The Recognition of Reason (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 141 The Recognition of Reason. By Edward PoIs. Foreword by George Kimball Plochmann. (Carbondale , Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. Pp. xi ~ 256. $6.00.) This book forces the reader to engage in "radically originative reflection." At the outset, especially if the reader studies the prolegomena of the first fifty pages first, the task seems forbidding, but in the end (and reading to the end is necessary) the experience is amazingly enjoyable and illuminating--like awakening from dogmatic slumber. Professor Pols, and through him the reader, owes much to a sabbatical leave at the Warburg Institute, and to '% villa in the Alban Hills" with a garden. But Bowdoin College should also be mentioned, where the author has worked and reasoned and taught for many years. The exploration or "new beginning" analyzes the continuity between sense experience and reason. The result is a realistic ontology which reverts from Kant to Aristotle : from the separation of a priori and a posteriori forms of experience to the Aristotelian "analytics." Pols attempts to express in modern terms a doctrine which he finds well formulated in the untranslatable Greek of Aristotle. I am accustomed to think of this type of realistic doctrine as "objective perspectivism." But Pols makes a behavioristic attempt to formulate the continuity of acts of awareness and acts of reflection, an attempt which takes him from psychology to ontology. Instead of paraphrasing his argument, I prefer to cite his own "tortuous" but wellweighed diction: It is a common theme in rationalist thought, first systematically expressed in Aristotle's doctrine of the formal character of the sensible obiect, that sensation is continuous with knowing . We separate sensing and knowing by such devices as the distinction between percept and concept, but it is perilous to suppose that they belong to totally different realms .... Reason's "nature" is something perfectly compatible with the sensory situation in which it finds itself. It is indeed but one of the ontological features that, taken together, constitute an enrichment of the sensory world. What gives us that "nature" also gives us the being of that world with all the brilliance and immediacy of it unmarred by the philosophical doubt that so often assails the "intuition" of Being. The vividness and immediacy of the here and now, which we rightly associate with sensation, is complemented by a vividness and immediacy of another order, which it is a chief task of this essay to elucidate (pp. 107-109). In the intimate union we are concerned with, the known object . . . functions simply by being what it is, and reason responds by a cognitive enjoyment of it, which, however imperfect and admitting of degree, demands that we should approach it in its own unique terms, and not in terms that conspire to make us think that what we so concretely know to be the case is in fact self-contradictory or otherwise impossible. It is a union the governing feature of which is the activity of the irreducible being of reason that brings it about. The accomplishments of this activity are as familiar as the light of common day, and the activity itself is rooted in myriad ways in the things of everyday that are in important respects different in kind from itself. Yet we do justice to it only when we dare to permit it to return upon itself. Then, beyond all perplexity and paradox, we see that intimate union of cognitive awareness for what it is .... Presiding over all this is that character of the act that makes me speak of radical reflection ; the self-knowledge is not the result of reason functioning at a level it has already perfected .... but is itself an advance won by realizing some of the possibilities of reason by bringing about a cognitive awareness of reason at its work .... The light of this reflective act plays over everything that I am now so tortuously expounding, and it is this, in the end, that allows us to see cognitive awareness in its own terms (pp. 88-89). While reason does realize itself and does this in what it is confronted with, it is not then necessarily confronting a priori forms or categories itself has...