated
and disoriented that our ordinary projection of understanding is prevented.
The perception -- the intuition and the immediate knowledge -- is still present,
but the mediate supplement, the structured Gestalt of internal recognitions, is
held back. In the clear and the light, without the mediation of what we would
take to be thought or the production from memory of any word, a whole
conceptual system is projected instantly into perception. The familiar world
leaps out at us. But it still may be arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and false.

Thought and perception are unified at their common point of origin, and that
unity is intimate indeed, despite the disparity of their subjective
phenomenology in explicit consciousness. This relationship will be opened
out further shortly as immediate knowledge and the intuitive aspect of
perception are treated in the following chapter.

§10 Conclusion

The lesson of the theory of understanding is principally that the real

generative structures of understanding, conception, and thought belong to our
existence, internal existence, but are largely hidden from consciousness.
Within consciousness the objects of these things appear, informed with
recognition and conceptual Gestalt; and while we have no trouble speaking of
those objects, difficulties arise when we attempt to turn thought on its own
internal operations. What we should begin to see in consciousness is a certain
kind of output and display from the deeper level of mental functioning in the
preconscious. As in Schopenhauer's idea of the small boat of representation on
the great raging sea of the Will,[67] we should begin to see consciousness as a
fragment or a distillation of the great whole of the life of the self (confident,
unlike Schopenhauer, in the principium individuationis) which continues
within us and constitutes us all through waking and sleeping, awareness and
insensibility.

THE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS OR IMMANENCE

PART TWO: KNOWLEDGE AND NECESSITY

§1 Remark

In this part an epistemological viewpoint will be expressed, in a general way,

which will provide the paradigm for the subsequent analysis of value as a
matter of knowledge. A fundamental feature of that viewpoint is the Platonic
thesis that knowledge, properly so called, requires a necessary ground. Thus,
the theory of necessity here, which will result in the description of eight
modes of necessity, is one of the most important aspects of the treatment of
knowledge.

Since the epistemological viewpoint is in many respects Kantian, I will begin

with a constructive criticism of Kant to show what has been retained from his
familiar doctrines and the reason for the changes that have been made in them.
Following that will be discussion of the salient distinctive doctrines here,
following by a presentation concentrating on the theory of necessity.

§2 Kant: The Unity of Consciousness

One important conception in Kant that may be adopted with little change is
his recognition of the unity of consciousness. The emphasis that is placed here
on the implications of that conception, however, will be slightly different.

The fundamental truth about individual consciousness and everything in it is

that it is a unified whole of manifold contents -- in short that it
is individual and self contained. Perception unfolds before each of us as a
seamless but complex and varied fabric, and it is because we each possess a
unique whole of perceptions that can be called by each "my" experience that
we say that consciousness is unified. The "I" in its barest and emptiest
meaning merely is the formal sign of the connection that the various contents
of experience have to each other. Without that connection to the whole of
experience, a new experience could not share in the focus of the "I" and would
have to be, as Kant says, the same as nothing to me.[68]

For the purpose here it is especially important to note that the unity of
consciousness is discovered through reflection. In the presentation of external
objects, we are not inclined to view experience as a unified whole since it is
purely accidental that some objects are present in our experience while others
are not. This suggests that the unity of consciousness is an attribute of
the perceptions which are the means through which the external objects were
known and thus can only be discovered when we reflect on the act of
perception -- i.e. when we take dual natured representation only in
its internal aspect.

The unity of consciousness does not originate in and does not solely
characterise self-consciousness or mediate or conceptual knowledge. Just
because it is only in reflection that the unity is recognized does not mean that
the unity is created by reflection. This is an important point because of the
ambiguities in Kant's treatment of the subject: whether it is perception that is
originally unified or only conception, where perception involves no
conceptual determination whatsoever, no beliefs, no statements. Viewed with
the proper generality, it must be admitted that any mental contents, perceptual
or conceptual, that do not exist as part of a unified whole simply stand in no
relation to the "I" and are "as nothing" to that "I."

Having recognized the unity of the contents of consciousness, the question

then to ask is why the unity should hold among such manifold contents.
Consciousness cannot simply be viewed as a box into which things can be
placed. The unity of consciousness is not a separate substantial entity, like the
Cartesian soul, distinct from the contents of consciousness which have been
unified. It is obvious that the contents come and go; perceptions occur and
then fade; memories come to mind and then pass away. Consciousness is thus
dependent on no particular material content, and this variation enables us to
abstractly conceive of the material of consciousness independent of
consciousness. That material is generally to be called "sensation," but the
fundamental limitation on the notion of sensation is that in principle we
cannot say what it really is like in separation from consciousness. The best we
can do is look at the material of perception, the color conveyed by light, the
tone conveyed by sound, etc., and say that this material is sensation once 1)
we conceive it as a mental content in separation from the external objects we
perceive by it, and 2) we conceive it in separation from consciousness, free
from the fabric and structures that bestow a relation to the "I." These
conceptions, of course, leave us with nothing definite to indicate as being
"pure sensation." No "patch of blue" will quite qualify for our inspection when
we require that the "I" inspect it outside the experience and consciousness of
the "I."[69]

§3 Kant: Synthesis

Kant approached the question of the unity of the contents of consciousness

through his theory of synthesis. While this theory turns out to be too
speculative to be considered true, it is important and helpful enough
heuristically to consider in detail. It is helpful to imagine that consciousness is
the product of synthesis, even if it isn't, and explore the consequences of that
assumption.

Briefly, in the theory of synthesis we imagine that the mind actively generates
consciousness by "taking up"[70] raw sensation and ordering it according to
certain innate rules. Producing or reproducing the material according to the
rules means that the unity of consciousness is due to the unity imposed by the
set of rules. Such unity of "rule directed activities" is described by Robert Paul
Wolff.[71] Kant's own example is counting, where the rule is to compile
decades and decades of decades, structuring thereby even very large numbers
that otherwise would totally escape the capacities of thought and
perception.[72]

A fundamental ambiguity in Kant concerns just what it is that synthesis

generates, a structured set of concepts describing the world or our immediate
perceptions. The aspect of Kant of greatest interest here is given in this
passage:

What is first given to us is appearance. When combined with consciousness,

it is called perception. (Save through its relation to a consciousness that is at
least possible, appearance could never be for us an object of knowledge, and
so would be nothing to us; and since it has in itself no objective reality, but
exists only in being known, it would be nothing at all.)[73]

The crucial notion here is that of appearance, meaning raw sensation, being
"combined" with consciousness and so yielding perception. The critical
question then concerns how these things are "combined," and the theory of
synthesis is supposed to explain that. There are a number of interesting
currents in this passage that will merit recall later. For one, the term
"appearance" has been used where the reader of Kant might expect "intuition,"
and this is part of Kant's retrenchment of the concept of intuition that will be
discussed at length later. It is perhaps also possible reading this passage to
think of "perception" as meaning "judgments about perception" -- but the
problem with that is that somewhere in setting out Kant's system some space
must be provided for phenomenal objects, which, like appearance, exist only
in being known but at the same time are concrete entities external to us in
space that are the perceptual focus of our sensations. Indeed, Kant has
complicated things for himself here by saying that appearance is itself
"known" and is an "object of knowledge," when we must prefer to say that a
phenomenal object is what is known and is the object of knowledge and that
the appearance is that by which that object is known. For Kant appearance as a
version of "intuition" originally meant the perceptual presentation of
phenomenal objects in space and time. If those objects are not then to be
"nothing at all" to us, clearly we must begin to see the process of combination
with consciousness as that which provides the object corresponding to the
appearance.

When perception is fully brought into the process of synthesis, this creates for
the theory the difficulty that it postulates a process only one stage of which
can possibly be examined. The product, consciousness, we can inspect, but the
preexisting manifold of sensation is not available to us separately. An extreme
simplification of the theory would be to imagine an assembly-line analogy of
1) accepting the raw material, 2) carrying out the operations according to the
rules, and then 3) presenting the finished product. The first of those three
stages is definitely hidden from us, and if we accept consciousness as the
"product" in the third step, then the unfinished laboring in the second step
must be hidden also. Just as bad, the third step might create a problem as well,
for if merely being synthesized admitted sensations into consciousness, then
every act of synthesis would add new and permanent contents to
consciousness, just as sewing sections onto a quilt leaves us, indeed, with a
complete quilt. If consciousness is not to be an ever expanding quilt of
sensations, then the synthetic unity of the conscious products must dissolve as
quickly as it is put in place.

It is tempting to say that as contents roll off the assembly line of synthesis
they leave consciousness, so that contents occur in consciousness only during
the second step as the activity of synthesis is occurring. That leaves us with
only one of the three parts of the analogy accessible to consciousness, the part
in which the action of the mind is directly working up sensible material. That
is rather difficult to grasp, however, when we still cannot distinguish sensible
material from the contents of consciousness that the mental activity is working
them into. The assembly-line analogy fails altogether because consciousness
as present to us doesn't work at all like an assembly-line: there are no step by
step operations that we carry out on sensations; instead we seem to carry out
all the operations all at once, so that phenomenal objects come up
spontaneously to consciousness.

Kant's initial thought apparently was to regard synthesis as a function of

thought, or at least of reproductive imagination -- both of which are mediate
functions subsequent to conscious perception. The problems of synthesis as
assembly or processing are not very acute in the mediate context. When
perception is drawn into the argument, however, the processes cannot work at
all in the same way; and perception is inevitably drawn in, as the force of the
unity of consciousness is sufficiently appreciated. If we cannot appeal to the
familiar mental processes of carrying out rule directed operations on some
given and producing some result, then the real processes that the theory of
synthesis is supposed to describe must be radically different from anything
that Kant's theory allows.

§4 Kant: Activity and Passivity

Kant's very idea of synthesis as a mental activity is what must be most

forcefully called into question. With the activity there is naturally also a
corresponding passivity; and it is these two notions that must draw our fire
first of all in refounding Kant's theory of synthesis. Kant never completely
broke up his theory and redid it, but he did have the courage to follow through
to some conclusions in his arguments that really contradicted what he actually
had wished to say. We can begin with Kant using the most naive form of the
theory of synthesis, and then gradually delve deeper until we realize that we
are dealing with processes that cannot possibly belong to consciousness. At
that point, to continue with Kant's courage, something so fundamental must be
discarded that we would need to recommend that Wolff's book (Kant's Theory
of Mental Activity) be retitled.

If consciousness were purely active with respect to the objects of knowledge,

then it would simply bring them into existence. That is not an ability we have,
however; instead we must be given the objects of our knowledge through
perception. We are passive with respect to the existence of spatiotemporal
substance; the objects act on us. Our passive datum is sensation, which the
mind can then take up in its activity. Kant thus says that we possess "sensible
intuition"[74] rather than the active "intellectual intuition" which creates its
objects. The problem running through the tradition is the ambiguity in the
notion of "objects being given," namely that phenomenal objects as such are
too easily seen as effects produced in our perception along with the sensible
material, while the objects causing the effects are hidden and unknowable
things in themselves. The status of the object of representation[75] was a
problem that Kant recognized and to which he devoted serious thought, but
his doubts that phenomenal objects could simply be given along with
sensation ended up leading him off in the wrong direction.

Since Descartes it has been a serious dilemma why a representation caused by

an external object need bear any resemblance to the object or tell us anything
about it. Any cause is only sufficient to its effect, and sensations as effects
conceivably could have any number of possible causes, including God, the
deceiving demon, etc. Kant sought to circumvent this problem by proposing
that the forms of objectivity of external objects are not conveyed to us
causally from without but are actually imposed by the subject from within.
This "Copernican Revolution"[76] stood the traditional relation on its head.
Kant thus takes the understanding as injecting into intuition certain forms
(concepts or rules) that are not to be found there originally and cannot have
been borrowed from experience in any way.

Kant's move, while brilliant and of continuing importance for us, immediately
must raise a most important question: What prevents us from organizing the
objects of the world just any way that we like? In our ordinary application of
concepts we tend to think that the world determines whether it is appropriate
or inappropriate to apply a certain concept. If I have the concepts of "dog" and
"cat" and I am presented with a cat, there is no constraint on me calling it a
dog if I like, but it is within the capacity of my understanding to grasp the
falseness of such an attribution. In order words, any concept I have can be
applied rightly or wrongly. With Kant's theory the sensation, which is purely
subjective, hardly seems in a position to determine whether the pure concepts
of objectivity in the understanding are applied rightly or wrongly. If we follow
something like a common sense view and imagine that something in sensation
forms the basis for recognition in understanding that some concepts should be
applied rather than others [erratum corrected], this destroys the whole point of
the theory, for we must then ask by what right sensation is determining how
we are to see the structure of the world -- it would have to already contain
forms of objectivity that were not put in it by the understanding. This brings
back the original dilemma in unchanged form.

One way to help Kant would be simply to say that the objective structure of
the world is arbitrary, and one version of this might be a notion that a certain
form for the world can be dictated by the structure of one's language or some
other essentially arbitrary conventional set of cultural rules. On relatively
superficial levels of generality this is quite true, but in any fundamental sense
it is absolutely unacceptable, as Kant himself also would certainly have
regarded it. To suppose that all structures of objectivity are at root arbitrary
and then hold that there are objective truths about languages, cultural
conventions, etc., is at least very paradoxical and in truth is hopelessly self-
contradictory and question begging -- reserving a special truth and
universality for the theorist's statements that those very statements deny. I take
this to be another case of Protagorean relativism subject to the Platonic
refutation above.

From trying to do it ourselves with computers, we should know now that any
notion of an absolutely amorphous and subjective input determining a specific
application of a general set of rules is completely meaningless and impossible.
General rules awaiting an input presuppose that specific objective structures
exist in the input to be recognized.

§5 Subject and Object

To resolve these problems in Kant as well as to provide the definitive basis for
the theory here, a new characteristic principle may be formulated: There is no
causal connection between subject and object. Neither is active or passive.
This is really a version of the principle of the dual nature of representation, or
a clarification of it; but it is important at this point to explicitly distinguish the
causal relation that must hold between external objects and our sensory
apparatus in the generation of sensation and the non-causal relation of
intentionality that holds between objects and the representation of objects in
the subject. In this section such a distinction will be explored both with
respect to Kant and in terms of a contemporary theory of knowledge, that of
D.M. Armstrong in his Belief, Truth and Knowledge.[77]

In Kant's theory the use of causality is puzzling. Apart from the problem of
whether subjective causality is going to make for an arbitrary representation
of the world, Kant accepts a conclusion that this representation, even if not
arbitrary, still is not going to inform us about how external objects really are
in themselves. Causality is one of the objective forms that is contributed by
the subject, but unfortunately to make any sense out of Kant's theory, it is
really necessary to think in terms of causality acting between things in
themselves. This would violate Kant's own caution of "empirical realism" and
"transcendental idealism"[78] that we have no knowledge how or whether the
objective forms contributed by the subject have any relation to transcendent
reality. But Kant seems always to be thinking that sensation is originally the
result of causal affection by external (transcendently external) objects. The
sensation is then "taken up" by the subject and through synthesis a
representation is constructed in which we see objects that are actually
affecting us.

The paradox in Kant's view, then, is that while it may be legitimate to apply
the causal form to the objects that we see, since the causal form was indeed
used to construct them, it is questionable, as Kant is elsewhere explicitly
aware, that we may then look beyond this representation and apply the same
form to the relation between the thing in itself and the self in itself without
actually assuming they are identical to the empirical object and the body. It is
not enough to say that the relation between things in themselves can be
"thought" but not "known";[79] for the whole question is about the legitimacy
of thinking certain things in the effort to understand knowledge, and if it is
Kant's theory that certain things about the transcendent
are unavoidably "thought," despite being divorced from science and the
manifold of ordinary knowledge, then it must be clearly shown what the
unavoidability is.

Kant is constantly tripped up over the two levels of reality that he is required
by his theory to posit: phenomenal or empirical reality, which presupposes the
subject, and transcendent reality or things in themselves, which exists
independent of any subject. Kant's distinction between immanent and
transcendent need not be abolished, but much of the way that Kant
characterizes the transcendent -- as an independent order of objects different
from phenomena yet between which, as between phenomena, causal
interactions can occur -- must be scrapped. If causality belongs to the
phenomenal realm, then our simplest rule is just to be sure that the
transcendent has been so construed that even the possibility or meaningfulness
of causal interaction on that level no longer holds.

In the progress of Kant's thought, with the withdrawal in the Dissertation of

the sensible forms of space and time and in the Critique of the intelligible
forms of the categories from the object into the subject, the sticking point in
the end is our continuing sense that sensation is a causal product. But the
withdrawal of the form of causality into the subject counterintuitively leaves
that sensation suspended in a limbo of unintelligibility between subject and
object. In our reform of Kant, we wish at the same time to preserve the
meaningful causal relation between external objects and our physical sensory
apparatus and also the difficult ontological relation between subject and object
that Kant has inherited from Descartes. Between subject and object, however,
there is only the form of intentionality, and we should say that this is entirely
different in kind, function, and existence from the physical relation of
causality.

Our two levels of consideration are: 1) the interaction between objects, which
means only phenomenal objects and which thus also means only causal
interaction; and 2) the relation between subject and object, where the subject
is the actual display of knowledge and consciousness that cannot be found
through an examination of the physical body of the subject. These two levels,
however, obviously do not correspond to Kant's problem of interactions
between phenomenal objects and things in themselves. Kant has confounded
the terms peculiar to one level with the relation between the two. It is the pure
relation between subject and object that gives us the distinction between
immanent and transcendent here. On the level of phenomenal objects the
problems of immanent and transcendent do not come into play. As
Schopenhauer vigorously urged against Kant (and for that matter,
Descartes),[80] there is only one order of objects of representation, the
immanent and phenomenal.
With these distinctions in mind, it should be helpful to turn to Armstrong's
theory. The view there is that knowledge occurs when there is a case of true
belief plus a law-like connection in nature (which I will take to mean a causal
relationship) between the belief state and the state of affairs in the world that
the belief is intended to represent such that for various possible believers the
true belief will occur with predictable regularity (under certain other
conditions specified by the theory).[81] The derivation of this from Plato's
discussion in the Theaetetus is obvious and familiar from contemporary theory
of knowledge.[82] Armstrong's formula is unobjectionable, in fact, as a
description of the relation between phenomenal objects. It is based on an
external perspective, and indeed he calls views such as his "Externalist."[83]
But this is just the failing of such theories as attempts to answer the Cartesian
problem of knowledge, and Armstrong comes very close to a decisive
formulation of that failing:

....but how can we who are, as it were, behind and locked up in our own
beliefs, determine which of our beliefs are properly correlated? If such a
correlation is knowledge, we may sometimes know, but we will never be in a
position to know that a correlation obtains, that is, know that we know. But
this is unacceptable scepticism.[84]

We do not need any kind of scepticism to greatly strengthen this objection and
to limit the scope and usefulness of Armstrong's kind of theory. The Cartesian
problem of knowledge was not so much a dilemma of being locked inside our
own beliefs but of being locked inside the subject, with the relation, character,
and even existence of external objects called into doubt by the possible
solipsism of the subject. Into that gap between subject and object Kant
brought the incredible gothic mechanism of the Critical Philosophy but failed
to credibly bridge it.

Here I have, in the principles of the dual nature of representation and of

ontological undecidability, formulated the view that the Cartesian
dilemma cannot be solved because it is a false dilemma, illegitimately giving
preference to one pole of the form of intentionality when each pole lays equal
claim in the given context of our ordinary experience and judgments about the
world. Armstrong may therefore be said to suffer from the fallacy of an
external perspective, and naturally our attention is drawn to the alternatives set
out by Armstrong. The major alternative for "non-inferential" knowledge that
he offers is the Cartesian self-evident belief.[85] A less powerful version of
that is just the notion of "initially credible" belief.[86] But both these
alternatives are unacceptable both on the general Platonic principle that the
"regress of reasons"[87] must end in knowledge which is different
in kind from "true belief"[88] and on the specific Friesian doctrine that, apart
from analytic propositions of logic, the regress of reasons must end
with immediate knowledge, which is similarly different in kind from belief
states (which are mediate representations).

In this situation "immediate knowledge" may be succinctly characterized

as identical to the external reality of objective states of affairs that Armstrong
recognizes as the actual basis for truth and knowledge. From an external
perspective it is close to a self-evident truth that the world of external objects
does not exist within the cranium of the subject; but from the internal
perspective, which is what we actually have as occupants of consciousness,
that same world of external objects does exist as a representation within the
subject. That aspect of our representation as mental content is what counts as
immediate knowledge, and clearly beliefs as subjective states, concepts,
judgments, etc., do not belong to either immediate knowledge or the external
world.

As we consider the physiology of sensation or the neurophysiology of

perception, Armstrong's description is relevant and meaningful. Even Kant's
theory of synthesis may be in that context, as we imagine the brain applying
its cognitive programs to the input of nerves from the various senses. But to
the real philosophic problem, these all fail. Considering the central place of
immediate knowledge offered here, the following section will treat evident
immediate knowledge, or intuition, in detail. In general
terms, mediate knowledge may be said to involve some function of memory,
and this will serve to distinguish from immediate knowledge all conception,
recognition, and language and may make for a better psychological criterion
than saying that mediate knowledge belongs to representation as mental
content but not to representation as the world of external objects.

§6 Intuition and the Immanent Object

Evident immediate intentionality is perception, what Kant called Anschauung,

intuition. It is convenient to start with Kant, but it will be necessary to differ
sharply with him on the nature of intuition -- or at least to considerably
reformulate the results of his own arguments. Using a theory of active
synthesis, we would need to see perception and so intuition as really
the result of synthesis, while in reading Kant it usually sounds as though
intuition is the same as sensation, merely the raw material for synthesis: in
the Critique, one tends to think that having finished the "Transcendental
Aesthetic" perception has been taken care of and only matters of thought
come next.[89]

Here the viewpoint is that even if we imagine synthesis occurring, the result
must still be present to consciousness immediately since a mediate result
would mean that the state preceding synthesis, containing the raw sense data
or whatever, is also present to consciousness -- which is false ex
hypothese that synthesis is what actually constructs consciousness (a view not
evolved until well into the "Transcendental Logic"). In this way Kant's
originally conceived intuition would not occur to the conscious subject -- a
formidably incongruous notion.

As we reason through Kant's theory of synthesis, immediacy and intuition in

their naive versions as raw sensation first vanish, because they cannot possibly
be contained in consciousness according to the principle that the unity of
consciousness requires synthesis, but then they return as we push the
argument to its logical conclusion and we reflect that synthesis as a mediate
process in consciousness does not make sense when what has been thought of
as "mediated" is actually not present to consciousness. The result of the
"mediation" appears to come up spontaneously; and even if we take seriously
the idea that some synthetic activity might correspond to the brain's
information processing of sensory input, from the point of view of
consciousness we must say that what appears to us as phenomenal objects is
given immediately.

To say that the object, or the phenomenal object, is immanent in intuition may
be taken as to do no more than affirm a common sense realist principle, that
the real things (tá ontôs ónta) are the things that I actually see and touch. To
be contrasted with this, as Plato may be contrasted with Aristotle, is the
Cartesian conclusion, ambiguously accepted even by Kant, that the real things
are transcendent, standing behind the things I see and touch, which are more
or less fictitious representations merely caused by them and perhaps bearing
little resemblance to them.

