Sense and Intellect (pt. I)

April 19, 2012 at 10:11 am (Uncategorized)

We set up the objects of sense as real and then have puzzling and inconsistent views of how intellection relates to them. Is it coherent to say that sensation is both illuminated and abstracted from? According to the illumination metaphor, sensation arises out of darkness and unintelligibility; according to abstraction sensation is the “hard fact” or “the particular” from which we construct some gaseous, ghostly, “universal” or “idea”. So is the intellect supposed to see itself as a god that draws forth the sensible from the abyss of noetic nothingness, or is it supposed to fall prostrate before the sensation as the luminous noetic standard of reality?

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