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Two minds can know one thing (the pen-experience)

Publié le lundi 4 août 2008

« As a man philosophizing ’popularly’, I believe that what I see myself writing with is double - I think it in its relations to physical nature, and also in its relations to my personal life ; I see that it is in my mind, but that it also is a physical pen.

The paradox of the same experience figuring in two consciousnesses seems thus no paradox at all. To be ’conscious’ means not simply to
be, but to be reported, known, to have awareness of one’s being added to that being ; and this is just what happens when the appropriative experience supervenes. The pen-experience in its original immediacy is not aware of itself, it simply is, and the second experience is required for what we call awareness of it to occur. »
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« But how the experiences ever get themselves made, or why their characters and relations are just such as appear, we can not begin to understand. Granting, however, that, by hook or crook, they can get themselves made, and can appear in the successions that I have so schematically described, then we have to confess that even
although (as I began by quoting from the adversary) ’a feeling only is as it is felt’, there is still nothing absurd in the notion of its being felt in two different ways at once, as ’yours’, namely, and as ’mine’. It is, indeed, mine only as it is felt as mine, and yours only as it is felt as yours. But it is felt as neither by itself, but only when ’owned’ by our two several remembering experiences, just as one undivided estate is owned by several heirs. »

William JAMES, "Two minds can know one thing", Essays in radical empiricism (1912), Canadian Libraries, Internet Archive, pp. 132-133



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