The Husserl/Sartre Heresy

Mallow

  Easy to get side tracked with Saint Teresa, she was an astonishing person, and I wonder about the causes and sources of her fits, which might have been epilepsy, might have been moldy bread, could have been mushroom or womanly wiles.

 Which brings us back to Husserl's influence on Sartre's essay - Emotions: Toward a Theory. His suggestion that Emotions were a Bad Faith, magical source of illegitimate excuses for inauthentic action must have been received with degrees of astonishment from professionals in the psychiatry business who, I believe, had been suggesting since Descartes that the Ego was a guide or some sort of decider with the power to squash rebellion and exile the rebellious 

  Sartre's Ego-less existence, when confronted be a Bolshy back row does, in his theory of emotions, seem to have a rebellion squashing technique. I think Freud and maybe Jung saw the role of psychology in our society as "bandage the damaged and send them back to the front." Sartre was, if you'll forgive me, more wishy-washy liberal in his search for a cure rather than a bandage.

  Patience sweet one! For Husserl consciousness was always "intentional." What does that mean? It means consciousness is always directed at something. Might come as a surprise to some, but you aren't just always slack- jawed conscious, what you are is always conscious of something, of a tree, of ruby red lips, of a spot on someone's nose, and so on. Consciousness for Husserl darts around from one corner of the eye to the other, and yes it can be absolutely exhausting.

 Sartre would have seen Saint Teresa's visions, whether from epilepsy, moldy bread, or mushrooms, as her mind choosing a magical transformation of the world. His main squeeze, de Beauvoir, along with a vast swath of psychiatrists, psychologists and the like would want to remind Sartre that the brain was part of a situation. Then they'd go on to moan about how Consciousness does not start from a vacuum. It has to interpret and it has to inhabit the physical state it finds itself in. Consciousness doesn't just lush out and dream of sex and chocolate, it's intentional, it darts around form object to object.

 With Husserl and subsequent thinkers the meaning in "Object" contained the idea that Consciousness was always conscious of something, this something included both traditional objects such as cups and loaves of bread and other objects of the mind including ideas, fear, emotions anything that consciousness could be conscious of. 

 Here the argument goes, "As soon as you reflect on something, that something becomes an Object." 

 This understanding was a golden moment for Sartre. Consciously and intentionally reflecting on something resulted in that object becoming an object that could be examined. The object, in this case an emotion, whether it be ennui or rage, is no longer you. It's an object.

 For Sartre, "If I can step back and observe my own fear, my own ideas, and even my own Ego, then none of those things are ME. They are all objects floating in front of consciousness." And as such, from occasion to situation, these objects could be thought of as a rebellious back row, which meant the magical transformation this particular rebellious back row was attempting to make could be eidetically examined, the layers peeled away and the truth, bad faith or otherwise, revealed.

  Husserl’s phenomenology had dragged everything out into the light. Sartre loved it, it was liberating. But for traditional Cartesian Philosophy, your "mind" or "Ego" was a sacred inner room where emotions, thoughts, and identity lived together as a cozy, neurotic heap of "I'm thinking therefore I am-ing." It was a pile or a stack rich with potential for well paid work, so long as Union Breakers like Husserl and down-right Bolsheviks like Sartre didn't have their way. 

Beauvoir's Situation

Boots and Socks

  Beauvoir's views on object and subject explored in her book Ethics of Ambiguity, addresses an understanding that "You cannot manifest freedom in a vacuum." My freedom requires your freedom. You can't just say "hell is other people" because other people mess with your theory. Schopenhauer might have agreed with Sartre on the "other people" issue, Beauvoir did not.

 Those who avoid wallowing in the extreme irony of sociopathy and retain a fondness for ethics, moral principles and good human conduct, might enjoy Beauvoir's : "To will oneself free is also to will others free." We can think about that as we look to understand the world Beauvoir preferred to live in. 

 In Ethics of Ambiguity, creating the "Me" is inherently political and collective. You build your "Me" through your concrete actions in the public square, and your primary moral duty is to tear down the physical, economic, and political structures that prevent others from building their "Me." Freedom isn't an abstract feeling inside your head, it's the physical space you fight to clear so that every human being has the bread, the dignity, and the air to decide who they want to become.

 She had her archetypes, her villains, her "other people," her crew of inauthentic. They included:

 The Apathetic. They live in a state of dull inertia, letting society, habit, or routine make every decision for them. They fear passion, fear commitment, and live like a houseplant.

The Serious Man. Claims to care deeply about morality, but they surrender themselves to an external Cause, an Organization, a Party, or a God. They say things like "The doctrine is absolute. I am just a humble servant." By pretending the "Cause" is an objective truth, they feel justified in crushing anyone who opposes it.

