Subject and Object

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Speculative metaphysics is rife with potentially specious arguments, one of the more obvious being, in what sense is mind even that to which a property can be given. And if it is the case the mind is that which assigns properties, then mind assigns properties to itself, then it becomes impossible to make any determination of what the concept of mind is reducible to, including whether it is that to which properties can be assigned.

And that’s just considering mind. If the consideration switches to consciousness, the argument reduces to whether consciousness is a property at all, or is it merely a prescriptive condition, followed by specifying how one of those is not like the other.

I think parsimony is sufficient reason to deny both consciousness as a property, and mind as that to which properties can belong, insofar as otherwise, we must find ourselves guilty of reifying the bejesus outta stuff…….rampant misplaced concreteness, donchaknow…… we ourselves invented merely to serve a particular purpose.

Or not. To each his own and all that.

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From the paper:

When I realize that I am, or am conscious, I’m not realizing anything about any objects or contents of mind or awareness. I realize consciousness (or awareness, or subjectivity) itself. My realization that I am conscious is not tied to awareness of any particular objects. Indeed, it has more to do with realizing the potential absence of any particular object or objects. In realizing the potential absence of any particular objects, I realize myself or my being (‘I am’) as distinct from all objects.

Not to any particular objects. But the “being” or “presence” of any kind of object whatsoever.

The object can only be absent because it “overflows” the here and now. It overflows the fugitive perception. This gets us into Heraclitus. On those stepping into rivers, other and other waters flow.

The “I am distinct from all objects” is one more expression of the ontological difference. The presence of objects is not itself an object that is present. To be sure, “presence” is a sign, an entity. But here it is not the label of a stuff. The weirdness here, in my view, is that this pointing toward the ontological difference is the only moment in philosophy where such a gesture is attempted. The issue is so damned elusive because it is indeed “special.” It is “too brutally simple.”

Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted ? You say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye. And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.

TLP, of course.

Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the world is my world.

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limitnot a part of the world.

He is influenced by Schopenhauer here, but his invocation of “pure realism” hints at a position other than dualism. The world is “immediately” there, but also “perspectivally” there.

The world and life are one. 5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.) 5.631 The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing. If I wrote a book The world as I found it, I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made.

If we generalize this and acknowledge other people, then we get at least an ontological perspectivism. I think we can even stop there.

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Jajaja, no you are not a weirdo. Your thoughts are very interesting. :slight_smile:

Yes, and that’s fairly true.A chair and Pluto exist even if they are not observed by an observer. They have “physical” or “objective” existence.

However, I think it is interesting to discuss the extent to which those pieces of matter depend on our perception.

The chair is clearly excluded from the lab because it is a pretty “human thing”. The purpose of a chair is to sit on and decorate rooms. Thus the chair’s existence is determined by our interests. Without the humankind, there wouldn’t be chairs.

But Pluto’s situation is quite different. This chunk of gravitational matter has been there for many years, obviously before humankind flourished. Pluto’s presence is dependent upon us. When the first astronomer discovered Pluto, it started to have a presence in our perception, even though it had existed before. If we had never discovered it, perhaps Pluto would be non-existent to us.

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Interested to know how you can distinguish or how you use your vocabulary when it comes to separating mind and consciousness. I will assume for now that mind is a thing and consciousness is a process.

As for the rest of your post I’m pretty much in agreement.

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That was an interesting paper, thanks for posting it. I’m not sure I agree with his thesis. Edey puts thoughts and feelings on the object side, which leaves the subject as a contentless void. But can’t we distinguish acts from their contents? In that case we could say that, while the contents are on the objective side, the acts themselves are acts of the subject?

Also, I would want to draw a sharper distinction between consciousness and knowledge. To be aware is not yet to know. In my opinion, knowing requires experiencing, understanding and judgement. So when Edey says “I know for certain that I am” and holds that no evidence could ever be relevant, I feel that he is collapsing knowing into experiencing, and I’m not convinced that works.

Next, Edey wants to deny that the subject can be “objectified”, but his collapse of knowing into experiencing muddies the waters with regard to what he actually means by this. In one sense I agree with him: awareness is not something that “appears” before consciousness in the way that an empirical “bodies” do. But this raises the question of whether “objects” are best understood as “appearances” or as that which is affirmed to exist via judgement. And in that latter sense, he seems to allow that the subject can be objectified, for his paper would be impossible to write if it weren’t.

