You wrote: “You don’t experience substance manifesting — you experience yourself understanding, questioning, and judging.”
Yes. I do. And so does the Zagorsk child — after three years of joint activity with an adult. Before that, the child does not experience herself as understanding, questioning, or judging. She experiences hunger, warmth, resistance. The first-person experience of being a rational agent is real. But it appears in development. It is not the starting point — it is the achievement.
This is where I think the disagreement between us is sharpest and most productive.
You say: begin with the structure of knowing itself, because it is the condition under which any investigation takes place. I say: the structure of knowing itself has a history, and that history is recoverable. The structure did not fall from the sky. It was built — in ontogeny, through joint practical activity; in phylogeny, through the evolution of social forms of life.
You are right that gravity is one intelligibility among others, while consciousness is the condition of all intelligibilities. But consider: the capacity to do physics — to identify variables, design experiments, evaluate evidence — is not given at birth. It is acquired through education, through apprenticeship in a tradition of practice. The “condition under which investigation takes place” is itself conditioned. Not logically — historically. And Ilyenkov’s claim is that we can study this conditioning empirically, not just transcendentally.
On judgment as a distinct level. You say the object provides the criterion, but only the subject identifies the criterion as a criterion and evaluates whether it has been met. “Is it so?” arises after grasping and constitutes a distinct cognitional performance.
I think this is right as a description of mature cognition. An experienced engineer does distinguish between grasping a load-bearing principle and judging whether her design meets it. But here is what I want to press: does a child make this distinction? Does a novice? When the Zagorsk child first manages to bring the spoon to her mouth on her own — is she “grasping” and then “judging”? Or is the grasping and the judging fused in the act itself, and the separation only appears later, as the cognitive apparatus becomes more differentiated through practice?
If judgment as a distinct operation is itself a developmental achievement — something that appears through the internalization of social practices of testing and evaluation — then it cannot be the foundation of an account of cognition. It is something that needs to be explained, not something that explains.
On normativity: is versus should. You say I cannot extract normativity from structure alone. “Structure tells you what is. Normativity is about what you should conclude given what is.”
But where does the “should” come from on your account? If it comes from the structure of rational agency itself — then you need to explain where rational agency comes from. If it is simply given — that is the same move you criticized when I invoked substance. If it develops — then we are back in history, in practice, in the very territory I am trying to map.
Here is how I think normativity works without a gap between is and should. The engineer does not first encounter brute structure and then add normativity from her own resources. She is already inside a practice — bridge-building — that has internal standards. Those standards were not invented by her. They were developed over centuries of building bridges that stood and bridges that fell. The “ought” is not injected by the subject into a normatively inert world. It grows out of the history of a practice. “The bridge ought to stand” is not a free-floating obligation — it is the condensed lesson of every bridge that collapsed.
This is not “substance doing what substance does.” This is substance organized into practices that carry normative structure within them. The normativity is real and irreducible — but it is historical, not transcendental.
On “concrete intelligible unity” versus attribute. You define substance as “something more like concrete intelligible unity” — leaving open whether a given substance thinks. Spinoza defines substance as having thought as an eternal attribute. These are genuinely different moves, and I want to understand what yours buys you.
If thought is not an attribute of substance but something that may or may not characterize a given intelligible unity — then the question “why does this unity think and that one doesn’t?” needs an answer. Your answer: “the cosmos is structured so that higher-order unities can arise from lower ones without being reducible to them.” But this is a promissory note, not an explanation. Spinoza’s move — thought is an attribute, always already there in substance, actualized differently in different modes — at least tells you where to look: in the specific mode of organization, in the specific form of activity.
I don’t say this to score a point. I say it because I think your framework and mine are closer than either of us has admitted. You want to preserve the irreducibility of judgment as a cognitional performance. I want to preserve the developmental origin of that performance. These are not contradictory. A capacity can be irreducible at the level of description and still have a developmental history at the level of explanation.