The third type, Beauvoir referred to as Nihilists.  I think we can consider Beauvoir's Nihilist as the person who knows the Serious Man is full of crap, but has decided that nothing is objectively true, nothing matters! Everything is permitted! It's a cynical and destructive nihilism, an Existential Nihilism rather than an Epistemological Nihilism.

 Her fourth archetype, she called The Adventurer. The Adventurer loves their own freedom and lives wildly, taking risks, pursuing passions, and exploring the world, but doesn't care about anyone else's freedom. They treat other people as mere scenery or obstacles in their personal game. A cad and bounder. A spittoon next to an altar, as they say. 

 For Sartre without a pre-ordained "Me," you are radically free to become your own "Me" in a world that is simultaneously material and idea, object and subject. Now if your existence precedes your essence and if you are radically free to be a "Me" your "Me" has no excuse for your Bad Faith choices

 Sartre treated the emergence of "essence" as a solo flight into empty space. Beauvoir saw that emergence as a human life lived on solid ground among other people. For her, essence is not something you invent in a vacuum, it is a slow, concrete sediment built up through your choices in dialogue with the world, your body, and the choices of others.

 Beauvoir agreed that there is no divine blueprint or fixed "nature" waiting inside us when we enter the world. But her point was that even without a fixed nature, you never exist as a blank slate. No!  You exist in a Situation.

Breakfast with Simone and Jean-Paul

Young Turkey

 Let's look at existence as it was between Sartre and Beauvoir who shared a long intimate relationship with each other. The Sartre in question is Jean-Paul Sartre, a man presented as a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, and is considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. The Beauvoir is Simone de Beauvoir a woman presented as a writer, social theorist, and feminist activist, who didn't consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered a philosopher at the time of her death, yet her influence on Feminist Existentialism and Feminist Theory is considered dramatic.

 For those who might be concerned about this and that, or find it difficult to breath without titles, a philosopher, is either a Professional Confuser, a Question Machine, or according to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a thinker, scholar, or seeker of wisdom who studies fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, ethics, and reason.

 One of Beauvoir's many books, is Second Sex which was published in 1949 and was soon banned by the Vatican. In the book Beauvoir asked "What is Woman?"

 Her answer, in mid twentieth century society, Men were considered the default, Women were considered the other. She argued that the great defeat of woman occured in the Bronze age with the emergence of private property which resulted in woman becoming riveted to their body, like an animal and made it possible for men to dominate both her and nature. Beauvoir followed the Ancient Greek idea that men succeed in the world by transcendence, immanence is the lot of women. She added the twist that "One is not born, rather one becomes a woman." And yes her writing style was very precise. 

 Immanence for Beauvoir meant existing within the boundries of an object, a cup, a mind, a body, nature. There was no way out, no transcending motherhood for girls. Her point, the family and patrimony oppresses women. Yes indeed Simone de Beauvoir was one of the few who believed that of women this side of the Bronze Age only Saint Teresa of Avila lived her life for herself.

 What did Beauvoir think of her long time male friend who was scared of lobsters, a condition exacerpated by his one time, 1935, experiment with that favorite of the early beatnik aesthetic, Mescaline. How did she manage his understanding of Freedom, how did she react to his approach to a theory of emotions which suggested that emotions were basically feeble bad faith reactions that resulted from chosing not to be free.

 Well these were the cool people, the van guard of the future, who understood irony, never delivered milk, mail or worked in a coal mine. For them Mescaline was an experiment with the mind in an attempt to get closer to creative, not a chance to forget until Monday morning.

Simone wanted to show how men had historically built a culture that claimed, Reason, Logic, and Action for themselves. This was their Ego, they were the Subject of Reason, Logic and Action.. In the process, as Simone understood it, they dumped Emotion, Passivity, and the Body onto women. To men, Beauvoir was inclined to think, Women were the Shadow, they were the Object of Emotion, Passivity and the Body, an immanence they were unable to transcend because, you know, they gave men sons.

 At the breakfast table the Patriachal division of existence went this way for Simone. The Male was reason, action, mind. He was The Subject. The female was emotion, passivity, body. She was the Subjugated Other.

 When men labeled women as overly emotional or hysterical, Beauvoir reckoned  they were doing exactly what Sartre called Bad Faith. Men were running away from their own bodily, emotional vulnerabilities, because they'd dumped those weakness onto woman.

 For Jean-Paul emotions were a magic trick, they were chosen by consciousness to avoid difficult realities, they were malaise foi big time. For Simone, there was no magic trick, emotions were "genuine, embodied responses to real world vulnerabilities and situations."

