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In Professor Hoeffding’s massive little article in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods,[3] he quotes a saying of Kierkegaard’s to the effect that we live forwards, but we understand backwards. Understanding backwards is, it must be confessed, a very frequent weakness of philosophers, both of the rationalistic and of the ordinary empiricist type. Radical empiricism alone insists on understanding forwards also, and refuses to substitute static concepts of the understanding for transitions in our moving life. A logic similar to that which my critic seems to employ here should, it seems to me, forbid him to say that our present is, while present, directed towards our future, or that any physical movement can have direction until its goal is actually reached.

At this point does it not seem as if the quarrel about self-transcendency in knowledge might drop? Is it not a purely verbal dispute? Call it self-transcendency or call it pointing, whichever you like–it makes no difference so long as real transitions towards real goals are admitted as things given in experience, and among experience’s most indefeasible parts. Radical empiricism, unable to close its eyes to the transitions caught in actu, accounts for the self-transcendency or the pointing (whichever you may call it) as a process that occurs within experience, as an empirically mediated thing of which a perfectly definite description can be given. ‘Epistemology,’ on the other hand, denies this; and pretends that the self-transcendency is unmediated or, if mediated, then mediated in a super-empirical world. To justify this pretension, epistemology has first to transform all our conjunctions into static objects, and this, I submit, is an absolutely arbitrary act. But in spite of Mr. Bode’s mal-treatment of conjunctions, as I understand them–and as I understand him–I believe that at bottom we are fighting for nothing different, but are both defending the same continuities of experience in different forms of words.

There are other criticisms in the article in question, but, as this seems the most vital one, I will for the present, at any rate, leave them untouched.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] [Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. II, No. 9, April 27, 1905.]

[2] [B. H. Bode: “‘Pure Experience’ and the External World,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. II, 1905, p. 128.]

[3] Vol. II, [1905], pp. 85-92.