OBJECTS AND SUBJECTS*
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ytyvovTa&, ... Theaetetus, I79 C.
?i. Prefatory.-When Descartes, Locke, and Hume undertake
the analysis of experience, they utilize those elements in their
own experience which lie clear and distinct, fit for the exactitude
of intellectual discourse. It is tacitly assumed, except by Plato,
that the more fundamental factors will ever lend themselves for
discrimination with peculiar clarity. This assumption is here di-
rectly challenged.
?2. Structure of Experience.-No topic has suffered more
from this tendency of philosophers than their account of the
object-subject structure of experience. In the first place, this
structure has been identified with the bare relation of knower to
known. The subject is the knower, the object is the known.
Thus, with this interpretation, the object-subject relation is the
known-knower relation. It then follows that the more clearly
any instance of this relation stands out for discrimination, the
more safely we can utilize it for the interpretation of the status
of experience in the universe of things. Hence Descartes' appeal
to clarity and distinctness.
This deduction presupposes that the subject-object relation is
the fundamental structural pattern of experience. I agree with
this presupposition, but not in the sense in which subject-object is
identified with knower-known. I contend that the notion of mere
knowledge is a high abstraction, and that conscious discrimination
itself is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate ex-
amples of occasions of experience. The basis of experience is
emotional. Stated more generally, the basic fact is the rise of an
affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given.
?3. Phraseology.-Thus the Quaker word 'concern', divested
of any suggestion of knowledge, is more fitted to express this
* The presidential address to the eastern division of the American Philo-
sophical Association, at New Haven, December 29, 1931.
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