Finally, I’m not sure I agree with his conflation of appearance with existence. Again, I would tend to want to link claims about existence with judgement. To experience “something” is not yet to make a claim about what exists. In the same vein, to be aware is not yet to understand what awareness is, or to judge that it exists as “me”.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I decided to revise my original post significantly in order to clarify my stance a bit. You can see the original by browsing the edit history.

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Easiest, simplest explanation……long time ago I read something that fixed in me a certain understanding.

And seeing as how understanding is “cognition in accordance with rules”, it is easy to see the primary rule is don’t confuse this with that.

In order to not confuse this with that, think of this as functional in this domain and that functional in that domain. And domains so different that if each one is thought as substituting for the other, neither one of them work in the domain into which they are substituted, and the poor ol’ subject has succeeded in confusing himself, which is EXACTLY what he didn’t want to do.

For me, then, consciousness (that in which all my representations can be united, represented as “I”), can never substitute for mind (that under which all intellectual faculties are necessarily united, represented as “self”).

Anyway……that’s how. No possible proof for any of it, but it’s still a fun way of exploring the unknowable.

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After a brief scan of the linked text: intriguing; fascinating. I will try to remember to read it all… :+1: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Good question! The two of them seem to swap meanings, often without warning, which I interpret as there being less difference between them than might be obvious at first. :thinking:

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I think I get you. But to test that, let’s take the letters n o w h e r e. Break them one way and you get “nowhere,” the narrator who sees everything from no place at all. Break them another way and you get “now here,” where and when anyone has ever actually seen.

I think where the break falls might be your “exclusive”: “now” only means something against a “then,” and “here” against a “there.” Take that away and “now here” doesn’t burst into total vision, it goes blank, and blank is nowhere again. Your “freedom from standpoint = the ruin of a subject” could be the same point: being specific is what lets anything show up at all.

With letters I can break the word anywhere I like, but where things end and begin for me isn’t up to me. It only shifts when something catches me out.

Did I break this right, or does all breaking land in total blindness?

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In making the distinction between subject and object, Edey is not proposing a substance dualism. The dualism he proposes is that the subject is real, but the subject is not an object. The analogy he gives is that of sound and silence – the silence provides the condition of appearance for sounds whilst not itself being a sound. It is the absence in which sounds appear. Similarly the subject is not an object – it is the voidness that provides the condition for the appearance of objects.

This reminds me of William James’ notion of “pure experience,” except insofar as for James, subject and object are functional roles that arise within pure experience – knower and known. I think this differs from Edey’s notion of the subject, which presumably can continue in the absence of objects, whereas James’ notion of subject and object can only arise in mutual dependence within pure experience. Edey removes the subject from the objective framework, whereas James dissolves the subject into the objective framework.

It also reminds me of Nagarjuna’s notion of “emptiness,” except insofar as for Nagarjuna (just as for James), subject and object arise in mutual dependence. So both James and Nagarjuna seem to agree that neither subject nor object can exist in the absence of the other, but they also seem to disagree on something I find quite profound. James falls back on what he calls pure experience, warning us not to reify this into a new substance. Edey falls back on the subject. Nagarjuna, on the other hand, tells us that there is nothing to fall back on at all. In his way of speaking, “emptiness is itself empty.”

Perhaps the reason for these differences can be accounted for by what motivated these individual thinkers. James wanted to move beyond Descartes’ philosophy, and he proceeded by examining the structures appearing in experience. So it seems to me that James still appealed to a kind of ‘ground’ in his pure experience, regardless of his warnings about the error of reification. Edey wanted to get past Descartes’ substance dualism in particular, but he seems to have followed Descartes’ line of thinking regarding the indubitability of the subject. So for Edey, the subject replaces James’ pure experience as a kind of ‘ground.’

More radical than both James and Edey, Nagarjuna insists that there is no ground at all. Nagarjuna was motivated by the goal of Buddhism – liberation from the unsatisfactoriness inherent in human life by recognition of the emptiness of the subject. Just as James warned against regarding pure experience as a new substance, Nagarjuna warned against regarding emptiness as a new metaphysical account. Nagarjuna leaves us nowhere to stand at all.

In Carlo Rovelli’s book Helgoland (2021), Rovelli recounts the evolution of quantum mechanics and of various attempts to interpret what it might be telling us. In the third and final part of the book, Rovelli delves into the relational interpretation that he himself fathered in 1996. What fascinates me is that he devotes a whole chapter to Nagarjuna – a second century Indian philosopher that isn’t an obvious candidate for inclusion in an account of quantum mechanics. He writes:

“Nagarjuna has given us a formidable conceptual tool for thinking about the relationality of quanta: we can think about interdependence without autonomous essence entering the equation. In fact, interdependence – and this is the key argument made by Nagarjuna, requires us to forget all about autonomous essences.

