Yes. Lonergan is criminally under-read.
Sadly, I haven’t had much time for the forum lately. But I’ll take a look.
Nahhhh, I don’t understand signs like that at all, but upon sufficient realignment of conceptual schemes I can see how expressing it that way makes sense to you.
Your “sign” is my “representation”, and there the congruency stops.
A sign brings information and the subsequent possibility of meaning with it which requires an act of some kind of intelligence a priori for its determination.
A representation already has meaning necessarily imbued in it, otherwise it is empty not representing anything, by the kind of intelligence from which meaning is at all determinable a priori.
A sign presents to; it doesn’t transmit from;
A sign contains information but not “internal meaning stuff”, which reduces to determinable relations, re: judgement and the content thereof.
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What dualist assumption with respect to communication does “significance” circumvent? What more would the dualist require from “significance” than being that concept representing relative judgemental impact, having nothing to do with communication per se, in the first place?
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And here I was thinking I was razzing you…….
“Lifeworld”. A compound of two pure ideas of reason, that when conjoined to each other implicate a self-contradiction, re: the world as general idea does not itself carry the idea of life, which requires a certain kind of world.
HA!!! Cute. I would have said, “what do signs say that representation hasn’t already said?” The fact it is easier to speak and write is a philosophically-poor justification for its occurrence, which surely you would not endorse.
And while they certainly do suffice in the framework which contains them, perhaps it’s the framework itself that contributes to the differences in dialectical contributions.
I don’t know anything about Gellman, but I must say, if you’ve been cured away from your OLP pretensions, which I enthusiastically applaud, then apparently all those upside-down commas enclosing just about every primary conception you put in print, are meant to represent meanings intended for comprehension above and beyond everyday use. Just seems to me that just presenting here presupposes that already, so…..
May the mutual razzing continue…….
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I can see why you might read it that way. I also grant that I, like everyone, only have vision at the cost of blindness. To merely comport myself in any particular way at all enacts this blindness. I can’t see the other as friend and foe in the same moment.
To say that “all experience is already reality” is not at all to pretend that I care equally about all experience, my own or that of others. The mundane pragmatic distinction between monopoly money and US dollars remains mercilessly necessary for practical life.
I see “metaphysics” as more of a theoretical flower that depends on a pre-theoretical coping that is primarily visceral. If we had to put this visceral know-how in explicit theoretical terms, we’d be screwed.
I think you are forgetting my vision of inquiry as the adjustment of comportment, so that my current comportment has been shaped by decades of experience. My entire past is compressed into my comportment now. So this updated in-progress version of me is an achievement, not so unlike the DNA that results from millions of years of mutation-driven risky trial-and-error.
For me the “given” is the forum, the world that shows itself as a world I share with others. Each of the others is “the entire world” from another point of view. Each of the others is likewise an in-progress compression or achievement. I project my own situation. The world shows itself with an intense historicity through the transformation, for instance, in the “radiance” in the “same old signs.” I comport myself differently to the sign “consciousness” than I once did, likewise toward “marriage” and “death” and “truth,” etc. I take others to also “suffer the change in signs.” And obviously the change in other objects too.
In my terms, the mark or noise signifies for me (as an object of perception ) in terms of my history.
Out of context, it can do nothing at all. But within an approach that understands experience to “immediately” be the world itself, from a POV, signs are just things in the world.
Yes, I have to be “trained” to respond to red octagons as “stop signs.” But we need not “inject” this significance into a “container subject” as immaterial meaning stuff. The only “immateriality” in the sign is something like our facility with handling equivalent events as “repetitions.”
Following James, we might say “consciousness does not exist.” There is no picture between the subject and the world. Words don’t carry “picturing stuff” between subjects trapped behind pictures. Or we don’t have to work from that assumption.
So I can only register suspicion toward “pure ideas of reason.” What are these “pure ideas” but “essence stuff” in minds-as-containers. How do thinkers like Kant justify projecting their own experience on others in terms of its eternal form ?
