As through a glass, darkly

“The first precept was never to accept a thing as true until
I knew it as such without a single doubt” ~ Rene Descartes

 

We begin, then, at the unsatisfactory base camp established for us by the arch-skeptic Rene Descartes; we begin within our minds. Descartes uneasily proclaimed a link between the world-within and the world-without, with his Cogito. He was at least as aware as any of his critics, either at the time or coming after, of the problem of committing a petitio principii - but the Cogito was the best he could do within the empirical frame he had available to him. We cannot presume to place ourselves above Descartes, who is justly lionized as one of the more important thinkers of Western philosophy; but we can tentatively observe that we have more frames available to us, and the benefit of access not only to the oeuvre of Descartes but to that of many other great minds, too. Korzybski says we are time-binding, and happily he is sufficiently correct that we can rely on him to say so rather than having to appreciate it independently.

One of the more trivial bequeathals of Descartes' thought is the concept of the Cartesian theater. This is a metaphor or model for what we might poetically term the "mind's eye," and describes the milieu for those entities that occupy our minds - all the things that I have communicated to you and that you have read awoke such entities in your mind, and all of those things existed in the same subjective sense. Subjective being has the character of arising endogenously within our minds - it is real to us, but is not directly accessible to anybody but us. Indeed, it is only directly accessible to ourselves insofar as we understand ourselves to be entities within the Cartesian theater - that is to say, insofar as we are possessed of self-awareness. All subjectively real things are things of which self-aware beings have awareness.

We could assert that there are subjectively real things of which we are not, or cannot be, subjectively aware; but that would invoke entities with which nobody could interact, and Occam's Razor tells us we need not involve such entities in our models. More importantly, we understand enough about these subjective entities that we can approximately measure their impact on us, and as a result we can advance the scientific hypothesis that subjective entities arise in the process of developing awareness of them. Thus, a subjective entity is a 'made thing' in a sense analogous to the Art we discussed earlier, and we as rational beings thereby become 'Artists of the mind.' The Art, in this instance, comes into existence only when we are aware of it, and this is an aspect of the reason why I chose to define Art to necessarily involve an Observer. We are aware of subjective entities as being the manifestations of a conscious and self-aware experiencing of the world, and in this sense we-qua-Observers intuit the agency of we-qua-Artists in the construction of that experience.

The idea that we could experience the world without either consciousness or self-awareness is a very hard one for us to grasp, because it is an idea that is from first principles not appreciable as a subjective entity. It is in this sense of a subjectively real existence that Bishop Berkeley intoned: Esse est percipi. We'll not follow Bishop Berkeley all the way back up the causal chain to the original Unobserved Observer, partly because that would be too lengthy a digression and partly because the notion of subjective existence we're discussing here is only a beginning.