"Thus the same object may supply a practical perception to one person and a speculative one to another, or the same person may perceive it partly practically and partly speculatively"
About this Quote
Alexander is smuggling a quiet revolution into a sentence that looks like polite taxonomy. An “object,” he says, doesn’t arrive in the mind with a single, fixed label. It can be practical for you, speculative for me, and even split in two for either of us. That’s not just a nod to “different perspectives”; it’s an attack on the comforting idea that perception is a neutral window onto reality. He’s pointing at the hinge where value, action, and theory meet the world.
The phrasing matters. “Supply” suggests the object isn’t passively received; it furnishes possibilities depending on the perceiver’s needs, habits, training, and stakes. A hammer becomes a tool in a hand, a design problem to an engineer, a symbol in a museum. Alexander’s real target is the philosophical impulse to treat the speculative gaze as more “pure” than the practical one. By allowing mixed perception within the same person, he refuses that hierarchy: thinking isn’t a separate, antiseptic mode that floats above use. It’s braided into it.
Contextually, this sits inside early 20th-century debates about mind, experience, and realism, when British philosophy was trying to reconcile science’s objectivity with psychology’s messiness. Alexander, known for a naturalistic, evolutionary metaphysics, is effectively saying: our contact with reality is real, but it’s never unconditioned. The world is there; our access is angled. That angle isn’t a defect. It’s the mechanism by which objects become meaningful at all.
The phrasing matters. “Supply” suggests the object isn’t passively received; it furnishes possibilities depending on the perceiver’s needs, habits, training, and stakes. A hammer becomes a tool in a hand, a design problem to an engineer, a symbol in a museum. Alexander’s real target is the philosophical impulse to treat the speculative gaze as more “pure” than the practical one. By allowing mixed perception within the same person, he refuses that hierarchy: thinking isn’t a separate, antiseptic mode that floats above use. It’s braided into it.
Contextually, this sits inside early 20th-century debates about mind, experience, and realism, when British philosophy was trying to reconcile science’s objectivity with psychology’s messiness. Alexander, known for a naturalistic, evolutionary metaphysics, is effectively saying: our contact with reality is real, but it’s never unconditioned. The world is there; our access is angled. That angle isn’t a defect. It’s the mechanism by which objects become meaningful at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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