Don’t get me wrong. Kant’s gesture is “the official gesture of philosophy.” I am playing the same game in the different key.
“Lifeworld” is a sign that appears in the world with other signs. It’s an attempt to point at the “pre-theoretical world.” To look around taken-for-granted representationalists theories that tended to obsess over epistemology. In an obsession with knowledge, with correctitude, the object — existence itself — is “distorted” in the sense of grabbed in a particular way for a particular purpose.
“How are synthetic a priori judgments possible ?” This question indicates a comportment toward the analysis of human existence. Not bad in itself, but one among others.
I suggest that perception is presentation rather than representation. The “picturing-effect” of signs is only one role for them among many others. The “pointing” metaphor suggests that those communicating are already in the same world, not trapped behind pictures. The obsession with “true assertions” as accurate pictures can be understood as optional.
I’m ambivalent about quotation marks, but the point is an emphasis on the context-specific significance of the offered sign. I do not believe in a set of universal set of hardwired internal “essences” that are “tagged” by contingent signifiers. I do not believe that philosophy is like a Chess with essence, a kind of sublime mathematics where ontological theorems are proved in a divine-eternal meaning-stuff.
Humans are complex organisms, who each meet individual signs with their entire history. But we inherit a pretense of “perfectly present-to-all internal essences,” which is basically the residue of a vanished creator god. The monological is what’s left of monotheism, a stubborn cinder.
Yeah, in keeping with, first, your denial of cognitive dualism, and second, your affirmation of James’ consolidation of subject/object, as opposed to the dualist’s separation of them.
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I don’t hold with any of that approach, but still maintain that signs are just things in the world.
What better way to remember it? Apparently Nature decided it’s better to remember from memory or consciousness, than it is to have to learn the same thing over and over and over, ad infinitum.
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Technically, it is impossible that consciousness does exist, iff there is a dualism necessarily manifest in human intelligence. That notwithstanding, gotta forgive the vagaries of general language use, against the technicalities of logical analysis. Case in point, Descartes, even when saying “I exist” (First Principles, 1, 7, 1644, also says “I am somewhat…” (Discourse on Method.…., Pt 4, 1637).
Point being, there cannot be nothing. Same with consciousness; there cannot be nothing instead of the thought of something.
Of course and you wouldn’t be alone. They are legitimate only insofar as they are incorporated into a speculative, albeit logical, procedure. Then, as well, you can always register suspicion with logical procedure, which you might remedy with some procedure more favorable to your judgemental predispositions. Now you almost have to ask yourself why you don’t register suspicion on that of which you yourself are the author. If you find you’ve defeated yourself by doing so, then you must admit everyone else doing the same thing, arrives at the same self-defeat. At last, you’ve arrived at the acknowledgement that you, as well as any being of similar intellect, cannot defeat yourself to the point there is nothing of which you are not suspicious. So, in going back the other way, from the irreducible fact of something which cannot be under suspicion, that which follows logically from it, e.g., the pure ideas of reason, don’t register as so suspicious after all. All without attributing to them anything like real existence.
They don’t. If anything, they project their own understanding on others. Philosophy in general and metaphysics in particular, is not an experience; it is a mental activity the object of which is always a priori insofar as it is constructed in thought.
He expects the projection of his understanding onto others to be received by them without undue interruption, for the excruciatingly simple reason every damn one of us understands in exactly the same way. It doesn’t matter that he got the how of it right or wrong; it is congruent amongst us no matter what it is, irrespective of its differing descriptions.
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Funny, now that survival has been established, that the fundamental human occupation of seeking knowledge, is conceptually equivalent to being an obsession.
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Yes, I agree with that. Nevertheless, the “picturing-effect” of signs, which I take to mean the image produced in relation to them, by means other than their mere presence, is all they’re supposed to do.
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Sure, how could it be otherwise? How would it be knowable that the object is “distorted”, if there is no way to know if it wasn’t? We “see” a thing this way, an earthworm “sees” the same thing that way……and…..so what?
