THE TOTALITY OF SYMPTOMS. Philosophical significance part 2.

Older  philosophers  made  a mistake in tracing the  origin of knowledge; experience IS the fundamental  basic fact and we cannot  get  behind it.

To try to find the origin of knowledge through our intellectual process is to beg the question itself. It is through REFLECTIVE Processes that we distinguish between the thinker as self, Thought as a mental process and the object as something existing outside us. These distinctions are brought out by adopting  certain standpoints or categories of thought which are relatively true  and useful for all our practical purposes.This is the principle of relativity in knowledge.

The ultimate reality though not relevant to our practical purposes, comprehends all the possible  aspects. Facts  are the nearest approach to the ultimate Reality. We need to ascertain the fundamental nature of fact. For example, the human individual as a fact presents multiple aspects which we vaguely  apprehend through our sense perceptions.  But to make the different aspects (which  may be termed “Fact sections”) clear and intelligible, we have to make use of particular concepts  relevant  for our purpose  and ignore others which do not concern us for the moment.

After we study the different aspects through different concepts we find that each aspect is as much true as the other, but we cannot reduce all the aspects into one category. The human individual  can  be  studied  from  the  standpoint of  bio-physics, from that of life, from that of mind or as a personality including all these but at the same time transcending these.The  categorical concepts cannot be reduced to one and in general, a  higher category, through our intellectual faculty through  our perceptual knowledge gives us the  certainty that somehow all these aspects are computed in an individual organism.

Thus  take the fact  that  a  human individual as  a whole is unintelligible and alogical though the “fact sections” can be brought  under the sphere of conceivability i.e., rationality and logic:  the fact as a whole is unique and supralogical or alogical, and a concrete whole out of which the different sections have been  quarried out by our  reflection.

The  factness is apprehended by perception but cannot be comprehended (understood)  by our  conceptual  knowledge. This is  true about all other facts. Alogicality is one fundamental character of fact, while logicality is the character of “fact sections”. That is why science deals with fact sections.