Puzzles of the Unconscious

 

When was the unconscious mind discovered? The question makes sense in a way the comparable question about the conscious mind does not. The conscious mind was “discovered” when it came to exist, just by being conscious: being conscious and knowing one is conscious are inseparable. But that isn’t true of the unconscious: it is precisely not known just by existing. The unconscious is a postulate, a hypothesis, a theoretical conjecture; and it makes sense to ask when such a postulate was initially proposed. As with all theoretical postulates, we can only approach it indirectly: we certainly can’t know about the unconscious by means of direct introspection. We have to employ inference, experiment, and theory construction. Let’s say for convenience that the unconscious was discovered by Leibniz in the seventeenth century, and later investigated by Helmholtz, Freud, Chomsky, and many others.  [1] We can say that we now know that the unconscious mind exists; at any rate, I have no wish to dispute its existence. Still, there are many unanswered questions about the unconscious that tend to be ignored, because in the minds of many people the idea is regarded as questionable or even taboo. I propose here to accept the robust reality of the unconscious mind (or many such) and tabulate some outstanding questions regarding its nature. My aim is to show how little we know about it.

            Why does the unconscious even exist? Why isn’t everything mental conscious? Some of it clearly is, so why not all of it? Freud thought that repression ensured the existence of the unconscious, but aside from various questions of empirical support and conceptual coherence there is the following point: why couldn’t repression banish disturbing mental contents to another parallel consciousness? After all, I am not disturbed by unseemly desires in your mind, so why couldn’t I have two conscious minds, one containing my acceptable desires and the other containing my unacceptable desires? All I need is to not know what is going on in the unseemly consciousness. It is not a necessary condition of epistemic insulation that the mind containing repressed material should be inherently unconscious, just that we don’t know what it contains. Another popular idea is that for some types of unconscious mentation there is a processing constraint: the conscious mind has a relatively narrow bandwidth, so we are organized in such a way as not to overburden it–nature relegates the bulk of mental activity to an unconscious that doesn’t intrude on our circumscribed consciousness. This is a pretty feeble explanation: whyis this so, and is it really true? For example, much linguistic processing is unconscious, with only the final product reaching consciousness, but it is quite unclear whether this has anything to do with considerations of cognitive capacity. Some consciously produced sentences are extremely complex, and some simple conscious utterances have simple processing antecedents. Complexity is not the determinant of what reaches consciousness. So we really don’t know why the unconscious exists, though it evidently does; we don’t know why there is such a thing as an unconscious. (Likewise, we don’t really know why the conscious mind exists, instead of complete unconsciousness, but that is another story.  [2])

            Is unconsciousness the natural condition of the mind with consciousness as a derivative and recent addition, or is it consciousness that is basic? Did the unconscious evolve first and only later came to coexist with consciousness, or was it the other way about? Were animal desires, say, initially all unconscious with consciousness something superadded (as higher-order thought theories imply)? How would we set about answering this question? What is the value in knowing what is in one’s mind as opposed to simply having a mind? Do some animals now existing have entirely unconscious minds? Could we encounter aliens whose minds are completely devoid of consciousness yet as sophisticated as ours? More generally, is the basic form of the mental an unconscious form, with consciousness something out of the ordinary? If most of mental activity is unconscious, as seems to be the case, at least in some areas (vision, linguistic understanding), then that would seem to imply that unconscious existence is the norm, the default condition. Consciousness might be incidental to most mental activity, by no means intrinsic to it. Again, this is not a question to which we have any clear answer, or any clear way of getting an answer.

            The underlying puzzle is why the mind has a kind of dual existence or identity: why is it partly conscious and partly unconscious? Why not just one or the other? These seem to be very different states of being, and it is hard even to understand how one thing can manage to be both: what is it for a desire, say, to be now unconscious and now conscious? We might suggest that it is simply to be known or not known by its possessor, but that raises a host of questions, not the least of which is that this makes the consciousness of a conscious desire quite extrinsic to its nature. One would expect uniformity in this respect, but it appears that the mind can happily exist in both forms. Thus we are sometimes told that all mental phenomena are intrinsically unconscious with consciousness injected from the outside by means of second-order belief; or contrariwise that the mind is intrinsically conscious with no unconscious at all or only a derivative unconscious (e.g. unconscious mental states are dispositions to consciousness). It is not conceptually easy to accept that the mind enjoys a kind of double life, now bound up with consciousness, now indifferent to it. For instance, words and grammar occupy two worlds, being both elements of consciousness and also components of a language faculty that largely operates behind the scenes. How do they make the transition to consciousness, and is their intrinsic nature quite independent of their appearance in conscious speech acts and conscious inner thought? Is meaning itself essentially an unconscious thing or a conscious thing? What exactly are we asking when we ask this question? Obscurity billows.

