What I want to do is think the horizon of my own understanding. From the subjective side “I” seem to be at once free and finite. From a more objective view I am embedded the very world I seek to know as it is in itself. What I am able to understand depends on the relation between myself and the rest of it. My capacity for understanding seems to be only partial because it depends on my constitution. Much of the way the world is may be constitutionally beyond my reach. I may be "self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference” as Hofstadler put it. But I could just as well be contained in a world at least some of which I may conceiving objectively as it is. If one of these ways are the case for all people on this planet, other intelligent beings with a different POV might presumably be in the position tell us how we are actually contained in the world.
We may perceive some of it trans-subjectively, that is not to say objectively. Objective understanding is hermetically sealed off from actuality, since we simply are built to interpret. No other perspective could provide us with objective understanding as this would imply that none of our subjective, bodily faculties of forming knowledge conceptions would be at work in creating this understanding. What we understand is necessarily a function of what we are. The more we are alike, the more we will understand in the same way.
Calling what we understand objective is to assume that all possible intelligences necessarily understand the way we do, if they would not be blind. This is indeed the assumption of science.
They are in the position to give us ideas, to influence our personal interpretation of our being-in-the-world. That is all, I think. We all choose different models in the end, fitted to what we are.
I think that the “ultimate truth” as far as truth gets ultimate is to be seen if we observe the model of reality a given person develops to the backdrop of what we know of his life. In studying how subjectivity gives rise to notions of objectivity. In this sense we can also understand science. Disinterested subjectivity gives rise to mechanistic objectivity. A very particular, even odd perspective rises from it, powerful enough to annihilate the planet, not even close to powerful enough to explain the conditions of its own arising. It’s just a technique, and an interpretation of the world aimed to make it accessible to that technique.
Right trans-subjective agreement is a putative means of achieving greater objectivity. But I think trans-subjective view intends to point beyond itself toward ultimate objectivity.
Yeah, it’s the view from everywhere or nowhere.
Perhaps ultimate objectivity “exists” only as the black background in a gestalt with every actual POV with which it is contrasted. As such the ulitimate is contentless. Even so it is phenomenologically like an encompassing ground or abyss from which known model or theory emerges. If nothing else, awareness of the ultimate in this sense shows up the limitations of every would-be totalizing model or theory.
I still say that it points to greater subjectivity, away from objectivity. Precisely because it points.
I’d say the view from a specifically human perspective, but understood as if it is from everywhere.
Thus, misunderstood, which means misleading us as to what it points out.
I think the model or theory emerges in the interplay between subjective desire to control, and the suggestion of an objectivity that may provide means to control. What is brought forward from the black backdrop (the unknown - the non-subjective) is that specific aspect of whatever may exist that answers to our subjective angle.
Jacob–OK. So is your position that the objective way of looking at things is hypothetical or speculative and that it is a subset of our inescapable subjectivity?
I think that the perspective is very real, but that it follows in all of its conditions from what we are capable of isolating.
It is nothing we should be calling objective, but rather a set of increasingly stable notions bound to deeply subjective conditions. Consider for example the imagination necessary to picture Earth orbiting the sun. How could a knowledge requiring imagination be objective?
Unless our imagination was given to us from God as an instrument that has nothing to do with our own animal, conditioned functions of survival, but is objective, a magic window of Truth, we could not think of any product of it as unconditioned, objective.
However:
-science is a consistent reality within the sphere of human imagination.
-science grants us certain powers of manipulation.
Therefore:
-the type of power which science grants us is inextricably linked to our imagination.
-the the aspects of nature over which science grants us control, are the aspects that have formed our imagination.
Well, take what Locke called the primary and secondary qualities of any object. Secondary qualities change according to POV. But what about primary qualities? A square is square even from points of view where it does look square. How can we conclude otherwise than that a square is a square independently of any subject’s view of it? That is the very definition of objectivity. One to one correspondence between a priori geometric intuition and things as they are would seem to have survival value. The neural structures that are the bases of forms of thought by which we understand experience may have been hard-wired into us by natural selection.