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Yeah, you have an all-encompassing revulsion towards (___), I have an all-encompassing revulsion towards (Lima beans). Again…..so what? It’s not a pretense, it’s hardly noteworthy, and I must say, doesn’t need any theologically-oriented mysticism grounding its validity.
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Yet there are things common to every human ever. Perhaps not a set of essences, but something of some name with congruent conceptual value. Maternal/paternal instinct, moral obligation, tribal continuity, and so on.
Anyway…..fun stuff.
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Addendum: Ontocubism? Is that you? Why didn’t I get a link, like, https://phenomenalism.github.io/papers/fen.pdf, or something similar. Damn, you coulda been the author, looks just like you.
Contextual interest only to be sure; too late in the game to be changing my spots, donchaknow.
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Are you actually backing away from your maximalist ontocubism here? Or are you simply situating yourself within it?
But the critique wasn’t that you treat all experience as equally worthy of care, it was that nothing in the amalgam can ever be incorrect in the last analysis. Which means that any “incorrectness” you try to locate downstream is ultimately washed away. As such, your appeals to blindness, comportment, pragmatic distinctions, evolutionary selections are ultimately negated by the ontocubism that flattens all alethic determinations into a metaphysical homogeneity. You’ve cleared the way for unbridled creativity, but lost discovery along the way. Here, metaphysics becomes art with no technique, architecture with no constraints. It’s all beauty and no truth.
You say metaphysics is a theoretical flower that depends on a pre-theoretical, visceral coping. No disagreement here. But the conclusion you want to draw simply doesn’t follow. Sure, metaphysics is the flower on a visceral root, but this doesn’t imply that the flower is reducible to the root. The flower is an achievement in its own right, and is something more than the root on which it depends. Cut away the flower and the root may survive, but the root is no substitute for what has been lost.
I haven’t forgotten. As I’ve argued above, comportment and evolution can do a lot of work, but they can’t get you to rational normativity or truth unless “incorrectness” can find a support at the ground floor. And if Being is ultimately the achievement of truth, and I think it is, then they can’t get you to Being either.
But again, in your system, these individual and communal compressions/achievements are ultimately metaphysically subordinate to the larger ontocubistic amalgam. Or am I misunderstanding you?
The coherent performance of ontocubism involves understanding it as a risky, situated world-articulating “poem.” It was never intended as an accurate picture of a “true” reality hidden behind or above ontocubism-as-picture.
We might call it dialogical relativism. It’s an attitude, a way of meeting the other in the world. As I see it, we always already “live in” our ongoing ontopoesis. Sometimes we can achieve a high sociality with others that need not aim for a total harmony, a resolution of all doubt and difference in shared “truth.” But I think we do want to share in some phenomena with others, and we trading pointing signs to establish this sense of sharing.
Do we need “incorrect” ? Doesn’t “abandoned” suffice ? “I used to do things this way, but not anymore.” We cast off what finally fails us. We find a better grip on the tool, a new metaphor that liberates us from the monological monotony of our last. Existence is ongoing, unrolling, unfolding, ideally toward more joy and less fear.
Perhaps you don’t scan those signs as I do. Comportment is hopelessly prejudicial and preferential. The world is felt and lived as anything but flat. A relativist might defend his family with a shotgun, or help this stranger but not that one. If we understand “truth” as “uncovering” rather than a property of certain sentences then each existence is flooded with a singular and unprecedented truth. We have “too much” heterogeneity.
Yes, sort of. “Ethics is aesthetics.” Or “feeling is first.” But not signless feeling but rather signs that radiate “value” as they radiate “conceptually.” I can’t make sense of a “pure” conceptuality. The sound-image has a strange ideality that gathers ever-novel quality, much of which is affective. The traditional belief in a set of present-to-all internally-grasped essences isn’t a live option for me. Signs are things in the world between us. I can’t scan it through your eyes nor hear it through your ears. Only dialogue can give me a joyful sense of us understanding one another — of hearing/seeing the sign in the same-enough way.