            Why is it that some mental phenomena readily admit of such a dual existence while some don’t? We can easily accept that beliefs often exist in an unconscious form, but we don’t think that sensations of pain do. You can firmly believe that p unconsciously but you can’t have an intense pain unconsciously—nor can you have a vivid experience of red unconsciously. So some of the mind can exist in both forms but some can’t: why is that? What is it about beliefs that allows them to flit between the conscious and the unconscious, while pain is stuck on the conscious side of the divide (sometimes the option of unconscious pain would be highly desirable—no need for anesthetic at the dentist)? Emotions too appear to prefer consciousness—can you be extremely angry or elated unconsciously?—though they can also exist in a partially unconscious form. It all seems rather arbitrary, with no obvious rationale or point. Can we imagine creatures that invert our psychological make-up, with beliefs capable only of conscious existence and sensations of pain easily sliding from one state of being to the other? It’s all very puzzling. The division between the conscious and the unconscious seems to fall arbitrarily across the mind.

            The unconscious is often credited with creative powers beyond those possessed by the conscious, and there is much anecdotal evidence to this effect. Problem solving can occur both consciously, as with deliberate mental effort, and unconsciously, often during sleep. But why is this? Why isn’t creativity confined to one side or the other? It is commonly assumed that unconscious creativity is the surprising thing, but why exactly do we suppose that creativity naturally requires the exercise of consciousness? We readily accept that vision is largely an unconscious process, so why not accept that creativity is? Is there anything about creativity itself that favors one or the other mode of operation? Could it be that so-called conscious creativity is largely driven by unconscious creativity? The creativity of dreams is entirely unconscious, and maybe all creativity employs the same mechanisms (if that is the right word); also linguistic creativity, in the form of ordinary speech, is driven by unconscious mental processes. Maybe creativity is predominantly unconscious in human beings, despite our prejudice in favor of the conscious kind. But there would still be the question of why creativity prefers to operate in secret, not revealing its methods to conscious scrutiny. It appears that creativity can operate at two mental levels, but why this should be so remains a mystery. Creativity is already mysterious, and its ambivalent relation to consciousness only compounds the mystery.

            What exactly is the mode of being of unconscious mentation? It isn’t another locus of consciousness cut off from the primary locus (like other minds) yet it is still mental in nature: but what is this mode of existence? It would be wrong to call it “physical” despite the lack of conscious expression: it hovers in a strange ontological no-man’s land. Do we really have any adequate conception of what kind of thing unconscious mentality is? We can’t conceive it on a perceptual model, but we also can’t conceive it on an introspective model; nor can it be compared to unobservable entities like atoms (the unconscious is not just very small consciousness). We can talk of it, but do we really know what we are talking about? We might imagine the brain murmuring softly to itself, but that is so much desperate imagery; we find ourselves comparing it to especially unobtrusive types of consciousness. Or we wheel in something like computation and declare it to be just like that: but computation itself raises similar questions—what kind of being does it have? We know what conscious computation is, but what is unconscious computation? Computation can’t be just electromagnetic activity and the like: is it perhaps like unconscious computation in the mind? But now we are back where we started. We really have no clear conception of what an unconscious mental state is. That doesn’t mean there is no such thing, or that the notion has no theoretical utility; it merely points to a lacuna in our conceptual scheme. Accordingly, we find ourselves puzzled by the mode of existence of the unconscious (as Hume was puzzled about causation). We talk blithely of something whose nature eludes us—a not unfamiliar situation.