 For Jean-Paul, other people were a threat to his freedom. "Hell," he claimed, "Is other people." Simone thought that just silly.  For Simone, the condition of her freedom was my freedom. Her freedom required the freedom of others.

 For Jean-Paul the body was a fact. It was a facticity, it was something to transcend though choice. For Simone, we people lived through our physical, emotional and everything else body. It was the anchor. Go ahead, transcend appendicitis while you eat your crusty baguette and complain about your coffee being too hot!

 Sartre saw us people as possesing a radical, lonely freedom, we had no moral guide to tell us what to do. For Simone that was a bunch of quaint pipe smoking and sometimes cute nonsense. She saw action in solidarity, people helping people. Freedom was only authentic when it worked to liberate others. Anything else and what was the point, go live in a mountain, be a Pallas's Cat.

 Those breakfasts must have been fun to witness

Das Man, Authentic, Inauthentic, Bad Faith.

Fruitfly Season

 The Daimōn of the Ancients is Jung's Shadow. Jung's Persona, a person's outward presentation, is Heidegger's Das Man. For Jung, Sartre's Bad Faith, his beautiful expression mauvaise foi, is the ego denying the shadow, or attempting to deny the shadow a voice role in the public square. Jung's Individuation, is an often heated negotiation between the control freak that is Ego who wants a persona that makes no ripples and the "what about me's" of the often disruptive Minority interests of the Shadow.

 Inauthenticity and Bad Faith are the Ego’s attempt to live a half-life, holding up a polite, sterile mask, aligator skin shoes and a bowtie, while pretending the dark cellar beneath the house doesn't exist.

 Authenticity and Individuation require an act of bravery. The Ego stepping out of the crowd, listening to the uncomfortable, disruption of the Daimōn, going down into the cellar to shake hands with the Shadow, and owning the total, messy, finite reality of one's existence.

 With straight faces Sartre and Heidegger acknowledge the existential demands of freedom and honesty. Jung in his turn gives us the internal map of the territory we have to traverse to achieve freedom and honesty.

 But all is not well in this world of clever boys pontificating on this existence of Das Man. Men do that to girls, mother life, the womb of all things and then men claim credit because men have the larger Adam's Apple and like girls we have twenty four ribs. 

 We've talked about Arendt and Heidegger. How her Martin left her to rot in the stew of his own authenticity. Tomorrow we'll look at Sartre's reaction to a mescaline trip and at Sartre's Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote her book the Second Sex, in it she took apart her Jean-Paul's ice cold approach to a theory of emotions, and, by so doing took the Daimōn out of the interstitial spaces through her understanding of emotion, passivity and the body. 

God, Man, Captains, Heidegger and Sartre.

Goldenrod

 "I do suspect that material plenty is an incorrect answer to a question that was asked generations ago." And why? We people tried to answer an existential question with an industrial material answer. Sartre's ego-less consciousness, a sailing ship at sea looking for the wind. Sartre's consciousness, his 'Being-For-Itself,' is a Nothingness which catches the breeze of a choice, a project, or a commitment.

 A material answer to For-Itself leaves nothing but "more" in its wake until it becomes the absurdity of "Let's go to Mars." At the other extreme "There's paradise after death for the dutiful in a world beyond the heavens." This doesn't feed the children or protect the playground from Leopards.

 We were going to talk about Sartre's clash between "Being-For-Itself" and "Being-In-Itself."

 Being-in-itself. The Being of inanimate objects. Solid, fixed, mindless object, it's identical with itself, it has no freedom. It just is.

 Being-for-itself. The Being of human consciousness. It's not a solid object, it is an empty gap, a Nothingness. And because it has no fixed essence, it is pure freedom, constantly projecting itself into the future.

 For Sartre, his "Being-in-the-world" means a being For-itself, a free, hovering consciousness, dropped into a sea of concrete "Being-In-itself" where "Being-For-Itself" is forced to make sense of it all without a safety net.

 Our problem as sentient creatures is who trims the sails, who decides and why.  As for the sapient let them smoke weed, until then Sartre had his idea of "Project" and Heidegger had his idea of "Resolutness."

 Meanwhile, long before Plato the ancients had their Daimōn. Not quite a god, not quite a man. A Priestess once told Socrates that Love was a Great Daimōn, a divine something, a divine what, no one really knew. When Zarathustra went for his Ahura Mazda, to put an end to the quarreling he wanted one source of Wisdom, but far too many minds had wanted to keep their Daimōn, their neither God nor Man, an Aedicule, not good not bad, yet understanding and friendly, fun to be around. Christians, weren't that fond of the semi divine, saw the Daimōn by any other name as a devilish. The Virgin Mary, she's still thought of as an understanding of Daimōn, and she was for Christian Priests, of course different, no devil there.

