Subjectivity is relational

"Short" point on the phenomenology of consciousness

There is no consciousness without the actual relationship to that which is being perceived.

This might seem entirely self-evident, but actually runs counter to the entire programme of Western reductionism and its philosophy of the sovereign subject, the Faustian mind, dominating the machine-world.

In reality, subjectivity is immediately and completely dependent upon the Other. Upon the presence of something to perceive or to reflect upon. It doesn’t matter if these externals are categorized as being somehow parts of one’s own self, they’re still immediately distinguishable from the intentionality or the directedness of conscious perception or the act of intellection, and so are always other. The mind does not see merely its own intentionality. The intellect does not actually reflect upon nothing but the pure act of intellection.

So while the seer and the thing perceived can formally speaking be distinguished as meaningful referents, the complex event of phenomenal consciousness as such is predicated on the real presence of both.

In other words, the relationship is primary to conscious experience. Both parties are necessary.

This is clearly emphasized throughout most non-Western traditions of philosophy. Japanese thought for instance rejects the detached spectation of Cartesianism, maintaining that there’s no gap between the self and the reality known. The Chinese speak of xing 性, which cashes out essence in regard to the way something relates to its surroundings and to other actual entities.

(T'ao, Shih. (1702). “Broad-Distance Pavillion”. Illustrations to the Poems of Huang Yan-lü.)

The presence of the apple tree in the garden outside, or of the Big Dipper incomprehensibly far away, both somehow need me to be what they are. And I need them.

But even classical Western thought can in principle affirm this holistic relationalist at the core of being. Us Thomists would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is in a fundamental sense composite, that it needs both your intentionality and the real presence of an other to actually exist in reality. While you as a rational person are a discrete substance, to actually be alive, you need to relate to something else as well, be it an immaterial form or actual bodies.

To be fair, thinkers like the Irish bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) was on this same path with his phenomenalistic argument for idealism (he basically argued that since we can only know reality through experience, and every experience has to be a mental phenomenon, everything ultimately reduces to mental phenomena). But we still see this one-track reductionism here. The external world is somehow appropriated and colonized by the self, who “owns it” through its conscious experience, and so even here, the distinction between self and other is obscured by a form of monist idealism where everything is just made out of this “objective” mental substance that is equated with the individual consciousness.

No. Descartes’ dream cannot actually be reduced to his own mental substance, since even the dream is immediately relational in the above sense. The ancient Greeks knew this. They thought of dreams as something external, imposing themselves upon the person’s soul-complex.

In reality, subject and object can only be distinguished virtually. We can use concepts to refer to them in a meaningful way. But they can’t be separated in reality.

So in other words, the reductionist cutting-up of the world and consciousness into discretely separate entities expressed in the Cartesian philosophical anthropology, is only a virtual distinction, metaphysically impossible in reality.

In some sense, the construction of a simple and sovereign soul-substance of the Self (from the virtual distinction between self and other and the elimination of the latter) is a perversion of classical theism. A sort of auto-deification at the heart of Western culture, the turning of oneself into God. Something which happens to be clearly expressed in LaVeyan Satanism.

And this virtual distinction has been reified. It has been approached as though it were an actual, tangible reality, inculcating us with a worldview of separatedness and detachment.

Indeed a very useful tool of behavioural formation in the context of a capitalist growth economy.

(Mitsui, Daniel. St. Michael the Archangel fighting the devil. See more of his work at www.danielmitsui.com)

No, my friends. Solipsism is nonsense. Reductive physicalism is nonsense. Irrevocable determinism is a lie put forth to enslave and tear asunder.

You and I are never alone, and we actually and immediately exist in and through one another. We are embodied spirits, and our free actions have meaningful consequences without end.

(RIP Trevor Moore, 1980-2021).