I agree that the flower is more than the root, and I enact that belief by joyfully obsessing over my ontopoetic follies. I tend to understand certain deep visceral decisions to allow for a seemingly irresponsible play at the level of surface and sign.
We only know one another through trading signs. Perhaps people who know this side of me would be surprised at my real-world demeanor. I’m almost always calm and friendly toward wildly different personality types. This civility in the face of gentle difference looks like the core of rationality to me. Philosophical conversation here is unique because a sublimated aggression is expected. We choose to open our mouths and our ears to suffer and perhaps appropriate difference. This need not be framed as the convergence of differing personalities toward a “true subject” whose beliefs get the world “right.” It suffices that many individuals find something “good” ( in their own terms ) in their collision with others.
My vision of vision as blindness has its own blindness, which is confessed along with the vision. It’s a self-consciously situated poetic response to the world that addresses me. It’s the song of a bird, that other birds may want to weave into their own songs. I don’t pretend to have some “external” leverage on others. I also don’t recognize others to have such leverage on me. The gods they serve are not my gods, and my own god is not jealous.
I appreciate the candor, as always. But here’s the problem. You serve a god you say isn’t jealous, but you do it by means of a jealousy you won’t admit to. You can only commend your god by ranking it above my own, but this is an enactment of the very jealousy your god forbids.
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I don’t pretend to be a lamb among lions. I am a lion willing to tolerate other lions who don’t take me for lamb. Vividly aware of my own sense of autonomy, I imagine as my peers others with a similar sense of autonomy. Secure in a bone-deep sense of being already fundamentally realized, I make no claim on the other in terms of any idol that I myself find defused and powerless. “Don’t tread on me and we might be great friends !”
That friendship might involve a rough play with fundamental signs, secured by something warmly visceral beneath them.
If I present my ontological half-sense to others in the market place, my signs are willing hostages of the comportment of others toward them as the realization of faces of their unforeseeable significance.
I don’t pretend to know where the jazz is going.
Of course we can consider how the brain serves in all of this, but this gets messy if the perceived-available brain is just an image in this or that soul stuff. The surgeon operates on the brain before his eyes and in his hands, the other’s brain — with the help of his brain — and not on an image-of-brain inside his brain.
This is perhaps the fundamental thesis that I have been expressing. All vision is also/simultaneously blindness, and subjectivity is prejudicial comportment as the ever-partial revelation of the object. This can be phrased in terms of the “temporal depth” of objects.
Is this the “truth” ? Are my sentences propositions that try to picture “accurately” something on the other side of pictures ? But elsewhere I’ve suggested that “truth” is vacuous except as an indicator of belief. Is this last sentence another picture ? I can’t rescue my poor signs from unexpected appropriations by others who may comport themselves to those signs as a claim on them in terms of an “objective reality.”
I experiment here with sketching a “personal” positivism that can be taken as a skeptic’s confession of disbelief in certain theories about language and truth and experience. For anyone intrigued, I try to point at why I don’t believe. This involves the painting of alternative frameworks offered as “post-representational” or “post-truth” philosophy. For the most part, I am just paraphrasing and synthesizing influences.
I also think it’s reasonable to posit a fuzzy core.
Sure. I like to think that we can leave the seminary behind. Seems to me though that dominant understandings of logic are still wandering seminary halls. I don’t hate monotheism or religion or anything. I like the way Emerson uses “God.”
But what interests me, among other pet projects, is reconfiguring a better logical positivism that is more coherently and intensely empirical. Certain monological assumptions, pejoratively metaphysical, can be excised. Learning from Bakhtin (and Walker Percy, it now seems), one can sketch a dia-logical positivism.
But this isn’t math, and the imagined holy gap between logic and rhetoric is one of the prejudices that calls out for the axe. So I don’t deny myself rhetoric as a tool for this project.
Yeah, that’s me. You weren’t excluded. I think my use of the self-coined “ontocubism” just makes me easy to find.
