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.

To be or not to be, that is the question

“Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective;
somehow it’s something more subtle than that.” ~ John Polkinghorne

 

Although it is the beginning, it's not the sense in which we ordinarily - naively - think of things existing. We think of a thing existing in a measurable way; we think of it having physical properties like weight and dimension and color. This is objective existence, and it is different in important ways from subjective existence. One of these is that an objectively real entity is directly accessible to multiple observers. A mountain is, objectively, a mountain which can be observed independently by many people. Furthermore, an objectively real entity does not exist because it is observed (Berkeley is coughing pointedly, but let us ignore him for now); indeed, it exists even when it is not observed. Unlike a subjective entity, the objective entity has an independent existence of its own. It is the independence of objectivity, and the empirical evidence of our physical selves as such independent objective entities, that gives rise to the awareness of self qua self without which subjective existence were impossible.

If you accept that, you can also accept that objectivity exists a priori to subjectivity; the subjective analogue to an objective entity arises out of the process of observing that objective entity with a physical sensorium. There is a very interesting problem in empiricism, encapsulated by the philosopher David Hume when he posed the question: can we imagine a shade of blue we have never directly perceived? Hume differentiated between 'impressions' that are subjective entities triggered by or derived from the objective world around us, and 'ideas' that are subjective entities generated without reference to the objective reality in which we physically exist. Whether we can apprehend an idea of blue that is sui generis, and not merely an impression unconsciously remembered, remains a dilemma for empiricists. For our purposes right now, it is sufficient to state that all of us can readily understand both subjective and objective existence, and further that we can understand they are qualitatively different kinds of existence.

Because of the fuzzy skepticism of Descartes, it is not always possible to state definitively of any particular entity of which we are consciously aware that it is either subjective or objective; and this is another sort of problem, addressed by Borges in his Argumentum Ornithologicum. Nevertheless, we have at this point identified two ways in which a thing may be; and, at least theoretically, we have established that these ways of being are not necessarily universal - that is, some entity may 'be' only subjectively, or only objectively, although it may well exist in both ways and it can exist in both ways so homogenously as to blur the line between the two.

That is already quite some philosophical ground we've covered, but this is the point where we return to Korzybski and the metanow (which is not a Korzybskian construct, but which relates to his time-binding notion very handily). We do so by considering an entirely different kind of existence. We do so by considering words.