{333} (cont’d)


II. The formal characteristic of intellection

The truth is that philosophy, starting with Aristotle, has always understood that to know intellectually is to formally conceive and judge. It is not false that intelligence conceives and judges not even that only intelligence conceives and judges. But the question is different, is to intellectualize formally to conceive and judge? This is more than problematic, because —I will mention it here in a somewhat dogmatic way in order not to extend myself too much— the formal and radical function of intelligence consists in apprehending things as realities, in the form of reality.

Indeed, to apprehend reality is the elementary act of intellection. We conceive and judge how things are in reality, but to apprehend them as reality, to deal with them as reality, is precisely what is proper of intelligence, {334} its elementary act. In addition, it is an exclusive act of intelligence. Sensibility moves in the order of stimuli; regardless of how complicated these stimuli may be, they will never be able to produce one whit of what we call reality. But also, this is the radical act of intelligence. By a process we shall not analyze now in order not to extend ourselves indefinitely, intelligence begins to function when man has to suspend his adequate replies in the order of pure stimulations. That is the moment when the function I call “to become aware of reality” begins to act, which is the dawn of intelligence. Intelligence intervenes with its radical act, its elementary and exclusive act, in the way of apprehending reality as reality.

What is proper to intelligence is not to conceive and judge, but to deal with things as reality, to apprehend them as reality. Only then it can also lead to conceive and judge.


III. Sentient intelligence

The difficulty is based on the fact that here something ambiguous and obscure appears. When I have mentioned sensibility, I have affirmed that the sensibility of man senses things in the form of reality, which is true. We not only sense heat, temperature, colors or humidity, but also sense their own characteristic of reality. From my perspective, it is absolutely essential to underline this fact in the phenomenon of sensing. Man not only simply senses real things, but also formally senses their own characteristic of reality. Indeed, we have just seen that this is the same thing intelligence does. What happens here is that pure sensing senses pure stimulations {335} (such is the case in the animal and in almost the totality of times with the human organism); but in certain zones of the human receptors man senses the reality, senses their own characteristic of reality. Therefore, this can only mean that intelligence is not something separated and cut off from sensing, and in turn, human sensing is not separated and cut off from intelligence. There is only one act, the act of sentient intellection. What is sentient intelligence?


1. Its essential structure

Sentient intellection does not consist in the fact, quite trivial since the time of Aristotle, that intelligence and the senses have the same object, because Aristotle and his followers have insisted that with respect to this object there are two acts, one of sensing and the other of intelligence. To me this appears quite problematic. Is it true that two acts exist, one of sensing and the other of intelligence?

We might recall that Kant just brushed lightly on this problem when he discussed the problem of the synthesis of the categorial and the phenomenal. But the synthesis of Kant is an objective synthesis of the categorial and the phenomenal. That is not the case with my concept of sentient intelligence. It is not the case of an objective synthesis, of a synthesis in the objective truth. It is not even the case of any type of “synthesis”. It is the case of a unity in the act itself. There is only one act of sentient intelligence, and therefore, we do not have one complete act of sensing plus another complete act of intelligence, but only the unity of the act as such. Because of this, the dualism that since the time of Plato dominates the field of the history of philosophy needs to be overcome. Not because it may not be {336} true that there is a certain duality between the senses and intelligence, but because that duality perhaps refers to the specific contents of intelligence and sensing, which is quite a different matter. But in order to apprehend reality, it is not the case of two acts, but of only one act. Uniquely and exclusively an act that is precisely the act of impression of reality.

This act of impression of reality insofar as it is of impression is sensitive; insofar as it is of reality is intellective. In this unitary act there are two characteristics we must outline.

The philosophy of Husserl has been set upon the idea of intentionality. But sentient intellection is not primarily intentional, it does not consist in addressing things intentionally. Intelligence taken simpliciter, insofar as sentient intelligence —and not even sentient— is purely and simply “actualization” of what has been intellectualized.

