Fantasia on a Theme of Percy Bridgman’s

The object of analysis is understanding, the subject of analysis is activity—here, of writing. Writing is met as or during the activity of reading. There is no physical manipulation to track. The result of the operation is a description of what is done in the activity, or activities, but the only direct access one has here is to that of reading. The writing activity has been completed. Access to that is indirect. And one sees how regressive the whole operation can be, or is, and how the indirection is manifold in proportion to the regression—the reading of the writing of the reading of the writing, and so on. 

Every achieved understanding is yet another activity of verbal behavior which then itself calls for or merits or at least undergoes yet another analysis that is an attempt to understand an activity and to produce a description of it that is not a philosophy or a system. 

The question is raised, then, of whether understanding is the object of analysis, or is it a program of work, or is the object of analysis further analysis? Understanding gets forgotten in the process of achieving the end of understanding, and again the regression recurs, even if it looks like, or would be hoped to be, a progression. 

Skepticism is a name for all of this activity by which we seek to understand our understanding, if that is a legitimate way of talking about what we are in fact doing, if doing is the thing in fact that we are engaged in, and if it has a purpose that can be said to have been foreseen and established as a terminus of the entire inquiry. 

The activity itself of course generates activity that may be apart from the purpose, oddly enough, of the activity being engaged in. 

I may be trying, simply from where I stand, to understand what, simply, from where you stand, you understood, and so committed a description of. That ought to have been the end of it, if you were engaged in the process both you and I took ourselves and each other to be engaged in, that of understanding. 

Or were you engaged in an act of saying, or communicating, which may be two different and incompatible things, not something you understood, after analysis, but of saying what you were saying? Then I, not being the one doing the activity of saying, was not privy to the activity underway, and so could not have any knowledge of it, as I was not present during it, but am present now, in my own activity of reading, to which you, having said your say, have no access. 

This would begin to be a description or an analysis or an understanding of our problem, which might be stated as, making ourselves understood, communicating our understanding, or trying to understand one another. And that, not while in the act of further elaborating or of trying to know our own minds, our own thoughts, but of transferring those thoughts, as clear and definite results of an activity now perfected, to another. That other must meet those results, or take them up, or assume them in the midst of activities of his or her own, activities of differing subjects and objects, and in different phases of progress or regress, of in turn yet other such activities by others. 

It then seems clear why it might be said that “hell is other people” and “very heaven” the state of infancy. But men and women do not remain children, and poetry and science, like adults, arrest and concentrate themselves at times on objects not usually present, such as hypotheses and arguments, in order to draw them into some focus not given, but always suggested, by the flow of what is conventionally called life. It is the saddest thing I know, and there is no compensation for it.