“The long search for the ‘ultimate substance’ in physics has passed through matter, molecules, atoms, fields, elementary particles … and has been shipwrecked in the relational complexity of quantum field theory and general relativity. Is it possible that a philosopher from ancient India can provide us with a conceptual tool with which to extricate ourselves?”

And later:

“I am not a philosopher, I am a physicist: a simple mechanic. And this simple mechanic, who deals with quanta, is taught by Nagarjuna that it is possible to think of the manifestations of objects without having to ask what the object is in itself, independent from its manifestations.”

The physicist John Archibald Wheeler criticised physics for treating reality like a stage on which the universe exists completely formed and independent, while the subject (the observer) is a passive, innocent bystander watching through a glass wall without affecting the scene. Wheeler argued that quantum mechanics utterly destroys this “glass wall”. In his 1993 paper On Quantum Mechanics, Rovelli opens by dedicating the paper to Wheeler.

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Nagel’s “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’" through an Earth Centrist lens
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This is partially consistent with Husserl’s understanding of subjectivity as a kind of zero point of activity. But he would say there is no consciousness without there consciousness being of something. But this doesn’t simply mean awareness of or attending to an object like a spotlight illuminates objects. The subject is not a spotlight because attention is not simply a passive awareness of objects. Attention constructs its objects. Subjectivity can’t be detected through meditation or any other means as some kind of feeling of being, because reflection on consciousness turns it into an object. Subjectivty is not given the way that an object is, but that doesn’t mean it does not exist. It is one pole of the subject-object structure and neither side can be teased apart from the other except artificially. Objects are given to us in certain ways, such as being remembered, perceived, desired, imagined, judged, etc. Subjectivty is given along with intended objects as determining the mode of their givenness. This awareness is never neutral or empty but always of something given in some manner.

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I can see why that idea would stick with someone. I think the subject/object distinction is easy to overlook because we’re usually focused on what we are conscious of rather than the fact that there is a “someone” to whom the experience appears.

What’s interesting to me is the claim that the subject/object distinction is more fundamental than mind/matter. If that’s true, then trying to explain consciousness purely in terms of matter may already be starting from the wrong conceptual framework. The hard question, though, is whether we can say anything meaningful about the subject without turning it into another object.

That seems to be where the real difficulty begins…

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I’m not sure what the author’s intentions were. I mean, conscious and unconscious are states of a thing, usually a living organism. Consciousness is a noun, not an adjective.

Subject and object are aspects of the way we structure events. The subject of a sentence is active in some sense. The object passively receives the action.

So if we speak of the ball hitting the window, the ball is the subject, even though it’s not conscious and has no self.

The word subject only takes on a philosophically confusing status when we think about knowledge or awareness. What is the subject in the sentence: “I know that the rock is mossy.” For that matter, what is the object of the sentence? A proposition? A sentence? A state of affairs?

These questions are frequently hi-jacked for dubious purposes. The only straightforward path is ontological antirealism.

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Nice !

That’s a quote from early Heidegger. He is waxing ferocious against the null confusion latent in understanding “objective” as “from no standpoint at all.”

“Being specific is what lets anything show up at all.” Yes. The subject is “in the object” as the specification or character of its manifestation. “Prejudicial deconcealment” can be demystified. Let’s say I am myself a painter at an art gallery. Each painting in that gallery is there for me. But I am focused on the paintings. Nevertheless, they show up “in terms of” my entire personal history, and in terms of my rods and cones, the distance of my eyes from the canvas, etc. The painting is only visually there in this or that specified way. The painting doesn’t “give all of itself” to any one person in any one lighting in any one moment. It is fundamentally a temporal synthesis of its “faces.” This is the gist of phenomenological transcendence. It’s not the painting is other than an internal image. I see the painting itself here and now. But I do not engulf or enclose its being in this seeing. The painting is also for others, also for me later. The painting can only show me THIS face by HIDING all of its other faces. Every aspect occludes the others. The painting is even primarily “in the future” or “always still arriving,” because we are schemers. We are “thrown projection,” acting primarily on objects as we expect them to perform.