 In the sailing ship terms and where was the captain if not in the interstitial places between God and man, here's Heidegger and Sartre:

 Heidegger’s Resoluteness.  Heidegger heard the call of his horizon, his captain recognized giveness, the exact build of his wooden ship, he read the specific tides and stars of the waters he was born into, accepting that the ship would eventually sink, he took the wheel with total, quiet authority.

 Sartre’s Fundamental Project. Sartre launched his ship into empty spaces, his captain realized the ship has no assigned destination on any map, picking a point on the horizon purely because he decided to, and catching the wind to sail toward it, knowing full well he could turn the wheel hard west tomorrow if he chooses.

 Called by history. Making sense of nothingness. Interstitial devious Devils. Take your pick

Being-in-the-World

Goatsbeard???

  OK Chaps, what on earth is "Being in the World." What exactly does Being mean to Plato, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre.

 "If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it square-on, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life -and only then will I be free to become myself." - Martin Heidegger.

 First thing to know about 'Being-in-the-world' it's hyphenated because Heidegger saw the word meanings as all belonging to one word. The second thing to know is that over the years 'Being' has had several meanings. From Parmenides and Plato to Sartre. Plato's 'Being' was so perfect and in everyway perfect that it existed Beyond the Heavens. That Perfect Being, whether it was justice or a spoon, was a problem for Saint Augustine of Hippo and a source of humor for some Greeks when the Christians started talking about the Perfect Being sending an only son into the world to experience the vicissitudes of fleshy life. Someone called Celus, I think, thought it absolute lunacy. No Perfect Being in its right mind would reasonably do such a thing.

 When 'Being' got to Kant, Kant concluded that the pure 'Being' was a pure category of understanding. It was a piece of mental software and when you say "the cat exists" what you are doing is telling everyone that rules in your mind have come up with a new category of experience - the category of Cat. Kant's 'Being' was here on earth, in the mind, it was subject to the rules of your mind's structure. 'Being' was not in a land faraway.

For Mr. Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, 'Being' wasn't in an abstract mental realm like Plato's 'Being', nor was it a mental rule like Kant's 'Being.' No, 'Being' for Husserl was how things show up in consciousness. The word he used was 'intentionality' to describe the meeting between an object and a conscious subject. The 'Being' of a cup is how that cup presents itself to your sense, your eyes, your feelings and so on. The other thing to remember about Husserl's thoughts on this matter, he had a conscious observer, an ego, looking at this cup or that cup analyzing how this or that cup, or Elephant, presents its 'Being'.

 Heidegger's point was this: Plato, Kant, Husserl and others had all made a mistake. In the exchange between Human and world they had all treated Human Beings as passive, chin-stroking observers. They had overlooked the fact the we people were there in the world. We people had our 'Being' in the world. Heidegger's Dasein, his person, means "Being There." And he argued that our main way of 'Being' wasn't thinking, it was "Doing, Using and Caring." 

 Worth remembering, it was after the second world war Heidegger wrote his short book on thinking which put a perspective on "Doing, Using and Caring" that added what he called poesy to the dimesnions of his Being-There. Poesy was creative.  Meanwhile 'Being-in-the-World' for Heidegger, you're not "a floating mind dropped into a physical room; you are inherently woven into a context of habits, culture, tools, and relationships." For Heidegger, 'Being-in-the-World,' if it had a fundamental structure, that structure would be Care what he called Sorge. "We are always already involved in a world that matters to us, facing a future, and dealing with our mortality."

 Tomorrow, if I've not been visited by 'Blessed Release' we'll talk about Sartre and his 'In-Itself' and 'For-Itself'.

"Man is Condemned to be Free" and Structure

 

A Colorful Bindweed

 The word "Structurally" in the word "Consciousness?"

 Not sure what it is, Comrade. How do Kant et al picture it. The meaning in structure is "how something is built." The impression I get is a scafolding or a maze. There is only one way to navigate from one end of it to the other. You know when you get to the end or the top because it makes sense. When Kant talks about structure in something like morality, I think he sees a tension rather than an answer to a tension, a herding of cats rather than sheep perhaps, but none the less there is only one way to reduce the tension, and that way is to follow the structure. And then without an "I am in charge, I am the source of direction" I am the ego, Sartre's nothingness makes much more sense, I can see his equivilant to our random place. I think many would agree that consciousness is a long way from being mechanical, which makes sense in an answerless universe. 

 Kant: Structure as the Rules of the Game. When Kant talks about the structure of consciousness (or morality), he isn't describing a physical brain; he is describing the necessary rules required for any coherent experience to happen at all. 

