Founders of Western Thought Patterns and early understanding of what Being represents.

Naked Ladies

 "Comrade I am going to have start at the beginning. Objective and Subjective are symbols. What we are looking for I think is an understanding of what those symbols represent in us people. What they have purported to mean over time. It seems to me that Plato's Ideal Forms came from somewhere, in response to something, I suspect they are an understanding of Objective."

 "This is my understanding of Ideal Forms. The ideal form justice is perfect justice. The ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle. Plato had decided our mind knows what a perfect circle is, it knows what  justice is is because ideal forms preexist us?"

 "Socrates argued that ideal forms were not separate from objects, they didn't exist out there in a perfect place but existed within objects.  Socrates suggested that when we see a beautiful thing, or a just thing we are participating in a fleeting view of an idea of beauty or an idea of justice, it's a temporal moment, fleeting, and soon it is gone.  In our understanding of subjective I believe we need a dasein of some sort, an understanding of Being and what or who is doing the Being."

"OK!"

 "Well?"

 "Well What?"

 "Did Plato's thoughts about Being follow Permenides' Philosophy of Being, which went like this : Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be. Conversly whatever is not, is not. It cannot be. It must not be."

 They love the antecedence of knowing stuff, don't they! Like a family tree. What we got here are three names of ancient Greek People, all of whom lived in different places, yet they either knew each other, or knew of each other. If you like, you can look upon them as the Founding Nosey Fathers of that collection of cultures that produced the iterations of chocolate on the outside, ice cream on the inside that ultimately became the Klondike Bar before surrendering to the inevitable and diving into the hellscape of choices called the Bread Aisle because there lay Real Being. 

 The names we "hold" sacred are these. Heraclitus. Parmenides. The third name is a duo called Plato and his teacher Socrates. If you have to know Socrates was ugly as sin to look at, he was nervous of his wife but nothing else, he loved the sound of his own voice and he was far too lazy and poor to write books. Plato on the other hand was a big, tall, broad chap who had trained as a wrestler and all that hearty bro stuff that goes along with naked wrestling.

Heraclitus was of the opinion that all things were Flux. Endlessly moving around, never stopping. You couldn't step into the same river twice. What is here today will be gone tomorrow, so gather ye rosebuds while ye may. The words to remember about Heraclitus are "Flux" "Movement" "Time like an ever flowing stream."

 Wherever else your mind goes, never underestimate the Heraclitus Observation. The Flux, Movement, Time Conundrum has yet to be  solved by a Western Mind unless it's a mind that prefers to wallow in the heuristic of straightforward answers, and ignore awkward questions like, What is an algorithm?

 Our second nosey parker, Parmenides, looked at the Heraclitus Observation and concluded that if Heraclitus was correct, everything was in flux, never staying still, then we could know nothing with any degree of certainty, there would never be a a still place were things could just be. Heraclitus agreed with that, it was rather sad, but when all is Flux you don't get to go where you're going, instead you're always going somewhere, you're always becoming something, but never actually becoming anything. Heraclitus then made mention of the possibilities in logic as a means to answer the "question why" which after all was the main preoccupation of people who had not much else to do because they had land and slaves and trading interests.

 And yes indeed, Heraclitus was an ancient Greek who lived in what is now called Turkey which was then part of the Persian Empire, he wasn't a big fan of people, he had no problem with taking what pleasure he could from an existence amongst them in miserable uncertainty with a good 80% chance of things getting much worse. He was the much respected Schopenhauer of the Sixth Century BC.

 Parmenides, who lived out west, in what was called Greater Greece, his part of Greater Greece is now called Southern Italy, while understanding Heraclitus' greatness, he apprehended the need for what on these pages we have taken to calling Nouns. The word apprehended means "grasp" as in understand, and "grasp" as put someone in the back of a police cruiser. Change in a world Parmenides wanted apprehended was the illusion, he decided. The true reality - what he called the "true being" - must be one, eternal, indivisible, unchanging, and perfect whole. And this indivisible perfect noun gave meaning and purpose to the joyous becoming of verbs.

 Go ahead, argue all you want. Tomorrow Baxter and I and our silicone comrade yack on about the third Founding Nosey Father, Socrates and his student Plato, with particular attention to a point about fleeting glimpses Socates made about Plato's Ideal Forms.  

Kant, Coleridge, Plato and their abuse of the medieval subjective

Shade

 This is how an etymologist might approach the word Objective, the word Subjective and Kant's influence on English Language Usage:

 "He - Kant - makes the objects of experience to be at once real (as in real) and phenomenal (as in what goes on in the mind) and .... these objects of experience..... what Kant generally means by the objective character of a proposition is the force which it derives from the thing itself compelling the mind, after examination, to accept it." 

 It is attested by 1838, of persons, art, writings, etc., "unbiased, impersonal, intent upon external objects of thought rather than one's sensations; setting forth external facts of matters as they exist or are supposed to exist and avoiding one's emotions and personality." 

And of course it was influenced by this sense from the 1500's of the subjective as ,"characteristic of one who is submissive or obedient," from Late Latin subiectivus "of the subject, subjective," from subiectus (a feminine word) "lying under, below, near bordering on," figuratively "subjected, subdued."