            Mental states seem to transform from one state of being to the other: the same thing can appear consciously or unconsciously. We have a caterpillar-to-butterfly situation. But what is the nature of this metamorphosis: how does a mental state make the transition, the transformation? According to one theory, it simply acquires a suitable second-order belief to the effect that it exists, but that is hardly plausible for such cases as linguistic processing: when a word goes from unconscious manipulation to conscious utterance it doesn’t do so by being believed to exist. It undergoes a special type of transmutation: the unconscious lexical item becomes a conscious word. By what mechanism or procedure does this occur? Is it akin to biological metamorphosis? Not literally, to be sure, but the process may be as drastic and as profound—though occurring in an instant and evaporating as quickly. The unconscious-to-conscious transformation is real but baffling: it is not at all like moving counters about on a board. It is literally transformative—a kind of abrupt alteration of being. It would be different if the conscious and the unconscious shared no elements, keeping strictly to their own domain, but in fact there is systematic transfer of elements, thus raising the puzzle of how that is achieved. This puzzle is already raised by memory, which also involves a sudden transition from the unconscious form to the conscious form—the same thing taking on a quite different mode of being. It is as if it is injected with some sort of alchemical fluid that catapults it onto a new level of being. Look, Ma, I’m conscious! More soberly: there are transformational mechanisms that elevate the unconscious to the level of consciousness—though we have no idea what these mechanisms look like. Again, this is not a count against the unconscious, just an indication of how little we understand of its workings.

            Is there a biological law at work here? Does every creature with a mind split that mind into a conscious part and an unconscious part? No organism has a mind that is exclusively one or the other.  That seems plausible, though some empirical confirmation would be desirable. But it does raise the question of the ground of such a law: where does it come from, why is it true? In particular, why this arrangement as opposed to having two (or more) conscious minds, each dedicated to different tasks (as, arguably, with the central nervous system and the enteric nervous system,  [3] or the distributed consciousness of the octopus)? It seems like a solid law of mental functioning, but its rationale is obscure. It isn’t even clear what its functional significance is—what it does for the organism. It just seems like a brute fact (at least Freud had some sort of explanation of why the two parts of the mind exist as separate entities).

            Are we sure the unconscious mind can be described using terms drawn from the description of the conscious mind (including the use of the term “mind”)? We discovered the unconscious mind in the seventeenth century (we are supposing) and immediately began describing it by re-deploying the terms already at our disposal, those used to describe the conscious mind. But is this a good way to proceed?  Maybe a quite new vocabulary is needed (as with computational vocabulary): after all, the unconscious differs rather dramatically from the conscious precisely in not being conscious. Should we really be talking about unconscious beliefs, desires, knowledge, creativity, competence, etc.? But (a) no other terms suggest themselves and (b) how else can we maintain the view that we have an unconscious mind? Everyone knows that a great deal of brain activity has no conscious counterpart, but that doesn’t imply a second mind; using the same terms allows us to recognize that we are dealing with another level of mentality. Yet that may mislead us into ascribing more commonality between the two than is strictly warranted. Again, there seems to be a conceptual gap in our thinking about the unconscious. What we call “the unconscious mind” is an I-know-not-what—we refer to it but we don’t know what it is exactly that we are referring to. Is it subjective or is it objective? Do we know what the unconscious of a bat is like? Can a blind man grasp our visual unconscious? Even that basic question goes unanswered.

            Is there a competence-performance distinction for the unconscious mind? Here at least we can be fairly definitive: there is indeed. Linguistic competence is very largely unconscious, but a good deal of linguistic performance is too—all the activity that goes into producing an utterance. In the case of memory we have the competence (knowledge) that consists in storing information in a retrievable form, but we also have the performance that consists in actually accessing this competence—which can be affected by many outside factors. There is memory knowledge and there is memory action, and both are mainly unconscious. Then too, we have a competence-performance distinction for the conscious mind, so the distinction doesn’t track the conscious-unconscious distinction. It would have been striking if the unconscious were limited to competence and the conscious limited to performance, but that appears not to be the case.

            What kind of intentionality does the unconscious mind have? Is it just like the intentionality of the conscious mind? Do we have referential opacity in both domains? Could it be that one is object-directed and one is not? Jung’s unconscious seems far more amorphous than the conscious, so it is possible that some types of unconscious mentation lack the kind of definite intentionality we associate with the conscious mind. The more primordial the unconscious mind is thought to be the blurrier it is conceived as being (the unconscious as a “blooming, buzzing confusion”). Is unconscious desire as finely targeted as conscious desire? It’s hard to say, but the options are logically available. Is the unconscious mind as thoroughly infiltrated by the language faculty as the conscious mind? That would seem to be denied by the Freudian conception of the unconscious, which is not linguistically sophisticated (that inarticulate id). Different types of intentionality might be exploited in different unconscious parts of the mind. Maybe some regions of the unconscious are more analogue than others. There might be as many types of intentionality (representation) as there are types of unconscious.