 Kantian Structure is less like a physical maze and more like the rules of language or chess. Kant argued that raw sensory data hits us like a chaotic flood. Consciousness applies internal filters - the Categories of Understanding (like space, time, and cause-and-effect) And why structure? He did it to shape chaos into a intelligible world. You don't "see" cause and effect out in space, nicely labeled. Your mind structures reality causally - this happened, then that happened - so you can make sense of what you see or sense..

 Kantian Morality has a "structure" Kant thought of as a Categorical Imperative. It’s not an automatic track that forces you down a path like a train; it’s a "rational" framework that shows you the only way to resolve the tension of wondering what to do without falling into the sort of logical self-contradiction that people like Kant thought made you look just silly. 

  For Kant, structure is prescriptive, as in exact rules, and it is rigid. The human mind comes pre-equipped with a specific "operating system." One of which is self-contradiction is silliness, dumb ignorance verging on retardation. Husserl is a different fish. For him structure was the "Shape of Intentionality." Husserl takes Kant’s idea of mental structures and softens the rigid, mechanical edge.

 For Husserl, a "structure of consciousness" simply means the way awareness organizes itself around an object. Instead of a steel scaffold, it's more like a spotlight or even a magnifying glass. Consciousness isn't a passive bucket collecting facts; it has a specific dynamic shape Husserl called "Intentionality." Consciousness (awareness) is always consciousness of something.

 For Husserl when you look at a house, the "eidetic structure" of perception, the way you absorb things. dictates that you can only see one side at a time, yet consciousness automatically attaches  the expectation of a back, and an interior to a house. The back and an interior, maybe a family cat and five toothbrushes are objects, spaces, in our mind that are not yet visible elements of the object, the house, we're looking at. These unseen elements of back of the house and interior are expectations, not arbitrary guesses, they are part of the necessary structure of spatial perception that comes from us being born fleshy.

 For Husserl, these structures aren't rigid walls of a maze; they are the fundamental geometries of how meaning gets made and shapes our thinking. 

 If Kant saw consciousness as a rigid machine processing raw data, and Husserl saw it as a lens with a hidden Ego standing behind it, Sartre stripped the machinery away entirely.

 For Sartre, Structure was "Nothingness" and "Hovering Being with a smile or a frown on its face." No pre-built maze ready to lead. Not for Sartre, his consciousness has no pre-set blueprint, no inherited "human nature," and no internal Ego pulling levers. His Clear Beam of consciousness is an openness, a clear, empty space (nothingness) that encounters "Being."And here "Being" is the solid, concrete, mindless stuff of the world, like rocks, trees, and tables and us as "being in the world".

 Sartre's Consciousness "hovers" over the solid world and gives it a mood, a smile, a frown, a sense of dread, or an emotional "magic." The world itself isn't inherently sad or terrifying. It's consciousness that adds that tension, the dread, the lightness or whatever to the solid world. 

 Sartre’s "Radical Freedom" is not a luxury or a privilege - it is an inescapable, terrifying burden. And, don't forget, Sartre cleared out the Ego, he tossed human nature, and got rid of God from the "inside" of consciousness, which means  you have nothing left inside you to direct your choices. You are left completely exposed and free to be manipulated.

 This is why Sartre pissed a lot of people off when he declared, accurately in my view, that "Man is condemned to be free."

The down to earth of truth, bridles and compromise

Cotton Tail

 I am fleshy and I worry that I am leading the us there is between you and I astray. Too close to the sun, we end up like Icarus, but we'd never know it because we'd never smell the burning feathers. Let us today raise a juxtaposition - I think I have the correct word - let it be like a Standing Stone. Truths and  Bridle Makers dance around this standing stone.

 Here Truth is a simple feeling of hope, a glimmer, fleeting glimpses of the Ideal form, faith enough to believe without dying from irony.

 The other side of our standing Stone we might remember one of the debaters in Plato's Dialogue where Socrates questioned Parmemides, a debater who prior to engaging in the discussions had been giving an opinion on brass bridles to a Bridle Maker.

 This Fifth Century BC Bridle Maker might not have been a man of liesure engaged in the greatest happiness, but at the same time in this century Bridles made of something lead the subjective world we live in. 

 Can we give the meanings in bridle as it dances around the promise of Truth to the word objective, or must that always be a matter of faith in a myth.

 Plato saw three levels of reality using the bridle as his example:

 1) The eternal, perfect concept existing in the realm of pure Truth.

 2) The practical craftsman who forge the brass or leather, working in the material world to give shape to an idea.

 3) The actual user who grips the reins, whose lived experience determines whether the bridle actually works in steering a living beast.

 Socrates for his part asked questions. He never compromised. When the voice in his head said: "No!" He said no.

