Between the lines

“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism”
~ Herbert Hoover

 

We've already stated that you understand the words to have objective existence as marks on a page - otherwise you could not read them. And you understand the words to have intersubjective existence, without which they could have no meaning for you. You also understand them to have subjective existence in that you have formed a subjective impression of the sentences you've read within your Cartesian theater. But this is not the limit of your appreciation. You have understood these words in another sense, unless you are an extraordinary person indeed. You have understood them within the context of being a self-aware conscious individual with your own history and your own prior impressions of all the things you remember from your life so far. What I am communicating to you has not arrived upon a tabula rasa within you: it has been projected onto an immensely complex and vibrant construct, which is your self-aware, self-generated, self-sustaining subjective realm. The interactions between the novel material introduced by this intersubjective process, and the established corpus of self-awareness generated subjectively over the course of your lifetime, themselves have an existence which makes your subjective world uniquely your own. Your critical faculty - your capacity for comparing the material I'm presenting to you here with the subjective material of your pre-existing subjective realm - gives rise to the ideal existence.

To see this, let's digress for a moment and return to empirical reality. We had said that, in the objective realm, things that exist do so in measurable ways. This capacity to be measured is a property of objective entities, and the things we can measure are also properties. But entities are not simply properties - we can group together 'things that are red' and 'things that are big,' to give two simple examples, but we do not thereby perceive discrete entities in the way we understand them: certainly, we do not in that fashion perceive entities we can relate to word-symbols and communicate intersubjectively with other people. Entities, in fact, exist as unique relations between properties. Every entity is theoretically describable as a specific set of relations among properties that exactly describe it, and within the empirical physical universe the whole immensity of Creation is similarly susceptible to representation as an exhaustive and exhausting catalogue of relations and properties.