The meanest tutor in the world++
The Online Debate we're using as part of the assessment for this moral philosophy course seems to be working really well. But I from time to time I have ferociously intervened. And this morning I'm being intellectually violent again. Muahahaha.
The student posted a reply to one of my posts: First of all, I'm not sure I understand your post. But I think that what you are saying is probably my point - if people could announce their whole truth through reason, there would be no cause for disagreement. But they can't. The subjective must always coincide with reason, because we are human beings.
And I unfurled an short essay on the presupposition of subjectivity+: Again, you seem to be asserting a generalisation M****: "if people could announce their whole truth through reason... but they can't." Why?
The term 'whole' here seems to be confusing matters. If reason were whole, we would only know this because we have access to it as a whole. Yet by your own admission, "the subjective must always coincide with reason, because we are human beings." This appeal to anthropology does two things. On the one hand it makes human-ness/humanity opaque. How can one know humanity but through some kind of rational understanding, an appeal to some objective order outside ourselves? (I'll explain this a little more in a second.) On the other hand, the consistency of reason - it's 'wholeness' - is untenable given your appeal to an anti-objective subjectivity that makes a human subject incapable of knowing 'big-T' Truth, only dimly lit 'small-t' truths which suggest an objective order without ever revealing this objective order as such. (This is reminiscent of the theatre of Samuel Beckett, for instance his short piece Play.)
Let me return to my first suggestion for a moment. I understand your suggestion "if people could announce their whole truth through reason, there would be no cause for disagreement" to mean that disagreements, paradoxes, and contraries are purely subjective illusions, illusions generated by subjectivity. But then the question arises, how can subjectivity 'get it right' if it is given to generating illusions in this way? Surely we need to presuppose some objective moral order to validate the truth of morality (it's goodness, mode, shape, form, etc), but at the same moment we need to accept the reasonableness of this objective order as being unstable because it is an assumption, not a truth (there is no truth here, only fancy and fantasies). In a way, it is precisely the presupposition of objectivity that makes room for subjectivity to take place, i.e. my internal interpretation of the world exclusive to 'me.' (This is a line of argument developed by David Hume in the first chapter of his Treatise on Human Understanding.)
But it is all the more interesting if we play the materialist game and turn this around the other way. What if we say that subjectivity is the presupposition of an objective shared universe? That the objective order of reality only becomes tenable on the basis that I can interpret this order, understand it as properly objective; a process which is ultimately thwarted because subjectivity cannot take priority over objectivity, the consciousness of the objective order always being one-step behind. How mystifying it is then, that to understand an objective order it is necessary to assume a subjective dimension which can neither sustain nor destroy this objective order, merely narrate its existence.
Moreover, if there is any claim to be made for human understanding to be 'rational' then it must be made in the suggestion that it is not, and will never be, objective. Disagreement is therefore not a subjective phenomenon, rather it is something that happens in the 'objective order' which takes the human subject out of 'the objective realm of things' and subsequently distances each human subject from the other, i.e. even in a crowd we are alone. Simply put, a subject is not an object. An objective order cannot accommodate subjectivity because it is not an objective phenomenon, therefore 'the human being' must be excluded from the objective order. Yet, 'objectivity' is where Existence happens, e.g. an object is an object by virtue of the fact that it exists as such, has particular determinate characteristics binding it to the physical world. But this existence of the object does not impute any moral value judgements, it simply 'is.' Hence, and paradoxically, "the subjective" does not exist as such, it merely functions as an assumption to sustain the existence of material reality.
Perhaps this then is why morality seems to be an intervention into an objective order, a disruption of something that ultimately spells out the ruin of this attempt. Relativism, absolutism, and pluralism all modulate the violent rupture of the excess of subjectivity in an objective order. Yet for the particular 'point of view' of the human being to take primacy, to relate to truth, then it must precede objectivity. And the logical way this can take place is if we begin from objectivity and posit subjectivity as a presupposition, i.e. some 'big-T' Truth does exist for moral judgements to be based on. We cannot begin with subjectivity and suggest the objective order of moral truth is the product of a subjective imagination because this ultimately makes objectivity an untenable illusion.
The problem for me is that you seemed to put the honesty/truth of reason on the side of the subject and renamed this the really existing human being, and moreover that this was your starting point. Such a position effectively means that we become incapable of accessing the objectivity that makes our reason 'honest' and true. So while "the subjective must always coincide with reason" I would also add that 'the subject is not a product of an objective order, rather it is a fundamental presupposition of objectivity generated through its formal structure.' It is as though by some bizarre turn of chance that we are human beings. Being human does not make us subjects.
This seems to be the only way you could successfully, and philosophically, argue that a human subject has access to some truth or morality as such. In which case truth is not whole, it is split by subjectivity. But this does not cause disagreement. Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of the objective order because subjectivity is presupposed by its structure. Hence, it is not 'being human/subjective' that causes disagreement, rather it is an objective state by virtue of which people can announce their whole truth.
--
That really was the long way around to pointing out how disagreement isn't the product of subjectivity, wasn't it? :)
It really irks me when people say being human equals being a subject. For pete's sake people, stop confusing objective statements about miserable creatures with the condition of subjectivity!
To reiterate, being human does not make us subjective.
~Niveau
+ Any allusions that seem to have no context were referred to in previous posts on the thread this came from.
