Knowledge and Authority in the Metaphysics of John William Miller

John William Miller is not often discussed in treatments of twentieth-century American philosophy or in considerations of the history and renewal of metaphysics, though he labored on a remarkable system from the 1920s to the 1970s, constructed to redirect philosophical idealism with an account of the embodied, historically situated actions that condition mental acts and their elaboration. Working from the northwest corner of Massachusetts, where he spent his career quietly teaching, Miller was not terribly concerned about publishing his voluminous writings, some of which were brought out posthumously and some of which are still appearing. Book-length secondary works devoted to his thought are still in the single digits.¹ Yet once encountered, Miller’s metaphysics shows itself both to capture the principal concerns of various contemporary theoretical initiatives and to disentangle otherwise snarled attempts to treat constitutional modes of thought in light of the contingency of individual experience. Miller’s metaphysics goes to the root of agency, seeking to establish the formal ground of action and to explain the relationship of action to its instruments, to the semiotic order that action yields, and to the rational thinking that remains dependent upon a primary mode of action that it seeks to explain. As such, the Millerian project uncovers the forms of activity that animate cognitive frameworks, from the constitutive to the regulative, demonstrating how a genuine metaphysics might be supported by particularity, contingency, and an entirely historical understanding of human experience.

Miller’s system hinges on active doing: human activities such as measuring, saying, seeing, attaching, defining, or suspending; Miller begins with the activities described by present active participles. All such activities utilize as their instruments functioning objects, entities that are both objects and the condition of other objects—as, in one of Miller’s favorite examples, the yardstick may be made of pine (qua object) and is used to measure objects (qua condition) (MS 33). The yardstick measures a space that is made relevant in the act of measuring; “space” as an object of thought, or an allegedly pure form of intuition, is a consequence of the use of an actual yardstick or measuring tool. Neither space nor any other universal category becomes appercipient without such activities of functioning. In the following, I want to reconstruct the terms of Miller’s mediating, midworld of functioning objects, and to consider the degree to which, with this principal metaphysical arrangement at its center, Miller’s project can do justice to what he calls “the integrity of finitude,” even while accounting for the formal intelligibility of a primary activity that must structure any discursive handling of it. Ultimately, I will begin to consider the consequence of Miller’s position for any account of intelligible order, from the authoritative to the authoritarian.

I. Millerian Actualism: The Midworld of Functioning Objects

For Miller, as for Kant, there is no experience or knowledge of any thing in itself, unbound by mental configuration. Yet Miller argues that the categories that frame experience are neither aprioristic nor entirely spontaneous. We “declare” or “utter” objects of notice, so any given experience is tied directly to an endeavor performed. One cannot say either that the world is “really” spatial or that one happens to get on with the pure intuition of space; neither type of claim can be verified over and against the other. An intuition of space as such—the concept of space as a universal—is always both the outcome of particular acts of gauging and their condition. As such, the primary functioning object is the body, specifically one’s own, individual body. One first uses eyes or ears to take awareness, or voice to distinguish order from an indefinite manifold. Thus, language is fundamentally geared for functioning activity, for with language we both name particularity and situate it within the structures necessary for its meaningful understanding and general communication. Language is so crucially at the center of functioning activity that Miller uses the word “utterance” to characterize all functioning acts.² One may articulate the designation for a segment one has marked spatially, and one may simply take up a...