Abstract

The paradox of philosophy has a clear relevance to the paradoxes of our times. After the early revolts in philosophy at the beginning of the century, philosophers have sought concreteness and objectivity; they have cultivated experience and existence; they have built structures to use and determine facts and data. Since experience and existence define both nature and art, there are no inexperienced facts, no ungiven data and, in general, no separate existences from which experience may derive concreteness and objectivity. What we do and what we say are not mere channels to reality but the specifications and embodiments of the real. We treat facts when we act and speak, and the analysis of action and language is the analysis of what is and of what it is. But philosophies of existence and experience must treat facts and phenomena not the facts of any experience or problem; therefore, they undertake to solve no particular problem and, of course, they differ in their solutions of general problems of the nature of processes and reality, and of phenomena and existence.