            Are there degrees of unconsciousness or is it a binary distinction? People generally assume the latter, but it is not clear this is correct. Consider memory: memories can exist at varying distances from full recollection—from completely inaccessible to accessible after intense effort to tip of the tongue to flooding consciousness. Conscious accessibility is a matter of degree: some items in memory lie very close to consciousness, some are remote from it, some are just around the corner, and some are buried under a pile of misremembering. Language is similar: grammatical rules can sometimes be excavated and brought to consciousness, though some cannot; we construct some utterances at lightning speed with no conscious knowledge of how it is done, while others are laboriously constructed (as with writing) in full knowledge of word choice and grammatical form. In general, we should stop thinking in sharply binary terms and accept that the distinction is graded and fluid, with borderline cases and varying accessibility constraints.

            Is personality partially unconscious? That was Freud’s main contention, his theory being that our motivations and personality traits are largely fixed by unconscious factors; and we still hear talk of “implicit bias” (i.e. unconscious prejudice), hidden sources of irrationality, unacknowledged cognitive dissonance, automatic stereotypical thinking, and the like. Common observation suggests that people are often only dimly aware of their true personality; they are lacking in self-knowledge. So it appears that large chunks of personality are unconscious—cut off from conscious knowledge. To put it differently, the springs of action are often unconscious springs. But some of our motivations are conscious enough, are they not? So again, why are some conscious and some unconscious? Freud had an explanation—repression, especially of a sexual nature. But that theory limps in many ways, leaving the question wide open. Must personality have an unconscious component? Do some people have a more unconscious personality than others? Do animals also have a partially unconscious personality? Do unconscious personality traits function in the same way as conscious ones? Would it necessarily be a good thing to render all personality traits fully conscious? Why exactly does personality divide up in this way? These are all good questions, though seldom discussed.

            It seems to me that the question of the unconscious is still regarded as ideological in character, quasi-religious even. You either Believe or you don’t. It is time to treat it as a scientific question, to be studied like all scientific questions; and the first step in doing this is recognizing how little we know about the unconscious in fundamental respects.  [4]

 

Colin McGinn       

  [1] I daresay this is not historically accurate; perhaps we can date the discovery of the unconscious back to Plato’s Meno with Socrates and the slave boy. The point is that the unconscious was discovered long after it began to exist, much later than the conscious. The existence of the unconscious is a genuinely surprising fact.

  [2] This is the question of why we and other animals are not unconscious zombies: why did evolution see fit to engineer consciousness into existence? But once it did what was the reason for adding an unconscious level of mental reality? Why not make the mind completely transparent?

  [3] See my “The Second Mind” in Philosophical Provocations (2017).

  [4] If the unconscious is by definition the part of the mind of which we are ignorant, then it is also the part that remains largely unmapped scientifically. And indeed it is in its nature resistant to easy investigation. If only we had an unconscious cerebroscope!

I’ve been wondering about Judas Iscariot recently. We are told he betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, a contemptible act. But what surprises me is that it took money to get him to betray Jesus, quite a bit of it. Surely it is more realistic to suppose that he did it for a much less compelling reason, e.g. to be popular with the mob. And isn’t it unrealistic to suppose that only one member of the twelve apostles betrayed Jesus? Judging by contemporary standards, one would expect most of the apostles to have been in on the betrayal. Judas has been represented as far more singular than human nature suggests. 

 

 

Song and Soul

 

It is a truism that song touches the soul. Something about song and something about the soul naturally mesh: that is, song and the emotions are suited to one another. But why is this? What features suit song to the emotions and hence the soul? Song is clearly language set to music, but what is language and what is music? Language is the pairing of sound and meaning, or better the union of the two: sound expresses meaning and meaning suffuses sound. Music is the union of melody and rhythm: pitch variations conjoined with temporal intervals. So song is the union of these two unions: a song is the joining together of the sound-meaning pair (language) and the melody-rhythm pair (music). When you sing you are fusing your ability to conjoin sound and meaning with your ability to conjoin pitch variations and temporal intervals. A song is a synthesis of these four elements: sound, meaning, melody, and rhythm. In a song, language is converted into something temporally structured (bars, note lengths) and pitch variations are imposed on it (the standard musical scales). Language becomes music. So there is a metamorphosis into an aesthetic medium, no longer a mere vehicle of communicative speech. Language is called upon to operate in the realm of art. Meaning itself becomes an aesthetic object by being subjected to musical forms. The speech act of song is a distinctively aesthetic type of speech act. And music itself becomes imbued with the representational power of language: it acquires an extra layer of meaning, a new type of significance. Music becomes semantically complex, doubly expressive. Such are the powers of song to transform both language and music into new versions of themselves.