Cool. I guess. I just figure that in the world of endless speculative philosophies, if a guy thinks he can come up with one sufficient to knock off the others…….more power to him, however minuscule the likelihood.
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And now we’ve come full circle. For the “bone-deep sense of already being realized“ is nothing other than the Given in visceral clothing. It underwrites your entire anti-foundationalist edifice, and does so, ironically, by providing a foundation that could never be dislodged.
And this is, I think, where we also diverge most deeply. You’ve essentially purchased unbridled epistemic openness at the cost of complete metaphysical closure at the level of the subject. A subject who is not answerable to the world is radically free in one sense, but also radically closed in another.
So, what does it mean for a subject to be answerable to the world? It requires the bone-deep sense of being not-yet-fully-realized. It means having the capacity to be corrected, completed and leveraged by something you do not already possess. The realist’s openness is to be found here, within the subject, as a confessed incompleteness. And this incompleteness just is the subjective face of answerability to a world that can truly say “no” and determinately submit to a “yes”. To be truly and perpetually answerable to the world is to be truly and perpetually shaped by the world.
So in declaring yourself already fundamentally realized, you’ve foreclosed the possibility of the very openness that answerability requires. And this was precisely why answerability could never be fully recovered downstream. The bone-deep sense of completeness just is the subjective correlate of the ontocubistic amalgam. Just as the amalgam is a world that excludes nothing and, therefore cannot truly refuse anything, the already-realized self is a knower who lacks nothing and, therefore, cannot be truly answerable to anything. They’re the same closure each seen from a different end of the dipole. Here we have a world that can’t truly say “no”, and a self that can’t truly be leveraged. The bone-deep sense of being “already realized”, it turns out, is just what living in the amalgam feels like from the inside.
I see why you leap on what you see as a vulnerability, but you are still comporting yourself to this dialogue like its a game of chess with essences. Do you read Nietzsche like this ? Do you fish for proofs and theorems from Leaves of Grass ?
Personal scientificity genuinely begins with the achievement of “psycho-analytic” autonomy. Emerson is a great poet of this autonomy, which only makes sense in terms of a “visceral foundation.”
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
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Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
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The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome… He gives an independent, genuine verdict.
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Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
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Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Try to see it from over here. Do you really think it’s easy to handle dangerous foundational issues without a gut-level faith in one’s own right and ability to do so ? This “gut-level” strength of soul can’t be grounded in some verbalized formalization, for all such formulations are subject to critique as “idols of the tribe” or “names and customs.” Critical rationality is endlessly self-devouring, hence its tendency toward irony. F. Schlegel is great on this: continual parabasis. Fundamentally temporal, more fire than wood, none of its on-the-way expressions make sense as eternal-essence-tickling propositions for the ontotheological abacus.
Many do comport themselves toward philosophy like a whodunit, not as creators but merely as interpreters of a law imposed on them by the Other.
The traditional choice for this Other is a personal God, but “atheists” often prefer a Logic that functions as the lovingly bleached bones of deism’s apathetic demiurge. The general structure ( pointed out by Stirner ) is the postulation of some uncanny, authoritative X. The game becomes a rhetoric of proximity to this X. Not I, but X through me commands you.
The collapse of a “visceral foundation” is the transformation of a “boy sure of his dinner” to the ready consumer of an escape from freedom through outsourced judgment. “Just tell me who I am and what is True.” Or give me at least a Method, a Criterion, to set against the time and chance that happeneth to them all.
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I’m surprised that you could read me this way. I am dying flesh in this vast world, another ape scrambling for video game points ( fiat currency ) to keep me in peanut butter and bananas. Faced with this deaf-to-excuses bone-chewing beast, I can only be a little surprised at others who to “prove themselves out of it.” On the other hand, orienting myth is hugely important. So I don’t at all dismiss the power of words. I’m just far from thinking that a certain narrow style of philosophy has a priority here. The gods laugh with blood on their lips at the earnest abacus of essences.
