Note 9

The fundamental question is:

1) How do we subjectivize the world such that it can be responded to in agency, that it can be worked upon by the understanding, that it can be used as a supplement to our need?

2) The Western liberal cultural tradition has relocated the modality of this subjectification towards the starting point of representational individualism, where subjectivity and objectivity has been narrativised through a notion of the "man as observer", as the starting point of his "idea of his life" within a society organized around that belief system. Representationalism is a neccessary postulate for intersubjective notions of objectivity, and the paradox of subjectivised intersubjectivity remains the chief philosophical paradox within this account. Life regains apparent coherance around this account, but as always, breaks down through philosophical enquiry.

3) The individual is a factually verified superstition (of course, fact as usually applied is itself a superstition), based primarily on the agential instinct for self-preservation. More than the commonality of sense perceptions, it is the drives and perspectives that condition the instinct to self-preservation that patterns the world into objectivity, becoming the common forum as it were within which differences can thrive under the banner of the subjective, or the internal. However, insofar as the conditions of actions are unprimary and complex, superstition is required for the reproduction of social values- and not only social values- as the compass towards the equilibrium to which man seeks to maintain when he acts.

4) This deadlock of habit and the superstitious frame of mind is the primary veil to which it is the goal of individuals to pierce, therefore affording second-order insights into the nature of things as they function within the acting individual. This is why we have to catch ourselves in the act of thinking: thinking must precede the act, not the other way round.