Kant has actually accepted Descartes even while providing the elements for
his refutation; for Kant, having asked what we mean by an "object of
representation,"[90] answered that we mean a certain non-arbitrary structure
of spatiotemporal and causal forms, etc., in experience. If this is so, then what
we mean by an object is clearly immanent in experience, and what's more,
according to Kant, we have put that structure there ourselves through
synthesis. The latter aspect, as I have indicated, deserves to be gravely
qualified, although in retaining it the Kantian conclusion would be justified
that we then do not know the real (Cartesian) objects -- we have merely
constructed a sort of private or intersubjective analogue. On the other hand,
that conclusion could be avoided by assuming that the "we" putting the
structure into experience is more than the individual self -- so that Cartesian
matter or the Kantian thing in itself is replaced by an Idealist meta-
consciousness that ensures the objectivity of the phenomenally immanent
object. This is at least as awkward, and is certainly less straightforward, than
the Cartesian view.
The status of an object of representation here may be seen to involve aspects
both of realism and phenomenalism. The phenomenal aspect is that the
objectivity of the world is only meaningful in terms of the form of
intentionality and so the relation between subject and object. At the same
time, the field of phenomenal objects is commonly where we ignore the
subject; and the external perspective of science moves confidently through
the objects without concern about the necessary correlate of the subject. There
is no error in that, but the irony of it, for the theory here at least, is that realism
requires an appreciation of the subject as well as the object. The realistic
aspect, then, is that the existence of object and subject are genuinely separate
and independent. Heidegger's sharp distinction between the existence of
things as such and their qualitative character as individual things is a help
here, since the former is real and separable while the latter is phenomenal and
relative to the form of intentionality. And again, only immediate knowledge
constitutes the objective ground in intentionality, while many kinds of mediate
intentional objects may or may not correspond to factual states of affairs in
phenomenal objects.

The relation of intentionality is like some holographic image where both the
observer and the observed are spontaneously projected from the hologram.
The space into which the holographic images of observer and observed are
projected is existence, and the lack of decision on the dual nature of
representation, which leaves us unhappy about that to which the hologram
itself "really" belongs, leaves reality as a sort of Gestalt trick of perception,
where one moment we are locked into a Cartesian solus ipse with no exit,
while the next moment we move confidently through a familiar world of
public objects. The "spaces" of existence in this simile, internal for observer
and external for observed, are the special concern of the theory of negative
transcendence. In the end, however, we say that the hologram is existence
itself, and the dilemma of ontological undecidability is resolved by the theory
of positive transcendence. The "spaces" become perspectives within existence,
not absolute ontological alternatives that we are bound to choose between.
This might be taken as a triumph of phenomenalism except that positive
transcendence is neither subject nor object, cannot appear except in the
continuing intentional projections of subject and object, and certainly cannot
be said to exist as more one than the other.

The elaboration of these stages in the theory will of course be handled in turn.
What we need note now is merely the ontological dimension of the
epistemological conclusions arising from a consideration of Kant. Keeping
this ontological dimension in mind is especially important in giving proper
credit to the status of intuitive immediate knowledge since we commonly load
much of what is subjective and mediate onto intuition through the abstract
ubiquity of our judgments and the powerful Gestalt of our preconscious
understanding. Pure intuition, should it be possible to recover it, would be a
strange state indeed, for it would have to be without the ordinary distinctions
and guideposts that regulate daily life and the activities in which we
commonly engage. If action is possible in such a state, it would have to be an
extreme version of the Taoist ideal, without intention, without thought,
without effort, without "mind" -- as though our consciousness did not even
exist, or existed merely as a spectator.

§7 Necessity: Formal and Synthetic

Together with the underlying ontological structure of the theory presented

here, there is also a special epistemic structure, namely a theory of modes of
necessity. These various modes are a non-reductionistic description of the
different grounds of immediate knowledge underlying object language
systems of theoretical and practical knowledge. This structure of necessity is
elaborated both according to ontological and logical or epistemological
principles. In the theory of consciousness there are three modes that will
concern us: in this section, again, the focus will be on the theory of necessity
in Kant, and that will involve 1) analytic necessity, which can be largely
presupposed, and 2) synthetic necessity a priori as described by Kant. In the
following section I will diverge from Kant into what will be called 3)
the perfect mode of material necessity. That discussion will serve to open the
possibility of the further modes of necessity.

An important result for Kant of his theory of synthesis was an argument for a
kind of necessity that went beyond the necessity of merely analytic
propositions or, as we might say now, necessity that might be derived using
no more than the laws of logic. That necessity belonged to certain synthetic,
logically contingent propositions that could be made a priori, or
independently of experience. The basic argument in this was that synthetic
propositions a priori are justified by conditions sine qua non for the unity in
plurality of experience.[91] Given that experience is a unified whole with
respect to being the content of a single consciousness, Kant says that the
conditions for the possibility of this unity are the abiding forms of unity that
are applied through the process of synthesis and so apply equally and
universally regardless of the particular material content of experience.

Kant's perspective is profoundly insightful and important, despite the

objection that from an internal viewpoint the forms of unity cannot be seen as
deliberately implanted into a preexisting material by some mental action.
What we are given in consciousness immediately is the form and the matter
together. With reflection, we come to distinguish the "form" from the "matter"
by recognizing those abstract (formal) aspects of the perceptual field that do
not vary with time or position. As it happens, Kant's sine qua non argument is
still effective just because consciousness still presupposes the same formal
unity, even though the supposed deliberate activities of synthesis are not given
to our examination.

What the forms of unity are was a big question for Kant. He thought that he
could derive them from the forms of pure logic, because it seemed that those
would be the forms of pure thought, independent of intuition and empirical
reality and so perhaps related to the non-empirical basis of reality, things in
themselves. That was pretty much the doctrine of the Dissertation, that pure
thought did know things in themselves, consequently called nooúmena,
"things thought."[92] In this treatment I have taken thought to be closely
related and dependent on perceptual mental functions, in which case Kant's
view cannot be allowed. It does seem reasonable, however, that there is a
kinship between logical forms and the forms of unity in consciousness, going
in the other direction, with the former evolving out of the latter. Whether or
how this is so is really not a very important question here. What should be
noted is that Kant's emphasis and his notion of the direct noumenal relevance
of the pure forms of logic strongly biases his regard for the forms of unity
both in his attempt to derive them and in his use of them after he thinks he has
discovered them.

Causality is the most important form of synthetic unity in any historical

perspective on Kant,[93] but we find Schopenhauer holding that what Kant
proved, in his attempts to justify ("deduce") the category of causality, was
simply that there must be temporal succession, not that there must
be causal succession.[94] Indeed, what is minimally required as a basis for a
synthetic unity of consciousness is a nexus of temporal unity, in order that
events of one moment of time must be considered to belong to the same
consciousness as the events of a preceding or following moment. Causality is
not the minimal requirement, and it is easily arguable that causality is very
much ontologically secondary to time in the sense that while causal events are
ubiquitous and manifold, they are all events in time, presupposing temporal
succession. If there are events and natural relationships where the concept of
causation is not applicable, there certainly are none where the concept of time
isn't.

Although more relevant to past and present scientific debates, the law that
every event must have a cause still seems reasonably to presuppose a more
basic law that every event must follow and must precede other events in time.
The causal law adds to the temporal the requirement that the character of an
event depends on both the character of certain preceding events and the
requirements of various "laws of nature" that govern causal transformations.
Hume's method of considering what is conceivable is helpful in distinguishing
purely temporal from causal connection a nightmare succession of totally
unrelated events is an easy and clear enough conception of a world without
causality. A world without time yet with causality is far and away a more
difficult, and for me impossible, condition to imagine.

The basic forms of synthetic unity in the perceptual field are simply the nexi
of temporal succession and spatial location. In temporal terms alone, after
Leibniz, these are the relations of succession and simultaneity;[95] but the
relation of simultaneity would be empty if there were no "room" for
simultaneous events to coexist. The form of simultaneity is the spatial nexus,
but it should be emphasized that in the full articulation of mental function the
spatial nexus may be said to relate simultaneities that do not have "room" to
be spatially distinct, namely states of mind. The possibility of a non-spatial
reference for the spatial nexus serves to point up the important point that the
spatial nexus is not the same thing as space. And the structure of space,
Euclidean or non-Euclidean, Lobachevskian or Riemannian, which has often
been mistakenly taken to refute Kant's Euclidean expectations, is absolutely a
separate matter from the consideration of the spatial nexus as a form of
synthetic unity.[96]

In considering the temporal nexus, a question arises that is relevant both in

physical debates and for us, namely, the directionality of time, the "arrow"
that heads for the future but never for the past. Where in modern physics time
has to an extent been assimilated to the spatial dimensions, the question has
arisen why the temporal dimension, and not, apparently, the spatial, is
asymmetrical. Is the temporal nexus itself directional? If it is not, then is the
temporal nexus really different from the spatial nexus? After all, it is not very
tempting to say that there are three spatial nexi just because there are three
spatial dimensions. It is conceivable that there is only one nexus of formal
synthetic unity that both spatially and temporally binds together the field of
perception. This nexus is then differentiated by the intuitive ground of space,
whatever that is, into the three spatial relations and by the intuitive ground of
time, whatever that may be, into the asymmetrical temporal relation. If this is
the case, then the problem [erratum corrected] of the identification of the
intuitive grounds of space and time is separate from the theory of formal
synthetic unity. It does seem to be the case, and for time the matter will be
shortly taken up in relation to perfect necessity. For space, in so far as it will
concern us at all, the problem is the concern of the theory of negative
transcendence.

In considering Kant's notion of necessity as a result of the formal synthetic

unity of consciousness, the important conclusion is that apart from the
significant epistemological admission that there is a formal synthetic
necessity, there is really very little of substance to be drawn from the
theory. Space, time, and causality -- the flashpoints of controversy in debate
over Kant -- all involve some ground or complication or articulation beyond
the simple formal necessity that, in the most abstract and minimal way, makes
the unity of consciousness possible. Where Kant was deceived and misled,
and where in a sense he begged the question, was in the fullness of meaning
that he gave to his pure forms of thought and hence to the pure concepts of the
understanding which he believed followed from them. Kant's own awareness
of his difficulties is reflected in the extent to which he reintroduced time, after
having presumably disposed of it in the "Transcendental Aesthetic," into the
articulation of causality in the "Analytic of Principles."[97] The whole gothic
structure of the "Transcendental Logic" is an attempt to weave out of the
thinnest possible material the most substantial conceptions. It was not effort
wasted, but certainly effort left incomplete.

Having cut down Kant's category of formal necessity so thoroughly, it must

now be said, in all fairness to the reader, that rather more than this will come
of it in the end; for it will be considered later that certain other modes of
necessity come to be conceived by us according to the principle of formal
necessity -- the principle of connections according to law-like regularities.
These will be considered in turn.

§8 Necessity: Material

In this section the field of necessity will be expanded from Kant's notion of
synthetic a priori necessity. First will come a general consideration of
material necessity, with a restriction of Kant's a priori necessity into what will
be called a priore necessity. Second will come a discussion of the significance
of Aristotle's theory of future contingency in On Interpretation, the use of
perfect and imperfect temporal aspects in the grammar of many languages,
and the way in which these lead to a recognition of our first mode of material
necessity, the necessity of the perfect aspect.

The sense of the terms a priori and a posteriori originally concerned what can
be known before the particular cases of experience are considered and what
can be known only after experience has been received as evidence. We might
say, looking at the terminology, that the distinction refers to the priority or
the source of the ground of knowledge: that a priori knowledge can be based
on something available to thought at any time, without the need to await some
datum from experience, while a posteriori knowledge literally
comes afterwards, after the consultations of thought with itself. The a priori/a
posteriori distinction has tended, especially with respect to Kant,[98] to be
easily construed as a form/matter distinction, with the a priori content
corresponding to innate mental forms, whether those of the analytic truths of
logic or those of the synthetic truths of the forms of the synthetic unity of
consciousness, while the a posteriori content is given in the sensible manifold
of intuition.
As such, the a priori/a posteriori distinction does not have any immediate
connection with one's thinking about necessity and contingency. The fallback
position for necessity is always logical necessity, that the denial of tautologies
or analytic truths results in an internal contradiction. In those terms a
priori synthetic truths would not be necessary. However, we call a
proposition contingent only if it is possible for it to be or become, in time,
false; and if there is synthetic a priori knowledge properly so called, it is
impossible that it should be discovered to be false. What can be known
independently of any experience may thus be considered to be necessary
knowledge by virtue of its timelessness, universality, and perhaps even
the inability of the world to appear except in conformity to the a
priori expectations. This carries us back to a more Platonic conception of
necessity, where the necessary truths are such not because of any internal
logical requirement (Plato being unaware of the theory of such things) but
because an ontological fact extrinsically provides for their own fixed eternity
and for the impossibility of their ever becoming false. The necessity of Kant's
synthetic a priori truths is similarly extrinsic, though it is more
epistemological, in the conditions for the possibility of experience, than the
Platonic (though there was an epistemological dimension to Plato's necessity
also in his doctrine of knowledge by recollection).

For us the articulation of the extrinsic grounds becomes the major concern.
Because of this the common extension of the term "a priori" becomes
inappropriate, for Kant has used that term far beyond the limits that should
have been strictly imposed by the formal ground for synthetic knowledge a
priori that was cited in the "Transcendental Deduction," where the principle of
the possibility of experience was put to use. As Kant believed that the
necessity of the moral law resulted from an unconditioned version of the very
same universality, and indeed the very same forms, as expressed in the case of
the synthetic categories of experience, it is reasonable that the moral law and
its derivatives should have been similarly said to be true synthetically a priori.
But since this ground for the moral law will be rejected here, that legitimacy
for the usage will be lost.

Retaining the basic distinction of form and matter as the basis for the
distinction between a priori and a posteriori, the meaning of a priori will be
drastically curtailed in the usage I will now establish for the purposes of this
discussion. In that the "form" can refer only to principles of logic or the
synthetic nexus of the unity of consciousness, no further cases of necessary
truth will fall under the traditional a priori category. To signify this change,
the form of the term itself will be slightly altered: by a priore, with the proper
Classical Latin ablative ending,[99] I will refer to the restricted meaning of
formal necessity. By a posteriore, similarly altered, I will now refer to all
extrinsic grounds of knowledge, so long as they are what we will
call material grounds in immediate knowledge (whether intuitive or
nonintuitive). These may or may not be necessary grounds, depending on their
own peculiar character.

In that it preceded the individual cases of its application in experience, a

priori knowledge was always of the nature of a prediction of what was going
to occur. The form of a priori knowledge, also, would tend to be in the form
of rules or laws, on the basis of which predictions of events could be made.
The form of a priori knowledge will tend to assimilate modes of necessity that
I henceforth will not call a priore. There are two especially interesting
examples of this. First is geometry, whose axioms were certainly considered a
priori knowledge until quite recently and whose form certainly continues in
precisely the same way it always has. What has changed is the nature of the
supposed ground; and the geometric axioms have tended to assume the
character of scientific predictions which can be falsified by the event. The
second example is just scientific prediction in general, whose character will be
of particular concern in the theory of negative transcendence, for which I will
reserve a more detailed discussion. This sense of a priori, then, is worthy of
note; and, if the occasion demands, the term in its original spelling may be
used for it. Otherwise, we should just say that the formalizing character of our
abstract and conceptual mediate knowledge will tend to assimilate all modes
of necessity to the regulative form of a priore knowledge.

From now on it will very much be more the field of the a posteriore than the a
priore that concerns us, and the thin edge of our wedge of material modes of
necessity will come from a reconsideration of a very ancient issue. The
question of future contingency will provide the first mode of material
necessity and will also establish the distinctions upon which the subsequent
theories of time, change, will, and so value itself will be established.

In the first place there is a subtle difference between what I will specifically
call "Determinism" and what may be called instead "Fatalism." Fatalism arises
out of an observation that the events of the past cannot now be changed and
that, while from our small perspective the future seems different in kind from
the past, it is conceivable that this difference is only apparent and the result of
our ignorance. To God, we might think, seeing past and future equally, all
events have already been fixed and known from all eternity. With this in
mind, Aristotle's discussion in On Interpretation upholds the view that, while
true statements may be made about the future, e.g. that there will be a naval
battle tomorrow,[100] the truth of such a statement will only be contingent --
until, indeed, the event comes to pass. A Fatalist perspective would be that the
future was never really open and that, whether we were in a position to know
it or not, the truth of propositions about past, present, or future is equally
necessary due to the eternal fixity of all events.
Determinism, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated notion in which the
necessity of events is due, not to their fixity in eternity or in the eye of God,
but to the manner in which natural law constrains coming-to-be. The future,
then, may even be regarded as open and unrestrained possibility in its own
right, unknown even to God, but the character of events that come to be in the
present may be said to be absolutely determined by the operation of natural
laws. God as a Fatalist would merely have to look to know; but God as a
Determinist would have to calculate. Like Laplace, he would have
to derive the future states from the states that are given in the present.

Here we are interested in what forms the original basis for the pessimistic
Fatalist extrapolation into the future. The case of material necessity that
should be considered to stand first dialectically for us is the necessity of
events that have already occurred. In the sense of the necessary as that which
cannot be otherwise, or of the necessary as that which, now, cannot be altered
by events, it is trivially true that the character of the past is necessary. Any
complication in considering this results from the perspective one takes: sub
specieae ternitatis one is committed to no fixed present and so may ask
whether it is proper to attribute to all events in eternity the necessity of events
in the past or the contingency of events in the future. On that score
contingency usually wins now (with or without the addition of Determinism),
as necessity was more likely to win in the Middle Ages -- obviously motivated
by belief in Divine omniscience and its consequences. Such sentiments are
really more a matter of Zeitgeist and cultural bias, where for us each
perspective must now be restricted to its proper grounds and objects. Eternity
is not actually present to us for it to become a real problem whether it is
essentially, as a whole, necessary or contingent. The perspective of
consciousness is not like the imagined mind of God, viewing things sub specie
aeternitatis. A present moment for us, having been lost, can never be
retrieved; and the real possibilities that were lost when the moment passed are
forever lost.

The present is somewhat different from the neat alternatives of past and
future. When we fear to see something realized, seeing it realized before us
means that it is already too late to prevent it. On the other hand, in seeing
conditions before us, we tend to think that we can change them. The
contingency of the future means that it is possible for things to be different
than they are; but our power to change things means that we change them in
the present, not in the future. The present is the place of change and the place
of real potentiality, so that the door being closed, it can be open. The present
is a paradox.

If we are to think of the past as necessary, the future as open to various

possibilities, and the present as combining both these features, it would be
convenient to make a division that combines the past with the necessary
aspect of the present and the future with the contingent aspect of the present.
This very division lies ready at hand for us in the common practice of diverse
natural languages. This will provide a ready-made, and in fact Classical,
terminology for this first critical mode of material necessity and its
corresponding mode of contingency. Just as many languages distinguish the
past tense from the present and these from the future, many others (Japanese,
Russian, Arabic) distinguish the perfect aspect from the imperfect aspect.
These terms are found in Latin grammar, where perfectum originally simply
meant "finished" or "complete," and not "perfect" in our present English
sense. These terms were actually more appropriate for Greek:

The perfect of Greek verbs is a true perfect and never has the meaning of a
simple past tense as does the Latin perfect. The perfect tense denotes an
action completed so shortly before the present moment that the effect of
that action may be called a present state.[101]

Here the perfect is cited as a "tense" because in the indicative in Greek tense
and aspect meaning are combined. However, in the subjunctive and
imperatives moods the tense system [erratum corrected] falls away entirely,
and only aspect remains. These are the old Indo-European aspects,[102]
indicated in "strong" verbs by internal vowel changes: the perfect, imperfect
(called "present," however, in Greek grammar, with "imperfect" reserved for
the past imperfect of the indicative mood), and aorist, where the aorist
represents the action in photographic simplicity without sense of either
completion or incompletion. In English there is also a full system of aspect
through the use of auxiliary verbs. In the present indicative we can say: I have
run (perfect), I am running (imperfect), and I run (aorist, which, however, has
acquired a sense of meaning habitual action).[103]

The necessity that events possess merely by virtue of having occurred will
therefore be called here perfect necessity. The contingency that events possess
because they are occurring or have not yet occurred will be called imperfect
contingency. The terms thus used are of course not to be confused with their
ordinary meaning in English. The possibility of confusion might warrant
modification of the terms, as they are sometimes used in grammar, into
"perfective" and "imperfective." However, there is little occasion here for the
ordinary meaning of the English terms, since "perfection," as say with the
perfection of God, is no part of this theory. My inclination, then, is to side
with Schopenhauer that an unusual term should not be used so long as a
common term is at hand. I simply use them in a way more evocative of their
etymology than of their current usage.

The division between perfect necessity and imperfect contingency becomes

increasingly important for us for the same reason that the distinction between
potentiality and actuality was important for Aristotle. The distinctions are
ontologically isomorphic and similar in their consequences. Indeed, where
Aristotle spoke of the form and matter that composed all things in the world,
my concern is with the material of consciousness, which is to be linked with
actuality and perfect necessity after the manner of the Aristotelian species, and
the power manifest in consciousness, through which on the one hand the
world changes without our intervention and on the other hand is altered
through our own agency. The sensible material is to be considered
essentially immanent, while that which transcends consciousness, existence, is
to be suitably associated with the imperfect aspect and the peculiar emptiness
of futurity and potentiality.

In this the intuitive ground of the temporal nexus is now suggested: the
ontological junction between that which is essentially of the perfect aspect and
that of the imperfect. The reality of time is within the present, and as such it is
not so much a temporal nexus as the ontological relation between immanent
and transcendent, as I have been unfolding the meaning of these terms here.
What is present to us is primarily the "arrow" itself, the feeling of what can be
done or undone and what is already locked into reality. The temporal nexus as
such, the connection between successive moments in time, originates first in
the abstraction and dissociation of past from future as we distinguish perfect
from imperfect and then these from the present where they are so intimately
conjoined. Spatialized time, the "clothesline across eternity,"[104] comes at
the end of a long progression of dissociation, abstraction, and hypostatization.
Time conceived as space, in other words, is an illusion: our need to
simultaneously visualize two separate moments, or many, in time means that
we apply the form of space where such simultaneities can be imaginatively
separated.

At this point in the theory, our sense of a posteriore and imperfect modes of
contingency opens the way into the dynamical transcendent and the possibility
that further modes of necessity, after the manner of the a priore and the
perfect, may be distilled out: the increasingly weak and restricted senses that
will include matters of value. It should be kept in mind that while each sense
of necessity will be secure and uncontradicted in its domain, each sense
of contingency will always only be relative since it may include cases that will
turn out to be necessary in terms of a weaker mode of necessity. Thus it is
reasonable to speak of logical contingency, a posteriore contingency,
and imperfect contingency, even though the whole point of the theory here is
to deny that all logically contingent propositions are actually contingent. In
the theory of absolute transcendence we will eventually consider the sense in
which even analytically true propositions may be take to be contingent.
§9 Conclusion

A cornerstone of Plato's thought was that knowledge, to qualify as knowledge,

must be eternal and unchanging. From this conception of knowledge he
inferred that the objects of knowledge must also be eternal and unchanging,
thereby disqualifying the things of experience, transient and mutable as they
are, from any role as ground for cognition. Aristotle, who by no means
disagreed with Plato on the nature of knowledge, denied the validity of the
inference to immutable objects removed from the world of experience. One of
Aristotle's insights was that the regularity of change in the world provides a
suitably immmutable basis for knowledge. There is no need to substantially
alter this view even today, although the tradition seems to be of many minds
about how to regard the matter metaphysically -- namely whether the
regularities in the world belong there objectively or are put there by a
projection from the brain, from language, from a traditional cultural mythos,
or from the scientific enterprise itself. All the subjectivist approaches,
however, are little better than admissions of epistemic defeat.