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We might even intensify this slightly. The subject “is” the mode of their given-ness: “prejudicial or specified deconcealment.” I understand that we also appeal to the subject as the cause of this rather than that manner of given-ness. This is good psychology. So I take your statement as a blending of two solid insights.

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I agree, but I think a few thinkers have managed to do this. As I see it, you touch on precisely the right issue. I’d phrase it this way. We should not read “consciousness” or “being” to point at a thing or a stuff.

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This is precisely what resonated with me all those years ago… the standard mode of investigation starts from the wrong place after having been misled by Descartes four centuries ago.

The “Hard Problem of Subjectivity” – nicely put. Hume’s bundle theory leads in the direction of there being no abiding self – it’s just a cohesive bundle of qualities that arise and dissipate, having no common essence but only a family resemblance, like Wittgenstein’s analogy of the thread having no unifying fiber running the whole length.

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Thanks for posting this paper @Andy; I found it quite stimulating.

I said earlier that I agree with Edey that subject/object is more fundamental than mind/matter, but the word “fundamental” is a bit problematic, because it might imply exactly what I would deny, namely that the distinction is trans-historical, or absolute, or ontologically primary, or a transcendental foundation, i.e., a ground. And indeed, Edey believes it’s all of those and more.

For me, subject/object is fundamental not as in a ground but just because it pervades experience as it actually is and has come to be historically. Substance dualism is I think certainly secondary to this, a theoretical reification of it, but the subject/object relation itself is a relation of mutual (but asymmetrical) mediation, in which neither pole grounds the other—and which is not itself a ground. It is not a division between an awareness outside the world and the world that appears to it; it is a relation within the world.

The primary fallacy I would identify in the paper is the confusion of the order of knowing with the order of being. Edey takes the priority of awareness in experience to imply that it is prior in being. We can say in response: awareness might have primacy in experience, but it’s actually derivative of our existence as biological, social, and historical agents. And Edey even unknowingly admits this himself:

As small children, we learn to talk, to conceptualize, and to reason, and we learn to call ourselves “I”.

So we have to ask: in the face of this reality, how does Edey arrive at the subject as an awareness distinct from all objects—what he later calls pure consciousness?

He does it with a trick, most obvious in the “Subjective Insight” section:

I am the subject. If I should identify myself with some object, that identification is destroyed as soon as I pay attention to that object and notice that it is not from the object that I pay attention. So I am not anything that can be attended to. I am not anything detectable, anything that can be found anywhere. I am nowhere to be found.

You begin by becoming aware of your hand, and that you are not your hand. Then you turn your attention to your thought about your hand, and notice that you are not that thought. And so on until there is nothing left but awareness itself.

But the thing remaining after every objective determination has been subtracted is not an ontological discovery—it is the theoretical product of the methodology of abstraction. The subject here is an abstraction from the living, embodied, social individual—an abstraction that is then taken as ontologically prior, thus hypostatized.

Edey thinks of this as going to the root, hence literally radical:

So let us focus the meaning of “self” here in what is literally a radical manner — getting at the root.

This is what Adorno was talking about when he wrote this beauty:

All these sorts of considerations are too radical and for that reason, like most radical questions, not radical enough.

— Negative Dialectics, Outset from the Concept

According to Adorno, to be radical in the sense of thinking outside the box or breaking with tradition, you have to drop the search for the first principle, the root. Edey doesn’t, thus he remains very much within the tradition.

Above I mentioned “our existence as biological, social, and historical agents”. Talking of agency, this is something that’s notably absent in Edey’s account of the subject, and this is evident from the very first sentence, where he states an equivalency as if it’s unproblematic:

subject and object, or awareness and appearance

In a way, the entire paper is spun out from this. As @Frank noted, the grammatical sense of subject/object—from which the philosophical sense is derived, I believe—already has subjective agency built into it: the subject is the actor, the object is the acted upon. Equating subject/object with awareness/appearance narrows a multifarious dimension of life, i.e., one that can consist of many different kinds of relation, down to contemplative perception.

Consider the terms of such familiar distinctions as between, for instance, observer and observed, seer and seen, hearer and heard, or thinker and thought, where the role of consciousness is explicit. Such pairs generalize to the distinction between subject and object. The concept of “subject” is at the core of any concept of “self”. Its meaning is given in the distinction between subject and object

[my bold]

So for Edey, the subject is primarily a spectator, separate from the world and contemplating it. Thus it looks rather like the later conclusion that the subject does not exist in the world is already presupposed.

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Yes! Hence my interest in Nagarjuna.

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The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground ~ Chogyam Trungpa

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