Spencer Heath Archive

Item 427

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

About 1954-1955

 

 

 

     I’m inclined to believe that there is no such thing as a verb without an object. In harmony with Locke, it seemed more likely that all thinking is derived from ex­perience — that it comes from our contact with the objective world either on the part of the individual or on the part of his race as epitomized in his subjectivity. No doubt there is such a thing as subjective thinking for the individual but this is only because the accumulated experience of his race is epitomized in him.

 

     The dispute between skepticism and idealism, as between Hume and Kant, seems to boil down to whether or not there is an objective world. Kant does not deny such a world. But the argument which he uses to establish his non-objective pure reason, or mysticism, is an argument which in effect logically denies the existence of an objective world, just as, conversely, Hume’s arguments for objectivity, by its exclusiveness, logically denies the existence of subjective reality.

 

     The impasse seems to be solved by discovery that the two worlds of experience — subjective and objective experience — are not mutually exclusive but are reciprocal. Kant seems to suppose that thought or reason is a function of itself, that there can be conception without an object of conception — that there can be thinking without an object of thought. He seems to recognize neither the dependence of function upon struc­ture nor the dependence of functioning upon an object to be functioned upon.

 

     If he had looked upon thought, or reason, as the function of that portion of bodily structure so differenti­ated as to perform that function he might have realized that all functioning structures must function upon some object — that thought must function upon experience and the objects of experience, just as digestion must function upon the materials or the objects of digestion and cannot be subjective alone, or that walking cannot be merely walking as such, considered subjectively, but that the verb must have an object, something that is being walked upon. It may be even doubted if there can be a verb without an object. Even the verb to be or to exist carries the implication of something to be upon or exist upon or in some manner related to.

 

     Relationships in a dynamic cosmos where there is such a thing as life, or even motion, cannot be static but only in the nature of happenings or events or what the physicists call action. An adventure in what Kant calls “pure reason” may have a certain self-consistency with whatever fantastic premises it may rest upon, but can have no validity for the life or experience of mankind beyond the experiential value of its premises. All of which is to say that reason cannot spring out of itself but can take place only as an interaction between the subjective self and the objective world in relation to which it lives and moves and has its being so-called.