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CHAPTER III
THE REAL INTELLECTIVELY KNOWN WITHIN A FIELD:
THE SENTIENT LOGOS
In primordial apprehension one apprehends each real thing in its twin dimensions as individual and in a field. But to intellectively know something in this latter way is not necessarily to intellectively know it in the field manner, i.e., as in a field. Being in a field concerns the notae of the real thing; the field is a dimension of these notae. But intellectively knowing something as in a field is something different: it is intellectively knowing the real thing inasmuch as it is included in the field which it itself has previously determined by its notae; it is to intellectively know not the field-thing but to intellectively know it "in" the field.
The intellection of a real thing in the field of reality is, as I have already said, an ulterior intellection or modalization of the primordial intellection of something real. To be sure, this modalization is not only about being in a field; every intellection of a real thing has the modalization of being intellectively known as a moment of the world. In both cases we not only intellectively know something as "real"*, we also intellectively know what this real thing is "in reality". But in field-type [1] intellection we intellectively know what something is in reality with respect to other real sensed or sensible things; while in the worldly intellection we intellectively know what something is in reality in the world. {46} In this second part of the book I refer only to what something is in respect to other things within a field.
In order to see what this intellection is, we must explicate two great problems: (1) In what does field intellection as such consist? And (2) What is the basic structure of this intellection? {47}
§ 1
FIELD INTELLECTION AS SUCH
This intellection has two distinct aspects and moments. In order to encompass them in a single denomination I shall employ the classical word logos.
This word has many meanings in Greek. But here I refer only to that meaning in which the logos consists in declaratively saying something about something. Now, as I see it, this logos was not conceived by the Greeks in a sufficiently radical way. To do this, I need to rigorously pin down how I understand the logos.
1) Logos stems from the verb legein which means "reunite", "gather together". This is the meaning which still survives in words such as "anthology". In the problem with which we are concerned, the Greeks anchored their idea of legein in this idea of reunion. Now as I see it, this is inadequate. To be sure, legein means "reunite", "gather together"; but reunite what? This is what one must begin by explaining. The Greeks did not attend to this problem. In fact, one reunites and gathers together what is in the field of reality. Whence legein, rather than denoting the reunion itself, should serve to designate an act of reunion qua "field": it is a field legein, i.e., a legein within a field. Beneath the reunion one must go to the fieldness of the legein.
2) From legein the Greeks derived both the word logos and its corresponding idea. From its meaning of "to reunite", legein came to mean "to enumerate", "to count", etc., whence it acquired the meaning of "to say". And this is what the word logos means. Logos has the {48} two meanings of "to say" (legon) and "that which is said" (legomenon). And there the Greeks anchored their reflection. When that which is said is a declaration of what a thing is, the Greeks claim that one deals with the logos in an autonomous sense: declarative logos (logos apophantikos). This declarative logos consists in "declaring something about something" (legein ti kata tinos). The logos always involves a certain duality of "somethings". But the Greeks did not concern themselves with the first "something"; they thought that that which is said can be in itself just an idea. But as I see it this is untenable because the so-called 'ideas' always come from things, and only from them. Whence the declaration of what something is cannot be fully carried out except as based on something else in the field. What something is in reality cannot be understood except by referring it to some other thing within the field. Therefore logos, prior to being a declaration, is intellection of one thing in the field based upon another. And this means that the logos itself is a mode of intellection and hence is not a structure which rests upon itself. The tendency of the Greeks was always in the opposite direction, a tendency which I have termed logification of intellection. At the dawn of philosophy, in Parmenides, there is a growing intervention of phrazein, of expressing; a tendency which culminates in a "discerning with logos", krinein logoi. And this was not just a manner of speaking: the proof is that Parmenides' disciple Zeno is presented to us by Plato as a theoretician of dialectical discussion. Even in theology, logos has been attributed to God, in the philosophical sense of judgement. But this is impossible. Intelligence is not logos; rather, logos is a human mode of intellection. God has intelligence but does not have logos. One cannot logify intellection but on the contrary must intelligize the logos. {49}
3) For the Greeks, logos was a problem of the first magnitude. But they always understood this problem seeing in the logos the supreme form of nous, of intelligence; i.e., the nous as expressed or expressible. After Parmenides, only this logos type of intellection is intellection in the strict sense; the rest is mere doxa, opinion. Regardless of what Parmenides himself understood by doxa, it is certain that Plato and Aristotle understood that doxa is aisthesis, sensing. And so with Parmenides thus ensconced in nous, he tells us that to intellectively know something is the same (tauton) as to intellectively know that this something "is": that which is intellectively known is on, being. The logification of intellection thus brought along with it the entification of reality. And as the logos always involves a certain duality, Parmenides therefore insists that the on, being, is one, hen.
To the Greeks the force of all this was overwhelming. And the proof is the manner in which Plato and Aristotle disputed with Parmenides. To Plato, the identity of what is intellectively known with being leads to the problem of negation: one says of something that it "is not". Hence the "parricide" which Plato believes he is committing against Parmenides is but an act of supreme fidelity: to intellectively know that something "is not" is always to intellectively know that what "is not", "is". That was the idea of the being of non-being in Plato. Aristotle confronted the problem of Parmenides not from this identity of the legomenon with the on, but from the presumed unity of being itself. For Aristotle "being" is expressed in many ways; the unity of being is not destroyed but rather being is endowed with diverse types of unity. His logos is a copulative "one" which possesses different modes of unity.
In the final analysis the Greeks saw the radical problem of logos in the formal plane of being and unity, i.e. in the plane of what is said or expressed. But as I see it the discussion should not have been carried to this formal plane; {50} rather it should have descended to a more fundamental plane.
