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section t wo Critical Considerations One might expect that I would launch a rather severe criticism of these considerations risked by Eddington. And one might perhaps expect an apology for taking it all so seriously and even for seeking links with our metaphysics, which indeed goes beyond all that. Why waste time trying to bring Eddington onto the side of the angels? Even if one succeeded, what would have been gained by all that save that Mr. Eddington would be, after all, a good metaphysician and, having discovered so much himself, he is indeed a very intelligent man, but that is a personal matter, of little interest to the philosopher. But it is philosophers who have criticized Eddington severely and I am convinced that they are wrong on all the points they have criticized. The only criticism one could make is that his system is incomplete and sometimes rather vague. But even this won’t hold for one who reads his works and takes into account the intention of the author as well as the limits he has placed on himself. The books are, for the most part, lectures. The methodological problems of relativity and of indeterminism are the only ones he has studied in depth, insofar as they are methodological problems. For the rest, he wishes only to make suggestions. He must be studied with all that in mind. But there is more. I am convinced that we find new things in those suggestions , new ways of looking at old problems, above all that of the relation between body and mind, and the relation of physical indeterminism and freedom. These are two points on which he has been sharply criticized. But let us pass in review the few theses in which Eddington would have sinned. 1. Knowability, the Fundamental Attribute of That Which Is Put like that, it is hard to see what could be brought against this thesis. It is rather the expression“mind-stuff”which has led critics to think him an idealist . But isn’t being intelligible? And isn’t this intelligibility a transcendental property of being, and identical with being? And if he makes precise that it is 207 actual being to which our consciousness reacts, what is ambiguous about that? It is above all existential being that we know; the possible is known insofar as it can possibly be and we do not react to it as we do to actual being, but as the possibility of being. But at bottom it is always actual being that is the aim. The whole abstract order that is discovered as the metaphysical conditions of the sensible being offered to our experience makes sense only in the total reality of this sensible. It is material reality which is immediately offered to consciousness. In this material reality Eddington seizes on actuality as the transcendental character, and in this same grasp is given the transcendental intelligibility of that which is. Starting from sensible reality as he does, it is surprising he hasn’t been accused of materialism rather than idealism. What seems to have been lost from sight is that he defines being as knowable and not as known by a particular consciousness. How can he possibly be called a subjectivist idealist for whom reality is derived from consciousness ? Unless one can call idealist one who establishes the homogeneity of the real and the knower. Evidently, being is known by the Absolute. Eddington defines intelligibility by reference to a transcendental consciousness, but being is intelligible even when we don’t know it, and on the other hand this intelligibility would make no sense if it had no fundamental relation to some consciousness. Since when has immediate realism implied any other immediacy than that described by Eddington? Since when must our consciousness be in immediate contact with all that we see and sense? The photons that bombard the retina are not the sun, and the nerve currents which propagate shock are not necessarily channels that carry bombarding elements. Do the chemical transformations in my brain mutilate reality and deceive me into thinking I am confronted with the thing I profess to know? The star I see is in reality not there where I see it and perhaps it was extinguished millions of years ago. The man I see and speak with is not completely the same as he was when I saw and spoke to him before. Are we deceived by all that? Must we reject...

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