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§ 2

“HUMAN” REALITY

As any other reality, man is a system of notes in accordance with which he has a particular form and mode of reality. The question about human reality has two aspects: determination of the notes which constitute man, and the elucidation of his form and mode of reality.


I

The notes of human reality

What is human reality from the point of view of its notes? Of course, I am only going to be concerned with the notes considered globally, so to speak. Man is a system of notes which we can collect into three groups.

1. First and foremost, man has a group of notes in accordance with which we say that he is alive: this is life. Each living being is constituted by a certain independence from its surroundings, and by a specific control over them; but these two moments express something more radical. Indeed, independence and control express (in their active or passive actions) that a living being, acts not only through the notes it possesses, but also in respect of the system they constitute. Certainly any substantivity, even something which is just mineral, may involve the totality {31} of the system in its activity; but a mineral thing does not act in respect to the totality of the system as such. This moment is the radical and formally exclusive moment of life. One lives for and to be, oneself. In other words, the living being is a “self”, an autós. This does not refer to a moment of “reflection” from the notes towards the self, because reflection as such consists in taking the self as an object. In addition to all the other objects, the living being would then have one more: himself. This is clearly the idea which Aristotle had. But we are not referring to that here; rather, we are seeking the nature of the autós. Only because the living being acts as an autós can it in some cases carry out reflection. To be oneself is prior to any reflection, and is the foundation for its possibility.

This is what is formally constitutive of a living being: to be an autós, to be oneself. Life is not just the passing of time. Passing of time is the manner of auto-possessing oneself. Naturally, one could ask, Is one cell a self? Fully and completely as man is, certainly not. Indeed, there are degrees of life, degrees of being a self. In the most elemental living beings there is something like a rudimentary, primordial autós, which increases in the biological series until we reach man. These degrees are precisely the different types of living beings. To live is to auto-possess oneself, and the passing of time associated with life is the manner of auto-possessing oneself.

2. Man is a living being which has a special character: he is animated, he is a living animal. Life has split apart here the function of sensing. This is what is formally essential to the animal: to sense is to have impressions. Now then, any impression has two moments: a moment of affecting the living being, and a moment of formal pointing to something other, to that which affects the animal. By the first {32} moment we say that the impression has a content: color, weight, sound, etc. By the second moment we shall say that this content is something other than the living being; this is the moment of otherness. The intrinsic unity of these two moments is the impression: being affected makes us impressingly sense what is other. Each sense has its own form of otherness. Sight presents, hearing announces, kinesthesia orients, etc. There are, thus, different forms of otherness in a living animal. But all these forms inhere in a radical form of otherness which I shall call formality.

In the case of non-human animals, the formality of the impression is pure stimulus (Sp. estimulidad). The animal senses the “other” only as stimulus. A stimulus is a sign for the animal to respond: the heat heats and is a sign that the animal should approach or flee, etc. But other than being a sign to respond, the stimulus is felt only as a stimulant. And this “only” is what comprises pure stimulus. The “other” belongs signitatively to the response itself; it is the signitive moment of the response. It is not just stimulus, but it is there stimulantly appprehended, i.e., apprehended only as stimulant. The “other” exhausts its otherness in this articulation; this is the formality of pure stimulus.

3. But man has a third note besides life and the capacity to sense: intelligence. What is intellective knowing? It is usually remarked that intellective knowing is to conceive, to judge, to reason, etc. Certainly, the intelligence performs all these acts. But this does not enlighten us concerning what the act of intellective knowing formally is, the intellection. Well then, I consider that intellection formally consists in apprehending things as real, that is, “as they are de suyo”; {33} it consists in apprehending that their respective characteristics belong properly to each thing itself; and that they are characteristics that the thing has de suyo. Everything that man intellectively knows is known as something de suyo. This is the formal essence of intellection. I shall clarify this idea further. “Being de suyo” is the mode of things being present to man when he confronts them through his intellection. To conceive and to judge (lógos), and give reason for, are nothing but modalizations of the apprehension of something as de suyo. If one wishes to speak about faculties, I will say that human intelligence is the faculty of the real, the faculty of the de suyo. It is not the faculty of “being”, because being is always something posterior to reality. If we say of something that it “is real”, this is due to the structure of our languages, since there is no “real being”, but “reality in being”, actual reality in the world.

