Here is a philosophical maxim from James Conant:
"Do not read the character of the logically primitive phenomenon off the model of its logically alienated counterpart!" The Logical Alien p.368
I'm tempted to stop there. Let it sit, and just think more about what this means. It would take too much to trace out the role it plays in Conant's thought, in a book I am only starting to get into, and to unpack what interests me about it. But I'm going to push on a bit:
"a philosopher who suffers from logical alienation is one who mistakes a case that suffers from logical privation - a logically alienated case of consciousness, or of the exercise of a cognitive capacity, or form of human life - for the logically primitive form of the phenomenon under philosophical investigation." (368)
What is it to mistake a logical privation for something logically primitive? It seems to me that Conant's target, the kind of common philosophical mistake that he is trying to get a perspicuous view of, is the same that is under attack in Dooyeweerd's New Critique Vol. II, part 2 "The Epistemological Problem in the Light of the Cosmonomic Idea". It is the "dogmatic attitude in epistemology" that fails to see that "what has been theoretically isolated is never the 'datum'." (NC II, 433). The "logically primative form of the phenomenon" is what Dooyeweerd here calls the 'datum':
"The real 'datum' is the systatic coherence of meaning. In mature naive pre-theoretical experience reality is grasped in the full systasis of its modal functions. In this systasis the psychical and the logical functions prove to be bound up with all the other modal functions of human experience in an insoluble temporal meaning-coherence." (NC II, 433)
The logically alienated case comes into view as a result of a theoretical disjunction. It is a feature of the "dogmatic attitude in epistemology" that it:
"simply took for granted that which should be the chief problem of any critique of knowledge, viz. the abstraction of the sensory and logical functions of consciousness from the full systasis of meaning of the modal aspects of human experience." (NC II, 431)
If I am correct in thinking that Conant is making a fundamentally parallel point to Dooyeweerd then I think that in the 1026 pages of The Logical Alien there may just be the start of an answer to Rene van Woudenberg's question: "How exactly can naive experience and common sense function as touchstones in philosophy? How does this work in practice?" ("Two Touchstones for Philosophy: Naive Experience and Common Sense" in Philosophia Reformata 85:1 (2020), 38). To put it simply:
Do not read the character of the logically primitive phenomenon off the model of its logically alienated counterpart.
Or, remember that what has been theoretically isolated is never the 'datum'.
Hopefully I can come back to this and show the significance of these twin-maxims for a number of philosophical problems.