            But how do these constitutive features of song mirror the emotions? One would like to find parallel structures at work in the emotions. First, sound and meaning: what in the emotions parallels this duality? Surely this: emotions admit a distinction between their felt character and their representational content. It feels a certain way to be angry or in love and these emotions are about certain people and states of affairs—what philosophers call qualia and intentionality. Moreover, these features merge and meld: they are not independent dimensions like size and color. So emotions are structurally similar to language in joining the phenomenological and the referential—a coloration of consciousness and a semantic content. Second, melody and rhythm: how do emotions parallel thisdistinction? Certainly not by sounding like higher and lower notes, or by mimicking the sound of a drum; but at a more abstract level we can find similarities. Pitch intervals consist of variations along a continuum of sound, selections from acoustic space; and rhythm is the spacing of sounds over time. But don’t emotions also vary continuously in an analogous way, and don’t they also occur spread out in time as separate experiences? Your anger can reach a high affective pitch, waxing and waning, then give way to something less intense; and it can also develop over time according to a recognizable pattern. Your love can burn brightly or dim languidly, and it also throbs and pulses in predictable ways (as when you meet or part from the beloved). Emotions evolve in time and they can be more or less intense (sharp, deep, tormenting, exhilarating). They can also be repetitive and maddening (or soothing). They can reach a crescendo or peter out, scale new heights or plumb new depths. Emotions seem to possess a “music” of their own: staccato or smooth, vibrant or torpid. So emotions mirror the musical form of a song, as well as its linguistic form. As the song progresses, its melody and rhythm intersect with the phenomenology of the corresponding emotions, in such a way that a certain note seems to condense a whole world of emotion, capturing the emotion perfectly. The music of the song maps onto the “music” of the emotions, with its variations of pitch and temporal development. Thus a song can condense and encapsulate a familiar human emotional experience, say the breakup of a love affair. There is an underlying commonality of form. The fourfold union of song reflects the fourfold union of emotion: sound-meaning plus melody-rhythm mirrors feeling-meaning plus affective variation combined with temporal development. The song is targeting the emotional structures of the soul.  [1]

            And there is a further similarity, namely the close connection between the inner and the outer that characterizes both song and emotion. Emotion characteristically has a behavioral expression, both vocal and non-vocal, as when a person shouts and stamps his feet; but song too, like most music, is often accompanied by behavioral expression, as in swaying and dancing. Musical experience and emotion both tend to translate into bodily movement. So hearing a song is apt to lead to the same kinds of behavior that the corresponding emotions lead to—swooning, jumping up and down, lachrymation. The emotions have their bodily manifestations, and so does hearing a song. This affinity enables song to connect with emotion, just as if a song were an embodied emotion. Also, the connection between the inner and the outer in the two cases is not an external connection: the behavior is integral to the emotion (in a way notoriously hard to articulate). The inner and the outer are unified. So there is a third union to be added to the previous two: both song and emotion are the union of three unions. Song is thus the ideal vehicle for the expression of emotion: they both have the same abstract architecture. The soul sings.  [2] 

 

Co

  [1] Similar remarks may be made about poetry and emotion: the affinity is undeniable, and it is natural to find in emotion some of the structure of poetry—meter, assonance, dissonance, etc. Song, of course, is a form of poetry, as well as being a form of music. A song is poetry set to music, and this enables it to tap into the emotions via the formal analogies between the two.

  [2] Less poetically, the emotions are analyzable using much the same conceptual apparatus that we can use to analyze the nature of song. The two are isomorphic, formal twins. That is why a song feels like an aural emotion.

 

 

An Objectivist View of the Universe

 

I will describe a metaphysical view aptly labeled objectivist. My aim is expository rather than argumentative, though I am inclined to accept the view. Objectivism says that the universe (reality, being) is fundamentally objective not subjective, with the emphasis on “fundamentally”. It isn’t that the universe has no subjective features; it is just that these features always have an objective basis. By “objective” I mean “not mind-involving”—having nothing intrinsically to do with consciousness (or unconsciousness). The view contains two sub-theses: all properties have an objective basis or correlate, and all concepts have an objective counterpart concept. For example, the property of being red, though subjective, has a basis in objective properties of objects and nervous systems; and the concept of being red has a counterpart concept in concepts of such properties. The color is mind involving, but the correlated objective properties of objects and nervous systems are not mind involving; and the concept of the color is graspable only by someone who experiences the color, but concepts of external objects and nervous systems are not so graspable.  That is, subjective facts always have objective facts behind them—but not vice versa. I won’t harp on the property-concept distinction in what follows, since the same point applies to both: I shall simply say that the subjective is always backed by the objective. What “backed” means will vary with the topic: it could mean straightforward identity, or it could mean something like supervenience or grounding or realization. For example, pain always has an objective correlate of some sort, though views may vary about how strong this correlation relation is. Strong objectivism might insist on reductionism via identity; weak objectivism might claim only a supervenience relation. The general idea is that the subjective is always embedded in the objective, while the objective need not be embedded in the subjective (and typically is not). Thus reality is fundamentally objective. We could put this by saying that the subjective is always emergent on the objective, but the objective is never emergent on the subjective. Mind-independence is the basic form of reality.