In the first place, is it true that logos formally falls back upon an "is" (including also the "is not")? The truth is that the Greeks never tell us in what, formally, intellective knowing consists. Nonetheless they believe that intellective knowing and therefore logos is always intellection of the "is". Now as I see it the formal act of intellective knowing is not intellectively knowing the "is", but rather consists in apprehending reality; the formal terminus of intellective knowing is not being but reality. I have explicated this already in the first part of the book. One cannot entify reality, but on the contrary must reify being.
Hence intellective knowing is something previous to any logos, because the real is proposed to the logos in order to be declared. In virtue of this, intellective knowing is not formally judgement, nor saying what the real "is". One cannot logify intellection, but must do the reverse, viz. intelligize the logos; i.e., conceptualize the logos as a mode, as a modalization of intellective knowing, which is to say of the apprehension of the real as real.
Entification of reality and logification of intellective knowing are the two great presuppositions of Greek philosophy. For my part I think that it is necessary to reify being and intelligize the logos. And with that, one reaches the fundamental plane of the logos. What is the nature of this plane?
For the Greeks, intelligence (nous) and sensing (aisthesis) were always opposites. Be as it may the doxa of Parmenides, there is no doubt that Greek philosophy always ascribed the doxa to sensing. But what is sensing? It is of course the presentation of something which in one or another way has a moment of reality. But if this is so, there is never a {51} structural opposition in man between intellective knowing and sensing. As intellective knowing is apprehending the real, it follows that if the real is already presented in and through the senses as real, then intellection itself already has a radically sentient character. There is then no opposition between intellective knowing and sensing, but rather a structural unity. Intellective knowing and sensing are just two moments of a single act, the act of impressively apprehending reality. It is the sentient intelligence whose act is impression of reality. Logos is a modalization of this impression of reality. Logos is not intellection of being but of reality sensed in impression; the "is" of the logos is but the human expression of the impression of reality. Hence ultimately the logos is intrinsically and formally a mode of sentient intellection; it is sentient logos. What does this mean in more concrete terms? We shall answer that question in detail throughout the course of this book; but to orient the reader I shall anticipate some ideas which will be developed later.
Most importantly, I do not refer only to the fact that the logos is based on an impression of reality; in such case it would be only a sensible logos. Rather, I mean that the impression of reality is itself what has need of the logos. And this necessity is what confers upon the logos its sentient character. Logos in effect tells us what something is in reality. And the difference between "real" and "in reality" is determined by the impression of reality in its field moment.
Furthermore, I do not mean that what is intellectively known in the logos is sensed the same as a color or a sound; I can intellectively know, in my logos, irrational numbers, for example. But the fact is that both the color and the irrational numbers pertain to the content of what is intellectively known, whereas the intellection itself in its sentient mode concerns not the content but the mode in which this content shows up in the apprehension. {52} We shall investigate this at some length below. The irrational numbers are not apprehended like a color, but just as color they are apprehended in the same formality of reality, in the same impression of reality in which color is apprehended. An irrational number is not the same as a color, but it is real in the same formality of reality in which the color is real. In both cases the formality of reality is numerically the same. Lgos is sentient not by virtue of what is intellectively known, but by virtue of the mode of its intellection; it is an intellection within the formality of sensed reality.
What is the structure of this logos?
In the first place, logos as mode of intellection is an ulterior mode of mere actualization of the real. This mode consists in being a "re-actualization" within a field of what has already been actualized in the primordial apprehension of reality. Underlying every act of logos is the reactualization of the real within a field. This is what makes of the logos a mode of intellection, a mode of actualization of the real. Logos is to be understood with respect to intellection; we thus have an intelligization of the logos.
In the second place, this actualization is imposed by the impression of reality; it is what bears us from the immediately real to what that real is in reality. What is intellectively known in the logos is what is real in its field moment, i.e., within a field, because every impression of reality is of field-type. Nonetheless the real thus apprehended is not necessarily sensed as within a field. Every impression of reality is, in fact, of field-type; it has a moment of transcendental openness to other sensed things. The sensed real has thus a formality of reality with two moments: an individual moment, so to speak, and a field-type moment, a moment within a field. But apprehending the real in the field manner is something different; it is not apprehending that the individual reality opens up a determinate field, but is {53} apprehending the individual reality based on the reality field itself. And it is not necessary that this always occur; it is not necessary that the individual formality be apprehended in the field manner. But on the other hand, apprehending the individuality in the field manner, i.e. based on the field, is necessarily a mode of sensing. And in this mode of sensing I sense not just that what is apprehended is real, but also what the apprehended thing is in reality. Now, apprehending what something is in reality is nothing but logos. Hence the logos is the field-type mode of sensing reality, and conversely sensing the real in the field manner is already an incipient logos. The logos is, then, a mode of sensing, and sensing is incipiently a mode of logos; it is sentient logos. It is the mode of sensing the real in a field, i.e., the mode of intellectively knowing the real based on the field of sensed reality.