Right! That seems to be a primary form of imagination/conception. The form most consistent with applicability, hence what we would be tempted to call the most objective. I agree that these conceptions seem to be hardwired in us, and that in as far as we are the standard, they objectively exist. Whenever Kant talks of a priori intuitions I am thinking of such basic geometry, of which duality (from wich logic is derived) is one aspect.
Here it becomes possible to conceive of thought that is more objective to man than logic - thought that is more fundamentally consistent with the human mind.
I added the word “more” before “fundamentally” in the last sentence - we can surely move beyond geometry too, surely also geometrical conceptions arise from certain conditions. But understanding logic as secondary to ‘geometrical intuitions’ seems to be a step closer to the root of our cognitive consciousness, which should enable a level up of control over our environment.
Before we automatically think control in terms of technology, deeper understanding may disclose a different type of control, and a different type of conception of “environment”.
So the apriori categories of thought in so far as they are not conditioned by language, may be based on neural structures. If so, it seems a way toward understanding the objective psyche [a Jungian term] would be to integrate the findings of neuro-cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and structural linguistics like Steven Pinker is doing.
I would group linguistics under geometry.
Try to understand our conception of grammar by explaining it in terms of our conception of form.
I’ll work on that. Meanwhile, I’m curious, what’s the significance of the Song of Solomon quotation in your signature line for you?
For me that phrase has to do with sacrificing the subjective in favor of the objective. I feel that western man is in such a position, if ‘vineyard(s)’ means ‘world’ or ‘reality’ - he subscribes to an image of the world which is per definition not his, and the notion of which therefore takes away from his own world.
I adopted the phrase at the surprising realization that I actually have the power to explain existence in terms that make sense to me, terms that actually (here, now, in relevant terms) make sense. I’ve for long faithfully believed in science as “the truth out there” as most of us do, until this valuation-concept dawned on me.
[size=85]The “objective” science of functionality (totally subjective to the specific condition that objectifies it) is deathly, and Nietzsche painstakingly made the first step to another type of science, a “philosophy of the future”. We should be keeping two things closely in mind: the will to power as the scientific formulation for what drives and keeps the world moving, and willing as valuing. Value and power are closely related concepts and this relation has not been fully understood in philosophy so far. The reason for this failure to understand becomes apparent in this thread, as philosophers hark back to a Darwinistic model, where repetition of successful function, “nature as law”, is emphasized, instead of nature as a constant experimenting, to which success and procreation, and consequently also “natural law”, are contingent. [source-thread][/size]
This made of science a comprehensible product, useful and true in its own context but quite random outside of it. Something by nature obedient instead of commanding - a revaluation that is steering me toward my own vineyard.
I was also just admiring the poetry of Solomon. It is remarkably exuberant compared to the dusty image the Jewish God has acquired.
Hegel extensively dealt with the things discussed here, and pointed to similar conclusions as I have arrived at… or so it seems. I was just reading in Phenomenology of the Spirit:
[size=90]“This unconditioned universal, which is now the true object of consciousness, is still just an object for it; consciousness has not yet grasped the Notion of an unconditioned as Notion. It is essential to distinguish the two: for consciousness, the object has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle; but consciousness is not for itself the Notion, and consequently does not recognize itself in that reflected object. For us, this object has developed through the movement of consciousness in such a way that consciousness is involved in that development, and the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection. But since in this movement consciousness has for its content merely the objective essence and not consciousness as such, the result must have an objective significance for consciousness; consciousness still shrinks away from what has emerged, and takes it as the essence in the objective sense.” [A. III][/size]
“the reflection is the same on both sides, or, there is only one reflection.”