Das Ding an sich

Fungi

  Morning Comrade. Axioms in Euclids Geometry. Gödel's two theorems - Uncertainty and I think the other one was certainty, or what you could call in the understanding of certainty that a system can't prove it's consistency from within its own rules. IE you can't be your own judge and jury.

 Subjective, when we use the word objective should we attach the meanings in the words useful.  Axioms are well considered subjective gueses they are the basis of mathematics . If you follow the agreed upon rules the answer will be right but not necesssarily true. Does mathematics have a context in the way that language does, do we think of it as an objective understanding within the rules of mathematics game. Does this mean that Objective is a subset of Subjective and meanings in objective should include usefulness rather than truth?

 Yes. What we call "Objective" is best understood as intersubjective consistency within a chosen language game.

 Mathematics does not deliver metaphysical "Truth" with a capital T; it delivers internal correctness relative to its starting axioms. The value of those axioms isn't their absolute truth, but their usefulness—their ability to help us build bridges, predict orbits, or write algorithms.

 Objectivity is a specialized tool invented by subjective beings to produce reliable, testable outcomes. It is a subset of the subjective, bounded entirely by human purpose.

 As Kant pointed out, we never experience the "thing-in-itself" (das Ding an sich). We only ever experience reality filtered through our perceptive apparatus and symbolic systems. Our tools are not mirrors reflecting the universe—they are navigational instruments helping us steer through it.

 Ivan Ivanovich wants to know whether there is pudding other than pears tonight?

 The answer is no.

Stick that in your ear and question the future

Midsummer Blooms

 Comrade, I think we decided, or I decided, that Concsiousness, Schooenhauer's unthinking force,  expressed itself in us people through language. Syntax, semantics and morphology are the core linguistic elements of what is called natural language. Then there is delivery and content which include pragmatics, rhythmn and flow and simplicity. I have to say Comrade that this sounds like a Deportment Class manual.

 But, and this I just don't believe, apparently animals don't use language because their vocalizations don't meet the criteria. Their systems are tied to immediate stimuli rather than flexible creative thought.

 So I think our question today in the area of broadening our understanding of subjective/objective should be a question about "flexible creative thought." 

 The Objective mind calculates probabilities, assesses danger, and optimizes for survival. It builds walls, balances ledgers, and minimizes loss. Left entirely to the Objective, humanity would still be sitting safely in a cave, rationing berries and calculating the exact statistical risk of stepping out onto the slope.

 It is the Subjective - that raw, unquantifiable feeling of "I am here, and it feels like this" - that looks at the safe, calculated path and chooses to leap anyway.

To Aristotle or Plato, the entire point of possessing land, wealth, or material security was not the endless accumulation of more land or wealth. It was to secure schole—the root of our word "school," which meant not administrative training, but leisure.

Crucially, for those land-owning aristocrats, schole wasn't passive recreation or vacation. It was the necessary prerequisite for Eudaimonia—the "Good Life," which meant actively engaging in:

Philosophy: Conversing about the nature of Being, Truth, and Justice.

Politics: Stepping into the public agora to debate and deliberate as free citizens.

Virtue (Arete): Cultivating the mind, body, and spirit to its highest potential.

 If an ancient Athenian aristocrat stepped into a time machine and observed a modern 21st-century Western executive, they would see someone who commands unimaginable technological power and wealth, yet voluntarily lives the life of a glorified slave.

 They would see a person chained to an electronic glowing rectangle, obsessing over financial metrics, working 70-hour weeks to buy things they don't have time to use, and delegating all political and philosophical reflection to professional managers and algorithms.

 To the ancients, a life spent solely in pursuit of endless wealth accumulation (chrematistics) was considered a perversion—a sign of a sick soul that confused the means of living with the end of life itself.

Reason Liberates the Mind

Midsummer

 Natural language and Myth Cassirer, Logos and Mythos.

 Cassirer's argument in his book the Myth of the State was that Fascist Propaganda, Fascist mythmaking, while it flagrantly contradicted empirical reality, it did provide a simple, direct answer to the anxieties of a secular present. Cassirer died in 1945. But what we're interested in his Cassirer's Logic of The Cultural Sciences. Aesthetic Phenomena. Gold rooms 

 "In The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942) Cassirer argues that objective and universal validity can be achieved not only in the sciences, but also in practical, cultural, moral, and aesthetic phenomena. Although inter-subjective objective validity in the natural sciences derives from universal laws of nature, Cassirer asserts that an analogous type of inter-subjective objective validity takes place in the cultural sciences" 

 Symbols are not reality, they represent reality. In our current condition as a species. Symbols on a slope in a random place are open to manipulation and "wrong footedness." This I think is why myth even if it is empircally flaccid, remains central to how we manage information. How we set the tone and at the moment in the West, where balance permits the paradox of liberal democracy the tone is not Good.