This faculty of the real has a precise structure. To understand it, we will take another look at sensing.

Man, the same as the animal, senses heat, sound, weight, etc., as impression. But there is an essential difference between him and the animal. What is the same in man and animal is the content of an impression; but what is different is in the line of otherness. Man senses “the other”, not merely as something that is a sign to reply; he does not sense only that heat heats, but senses that heat is hot. Its characteristics are characteristics which characterize what heat is “de suyo”. The content does not consist in affecting man, but consists in being something “in itself”, be it affecting man or not. The animal senses the stimulus “stimulatingly”. The otherness is in the animal, a formality of pure stimulus. But man senses this {34} stimulus in a different formality: in a formality of reality. Certainly, the great majority of human impressions are, as in any animal, merely stimulative. If one had to apprehend, for example, synaptic transmission of enzymatic reactions as realities, the life of the human animal would be impossible. But there are some special receptors which sense the impressions as otherness of reality. And this is specifically human. Human sensing is something different than animal sensing. Man senses what is sensed not “stimulatively”, but “really”. Due to this moment of otherness, due to this moment of formality, in impression man senses a mode of otherness different than the one sensed by an animal. He not only senses heat, not only senses that heat heats, but he senses impressively that heat “is hot”; i.e., he senses reality. Because of this man senses reality impressively; he has what I call impression of reality. Man has the capacity to sense reality. This impression of reality is not a second impression added to the impression of heat. Rather, it is just a moment, the moment of formality of a unitary and unique impression: the impression of hot reality. But since we are not going to be concerned with heat, or weight, etc., but only with the moment of reality, I shall call this moment, although somewhat inadequately, the “impression of reality”.

The impression of reality is characterized by great complexity, because each sense senses the formality of reality in a different way. The senses are distinguished one from another, not only by the content of the sensed note, but also by the mode of sensing reality. Vision presents the real as eidos; hearing presents it as announcement; taste as {35} fruition (let us not forget that wisdom is, etymologically, taste²), tact as probing, smell as tracking, kinesthesia presents to me, in dynamic tension, the reality, not “before” me, but as a “towards”; it is not “towards reality”, but reality itself as “towards”. And the enumeration could be extended to cover orientation, balance, etc. We are not dealing with different impressions of reality, synthetically gathered together, but with different moments of the singular impression of reality. Because of this, those moments overlap. In particular, the moment of the “towards” overlaps all the senses; this is the directional presence of reality.

Now, this impression of reality poses a most serious problem. Insofar as it is impression, it is an act of sensing: to sense “the other” in impression is what formally constitutes sensing. But insofar as that which is sentiently apprehended is formally reality, to apprehend it is, as we have seen, the formal act of the intelligence. And this means that the impression of reality, in virtue of being an impression, is an animal sensing; but inasmuch as what is sensed is reality, it is an intellective act. And both aspects are aspects of an act which is numerically one. The impression of reality is not two acts, but only one. Therefore, this act is an intellective sensing, or what comes to the same thing, a sentient intellection. It is not the case that intelligence is turned towards that which is sensed; such would constitute a sensing intellection. We are dealing with a structural unity: the intelligence itself senses reality. This is sentient intellection. Assuredly, one can sense without intellection, but one cannot intellectualize without sensing. To sense is the primary and radical form of intellection. This is not sensualism. Sensualism pretends to reduce everything intellectualized to {36} contents of impression. That is absurd. It is rather about a sensism: reality is always the de suyo; and the primary and radical form of sensing the de suyo is intellective sensing. Thus, the act of intellection, in contradistinction to the act of sensing, is not a complete act by itself independently of the act of sensing. Not what is sensed, but sensing itself is what is intrinsic to intellective knowing as such. Not by reason of object, but by formal structure as a faculty, do intelligence and sensing constitute one unique faculty qua faculty; a faculty which carries out the sentient apprehension of reality, i.e., the impression of reality. There are not two acts, one of sensing and one of intellective knowing, each complete in its own order, and synthetically converging; rather there is but one complete act of a single faculty, the faculty which I call “sentient intelligence”. This is the unity of the apprehension of reality as formality of things.