In the third place, the impression of reality sentiently "bears" us to the logos. Hence sensing in the field manner is formally movement. It is not a movement which bears us from one intellection to another; but rather the movement itself is that in which reality is formally reactualized. What is this movement? It is not a simple intentionality, nor a directing of oneself to one terminus from the other. Beneath the intention there lies something more radical: attention. Attention is not merely a psychic phenomenon, but a properly intellective moment, yet not the most radical one. Attention, in fact, is borne from one terminus to the other. And that which attentionally bears us is therefore prior to attention itself. And this is precisely the movement in which the logos formally consists: only because we are moving ourselves do we attend to different termini; and only by attending to different termini do we also have different intentions. Now, that movement is {54} strictly and formally sentient. In order to apprehend something real based on the field we need, within the field itself, to distance ourselves or to step back [2] from the real thing in question. This is not a stepping back with respect to space, but in the ambit of reality, of a reality sensed as formality. That stepping back is thus sentient; it is structurally found to be based on the moment of the "towards" of sentient intellection. It is therefore a stepping back in sentient intellection. And with the thing thus apprehended by stepping back, in the field manner, from the field "toward" it, affirming what it is in reality. Affirmation is the reversion of sentient intellect to the real. Distance is a stepping back in sentient intellection, and the reversion to the thing in sentient intellection is the very essence of affirmation, is the logos. It is a sentient intellection in stepping back within a field. Dynamism, formally constitutive of logos, is being an intellective movement in which we have stepped back in the sensed field of reality.
Reactualization of the real, movement within a field, is what logos essentially is, viz., sentient logos. An intelligence which was not sentient would not be able to have, nor would it need to have, any logos whatsoever. In contrast to classical philosophy, it is necessary to think, then, that logos is formally and constitutively sentient logos.
Granting this, it is necessary to explain at greater length this structure. It will be done in two steps: What is the basic structure of any logos? And What is the formal structure of the logos? As this second step is quite involved, it will constitute by itself a separate section, Section 2, of this volume.
{55}
§ 2
THE BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE LOGOS
This basic structure has, as I have already pointed out, three moments. First, the logos says something about something. Therefore there are two somethings; this is the dual structure of the logos as a mode of intellection. In what does this duality consist? Secondly, the logos moves in this duality. In what does this movement consist? Thirdly, the logos declares what something is in reality, and how it is installed in a reality field as a reality constitutive of the medium of intellection itself. The basic structure of the logos has these three moments: duality, dynamicity, mediality. Only upon this base can there be a declarative logos about something. Let us examine these moments in turn.
I. The duality of intellection in which the sentient logos consists. We shall repeat what has already been said in order to explain it in a coherent fashion. The logos tells us something about a real thing, and what it tells us is what this thing is in reality. And what it tells us of the thing is in turn based on the prior intellection of another real thing, because what it tells us, the so-called 'ideas'-as I have already indicated-do not exist on their own but are the intellection of things. The fact that the logos tells us something about a real thing means that we do not intellectively know what this thing is in reality except by intellection of something prior. Now, these two things-that of which we seek to know what it is in reality, and that prior thing by which we intellectivly know it-are each {56} a terminus of a primordial intellection. And the result is that in the intellection of what something is in reality two apprehensions intervene. First, this thing is apprehended as real in a primordial apprehension; for example, I apprehend something as a reality in a landscape. But there is another apprehension, the apprehension of this same real thing already apprehended, and inasmuch as it is what it is in reality: from what was apprehended in the primordial apprehension we now say that it consists in being a tree. For this, I recur to the previous apprehension of something that was a tree. And it is based on the intellection of this tree that we intellectively know that the real thing in the landscape consists in reality in being a tree. This second apprehension is not a primordial apprehension of reality; it is something different: an apprehension which I shall term dual. For it is certainly true that a real thing is apprehended, but it is so with reference to something previously apprehended.
That which is apprehended, instead of being apprehended directly, is apprehended as a function of a previous apprehension. One has, so to speak, one foot on the thing which is being intellectively known, and the other on something which has already been so known. For this reason, the apprehension is dual. It is thus intellectively known that the thing (of which we seek to know what it is in reality) is the same, similar to, or different from that first and previously known. The apprehension of the real as "real-among" is constitutively dual because this apprehension involves the apprehension of the real thing and the apprehension of that "among" which the thing is. If there were no "among", the apprehension would never be dual. But having an "among", the apprehension is necessarily dual. And as the "among" is sensed, so also is the duality.
What is this duality? Dual apprehension is a mode of actualization of the real. It is not constituted by the fact {57}that some notae of its content are complete. That has nothing to do with the matter, because even the most simple part of its content can be intellectively known in a dual apprehension; the simplicity of content would be a derogation or absorption of all complexity. It is therefore not this which constitutes the dual apprehension. Dual apprehension is a mode of actualization of this content, simple or complex, a mode of being present to me. Hence, dual apprehension is contrasted with the primordial apprehension of reality, which is constituted as a mere actualization of reality. They are then two structurally different modes of actualization. The primordial apprehension is the actualization of the real in and by itself; the dual apprehension is its mode of actualization based on another thing. I repeat, this is a structural difference, and therefore not a difference which is psychic or vital in character.
It is clear that this apprehension is not rigorously dual, but rather plural, because I can and in general do start not from one single thing but several. But in order to simplify matters I shall lump them together under the rubric 'dual'.
In primordial apprehension every possible type of thing is apprehended in a unitary mode; for example, a landscape with trees. But now we do not apprehend these things unitarily; we do not apprehend, as we did before, the landscape with many things. Rather, we apprehend each thing that there is in the landscape. We do not apprehend a "varied landscape", but "various things in a landscape". These diverse things are certainly in the same field, and therefore in "one" actualization; but this "one" actualization is not "unitary". It is rather what I term differential (or 'differentiated') actualization. We are dealing, then, with a unity, but one which is "differential", and not simply "varied". In differential actualization there is a strict unity; otherwise it would not be {58} "one" actualization. But with respect to this unity, things are not merely notae of the landscape; rather each of them is in and by itself a thing. Hence the unity of actualization is differentiated in things, which are differently moments of the unity of actuality.