What do we understand here by “actualization”? Someone might think that this is what Aristotle was saying when he affirmed that epistéme and epistetón are tautón (the same) in the act of knowing. I will not say that this may not be true, but this is not to what I am referring directly. Because in that sameness Aristotle understands the entelécheia as an act, which is precisely the act of a potency, the potency of man to intellectualize or to sense, and if you prefer, the capacity of things to be known. When talking about actuality I do not refer to the “act” of potency, but simply to “actuality”, as when we say that the news of a story has great actuality in a society or at a particular moment. This is not the case of the act of potency, but of that characteristic by virtue of which we say of something that it has actuality, that it is in everyone’s mind. The essence of the intellective act {337} is purely and simply actualization. The invocation of all of the other characteristics, whether entelécheia or anything else, is an explanation of that primary characteristic of elemental actuality, without which all the others would be left in the air.

There is a question that surfaces immediately, can we say, for example, that the apprehension of heat is a pure actualization? After all, how can it be denied that the temperature I perceive depends in great measure on my conditions, on the temperature of my own body and many other circumstances? Two persons that touch or palpate the same object can sense it in a different thermal form, how can it be said then, that it is pure actualization? This must be understood because, when criticism of the secondary qualities is made, what do we understand when it is affirmed that secondary qualities are not real? What this means is that if I leave, things probably have no color, but have a stream of photons or electromagnetic waves of a certain amplitude. Probably this is true, but the question is different.

To know an object and the reality known in it is not simply to know what a thing is when it is not present to me, but what it is while it is being present to me. In other words, there are different “levels” of reality. Here we insist that in the apparently most subjective and most physiologically conditioned act, such as sensation can be, inasmuch as that sensation is produced and precisely at that level of sensation, what becomes present to me is real. To pass from the reality of color or temperature to that which is the reality of thermal bodies or colored when they are outside the level of perception, is, among other things, the level of science. But we have to emphasize, although it {338} may seem scandalous —and that scandal for me is a real scandal in philosophy— that in the order of perception that which is perceived has reality immediately, but only in order to the act I am performing. This book has this color, as far as color, precisely when I perceive it. It will be said that there can be illusions, but these illusions always refer to something real; a complete science will have to explain how illusions are produced, but illusion does not consist in having no object, but that the object may appear to me in a different way that it may appear to someone else, and above all, different from the condition of the object when it is not present in any perception. But that is a different matter.

When Schopenhauer was telling us happily that if we had green eyeglasses we would see the whole world as green, he was right. But that is a real phenomenon; the green color of some eyeglasses and the chromatic conditions of that perception are perfectly real. The error would consist in affirming that they are real independently of the eyeglasses and the eyes, something I do not claim at all. The characteristic of reality is an intrinsic formality of what is perceived and to pass from the level of immediate reality in the perceptive act to deeper levels —what things would be when man has no perception of them— demands the long and arduous road of science.

Therefore, sentient intellection is pure and simple actualization. Regardless of the type of processes that may be involved in perception for it to be produced, they are mechanisms required to have an actualization, in order to have an act of sentient intellection.

Nevertheless, in that actualization the object does not acquire anything, in the sense of acquiring a new property. It only acquires {339} actuality. One thing that is very actual —for example, the trip of man to the Moon— does not acquire any new properties by the mere fact of being actual. But there is a certain dualism between what the thing really is and the dimension of actuality it has facing the mind that intellectualizes it and insofar as it intellectualizes it sentiently. That duality is what makes us say that in the act of sentient intellection naked reality is not purely and simply there.

Insofar as reality is actualized, that actualization constitutes its radical, formal and original truth. Truth is not primarily the conformity of thought with things; it is also not an ontological truth in the sense of conformity of things with the understanding, for example, with the divine intellect; it is not even, as Heidegger pretends, a mere unveiling. The truth is primarily the presentation of reality, the actualization of a reality precisely in its formal and constitutive dimension of reality. This is the real truth. “Real” because it refers to the thing insofar as real and that is the way through which truth will have to enter, one way or another, into the transcendental order. It will never do it through conceptive considerations.

This is a unitary act. And that means that we can describe that act using two slopes, through the sensitive and through the intellective. We can describe it through the sensitive and then we have to say that every sensibility, every sensible perception, in one form or another, is intellective since in it reality is sensed. Conversely, we will have to say that any intellective act that apprehends reality, apprehends something, i.e., apprehends it in a sentient way. By the first way, the act of sentient intellection unveils to us sensing as intellective sensing. By the second, it unveils to us intellection as sentient intellection. Let us reflect, although it may only be {340} for a moment, on the two slopes in order to clarify the unity of the constitutive act.