This reflection is what I have proposed to be recognizable as basic geometry. In a manner of speaking, the screen between the subject and object, the mediator between consciousness and its product (of which it is itself is a product) - the “magic mirror” through which “raw” existence / energy appears to itself as form, being(s).
Interesting application of the verse. My impression is that thought has been trending more and more towards the subjective for several centuries. It may be the result of a rapidly changing society where individuals are atomized and consequently there sem to be less judgments that hold good in the same way for everybody. Realization of our subjectivity has not cured us of our disasterous attempt to overcome our dependence on nature.
Hegel’s statement’s here apparently grew out of Jacobi’s reaction to Spinoza’s “pantheism”. In Spinoza’s system what things are depends on their not being other things. In themselves everything is part of God. So being a particular thing depends on each thing conditioning and being conditioned by everything else. This results in conditions of conditions. Grounding requires something unconditioned. For Jacobi this was God. Faith could not be justified in cognitive terms.
If one does not except God as the explanation of the world of conditions one has to find the conditions of the unconditioned because explanation is precisely the specification of the conditions of something. The German idealists attempted to break out of this infinite regression by proposing to find the unconditioned in subjectivity. That is, consciousness itself is unconditioned because it is what enables us to be aware of all conditions.
To prove it, they appropriated Kant. The existence of the objective world is inferred from causality, but the category of causality depends on the subject. It is the subject’s spontaneous application of the concept of causality to phenomenon.
Hegel seems to take the next step in the passage you quote. Kind of an apotheosis of subjectivism. From there it is only a hop, skip and a jump to the grandiosity of a historical dialectic and projection that the rational was the real and the real rational. No?
I don’t think any scientist has realized his subjectivity to the proper extent. And without including science, a notions of subjectivity are meaningless, because they would still fall within the belief in the presence of scientific objectivity.
It is one thing to understand the world as being perceived as subjective, it is quite another to explain science as a subjective endeavor - refute the notion that it is objective, as I believe I’ve done, sort of. I need to work on that more.
So far the view of science was always ‘in a largely subjective world, at least we can be sure that science is true everywhere’. But we can’t. It all depends on what we start with, the context we choose to manipulate, the criteria we choose to determine consistency.
I’ve tried to show this to be unnecessary. My explanation of “valuation” should account for everything that can be perceived, every form of being, every form. And the beauty is that it does not require belief, just a close look at ones own primary activity.
The key word here is “condition”. That is all one has to look at to explain anything.
There need be no abstract, condition-less explanation of something that is per definition conditioned. Existence is conditioned by it being conditioned. We only need to look at how conditioning is possible in the first place.
But Kant was completely in the dark as to the subjects conditions, how the subject conditions the content of his consciousness.
I find Hegel one of the few who consistently makes sense. He doesn’t just propose things, but thoroughly works out concepts to see what they must lead to, draws consequences, describes process, describes how types of consciousness come into being.
Anyway, the real and the rational are terms for different things, representations of different conceptions. Neither exists as such - neither has meaning for me now that I’ve transcended that dichotomy. So I could not agree that they are equal or interchangeable - in as far as the words have meaning they mean different things. But they are just not meaningful anymore at this point.
Valuation is the consistently relevant term. Notice it’s (derived from) a verb. In as far as anything really “exists” as we understand the term, its being is grounded in this root-activity, the ground of all beings, entities and forms.
What this “primacy of valuation” view brings about is not only an understanding of the supposedly objective in terms of its applicability to the subjective, but also understanding of the subjective in terms of what appears to be happening objectively. The dichotomy “inside”/“subjective” and “outside”/“objective” is not just questioned, but made unnecessary, impossible even.
I don’t know how much any scientist has realized his subjectivity. Science was thought of as a subjective endeavor in so far as thinkers took on the Cartesian aim of making the human subject “the master and Possessor of nature.” A conception of humanity that valorizes our capacity to affirm our sovereignty over ourselves and the world doesn’t seem tenable to me at this point.