More on the epistemological than on the ontological side of his theory, Plato
took the ultimate foundation for knowledge to be intuitive -- though reduced
in the world to a memory of the pre-natal intuition. Aristotle, who was the first
to clearly conceive the logical issue that not all synthetic propositions could be
logically derived from others without an infinite logical regress,[105] also
regarded substantive knowledge as ultimately justified and grounded by
intuition -- insight by pure mind (noûs). From these beginnings philosophy
made little enough progress until Kant, who was the first to see that the truth
of Aristotle's synthetic "first principles of demonstration" might be grounded
in some way other than through tautological or intuitive self-evidence. The
Friesian School was virtually the only post-Kantian tradition to correctly
address these issues and appreciate their significances.[106]

The world is an interplay of chance and law, contingency and necessity. I

have agreed with Plato that all knowledge is founded on some aspect of
necessity, and so far in this treatment the three aspects of necessity have been:
1) analytic necessity, which is often the only kind allowed in modern
epistemology and metaphysics; 2) synthetic a priore necessity, which is a
function of the unity of consciousness after the manner of Kant's "principle of
the possibility of experience"; and 3) perfect synthetic a posteriore necessity,
which refers to the aspect of fixity, definiteness, and immutability of the
material, immanent contents of consciousness. Although each of these, and
the modes of necessity to follow, is weaker and more restricted than those
preceding, perfect necessity is of special interest as the fundamental ground
for all factual knowledge of the world, since the definiteness of all states of
affairs in intuition is an expression of it. It may at first seem strange to think
of mere fact as involving necessity, but familiarity should resolve this
strangeness once we examine the meaning of necessity and its history and
cease to beg the question by instantly equating the term with what is now so
well understood as logical necessity.

In the Timaeus Plato seemed to think it a sufficient justification of the doctrine

of Forms to say that it was equivalent to believing that there is a difference
between knowledge and opinion.[107] This is still close to the crux of the
issue. Modern epistemology, as in the theory of Armstrong, is actually little
able to go beyond the suggestion in the Theaetetus that knowledge is true
opinion accompanied by an explanation or justification. This is, after all, not
so bad in the light of the paradigm of scientific method. A scientific
hypothesis is a kind of educated guess, an elaborate opinion, which gains
credibility in proportion to the consistency with which observational and
experimental evidence supports it -- or at least fails to refute it. There is an
abiding paradox in the Theaetetus conception, however, which was obviously
appreciated by Plato and has been more recently treated by Nelson.[108] All
opinions, if believed, are believed to be true. Thus, a true opinion and a false
opinion, taken entirely by themselves, are no different and cannot be
rationally discriminated. The true opinion is discovered or proven to be true
by means of its "explanation or justification"; but if the truth of the opinion is
known by means of the justification, then the justification certainly is
equivalent to knowledge of the matter at hand, which renders the "true
opinion" aspect of the theory superfluous. Given direct knowledge, we discard
opinion.

The suggestion of the Theaetetus thus is an elaboration that leaves the basic
question entirely unchanged -- the problem of knowledge is simply thrown
back one step, to the content of the "justification." Where a scientific
observation is merely a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition to the truth of
the belief, this regress is obscured. And in an "externalist" theory, which
describes a regular connection that is outside our inspection, the requirement
of justification is transformed into something really alien to the Cartesian
problem of knowledge. The Thaeaetetus can be well taken in one sense,
however; for if instead of "true opinion" or "true belief" we substitute "true
mediate representation," then, for cases of conceptual knowledge, the
"justification" will, usually, contain something distinct from the mediate
representation-although it must still count as knowledge, immediate
knowledge, in itself.

Nelson's view was that if nothing can be accepted at face value as being
knowledge, then we can never accept anything as being known.[109] No
criterion will ever enable us to admit that something is to be accepted as
knowledge unless the criterion can be independently known to be true.
Otherwise we may as well admit that we just go along picking out rules to suit
our prejudices regardless of any relation to reality they might have (a view not
without its appeal, to be sure). Nelson, like Plato, considered it essential to
keep in mind always that basic difference between knowledge and opinion.

While the major and critical conclusions of the theory of consciousness must
be epistemological, it also has obviously developed important psychological,
logical, and ontological conceptions. These all provide essential materials for
us in understanding the nature of will and value in both its internal aspect and
its external and objective role. For both Plato and Kant theoretical knowledge
was a prerequisite but transient feature on the way to the theory of value and
practical reason. Here the case has been the same.

THE THEORY OF EXISTENCE OR NEGATIVE TRANSCENDENCE

§1 Negative Transcendence

The theory of negative transcendence is a crossroads where, in a general

theory of reality, each direction would be of great intrinsic interest. Here it
will be sufficient to look down each of the branching ways only far enough to
gauge its significance for the subsequent theory of positive transcendence.
The branching ways are 1) the theory of space, 2) the theory of natural
causation, and 3) the theory of will, which leads on to the theory of purpose in
positive transcendence. The wealth of topics here provides much of the
ontological background and foundation for the theory of value. Value is more
an internal than an external phenomenon, and it is here that the implications
of the distinction between internal and external are addressed as such. The
theory of value is also a theory of change by means of will and purpose, and it
is here that we must provide a general theory of change in time and a means of
distinguishing free change through will and purpose from change determined
by natural causation or chance.

The fundamental meaning of negative transcendence may be approached in

different ways. We might first of all note with Locke that colors, textures, etc.
do not really belong to objects because they are phantasmata of perception --
subjective causal products dependent on the organs of sense. The real external
objects are then left with the "primary" attributes, which are the Cartesian
substantial properties of extension, number, etc. It later occurred to Kant that
those properties also were contributed by the subject. This leaves the external
Cartesian objects or things in themselves removed from our knowledge or, as
has already been argued here, simply removes from what is intrinsically
external both formal and material attributes. What is left, in any case, is a
curious emptiness, since we have abstracted every features by which we know
and identify objects.

A more direct and sweeping formulation of negative transcendence comes

from a consideration of the form of intentionality. We may say that the very
notion of the distinction between an object and its attributes, between what a
thing is and the fact that it is, is itself a condition imposed by the form of
intentionality. The object/attribute distinction enables us to contrast external
things in so far as they are substantially independent of me with the external
things in so far as they are known by me through the representations that are
sustained by my existence. The attribute that is known means nothing outside
the relation of intentionality that connects my existence with that of the things
I perceive. Their existence is distinct from mine, but my existence comes to
be known to me as a reflective derivative of my intuition of the existence of
those other things. And so that attribute, which is the essence of the
immanent, and which I immediately ascribe to external things yet reflectively
return to myself, is distinct on both sides from the actual existence of objects
and subject. This existence, however, is left as a void. The problem is much
the same as that posed from Parmenides to Heidegger: we are ordinarily faced
with things which, in the relation of intentionality, have being -- the ónta,
"being things" -- but we then wish to ask what this is then that makes all such
things "beings," what it is that constitutes tò eînai, the "to be," existence as
such.

These ways of approaching negative transcendence might lead us to

characterize it as "private" rather than "negative" transcendence, since we
have merely deprived existence of its phenomenal attributes. As we proceed,
however, it should become clearer that this part of the overall theory stands as
the negation of Being or even as the theory of Not Being, which, as the
Atomists said, exists as much as Being [110]. The Atomist paradox, indeed, of
the void and the plenum, is the essence of negative transcendence. The
similarity and the connection that Hegel described between Being and Not
Being [111] is also very germane, although the motivation and explanation
here will be different from his.

At the same time it may be helpful to remark specifically on the use of the
term "transcendent." The basic significance of both this and the corresponding
"immanent" should be no more than their meaning in Latin: to "pass over" or
"climb across" and to "remain within" [112] What we "remain within" is
sensible and phenomenal objectivity. The only thing that we might "climb
across" to from this is pure existence. Older versions of transcendence should
be kept in mind: 1) the Platonic, where the eternal Forms of things are
substantially independent and separate from the phenomenal universe; 2) the
Theistic, where God and various eschatological locations are similarly
separate; 3) the Cartesian, where physical objects are present in the same
immanent space as we are but are not immediately, or even certainly, known;
and 4) the Kantian, which is like the Cartesian except that the objects are
unknown, space is only a form of sensibility, and knowledge is restricted to
internal, phenomenal, and intersubjective representations. With respect to the
first two versions, it is meaningful to speak of immanent existence as opposed
to transcendent existence, where two qualitatively different kinds of Being are
involved. Interpretations of both, however, may hold that immanent existence
is an epiphenomenon of the transcendent and cannot exist without it. In those
terms we might add (5) a Deistic version of transcendence in which immanent
existence is fully able to continue even if transcendent existence were to
vanish. Obviously it is also possible to combine Cartesian or Kantian
transcendence with the others.

§2 Internal and External

The paradox of the dual nature of representation and of ontological

undecidability belongs peculiarly to negative transcendence. We have two
perspectives on existence, the one given us by the fact that each of us exists
and so is already in a relation of identity to being, and the other given us by
the relation of immediate intentionality to other entities whose existence is
distinct and separate from us. The personal existence or transcendence each of
us possesses, which sustains consciousness and representation, is called here
"internal" existence and representation, while that of all objects immediately
intended in representation, including the body, is called "external" existence
or transcendence. Although these represent profoundly different perspectives,
it is especially noteworthy that the internal and the external are
the same existence, with internal existence doubtlessly corresponding to the
body or some fragment thereof in external existence. Although the world is
very different for internal and external existence, it should never be forgotten
that they are two complementary sides of the same coin or, in the previously
simile of the hologram, the two sides of the plate holding the holographic
image. This dual perspective on the same existence may be taken as the
special theory of mind offered here.

The emptiness that is characteristic of negative transcendence is to be

regarded differently depending on whether we consider it the emptiness of
external or of internal transcendence. The external emptiness may be
metaphorically called "hiddenness" and the internal "transparency." External
existence is hidden behind the appearance. The intuition that presents external
reality to us reveals it but must also continue to conceal it in so far as it is
substantially separable. We are therefore in a relation to external
transcendence, but it is hidden as such in the bare thatness with which external
objects are posited. We can't think, however, that there is going to be an
emptiness associated with internal existence in just the same way. Immediate
knowledge does not present internal transcendence along with external
objects, and so the internal is not going to be hidden by the same relation as
the external is. Instead, we will say that internal existence is in its turn devoid
of content because of its "transparency" (to borrow a term from Sartre [113])
as the window of knowledge whose contents, in the form of intentionality, are
immediately attributed to external existence. Those contents, even when
examined in light of the fact that their reality is dependent on internal
existence, do not yield up knowledge of internal being, but only of the relation
between internal and external that constitutes immediate knowledge. By
reflecting on our inner states, we reflect on immediate cognitive acts and their
immanent contents, leaving the pure subject and its pure internal existence as
always a present pole of the relation -- but always frustratingly inaccessible.
The subject is thus the unknown knower which figures so fundamentally in
Schopenhauer yet which seems to have few consequences for him, unlike its
role in the Upanishads where Schopenhauer had found it [114].

By the term "ego" what I will mean specifically here is the internal existence
of each of us individually. This is more than Kant's "abiding and unchanging
'I'," [115] which only referred to the structure of formal unity of the contents
of consciousness. That structure of unity belongs, after all, to the content of
the relation of intentionality, not to the pure poles of the relation. Such formal
unity and internal existence are certainly to be profoundly associated with one
another, however, since it is the relation with its unified contents that
separates internal existence from external existence. But formal unity is not
enough: internal existence is not an abstract unity; it is a fragment of
existence, specifically my fragment, unique and individual in a way that the
abstract universality of terms such an "I" and "my" (indexicals) cannot equal.

Besides the association of internal existence and formal unity, which is

common to all persons, there is a further, more common and comfortable,
meaning for "ego," which is that idiosyncratic coherence and unity to be
found in the contents of each individual personality, a structure of mind and
experience peculiar to each identity. The use of the term "ego" to denote this
structure is now common (it is essentially the Freudian ego), so here the term
will be used underlined to denote a special meaning of signifying internal
existence or formal unity. What may be taken to most clearly distinguish the
ego as a psychological structure and the ego in the technical use here is the
familiar daily phenomenon of the loss of consciousness in sleep:
the ego literally vanishes; in dreamless sleep there is no internal existence. But
the material structure of the ego carries over in sleep and fills each newly
arisen morning consciousness with the abiding, or at least slowly changing,
attributes of self-identity.
The significance of the internal/external distinction will be further developed
in the following sections.

§3 Space

The issue of space is of the greatest intrinsic interest yet the most quickly
leads into problems that are far afield from our inquiry. What is relevant is the
role of space in the ontology we are providing to positive transcendence, and
that role is central and important in a way that has been seldom seen since the
Eleatics and Atomists.

Having adopted the term "transparency" in reference to the ego, this suggests
the transparent emptiness of space in perception. This suggestion can be
meaningfully elaborated, for an internal/external distinction can be applied to
space as well as to negative transcendence in an abstract sense. Thus we
should note that the space that we perceive between ourselves and the objects
of our perception, the truly transparent space, is as much a projection and, as
we might be tempted to thin, an artificial construct of perception as is the fact
that we perceive the sensible phantasmata of visual perception as belonging to
external objects. There is no space between the image on the retina of the eye
and the retina, yet we perceive the image in a stereoscopic projection. This
transparent projection may then be contrasted with the "true" external space
which in fact lies between the perceived object and its retinal image. With true
realist confidence, we usually take it for granted that the external space is just
the same as we perceive the internal space to be. The problem with this now is
more likely to focus on whether real space is Euclidean or non-Euclidean; but,
from our introspective point of view, what is of greater interest is that in the
history of thought this "just the same" used to be literally true in the most
naive and charming, yet culturally and conceptually distinctive, ways. Thus
the void of space for the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greek was limited and
bounded [116] -- below by the firmament of the earth, above by the firmament
of the heavens. The Biblical idea of a "firmament" in the heavens is very
strange to modern ears, but it was natural enough to think that all we perceive
in the sky is something solid, just as everything else we look at here below is
solid. The notion that space might stretch on beyond these firmaments doesn't
seem to have occurred to anyone for a long time -- the physical reality of
space was sensibly bound to the void as actually perceived. External space is
an object for conception and imagination, and not until the Greeks did
conception begin to break through the perceptual barriers of internal space.

The emptiness of space has always been a troublesome notion. Early thought
could avoid the nasty alternative of nothingness by resting with the thought
that the void was, after all, filled with air, demonstrably substantial albeit
invisible. The Greeks, vaulting to larger conceptions, still felt easiest by filling
the volume of the heavens with fire or aithêr. The Atomists, by affirming the
existence of both being and nothingness, atoms and the void, squarely
formulated one of the most profound paradoxes of Greek philosophy. Until
this very century aether and the plenum of being still had their place in serious
science. Now we act as though what the Atomists did was obvious; and not
only is the nothingness of the void insensibly accepted as self-evident, but the
course of science seems to have shown that matter is mostly, or even entirely
(in the form of Dirac point particles), empty space. And so we curiously are
untroubled by the nothingness of something so physically fundamental, even
while at the same time in Einstein's Relativity, space is spoken of as so
substantial a thing as to be "curved" and space-time may be taken to flow
much as water.

For Parmenides space and being are closely associated. His was the first
abstract conception of pure existence, but all the same he could not avoid
giving the plenum of Being a spatial extension. This now could easily seem to
be little more than a curious artifact of early thought. However, no
contemporaries criticized this association; and when notions of space were
becoming more sophisticated, the Eleatic Melissos of Samos simply made the
extension of Being infinite [117]. The Atomists, in turn, together with many
other post-Parmenidean philosophers such as Empedocles,
explicitly retained the extended plenum of Being. The Atomists added an
affirmation of the reality of Not Being, but the only reason that affirmation
made any sense at all to them was because it was an affirmation of the reality
of empty space. Without space, Not Being would be just as empty and
meaningless a conception as Parmenides thought; and we might easily supply
for Parmenides his certain reply to the Atomists: that for space to be
conceived as real, it must actually be already conceived as Being. The
ambiguity of such a response is of interest to us; for is it that space is simply a
being, an object among objects, or, after Parmendies, does the emptiness of
space signify that it is the Being, the transcendence of immanent objects?

In any case, amid the debate over the void, the Eleatic plenum remained and
has been passed down to the present age as the conception of material
substance. Thus what may seem to be a naive association of existence with
space, when flatly stated as such, has survived unchanged into periods that
would consider themselves far from naive. The only times that this association
has really not been followed, apart from those denying the reality of
perceptual objects, have come with Islamic Atomists [118] and Leibniz, who
held that objective substance was without extension. Now, in the quantum
mechanical theory of Dirac, the electron and other leptons are assumed to be
dimensionless; and this assumption has so far been born out by the failure of
any experiment to detect a measurable size for such particles. At the same
time quarks have also come in for consideration as point particles. Between
quarks and leptons, all matter would be without extension, and so for the first
time science seems to be in a position to dispense with the Eleatic-Atomist
plenum of Being. It is in contrast to the absolute emptiness of this matter that
the seeming substantiality of Einstein's space become even more interesting;
and one of the most interesting aspects of this is what happened to the "ether"
with which Maxwell had filled space as the substratum for the propagation of
electromagnetic radiation. It is often supposed that Einstein disproved the
existence of ether, but the effect of Relativity is to assert that no experiment
can be constructed to detect ether even if it does exist. Any observable effects
that ether might be thought to have as the medium of electromagnetic
radiation (or of any other field quanta, to generalize) are negated by the
requirement that the speed of light remain a constant and by the attendant
Relativistic changes of length in space and of the rate of passage of time. And
in science undetectability is usually the same as non-existence

Here I will conclude that the ontological reality of space, regardless of its
geometrical structure, is as the Parmenidean plenum of Being or the Atomist
matter. To space we always ordinarily tend to attribute a certain ontological
priority. The emptiness of space gains from that a spurious and illegitimate
priority also. Removing all the objects from spaced leaves nothing. If that
were all there were to it, there would be no problem; for obviously removing
all Being leaves Not Being. The problem is that removing all objects from
space still leaves space. The apparently gives to Not Being, as the Atomists
thought, a reality equal to or even greater than Being. The reality of space,
however, is already the reality of Being, and its emptiness, its apparent Not
Being, and the whole paradox of the void, is an accident of perspective,
an artifact of our being the cognitive pole of the ego in the relation of
intentionality. The ether is there after all, invisible, undiscoverable, and
irrelevant to science.

For the purpose here, this is basically what is relevant about space. Much
more may be said elsewhere. I have obviously discarded the subjectivism of
Kant's view; and an independent consideration of that is not necessary after
the extended treatment of Kant's epistemological subjectivism in the theory of
consciousness. At the same time I would agree with Wolff that Kant
"decisively refuted" Leibniz's relativistic conception of space [119]. This
leaves us to the paradox of realist conceptions; but the force and the economy
of this theory is that it assimilates the paradoxical emptiness of space to the
coherent theory of the emptiness of negative transcendence. This is a theory
simultaneously of emptiness and of plenum; for both the atoms and the void,
the Being and the Not Being, of the Atomists are equally conceptions of
negative transcendence. An Eleatic critique of the Atomists would be just:
they can't coherently have it both ways, with a little bit of Being here, a little
bit of Not Being there. It must be all one or all the other. But we can have it
both ways; for the uniform plenum of Being appears to us as Not Being
because of the empty way in which Being appears as negative transcendence.

Thus the materialism of the Atomists has been subtly restored. It is no longer
a scientific materialism, however, and it is just because science has abandoned
it that this turn is possible. Nor is it part of the scientific conception of space,
for it exists only on the blind side of scientific space. Where the ether of
Maxwell has gone is where this theory makes its affirmations. The emptiness
of space in the hiddenness of external transcendence is truly a needed
reminder that the solidity of the Newtonian billiard ball is a conception that
owes more to Parmenides than it does to Newton. As Being vanishes from us
into the scientifically dark domain of ether, it is also a needed reminder that
the dull uniformity of the Eleatic One or of Atomist matter is also
a conception. That conception we now say is due to the nothingness of
negative transcendence; and that nothingness as the hiddenness of external
transcendence could easily conceal just the sort of kaleidoscopic wealth and
variety that Plato attributed to his World of Forms.

It is sad to imagine any thinker resting satisfied with the insipid stuff of
traditional matter. This effect of the appeal of the perspective of negative
transcendence is like going to look at the Taj Mahal on a dark and cloudy,
starless and moonless night. We know it is there, but we would be pathetically
mistaken to think that the dismal uniformity of nothingness evident to us had
anything to do with the reality or the beauty of the object. The sun will come
out only with positive transcendence, when we will be able to return back
before Eleaticism to the sensible concreteness and perceptual solidity with
which the Egyptians and the other naive ancients endowed the firmaments of
heaven and earth.

§4 Time and Causation

Space is really no more than the junior partner of the theory of negative
transcendence. It is through the consideration of time that we begin to lay out
the dynamic structure of positive transcendence. In this section the topic will
be first the general ontology of change and then its specific form for external
transcendence. This will address the ontological foundation of scientific
knowledge and will also provide the framework for the theory of pleasure and
pain as instances of positive transcendence.

The essential characteristic of time is that it is the place of change in

existence. The perfect material of experience, which appears intuitively in
space, represents that aspect of fixity in reality whereby something, having
been, will never have been otherwise. The imperfect aspect of power and
possibility represents no fixity and actually extends into the emptiness of the
future. That emptiness is the nothingness of negative transcendence. The
character of reality is found in the perfect material, but the occasion of reality,
the presence and the power by which it continued to exist, is found in the
empty poles of existence in the reality of intentionality. The past for all its
fixity still exists in one sense only at the mercy of the future, for its is always
new existence that suffers continuing perfect material to reflect, or not, past
states of existence. The geologist reads out of the record of the rocks, as we,
presumably, read out of the record of the brain, the story of the past. As events
erase those records the past loses its only ground in continuing reality.

Where for space I have drawn on the precedent of the Eleatics, it is Aristotle
who now becomes interesting for time. If we take the imperfect aspect to
depend on an ontological aspect of existence, as here with negative
transcendence, then the parallel with the Aristotelian distinction between form
and matter, act and potential naturally suggests itself. The Aristotelian form
of primary substance, which is concrete and individual, the total actuality of
the thing, is equivalent to immanent, perfect material here. Where most kinds
of matter for Aristotle, like clay, are actual to some degree, we must go
forward to the logical extreme of matter from the Aristotelian definition,
prime matter, to find the equivalent of imperfect material -- the pure potential
that now makes all the differences of the future possible. The future is not a
dark corridor extending off into some dim distance; it is the power of the
present to generate new events. This power is not the inert availability of a
lump of clay, furthermore; it is the inner dynamism of a growing thing.

The relation between immanence and transcendence (only the empty form of
negative transcendence, so far) or between perfect and imperfect is the
ontological basis for all change and all novelty. The emptiness of existence is
thus not some remote mystery to which we may be indifferent; it is a very
present mystery, one that drives the events all around us. And within us. The
relation of the transcendent to us, however, is not a causal relation: the
transcendent does not cause the immanent; the imperfect does not cause the
perfect. Causation can only be described in immanent terms, as holding
between objects which have transcendence but which are differentiated and
identified by virtue of their immanent content. It is objects that cause change
in objects, not transcendence in immanence. The view is virtually identical to
Schopenhauer's, wherein the transcendent Will, which in every way provides
the impetus of change and the contents of possible novelty in the world, is
wholly separate from the workings of Schopenhauer's "Principle of Sufficient
Reason," namely causation, etc [120]. Causation figures in the occasion of
change, and each occasion is dependent for its reality on the existence of
particular antecedent conditions. The transcendent may contain the range of
all possibility and the range of all individual causal laws, but the occasion of
change is determined by what already exists immanently. Those antecedent
existents are what we call "causes," and so in the first instance causation is to
be seen as a relation between immanent objects across time. The well of
possibility for all changes, however, within which all causal rules and
restrictions are eternally articulated, lies with the transcendent.

Causality will be for us only one of two perspectives on change in time: the
one given by regard for events rising out of external existence, the other by
that for events issuing from internal existence. Both internal and external are
alike imperfect material of experience. If it happens that we are merely
spectators to changes in existence, then it is external existence that should be
said to be the ground of change. If it happens that we seem to initiate the
changes ourselves, in which case the change occurs by virtue of our own
existence, then internal existence should be said to be the ground of the
change. Events do not simply bubble up out of external or internal existence.
There is an occasion for change for each, and these are to be called "cause"
and "purpose" respectively.