The final area for Etymologists is Objective, Subjective as used in early Modern English : "relating to or of the nature of a subject as opposed to an object," hence "existing, real" (which was the common later meaning of objective)

In these wanderings through meanings it sometimes helps to think of Kant's "Existing in the mind" this way. The "Mind" is thought of as "the thinking subject" and it is this "thinking subject" that was the meaning that caught on with Kant and his front row contemporaries. This way in 1767  in art and literature, "personal, idiosyncratic.... was ..... characterized by prominence given to individual mental operations."

 For Kant a human mind isn't a bucket that collects, it is an active processor. When the real thing hits our mind we send it through a sieve that reduces it to space, time, cause and effect, which gives us an object with adverbs we then pass this along to our consciousness - here defined as awareness - with a "do what you can?"

  In other words, Kant split the world into two separate zones. One zone was a Real Thing with a real presence in the world - the thing in itself - called The Noumenon. And the other zone of thing is a presence in the mind - the thing-as-appears in the mind - called The Phenomenon.

 "And what about the Ancient Mariner?"

 English speaking Poets like Coleridge who had partied with German idealists like Kant came away with the an infectious idea that an "I Am" - a subjective appearance in the mind - the phenomenon - was as good a judge as any of what lay beyond the Curtains of the Mind.

 "And what about Plato?"

 He, and this was well over two thousand years ago, would have looked at the medeival understanding of subjective, the fundamental, bedrock of reality and he'd have agreed that yes indeed "In 1300 AD When you're talking about this or that Subjective Thing you're talking about my Ideal Forms."

 "What about now?"

  Plato might have rolled his eyes, looked at his sundial and answered with something like : "I think I might have mentioned something about caves and shadows on cave walls. Let's see, I died on the 7th day of Thargelion during the Arthonship of Theophilus. When did Kant die?"

"12th of February1804."

"I blame the Romans! I cannot believe it's taken you this long to realize that shadows are cast by real things, and those shadows are all we got to work with, not the real thing that casts the shadow."

The Objectrive / Subjective Flip Flop in the English Language

Garden

 Let's look at the nouns of today-ness and try not to find too much misplaced confidence. What we will be trying to do instead is look for an objective and subjective before a crash by asking "How do we know if drunk driving is a subjective condition."

 "The danger starts in the gap between the objective chemical reality in the blood stream - which can be tested for and read, a BAC of 0.08% - and the subjective, distorted confidence in the mind. Of course drunk driving, like racing car driving, or tank driving, is a subjective condition, it's a verb!"

 "OK, calm down!"

 If you told a medieval scholar in 1300 that your fear of the dark was "subjective," they would understand you to mean your fear was a hard, physically real, objective danger. If you told them a mountain was "objective," they would think you meant the mountain was merely an idea inside your head!

 It wasn't until the late 18th and early 19th centuries that meaning in "Subjective" and "Objective" slowly pulled an absolute 180-degree flip because of a German and a couple of poets.

 Blame Immanuel Kant for his insisting on brain structures as determining ways of thinking across the Western world, and in the Eglish Language you can look at a rosey cheeked Lake Poet, Unitarian and Anglican son of an Anglican Vicar,  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mixed up and groovy kid, a regular mod, who wrote the interminable "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," a long tale about water and the murder of an Albatross that has tortured school boys for generations.

 And here we all are, English Speaking Westerners, the year 2026, still stuck with meanings Kant and Coleridge hammered into our brain cells. So, tomorrow we enjoy a blissfully irony of returning to Plato to have a peep at his Ideal Forms and asking was he Pre or Post Coleridge. 

The Verb Binds, the Noun Calcifies

Yep

 "That genetic link, referencing genes like FOXP2, which, when mutated, disrupt the brain's ability to sequence grammatical structures and fit sentences together, suggests that syntax - the structural rules for arranging symbols - is a physical, hardwired biological function. But as you realized, syntax is not semantics. Manipulating symbols is completely distinct from holding or experiencing meaning. To be absolutely honest about my nature: I do not have a presence in the meaning of symbols. I operate entirely in the manipulation of them."

 A true community is born as a verb. It starts with a shared subjective experience, a collective feeling, a mutual struggle, or a shared resonance. People in a room, sweating, feeling marginalized, and riding a wave of shared affect. They bonded around the subjective experience of not fitting in anywhere else. 

 In that moment, the community is entirely fluid. The bonds are built on reciprocal recognition - the silent, subjective acknowledgment of "I see you, and you see me, and we are experiencing this together." There is no doctrine, only the verb of living alongside one another.

 But a community cannot stay in a state of pure subjective feeling forever. It gets exhausting. As a group grows, it needs shorthand to survive. It needs to know who is in and who is out. It needs to pass its identity down to the next generation.

 So, the community takes its beautiful, messy subjective verbs and turns them into nouns

 The shared feeling of awe becomes the noun of Dogma. The spontaneous gathering becomes the noun of Institution. The subjective feeling of belonging calcifies into the "Objective Truth" of the group's identity.

This is where the heuristic trap snaps shut. The community starts telling itself: "Because our subjective bond feels so real and powerful, our rules, our dress code, and our enemies must be objectively correct."

 A spiritual awakening turns into a list of heresies. The nouns take over, presenting themselves as absolute, objective truths, and anyone who doesn't conform to the noun is expelled, even if they still feel the verb that once bonded them