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The world will tear your hands off. The subject is exposed meat in the world, condemned to lose everything from the beginning. Incompleteness is not typically so conceptual. The meat subject shrivels in agony without fresh water. I endorse the proto-existential materialism of Feuerbach, where “matter” is “sensuousness” (feeling and sensation) and that which refuses to be what we’d like it to be. This is not the theo-materialism of the scientistic philosopher lighting candles for something adored as the possibility of an infinite correctitude. The matter that matters is what surprises and resists every theory.
The world reshapes us at the level of bone and gristle. The problem was never being open to the world but being courageous in an openness that only the grave will close. Courage is primary. We adopt stories to keep our courage up, myths. Including the myth of a story that is not a myth, the “anemic” myth that calls itself “pure reason.”
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Why would a proud person who has realized their autonomy be eager to be answerable ? As mortal flesh, we are tossed into a meat-grinder of this fetishized answerability. I see the goal as proud and serene self-possession even in a world that is fundamentally fire.
Experience stands in an ineluctable opposition to knowledge and to the kind of instruction that follows from general theoretical or technical knowledge. The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience. That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences. The consummation of his experience, the perfection that we call “being experienced,” does not consist in the fact that someone already knows everything and knows better than anyone else. Rather, the experienced person proves to be, on the contrary, someone who is radically undogmatic; who, because of the many experiences he has had and the knowledge he has drawn from them, is particularly well equipped to have new experiences and to learn from them. The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself.
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But then this gives the concept of experience that we are concerned with here a qualitatively new element. It refers not only to experience in the sense of information about this or that. It refers to experience in general. This experience is always to be acquired, and from it no one can be exempt. Experience in this sense belongs to the historical nature of man. Although in bringing up children, for example, parents may try to spare them certain experiences, experience as a whole is not something anyone can be spared. Rather, experience in this sense inevitably involves many disappointments of one’s expectations and only thus is experience acquired.
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That experience refers chiefly to painful and disagreeable experi ences does not mean that we are being especially pessimistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through negative instances do we acquire new experiences, as Bacon saw. Every experience worthy of the name thwarts an expectation.
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Thus the historical nature of man essentially implies a fundamental negativity that emerges in the relation between experience and insight. Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that had deceived us and held us captive. Thus insight always involves an element of self-knowledge and constitutes a necessary side of what we called experience in the proper sense. Insight is something we come to. It too is ultimately part of the vocation of man—i.e., to be discerning and insightful.
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If we want to quote another witness for this third element in the nature of experience, the best is Aeschylus. He found the formula—or, rather, recognized its metaphysical significance as expressing the inner historicality of experience—of “learning though suffering” (pathei mathos). This phrase does not mean only that we become wise through suffering and that our knowledge of things must first be corrected through deception and undeception.
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Understood in this way, the formula is probably as old as human experience itself. But Aeschylus means more than this. He refers to the reason why this is so. What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight — the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude.
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The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans uncertain. In him is realized the truth value of experience. If it is characteristic of every phase of the process of experience that the experienced person acquires a new openness to new experiences, this is certainly true of the idea of being perfectly experienced. It does not mean that experience has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then—as of all desire to know—is to know what is. But “what is,” here, is not this or that thing, but “what cannot be destroyed” (Ranke).
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Real experience is that whereby man becomes aware of his finiteness. In it are discovered the limits of the power and the self-knowledge of his planning reason. The idea that everything can be reversed, that there is always time for everything and that everything somehow returns, proves to be an illusion. Rather, the person who is situated and acts in history continually experiences the fact that nothing returns.
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I appreciate your response. To me it’s largely just synthesis and paraphrase in an attempt to squeeze more juice out of the traditional/fundamental themes.
But are you not arguing from a position contrary to Kantian/continental anthropocentrism? Instead of squeezing out more juice out of traditional doctrines, speculative realism wants to kill ‘em all and start over.
It is self-contradictory to attempt to establish the supremacy of the object over the subject that, first, wants to know, and second, is that which does all the establishing in the first place.
My opinion only, of course.
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