Here "cause" is used in a narrow, sufficient, and efficient sense. What an

efficient cause presupposes are necessary conditions, principally the natural
laws governing such changes. In this we are obliged to recognize the de
facto procedures of science. The clarity, precision, and success of modern
science stand or fall with the use of the formal, mathematical law. Such a law
is formulated hypothetically, and we are at liberty to wonder if such
formulations, even if practically successful, bear any relation to whatever it is
in nature that directs events to follow the patterns that they do. The
consequences of this situation will remain of interest as we continue. A law
itself is merely necessary and of itself occasions no changes, though of course
causes are causes just by the law-like way in which they effect change. It is
the essence of causation that the occasion of change is ontologically in the
perfect aspect -- i.e. actual conditions are causes. In a realm of physics where
the directionality of time may be open to doubt or, at least, discussion, it is
conceivable that causes could work backwards as well as forwards in time.
While that has not become any part of serious science, it is possible. But in
this treatment it is taken to be impossible. The temporal inverse of cause
is purpose, which will be handled in its own way in the theory of positive
transcendence.

Cause can only explain the determinate aspect of events, not the
indeterminate. Chance novelties, which cannot be predicted given the
character of antecedent events, are accepted by common sense; but of course
the progress of science has amply demonstrated that what appears to be
indeterminate in events now sometimes turns out to be thoroughly explained
by some new theory later. As the scientist or philosopher contemplates a
future of ever expanding and increasingly comprehensive scientific laws, this
extrapolation from the progress of the past can become the claim
of Determinism that every aspect of events will eventually be shown to be
determinate. The flaw in this right now is that quantum mechanics has
embraced chance as an essential factor in the most fundamental physical
interactions in the universe; but whether quantum mechanics is discarded
tomorrow or not, we can already see that it is the special power of the concept
of causation that we seek to assimilate to it as much as possible, whether there
be indigestible fragments of chance or not, or whether the vastness of
inexplicable events renders it obviously unlikely that even something so
mundane as the weather will be fully understood in the foreseeable future.
Causation is an article of faith that within its proper sphere is really
unchallenged, even by the great historic "sceptics," such as Hume or al-
Ghazzÿamlÿim, whose scepticism really consisted of merely pointing out the
faith-like character of our certainty in causation [121]. Chance, after all,
explains nothing: it is the very essence of instances of chance that there should
be no reason why one thing should occur rather than another.

It is a most significant fact about the world that what it is in nature that
scientific causal rules are meant to describe is hidden. It is no part of
immediate knowledge. It took thousands of years just for someone to notice
that heavy objects do not fall faster than lighter ones of the same shape. The
determined sceptic is free to wonder whether indeed in Aristotle's day heavy
objects did fall faster than lighter ones. Instead of any sort of proof about the
constancy of nature, science has simply come to a method of suggesting
hypotheses which are sufficient to the observational facts and which are
productive of critical predictions. No ontological commitments are made.
Confirmation to any degree often must be rooted out, sometimes with only the
most difficult and tortuous stratagems and techniques. The objective laws of
nature that successful hypotheses might seem to describe are themselves
somehow directly inaccessible, and this circumstance leads to debates about
whether the vaunted "laws of nature" may not be after all mere human
contrivances that correspond to nothing in the vast maelstrom of the universe.

What is at question is the objective ground of causal necessity. Such a

necessity would be an unvarying restraint on physical coming-to-be. Each
time we look for a natural explanation of an event or expect that certain things
will occur because certain conditions have come to pass, our confidence and
our certainty that such an explanation is to be found reflect our implicit
confidence that a ground of causal necessity exists in the world; and whether
it exists in just the form that our hypotheses of formal mathematical laws do is
inessential. If our confidence in the ground of causal necessity really left us,
then any attempt to continue with science would be meaningless; for in
science, even if we believe that laws of nature can change, we have to at least
believe that they change in a way that a further, higher order, law can describe
-- otherwise we must simply contemplate in dumb wonder changes that are
beyond our reckoning. In this respect, to take science seriously we must take
seriously our faith-like desire for causal explanations. The hiddenness of the
causal ground, however, does leave open to us an avenue for the extensive
belief and theory that has always existed about exceptions to laws of nature --
namely, religious beliefs about miracles. These will be considered at the
appropriate place in the theory of positive transcendence.

As previously a posteriore contingency was considered to break down into

perfect necessity and imperfect contingency, now the notion of causal
necessity can provide the basis for a further division. Where before the
division between perfect and imperfect was between what was fixed by
having been and what was unfixed by coming to be, the division now is within
that realm of possible coming to be, where causal necessity renders the
occurrence of some events necessary and others impossible -- with a residue
unaffected by causal restrictions. In tribute to the Kantian precedent, the
ontological division in this can be said to be between the conditioned and
the unconditioned. The "condition" in this case refers to the antecedent states
of affairs that occasion the operation or applications of a particular form of
causal necessity -- with such a feature in mind Kant referred to scientific laws
as "hypothetical imperatives" [122] The "unconditioned" in this sense refers to
the element of chance and random variation that occurs -- within which, as
well, any further modes of necessity might operate. The "unconditioned" is
thus indifferent to any "hypothetical" antecedent.

While in a study of science our attention is focused on what is determined and

so on the laws and formulae that dictate causal necessity, this preoccupation
gives us a distorted perception of reality; for there is nothing in causal
necessity that dictates that the planet earth, or a redwood, or human beings, or
own selves should exist. All these are products of chance, essentially -- a
chance shaped, indeed, by natural law but chance none the less. The flow of
possibility that is the imperfect aspect is merely channeled by causal
necessity; nothing in particular is required to come into being. It is not so
much the necessity of natural law that is the most disturbing to many, but the
residue of chance; and while the chance in quantum mechanics may be what is
of interest to philosophers, it is a far more macroscopic element of chance that
creates the greatest controversy: where in biology the notion of "random
variation" has become a technical term in the theory of evolution by natural
selection. There is some irony in the fear of evolution that possesses the very
people who wish to preserve a religious mystery at the heart of existence. To
them chance is a dead end, mere opaque, meaningless randomness. But to us,
from the vantage point of this theory, it is causal necessity that is the dead
end; and it is the flow of chance possibility that is the river of escape from the
blindness of natural events. By our escape we give to science its due but at the
same time dismiss it with its limitations.
The full dialectical characterization of causal necessity is as synthetic a
posteriore imperfect conditioned necessity -- with a corresponding
unconditioned contingency. In this it is the conditioned/unconditioned
distinction that refers to the ontological ground that is the basis of this
particular necessity/contingency distinction. Thus, while we may speak of
logical necessity as opposed to logical contingency, or even of scientific
necessity as opposed to scientific contingency, we do not speak of
"conditioned necessity" as opposed to "conditioned contingency"; for
"conditioned" refers uniquely to that conditioning ground of necessity which
has been divided off from what remains of imperfect possibility. If causal
necessity did not exist, then the unconditioned would be coextensive with the
imperfect and there would be no reason to speak of anything as "conditioned."
And so the unconditioned is what remains from a logically exhaustive
division, and it retains the character of a contingent ground from what has
originally been divided -- the imperfect aspect.

We are left to wonder about the nature of the ground of causal necessity. Its
hiddenness brings to mind Plato's warning in the Timaeus that his talk about
nature could only be a "likely story" [123]. While we commonly may feel
more certainty than that would warrant in the force of natural necessity and
the results of scientific inquiry, we are still bound to admit that we cannot go
much beyond Plato in our ultimate assurance about causal laws. Even though
causal laws in themselves may be necessary conditions of the event, the
theory of such laws is never more than sufficient to the phenomena. As we
admit uncertainty in the ground itself of causal necessity, we must also admit
an inescapable logical uncertainty in our hypothetical formulation of causal
laws.

§5 Will

Schopenhauer's famous decision was that the thing in itself was will [124]. His
point may be well taken as an identification of transcendence, but here we
must qualify it as being seriously limited on two scores: 1) it is a conception
only of negative transcendence; and 2) it is a conception only
of internal existence. With these in mind we can credit Schopenhauer with his
insight yet avoid the peculiarities of his theory. Our definition of will then is
that it is simply the ability that we possess to introduce chance into the world
by virtue of our conscious existence, the small well of internal transcendence
of the ego.

External objects, including the external existence that corresponds to our own
internal existence, are at the causal mercy of other objects, and in time such
objects exist by virtue of the happenstance of antecedent conditions. We even
imagine natural causation as a series of causes into the past -- a spatialized
series of conditioned events as the perfect aspect is expanded into the depth of
lost presents. Every cause is conditioned by other causes and every individual
object is conditioned by the character and motions of distinct objects, back
into the forgotten beginnings of time. On the other hand, we see ourselves as
somehow distinct and separate from this whole order because there is in truth
only one internal object in the whole of experience for each of us. It would
certainly make things easy if this unique object could only be conditioned by
itself, in its isolation, and were not dependent on the character of other things
for its own character. The internal object would be unconditioned and free of
hidden causal constraints. We are limited by causal constraints, but an
inability to simply leap off the ground and fly or to survive without eating is
usually not what is troublesome about the nature of will. The trouble with will
is free will.

The most difficult aspect of free will theory is defining what in the first place
that is supposed to mean. Being "unconditioned" is not enough: so far all that
need mean is that the event is a matter of chance; and if chance were the
determining actor in my free acts, I am no more intimately associated with
them than if they were wholly determined by antecedent causes. Any theory
that seeks to conform to the strictures of scientific explanation is liable to
seize upon chance as the chink in the armor of determinism that allows for
some form of free will to be introduced. While it may be the chink, it is not
particularly helpful in itself. A chance event is not controlled or conditioned
by anything, and if my actions were the result of chance, they would certainly
not be under my control. If confronted with a choice between indistinguishable
alternatives, it is not the same for me to decide the choice by flipping a coin as
by making a decision. The one is a random event, the other is an exercise of
will. What we want is not that the choice be unconditioned, absolutely, but
that I be unconditioned; and if I am what is free, then I may also make free
decisions about alternatives that are not indistinguishable.

In the will we each have our own private preserve of ontologically imperfect
material, our own well of future potential that presumably we can dispose of
as we please. At the same time the identity of this with some fragment of
external transcendence means that we are limited by the causal constraints of
the external and are subject to the effects of the causal series of natural events.
Against the theory of external events, which is the whole of science from
mathematics and physics to biology and neurophysiology, we have little to
show for our freedom but a vague subjective sense that we can choose freely
as we will. The will as such has no apparent structure, and sometimes we even
grasp onto our ability to make completely arbitrary choices as the essence of
will. That is not very reassuring, however, when the problem is usually to
choose between important differences, where an arbitrary choice would seem
foolish or insane. For that we need a theory of rational purpose which is at
once also a theory of rational freedom.

§6 Conclusion

What we should derive from the theory of negative transcendence is a pair of

questions that now have special meaning for us. Specifically these will be: 1)
What is the positive content of the emptiness of the Eleatic plenum? and 2)
How is it that purpose, or rational choice, can be the unconditioned occasion
of free will? The questions about the structure of space and the nature of
scientific knowledge, which have been touched upon, are intrinsic to negative
transcendence and will not be considered again in this treatment.

THE THEORY OF VALUE OR POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE

REMARK

The theory of positive transcendence will be presented in three parts: 1)

"Conditioned Positive Transcendence," where a transformation in perspective
redefines the ontological place of sensation and where pleasure and pain are
considered as belonging to the first category of value, albeit one dependent on
causal conditions; 2) "Unconditioned Positive Transcendence as Purposive
Value," where the ontological basis of the ordinary categories of purposive
value is set out along with the attendant modes of cognitive necessity; and 3)
"Unconditioned Positive Transcendence as Absolute Transcendence," where
the ontological basis of religious value is considered under the subdivisions of
the problem of evil and the pseudo-value of numinosity. The basis for this
division itself will be considered in turn.

PART ONE: CONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE

§1 Sensation and the Sensible Plenum

Kant's "Copernican Revolution" put the mind, hitherto the passive, subjective
element in perceptual knowledge, into the role of the active originator of the
objective forms of knowledge that structure the world. Now the "Revolution"
must be carried a step further, so that sensation is converted from a mere
subjective epiphenomenon into the very content of existence. This will
constitute a return to something in the order of Dr. Johnson's naive common
sense, where in the immediacy of the perceived object, which is ontologically
independent, sensation belongs to the object and is also a subjective
epiphenomenon. We ordinarily see things as themselves being colored or
textured in their own right as objects, regardless of the eye that may or may
not be there to see them or the hand that may or may not be there to touch
them.

The problem of sensation is already familiar from the theory of consciousness.

As Kant made what hitherto was regarded as a contribution of the object, the
objective forms, a contribution of the subject instead, a continuation of Kant's
"Copernican Revolution" means taking what he continued to regard as purely
a contribution of the subject and changed its origin also. Thus pure sensation,
which is neither a perception nor an exhibitor of any objective structure and
which might be regarded as no more than the support of the objective
structure of perception, may be taken out of its cognitive limbo between
object and knowledge and put back in as the underlying reality of existence
itself -- to be assigned indifferently to subject or object as emphasis is placed
on one pole or the other in the relation of intentionality. The near
meaninglessness to which Kant reduce sensation is especially striking when
we consider that sensation was still conceived to have been causally effected
by external objects, even when that effect and those objects are all matters that
can only be "thought" since they belong to the realm of things in themselves,
while sensation must still, in order to prevent an absolutely arbitrary
construction of knowledge by the subject, so constrain the application of the
forms of objectivity to give a coherent and consistent phenomenal
representation. By Kant's own principles the former is a speculative liberty
that hardly should be a basic principle of a theory of knowledge and the latter
is absolutely impossible once pure sensation has been properly defined.

Pure sensation, as something separate from all the forms of objectivity, is left
by carrying Kant's system to its logical extreme with no cognitive content or
structure whatsoever. If sensation is to mean anything cognitively, it cannot be
as pure sensation; and this will be true even when we want to say that positive
transcendence, of which this conception of sensation is an approximation, has
cognitive significance. The factual structure of object and sensation, the
content of the immediate object of perception, may be said with equal truth to
be contributed by the subject or imposed by the object -- when we take with
sufficient seriousness the relation of intentionality and consider that both poles
of the relation are equally primitive and irreducible. The virtue of pure
sensation, having suffered the humiliation of our abstracting from it all the
forms and relations of knowledge, is precisely that we now may see it
standing outside the relation of knowledge: and the only thing that stands
outside intentionality is existence. The material aspect of sensation, over the
above its factually cognitive content of form and structure, comes into its own
once we recognize its ontological status. Pure sensation, cognitively empty
and relegated to a peculiar non-status, really stands for far more than factual
cognition.

Pure sensation as an entirely subjective epiphenomenon can easily be

maneuvered into a common sense content to our existence. The emptiness of
our own internal existence, its "transparency," has seemed formally due to the
relation of intentionality that empties all material content onto external
objects. In our naive regard for perception, pure sensation unquestionably
belongs to external objects; but if we then regard these apparently external
qualities as in fact internal and subjective, we have actually returned a
material content to our own transparent existence. Our conclusion should be
that color, texture, etc. put us in immediate relation to our own existence, or
better yet, since the relation is one of identity, that they constitute our
existence. This should have a considerably concrete appeal to it; there is an
emotional sense to the notion that my sensations constitute a direct access to
my own existence.

Other theories also return sensation to objects, though not necessarily as their
existence. Armstrong, whom we have previously considered, although a
materialist who identifies mind and brain, himself holds that secondary
qualities belong to the external objects that they seem to [125]. But with such
a move, Armstrong wishes to erase the subjective status and internality of
secondary qualities altogether. Closer to the viewpoint here is Whitehead, who
wished strongly to preserve both our naive and sophisticated senses that the
sensible secondary qualities belong both to external objects and to the body of
the subject. His solution, as he says, is that, "everything is everywhere at all
times" [126]. Like Leibniz, Whitehead has postulated a plurality of real
entities that mirror, in different ways, the real entities beyond them. Distinct
things, although separate, have a real presence in the representation of all
other things. Thus sensation, while existing by virtue of its subject, is also a
genuine part of the existence of the represented object.

The problem of internal and external here, however, is approached without the
same sort of ontological pluralism. The principle of ontological undecidability
suspended judgment on the question altogether, and that was sufficient to
provide separate fields for the problems, like space and time, separately
germane either to internal or external perspectives. The revolution of positive
transcendence does not alter that situation. Sensation still does not belong
more to one pole of intentionality than the other; instead the dilemma of to
which pole of existence sensation really belongs is turned inside out, and the
poles themselves are subordinated as projections from the ontologically prior
positive transcendence of sensation. In a sense this still does not explain how
my "patch of blue" can be both a subjective epiphenomenon and in a real
object "out there": the thrust of the solution is that the [erratum corrected]
distinction is only an apparent one, part of the consciousness and not part of
Being. This is a more through "everything is everywhere" than even
Whitehead has, for Whitehead still must distinguish separate spatial locations
for real things and the sensations by which they are represented in other things
and rely on physical connections to link them up. Here we can see that this
ontological pluralism suffers from the problem of an external perspective: in
space things do not exist in each other and are only related to each other
causally; but in that space as a whole is subordinate to the form of
intentionality and secondary to the Being which is neither internal nor
external, mental or spatial, we are free to say that the sensation in
representation and the existence of represented phenomenal objects really are
the same, identically, in positive transcendence. With the viewpoint, we need
not burden our theory of space, as Whitehead must, with the paradox of
multiple presences.

With the duality of perspectives still in mind, we can even so say that the
answer to the question of the "stuff" that fills the plenum of Being, for which
the whole history of philosophy and science has been able to provide only the
thinnest of abstract descriptions and explanations, is quite simply the sensible,
concrete plenum that we continually perceive in ordinary experience. Table
thumping, while innocent of metaphysical commentary, is intuitively the
precisely correct answer to the idealism of Berkeley, for the sensible solidity
of the table is just as much the stuff of material substance as it is the stuff of
soul. Gaining this perspective on the plenum truly completes Kant's
"Copernican Revolution," which had left sensation as a pathetic and
paradoxical non-entity. Confidence in the independent structure of the world,
such as characterizes even Descartes, allowed a clear and consistent belief in
the nature of sensation as an epiphenomenal and causal product, private and
subjective. Kant's move of taking the objective structure of the world and
placing it in the subject should have meant that sensation also lost its simple
traditional place. That aspect of the matter, however, was overlooked. As Kant
had made what was objective subjective, it would only have been reasonable
to make what was subjective objective; but Kant's beliefs about thought and
reason, that they actually do have a Dialectical connection to external reality,
prevented that.

The most difficult task here is to overcome the weight of a tradition of

centuries in philosophy that by now has made the subjective epiphenomenal
nature of sensation nearly self-evident. All that self-evidence, however, does
not prevent our naive impressions from continuing to attribute colors and
textures and odors to objects themselves, just as no amount of skepticism in
epistemology seems to prevent philosophers from living their lives in such an
otherwise ordinary way as would seem to imply tacit acceptance of the reality
of the world as it appears. I see that the objects I perceive
are themselves colored, etc., and I suppose that in breaking them open I shall
discover that they are through and through colored, etc. in the same way. This
is to say that our naive impression is not just that phenomenal objects
are covered by sensation but that they are a plenum with respect to sensation.

The sense of solidity that we give to the stuff of Parmenidean Being is not just
the abstract fullness, virtually equivalent to emptiness, that we give to all
conceptions of negative transcendence; it is fleshed out, we might say, by the
sensation of fullness which we do literally find in the perception of our own
flesh and which we do find consistently however we break apart any solid
object. We are never deceived that the stuff of sensation in objects belongs
merely to the surface. Now, by this theory, in feeling the solidity of things
around me, there is no horror in the revelation of science that the universe is
emptiness; for we see naively what science cannot see in its sophistication,
that Being is present in its own absolute fullness and solidity. The coldness
and the solitude of the atoms and the void is banished and the common
richness of my daily observations of the world becomes the genuine revelation
of the thing in itself.

§2 Caused Value

For all the "Copernican Revolution" above, sensation is still nothing that we
are able to inspect in isolation. The theory continues to deal with an
abstraction. At this point, however, we may consider a species of feeling
which is akin both to sensation and to the following categories of purposive
value. That is the species of pleasure and pain. What is characteristic of
pleasure and pain for our purpose is that they are part of the causal order, i.e.
dependent on external causes, states of the body, etc. They are thus as
epiphenomenal as sensation but without the same cognitive dimension in
perception. Instead they have a dimension of value, and that value is
supremely one of our own physical existence. The thesis here is that pleasure
and pain are value, but in a qualified sense: they are one manifestation of
positive transcendence, one ontological perspective on the content of
existence. Following Nelson [127], pleasure and pain will be called "intuitive
value" in that they are present to consciousness without the mediation of
thought or reflection. There is no cognitive dimension to intuitive value,
however, apart from phenomenal objects, and there is thus no special mode of
necessity to be associated with their ontological ground.

Unlike the theoretical abstraction of sensation as such, pleasure and pain do

not need any special analysis to be identified. According to our theoretical
analysis of sensation, however, pleasure and pain can, as sensations, be
identified as manifestations of positive transcendence. That they are also
manifestations of value is another matter; and this conclusion rests wholly on
their own intuitive character as value. Why this connection or coincidence
between positive transcendence and value should occur is a question that can
only be answered in the following section. What we can deal with here is the
ontological status of pleasure and pain, and in that sense we can recognize that
they are the substance of my existence in so far as I am existentially at risk
from external objects and states of affairs in nature: although they qualify as
sensation to be considered matters of positive transcendence, they also share
with sensation the quality of being causally effected and causally dependent
on external objects. Pleasure and pain can be said to represent the positive
transcendence of that fragment of external existence, my body in whole or
part, that corresponds to my internal existence. Pleasure and pain are free of
the form of intentionality in the sense that they are in no
way cognitive sensation; and like a pure and non-cognitive sensation, they are
isolated and opaque causal products from which no inference of knowledge is
made to the establishment of an external object with the character of
"pleasure" and "pain." The most that we say, knowing through our theoretical
cognitive means the causes of pleasure and pain, is that such and such objects
are "causes of pleasure and pain." A not very informative inference.

What we infer about our own existence is more important: pleasure is a good
(prima facie) existence which furthers our existence, both to its character and
to its very reality. But then we must say that pleasure and pain may be
deceptive in these senses, for it is no entirely unusual condition that pleasure
may attend causes that can actually kill, while pain may attend causes that can
actually save life. This merely reflects the opaque character of causal change:
introspectively opaque but at the same time entirely open to scientific inquiry.
Thus we come to experimentally understand how heroin, for instance,
deceives the body by mimicking the structure of native chemicals of the brain,
inducing pathological states of intense pleasure -- pleasure, indeed, so intense
that addiction and the ruin of what would otherwise be every ordinary and
desirable aspect of the good life seem a reasonable trade-off. Our judgment
always continues, however, that unless something is wrong in external
conditions, pleasure should uniformly and properly indicate the good and pain
the bad. Because of its occasional deceptiveness, and because of a
metaphysical belief that immanent reality or matter is tainted with evil or
imperfection, pleasure has often been taken as altogether evil, regardless of
true conditions. Here, however, pleasure and pain in each case of their
occurrence can only be taken to be good or evil according as we see through
the true, non-intuitive good and evil of the situation.

While pleasure and pain would seem to constitute internal existence in the
sense of being private and individual, their place in terms of the alternatives of
the ground of change is firmly external. To say that pleasure and pain are
causal products and subject to the conditions of external transcendence is the
same as to say that they arise out of the potential of the external imperfect
aspect. One approach to purposive value will be to say that such value is the
occasion of will; but pleasure and pain are not occasions of will, which is
internal potential, but effects of causes, which is external potential. The
intimacy of pleasure and pain to our existence is the strongest sign, from
within, that we are not disembodied spirits in the world.