++ I was really tempted to name the post "Why You Don't Exist and Everything Else Does" but I was worried the student's ego might be just a little bit too fragile to take that kind of a joke.
The student posted a reply to one of my posts: First of all, I'm not sure I understand your post. But I think that what you are saying is probably my point - if people could announce their whole truth through reason, there would be no cause for disagreement. But they can't. The subjective must always coincide with reason, because we are human beings.
And I unfurled an short essay on the presupposition of subjectivity+: Again, you seem to be asserting a generalisation M****: "if people could announce their whole truth through reason... but they can't." Why?
The term 'whole' here seems to be confusing matters. If reason were whole, we would only know this because we have access to it as a whole. Yet by your own admission, "the subjective must always coincide with reason, because we are human beings." This appeal to anthropology does two things. On the one hand it makes human-ness/humanity opaque. How can one know humanity but through some kind of rational understanding, an appeal to some objective order outside ourselves? (I'll explain this a little more in a second.) On the other hand, the consistency of reason - it's 'wholeness' - is untenable given your appeal to an anti-objective subjectivity that makes a human subject incapable of knowing 'big-T' Truth, only dimly lit 'small-t' truths which suggest an objective order without ever revealing this objective order as such. (This is reminiscent of the theatre of Samuel Beckett, for instance his short piece Play.)
Let me return to my first suggestion for a moment. I understand your suggestion "if people could announce their whole truth through reason, there would be no cause for disagreement" to mean that disagreements, paradoxes, and contraries are purely subjective illusions, illusions generated by subjectivity. But then the question arises, how can subjectivity 'get it right' if it is given to generating illusions in this way? Surely we need to presuppose some objective moral order to validate the truth of morality (it's goodness, mode, shape, form, etc), but at the same moment we need to accept the reasonableness of this objective order as being unstable because it is an assumption, not a truth (there is no truth here, only fancy and fantasies). In a way, it is precisely the presupposition of objectivity that makes room for subjectivity to take place, i.e. my internal interpretation of the world exclusive to 'me.' (This is a line of argument developed by David Hume in the first chapter of his Treatise on Human Understanding.)
But it is all the more interesting if we play the materialist game and turn this around the other way. What if we say that subjectivity is the presupposition of an objective shared universe? That the objective order of reality only becomes tenable on the basis that I can interpret this order, understand it as properly objective; a process which is ultimately thwarted because subjectivity cannot take priority over objectivity, the consciousness of the objective order always being one-step behind. How mystifying it is then, that to understand an objective order it is necessary to assume a subjective dimension which can neither sustain nor destroy this objective order, merely narrate its existence.
Moreover, if there is any claim to be made for human understanding to be 'rational' then it must be made in the suggestion that it is not, and will never be, objective. Disagreement is therefore not a subjective phenomenon, rather it is something that happens in the 'objective order' which takes the human subject out of 'the objective realm of things' and subsequently distances each human subject from the other, i.e. even in a crowd we are alone. Simply put, a subject is not an object. An objective order cannot accommodate subjectivity because it is not an objective phenomenon, therefore 'the human being' must be excluded from the objective order. Yet, 'objectivity' is where Existence happens, e.g. an object is an object by virtue of the fact that it exists as such, has particular determinate characteristics binding it to the physical world. But this existence of the object does not impute any moral value judgements, it simply 'is.' Hence, and paradoxically, "the subjective" does not exist as such, it merely functions as an assumption to sustain the existence of material reality.
Perhaps this then is why morality seems to be an intervention into an objective order, a disruption of something that ultimately spells out the ruin of this attempt. Relativism, absolutism, and pluralism all modulate the violent rupture of the excess of subjectivity in an objective order. Yet for the particular 'point of view' of the human being to take primacy, to relate to truth, then it must precede objectivity. And the logical way this can take place is if we begin from objectivity and posit subjectivity as a presupposition, i.e. some 'big-T' Truth does exist for moral judgements to be based on. We cannot begin with subjectivity and suggest the objective order of moral truth is the product of a subjective imagination because this ultimately makes objectivity an untenable illusion.
The problem for me is that you seemed to put the honesty/truth of reason on the side of the subject and renamed this the really existing human being, and moreover that this was your starting point. Such a position effectively means that we become incapable of accessing the objectivity that makes our reason 'honest' and true. So while "the subjective must always coincide with reason" I would also add that 'the subject is not a product of an objective order, rather it is a fundamental presupposition of objectivity generated through its formal structure.' It is as though by some bizarre turn of chance that we are human beings. Being human does not make us subjects.
This seems to be the only way you could successfully, and philosophically, argue that a human subject has access to some truth or morality as such. In which case truth is not whole, it is split by subjectivity. But this does not cause disagreement. Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of the objective order because subjectivity is presupposed by its structure. Hence, it is not 'being human/subjective' that causes disagreement, rather it is an objective state by virtue of which people can announce their whole truth.
--
That really was the long way around to pointing out how disagreement isn't the product of subjectivity, wasn't it? :)
It really irks me when people say being human equals being a subject. For pete's sake people, stop confusing objective statements about miserable creatures with the condition of subjectivity!
To reiterate, being human does not make us subjective.
~Niveau
+ Any allusions that seem to have no context were referred to in previous posts on the thread this came from.
++ I was really tempted to name the post "Why You Don't Exist and Everything Else Does" but I was worried the student's ego might be just a little bit too fragile to take that kind of a joke.