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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In the first part of this book, we investigated intellective knowing and its primary and radical mode. This is the problem which I propounded under the title Intelligence and Reality. But intellection admits of two ulterior modes of intellection; these will be the subject of the second and third parts of the book.
In order to commence this study it will not be out of place to set down some of the essential ideas expounded in Part I; I hope that they will facilitate correct comprehension of Part II.
Above all, intellective knowing is not an act of consciousness, nor an act of realizing something, because to realize what is intellectively known, it has to be present in the intellection. And this act of capturing something and making it present is what we call apprehension. This is the radical act of intellective knowing, an act of apprehension.
What is this apprehension? Every intellection is an act of apprehension, but not every act of apprehension is intellection. Sensing is also apprehension. These two apprehensions can be directed to the same object, for example a color, a rock, etc. Hence, in order to conceptualize what intellective apprehension is, the {12} most direct road consists in studying the modes of apprehension of this terminus which is common to both of them.
In the apprehension of this common terminus, for example color, the apprehension has its own radical character: it is sentient apprehension. Sentient apprehension consists in apprehension in impression. Impression is not just an affection of the apprehendor; rather, in this affection the impression presents to us something other than the apprehendor and his affection. This other thing has three constitutive moments: a content, a mode of being other (which I have called the 'formality of otherness'), and a force of imposition. For our problem what is essential is found in the moment of formality. What is apprehended remains in the apprehension according to its formality; this is what I have called actuality. Actuality is not presence, but a being actually in presence. It is therefore a physical moment of what is apprehended.
Now, this actuality, this being situated or being actually present can have two modes. Something can be actually present as a mere response sign; this is the actuality which I have called 'arousal'. It is the formality of arousal or stimulation. The characteristics of what is apprehended, for example its luminous intensity or its sound, are thus determining moments of a response. For this reason what is apprehended has an actuality but only as forming part of the response in itself. This is what constitutes pure animal sensing.
But there are apprehensions in which the characteristics of what is sensed in an impression are characteristics which are formally apprehended as pertaining to what is apprehended as its own: the intensity of a color or a sound is a moment apprehended as a character of its own of the color or the sound. This is what I call formality of reality. Reality is the mode of being "of its own", within the apprehension {13} itself. "Of its own" signifies that it pertains to what is apprehended even before the apprehension itself (prius). As this mode of being situated in the apprehension is a mode of being situated in impression, it follows that the apprehension is an act of impression of reality. In it, its content is actual in the impression, but with no reference whatsoever to a response. This is what I call mere actuality: what is apprehended is present and is just present. Now, these three moments (impression, of its own, and mere actuality) unitarily constitute what I call being de suyo. This is the formality of reality: a mode of otherness which consists in the de suyo. It does not refer to reality in the sense of the real as something "outside" of the impression, but to a formality present "in" the apprehension itself. And as such this formality is a physical moment of what is apprehended.
This apprehension of something in the formality of reality is just sentient intellection, or if one wishes intellective sensing. To apprehend the real as real is precisely the formal character of intellection. Being an impression is the formal character of sensing. Hence the impression of reality is the only act constituted by two moments: impression (sensing) and reality (intellective knowing). This apprehension is a sensing, but not a pure sensing as in the animal, but an intellective sensing, a sensing in which reality is sensed as reality. Man has this human sensing which the animal lacks, but also has a sensing which is purely on an animal level of stimulation in certain zones of his reality. Animal sensing is certainly a sensing "of man", but is not a "human" sensing. In human sensing, the sensing is already a mode of intellective knowing, and intellective knowing is already a mode of sensing reality. Sensing and intellective knowing are thus not two acts, either successive {14} or concurrent; nor are they partial acts. Rather, they are two structural moments of a single act. This unique structure is therefore sentient intelligence, a formal structural unity whose only act is just the impressive actualization of the real.
Since it pertains of its own to what is apprehended, it follows that this formality of reality has two aspects, one opening onto what is apprehended, the other onto the sentient intelligence. The first aspect submerges us in and makes us penetrate into the real itself. The second, on the other hand, leads us to submerge ourselves in the intellection itself. This is what is important to us here, although the two aspects neither are nor can be independent.
The formality of reality is open qua reality; a single impression of reality encompasses the most diverse contents. This openness is transcendentality; it is not a concept of maximal universality, but a physical commonness of reality and therefore a moment of communication. In virtue of this openness, each thing is de suyo real only with respect to others; i.e., every real thing opens onto a field of reality. This does not refer to an extrinsic relation among things but to the moment formally constitutive of the openness of each real thing as real. Each real thing has, then, two moments. One, the individual moment (so to speak) of its own reality; the other, the moment of opening up or onto a field, the moment of field nature. They are two moments of a single reality; everything real is individually and in this field-sense real, and is always apprehended in these two moments.
Thus we have here what intellective knowing is, viz. the mere actualization of the real in sentient intelligence.
This intellection has diverse modes, i.e. diverse manners of actualization in the sentient intelligence {15} qua intellection, determined, as I said in Part I, by the respectivity of reality itself, by the modes of actualization.