Considered as the unique category of value for our fragment of external

existence, pleasure and pain may be taken, in this qualified way, as the
ultimate good and evil of our lives. Disregarding for the moment the largest
issues of "true" good and evil that must be considered under the theory of
purposive value, there is no simpler criterion of the "good life" than that pain
should be avoided and pleasure maximized. One needn't be an Epicurean to
accept that strategy. We know too well that some pain, perhaps even very
great pains, are unavoidable in human life. That is the nature of causal
existence. Living our lives is itself a protest and struggle against the inevitable
pain, and the inevitable death. When the horror of that situation is felt
sufficiently strongly, we are liable to see pronounced the doctrines that take
pleasure and pain and even the whole physical world as inessential,
meaningless, illusion, or evil. This whole problem of the presence of evil and
our vulnerability to it will be considered in its turn; at this point it is sufficient
to note that the problem of the presence of evil belongs as much to purposive
value as to pleasure and pain. Furthermore, by the doctrine presented here,
pleasure and pain are far from being something that we can ontologically
slough off; they are as much a part of Being as the purposive categories of
value -- the causal, physical world is as much a part of the transcendent as any
"spiritual" values or realities. So the task is not to pretend that our
disembodied spirits are indifferent to pleasure and pain; it is to labor with all
our might to create the good conditions that minimize pain and engender the
natural and worthy pleasures that are so familiar to everyone. As a matter of
fact, most people of good will and good sense pursue such a course.

In religion and philosophy the traditional distrust of pleasure and pain is

understandable and unfortunate. It is understandable because it is a deep and
universal human grievance to be at the mercy of natural causes. The Socratic
principles that it is better to suffer evil than to do it and that nothing can truly
harm the good person, a notion adopted by the Stoics and then Christianity,
reflect this grievance. Because pleasure and pain so often are arbitrary matters
of fortune, they are subject to being condemned together as equally amoral
and so immoral and positively evil, a snare and deception for the good. One
step beyond that is to accept pain as a good in itself, as a proper lesson in
disillusionment with physical existence. In contrast to such sad doctrines is the
simple hedonism of elevating pleasure to the sole good and pain to the sole
evil. As evidenced by the serious qualifications of Epicurean doctrine,
however, no hedonism can really be kept as a completely simple system.
Hedonism does reflect our intuitive grasp, however, that, despite the tricks
that nature plays on us, pleasure is a good in itself which, in the proper order
of things, should only be caused by good.

PART TWO: UNCONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE AS PURPOSIVE VALUE

§1 Remark

Before setting out the structure of the theory of positive transcendence, I will
approach it by way of its closest historical antecedents. I have already devoted
much attention to Plato, Kant, and the Friesians; and it is now Schopenhauer,
Jung, and Rudolf Otto who come to be of the greatest interest. Having
prepared the field in that way, I will proceed to the cognitive and ontological
articulation of value. The hope in these historical sections is to convey a
familiarity with the sorts of considerations that will subsequently figure in the
theories of purposive value and absolute transcendence proper. Such
familiarity, though from the somewhat different tone and context of the
theories of earlier philosophers, will provide useful points of contrast with the
theory here; and the historical perspective is valuable both for an
understanding of this theory and for itself.

§2 Schopenhauer

One of the most curious aspects of Schopenhauer's system of metaphysics is

his own theory of Ideas [128]. These Ideas are Schopenhauer's conscious
attempt, having discarded Kant's notion of reason, to reinstate, mutatis
mutandis, the Platonic Forms as contents of the transcendent [129]. This
scheme is of great interest and is very close to the view that I will actually
present subsequently. In describing it and then translating it out of the peculiar
terms of Schopenhauer's system, we will arrive at a good first approximation
of positive transcendence.

Schopenhauer's special framework of discourse is given by the Upanishadic

doctrine of the unknown subject of knowledge, the [erratum corrected]
knower that cannot be immediately reflectively known [130]. Despite its
essential and fundamental place in Schopenhauer's system, he does not say
much about the subject of knowledge. In the terms of the discussion here,
however, the subject of knowledge is internal transcendence, not the
metaphysical over-soul that Schopenhauer, or the Upanishads, may have had
in mind; and this will play its part in reinterpreting the sense of
Schopenhauer's results. The subject of knowledge, or the things in itself,
Schopenhauer does interpret as being the "Will" -- though the Will hardly
seems to be presented or characterized as much of a subject of
knowledge. The contents of the world of representation are taken to be known
by being objectified according to the "principle of sufficient reason" [131], by
which he means that the principle of causality is applied in the projection of
sensation from the subject to its causes in phenomenal representation [132].
Thus he refers to the spatiotemporal world as the mediate "objectivity of the
Will" [133], namely mediated by the principle of sufficient reason.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer characterizes the Ideas as the "immediate

objectivity of the Will" [134]. In immediacy, the Ideas are not subject to the
principle of sufficient reason and stand apart from space, time, and causality.
This is an interesting move, because in this Schopenhauer must distinguish
objectivity as such from causality, meaning that he cannot identity the
projection of sensation into objectivity with the application of the principle of
sufficient reason -- the form of objectivity must be applied as well. If the
subject of knowing were able to supply the subject-object
form without applying the principle of sufficient reason also, the world, all
Being actually, would suddenly stand out as the eternal and unchanging
Platonic realm of Forms, containing the exemplars and archetypes in beauty
and perfection of all things [135]. Beneath the principle of sufficient reason,
the Ideas are, as Schopenhauer sees it, and as Plato imagined, the stuff and
substance, the basis of existence, of all the changing objects that we see
coming to be and passing away in space and time. Temporal reality as a
"moving image of eternity" was Plato's image; and for Schopenhauer all that
we see may be said to be eternity as perceived through the revolving and
distorting kaleidoscopic mechanism of the principle of sufficient reason.

The great irony and curiosity of Schopenhauer's whole metaphysical system is

that the Will, which he unfailingly characterizes as a principle of evil,
suffering, and futility, should appear in its "immediate objectivity" as a thing
of beauty and perfection. We might expect otherwise. In fact, Schopenhauer's
objection to life and the Will seems necessarily to involve the role of time,
since it is in time that goals are sought, desires pursued, and the futility of
both attained and unattained ends is felt. The principle of sufficient reason,
wherever it comes from, not the Will in itself, would consequently seem to be
the culprit. Without that mediation of objectivity the subject of knowing
would have divine existence, knowing for eternity the bliss of unchanging
contemplation of the world of Platonic Forms -- a fate that Plato imagined for
the gods and for the most blessed of lesser beings. With different sentiments,
Schopenhauer could have derived a very different sense of the world without
changing any essential details of his ontology. It is this better sense, indeed,
that we should derive from such reasoning.

Schopenhauer's construction of the Ideas as the "immediate objectivity of the

Will" does not make any practical difference in how they are known. That is,
the Ideas are not perceived in separation from empirical objects; and so it
must be said that Ideas can be distinguished in experience only because they
constitute some identifiable difference in the objects. Schopenhauer's
distinction between the "mediate" and "immediate" objectivity of the Will is
possible because of our ability to conceptually dissociate the form of
intentionality from the spatiotemporal and causal nexi that unite experience.
As treated here, however, all "objectivity" must be collapsed into its concrete
representation in experience, or, if dissociated from the forms of knowledge
and objectivity, be considered as contents of the subject or the non-intentional
transcendent. Thus Schopenhauer's separation between mediate and
immediate objectivity must be regarded as artificial and unhelpful. What the
separation creates is a false impression: an impression that belongs to the
Platonic Forms also, a quality of being eternal and unchanging, which is
simply an artifact of the fixed and perfect quality of the concept. That is a
matter of metaphysical interest, but it belongs to the theory of immanence and
does not have the same importance as in Plato or in Schopenhauer. The
perfect aspect of Schopenhauer's Ideas belong to their immanent milieu, not to
them in some peculiar and contrary-to-fact state of separation. For us this is an
important point, since the perfect aspectual quality which is so conspicuous
with Platonic Forms and Schopenhauer's Ideas is precisely what does not
belong to positive transcendence, although these things are otherwise
ontologically similar.

Schopenhauer's Ideas are principally matters of aesthetic theory: they are

beautiful and make empirical things beautiful. Schopenhauer's notion of
morality is divorced from this and is far less formal and systematic, though it
must be viewed with a thought to its ultimate relation to all value, which
would include it with the Ideas. Hume's view on morality rather than Kant's is
paradigmatic for Schopenhauer [136]. The Humean "sentiment" of morality,
however, Schopenhauer views as arising from a specific condition:
the sympathy for others that stays our will to inflict harm is due to
a recognition of our underlying metaphysical identity [137]. There is
consequently a covert formal aspect to Schopenhauer's view, which just as
Kant's rational universality, operates to overcome which Nelson called "the
numerical differentiation of person" [138]. Thus, Schopenhauer sees the
differences between persons metaphysically erased in the underlying Will, just
as Kant in universalizing his maxims moved everything from the individual
case to the general law. Schopenhauer does not think of morality in terms of
imperatives or formal rules; but his meaning of moral sympathy obtains its
sense from an ontological principle which could easily be made into a
criterion. In the full articulation of value below, the form of intentionality will
be used in a similar spirit to differentiate categories of value.

As a theory of positive transcendence, Schopenhauer's theory of Ideas puts too

much into a view of them as distinguishable from empirical objects.
Collapsing objectivity back together leaves one wondering what it is in
empirical objects that gives one some intimation of the transcendent and a
basis for separating out some such things as Plato's or Schopenhauer's Ideas.
Here the beautiful is distinguished in empirical objects because, in a sense, as
we shall consider, it becomes an object of fascination or desire for the will.
The quality of value in an object is not a factual attribute because it exists only
in relation to the will and consequently is liable to be characterized as
following entirely from a subjective and possibly idiosyncratic projection.
Schopenhauer would be less than happy to see beauty as an object of desire --
since that presumably would set one on the treadmill of futile striving -- but
the notion of an object of fascination is altogether appropriate even for him.

§3 Jung

Fascination is a quality of the projected Jungian Archetype [139]. Jung's

Archetypes need differ in no metaphysical detail from Schopenhauer's Ideas
(hence the equivalently Platonic terminology) except for the ambiguity that
follows from Jung's desire to withhold metaphysical commitments: so that his
views might be seen to hold either in terms of materialism or on the basis of
the more sophisticated Kantian approach of Schopenhauer [140]. On the basis
of materialism, however, the Archetypes could only be subjective projections
of specifically human evolved forms. Jung seems to have wished to provide
for that possibility because of a belief that respectable science would expect
materialism [141] -- and since the ontological term in the theory was not
practically essential to it anyway, there was not much point in making matters
more difficult than necessary. Jung's private beliefs, on the other hand, were
principally derived from Kant and Schopenhauer, and consequently there is
always in his thought the background notion of underlying identity between
subject and object [142].

There is much in the Archetypes, however, that would seem to be peculiarly

human: the forms of anima, animus, mother, father, Hero, etc. [143] belong to
human life as they might not to other kinds of creatures. This aspect of the
Archetypes might be said to form a sort of layer over Schopenhauer's more
general scheme, and the effect of this in some ways is very contrary to
Schopenhauer's views: for instance that the attraction and fascination of
woman for man, and vice versa, is due to the presence or projection of an
Archetype [144]. To Schopenhauer there seem to have been few more
horrifying aspects to human life than that woman should attract or fascinate
man. Schopenhauer, in his bizarre misogyny and world-denying rejection of
the forces of life, did not even consider the female form to be beautiful [145]:
sexual attraction he seems to have set aside as a matter of some dark working
of the Will, which strangely is not represented in the beautiful "immediate
objectivity" of the Ideas. The force of logical consistency is therefore on the
side of Jung, whose theory is able to enter more fully into the explanation of
human actions.

For the theory presented here, the peculiarly human content of Jung's
Archetypes, male and female, etc., is of secondary interest. The philosophic
generality of Schopenhauer's theory as an account of value is the kind of thing
we are looking for. Apart from the specifics of human Archetypes, however,
we can still see Schopenhauer's general theory as importantly modified by
Jung. This is what makes Jung's theory philosophically, as well as
psychoanalytically, important. The fascination of the projected Archetypes
brings them into relation to human action -- value as the occasion of will,
whereas Schopenhauer's aesthetic Ideas are artificially and arbitrarily made to
stand aside from the Will. Of equal importance is the fact that the ugly is often
as fascinating as the beautiful and may be just as much an occasion of will. It
would be a just criticism of Schopenhauer to say that in all consistency his
Ideas should reflect the dualism of good and evil just as much as to the events
of the world, particularly when he holds the Will to be somehow essentially
evil and the Ideas no more than an objectification of that underlying reality.

The question of evil goes beyond the simple theory of value and will be found
in detail in the third section of the theory of positive transcendence. It is at that
stage that Jung can come into his own in this treatment. The struggle of good
with evil is literally and profoundly an Archetypal struggle, a terror of both
soul and history as cosmically general as when it first dawned on Zoroaster, a
"problem of evil" that Jung in a most important, and certainly less neurotic,
sense came to better grips with than did Schopenhauer. Jung is therefore not
just important for us out of a perceptive criticism of Schopenhauer or out of a
rendering of his system more consistent; he is important because he has
adopted aspects of Schopenhauer's system for the same reason that this essay
has: it represents a good perception of reality which, with modifications, can
be made better. As Schopenhauer erred in making the Will wholly evil, and
the Ideas wholly beautiful, Jung undoes the artificial separation and displays
the conflict as it is: a self-consuming tension within positive transcendence,
which is at once within the unconscious also, a general, and essential, duality
of value. The problem of evil is not just another hopeless theological puzzle, it
is a practical and awful historical and psychological reality, kicking around in
philosophy since its Presocratic inception.

§4 The Friesian Tradition in Otto

As Jung reached out for terms to properly describe his Archetypes, he easily
picked up a very suitable one coined by Rudolf Otto -- "numinous." Here the
importance of that goes far beyond the actual use Jung made of the complete
theory of the numinous, for the complete theory is actually just the Friesian
epistemology that I have spoken of from the beginning. This is the last
historical layer in the theory positive transcendence, and with its assimilation
and reinterpretation, positive transcendence may be set out as a new and
independent inference.

At this point it is worth remarking how completely the vague Platonic

epistemology of the Forms has been changed. Since the transcendent is not a
separate world or order of objects, it is not known in any kind of separate
intuition. With more of an "immanentized" Aristotelian Form, the distinction
between immanent and transcendent comes down to that between fact, which
is purely theoretical, and value, which, as we shall see, engages the will and so
our own internal potential for change. Kant's notion of Dialectical reason,
which only in a very indirect way reveals the transcendent, is discarded
because it is really based on, and is our miserable substitute for, the
"intellectual intuition" that we do not possess. The character of things which
here I take to bespeak the transcendent finds its antecedent in the Friesian
doctrine of Ahndung or "intimation," which is the precise theoretical vehicle
for Otto's numinosity [146].

Fries accepted the terms of Kant's system so far as to say that empirical
knowledge, for which we possess intuitions, is to be contrasted with the
"faith" (Glaube) of reason [147], which represents a negative and abstract
cognitive relation to things in themselves, similar to Kant's notion of the
transcendent application of pure thought, severely limited by our not
possessing a corresponding intuition. Going beyond Kant, however, Fries held
that there is no reason to doubt the knowledge represented by Glaube (it is
non-intuitively immediate) and that we also possess non-cognitive feelings,
the basis of religion, which refer to the transcendent [148]. Thus the Friesian
theory has an interesting symmetry: with respect to the immanent, feeling and
concept are united in empirical knowledge and understanding, while with
respect to the transcendent, feeling (Ahndung) and concept (Glaube) both
exist but are separate, i.e. we do not and cannot know how to combine them
into the same kind of knowledge of the transcendent that we have of the
immanent. What is retained from Kant in this is the notion of things in
themselves as a separate order of objects which could be adequately known,
uniting Ahndung and Glaube, through an ideal, intellectual intuition. In the
context of the theory here, this is of course unacceptable as it stands.

Otto certainly represents the most interesting, and indeed, popular, use to
which the Friesian epistemology of Ahndung was ever put. He was an
associate of Nelson in the revived "Fries'sche Schule" of the early days of this
century, but his notions were regarded by Nelson as too mystical [149]. The
"numinous" is, however, in straightforward Friesian terms an "intimation' of
the "holy," the terrifying, powerful, divine presence [150]. This may easily be
taken as no more than a phenomenological description of what is actually
present in religions; and, for from any kind of creative mysticism, draws its
examples directly from common, if overlooked and philosophically
unappreciated, religious texts and sentiments.

The constant and characteristic use by Jung of the term "numinous" with
respect to the Archetypes [151] is in a weaker sense than Otto. The
numinosity of the Jungian Archetype is broader and emotionally much weaker
than the strictly "holy" object of Otto:" the anima Archetype of the inner,
feminine soul of the male may be dreamed or religiously experienced in a
terrifying, fully divine and numinous aspect, but in its common projection
onto actual women, the aspect of compelling fascination is certainly the
salient characteristic, while the terrifying or overpowering aspect of
the numen is very lessened or, normally, eliminated [152]. Here for the
moment we are less interested in the dream and religious aspect, as well as in
the psychological sense of "projection." The "intimation" of the transcendent
is to be characterized in general as that quality of an object, and secondarily of
an image or concept, which manifests the power to preoccupy the will, either
weakly and passively (though taking this as a "weak" sense is really
prejudiced and wrong) as an eye-catching fascination or so as to occasion
actions (a "strong" sense to us busy and driven moderns).

Unlike Jung, we do not need to worry here about assimilating any of this
theory to a paradigm of scientific respectability. The only final philosophic
requirement is that the theory be adequate to the phenomena, meaning moral
life, aesthetic insight, religious experience, and the great perplexity, fears, and
longings that we all must feel about human life in our most open, vulnerable,
honest, and questioning moments. Whether there are satisfactory answers to
be found or not, the theory must maintain its focus and perspective -- its
relevance -- to the meaningful subject of life. As a historical dialectic for the
theory presented here, all the philosophers I have mentioned grasp some
important and fruitful principle for a complete and non-reductionistic
approach. One fundamental thing they all share, which I take to be the great
lesson of philosophy in the Kantian tradition, is the final abolition of the
Platonic reasons for the separation of the objects which embody value from
the objects that we perceive in the phenomenal world while at the same time
retaining the Platonic insight and forwarding the Platonic program by using
new distinctions to establish a different form of ontological dualism.
§5 Purpose

Here, in what counts as the essence of the theory of positive transcendence,

we are concerned with two things: 1) how value is known; and 2) what sort of
objective reality value has. In the former respect there are the nature of the
non-intuitive cognitive ground of value and the mode of necessity of that
ground. These are issues familiar from the theory of immanence. In the latter
respect there is the manner in which that cognitive ground enters into
empirical object and experience. We have approached closest to this in the
theory of negative transcendence. Once the framework of the theory is
delineated in this section, the following section will deal with the fundamental
articulation of value, where the basic ontological differentiation of value and
identification of the corresponding modes of necessity is carried out. That will
not consist of any kind of exhaustive list of value or virtues, merely the most
general ground and categories which will each embrace very broad realms of
discourse.

My approach, again, to the question of knowledge of value is at root Socratic

and Platonic. Opinions solicited from conscious understanding concerning
value are liable to very to wide and startling extremes. The Socratic insight
and, beyond a certain point, faith are that all such opinions, if closely
examined, at length appear to be incoherent and then, at great length, begin to
resolve themselves into consistent principles which a subject may even deny,
yet to which nevertheless the subject has constant recourse. I do not attempt to
prove this thesis -- if indeed, as I strongly doubt, it can be proven, unless by
a reduction ad absurdum of alternative suggestions. Nelson is properly the
spokesman for the Socratic Method [153]. If the Socratic thesis is correct,
however, then obviously we are somehow dragging, unawares, a mass of non-
intuitive knowledge into experience. That this is in fact possible is now
abundantly clear, as I previously noted, from our common use of linguistic
rules the nature of which we are usually ignorant and about which we may
even hold absurdly erroneous opinions. That most such rules are actually
learned, as with many of the social mores that may otherwise be mistaken for
truth of ethics (and upon which Aristotle focuses in characterizing the
problem of ethics as inculcating worthy habits [154]), is also clear. Our
concern thus parallels Chomsky's belief that there is a universal and innate
grammar, the existence of which would vindicate the Rationalists' belief in
innate knowledge [155].

In directing the dialectical argument towards this juncture in an ontological

theory, I have so far been assuming a certain conclusion in value theory,
namely that the concept of purpose, as it will be described, will uniquely and
definitively illuminate the meaning of value. A connection has already been
supposed, also, between value and will such that purpose not only answer
questions for us about value but also about the problem of free will. What
value might have to do with purpose and will, independently of this theory,
however, is something that should be addressed. We cannot simply say, as
with pleasure and pain, that these are intuitively matters of value. We also
face the implicit challenge of G.E. Moore, who held that value could not be
defined and could not be identified with any factual attribute of objects [156].
Indeed, I do not intend to give any kind of analytic definition of value, much
less to identify it with any factual attribute of objects or with any pseudo-
factual attribute of supernatural objects (as in Plato). In the end we will not
wan to say that value is essentially purpose but that value, being what it is,
enters into our experience as purpose in one way, as pleasure and pain in
another, and perhaps in other ways as well.

With respect to the common definitions of value, that is the object of interest,
of desire, of emotion, of feeling, of love and hate, etc. we might hope to be
able to say what it is about value that inspires these various definitions yet is
somehow not adequately expressed by them. Clearly we can note that each of
them somehow involves us, postulating some sort of connection between
objects and us that is not purely cognitive. In a purely factual universe it is not
difficult to imagine ourselves as merely disembodied, even non-existent,
observers, to whom the existence of things has no meaning or bearing beyond
that. With objects of interest, desire, etc., on the other hand, we cannot
imagine ourselves quite so disinterested and apart. But again,
we can imagined ourselves apart and disinterested when we consider that
some things are reckoned to have value in themselves and on their own right
without reference to us; and so we do like to think that a universe without our
presence might still contain value. This consideration confuses the further
question of whether our connection with the value of objects results from
value in the objects, which appears and engages us, or whether the connection
simply means that we impose the value on the object by our own subjective
urge or decision. By the subjective approach, there could be no value in an
observerless universe, expect in so far as we, in imagining such things, in
effect become value attributing observers. At the same time, if the value is in
the object yet is not a factual attribute, we are bound to account for the
paradox of a thing possessing value and being able to convey knowledge of it
to our cognition without it doing so by means of any phenomenally or
empirically identifiable characteristic.

The notion of purpose embodies at once the sense of being an object and the
sense of being an object of will or of desire, interest, etc. Indeed, "purpose,"
"end," and "object" can all be used synonymously to represent an object
of intent, where the intended object is taken to exist (contingently) in the
future in so far as the will can anticipate bringing it about. This in itself does
not bespeak any necessary connection to value, but it does run close to it in
the same way as the previous notions of interest, etc. do. Nelson certainly sees
a connection:
Teleology deals with the purpose or value of things. Objective teleology is the
theory of the intrinsic value or purpose of things., i.e. the purpose or value
they have by virtue of their mere existence.... Subjective teleology deals with
value of things qua objects of our will. Obviously, ethics does not deal with
the purpose of the existence of things in general, but only with that which is
required of ourselves, of our will [157].

This "objective teleology" obviously embodies the paradoxical notion of an

end which is not an end out of any relation to a will, although that very same
paradox is found in the beliefs of Aristotle and others in the inherent teleology
of nature. What we can derive from such paradox, however, is just the notion
of an object in the future whereby this object exercises some influence on the
present in order to bring itself about. This could not be a causal influence,
especially when we consider that this future object does not even exist. The
influence can only be that this object is valuable: it is so inherently worthy of
being brought about that this worth acts on the present to do so. This just
seems to be piling paradox on paradox, however. Even traditional notions of
objective teleology either bring the subjective element back in, by making
objective ends the will of God, so that the future objects exist in the intention
of God, or they identify some inherent teleological intent in the present object.
The former move merely brings us back to the meaning of purpose with
respect to will, while the latter only reminds us of what we have been trying to
do -- find some non-factual quality in objects -- without actually doing so in
any way useful to us.