The differential actualization is a mode of intellective actualization, a mode of a real thing being present to us in sentient intellection. This does not mean that the content of the differential actualization is multiple, but that it is positively actual differentially. Now, upon being differentiated, the apprehension of the real thing becomes converted into something of which we say what it is in reality.
This brings us to a stricter conception of what duality is. To intellectively know what a thing is in reality among others is to go from something priorly apprehended toward something of which I desire to intellectively know what it is in reality. If one were to think that the duality consisted in two apprehensions, the apprehension of the thing of which I desire to intellectively know what it is in reality, and the apprehension of the prior thing to which I recur, then what I would have would be "two" primordial apprehensions of reality; but not "one" dual apprehension. Two "ones" do not make a "two". Duality does not consist in two primordial apprehensions but is a dual apprehension.
In the second place, one might think that this prior presence of the thing, on the basis of which one intellectively knows what another thing is in reality, consists in an internal fusion (the name does not matter), a type of radical reminiscence, so that the apprehension of what the thing is in reality would in large measure be a composite of apprehension and reminiscence. But this is not what constitutes the duality of which we are here speaking. For whatever this fusion may be, {59} the presence of one apprehension in the other is not a fusion; i.e., the duality is not a composition.
The duality in question is thus neither duplicity nor a composition of primordial apprehensions. And this is because duplicity as well as composition affect only the content of intellection, the content of what is dual; but the duality itself is something much simpler and decisive. And this in turn is because the dual apprehension is the apprehension of a "real" thing which I want to apprehend as it is in reality; and in this reality, and not in its content, is where the duality is formally found: to be in reality what is real. Reality has intervened twice, and in this identical formality consists the unity of the two apprehensions. The dual apprehension consists in something like apprehending the reality of a thing in light of the reality of something else priorly apprehended. The prior apprehension is present in the thing which we wish to intellectively know like a light by which this thing is apprehended as it is "in reality". The "based upon" is the light generated by the apprehension of the thing priorly known. And this is the essential point. But it is necessary to fix more precisely just what this light is.
One might think that it is just a type of "comparison" between the second apprehension and the first. But this is not so, because any comparison presupposes an "ap-pearing" of what is compared and is based on that appearing. And it is precisely in this appearing where the dual impression is found. The real thing appears in the light which constitutes the reality of the prior thing. And this light or clarity of appearing is just the dual apprehension. This apprehension is "an" apprehension, but is an apprehension in the light of something priorly apprehended. What we here term "light" {60} is but the moment of each real thing in a field which constitutes reality itself. We are dealing with the fact that it is in the light of the reality in a field of the thing previously apprehended that one apprehends what a real thing is in reality, be it the same, similar, or completely different from the prior thing. And precisely because of this the entire process of intellection along these lines is always saddled with the weight of the old, because the old makes it possible to apprehend what the new is in reality; but it tends to excessively assimilate the new to the old.
In order to prevent misunderstandings, let us summarize what has been said. The primordial apprehension of a real thing, and the apprehension of what this real thing is in reality, are two apprehensions; but only the second is in turn dual. Let us not confuse the two acts of apprehension (primordial apprehension and apprehension of what something is in reality) with the internal duality of the second of the two apprehensions.
Now, this brings us to the possibility of a logos.
1. Every real thing, besides being individual, is de suyo of field nature, i.e., within a field. And this field nature is what determines the field of reality in which the thing is included and which encompasses all the others. This field, then, has been generated by the reality of each thing; which means in turn that the unity of being in a field and being individual is a unity which constitutes within the thing itself a type of unfolding of the two moments in the thing: its "reality", and its "in reality". The logos is intrinsically and formally based on the fact that a real thing refers, within a field, in transcendental openness, to another real thing. The logos is referring intellection, a mode of actuality {61} which refers from the reality of something to what this something is in reality.
2. This unfolding is in turn the intrinsic and formal foundation of the ambit of its actualization in intellective duality. When we refer to a prior thing, the ambit takes shape in which the logos is going to be constituted in a dual intellection. This is the ambit of the proper intelligibility of the logos.
3. This duality is the intrinsic and formal foundation of the apprehension of the two somethings, of the something which is said (ti), and of the something of which it is said (kata tinos). Only because we are referred to something prior can it be intellectively known what this something is. The ambit of the intellective duality is what makes the two apprehensions possible. Only because there is an intellective referral can there be apprehension of an prior thing which illuminates us. With this, the something of this prior thing is constituted in a principle of intelligibility of the real thing.
4. Finally, these two apprehensions are the intrinsic and formal foundation which permits one to say, to intellectively know, a "something" based upon another "determinate something"; i.e., this is the foundation of the logos itself, of the intellection of what something real is in reality. It is the formally dual constitution of the logos. The logos is then radically based upon a modalization of the primordial apprehension of reality. For this reason it is a mode of sentient intellection which in turn has to be conceptualized from within intellection and not the two apprehensions which intervene in saying what something is.
And here we have the first basic structural moment of the logos: duality. But there is a second essential moment, that moment by which one goes from a real thing to another prior one, and inversely from the latter to the former. This "going" is {62} manifestly of dynamic character. The logos "says" something about something, and this saying is a "going", a dynamic intellection. The modalization in which the sentient logos consists is a dynamic modalization; and we must now proceed to examine it.
II. The dynamism of intellection in which the sentient logos consists. As we have just said, in the logos there are two "somethings". And of these two somethings, the logos in dual intellection "says" or "speaks" about one based upon the other. This saying or speaking has its own essential, basic, structure. The logos involves a duality, but not static duality; rather, one in which sentient intellection apprehends one real thing while going, so to speak, from another. The logos, then, consists in a duality in which the two termini are two moments of a unitary movement. This is a dynamic duality, and is the second basic structural moment of the logos. In what does it consist?