Let us look at intellective sensing. The sense of touch, for example, involves the naked presence of a thing; touch is not simply to sense the roughness or smoothness of a surface, but rather touch gives us in a way, if you will, unrepresentative, without any idea, without eídos, the naked reality of a thing. St. John of the Cross had already pointed out that God is present in the soul in a kind of call, without manifesting what it is in itself. That is the naked presence of reality. But inasmuch as it is presence of reality it is the case of intellective sensing.

There is another way, which has had better fortune in the whole of philosophy. It is the way that something may be present to us insofar as reality in its own and internal figure, what a Greek would call the intrinsic and constitutive eídos of it. Through vision things themselves are present by their eídos.

Through hearing we have something different. Obviously, there is an immediate presence connected with sound. But it is always present to us (at least, in a very small psychological elaboration) as sonority of something, something that is not present in the sound itself, and this is precisely the feature that distinguishes it from sight. In vision I have the figure, and by it I have the very thing with its figure, but in hearing I perceive something that belongs to the thing itself, that is real, but the thing is not present to hearing since it only notifies me it is there. That is precisely reality by announcement (Sp. en noticia).

Cenesthesia¹ is the form of apprehending reality by intimacy, of apprehending it intimately.

Of course, there are other senses, for example, the sense of orientation and equilibrium, kinesthesia. We are going to take them all unitarily. In these senses reality is present to me {341} in several different forms; it is present to me in an act of “going towards” something, in “tension-towards”. Definitely, this is essential for our problem. One of the great prejudices that have been gravitating on philosophy has been to think that what is essential to a perception is to have the object “right-in-front” of you. Yet, there are perceptions that exist as towards, as pure direction, and in which its object is not right there in front of you. It is not the case here that I may arbitrarily perform an act of mine of going “towards” something, but that reality itself, insofar as reality, is reality in its form of “towards”. And if I proceed towards it, it is because reality as such takes me precisely “towards” its deeper dimensions. I do not go towards reality, but sense “reality-as-towards”.

Therefore, we have naked presence, figure, announcement, interiority, and towards, which are the ways or modes of intellective sensing because they are modes of how reality is sensed in each of these sensings (Sp. sentires).

We reach the same conclusion taking things through the slope of intelligence, and that is the sentient intelligence. Intelligence apprehends reality, not in a conceptive manner, but in a sentient manner. In the case of touch, intelligence is groping. In the case of sight it has been understood that intelligence apprehends things precisely as something that is right in front of you, what has been called representation; but it is completely wrong that to intellectualize is to represent, although man may legitimately have representations. When man intellectualizes in the mode of hearing, he perceives real things as announcement, i.e., as manifestation. Something similar can be said in the case of interiorization proper to the act of cenesthesia that to intellectualize is to apprehend something intimately, and above all in the version of “towards”. It is absolutely false that the primary form in which intelligence {342} has and searches for things is by having them right in front of it (re-praesentare); the majority of times reality is present to man in the form of direction, in the form of “towards”. And this is essential for our problem.

These modes of reality are not simply juxtaposed. Sentient intelligence and intellective sensing are, with all their multiplicity, manifestations of a single phenomenon, namely, the mode of apprehension of reality. This is why the multiplicity of senses and the multiplicity of modes in which the real becomes present to us is not —as Kant would say— a base upon which we synthetically realize the operation of the “I think” with which we conceive, intellectualize and judge. There is no such synthesis. It is just the opposite. The senses are present to us as analyzers of that primary unity in which the turning of man to reality as such consists. As a consequence of this the different modes intrinsically overlap among themselves. We are not going to review each of the modes, but will refer to just one of them, which is essential for us, the “towards”. Reality in the mode of “towards” overlaps with the reality in all the rest of the modes of presence. The consequences of this are important since nothing is perceived purely and simply as something that is right in front of you even in the case of sight, but rather as something perceived “as towards”. In this case the “towards” is precisely the intellection “towards” that which is in the interior of what is seen, towards its interior. Also, there is nothing that may be perceived as mere sound, since sound, insofar as opened by the “towards” takes us towards the sonorous thing. We always encounter here this turning of the intelligence towards something that is beyond what is immediately present, not as something added to the presentation of the real, but as something constitutive of the very way in which reality is present. Nothing is present to us in its pure presentability, {343} but everything is present to us in a dimension and festooned wth reality “as towards”.