If we entertain the notion of objective teleology, what we must say about the
future object is indeed that it does not exist; but what we mean by that is that
the object does not exist factually the way objects in the past or present exist.
The future object does exist in a certain factual sense, however, when we
make true statements about the future whose truth is only contingent; and this
claim on reality we have already said is due to the ontological status of the
future as the imperfect aspect of existence. The imperfect, or potential,
factuality of future objects means that they do correspond to a facet of reality.
Now, if it is the value of future objects that brings about their existence,
teleologically, in the present, we can infer that value must be the positive
content of what previously we have only conceived as the negative
transcendence of the imperfect aspect and the similar, empty, concepts of
existence. If we deny that there is any teleological intent in the factual object
of the present, and if we deny that there is any teleological intent in the will of
God, and if we deny that future objects possess factual existence, then all that
seems to remain is that worth is the non-factual quality which, as the positive
content of the future, accounts for objective teleological change.
In considering this argument, we need have no reason to believe in objective
teleology. On the contrary, it is clearly no part of science, and from our
introspective point of view, it is no part of our considerations either. However,
the concept of objective teleology is now helpful in our "subjective teleology"
or the theory of real purpose as the object of will; and this should not be
surprising if we believe that any notion of "teleology" must be relevant to the
true means of purposive change that is present to us. We need help because
the notion of purposive intent is not enough: the same understanding can have
the same intention but act on it in one circumstance and not act on it in
another. The difference, indeed, is that the conscious intent must give way to
an act of will that realizes the object in existence. Conscious intent cannot
display the occasion of will -- the actual impetus of the deed. The occasion of
an act of will must, if it is to be free, not be a causal occasion and must, if it is
to be rational, not be something merely opaquely arbitrary. A free and rational
occasion of will is suitably to be called a purpose, but now this must mean,
not the theoretical conscious intent, but the content of positive transcendence
that is the teleological object we have just considered. Our neutral and
theoretical concept of purpose, which need have no relation to value, merely
reflects our non-dynamic theoretical representation of intended objects; but
this is representation just like all other conscious, conceptual representation.
The difference with purposive intent is that it presents an object of possible
will, which must draw in the ontology of will to a full and adequate
conception of purpose. The ontological object of will, then, is the intended
object in so far as it is a future object and possesses as such the special
character of a future object. That character is just the quality of worth or
value.

The way in which, thinking of Nietzsche or Existentialists, we imagine value

to be created ex nihilo out of the free will may be turned around so that it is
the values which create free will. This, in turn, is similar to Heidegger's
uncovering of Being, whereby new values are introduced. The Being doing
the uncoverings for us, however, is our own internal existence, the ego, and
while good or evil may be freely uncovered, the difference between the two is
not itself a matter for our decision. It is not a matter of our immediate
comprehension either; for the occasion of will, the ontological purpose, is a
non-intuitive immediate object. We expect that this will conform to our
conscious intent, but it does not always do so; and it is only after serious
reflection that we can often sort it out. As positive transcendence, this non-
intuitive value can be considered to belong either to the subject or the object.
thus we should be able to see why, as interest, etc., value sometimes seems to
depend entirely on the relation of a subject to objects of value and other times
seems to belong entirely to objects. And it is not enough to recognize an
occasion of will in every deed, it is also important to see one in every
deliberate inaction. Both activity and passivity can have their intended
objects; and while the object affecting the passive subject already exist, the
will has as the future object of its own passivity the effect that it intends to
produce by receiving the action of the other thing.

As positive transcendence is uncovered on the occasion of will, it is in the

fullest sense only an occasional presence. We do not have access to it merely
by thinking, without the datum of our own deeds, any more than we have
access to pleasure merely by thinking it. Thought is, indeed, an act of will,
albeit a subtle one, and greatly clouded by the opinion whose hollowness
often can only be adequately demonstrated by their failures in practice. This
occasional presence we may take as typical of positive transcendence, whether
it be as sensation which provides the plenum to the emptiness of space, the
intuitive value of pleasure and pain, or the non-intuitive value of purpose.
What produces the occasion of purpose is different from the other two, for it is
indeed we who do it by our own free will: and so we are for ourselves thus
hidden to our own casual thought. The proof is in the deed, just as in the
theory of understanding with which I began this essay the proof is in the
linguistic act.

Nothing so fills us with the presence of our own existence, apart from great
pain or pleasure, as strenuous activity: those two conditions tell us much about
positive transcendence -- on the one hand that we suffer as an object, whether
in pleasure or pain, and so come into possession of our Being, or on the other
hand that we act as an object to change external objects by our agency. In
each respect we belong to the theater of external objects and are bound by the
laws of physical necessity, but also in each case we are a focus of reality in
the self that stands apart from spatiotemporal objects.

The occasion of will is a felt impetus of action. Purpose as a content of

thought is no more than an epiphenomenon of that impetus. As such an
impetus, purpose is hidden and mysterious. Much of Schopenhauer's appeal
for his thesis of the will as the thing in itself is based on the impenetrability
and irreducibility of the moment of action [158]. Kant's formal definition of
will, as that whereby we effect changes in external existence [159], is a pale
placeholder indeed beside our own subjective experience of even the simplest
action. Nothing says so much that we are in possession of ourselves than that
we are able to dispose of the small realm and vulnerable fabric of external
existence that is around us. What is doing the disposing is not the Cartesian
soul, a place of light, pure, clear, and open; instead, that Cartesian
consciousness is very much more like Schopenhauer's little rowboat (the
"principium individuationis") tossing about on a raging sea. Where
Schopenhauer has the raging and fearsome universal Will, however, in whose
hands consciousness represents only a pathetic charade and self-deception of
self-control, we must take the individuality of existence and the
particularization of the will a little more seriously -- we cannot take, as
Schopenhauer does, space to represent an imposed form which creates only an
illusion of multiplicity.

What is to be well taken in Schopenhauer's theory is this: that consciousness is

only an aspect, and often a feeble one, of the self that disposes of action. We
have prepared for this with the theory of the preconscious content of states of
instantaneous understanding. That becomes important now because the
occasion of will is similarly obscured. That is not to say that consciousness is
alien or opposed to the preconscious self, as though my conscious self were
controlled by some other self. There is only one self, and consciousness is
merely an appearance or a sort of distillation of it. The best way to think of the
matter is to follow Schopenhauer's undeveloped sense of the Will, or of the
unconscious, as the Upanishadic Knower, the unknown Subject of knowledge.
That is a paradoxical and most un-Cartesian formulation, but strictly true.
Consciousness is the content of the Known; it is projected out of the Knower
by the form of intentionality, whose presence leaves the Knower forever
empty to theoretical cognition. But each of us is a knower -- our own internal
transcendence -- and we are each aware of our existence and our activities,
cognitive and otherwise. So while an appealing metaphor for the unconscious
is darkness, it is more correct to compare its emptiness, as in the theory of
negative transcendence, to lighted transparency. The transcendent content of
our purposes belongs to us as a content of the Knower, but involves rather
more than can be accounted for in terms of theoretical consciousness alone.

Non-intuitive purpose finds a place in the theory of time from the theory of
negative transcendence. Where before the occasion of causal change was
found in the intuitive material of perfect aspect, now the occasion of
purposive change is found in the non-intuitive content of the imperfect aspect,
namely our own internal existence, our own domain of potential. This makes
for a pleasing theoretical symmetry between cause and purpose, where the
ground of one is in the perfect and the other the imperfect. Those may be
simplified into past and future, although strictly speaking each exists only as
an aspect dependent on the present. Just as purpose as a teleological "cause" is
effective only because of its presence in the imperfect aspect, so is no remote
cause of the past effective unless its own consequences are present in the
perfect aspect and qualify as causal occasions themselves. We thus
do not admit a teleology in nature but do admit it in Being, of which nature is
of course, as external negative transcendence, an aspect.

While we may say that purpose, as introducing a change into existence, arises
out of internal transcendence, purpose as positive transcendence, like
sensation, does not belong exclusively either to internal or external
transcendence. In this way the value introduced by purposes, and their
cognitive grounds, although at first especially associated with will, belong as
much to external transcendence as to internal, although in a particular way.
Thus, where I have said that the plenum of sensation belongs to space, but not
in any way that is important or even recognizable by science, in the same way
do we find an apparent external presence of purposive value. Beauty is the
prime example of this external presence. It is also noteworthy that in this
positive transcendence seems to contribute both the perfect and factual quality
that belongs to sensation in its immanent and phenomenal context and the
imperfect and evaluable quality that belongs to purposive value in its external
presence. These contrasting perspectives and aspect of reality blend into the
same objects and experiences. Indeed, the quality of fixity that Plato and
Schopenhauer mistakenly associated with their versions of positive
transcendence as belonging to something separate from phenomenal objects
actually only belongs to purposive value when it is instantiated in those very
phenomenal objects.

While it is an act of will that so far has been most conspicuous to us, a
stillness of the will is just a significant. When our attention is fixed on
something, when we deliberately dispose ourselves to be acted upon by some
impression or some thing, these are also cases of purpose -- a passive rather
than an active purpose. Just what the fascinating aspect of numinosity means
is its preoccupying and even riveting power; but this belongs to value far
beyond numinosity alone. Where value belongs more to the object as such, as
with beauty, our typical attitude towards it is a passive contemplation. Such a
disposition to appreciate something independently valuable then can shade
into a disposition to be passively acted upon by a cause productive of
pleasure. The independently valuable object is ontologically significant, and it
is of interest for us that Schopenhauer's theory of the beauty of Ideas was
directly linked to the ability of beauty to quiet the Will [160]. Since
Schopenhauer tended to see that futility and evil of will in its restless activity,
he also regards its intentional passivity as its negation or annihilation. We
need not be so unfair to the will, or to the value of deliberate passivity.

The theory of the purposive occasion of will here is easily conformable to

Jung's notion of the "transcendent function," or the process by which
unconscious contents are given and assimilated into conscious life [161].
Jung, however, was mainly viewing the relationship as a theoretical and
passive one, that unconscious contents are manifest in dreams, spontaneous
fantasies, myths, etc., and of course the contents he was concerned with were
Archetypal in the less general sense that suited his purpose. With Jung's help
we may extend our perspective on the occasion of will. There seem to be three
spontaneous expressions of the "transcendent function" that we may note by
combining Jung's theory with that presented here: 1) the simple acts of
conscious will, whether trivial activities of daily life or the most heroic needs;
and these are paradigmatic for the notion of the purposive occasion of will; 2)
the mysterious moments of conscious creativity, whether physically or
mentally manifest, when the right "idea" occurs out of the blue to solve the
problem at hand or the new aesthetic impulse occurs to set the cultural fashion
for months, years, decades, or centuries (this may be taken as a case
combining an objective, external value with an activity of the will whereby
the external thing is actually produced); and 3) the true Jungian dispensation
of the Unconscious, which is unbidden, unexpected, and often unwanted. That
is the condition, of greatest psychiatric interest, where the unconscious self
seems to be an agent independent of the conscious self; and the more active
and independent that unconscious self becomes, obviously the more the
conscious self slips into mental disorder and then psychosis.

In looking for a theory of freedom the third alternative is not much help; but it
is equally evident, as in the second case, that there are gray areas between the
trivial arbitrary freedom of daily choices, between this for lunch or that for
lunch, and the curious moments of inspired creativity and, indeed, inspired
understanding. Substantive freedom is not trivial arbitrary choices: it is
possession of the "means of production" of genuine imaginative alternatives.
The Jungian orientation is helpful and illuminating because of its sense that
mental health implies a wholeness of self and a close relationship between the
conscious ego and the unconscious means of creative production. On the other
hand, the unconscious may be driven into opposition to the theoretical
consciousness, in which case it becomes a separate and increasingly coherent
and disruptive force.

And so to summarize, there have now been three levels of positive

transcendence distinguished: 1) that of sensation alone, 2) that of the intuitive
value of pleasure and pain, and 3) that of the non-intuitive value of the
purposive occasion of will. Sensation as such is no part of the theory of value
because it is simply abstracted from a theoretical context. In that context
sensation is even the material of the perfect aspect, the polar opposite of the
imperfect meaning of positive transcendence. Pleasure and pain are genuinely
matters of value, and in the symmetry of the theory they even possess a
certain exclusivity and pride of place. They are very limited in that
exclusivity, however, for they are opaque causal products, subject to the
workings of nature rather than to rational purpose. It is a prime concern of
purposive value, however, to protect us from pain and to insure that our
worthy pleasures do not mask harmful causes. Where pleasure and pain can be
ontologically characterized as the positive transcendence of a fragment of
external existence corresponding to an individual internal transcendence,
purposive value can be construed in the opposite sense: it is an internal
transcendence, the source of potential of an individual will, which corresponds
to a fragment of external transcendence. The fragments of external
transcendence are different from these opposite perspectives. For pleasure and
pain the significant external transcendence is the body, or as much of the body
as effectively communicates with the central nervous system and
consciousness. For purposive value the significant external transcendence is
that consisting of internal space, or the region of our perceptual experience. In
that purposive value thus belongs to objects of will in our perception, it comes
to be extended to external transcendence in general as we judge that valuable
objects pass out of our experience but continue to exist, while other objects of
interest to us, while never part of any actual experience, are at least part of
a possible experience. This sort of complex symmetry between intuitive and
non-intuitive value is also the sort of thing we will now find within purposive
value itself

§6 The Varieties of Purposive Value

The remaining task for the theory of purposive value is to distinguish the
structure of purposive value in so far as it can be made out on the basis of the
ontological criteria that have been employed right along, namely the
distinction between internal and external transcendence, etc. This articulation
is of course not exhaustive by any reckoning in comparison to the distinctions
that are commonly employed and multiplied in ethics. For our purposive here,
however, the articulation should be exhaustive in so far as it distinguishes
separate object language systems of value whose uniqueness is the force, the
obligation, and the universality of the type of value they represent. This
uniqueness will be signified by the specific mode of necessity that will be
associated with each ontological ground.

Of the ontological distinctions, the newly important one at this stage is that
between the internal transcendence of the ego and that of distinct individuals
who may be affected by the ego's actions. A real plurality of consciousness
has been admitted all along in the theory, but only now does the relation
between distinct consciousnesses become a special area of theory.
Furthermore, where before in the distinction between internal and external
transcendence we were indifferent (except in relation to pleasure and pain)
whether a specific fragment of external existence did or did not correspond to
an internal existence, now it becomes of essential interest whether an object
merely possess external existence or if, through conscious life, both internal
and external.

The very idea of "modes of necessity" is derived from ethics in the sense that
Kant and others have used the name of the grammatical "imperative" mood to
characterize and distinguish the pronouncements of ethics expressing
obligation and duty from the common indicatives of ordinary language that
merely express matters of fact. The Kantian imperative is a mode
of necessity just because it is supposed to be a synthetic a priori truth. Kant's
association of necessity with an "imperative" is also evident in his
characterization of scientific laws as hypothetical imperatives. Here, however,
we have already disallowed that moral imperatives can be necessary in just the
same way that Kant imagined. The "mode of necessity" has come to mean
something very much more specific, and we have already examined and
named four modes of necessity, including the "conditioned" necessity of
scientific laws. Even the common indicatives of daily life have fallen
themselves under a mode of necessity, the perfect, which we say is
responsible for the fixity and unalterability, in the perfect aspect, of factual
states of affairs.

The Kantian imperative as necessity means a number of different things. First

of all as knowledge, it is necessary in the Platonic sense of being eternal and
unchanging, with an ontological ground sufficient to this status. Having
deprived Kant of his own ground in unconditioned reason, we have now
provided a new one in the purposive occasion of will in positive
transcendence. As a ground of necessity this falls under the mode of
contingency last considered, the unconditioned (thus preserving part of the
sense of Kant's ground). In addition to a bare logical sense, however, we also
have some notion of necessity representing a certain immovable restraint: and
so what physical necessity tends to mean to us is the way in which the forces
of nature actually prevent us from doing things that are physical impossible;
what perfect necessity means is the way in which time snatches away the
present to where we can no longer touch and alter what has come to be;
what a priore necessity means is the way that we are bound and limited by the
unity and identity of our own consciousness; and what analytic necessity
means is, really, the meaninglessness that results from self-contradiction. Our
sense of the restraint imposed by imperative necessity is very different. First
of all it has no effect whatsoever in external existence but concerns only the
internal, i.e. the will. And there, although its effect is to restrain the will, the
will can all the same violate that restraint. That is a unique dimension to
value; for while the duality of truth and falsehood is possible in all
representation, where mediate propositions may or may not correspond to an
immediate ground, in value a conflict is possible in the ground itself, creating
a duality whereby an evil occasion of will means the manifestation of a value
in violation of true worth. It is the essence of the imperative that
the obligation it expresses is a free restraint, which may or may not be
effective. All occasion of will is still an expression of value, however, and so
we come to speak of negative values, which are violations of a necessity that,
if it were a necessity of nature instead, could not possibly be violated. The
force and restraint of the imperative mode is what we already understand by
the moral sense of "ought." We ought to do the good, but we are free to do
evil. With sufficiently mature understanding, however, we are able, having
done evil, to recognize it as such.

It would simplify matters at this point to say that all propositions expressing
value are grounded in imperative necessity and be done with it. The matter
does not seem so simple however; for although it will remain perfectly true
that all value is grounded in positive transcendence, the notion of an
"imperative" does not seem appropriate to describe all of it. That Kant should
have focused on a very formal conception of duty is disturbing to many; and,
in compensation for this, we find that Nelson has supplemented a Kantian-like
theory of moral duties with a positive theory of ethical ideals [162]. Since
such ideals are not morally obligatory, but supererogatory, it is not appropriate
to call them "imperatives"; and instead Nelson borrows the name of another
grammatical mood (as used in Greek), the "optative." Under categorical
optatives, Nelson also subsumed aesthetic value, [163] which even Kant had
so far recognized as being distinct from ethics as to radically separate, in his
theory of aesthetic "judgment," from his own treatment of practical reason.
Indeed, aesthetic value seems to concern external existence in a way that we
were far from considering when only imperative value and morality were in
question. Nelson's "optative" is thus an important step; and if we recognize
that optative propositions must belong to a very different object language
from imperative propositions, then we must also recognize that some
distinction must be made in positive transcendence to signify the difference in
the grounds that is reflected in the differences in the languages. And if there is
more than one mode of necessity in positive transcendence, then we must also
reckon that there are continuing modes of contingency in positive
transcendence also, which will mean for us that not all acts of will are going to
instantiate an instance of value. Thus it is not the case, as we something get
the feeling from Kant, that everything we do must be done with a
consciousness of duty, or that everything we do must be reckoned to
contribute to the highest good or anything of the sort.

The first principle for distinguishing between the object languages of value is
the difference in the force of the obligation felt by us, if any, and the nature of
the disposition or restriction of the will, if any. For instance, in addition to
Nelson's distinction between moral duties and ethical ideals, the latter
expressing no true obligation at all, we can already say that a further
distinction appears warranted between ethical ideals and pure aesthetic
judgments, where the latter attribute value to object in a way totally separate
from any relation they might have to will. There is a disposition of the will in
these cases, however, and it is the passive, disinterested fascination we may
have with aesthetic objects. Such considerations will warrant a
reëstablishment of the sort of division that Kant had drawn between moral
obligation and aesthetic judgment. The second principle we will use in
distinguishing between object languages involves the possible distinctions that
we can make in positive transcendence. We can make a variety of distinctions
by considering the presence or absence of internal or external existences in so
far as these appear to bear on the meaning of the object languages that we are
able to recognize. The major division that must be made in this respect is
between an object language grounded on some relationship between
existences across positive transcendence and an object language rounded on
positive transcendence as such, in the total absence of internal and external
transcendence. Object languages in the former sense may be said to
express relative transcendence, and an object language in the
latter absolute transcendence. Absolute transcendence will be considered
separately in the final part of the theory of positive transcendence. Now we
will proceed to the categories of relative transcendence.

§7 Love and Hate

Besides the distinctions just mentioned, between moral obligation, ethical

ideals, and aesthetic judgment, I will now introduce one further distinction
within moral obligation to give us a narrower category of "imperative"
necessity as our first mode of value. The concern in this area of value is the
inner disposition of the will and so our own existential readiness to affirm
value in attitude and deed. This is what Kant called the "good will." The moral
distinction is the one that he himself emphasized, [164] that the moral worth
of actions depends entirely on the purity of the intention. I take this to be
sufficiently important and sufficiently clear cut in meaning to warrant status
as a separate category of value, in contrast to the moral rules, etc., that
concern the content of actual deeds.

The good will, as a source of change in the world, intends to act according to
the positive content of value, even as ill will intends the negative. The good
will as a purposive value, however, is not an emotion of good will, although it
may give rise to emotions in varying degrees. It may also give rise to
understanding in varying degrees. Good will may even be said to correspond
more to a choice than to a feeling in the sense that Zoroastrianism interpreted
the fundamental orientation of every person in the world as a choice between
good and evil [165]. Such a choice then determined one's acts in the world and
one's fate in the hereafter. In a less apocalyptic sense, Kant saw that while
confusion of deeds can impeach the intelligence, wisdom, or sanity of acts of
good faith and good will, the good intent alone reflects whether deeds
are morally praise- or blameworthy. Someone can be blamed for being a fool
but neither blamed nor punished for meaning well. It is also true, however,
that in the self-deception of evil someone can think they mean well but
actually proceed with ill will.

In considering the Biblical injunction "love thy neighbor," Kant notes that an
emotion cannot be commanded. Such "pathological" love [166] Kant contrasts
with a sense of love as a moral disposition which can be commanded. This is
also relevant to the sense of good will here: love and hate may be considered
attitudes of will towards the world and others which color the manner in
which will is then exercised. Confucian ethics also looks to an inner readiness
as the origin of morality: rén, which is variously translated as "human
heartedness," "benevolence," "charity," "humanity," "love," or "the inner love
for man which prompts to just deeds" [167]. We may take all those meanings
to be distinct, but what is common is Kant's sense of good will and non-
pathological love. This act of choice or disposition of the will, however, is to
us a certain order of non-intuitive immediate knowledge of value, present to
us as an occasion of positive transcendence. Indeed, this is an occasion of
will in the purest form; for it concerns the will alone, without reference to any
particular end or act.

The primacy of good will and Kantian-Confucian love will be reflected in our
use of the term "imperative" to characterize the necessity of the cognitive
ground of this mode of value. As it solely concerns internal transcendence,
this stands in pure contrast to the conditioned necessity exclusive to external
transcendence. As the first mode of unconditioned necessity this is in full, of
course, imperative unconditioned imperfect a posteriore synthetic necessity.
The corresponding mode of contingency will be called the "purposive" to
emphasize that what is contingent in comparison to imperative necessity is
any actual content or object of actual deeds. This sense of "purposive"
therefore concerns the intended end or means of an act, while the imperative
requirement of good will is concerned only with the moral intent, which is
either that of good will or ill will. The importance of this distinction should be
clearer when we realize that a theory of ethics is conceivable, and is
occasionally even encountered in practice, that the external acts and objects of
action are indifferent so long as the motive is pure. The saying, "to the pure,
all things are pure," perhaps reflects something of this, though no mature
moral judgment is going to hold that actions and ends are irrelevant and of no
ethical concern. Instead, we should recognize that there is a difference in
object languages here, and that in moving from the motive to the external
effects of will we are moving to different modes of necessity and cognition.

§8 Right and Wrong

When we take the pure relationship between two or more consciousnesses in

so far as their wills affect one another, without regard for the ends of willing,
then we are in the pure category of deontological value. We will not deny to
the good ends of will their value and ethical importance; however, in the
tradition of Kant and Nelson, I will say that the content of morality consists of
the values in this category, which are necessary conditions on all subsequent
values. A violation of these conditions invalidates the worth of any end of
willing. With respect to coming-to-be out of internal transcendence, the thrust
of this category of value is a limitation of the will so as to concede to others an
equal opportunity or a fair share of the same good ends. There are a variety of
considerations, distinctions, and viewpoints in this one category. I will not go
into them. From the point of view of the individual, the problem is just one of
doing right or doing wrong. From a general standpoint, we come to be
concerned about the rights of individuals, distributive justice, and then
retributive justice where we have a sense that the doing of wrong merits
punishment. Just how these things are differentiated in this mode of value
does not concern us here. We need merely recognize that what they have in
common is the pure relationship between individuals and how acts of will
should or should not affect each other. The good ends of willing are
presupposed and subordinate. In a Kantian sense, I do not see morality as
consisting of willing so as to produce the greatest good.