            Notice that I have not used the word “physical”: the objectivist view is not that everything has a physicalbasis. There are three reasons for this. First, the concept of the physical is not well defined (for reasons I won’t go into here). Second, we want to leave open the possibility that fundamental reality is not what the physical sciences (currently) describe. Third, it may be that physics harbors subjective elements: our concepts of geometry, causality, and motion are arguably anthropocentrically constituted (at least in part). It could be that a genuinely objective physics has to move beyond these human concepts in order to achieve the kind of absoluteness demanded by the “absolute conception”.    [1] So the objective world I am talking about might not coincide with the world as described by physics; at any rate, we are dealing with different doctrines. Objectivism is committed to the idea that everything has non-subjective nature (or correlate)—something that is captured in a “view from nowhere”—not that everything has a physical nature (whatever that may mean). The thought behind it is that minds are just part of reality; they don’t condition the whole nature of reality. And where they do exist they always rely on non-subjective features. Thus objectivism stands opposed to subjectivism—the doctrine that reality is inherently subjective. Idealism is the obvious form of such subjectivism, but other versions of subjectivism are conceivable. The point of objectivism is to insist that reality is not subject to the mind—and even the mind depends on non-mental factors. Even if we cannot achieve a perfectly objective conception of things, reality itself demands such a conception. Maybe a completely objective conception is impossible for any conscious thinking being—in which case reality is necessarily inconceivable as it is in itself—but still its nature is such as to be quite independent of any subjective intrusion. Objectivism regards reality as perspective-neutral, perspective- transcendent. This view goes beyond what is commonly called realism: it isn’t just the doctrine that reality is independent of our thoughts; it expels anything subjective from reality (except for the manifestly subjective). It takes reality in general to be radically removed from anything mental. Even when objects have subjective properties, such as color, they have underlying properties that have nothing to do with the mind. And even if some properties are irreducibly subjective (e.g. color experiences), they must exist against a background of objective being. There is no such thing as the kind of free-floating subjectivity that idealism contemplates. Metaphysical objectivism affirms that reality exists on a bedrock of entirely mind-free facts, whatever exactly those facts may be. The basic reason for this is that reality pre-dates minds and would exist even if minds did not. Objectivism is the abstract position that reality is constituted quite separately from mind: it is not committed to any particular view of what the underlying reality is. In that sense it is ontologically neutral.

            It should not be taken for granted that subjective facts necessarily have objective counterparts or correlates—after all, many philosophers have denied this. It tells us something about the nature of the mental: it needs the non-mental. It can’t exist without it. No matter how irreducibly subjective a mental state may be, it must bring with it something quite different from itself—something objective. The objective, on the other hand, obeys no such requirement: it can happily exist without the company of the subjective. The subjective, however, is dependent on the objective in order to have any being at all, despite the opacity of the connection. Thus some sort of objectivist reduction would appear indicated—yet no such thing seems on the cards. This is really quite puzzling. The subjective is irresistibly drawn towards the objective, entirely parasitic on it, yet quite different from it. It is true that the subjective is enmeshed in the objective, notably via causality, but still the nature of the necessary connection is far from clear (thus allowing dualism to gain a foothold). So the objectivist position is not free of perplexity: it is true without being intelligibly true. The objectivist therefore carries a heavy explanatory burden, which he fails to discharge (I don’t regard this as an objection). The position is certainly interesting and distinct from other more familiar positions. It should be debated on its own terms.

    [1] Objectivity can come in degrees (as can subjectivity): one conception can be more objective than another. Thus physics may be very objective compared to common sense. But there also must be a form of objectivity that is absolute—where the objectivity is complete. For reality itself does not share gradations of objective understanding: facts have absolute objectivity when they have it at all. The world itself is absolutely objective (not counting the mental world).