1. Above all, this movement starts from the thing already apprehended as real in primordial apprehension. This apprehension as a point of departure is an apprehension in which we already are here-and-now present in the real. What is this "being here-and-now present"? It is just what constitutes a state [estado]. This is an essential concept. Modern philosophy in general has erred regarding the reality of the state. To my way of thinking, this reality must be recovered. In our problem, a state is not a mode of affection counterposed, for example, to acts. If that were so, the state thus understood would be, together with all of its indispensible nuances, a psychological state. Here we are not referring to that at all, but to the state in another sense: "being here-and-now" is a "being situated in" something. Every impression has, as we have already seen in the Part I, a moment of affection. But every impression has another moment, the moment of otherness, which consists in that what is present in an impression doing nothing but remain in accordance with its own formality, be it of {63} stimulus or reality. Here we are interested only in the formality of reality, the "remaining" [3] of what is presented as something on its own. And this remaining is here the essential point; it is the very essence of the "being here-and-now". A state is above all a "remaining". And this "remaining", that in which we have remained, is the point of departure of the movement of the logos.
But it is necessary to forestall certain misunderstandings. First, this is not a "relation" but a "respectivity", and moreover a respectivity common to the impressive intellection of the real and to the real itself. This "remaining" is not something static; i.e., "remaining" is not opposed to "not quiescient", because remaining is neither quiescent nor not quiescent. These two characteristics do not have to do with remaining but with the content of reality as mine, as much as with things. But "remaining" is something which concerns the mode in which reality, be it quiescent or not, is situated in my impression.
In the final analysis, a state is above all a "remaining in" as a mode of being here-and-now, and a "being here-and-now" as a mode of "remaining"; it is a "to be remaining". And this state is therefore a physical and real moment. But the primordial apprehension as a point of departure of the sentient intellection in which the logos consists, is not any type of remaining.
From what has been said it might seem that state is nothing more than another name for actualization. But this is not the case, because as the point of departure of movement, remaining has a precise formal character which is essential and decisive. Impression, in fact, besides the moment of affection and the moment of otherness, has a third moment which I have called the force of imposition of the real. Now, as point of departure of intellective movement, this imposition force of what is intellectively known in primordial intellection, consists in this: the real thing apprehended, in moving us toward {64} what is in reality, retains us insofar as it is real. This is the retention of the real. We are in the real, we remain in the real, and we remain retained by the real. We continue to be retained not in this red color qua red, but in this red qua real. By the expression "remain in the real as real", we are referring to a state; by "being retained in it" we mean a formally initial state. Retention is not a certainty or anything like that; because every certainty and even every intellective intention is grounded in a previous retention. The real retains us. But how?
2. We are retained by the real according to all the modes of reality, one of which is the "towards". The "towards" is a mode of the real presenting itself. Insofar as it determines intellection it has a particular character. On the one hand we go "towards" that which is presented as real in the "towards". But we do not go outside of the real; just the opposite: continuing to be retained in the reality which we left, we go to more reality. And therein consists the intellective movement as movement: it is by being in the process of moving in reality that we are retained and sent forth by it. Toward what? Toward the diverse real things "among" which the real, which we seek to intellectively know, is. This is a concrete movement by reason of retention of the point of departure, and by reason of the field-nature "among" towards which we go. It is a movement in reality. Hence it is a movement of sentient character, a movement of sentient intellection. The logos is sentient logos not only by virtue of being dual, but in virtue of being movement in reality as a field. The logos is not simply "to go" by moving oneself; but rather "points" to a terminus which can be unknown, or even empty. This is proper to a sentient movement. If it were not sentient, there would not be movement in the logos. {65}
3. This movement goes from what we seek to intellectively know toward something else priorly apprehended in the real itself, a second something based on which we, moving ourselves, seek to intellectively know the first thing. In virtue of this, that based on which we are going to intellectively know the new thing, is something distinct from it. This is distancing or stepping back in the reality field. It does not refer to a merely verbal distinction, but to a stepping back in the field. The two moments of the formality of reality, the individual moment and the moment within a field, are in a certain way autonomized in the real thing itself. In the field, things are included, and the field encompasses them; so that the field itself, as we said, acquires a certain autonomy of its own. And this field "exceeding" with respect to each thing, actualizes each of them in a very precise way, viz. through its stepping back. This is a rigorous distance; not simply longitude or distinction. Longitude is distance only when it is or is supposed to be traversed. Intellective movement traverses the "among", and hence the position of some things "among" others acquires the character of distance. Intellective movement is distancial, so to speak; distance is the traversed distinction.
4. This distance is traversed in a very precise manner. The point of departure in the "towards" points to its terminus, toward that based on which it is intellectively known. With this terminus the movement itself is not univocally fixed, but it needs to be. Whence the intellective movement in stepping back is essentially an oriented movement. The orientation is not a type of extrinsic collocation of the intelligence so that it can let fly its movement; but rather is the character of the intellection itself as intellection. Every apprehension of things in a field bears the imprint of the orientation in which they have been {66} primordially known intellectively. The orientation does not consist so much in that the "from" and "towards" of the movement are fixed, but rather that even within this fixing, different trajectories of intellection will fit. These trajectories express what I here understand by 'orientation'. With the same "from" and with the same "toward" there can be and there are different orientations for going from one thing to another. This diversity of orientations is ultimately arbitrary; it is the result of an intellective choice. Whence the optative character of concrete intellection in movement. Here, naturally, the problem of this option qua option does not interest us; we are only concerned with its foundation in the reality of what is intellectively known. This foundation is just the sentient character of intellection; it is by being sentient that this intellection is oriented.
