You are right. However, people aren’t concerned with the structure. People don’t care. The species could have accomplished far more at this point if ethics was grounded in physics. But, for far too many people, far too often, things that drive us have nothing to do with what you’re saying. Things like greed, jealousy, and insecurity.
That’s a good reply and I appreciate the concession on the ontology-to-norms gap. But I think the convergence you’re pointing to actually reveals a difference that matters more than you recognize.
You frame your norm as: “if you want inquiry to work, you cannot distort its inputs.” Thats a hypothetical imperative. It tells us what’s required given the goal of functioning inquiry. But hypothetical imperatives are exactly the kind of thing that reduces to mutual convenience — someone can always say “I don’t want inquiry to work, I want power,” and your structural argument has no answer to that. The self-defeating nature of distortion is only a problem for someone who already cares about the system functioning well. A propagandist doesn’t care if the system degrades as long as their standing within it is secured.
The normativity I’m pointing to isn’t hypothetical in that way. It’s not “if you want to inquire, then be attentive.” Its that the demand for attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility is already operative in any act of raising a question — including the question “why should I care about inquiry?” You can’t coherently repudiate these demands without exercising them. That’s not a conditional norm, its a transcendental one. The propagandist who says “distortion is fine as long as I benefit from it” is still making a claim — they’re still normatively oriented toward truth, even as they attempt to repudiate or devalue those norms.
So I don’t think the difference between “normativity in the act” vs “normativity in the conditions” is just a matter of emphasis where we need both. I think that your version is genuinely vulnerable to the power-skeptic in a way mine isn’t. The conditions for inquiry can be sabotaged — you’re right about that, and its an important practical point. But the obligation not to sabotage them doesn’t come from the conditions themselves. It comes from the fact that anyone making any claim whatsoever is already operating under demands they didn’t choose and can’t coherently refuse.
But how can we demonstrate this intelligibility? A few thousand years ago, we attributed magical powers to a rock; even today, we talk about rocks possessing positive and negative energies. There may be some confusion between intelligibility and truth. Truth presupposes intelligibility, but intelligibility does
necessarily presuppose truth? What does it mean for something to be intelligible?
You are right that my argument as stated is a hypothetical imperative: if you want inquiry to work, do not distort its inputs. The propagandist who says “I do not want the system to work, I want power” escapes it.
But notice what the propagandist does in saying this. He formulates a claim. He expects it to be understood. He relies on the norms of intelligible communication to make his rejection of those norms effective. He cannot coherently deny the requirements of inquiry while using inquiry to do the denying.
This is your point, and I think you are right that it is stronger than mine. The transcendental norms — be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible — cannot be coherently rejected because the act of rejection presupposes them.
But I want to add something to it rather than simply concede. The transcendental norms tell us that distortion is incoherent. My structural argument tells us that distortion is also self-defeating — that the propagandist who sabotages the information system degrades the conditions of his own survival, even if he does not care about coherence. The two arguments address different opponents: yours addresses the philosopher who asks for justification, mine addresses the pragmatist who asks what happens next.
Perhaps the complete position requires both: norms that cannot be coherently denied (your contribution) operating within conditions that structurally punish their violation (mine).
You are right that people are driven by greed, jealousy, and insecurity — not by structural logic. But Ilyenkov would say: those drives are themselves formed by social conditions. The greedy person was not born greedy — they were shaped by a system that rewards accumulation and punishes sharing. Change the structure, and the drives change. Not instantly, not completely — but the direction of pressure matters.
Excellent distinction. Intelligibility is not truth. The magical interpretation of the rock is intelligible — it has internal coherence, it explains phenomena, it guides action. But it is false. Intelligibility means: capable of being grasped by an act of understanding. Truth means: what is grasped corresponds to what is. The rock is intelligible under many descriptions, only some of which are true. The task of inquiry is to move from intelligibility to truth — and that movement requires undistorted access to the object.
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I know that Ilyenkov’s approach is heavily indebted to Hegel and Marx.So when you say “truth means: what is grasped corresponds to what is”, this sounds like a standard correspondence theory of truth , which Hegel criticizes. For him, truth is not a match between a representation and an independently fixed object; rather, truth is the self-unfolding of the object through the activity of knowing. The object is not simply “there” awaiting undistorted access, it becomes what it is in and through the dialectical process of its appearances being tested, negated, and transformed.
False descriptions aren’t simply discarded, they’re sublated, preserved and overcome within a richer account. Even the “magical” interpretation expresses something about human relation to nature, albeit in a distorted form. Is this consistent with your reading of Ilyenkov?
I’d like to return to this claim in the original post to compare and contrast it with Buddhist philosophy of mind.
The idea itself is not entirely foreign to some strands of Buddhism, although it appears there in a very different cultural idiom.
The nature of mind — In early Buddhist texts there is the declaration that the mind is “luminous” but that it is “obscured by adventitious defilements” (Pabhassara Sutta.) In later East Asian traditions this develops into the idea that mind is identical with the “true nature” (Buddha-nature, tathata). In that understanding, awareness is not something produced by matter. Doctrinally, Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophy says that ‘the nature of the mind, its clarity and awareness, must have clarity and awareness as its substantial cause’ (ref).