2. Intelligence and reason

And thus, intelligence situated as “towards” is precisely our reason. From this follows that sentient intelligence is the dawn of reason. It is the dawn of reason because reason is search; it is to go towards. Intelligence does not go towards things because it decides to search for them; it is just the opposite, intelligence decides to search for them because it is driven by reality in the mode of “towards”. That is why, when Kant would say that contrary to the speculative interest that moves reason he needed to search for an interest founded on practical reason, a practical or pragmatic interest, Kant would always start from the supposition that it is the case of an “interest”. Of something, that therefore, is so to speak injected to intelligence and reason. This is not true. It is the mode of the presentation of reality what inexorably carries with it that the intelligence, not only may apprehend the content of what is immediately given, but may go to what is present in the form of reality. And may also go “towards” whatever there is in the depth of all that reality. It is not the case that intelligence may go “towards” something because of an interest of intelligence, but rather that the intellectualized reality, by its very mode of presentation, places intelligence here and now in a situation for searching.

In this going “towards” the object, in this “searching” (Sp. quaerencia, Zubiri neologism), in this intellectus quaerens that goes towards the object reason does many things; it actually conceives how things may be constituted, it has devised the procedure of the abstract concepts whose efficacy cannot be denied, etc. But this is not the only thing it does because, at the end of it all, intelligence needs {344} to confront everything it has searched for with the reality that is immediately and primarily present. At that moment things confirm reason to man or take it away from him.

Here is where objective reason appears. Reason, which until now has not been presented except with a characteristic of search, is now presented to us as a candidate for things to approve reason or reject it. Against what Hegel proposes, the primary statute of reason is not objective reason, but precisely the opposite. Objective reason depends on things in order to be accepted or rejected. Objective reason is not the concept; it is things confirming reason to man.

Thus, truth acquires an appreciably different characteristic. It is not simply the case now of the real truth, i.e., of the immediate presence of a reality merely actualized in the intellective act, but of something different like the truth of an “encounter”. Here is where we will be able to say if this encounter is conformitas intellectus cum re or conformitas rei cum intellectu divino; but the first thing is that encounter. Intellectual fruition is the warmth of that truthful encounter with things in their pre-sensed reality.


IV. Transcendental reason and the problem of metaphysics

When inside this structure reason takes us by way of impression of reality —and not simply by way of the specific contents that this reality offers to us— is when sentient intelligence constitutes the dawn, not only of reason in general, but of a very concrete form of reason. That is speculative reason or transcendental reason.

{345} Transcendentality is purely and simply the characteristic of reality. The moment of impression of reality, proper to every sensation and perception, is transcendental, a) because it is above or transcends the specific content in which it is presented to us; b) but, in addition, because the moment of “towards”, which envelops every sensible perception, takes us not only to other things, but also to other dimensions of the reality. And it makes that precisely because of that characteristic of reality, and at least in principle, it may be able to lodge all the other things. That is transcendental reason. “Transcendental” —I repeat— because it is something that affects the impression of reality, and also because it takes us to the unitary and primary totality of the real. Due to this, the transcendental order is not a problem of concepts, subjective or objective, but is a physical moment of reality, as “formal” as anyone may wish, but effectively real in them.

Questing reason on this transcendental line is as problematic as the very characteristic of reality. This “problem” should be explained, but here I only intended to introduce it and put it in context. It was the case of showing that the history of metaphysics takes us, as a primary and radical problem to the problem of what intellection is, which to me it seems should be one about sentient intellection. It is in that sentient intellection where philosophical thinking should be anchored, where the characteristics of the transcendental order should be disseminated, and where the concepts that constitute the system of metaphysics should be measured. Because of this, sentient intelligence is that primary element in which the transcendental consideration of the world and reality is installed.

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¹ [Tr. note: cenesthesia, general sensation of the body caused by the functioning of the internal organs]