Discussion Mr. Muscio’s Criticism of Miss Calkin’s Reply to the Realist
I have just read with great interest Mr. Muscio’s able and clearly written criticism[1] on my paper, “The Idealist to the Realist.”[2] Muscio’s statement, mainly in my own words, of my argument may be summarized as follows: “What is asserted is that the ‘idealist discovers by examination of objects—he does not (as the realist accuses) assume—that both sense qualities and relations are mental.’ Hence the question arises: What does Miss Calkins mean by ‘mental’? The answer to this question is best seen from the treatment of sensible qualities. … The ‘idealist’ we are told, ‘rests his case … on the results of direct observation coupled with the inability of any observer to make an unchallengeable assertion about sense qualities save in the terms of idealism. To be more explicit: The idealist demands that his opponent describe any immediately perceived sense object in such wise that his description can not be disputed. The realist describes an object as, let us say, yellow, rough, and cold. But somebody may deny the yellowness, the roughness, or the coldness; and this throws the realist back on what he directly observes, what he knows with incontrovertible and undeniable certainty, namely, that he is at this moment having a complex experience described by the terms yellowness, coldness, and the like (an experience which he does not give himself). This statement, and only this, nobody can challenge.’”
Mr. Muscio’s criticisms are two:
I. It is impossible to ‘‘describe’’ sense qualities for they are ele-
mental, incommunicable (p. 324).
II. Miss Calkins uses the term “mental” ambiguously, meaning by mental sometimes (1) the “incommunicable” (p. 324), sometimes (2) “that which is like me” (p. 325). Now, the sense-quality is in truth (1) incommunieable, but is not on this account “mental.” And (2) in the second and admissible sense of mental, yellow is not mental, that is to say, it is not true that yellow “thinks, feels, wills, acts” as I do (p. 325).
Upon these criticisms I have the following comment to make: I entirely agree with Mr. Muscio that it is impossible to describe a sense-element. But the quotation from my paper makes it clear that I apply the term “describe” to the sense-object, or sense-complex, not to the sense-quality. I speak of making assertions about qualities and of “describing” objects, or things, by enumeration of their qualities. Mr. Muscio’s criticism is here based on a misreading of my statement. But this is a minor point and need not detain us.
Far more important is Mr. Muscio’s distinction between (1) “mental” in the sense in which yellow may be called mental and (2) “mental” meaning “like me”—a difference which, as he rightly notes, my paper, “The Idealist to the Realist,” ignores. My reason for leaving so important a distinction out of account was the fact that I was strictly limited to fifteen minutes in the delivery of the paper, and that it overran its predestined bounds in its published form. I offer this, however, as explanation, not as excuse, for Mr. Muscio’s criticism more than half inclines me to believe that I might better have withheld a partial statement of my view. The present brief discussion is mainly an attempt to make good the former omission.
I agree with Mr. Muscio in the belief that the basal meaning of “mental” is “like me.” To be mental is, ultimately, to be a self. The form of idealism which I uphold is, in other words, personal idealism,—the doctrine that the universe is constituted by interrelated selves, not phenomenalistic idealism, the Humian doctrine that things and selves alike are resolvable into series of mental “contents,” impressions, and ideas. In what sense then can I call “yellow” mental, since (as my critic rightly insists) yellow does not, like a self, “think” or “feel.” I answer: yellow is mental in the subordinate sense of being an “aspect” or “partial experience” of a self. The only unchallengeable assertion about yellow is that it is a way in which I, a self, am conscious. Mr. Muscio accordingly mutilates reality when he says that yellow is mental only in the sense of being incommunicable. For yellow is not merely incommunicable: it is the incommunicable experience of a self. The conception is in truth through and through personal: the “communicated” is experience shared with and by a self, and the “uncommunicated” is that experience which a self does not share.
To summarize this reply to Mr. Muscio: I agree with him that the term “mental” is used in two senses in my paper, and (2) that a sense quality is not mental in the sense of being a self. But I insist that a sense quality is mental, or ideal, in a genuinely idealistic sense, that is, as aspect or “content” of a self. Thus “yellow” is a certain experience which a self has (or which selves have); just as any relation (whether knowledge, or dependence, or influence) ultimately is a self-in-its-relating,—a self as knowing, depending, or acting. And again I ask Mr. Muscio and the other critics of idealism to make any other unchallengeable assertions about sense-qualities.
I realize that the “unchallengeableness” of these statements will not give pause to those neo-realists who regard the indisputableness of an assertion as a possibly insignificant character of it.[3] This indifference to a self-evident truth is perhaps to be explained by the fact that the neo-realists, adhering as they do to the philosophy of “primordial common sense” (excepting only in their highly uncommon explanations of illusion), enter on the business of philosophy with a very respectable stock in trade of unchallenged (not of unchallengeable!) assumptions. But thinkers who have divested themselves of this hereditary capital and who have to make their way in the world of speculation without such helpful presuppositions as the “knower” and the “known world,” with its “evident composition,”[4] can not afford to throw away even insignificant certainties. They hold that however unimportant the unchallengeable in itself, the character of being unchallengeable is of utmost significance in the philosophical search for truth.
Of course, my argument in its present form has led only to a solipsistic type of personal idealism. The first stage of the argument against non-idealism does, in truth, lead to a temporarily solipsistic conclusion. The way out of solipsism, through a recognition of the implication of the passivity and receptiveness of my experience, I have indicated briefly in the article under discussion and more at length elsewhere.[5]
Mr. Muscio concludes his very temperately written article with the rather extravagant observation that “the hypothesis that the objects of knowledge are mental will have to find some definite, relevant, and logical support if it is to be more than a mere forgotten fantasy.” The remark is the more surprising in that Mr. Muscio has just admitted that it “is doubtless true that ‘realistic’ writers have little positive doctrine.’? He defends the realist, however, as a “clearer away of much rubbish.” Waiving the question whether or not the realist has yet, as a fact, cleared away the “rubbish” of idealism, I am loath to agree with Mr. Muscio’s implication that demolishment is all that may be demanded of philosophical thinkers.
Wellesley College.
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