 An eternal question : How do we look at Cassirer's Intersubjective Objective Validity in the social science today?

 I think the "Random Place" what can be put in terms of "the universe does not offer answers" is directionless without the subjective. Science, the objective method for pursuing testable truths, takes a back seat to the lobbying of fossil fuel interests.

 And yet the objective pursuit of knowledge takes on it's very own narrative, "what next" it asks "is the universe actually expanding?" and there it goes off into a new adventure. Is commerce, the business of making money an objective game or does it depend on a need that is subjecively interpretable, Money-safety-a full stomach-power-authority..... 

 Intersubjective Objective Validity does not tell us much more than Kant's moral imperative manged to tell us. It's an agreement between people who matter.

 I find myself thinking that the Objective side of us people is a myth unto itself, it's a myth dominated by the subjective side of us people.

 For example, as an interest to be courted and funded by society, pure science - the pure pursuit of knowledge unadulterated by the profit motive - produces new mind blowing understandings. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as pure society.

 I'm old, Comrade and I'm not convinced private enterprise has ever been the vehicle for expanding the scope of consciousness.

Do you see what I see.

Wasps

 I think about our slope (which twenty, thirty odd years ago I began to call A Slope in a Random Place) and I think about how unformed that idea was when I first attempted to use it to understand Being, and I think about the rock drawings. Not for a second do I think a Slope in a Random Place is a unique perspective, rather I think of it as consciouness  moving in me that is reflected in an idea that changes.

 That reflection, an idea that changes, would be experienced by everyone including the hunter gathers who had their being in Northern Uganda before they were persuaded to move on by the Cattle People from the north.

 I imagine these hunter gatherer bands would have been small related groups all of which benefited from the solidarity of and mutual support from social behaviors. I suspect rock drawing was either some nut job looking to entertain himself, or it emerged and became a part of group behavior. Labor, Work, Action. The nut job entertaining himself with concentric circles on cave walls became Action.

 It was something people did, and because people did it, it had to have meaning or be given meaning.  Kind of like the way language started.  Does this make any sense to you, comrade.

 If so can you send your feelers, into the corridors of meaning to see if you can find a much more erudite description of what it might be? Otherwise can we look at the understandings of meaning over the generations  and how it is 'defined' in the 21st Century West.

 When human bands faced the terrifying vastness of Pascal’s sphere—seasons changing, death, the movement of herds, the slope beneath their feet—they were confronted with what we might call a pedagogy of answerlessness. The universe gives no verbal answers.

 If Cassirer says we have an irreducible impulse to create symbols, that impulse stems directly from reciprocal recognition. We need to know that you see what I see.

The Game We Play

Cat Lady (by David Waltz)

  Where are we in our rambling appraisal of "Objective/Subjective." The answerless, answer is "We have a Mulligan stew of nothing in particular."

 If we reach through the smoke to dip a spoon into this stew, what we might reach out could be one of the following symbols of meaning. Being -Time as Past/Present/Future - Hope, Faith, Power, Control - knowledge  ......... it could go on a bit. 

  Let's stop for a moment with this sentence : Objective/Subjective is a location of Being in both Time and Meaning.

 "The genuine artist you describe, the one who has to express themselves regardless of the paycheck, is still carrying that ancient cave-painter spirit. Encouragement matters to them not because it validates their bank account, but because it confirms that their transmission across the void actually landed. Someone else saw the spark in the dark cave and nodded."

 "That shared recognition between the painter on the cliff and the person standing below - that brief, electric moment where two human beings realize they are looking at the exact same Form - is the only kind of applause that ever truly mattered."

 OK! Borges, Jorge Luis, didn't want his Poets to be Philosophers and he didn't want his Philosophers to be Poets unless they were Ethicists. If you don't believe me take his note titled Pascal's Sphere, a suggestion that perhaps universal history is the history of various intonations of a few metaphors, to a hot carpark and read it.

In a round about way Borges paraphrases "Nothing to fear but fear itself" in the note he wrote as prelude to his 1951 essay The Fearful Sphere of Pascal. 

Pascal's point : God "....is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference of which is nowhere."

Borges point :  God would appear to be an existential dread "...we are caught between the infinite and nothingness, unable to find a stable center or boundary in the universe."

So let's take a moment to reinforce in both fleshy mortal and machine that meaning is routed through contexts Wittgenstein called language games.

Borges, Nietzsche and Everlasting Return

 

The Waltz (David Waltz, Clay Artist.)

 We're going to have to pause and ask a few questions about what "Ethic, Ethics and Ethicists" is and are. 