Above all, there is the primary and radical mode, what I have termed the primordial apprehension of reality. This primordiality comprises two characteristics. First, what is apprehended is actualized directly, immediately, and unitarily (despite its possible complexity of content, for example in the case of a landscape). This is the apprehension of the real in and by itself. The reality thus actualized has twin moments, individual and in a field; but they are apprehended indivisibly as moments of a real thing itself. This is what I term the compact apprehension of reality. But primordial apprehension has a second characteristic: it not only apprehends the real compactly in and by itself, but moreover apprehends it "only" in and by itself. The "only" is the modal characteristic of the primordial apprehension of reality.
But there are other modes which are ulterior modalizations of this primordial apprehension. The real, in fact, can be apprehended not only as something which has the characteristic of being in a field, but also as something which, by opening up a field, is included in it. Thus the real is not only apprehended as being in a field, but the field itself is apprehended in the same way, i.e. by means of the field which the real has determined. The moment of being in a field which in the primordial apprehension is actualized compactly together with the individual moment, is now autonomized so to speak with respect to the individual moment. The field is no longer just a compact moment of the real thing, but is the ambit of reality, an ambit which encompasses many real things. Thus each real thing should be intellectively known therein not just in and by itself but also with respect to the other {16} realities of the field. In this way we intellectively know not just that the thing is real but moreover what the real thing is in reality. This "in reality" is an ulterior modalization of the intellection of the thing as real.
Now, the actualization of a thing (i.e. one already intellectively known as real) within the ambit of reality of other things is the intellection which we call logos. It is the intellection of what a real thing is in reality, i.e. with respect to other real things. This logos is a mode of sentient intellection. It is above all a mode of intellection by being a mere actualization of the real in the sentient intelligence; this mode is a "re-actualization". As such, the logos is an intellective moment. But this real thing is reactualized in a movement which bears it to others, and in function of them; only thus is a real thing reactualized. In accordance with this moment the logos is an impressive movement; it is the sentient moment. In it is where what the real thing is in reality is re-actualized. Hence it follows that the logos is sentient intellection; it is a sentient logos. The sentient logos is intellection within a field; it is a modalization of the impression of reality. To intellectively know what something is in reality is to restore the unity of the field nature moment and the individual moment of the real.
It is essential to observe that we are not dealing with a process but with a structure. When one intellectively knows what something is in reality after having intellectively known it as real, this 'after' does not mean that what one does is to "set oneself" to the task of intellectively knowing what that thing is in reality. The intelligence does not "set itself" the task of understanding what something is in reality; rather that task is already thrust upon it by reality itself, by the unity of its individual and field aspects. It is reality itself which, upon being apprehended as real, determines its {17} intellection "in" the unity of the field-nature moment and the individual moment. This is not an act which starts from me, but rather is a mode of actualization which starts from reality itself qua formally sensed reality. It is the sensed character of the real which necessarily determines us to understand what something is in reality.
To be sure, the real is not respective only to other things which are real within a field; it is at one and the same time respective to other real things qua real, i.e. qua of the world. World is the respective unity of everything real qua real. But I shall deal with the world and its respectivity to the field in Part III of the book. The second part is devoted to the sentient intelligence as logos: Intelligence and Logos.
This study will be conducted in three sections:
Section 1. The intellection of things in the field of reality.
Section 2. The formal structure of sentient logos I: logos as movement, as dynamic structure.
Section 3. The formal structure of sentient logos II: logos as mediated intellection. {18}
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SECTION I
INTELLECTION OF THINGS IN THE FIELD OF REALITY
In order to study the intellection of things in the field of reality, we must start from a conceptualization of that field. Every real thing has two moments in its formality of reality: the moment of individual reality and the moment of reality within a field. Hence, the field is a dimensional moment of a real thing. This field-nature moment can be considered in different ways. The field is something determined by each real thing, and this determination has two aspects. One, the most obvious, is that of being actually determined by the real thing itself; the other, that of being something which, determined by each thing, is a field which encompasses all sensed real things. According to the first aspect, reality is something open in itself, and according to the second aspect it is something which includes all things, it is the ambit of reality. Comparing the field to light, we might say that a real thing is above all a source of light, it is luminous, it is what bathes the field in light. But seeing that a thing is luminous is not the same thing as seeing that all other things, and the illuminator itself, are illuminated by the light which emanates from this real thing. The light from the illuminator insofar as it is such is a note determined by this luminous thing. But if we consider the light as something which illuminates real things, then this light is no longer just a note of each thing, but an ambit which encompasses everything {20} in the ambit of illumination, including the source of light itself. It is indeed not the same thing to see how the light shines forth from the luminous thing as it is to see this thing asilluminating, as spreading its light over everything else. In this comparison, the light is the field. And through its being determined by each thing, when I apprehend something in primordial apprehension, I do so not just in its moment of individual formality, but also in the moment of its formality within a field. This is true both with respect to its aspect of being a note of the illuminator, as in its aspect of being an illuminating source of reality. It is the compact unity of these two aspects.
Granting this, if we apprehend things in the field of reality we can in turn apprehend them in two ways. One, as things which are included in the field; this is to intellectively know them as of field-nature. But we can also apprehend them as a function of the field in which they are included; this is to intellectively know them in the field sense, i.e., from within the field. Apprehending a thing in a field is proper to the primordial apprehension of reality. Apprehending it from within the field is proper to the logos.
Hence there are two steps in our problem:
1. The field of reality.
2. The real as intellectively known from within the field.
They will be the themes of the next two chapters, respectively.