Kant and Nelson thought that the essential feature of morality could be
reduced to a rule, the moral law [168]. Since the conditions of moral worth are
simple and distinct, especially as a restrictive condition, this can be accepted
as generally correct, although it is not so important to try and find a single
exhaustive formulation that will be entirely adequate to the meaning of the
value. One of Kant's secondary formulations of the moral law is both
deservedly famous and very suggestive of the conditions of right and wrong.
This is Kant's rule, "Treat others always as ends also and never
as means only" [169]. So how do you treat someone as an "end"? The
straightforward answer to that is that you do not act in ways that may be
prejudicial to them or their interests without their consent. We are all the time
using other people for some ulterior good end, often ends that are totally
unrelated, or even adverse, to their own desires; but this is a morally
acceptable relationship so long as they help us by their own informed and self-
responsible agreement. The end is where use and means terminate, and we can
easily look upon the fulfillment of our desires as being cut off as soon as the
path to our ends crosses a field of interests properly belonging to another:
however, that person may then freely assume the pursuit of those ends in our
behalf or volunteer to us the use of their person or interests. Thus the principle
of morality and of justice dictates that the use to which the existence of a
person is put is the prerogative and responsibility of that person alone. The
only time we are justified in contravening the guiltless will of another is when
they are acting contrary to justice or to their own clear best interest due to
some manifest error of knowledge or to mental incapacity (from youth,
inexperience, or mental illness) -- and this, as a protection of an individual
from themselves, is not putting anyone to use for an extrinsic end.

Such is what we mean by the "dignity" of the individual, and it is an aspect of

moral value that is often lost in abstract generalizing formulations -- let alone
in principles of social utility and the like. This particular means and ends
formulation by Kant is especially relevant when we consider that ordinarily
we require the help of others in attaining our desires -- and that so much of life
is simply desiring the presence, companionship, and affection of others. Too
many of the daily wrongs of newspaper stories concern the violence and
tragedy of the love and hate of people for each other, without any necessary
reference to possession as inanimate goods. We ask others to do things for us,
to be with us, and to love us; and all our agency ends at the doorstep of their
will, where, if we are just, we await their choice.

The force of the obligation of moral value is only attenuated from the
imperative of good will by the complexities and uncertainties that are
involved in all its ramifications. For instance, I have already carelessly
coupled the interests of individuals with their existence; but it is a serious
question, upon which reasonable persons may disagree, to which extent the
protections of morality or justice do or should cover interests: personal
possessions, real property, employment, capital, social welfare, etc. In the
same way it is possible to make excellent arguments for authoritarian or
totalitarian governments on the principle that government, or history, is a
science that only the qualified few should be entrusted with. Since similar
argument began with Plato, they are hardly a startling or unfamiliar
innovation; and they can make a very fine show of morality on the principle I
have just stated, that ignorance or errors of judgment, in this case on the part
of the many, warrant their interests being directed by others. Such interesting
issues I cannot explore here; we need merely pick a term to suit the force of
necessity relevant to the values of right, fairness, and balance between
individual consciousnesses.

In Latin and Arabic it is possible to express an imperative through the use of

the subjunctive [erratum corrected] mood. Such an imperative is called a
"jussive," and it is only removed from the force of the imperative by being
more polite or indirect. This suits the case quite well. To be contrasted with
what is commanded or forbidden is what is merely permissible; and in
dividing off jussive necessity from the previous "purposive" contingency, the
remaining contingency may be called the "permissible." Again, in a procedure
that can be made a virtual criterion in such cases, we can easily imagine an
ethical system whose modes of necessity terminate at this point, leaving duty
and good will as the only criteria of ethical value. This not so vary far from
what we actually find in Kant. Kant does speak of "ends," [170] but such ends
seem to be constructed entirely on the basis of the principles and the
consciousness of duty -- giving Kant's thought a shadow of humorlessness,
Calvinism, and even Prussianism, despite the fact that all these are totally
contrary to Kant's own personality and private, informal beliefs.
§9 Good and Evil

In this category of purposive value we consider existence in general in so far

as its contents constitute good or evils in relation to internal transcendence.
This is a very broad field, what Nelson called the ethical theory of ideals. It is
the centerpiece and most characteristic part of the theory of purposive value:
for it deals with the proper value of the objects of our purposes and so of
purpose in its final sense of meaning the end or objective of action. In this
way a deed is broken down into three parts: 1) the intent as the motive,
regardless of what the act or the end may be; 2) the intention as what is to be
done, in so far as this affects other persons; and 3) the intention as the goal
and end of what is to be done. The value of each of these parts constitutes the
ground of a separate object language of value; but the value of each is also
a necessary condition of the value of the modes that follow, so that the worth
of the goal is compromised by ill will or wrong committed in its attainment,
and the value even of the fulfillment of duty is undermined by ill will as well.
At the same time the value of the ends of willings is comprehensive, and the
other categories of value can be taken to be ends themselves, subsumed under
the object language of this category. We desire good will and justice as goods
in their own right, and this does indeed make them goods as much as anything
else [171]. The field of goods covers things that are merely individual goods,
like the food that I personally require for life, and goods which essentially
refer to more than one person, whether the possessions that enable an
individual to provide for the well being of families or the public wealth or
institutions that provide for the general well being of a society. Thus, besides
the relation of internal and external transcendence involved essentially in this
category, a relation between different internal transcendences may also be
involved.

The force of the obligation in this category of value is now very different.
Indeed, "obligation," is no longer the correct term. So long as we avoid
inflicting evil on others, we really are under no obligation either to will good
ends or to avoid willing evil ends. This value is supererogatory, and because
of that Nelson called the propositions in this language "categorical optatives."
"Optative," however, merely signifies the expression of a wish, and this seems
too weak for the case. To do the good and see it done is a practical matter that
goes beyond our mere wishing. In Greek the subjunctive can be used to
express an exhortation much as the Latin subjunctive can be used (as the
jussive) to express a command. This is the "hortative" usage; and that term
will suit the meaning here quite well. Thus, among the actions that are
simply permissible in terms of morality, there are many that we would rather
prefer to see done, and others we would rather were not done, because they
are still, beyond the reckoning of morality, worthy or unworthy in a different
sense. There are gray areas, of course, between jussive and hortative: some
may see our relation to other persons as entailing a social obligation and a
contribution to the welfare of others, while an opposing viewpoint would be
that a life completely removed from society is perfectly acceptable so long as
the pursuit of the private goods of that life does not adversely affect other
individuals. The resolution of this dilemma is not important for us here -- just
that the alternatives exist.

Having selected out the permissible actions that are for good or evil ends,
what remains may be said to be matters of "private" contingency, in the sense
that no public object is any longer involved which is of the slightest interest as
an ethical good. Where we have considered the conceivability of previous
modes of contingency as terminating the object languages of ethics, this mode
of contingency in fact does so. The "private" is what is removed from the
theater and the considerations of what constitute the goods and evils of human
life.

§10 Beauty and Ugliness

An object may seem good and desirable even when it serves no apparent
function in our lives apart from simply existing. In other words, it is a good in
itself. This is a somewhat paradoxical category of value for us since the
relationship to will that has served as our dialectical path into value theory has
now fallen away. A good in itself possesses value independent of any purpose
that it may serve and independent of any will or internal transcendence that
may have some relationship with it. That is the sort of judgment we make.
However, there is a connection. This category is the closest we come to
Nelson's "objective teleology"; and Kant himself noted a sense of
"purposiveness" in aesthetic value that he took to be characteristic of it [172].
The good in itself is for us an occasion of will, but a passive rather than a
active. It is Schopenhauer's quieting of the will. In this passivity we appreciate
the independence of the object; and this appreciation can be called
"detachment" or "disinterest" even while, on top of this, we may be interested
in possessing or having access to these things. As an end the good in itself is
an end in itself, and the use of both "good" and "end" in these senses signifies
the relation to all of purposive value with the added senses of completeness,
finality, wholeness, and inner integrity. The connection to the rest of
purposive value, indeed, is that it all may be subsumed under this category
just as all moral value may be subsumed under hortative value. Thus all
ethical goodness may be said to be one case of beauty, while beauty may
extend beyond goodness.

The quality of intrinsic value is especially conspicuous in things that are either
beautiful or ugly. The inner integrity that makes for a good in itself, however,
is not necessarily that of beauty or ugliness, though it may be convenient for
us to think of it that way. Similarly, this category may be called that
of aesthetic value, as that of right and wrong is of moral value. In the use of
"aesthetic," however, the emphasis should be more on the etymological sense
of perception than on the more recent sense of artistic value, although that will
of course be a subcase. In perception we are given the ontological
independence of an object, its external transcendence, just as in the beauty of
an object we have its independent value and a sense of positive transcendence
that is intrinsic to existence even when it passes beyond any actual relation to
a will. This category of value thus represents an ontological finality as we pass
over to the world of public objects. Where before in positive transcendence
sensation as the plenum of Being was only an abstraction, now we can say
that the concrete presence of positive transcendence in objects is their beauty
or ugliness. Our selves and our lives are also to be subsumed under that value,
so that as we strive to do right and realize the good, we are creating a whole
that is a good in itself and an expression in beauty of positive transcendence.

The quality of necessity in aesthetic judgments has become weak indeed,

belonging even to things that are far beyond any possibility of our affecting.
Here Nelson's term "optative" finds the most suitable usage; for we wish
indeed to find beauty and goodness realized in many things that we haven't a
hope of being able to effect ourselves. The remaining mode of contingency
may be called the "arbitrary" in the sense that there is no basis in fact or value
to prefer one such thing over another. This arbitrariness does not exactly
terminate value, since we are still due to consider numinous value; but, as we
will see, the cognitive content of numinous propositions is in fact arbitrary.
Cognitive definiteness is limited to phenomenal reality and so belongs to
value only in so far as its transcendence is relative, i.e. in relation to our
immanence.

§11 Happiness and Unhappiness

For the sake of completeness, and as retrospective on purposive value, it is

fitting that we should consider happiness and unhappiness as, Greek-like, the
culmination of ethical and value theory. Happiness and unhappiness may be
said to hold intermediate positions between pleasure and objective value. As
feelings they are not aspects of the occasion of willing as is purposive value
and at the same time they are similar to pleasure and pain, causally dependent
on external conditions. On the other hand, those conditions may be very
general and have no immediate or direct physical effect on the individual.
Happiness consists in great measure of recognition that those conditions exist
and, most importantly, that those conditions, and the manner in which we
participate in them through the ordinary activities of our lives, are what
constitute a good and beautiful life.
A good life is something we might expect to provide healthy pleasures, which
makes pleasure an essential part of happiness but not the determining
consideration. Happiness anticipates pleasure because we expect, whatever the
counterexamples, that good conditions of life are conducive to pleasure.
Naturally there is some circularity there, since feedback on what is pleasurable
and what is not goes into considering what is good in life and what is not.
Happiness, however, subordinates many considerations into a larger picture of
life: what, apart from the moment, we are supposed to be getting out of life --
the aesthetic, moral or interpersonal, religious, pleasurable experiences, and so
forth. Happiness is a whole, an ontological completeness of life, and so
represents a combination of intuitive and non-intuitive value and all the
individual categories of value. When the whole is present, even some
adversity, pain, and evil may only strengthen its sense.

Happiness holds a special space in the theory of the articulation of value, as

Aristotle gave it in his ethics [173]. Happiness stands as a general goal in life,
the final purpose of life as a good in itself, the subjective counterpart to the
condition of the good life having been recognized, achieved, and experienced.
All the other articulations of value therefore enter into it to make a whole of
completion and fulfillment. The conditions of life, unfortunately, do not
always cooperate with happiness. Like pleasure, happiness is dependent on
[erratum corrected] chance and causality -- a real aspect of happiness is thus
the aesthetic optative of wish and the occasion of luck. Solon, expressing the
heart of Greek pagan pessimism, is reputed to have said never to count a man
happy until after he was dead. Only then would he be free from vulnerability
to adverse fortune.

The uncertainty of our luck has given rise to centuries, now millennia, of
protest against it in the form of doctrines that seek to identify happiness as the
direct result of inner goodness and wisdom. Stoicism comes to mind most
readily in this connection; but it is sad and pathetic to see how little effective
consolation such a doctrine can offer someone such as Marcus Aurelius over
his own dead children. It is incredible to think that any healthy person could
face such personal disaster and really feel, not just detached "Stoical"
indifference, but positive well being out of continuing inner virtue. Stoicism
therefore gave way historically to a different approach: if happiness is not to
be attained immediately through inner virtue, then what goodness gains is the
promise of happiness in the hereafter. Such an approach, for which Plato
himself must share some responsibility, became part and parcel of all
traditional Western and Middle Eastern monotheistic religions, with
complications due to pseudo-moral doctrines of faith, sin, and salvation -- we
even find Kant making immortality a "postulate" of the moral law [174].

In the ordinary conditions of life all this time, however, people have always
hoped against hope for that cooperation of circumstances which will bring
some measure of happiness in this life. The constant failure of that
cooperation merely adds to our pain and protest against the inherent evils of
the world -- and the mystery of the random viciousness of events. As either
Solon or Homer or the Buddha would certainly tell us, the lot of mortal life is
misery and suffering, in the face of which hope is a cruel, if compelling, self-
deception. Our concern now will be the order of value that consoles, or
deceives, us about these hopes and protests.

PART THREE: UNCONDITIONED POSITIVE TRANSCENDENCE AS ABSOLUTE

TRANSCENDENCE

§1 Absolute Transcendence

The paradox of the principle of ontological undecidability was resolved by

positive transcendence only at the cost of a Being which is neither subject nor
object and where "everything is everywhere." This may seem to substitute a
paradox not unlike the original one, and our curiosity is natural if we wonder
whether anything meaningful can be said about absolute transcendence --
transcendence as it is in isolation, without any relation to any subject or object
or immanent reality as we have previously exclusively considered it. This is
what remains for us of the Kantian problem of the thing in itself as a limit on
what can be known about reality. Indeed, positive transcendence cannot be
known in separation from the intentionality that is at once the form of all
knowledge and the essence of immanent reality. On the other hand, absolute
transcendence does seem to have a more than theoretical interest for us; there
is a prima facie case for an object language of value being grounded in it; and
we do have available to us a non-cognitive theory in the Friesian tradition that
can help describe our relationship with it.

We can conceive of a phenomenological meaning for absolute transcendence

when we realize what an absence of internal and external transcendence
signifies: an absence of consciousness. This means no less than three very
specific things for us: 1) we know that at one time we did not exist as
individuals, and we probably remember something of the first dim
experiences of childhood that were the first flickerings of conscious
experience; 2) we undergo the daily experience of loss of consciousness in
sleep -- our virtual annihilation in deep sleep, the vague awareness of dreams,
and the curious rebirth of awakening; and 3) we anticipate the final
annihilation of death. In each of these we contemplate, or endure, a condition
where we as subjects do not exist and where the world as objects does not
exist for us. What is the most emotionally and existentially disturbing for us is
death. No one returns from death to tell us about it, as even the Egyptians used
to say, but this has not prevented all peoples at all times from having the very
strongest beliefs about it. Such beliefs are one of the most important aspects,
if not the most important aspect, of religion; and religion, indeed, is the object
language of value that we will consider to be grounded in positive
transcendence as such. Even so, religion is itself a thing of immanent reality,
and perhaps even most of the doctrines of religion, not excepting the
eschatological ones, concern immanent objects. It could hardly be otherwise.

Questions of religion and absolute transcendence will be treated under two

headings. First is a major problem of religions and for us, the problem of evil.
This continues the theory of purposive value by at last addressing the hitherto
presupposed polarity of value, although the discussion belong to absolute
transcendence because it may be taken to be a general characteristic of
positive transcendence (and so characteristic of it as such) and because its
meaning seems to be bound up with the meaning of our existence and non-
existence. Second is the topic of numinosity, which on the basis of the
Friesian doctrine of Ahndung we will take to be the special mode of value and
the quality of the non-cognitive ground of religious object languages. By way
of the concept of numinosity the traditional philosophic problems of religion
such as Kant's questions of God and immortality can be approached.

With these discussions the theory of value will be complete, for absolute
transcendence represents the original and the strongest sense of value, without
the complication of the various relationships that must be considered between
objects and persons in the four modes of purposive necessity. All value,
indeed, tends to numinosity, as numinosity represents the only adequate form
of answer to the ultimate questions of the real meaning and worth of
conscious existence. Numinosity represents the absolute and separate
existence of value; and in the absence of the polarizing field of intentionality,
all the modes of value and necessity may be imagined to fall together in a
unity with numinosity -- just as they were historically already a unity in the
earliest religions. As religions claim the force of the necessity of all value to
rest, not on their several independent grounds, but only and entirely on the
numinous ground of religious revelation, numinosity will thus be said to
constitute an additional and final category of necessity -- but as a pseudo-
necessity, since when we attribute to the other modes of value their proper
independence and separate them from the authority of any religious
revelation, nothing remains of the numinous necessity but an unanalyzable,
material nimbus with definite cognitive content.

§2 The Problem of Evil

For our approach to evil, I will adopt a certain simple hypothesis, perhaps
even an over-simple hypothesis, which I will then use to investigate the
ontological character of the polarity of value. This will be that the essence of
evil is death, together with all that bespeaks, contributes to, and attends death.
This is the Zoroastrian sense of evil [175] and so is due a certain respect if we
are to believe that Zoroaster initiated belief in the general conflict between
good and evil. By what bespeaks, contributes to, and attends death, we will
understand disease, decay, pain, violence, mutilation, disfigurement,
disability, and anything else that is itself a threat to life, a warning of a
possible threat to life, part of the phenomenology of threats of possible threats
to life, or the results of such threats, especially those which are actually
damage done to the organism and so impair the functioning of life as it
otherwise would have occurred.

Death to us means one thing, the permanent loss of consciousness. This is not
the same thing as biological death. The difference is that biological life is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for conscious life. Threats to
biological life are thus threats also to conscious life; and in fact a threat to
biological life may fail in destroying it but all the same result in an
impairment of the organism that destroys consciousness. From an external
perspective, our view of death and evil is determined by the physical
conditions and natural laws that enable biological mechanisms to function.
From the same perspective we understand how violence, which for
Zoroastrianism is nearly as equivalent to evil as death itself, is a manipulation
of natural forces to the injury, or threat of injury, to the biological mechanism.

On the other hand, from an internal perspective, we confront the paradox of

our existence as conscious life. Our personal existence is not existence as
such. A stone or a dead body or a terminally comatose body all exist and
exist as much as we do. But they possess, a Jung says, "mere being" [176].
The being that is valuable to us is given to us by the form of intentionality,
although intentionality really creates a loss of being in the sense that the
material content of internal existence is projected immediately into external
existence. Sensation cognitively belongs to external objects. Life to us thus
consists of an alienation from existence, and death itself is no more than a
threat to return us to our previous condition in which no alienation from self
existed. Of course no self, as conscious ego, happened to exist in that state.
Intentionality thus lifts a fragment of existence out of blissful oblivion into a
curious dissociation of itself in which "life" appears to exist because of the
threat of a "death" that will return it to its previous oblivious "mere being."
We must be careful, however, not to simply think of death as reducing us to
external existence. That is how we must view the death of others when we see
the body which, to us, possess external transcendence but which no longer
betrays any signs of internal transcendence. Internally, however, both internal
and external transcendence are aspects of the same thing; so in the death of
the ego, internal existence is reduced to undifferentiated existence and not
merely to external transcendence.
In these terms we must conclude that evil only belongs to immanent reality.
The threat of loss of consciousness only becomes possible once conscious
existence has come to be; and the evils of suffering become possible only
when violence and the impairment of biological function can appear to a
conscious being as the pain and distress which threaten to presage its
biological death and conscious extinction. A stone, in its mere being, can be
crushed to fragments by natural forces without being wronged or suffering
evil; but any creature with glimmering of consciousness undergoing the same
destruction will suffer pain and genuine evil and, should its destruction have
been willfully arranged by some other conscious being, it will have been
morally wronged (unless the destruction is a retribution of justice, should we
believe in that sort of thing).

The loss of existence in intentionality is the creation of the emptiness of

negative transcendence. Value, as the uncovering of positive transcendence,
makes god the loss and beings to us the presence, both in internal and external
transcendence, of Being. The polarity of positive transcendence reflects the
ambiguity of our position: merely being is genuinely neither good nor evil; but
if our conscious life is good, then by comparison merely being, to which death
would return us, appears as evil. Good seems more essential to Being because
the biological growth in external transcendence is what makes possible and
then gives us the conscious being in which this growth, life, consciousness,
and existence first appear as goods. As we lose consciousness and life, it
seems contrary to a long evolution of effort. In considering all this, the final
sense of the meaning of value may be this: that existence and value are
essentially the same and that the difference between them which exists for us
is due entirely to the dissociation created by the form of intentionality.
Existence to us has come to mean, not a "mere being" which is the true
ontological irreducible substance of reality, but this precarious, transient,
vulnerable, ephemeral state of consciousness in which the ego exists. This
inversion of Being creates the tragic state of human existence. We at once
yearn for the original, invulnerable state of unity yet fear that in being
returned to it the existence we now have, where we have been able to become
aware of ourselves, will be destroyed.

In our association of evil with the polarity of consciousness, there is one

religious representation that is of great interest. The Biblical myth of Adam
and Eve is a classic explanation of the origin of evil and suffering, but from
this myth it is possible to draw conclusions that are very different from those
traditionally given in the religions that esteem the story. Thus following the
example of Jung's treatment of the story of Job, [177] we may build a new
perspective by rethinking the subtle truths of old. The premise of the Adam
and Eve story is that the forbidden fruit provides knowledge of good and evil.
The principal effect of Adam and Eve's ignorance of evil, curiously, is that
they do not know that it is shameful to run around naked. What we may note
about the situation immediately, on the other hand, is that in not knowing
good from evil or right from wrong Adam and Eve could hardly be aware that
it would be evil to disobey God's command not to eat the fruit. For that they
would have to know that disobedience to God is wrong, sinful, or evil; but
they are oblivious to such things. This makes a doubly curious outcome: first
that Adam and Eve can only know that they have sinned after they have eaten
the fruit, and second that, as the expression of their new knowledge, Adam
and Eve recognize that God has for some inexplicable reason endowed them
with shameful bodies which ought to be covered.

The naivete of this story is striking, pathetic, and important. The lesson that is
seems appropriate to draw from it now is that the knowledge of God is the real
source of the evil that God, in a tantrum over Adam and Eve's genuinely
thoughtless disobedience, causes to drastically infect, as punishment, all of
human life. Before the Fall evil only existed in the mind of God; and if we
were to take Kant's notion of intellectual intuition seriously, we might expect
that something could not exist in God's thoughts without being made a reality.
In effect this is what happens in the myth; and even apart from the logic and
morality of obedience, the situation with the nakedness in the garden seems to
indicate the ambivalence of God's creativity. When Adam and Eve are
embarrassed at being seen naked, God asks, "How did you know you were
naked?" [178] He knew they were naked all along; but they only realized how
shameful their state was after they acquired knowledge of what evil was.
God created the shame and seemed to value it; and the best that we can say
for God about it is that he may have had much more modern, and Western,
sensibilities than the makers of the myth (or the makers of the fruit) did; and
since the myth is an expression of the unconscious, that circumstance is not as
meaningless as it may sound at first. Or God may have been a good
Heraclitean, knowing that the innocence of Adam and Eve wouldn't mean
anything unless there was something to be innocent of. That is about the only
way that God's creation of shameful bodies makes any sense, though even that
is a peculiar sort of sense -- the whole thing savors of a dirty trick or practical
joke, like pinning a sign to someone's back, without their knowing, covered
with obscenities. But then the major humor of a practical joke is when the
victim discovers the trick, while God's reaction to the discovery was very far
from having a good laugh. It was more the defensive anger of someone who
feels guilty and doesn't want their tricks found out.