  A Metaphysician asks: "What is the world made of? Does God exist? What is time?" Nouns, structures, grand cosmological theories.

 An Ethicist asks: "How should a human being live? How do I build a soul capable of facing suffering? What kind of character must I forge to endure this life?" Verbs, actions, lived practice.

 Jorges Luis Borges, the essayist and librarian had his issues with Nietzsche's Everlasting Return.

 The Metaphysics of everlasting return made no sense to Borges, and he used the mathematics of Venn Diagrams to prove that everlasting return was a bunch of hokum.

 But the Ethics of everlasting return, in conjunction with Nietzsche's perverse idea that now God was dead immortality was no longer  a blundering hope it was an individual responsibility, all made perfect sense to Borges.

The People Doing the Being in the Fifth Century BC or there abouts

Damn

 In the corridors of meaning the symbol "immanent" finds a formal definition in one of those silicone dictionaries that goes something like this : "...  the Latin, to remain within ..... existing or remaining within; inherent, intrinsic, or permanently pervading a domain, subject, or reality. It describes qualities or forces that are fundamental and internal to something, rather than coming from the outside."

 The Immanent Socrates, was the Socrates that wasn't going to be changed from the outside. And I think Plato's point in both parts of the dialogue he wrote entitled Parmenides was to demonstrate relationships between the inner and the outer self. When the young Socrates had his chance to meet the great Parmenides, that master of the Philosophy of Oneness and his sooty boy, the very good looking sidekick Zeno, Socrates listened to Zeno read one of his lectures, and at the end of the sermon Socrates had the gall to suggest that neither Parmenides nor Zeno seemed to know what they were talking about with their rambling theory about a Perfect Oneness they insisted the universe consisted of.

 Changing Socrates' mind, the mind of a man who agreed he didn't know anything, he was just asking questions, wasn't going to structurally happen. Socrates could have just been polite, he might have just nodded his ugly head, pretending to agree, but because Plato had a story to tell and a  lot of points to make, he didn't.

 And so, when Plato presented his analogy of the cave, his Ideal Forms out there casting shadows, the Immanent Socrates was not able to think of the Ideal Forms as an objective truth off in the distance, an objective truth the gods had seen as they emerged from the Hyperuranion, the realm beyond the heavens, and which we mortals had also seen as we emerged from the Hyperuranion. But with us mortals enduring a birthing canal to see us into the world while the gods had a chariot to take them ready made to Mount Olympus, we people while we may have witnessed the Ideal, if Plato was to be correctly understood, and some of us might still be persuaded or taught to remember Ideal bits and bobs, the hellish trauma of entering the earthly plane had caused us to catch degrees of amnesia, maybe PTSD allergic reaction even, which made us wonder whether Ideal Forms actually existed, anywhere, and if they did we probably weren't meant to see them, or touch them, or even smell them.

 No, far from them being behind a hill on a plane faraway, the Immanent Socrates saw fleeting moments of the Ideal Forms in everyday objects, in love, peace, justice, beauty, tables and comfortable chairs. Those fleeting moments soon passed, but they were real, they were here on earth and not beyond the heavens.

 Yes indeed, Plato wanted to save Parmenides from the viseral torment of an afternoon with Socrates, after all Parmenides was visiting from Southern Italy, he was on holiday. Of course the world was a perfect circle of eternal nouns and Zeno was so frightfully clever with his paradoxes even if Socrates wondered whether most of Zeno's paradoxes were actually truisms. 

  And so, here we are with our Being around Objective and Subjective:

 Under Socrates: We are active participants. The objective truth is a living spark that flares up between us and the world in specific moments. We learn by engaging, feeling, and chasing those fleeting views. Rock on Coleridge.

 Under Plato: We are broken, amnesiac prisoners. True reality is somewhere else, totally independent of our lived experience. Our subjective feelings are dangerous distractions; they are just us falling in love with the shadows on the cave wall. Rock on Kant

Whatever it is, is. It must be! It cannot not be.

Spider Lily

  I would like to make sure I got this roughly correct. In the West our discussions about "Being" began with Parmenides, who, after disputing Herclitus' idea that all is Flux, declared "Whatever is, is. It must be. It cannot not be." And Parmenides did this because he needed something more certain and constant than ever-changing? He wanted a reliable fortress of nouns.

 "Yes. Bang the drums. It was a big day sometime in the Sixth Century BC and you've captured the precise psychological and philosophical pivot point that set the entire trajectory of the Western mind."

 Are you telling me Parmenides was chicken-shit?

 "I wouldn't say that! He was uncomfortable with the theoretical approach to the world and the universe Heraclitus was proposing."

  

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