5. Finally, intellection in distance or stepping back is not defined only by reason of the trajectory, but also by reason of the terminus to which it points the "towards" from which it is started. I can, indeed, choose somewhat arbitrarily that on which I am going to base myself in order to intellectively know a thing; I can go toward different things, things which are more or less arbitrarily selected. The movement which constitutes intellection of what something is in reality is not univocally determined in that from which one starts. And this lack of univocity actualizes the field of reality precisely as a field of liberty. In large measure, the intellection that differentiates what something is in reality is a free intellection. By this I do not mean that this intellection is an arbitrary act of the will, but that the intellective movement toward the thing, and toward what it will determine in the intellection, is a movement which is not univocally determined other than by a free act. {67}
This intellective movement, as we saw, is not something primarily of the intelligence, as Hegel thought. Intellective movement ('dialectic', Hegel called it) is not the formal structure of "the" intelligence, but "a" determination of the intelligence according to the differential mode of presentation of the real. Moreover, as this differentiality is constituted by the character of reality impressively given, it follows that intellective movement is a determination not of "the" intelligence but of the "sentient intelligence", and of this intelligence qua ulterior and field-nature actualization of reality. For these two reasons, I say, the idea of the Logic of Hegel is false in its very root. No dialectic is mounted upon itself.
6. What is the character of this intellective movement? The real retains us not so much by its content as by its formality of reality, as I have pointed out above. Now, we have already seen that we intellectively sense the formality of reality as being "more" than the reality of each thing. I have already said this, and repeat it for greater clarity in this other context. The "more" is not exterior to the real thing, but is an intrinsic and formal characteristic of its reality; it is precisely the moment of the thing's reality within a field. The real has the two moments of formality: individual and within a field, and this formality in its two moments is what has us retained.
This rententivity or retention in turn has two of its own moments in reality. First, the real, by being in a field, retains us in a very concrete form, viz., by thrusting us to the field of reality. This is the impelling moment of the retentivity of the real, the impellence of the real. What is real about a thing is something which impels us to this "more", this "beyond", which is proper to reality. {68}
But it does not pull us out of reality; rather, it keeps us there. In thrusting us impellently to that "more", it does not make us abandon the thing, but just the opposite; all impelling involves a constitutive reversion toward the thing. It is not a strict reversion because we have not left the reality of the thing; it is a reversion in the sense of a constitutive avoidance of such leaving. And it is this avoidance which I call reversion; it is the reversion of the field-nature moment to the individual moment. This reversion is what is expressed by the phrase "This thing is this in reality". While the impelling retains us by opening up for us, by going from a thing to its field, being in the field retains us by carrying us from the field to the thing. This moment of going from the field to the thing is what I call intentum. Permit me to explain, because as I see it this is an essential concept.
The intentum is what, etymologically, the word means, viz. a "tending to". It is not primarily an intention-as we shall see forthwith-but a tending. But this tending is not a "tendency" in the psychological sense; rather, it is a structural tension, the tension by which reality retains us in the thing from which we have stepped back. Every apprehension of the real is on this side a tension. Let us discuss this concept.
The intentum as tension is, as the word itself expresses, an intent. But this intent as a tension is not an intent to reach the reality of the thing, since we have never left it; it is the retentivity itself of the thing which tensely retains us in it. Hence, the intent in question is not an intentum of reality, but reality in intentum. If one desires to employ the metaphor of light, it is the reversion of clarity upon the illuminating sources themselves. {69}
Nor is intentum a type of effort to apprehend the real thing. In our language, "intent" is something like "attempt"; but with respect to its origins, intentum is not attempt, nor an attempt to go to reality, because we already are in the reality of the thing and cannot abandon it. It does not make sense, then, to speak of an attempt. It is in order not to confuse intent with attempt that I recur to the Latin word intentum.
Neither is intentum formally intentionality. 'In-tentionality' is a word and a concept which uses philosophy from the past centuries. In general terms, it is an act, or at least the character of the act in which we look at something, at what is intellectively known. This is the acceptation of willful intention translated into the act of intellection. This intentionality has at least two senses. In the scholastic sense, intentionality is the character which what is intellectively known has, considered only as intellectively known. As so known, it is the terminus of an intellective glance. And if something has no entity other than being intellectively known in intention, a scholastic would say that it has only intentional existence. In contemporary philosophy the idea of intentionality is not exactly that. For phenomenology, intentionality is not a character of an entity intellectively known, but a character of the act of consciousness; consciousness is a "referring oneself to" something, a noesis which as such is referred to something which is therefore its noema. Now, the intentum of which I am speaking is not intentionality in either of those two senses. Both, indeed, are based upon the idea of intellection being a glance toward something. But intentum is not that, because such an intentional glance presupposes that by its own nature we have to go "toward" reality, so that reality would be something toward which one must go. Ultimately, one would be dealing with a correlation. And this is false. {70} We do not go toward reality; rather, we are already in it and retained by it. The intentum is not a "going" but a "being here-and-now" tensively in the real thing, retained by it. There can only be intentionality because there is basically an intentum. This we shall see in another chapter.