That the knowledge of God was the origin of evil means for us that knowledge
itself, the form of intentionality, makes evil possible and, in the natural order
of events, real. The God of the myth is a frustrated personality who, in Jung's
terms, [179] often fails to consult his own omniscience. The tantrum of
punishment has a dreadful inevitability, even as in Milton's story the
perfection of the world has already been compromised by another of God's
creations gone astray -- in the revolt of Lucifer. It is a reality out of God's
control, and indeed God's fury partially seems to come from the disobedience
of his creatures as a threat to him: for he says, "Behold, the man has become
like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and
take also of the tree of life and eat, and live for ever--," [180] he must be
driven from the garden. This seems to make the essence of divinity, as with
the Greek gods, immortality. A God so in thrall to the logic of good and evil
and the conditions of immanent reality is an interesting comment for us on the
nature of religious myth making. As I have said, religions cannot escape their
immanent context. Where the myth of Genesis may have been intended to
blame evil on our disobedience, the result instead is the depiction of a
confused and violent, Euripidean deity; and I do not think that we would go
very far wrong to take this as [erratum corrected] an authentic representation
of numinous reality.

The reality of evil in immanent existence poses a practical problem to which

there are two broadly opposing solutions. The one is to resolve the dilemma of
suffering by taking good and evil as essentially interconnected, so that to
escape the latter we must escape the former also and return to the
undifferentiated mere being whence we came. The other is to suppose that the
development of mere being which brought conscious life into existence also
holds out the promise that further development will defuse the power of evil
and banish death and suffering, leaving purified and exalted life and goodness.
The first solution I will call the Buddhist and the second the Zoroastrian. I
choose "Buddhist" in particular because, by one interpretation of the Buddha's
teaching, there is no ultimate reality, no God or soul, behind the illusion of the
immanent world, so that nirvâna, "extinction," literally is reality vanishing
into Not Being. This is suitably indicative of the manner in which we must
regard the loss of consciousness and our return to mere being as annihilation.
Next, even though I choose "Zoroastrian" as a label for the second solution,
our modern secular notions of progress and the modern
secular apocalyptic notions such as the Marxist revolution are very much part
of this approach.

The Buddhist and Zoroastrian perspectives may be elaborated into sharply

differing doctrines, but at root they may also be viewed as complementary.
The former speaks to our passive and aesthetic relation to reality, the latter to
our active moral and hortative agency. As exclusive attitudes these each
become one sided. However optimistic we may be, there is in fact relatively
little in the way of genuine progress that our deliberate agency can accomplish
in one lifetime. An appreciation that a passive acceptance is equally valuable
with aggressive agency thus makes for a healthy perspective on life. On the
other hand, complete quietude and rejection of the value of the world is
tantamount to a rejection of life and a dismissal of the meaning of all our
actions -- and this can easily result in a real moral callousness. Buddhism
itself, while preaching abstention and non-violence, passed into Chinese and
Japanese traditions of Zen where the aesthetic affinities of the viewpoint were
developed and much of the thrust of the doctrine was subtly altered [181].
Thus Zen became the special branch of Buddhism for the samurai warrior
class of Japan, where violence, far from being rejected, was exalted into art.
Death and killing, indeed in this world of illusion, were of no significance if
done with enlightened detachment. The same detachment, in the spirit of
Chinese Taoism, rendered them aesthetic objects whose tragic beauty could be
appreciated. The ease with which this could pass over into revolting extremes
of moral callousness should be obvious, especially when death is so little
feared and the manner of a glorious aesthetic death so exalted that Japanese
soldiers in World War II were expected to die rather than surrender, while the
Allied soldiers who so dishonored themselves by surrender were treated with
contempt, brutality, torture, and murder.

In general, an exclusively aesthetic attitude towards reality is often elaborated

into morally false doctrines. I take the modern exemplars of this to be
especially Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche's brand of "beyond good and
evil" aestheticism becomes a philosophic theory of evil in Heidegger that the
goods of one age are simply destined to become the evils of the next. To be
creative, therefore, one must be "evil" in its contemporary sense. What one
creates, however, will soon be seen to constitute the new "good." Heidegger
thus speaks of the Greek word díkê, "justice," as meaning "the overpowering
order" [182] which must be shattered if anything new is to come of things. On
the surface this is no more than a correct description of what happens in the
course of historical change. The established order is almost always very
threatened by change and views the proponents of change as evil and
depraved, while the proponents see themselves as doing no more than
instituting justice, which is just what posterity will say about the changes that
do take place.

From the Socratic perspective here, however, this notion of evil making the
future is very much beside the point. If knowledge is different from opinion,
then it is not "justice" that in fact we see being continually overthrown but
the opinion of justice, which is most likely to be defective in some major
respect. The opinion of justice is doomed to repeated destruction
until knowledge of justice appears. The failing of Heidegger's view is a simple
consequence of its aesthetic over-generalization. The established order is
taken as an aesthetic concrete whole, which can only be destroyed as a whole
and replaced by some new whole. The unity and concreteness reflect an
aesthetic independence and perfection even while they conceal the flaws of
obvious evils. This aestheticism has become an
inappropriately active doctrine; and our scepticism about its suitability in that
role is fully justified by the kind of political movement that Heidegger
believed exemplified his ideals: National Socialism [183] -- which
appropriately founds its historical ally in the Japanese military tradition. In
their exaltation of death and pitiless violence, both the Nazis and the Japanese
militarists managed to create, briefly, living hells undreamt by Dante.

The Zoroastrian approach to evil may itself be broken into two, perhaps
complementary, orientations. These can be conveniently labelled the violent
and non-violent perspectives. Each of these presupposes a certain theory about
the meaning of evil. Violent Zoroastrianism accepts the negative expression of
value so long as it is turned upon itself. Thus violence may be met with
violence; murder may be punished with death; injury of any kind is to be
punished with a like or proportionately equivalent injury. In practical terms
this is common practice and even common sense; and even societies which
now agonize over capital punishment for criminal wrongdoers have few
doubts that the violent destruction of Nazism, with its immense cost in lives,
was a appropriate response in the circumstances. This use of death in behalf of
life is also evident in the universal destruction of life for nutrition. We may
even take the killing of things for food, whether plants or animals, as a
fundamental expression of the essence of violent Zoroastrianism and of its
sense that the destructiveness of evil can be used by the good in its own
behalf.

The alternative, non-violent Zoroastrianism, is suitably associated with

another religion, Christianity. The conspicuous modern advocate of this
perspective, however, was Mohandas Gandhi. The Hindu context of Gandhi's
thought is very similar to the Buddhism above; and there is even an equivalent
of the Zen samurai in the argument of the Bhagavad Gita that it is appropriate
for a warrior to obey his duty, dharma, and kill people because, after all, this
is all an illusion and killing and dying are not as they seem. Gandhi, however,
interpreted this allegorically. He thus saved for himself his Hindu roots, but
we shall be closer to the truth to take him under the category of
Zoroastrianism as the effect of his doctrine and efforts was an endorsement of
the possibility of progress towards the good. The theory about the meaning of
evil to be found both in Christianity and in Gandhi, indeed, is that good must
be returned for evil. Violence is thus to be met with non-violence, murder
with self-sacrifice, and injury with forgiveness. The classic text for this is in
one chapter in the Gospel of Matthew: "Do not resist (mè antistênai) one who
is evil" [184].

You have heard that is was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy." But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for
he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just
and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have
you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your
brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do
the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is
perfect. [185]

On this remarkable view, the "perfection" of God consists in treating with

equal goodness the good and the evil (though the more disturbing correlate,
unmentioned, is that God seems to inflict disasters on the innocent as well as
on the guilty). Virtually meaningless in practical terms for centuries, this
exhortation was given an astonishing political reality by Gandhi and then by
civil rights leaders in the United States such as Martin Luther King.

The solution in Christianity to the presence of evil, however, is strongly

reminiscent of aspects of Socratic ethics. It was a principle of Socrates also
that good should be returned for evil, and a theoretical tenet that no one
knowingly does evil. If that is true; then evil is ignorance, "virtue is
knowledge," and persuasion is the unique, and non-violent, means of
vanquishing evil in human affairs. Indeed, Gandhi's technique of non-violent
struggle essentially included persuasion. Satyagraha, or "Truth Force," was
before all else a way to win over the "enemy" and make him a friend. Non-
violent resistance was not for Gandhi simply a moral means of intimidation
and coercive pressuring. A non-violent campaign meant nothing unless the
"enemy" was treated as a friend right from the beginning [186]. On this
perspective knowledge of the good is a necessary condition of non-violent
Zoroastrianism, and thus Platonic progress is required, in the recovery of
knowledge of value, before progress is possible in history towards the
elimination of evil. Such a condition enables us to reconcile violent and non-
violent Zoroastrianism, for we may see the former as inevitable, indeed
necessary, unless some realization of Socratic philosophy begins to make the
latter possible. Whether such realization has occurred may be judged by the
event; and in this century, despite the isolated and limited successes of non-
violence, it is revealing that they have occurred at all. Our confidence in
continued progress in this direction will wax in proportion to our confidence
that the Socratic description of our ignorance is true and that the Platonic
description of our unrealized possession of non-intuitive knowledge of value
is also true. Since both of these are endorsed in terms of the theory here, the
reader may take me to endorse confidence in such continued progress. On this
view, also, the realization of positive transcendence as knowledge of value is
evidently essentially as positive value: Socratic knowledge is never of
negative value; and this is consistent with the thesis that the polarity of good
and evil is confined to immanent circumstances.

Buddhism, violent and non-violent Zoroastrianism, and Christian and Socratic

non-violence are not explanations or justifications for the presence of evil, but
simply solutions or responses to its presence, presupposing some judgments
about its nature. We might like to think that if there is progress towards a good
end, then in the light of that end, the death, misery, and suffering that have
occurred in the course of the progress will be explained and redeemed. This is
no more than a hope, however, and a hope whose only force can come from a
numinous prophecy. At the same time, no amount of Socratic progress can
touch the natural evils that befall us regardless of the moral condition of
humanity. While technological progress seems to increasingly promise an
amelioration of natural evils, a sweeping and complete obliteration of them
would also seem to be a matter of numinous prophecy -- beyond our
reckoning and reasonable expectations. Therefore, numinosity will now be our
concern.

§3 Numinosity

A Friesian intimation of the numinous is a sense of a breakthrough between

immanent and transcendent. This can mean a couple of things of interest to us.
First it can mean a complete loss of intentionality and a breakdown in the
distinction between subject and object. There is not much very meaningful
that we can say about that possibility, though it does enter into our
considerations. Second, and more interestingly, it tends to mean something
very specific in immanent terms, with no breakdown in intentionality, and that
is a suspension of the laws of nature. This can come in at least three forms: 1)
a supernatural being, who is personally exempt from the limitations of
causality; 2) events which are miraculous, whether effected by supernatural
being or by otherwise ordinary persons; and 3) an apocalypse, where the laws
of nature are radically transformed and immanent reality is made over into an
eschatological domain. We need to believe that these miraculous sorts of
violations actually occur for them to be of interest to us -- as metaphors for
absolute transcendence, without intentionality. At the same time it is curious
that the ground of conditioned necessity alone of the modes of necessity
should be opaque and intrinsically hidden from us. The possible removal or
transformation of that ground belongs to a level of reality beyond our
reckoning, even though it is firmly immanent in the negative transcendence of
external existence. A transformation of that ground would also strike at the
root of the conditions of natural evil. Such transformations, however, would
not suspend causality as such: supernatural beings are still agents, and
miraculous events are still caused.

In every religion there is a powerful sense both of the good and of the
miraculous. Part of the vulnerability of religions has come from the ease with
which these senses may be disconfirmed in practice. The God of the Old
Testament, while jealous to be praised as just and righteous, at the same time
inflicts appalling punishments, kills children and the unborn, and otherwise
conducts himself with the sort of erratic inconsistency that leaves us doubting
whether he even knows what compassion and goodness are. The moral
failings of gods, however, are a problem for most religions. Greek religion
was really killed off by the philosophic scepticism that we directed towards
the mythological antics of its gods. The peculiarly Hellenic thrust of religion
thereafter was an emphasis on the goodness and rationality of the gods or God
to the detriment of all other features. Even the miraculous aspect of religion,
despite the thaumaturgy of the Neoplatonists, went into decline out of a sense
that violations of the laws of nature would reflect opportunism or lack of
foresight on the part of the divine. Christianity swung back away from such an
extreme, but the desire for a justification of the goodness of God and of his
presumed acts in the world remained very strong and was even briefly felt by
Islâm (the Mutazilite school [187]). Moral criticism continues to be a
powerful force, both for religious self-justification and for attacks upon
religion. The situation is usually very confused, however, for the real power of
religion, its numinosity, does not depend on whether the religion
is actually particularly good or not. Religious self-justification glorifies in
exalting trivial mores as the symbol of its morality, just because these are
commanded by divine revelation, while carrying out at the same time gross
injustices and the most sickening deeds. Thus a religion hates to admit that it
may not represent a complete and necessary system of goodness and
knowledge. An attack upon religion that takes these failings as decisively
refuting the status of religion also confuses the appearance for the reality: the
criticism will have no effect on any who have the proper sense of the
numinous essence of the religion -- an essence embodied in the dogma of
revelation but in no way dependent on it and whatever rational character if
any, it may have.
The miraculous powers of religion, while perhaps easily disconfirmed as such,
shade into other potentialities that are less clear cut. A major responsibility of
all ancient religions was thus the fertility of the land, sufficient rain, protection
from invaders, etc. These things seem more matters of chance than of
miracle. Favorable chance is an important aspect in this way of numinosity,
and Jung has a special term of it: synchronicity [188]. Even when the laws of
nature do not seem to necessarily bring natural evil, it is chance that directs
the paths of disaster that do occur. The "meaningful coincidence" of
synchronicity is determined neither by chance nor purpose, but much for good
and evil can depend on it. "Meaningful coincidence" may even approach a
sense of fatalism, as chance events are constellated in a way that suggests
inevitability or plan; but this is a level of necessity far beyond the perfect
aspect and its sense of fatalism. Synchronicity can be, not just a cap of good
fortune atop the inner goodness of a happy life, but an aura of destiny which is
a happy end with a sort of numinous endorsement. This aspect of religion, like
the power of prayer, is something that can neither be proven nor disconfirmed.
It is a phenomenon of the numinous essence of religion, however, that belief
in fortunate synchronicity and destiny and even the ultimate of miraculous
powers will survive despite constant evident failures in practice. As with
moral weakness, these failings will never damage religion so long as the root
of numinous experience or insight is intact.

The power of religion, or of its supernatural objects, tends to expand even

beyond miraculous alterations of nature and the fortunate cooperation of
chance. Doctrines of an omnipotent God inevitably begin to strip away the
force of all the modes of necessity, not just that of natural law. The god and
evil, past and future, and even non-contradiction begin to be seen as all
matters of God's arbitrary choice. Ontologically this is rolling reality back to a
level of contingency before even analytic necessity: an ur-contingency. There
is not much we can do with that, but it is often part of the sense of numinosity.
At the same time numinosity is just the opposite -- an overpowering sense of
necessity. Such a necessity is like a ninth mode, a post-optative necessity, but
the object languages which seem to be founded in numinous necessity do not,
as such, represent any knowledge. Numinous necessity commonly attaches
itself to other modes of necessity, the modes of value and sometimes even the
necessities of nature; but where some part of numinous object language --
"revelation" or "prophecy" -- derives no necessity from another category, it
easily, to a dispassionate observer, appear completely arbitrary. In time, even
within a continuous religious tradition, it may even be denuminized and
judged arbitrary and inessential by its very own former adherents. A sense of
arbitrariness alone, however, is not sufficient, since it can just be a coupling of
ur-contingency and numinous necessity: these two can be two sides of the
same coin, that all necessities are arbitrary in terms of ur-contingency,
while all necessities, including the irrational contents of a numinous object
language, are equally necessary by virtue of their like derivation from the
arbitrary choice of God.

As a theory of God, the natures of ur-contingency and numinous necessity are

beyond our reach -- we cannot have a philosophically introspective theory of
such a separate supernatural being. On the other hand, the thing in particular
that makes God, or a god, a god in religions is something that is within our
reach: and that is personality. Personality first of all means our own identity
and our own internal transcendence, and religions have commonly treated of a
supernatural aspect of this, namely soul. Two of Kant's great problem of the
Transcendental Dialectic, God and immortality, are somewhat more accessible
when we take them as elaborations on the problem of soul. A theory of soul
can go in a number of different directions. Soul can be the charisma or
numinosity of a particular personality (a "great soul"). It can also be the
numinosity of every person, in the sense that if the soul survives death it is a
supernatural entity -- a spirit or ghost. And, again, soul can lead directly into a
God: doctrines of mystical identity with God are found in Christianity,
Judaism, and Islam but are most conspicuous in Hinduism, where the most
famous school, the Advaita Vedanta, is named "non-dualist" to signify that
soul and God are identical [189]. In these senses we may take it that soul is
the original and primary problem, while God and immortality are derivatives.
The Indian tradition, indeed, depersonalizes the "non-dualist" soul to an
extreme; but this is an anomaly of philosophic abstraction, ignored by popular
Indian religion, which we should ignore also. Personality, with numinosity
and miraculous goodness, is as essential feature of all religion, although
seemingly one of the lest rational when it comes to seeing personality outside
of human beings and some animals. Personality even in human beings,
however, should be a sufficient wonder and curiosity to occupy our theory:
personal identity is really a very slippery notion. By thought experiment we
can remove our memories, our bodies -- all the material clues that in a
practical sense anchor us to our identity -- yet still imagine ourselves as
the same continuous consciousness. Formal identity, Kant's "I," is not
sufficient for that since it is identical for each of us. Instead we have a
material identity, the material of our individual internal transcendence, and
this is not simply the same as its corresponding external transcendence, which
thought experiment can remove and which in physical terms is continually
altering. The peculiar and unaltered identity of internal transcendence is
signified by the numinosity of soul.

If soul is our personal gateway into absolute transcendence, the realization of

which, however, is beyond our reckoning at the event of death, then notions of
an apocalypse signify a general gateway for history and the world into
absolute transcendence. The Zoroastrian apocalypse, the Frashkart or
"Making Excellent," [190] is paradigmatic in this respect. That apocalypse is a
complete transformation of the physical world with a total eradication of death
and evil from existence, even to the point of the purification of those who
have been damned to punishment for their choice of evil and the destruction
of the hell to which they have been committed. The promise of such an
apocalypse was simultaneous in Zoroastrianism with a radical denunciation,
similar to the Greek philosophic moralism, of the powers of evil which
hitherto had figured in religion. As previously noted, whether a religion
happens to be particularly good in its practice is secondary, and it is also true
that a religion may actually fail to make any clear distinction between good
and evil at all. What is commanded by religion simply in terms of the will of
the gods or the practice of the tradition can explicitly include aspect of evil, as
with destructive gods whose malevolence must be placated. Although with
Zoroaster that changed completely for Middle Eastern religions, change in
religion did not necessarily mean change in the practice, as we might call it, of
God -- hence the agony of theodicies continually disconfirmed by experience.
Our lesson from this, however, should be that the practice of God is less
important than the sense of the numinous insight in religion. We can leave
God as an ambivalent being of Euripidean undependability while any sort of
numinous prophecy of goodness and excellence is germane to the role that our
own numinous existence has with respect to absolute transcendence. This is
because the knowledge of good and evil and the exhortation to the good is not
dependent on numinous necessity; and all the difference that any numinosity
in connection with it can make for us, since we will continue doing the same
things anyway, is to add a dimension of hope and reassurance. The
Zoroastrian apocalypse, unlike those of Christianity and Islâm, is explicitly
dependent on the political actions of human beings. There is even a bit of that
in Islamic tradition, where a suitably numinous human, the mahdi ("rightly
guided") initiates the events, political and military in nature, which shortly are
to be taken up by the agency of God and expanded into a supernatural
transformation. Similar events in Christian tradition are taken as signs of the
coming apocalypse, but it is not clear that they make any positive contribution
to a good end.

The apocalypse is the highest conception of religion in immanent terms. The

importance of this, to be sure, is usually undercut by an expectation of
supernatural agency. Even where the apocalypse has been completely
secularized, as in ideologies of revolution, the event is still often numinized
with the attribution of a virtually supernatural agency to the "forces of history"
or some such thing. Instead, and this is a valuable lesson for us with respect to
religion in general, we should be aware that any sense of numinosity, whether
in traditional religion or in the enthusiasm of some secular political ideology,
is deceptive in that it adds nothing to the rational necessities of morality and
ideal ethics. Thus, our hope for success in reaching a good end in history
depends, not on our enthusiasm for numinous prophecy, but on
our understanding of rational value. It is nearly impossible, indeed, to
maintain both attitudes at once. That difficulty, while dangerous for political
attitudes, is otherwise a natural and important effect of the fact that numinous
promises about the hereafter and the supernatural have little if any rational
basis. The apocalypse is distant; death is close; and a religious believer
personally has more to lose by the denuminization and weakening of his hopes
against death than by clinging to irrational apocalyptic doctrines. In any event,
argument would be ineffective with a genuine believer and unnecessary with
anyone in the least inclined to rational scepticism.

Since it is not knowledge, it may already be apparent that numinosity is not a

matter of non-intuitive immediacy. If anything, it has the ontological status
more of pleasure and pain, although it mimics cognitive forms and conveys
the sense of a necessary cognitive ground. While it is thus suitable to call it a
kind of pseudo-necessity, this has been complicated, as we have seen, by its
parallel sense of ur-contingency, as though the modes of necessity and
contingency were a cycle that issues from numinous contingency and
culminates in numinous necessity -- unified by the numinous force of our
sense of absolute transcendence.

§4 Conclusion

In this final section I have surveyed some of the elements of religion

phenomenology which are relevant to the system of the epistemology and
ontology of value present here. If the good, on the Zoroastrian hypothesis
above, is indeed life, then the final hope of all positive value can only come in
the numinous prophecy of life beyond individual death and of a
transformation of the world to completely eradicate evil in nature. A succinct
expression of such a promise is found in the New Testament:

Therefore do not be anxious, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we

drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the Gentiles seek all these things; and
your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his
kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things all be yours as well. [191]

In practical terms, this is nonsense. In rational terms, it is absurd. Yet what

speaks more to the heart of fear in the human condition when we know that
years of goodness and diligence, foresight and wise preparation can all the
same be suddenly overthrown into utter misery, want, and degradation? What
is the difference between a numinous prophecy which is a promise of
amelioration, what at least bespeaks the possibilities of the unknown, and a
mere Existential protest against an absurd world, which tragically and
hopelessly all the same arrogates to itself a certainty of that absurdity? The
difference, indeed, is hope; and when Kant asked, "What can we hope?" he
was revealing the real substance of his wisdom [192]. It is no accident that
many are consoled in life by religion and few by philosophy (pace Boethius).
The demands of hope are no source of knowledge, but we cannot help but
think that they are as much the motive for life as life is the motive for them.
All value, from pleasure to morality to beauty, has a hollowness, flatness, and
tragedy without hope; and that is why our final questions about value have
concerned absolute transcendence. The identities of pleasure, righteousness,
goodness, and beauty are not enough; for we can still despair of their
realization or even that their truth and worth is as it seems. It is indeed the
human condition not to know, as from day to day we pass from confident
expectation of good things to numb horror that some catastrophe has
overtaken us. With or without God, we are at the mercy of what we cannot
comprehend or anticipate; but our own hope, as it speaks out of our own
occasion of will in positive transcendence, does seem to reach further to the
root of existence than would a simple private fantasy. And so we are caught,
living a life we did not choose in the face of a despair with which we would
not have chosen life in the first place. If we then chose life in spite of it, it is
only with a hope and expectation beyond reasoning.

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