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Time and Experience
standing recalls the general structure of our situation. Our relation to our own organized contexts of action and thought is analogous to this relation of the particulars to the understanding. In us, as in the particulars that the understaning seeks to grasp, there is an inexhaustible residue. A similar situation arises in our relations with other people. We treat acceptance and recognition by the other person as a token of definitive assurance about our place in the world, an assurance that the other is never able to provide. We demand the unlimited from the limited. As we move further away from this human theater and turn our minds to distant nature, our ideas fall into contradictions. These contradictions are the antinomies of experience. We cannot solve them. Neither, however, are we entirely powerless to deal with them. We can diminish the restraints under which they place our insight and our power, and reestablish in our dealings with nature a paler version of the more intimate and complete knowledge we can gain of our own world. This rescue operation makes natural science possible. Natural science therefore provides us with a knowledge that is less perfect than the knowledge we can have of our own social and cultural constructs, or of one another, or of ourselves as reflected in the mirror of the other person. However, we can diminish its imperfection and increase its power by certain temporizing expedients. As a result, we blunt the force of the antinomies, although we cannot overcome them. All the antinomies of the impersonal can be reduced to two: the antinomy of time and the antinomy of objectivity.
The Impersonal and the Personal The understanding of the antinomies of time and objectivity rests on a certain view of the relation between our experience of ourselves and our insight into nature. The philosophical tendency I earlier labeled naturalism shares with the perennial philosophy the view that the impersonal has higher value—and allows for more secure knowledge— than the personal. In certain important respects the argument of this book, faithful to much of what is most distinctive and most discon-