Whence the intentum does not have an intentional but a "physical" character. In the first place, intentionality itself is not something purely intentional, but something physical. It is, as I see it, a physical act of the intelligence, the physical reference to what is intellectively known; and it is also and above all the strictly physical character of the act of intellection. It is the very physics of intellection-something like virtue. Virtue is not just a value at which I decide to aim, but is the physical character of being now in this value, or of having incorporated it into my physical reality. It is not an act of will which accepts some value as an object; but rather a physical character of this act of accepting itself, a valuable affecting in itself qua acceptance. Virtue is "moral physics". Now, intentionality is just the physical character of the intellective act. It is a mode of the intentum. It is because of this that I have said, and will go on saying, that there is no intentionality except as a mode of the intentum. We shall see forthwith what this mode is. Moreover, the intentum is in itself something physical. As we are already in the real, the reversion is not a "going toward" but a "being-now-tense-in". Both noesis as well as noema are grounded upon the intentum. But the Nous is an ergon. And this ergon is the intentum. The primary structure of intellection is not noetic but noergic. Strictly speaking, noergia is not a character exclusive to the intentum because the intentum is an ulterior moment of the primordial apprehension of reality. And it is this apprehension which formally and constitutively is noergic. Retained by reality, we are {71} physically impelled to what is in the field, and are also physically tense in the real thing. The physical actuality of the real is physically retentive in its two moments of being impelled and reversion.
Ultimately, the real in impression retains us in its two aspects, individual and within a field, not as aspects juxtaposed, but in the radical unity of the impression of reality. This structure has the double moment of being impelled and of intentum. They are not something added to the impression of reality, but rather constitute the very structure of the impression of reality qua of field nature. As intrinsically and formally of field nature, the impression of reality is impelling and is intentum. Conversely, being impelled and intentum are what they are only as structural moments of the impression of reality insofar as we are, in the field manner, retained in it.
7. This intellective movement, precisely on account of its moment of being impelled, is a movement in distance. And qua intentum, it has a very definite character. Starting "from" a prior real thing and going "toward" another in a movement oriented across the field of reality: this is how we apprehend what reality this real thing is. Now, as we have still not yet apprehended it, we do not yet have dual apprehension, but only dual movement toward it; this is expectation in the most etymological sense of the word, a "looking at from afar" (from which has been derived the meaning of "to expect"). Intellective movement is formally and constitutively expectant. Expectation is not a psychological state of general tension in waiting, but an intrinsic and constitutive character of intellective movement qua intellective. Expectation is the intellection of the other in its first presentation of itself as other. It is a mode of {72} intellection; we intellectively know what a thing is in reality in a movement from afar, and therefore expectant. One might tend to think that this means that we are surreptitiously asking ourselves what the thing is in reality. But this is not the case: asking is but the propositional form of expectation, and not the other way around. We ask because we are intellectively expectant. Moreover, we are generally expectant without asking or asking ourselves anything; we simply "are". The question is always something intentional; expectation on the other hand is something noergic. Expectation is intellection as distanced in via as intellection. What we expect is what the thing already apprehended as reality is in reality.
This intellective movement is that in which the logos' own "saying" consists. Naturally I am not referring to "saying" as such but rather to what is said qua said in this saying. Logos is sentient intellection in which we are retained by the real in its field moment, i.e. in the "towards" of reality. The terminus of this "towards" is something distanced from the particular real thing which we wish to intellectively know. To this terminus we are impelled by the real, but retained by this real to which we see ourselves turned by this thing itself. Logos is not simply a dual intellection, but one in which this duality is intellectively known over some time period, in a movement. Intellection is not just dual, but traverses this distance of the dual. And over this time period, from one terminus to the other, intellection is a movement which consists in saying (or explaining) what one thing is in reality from or based on another. The basic radical structure of the "saying" is movement. Hence I do not refer only to the fact that my act of intellection is dynamic, but moreover to the fact that the real sentiently actualized is actualized in a dynamic duality. {73} This is, I repeat, an intrinsic moment of the sentient actuality of the real. And as we have already seen, this actualization is what makes the "saying" possible. The dynamism of the intrinsic duality of each real thing is what makes possible the movement of saying something about something else.
But there is more. The logos with which we here occupy ourselves not only has two "somethings", and not only says something about something else: this "saying" has a supremely precise character: declaring. And this declaration is a time period in a medium of intellection. It is the third structural moment of the logos.
III. The Mediality of Intellection in which the sentient logos consists. The "saying" of the logos can and in fact does adopt many different forms. But for the purposes of intellection there is only a declarative "saying", apophantikos. This is a movement in which something is intellectively known from something else by declaring what the first thing is in reality. What is the basic radical structure of declarative intellection?
The intellection of the logos moves in the duality of a field of reality. But let us recall what this field of reality is. Every real thing qua real is open to other real things; this is the "towards" as transcendental openness. In virtue of this, every real thing is among other real things. This "towards" of the "among" is what formally constitutes the field of reality. As this field is the same in all the things included in it, It follows, as I have said many times, that this field takes on a certain autonomy of its own. The field is neither a concept nor a relation; it is a physical moment of the real in its actuality. Hence we say that "we are here-and-now present" in the field of reality. And it is in this field, in which we now are through {74} primordial apprehension, that we intellectively know, in the field sense, what something is in reality.
The field as reality is that "in" which the logos, "in" which the differentiating intellection, moves. That is, the field of reality is a field of movement. But of what movement? Not, to be sure, some kind of movement through an empty space-that would be a throwback to the idea of the field as space, and the field is not a spatial field but the field of reality. As the field of reality, the "among" has many different characteristics, for example that of physical or vital surroundings. But we are not concerned with that here; rather, we are concerned with the unity of the "among" as a "towards" of reality. In virtue of it, the field is neither a place nor some other thing which contains things; it is rather something essentially different: a field which upon being traversed, and in the very act of traversing, constitutes the intellection; it is the field of intellection.