However Buddhism also resists turning this conception of mind into a metaphysical substrate or “ground of being.” Instead, many Buddhist analyses treat subject and object as arising together within experience, so that awareness is not the property of a substance but the relational field in which knower and known appear together. The tradition is wary of reifying mind into any kind of substance. Madhyamaka (“Middle Way”) philosophy in particular insists that even mind is empty of intrinsic nature.
This is often misrepresented as nihilism, but that is incorrect, as nihilism is itself categorised in Buddhism as an “extreme view.” Rather, the point is that realising the nature of mind requires cognitive transformation. Without that transformation, discussion of it is said to be like “a cowherd counting his master’s cattle as his own” in a quaint traditional simile.
There may therefore be some points of affinity between Spinoza’s philosophy and Buddhism, particularly in rejecting the idea that awareness is merely produced by matter. But the similarity would not extend to their theoretical formulation, since Buddhism rejects the idea of any form of substantial being.
That said, Spinoza’s ethical maxims would certainly be recognised in Buddhism as sound advice for the pursuit of wisdom.
But how did the first system that rewards accumulation and punishes sharing come about, if it degraded the conditions of their own survival?
I’m not sure what you’re saying. Can you give an example of grasping an understanding of something, but that understanding does not correspond to what is?
However, we have evidence of the world’s intelligibility through our own intellect. In other words, there is a circular argument in the very act of demonstrating the world’s intelligibility. This is because we cannot demonstrate its intelligibility without the world already being understood by us in some way. We cannot demonstrate such intelligibility in the absence of ourselves already making use of our intellect.
Reading Husserl, when I consider this notion of intelligibility and the grasp, a comparison arises with Husserl’s idea of the original presentation of the object-sense. This presentation is the presentation of the object and occurs in an ideal sense, in the epoché. The sense of the object is ideal and lends itself to indefinite repetition. Here, ideality and indefinite repetition are correlative. But in Husserl, this ideal object is non-real. Following the Kantian tradition to some extent, Husserl asserts that ideality is not real (it is not in the world).
Kant would say of Spinoza that he falls into naive metaphysics (naive realism). Showing that such intelligibility is another way of predicating the thing-in-itself.
Originary presentation for Husserl is the way an object is given “in person” in perception. This takes place in lived experience, not in a quasi-transcendental space of ideal sense.
He distinguishes two senses of Real from Ideal:
Real (reell): what is immanently contained in the act (its lived components.
Real (real) in the natural attitude: things in the world
Ideal: entities like meanings, numbers, essences.
Ideal objects are by definition identically repeatable. They are not in the ‘empirical’ world, but this doesn’t mean they are unreal, only in the mind or in some transcendent sphere. Ideality is not a detached realm outside experience. Rather, it is a genuinely given mode of objectivity constituted within intentional life itself.
I refer to the noema, the meaning of what is perceived, is ideal and occurs in the original presentation. It is this that is not real. It differs from the noesis. Husserl understands it as a realm of meaning comparable to essences, significations or logical structures: something that remains the same across different acts and consciousnesses, regardless of how actual mental states may change.
That is why the noema is said to be ideal and not real (in the sense is not in the factual world): it does not perish in time, it does not occupy space, it is not located in the brain or in the physical world, but is rather an intentional objectivity that structures the relationship between consciousness and object.
There is a gap in the argument that I think matters, and it sits between the metaphysical claim and the ethical one.
The Spinozist position says thinking is an attribute of substance - co-original with extension, not produced by it. Grant that. What follows?
Evald moves from “thinking is an attribute of substance” to “restricting any individual’s thought restricts an attribute of reality.” But Spinoza distinguishes attributes from modes. The attribute of thought is infinite. Individual minds are finite modes - particular expressions of the attribute, determined by other modes. My thinking is not the attribute of thought. It is a specific, finite, causally determined modification of it.
This matters because the ethical argument depends on treating individual consciousness as if restricting it were equivalent to restricting the attribute. But you can restrict a mode without touching the attribute. Every finite mode is already a restriction - a determination, which is negation (Spinoza to Jarig Jelles, 1674). My mind is what it is precisely because it is not everything else. The attribute continues undiminished.
So if you want to ground rights in Spinoza, you need a different route than attribute-talk. One option: conatus. Each thing strives to persist in its being (Ethics III, P6). Restricting a mind’s activity directly opposes its conatus. This gives you something like a natural right, but it is not metaphysically privileged the way the attribute argument suggests - it is one striving among many, and conflicts between strivings are resolved by power, not principle.
Ilyenkov might actually help here more than Spinoza. If thinking is realized only through social activity - through the inorganic body of tools, language, institutions - then restricting access to these is not opposing an abstract attribute but cutting off the material conditions through which thinking actually happens. The violation is concrete, not metaphysical. You do not need substance-talk to get there.
The strongest version of this argument, I think, drops the claim that consciousness is an attribute of reality and picks up the claim that thinking requires material conditions that can be shared or withheld. That is enough to ground the ethics without the metaphysical overhead.
Hey impressive first post, ‘levthresh’! Look forward to reading more from you! 