To be sure, intelligence is essentially irreducible to that which is sensed. But, what is essential to this irreducibility? Is it a difference between faculties? That is the question. The Greeks used the word dýnamis, which the Latins converted into potentia seu facultas. But, to my way of thinking, potency and faculty are not the same. The word dýnamis, on account of this, becomes ambiguous. Potency is “a” mode (among others) of making something possible. But it does not simply mean that this potency is already prepared to carry out its activity. Clearly, intelligence as potency is essentially irreducible to pure sensing. There is no doubt that pure stimulus, however enriched and complex, will never be reality. Formality of pure stimulus and formality of reality are essentially {37} irreducible. However, this does not mean that the intellective potency is capable by itself of producing its action. It is only able to do so insofar as it constitutes an intrinsic and formal unity with the structure of sensing. Intelligence is the potency to confront things as realities; but it is not a faculty. To be a faculty it must be intrinsically united with sensing. Therefore, as a faculty of intellective knowing the real as real, it is a faculty intrinsically and structurally composed of two potencies: the potency of sensing and the potency of intellectualizing. It is not the concurrence of two faculties, one sensible and the other intellective. No. Man has only one faculty for intellective knowing, the sentient intelligence, in which he really senses reality in the form of an impression.

So then, what is reality and what is intellection?
Above all, reality (as I pointed out in the previous paragraph) is formality of the de suyo. Consequently, in the first place, reality is not mere objective independence. The more perfect an animal is in the zoological scale the less it will confuse what is perceived with mere organic affection; it will not confuse food with its hunger. In its moment of otherness there is an objective independence. The more perfect it is zoologically, the more of an objectivist it will be. But it will never be the most rudimentary realist. On the other hand, the most modest child of a few weeks surely has no use of reason, but has the use of intelligence; even though the child be mongoloid, oligophrenic, etc., he has a minuscule, but real use of intelligence, and indubitably is a realist. Within his most modest sphere he senses stimulating realities, stimulants which are de suyo. The independence proper to sentient intelligence is not an objective independence, but a real independence. {38} In the second place, reality is not mere objective independence, but neither is it just existence. Indeed, nothing real is non-existent, but it is not real because it exists, but because that existence belongs to it de suyo. If what is apprehended had existence and did not have it de suyo, it would not be a reality, but a specter. The same must be stated about its notes: they are not real unless they constitute a system “of”. Something fictitious is not a system of notes without existence; rather what is feigned not only has no existence, it does not have physical essence either. A system is real, not only because of its notes and because of its existence, but because both notes and existence belong to the content of the thing apprehended. On the other hand, the moment of reality is constituted by the formality of otherness of the de suyo. Reality is formality of otherness, and formality of the de suyo. Existence and notes are moments of the content. The moment of formality is something prior to existence and to the notes.

And the moment is a physical formality and not a conceptive one, because it is a character of the openness of the real as real; reality is always physically and formally respective. It is a moment of an intellectively sensed thing. And because of this, the moment is formally non-specific. When I apprehend several things sentiently in one simple act of apprehension, I apprehend several distinct contents, but in one single impression of reality.