This field is intellectively known in a dynamic sense. But what is thus known is not known only as one more thing; as we have just said, the field is not a "thing". Yet it is something which is intellectively known. How? Not like an ordinary thing or object, but like something whose function is not to be seen itself but to make things seen in themselves; it is the "medium" of intellection. What is a medium? And in what does its intellective character consist?
1. 'Medium' here is not that by means of which we go from one thing to another; i.e., it is not that by which we intellectively know one thing starting from another. Were that true, every intellection of the logos would be mediated or made into a medium by that by means of which we know intellectively. That this could occur is undeniable; but as the formal character of the logos it is false because there is also the immediate logos. If I say that this paper I see is in reality white, my logos is immediate. {75} The "medium" which we are here examining is something different. In making the medium into a medium, or "mediatizing", there are two apprehensions: (1) the apprehension of that by means of which I know intellectively, and (2) the apprehension of its mediatization function in virtue of which the apprehension of that to which this medium mediately leads us is united to the vision of the "thing-in-medium". But in the medium which is of interest here we are not referring to something which is apprehended in some act distinct from its medial function; rather, we refer to the fact that what is apprehended is only this function itself. The function is not something which is seen but something in which one sees, something which allows seeing. Thus light (leaving aside psychological questions) and a mirror are not things seen but things which make other things seen. In reality, this medium is not seen in a separate, different act from that in which we see the things which it makes us see. Indeed, in order to intellectively know the medium as if it were the terminus of intellection, it would be necessary to bring about a type of retortion upon the thing seen; in order to see a perfect mirror a special effort of retortion is necessary so as to convert it into something seen. Every logos is mediated, even if it be immediate.
This concept of a medium is essential in all orders of intellection. Modern philosophy has considered intellection of things to be the result of two factors, so to speak: of intelligence and of the thing itself. But this is inadequate, because it is essential to consider the medium of intellection. To intellectively know a thing individually, in a certain way by itself, is not the same as to intellectively know it in a social medium. In this aspect society is a medium of intellection. It is not something which pertains to what is intellectively known, but it is nonetheless something which makes what is so known to be seen in a particular way. Moreover, in different media the same intellections can have different modalities. And I do not refer only to the social medium in general, but also to particular ones, {76} for example a guild or corporation, whose particular medium makes things to be seen in a special way. It is not the same to intellectively know something in a social medium (general or particular) as to intellectively know something in a religious medium. Society in its diverse forms, such as religion, etc., are from this point of view not what we intellectively know, but something which makes us to intellectively know things. In different media things are seen in different ways. For this reason I say that the medium is something essential to intellection in all orders.
2. But if this is true, if the nature of the medium profoundly affects the intellection of things, how can one speak of the intellection of a real thing, as we have done up to now, viz. as something determined in the field of reality solely by the thing itself? This is the essential problem.
To answer this question it suffices to consider more carefully what we have just said about the social, religious, and other media of intellection. These media are media because we see things in them, but we see them in different ways. But what things? Real things as real. Then it is clear that these different media are but different modalities of what makes me see things as real. To see real things in an individual or social medium presupposes seeing them medially as real. Thus all the different media point to a primary medium, a basic medium which makes me to know intellectively what things, as real things, are in reality. What is this primary medium?
To intellectively know real things in a movement from one to another is to intellectively know them, as we have seen, in the field of reality. And this means that the field of reality-or rather, reality as field-is just that in which we intellectively know one thing from others. That is, reality {77} within a field qua reality is the very medium of intellection of the logos. This is what we were seeking; all the other media are qualifications of this primary and basic medium, reality within a field qua reality. Why is this so? The answer is clear: intellectively knowing is the mere actualization of the real as real. In the primordial apprehension of reality we intellectively know a thing as real. But the intellection in the field manner is a modalization of the primordial intellection of the real: we intellectively know what something is in reality in a mediated, not a direct way. Therefore this intellection is just a reactualization. Whence it follows that the field of reality, insofar as it concerns our problem, is a field of actuality, or better, a field of reactuality. Reality within a field makes us see the actuality of a real thing from another and in the process reactualizes the real. It is as a field of actualization that reality in the field sense constitutes the primary and basic medium of the intellection of the logos; it is reality as medium.
Logos, then, is not only dual and dynamic; it is also medial. To see a thing from another while moving in the field of reality is to actualize the real as physically real in the medium of reality. And this reactualization of the real as real is precisely its "declaration", the logos apophantikos. Medial intellection is declarative intellection. The field of reality as medium of actualization is the medial foundation of declaration. Such is the structure of the declarative logos. Only the mediality of reality as field makes the logos qua declarative possible.
In summary, the logos as such has a primary, basic structure: it is an intellection within a field, of dual character, dynamic and medial. Logos is a {78} sentient in-tellection in which one declares dynamically, in the medium of reality within a field, what one thing is in reality, based on another. This is its basic structure. Logos is sentient logos precisely because it is occurs within a field.
Granting that, we now ask about the formal structure, rather than the radical structure, of this intellection. This formal structure has two moments: the dynamic and the medial, because duality is ultimately a characteristic of the other two moments. The study of this formal structure in its two moments constitutes the subject of the following two sections.
NOTES
[1] ["field-type", "being in a field", "in the field manner", and "as within a field" all translate the Spanish adverb campalmente, which literally means "field-ly".-trans.]^
[2] [The English to step back is used as the most natural translation of the Spanish distanciar, a word which expresses a concept Zubiri has derived from Heidegger. - trans.]^
[3] [The Spanish quedar means to pause or bring to a pause, to remain in a state, to remain or to stay, as in Tennyson's poem The Lady of Shalott: "She stayed to look down to Camelot."-trans.]^