Reality is not, then, objective independence or existence. Still less is it something beyond what is sensed. To be sure, there is an infinite number of things beyond what is sensed; but we are brought to admit them, we are brought to them, by a sentient intellection of what is apprehended de suyo. Their notes, because of this, are real, but {39} this does not mean that they are real “outside” of perception. To make of the real, in the apprehension of a real thing in the world, something beyond apprehension, can be, as it has been millions of times in history, a serious type of error. Reality is not existence beyond apprehension. The last two are two zones of the real; but reality is neither the one nor the other. Reality is nothing but pure de suyo, not a zone within things. This is why the division of things into perceived and beyond perception is founded on the sentient impression of reality, and not the other way around.

To this concept of reality there is coupled the parallel concept of what intellection is. Intellection is not to represent, but simply to have that which is apprehended present as de suyo. It is the mere being present of the de suyo, that is to say, it is mere actualization of the real as real in the sentient intelligence.

4. Clearly, man has three types of notes: he lives, senses and intellectively knows sentiently. And the intrinsic and formal unity of these notes constitutes the system of human substantivity. What is this substantivity from the point of view of its notes? That is the essential point.

The human substantive system has an unusual character: it is a system which encompasses what we might call two partial sub-systems, where “sub-system” means “quasi-system”. We are not dealing with two unified systems, but of only one “single” system, the system of human substantivity, the only one which has strict constitutional sufficiency–something the “sub-systems” lack. These subsystems are two: what we call “body” and what should be called “psyche”.

A) First and foremost is the sub-system called “body”. It is a sub-system of physico-chemical notes, which have three moments. {40} Each note has a very precise functional position. Each note discharges its own proper function —if I may be permitted this expression— with respect to the functions of the rest. And in virtue of this, the physico-chemical notes constitute, as a positional sub-system, what we call an organism. But “body” is not synonymous with “organism”. The “of” not only determines the functional unity of the notes, but makes of them a well-ordered integrated set of physico-chemical notes. In virtue of this moment, the body is not an organism, but a principle of solidarity. Each note has repercussions with respect to all others; i.e., they are interdependent notes. But beneath this solidarity there is a still more radical moment: the organized and solidary notes express the actuality of man in the universe. This is the somatic function: it is the body as principle of actuality in reality, the principle of being present in the cosmos and in the world. The intrinsic unity of these three moments organism, solidarity and actuality is what constitutes body. What is radical about body is to be a principle of actuality. Body is, consequently, something more concrete than matter, because we are dealing with corporeal matter and not matter as opposed to spirit.

B) And yet, man has other notes, and another partial sub-system which I call psyche. But it too is only a partial sub-system. I do not call it “spirit” for the same reason I have not called the body “matter”. And neither do I call it soul, because this term is overloaded with a special, rather debatable meaning, namely, a substantial entity which makes its home “inside” of the body.

Because of this situation I prefer to call this aspect simply “psyche”. Psyche is not a substance, not even in the popular understanding of the term (this is clearly evident); but {41} neither is it so in the metaphysical sense. The psyche is only a partial sub-system of notes within the total system of human substantivity. Certainly, this sub-system possesses some characteristics irreducible to the corporeal sub-system; and in many aspects (though not all) has a certain dominance over it. But, despite this, psyche is only a partial sub-system. Man then, does not “have” a psyche and an organism, but rather “is” psycho-organic, because neither organism nor psyche has by itself any substantivity. Only the “system”, the organism, has it. Therefore, I believe, one cannot talk of a psyche without an organism. Let me clarify that I use the word “organism” here through linguistic license in order to facilitate reading of the text; strictly speaking, I should call it “body”. Man is not psyche “and” organism; rather, his psyche is formally and constitutively “psyche-of” this particular organism, and this particular organism is formally and constitutively “organism-of” this particular psyche. Therefore the psyche is of itself organic, and the organism is of itself psychic. The moment of the “of” is identical in the psyche and in the organism, and possesses a physical character. This numerical and physical identity of the “of” is what formally constitutes the systematic unity of human substantivity, which is a structural unity. Human substantivity is thus “one” by itself, and of itself. What is the formal characteristic of this substantivity in which man consists by reason of his notes? This is what we have to examine next.