Sure, we start in the world of things, not as philosophers. — plaque flag

I don't think philosophers who try to reverse engineer the natural order of knowing end up being coherent.

But I object to 'non-perceptible properties.' What's that supposed to mean ? This is where 'substance' starts to seem like a magic word. — plaque flag

Yes, I realize that. A power is an easy example. An apple tree has the power to produce fruit. It possesses this power, we can know this through inference, and nevertheless the power is not perceptible.

Yes, I realize that. A power is an easy example. An apple tree has the power to produce fruit. It possesses this power, we can know this through inference, and nevertheless the power is not perceptible. — Leontiskos

That power is possibility. I perceive an apple tree, and I understand the possibility of [ a future experience of ] fruit, given certain conditions. If I nurture the tree, if it's not cut down, then I can hope to enjoy fruit.

I could just say 'fruit' instead of 'experience of fruit' if I wasn't reacting against what I'd call the metaphysical fantasy of aperspectival reality.

Note that most of the objects in the world are not currently perceived. I've never seen the Eiffel Tower, but I think I could see it, given certain conditions. — plaque flag

Mill's point holds of every physical object. It is a proper accident. But it's not what objects are. Objects are not defined in terms of perception. From the book you cited in your other thread:

"Things-in-themselves? But they're fine, thank you very much. And how are you? You complain about things that have not been honored by your vision? You feel that these things are lacking the illumination of your consciousness? But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival."
-Bruno Latour — The Democracy of Objects, Chapter 1, by Levi R. Bryant

(link to book)

From the book you cited in your other thread: — Leontiskos

I can't recall the context, but I reject the speculative realists. I sometimes quote their presentations of correlationism, though, for it's one of 'em that gave me the handy term in the first place. But there's a huge gap between Kantian indirect realism and my own Mach/James inspired nondualism. So the speculative realists haven't clarified their opponent.

But it's not what objects are. Objects are not defined in terms of perception. — Leontiskos

I don't think objects are very well defined. I think all people end up meaning...being able to find words for...is possibilities of perception. I haven't heard any good alternative yet.

I could just say 'fruit' instead of 'experience of fruit' if I wasn't reacting against what I'd call the metaphysical fantasy of aperspectival reality. — plaque flag

Then perhaps this is the starting point for where we differ, which is probably rather subtle. I don't actually know very much about this view you are reacting against, but I am of course wary of defining objects in terms of perception.

I don't think objects are very well defined, and it would be sub-philosophical to avoid challenging popular understanding. — plaque flag

I think my single sentence about the common opinion has ended up being a distraction.

I think my single sentence about the common opinion has ended up being a distraction. — Leontiskos

Let's forget it then.

I am of course wary of defining objects in terms of perception. — Leontiskos

As you should be. The theory is interesting because it challenges some vague but strong sense of there being more to physical being than our actual and possible experience. It just 'sounds wrong.' But what then does one mean beyond such possible perceptions ? And ultimately beyond experience itself ?

To be sure, indirect realism needs some kind of Stuff Out There, because they have a Subject In Here. But Mach and James don't. It's all one stream (or, strangely, many perspectival streams of the 'same' world.)

My own philosophical work is largely motivated by a sense that people don't know very well what they are talking about in the first place. — plaque flag

It seems to me that people are generally smarter than they seem, and that what might look like ignorance is actually an act.

As you should be. The theory is interesting because it challenges some vague sense of their being more to physical being. It 'sounds wrong.' But what then does one mean beyond such possible perceptions ? — plaque flag

Given our fast-paced conversation, I would submit that an object is something like an existent thing (a wholeness or unity). Unperceived or even imperceptible objects are therefore possible.

For example, maybe someone believes in an imperceptible ghost or spirit that nevertheless possesses causal powers to influence the world which we are able to perceive. On my view this putative ghost is an object. For Mill it cannot be, having no possibility of sensation. (The notion at play here is object-as-causal-agent.)

That power is possibility. I perceive an apple tree, and I understand the possibility of [ a future experience of ] fruit, given certain conditions. If I nurture the tree, if it's not cut down, then I can hope to enjoy fruit. — plaque flag

This is exactly right, and it raises the point that Mill's definition of objects is parasitic in a problematic way. Usually when we talk about the possibility of perceiving, we are talking about the possibility of perceiving some object. Defining "object" as a possibility of perception thus throws this into confusion.* It would be like saying that there is the power-to-produce-apple-fruit apart from any tree or substance/substratum. Thus it is quite different to talk about objects as things perceived rather than as possibilities of perception. Talk of "[permanent] possibilities of sensation" elicits the question as to why these possibilities are permanent (or semi-permanent).

Your <quote from Hobbes> is a propos. It is precisely the object that impresses itself upon the sense organ. To talk about sensation apart from an object sensed is a very different approach to the senses and perception.


* On Mill's account the substantial and 'synthetic' claim that, "There is a possibility of sensing such-and-such an object," is reduced to the vacuous and 'analytic' claim that, "There is a possibility of sensing such-and-such a possibility of sensation."

Usually when we talk about the possibility of perceiving, we are talking about the possibility of perceiving some object. — Leontiskos

:up:
I think you've found a weak part in Mill's account. At the very least, he did not go into detail about the experienced unity of the object, what Husserl calls its transcendence. Mill is still too much caught in sense-data empiricism of his time.

the very idea of anything out of ourselves is derived solely from the knowledge experience gives us of the Permanent Possibilities. Our sensations we carry with us wherever we go, and they never exist where we are not; but when we change our place we do not carry away with us the Permanent Possibilities of Sensation: they remain until we return, or arise and cease under conditions with which our presence has in general nothing to do. And more than all—they are, and will be after we have ceased to feel, Permanent Possibilities of sensation to other beings than ourselves. — Mill

But he dissolves the sensing self in a way that foreshadows Mach. The only way to have a world in common and no selves and no [ 'deep' ] matter is (as far as I can tell) perspectival worldstreaming --- first person 'consciousness' as [nondual, perspectival ] being itself. With the experiencer goes experience, with only being left behind, the simple it-is-there-ness of a radical plurality of entities.

We have no conception of Mind itself, as distinguished from its conscious manifestations. We neither know nor can imagine it, except as represented by the succession of manifold feelings which metaphysicians call by the name of States or Modifications of Mind. It is nevertheless true that our notion of Mind, as well as of Matter, is the notion of a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it; a something which we figure as remaining the same, while the particular feelings through which it reveals its existence, change. — Mill

In case it's helpful for understanding my POV, I endorse this:

The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

The discursive subject described by Brandom is a locus of responsibility. Our bodies are trained into becoming this kind of entity, a responsible who rather than a mere what. But I place this discursive subject in the world as our most fundamental tradition --- a crucial piece of technology, for we are cyborgs, vampires even, in the way we bind time. One is one around here. There is exactly one responsible agent-soul in your/my flesh. The rest is madness or sci-fi.

But to me this is still a worldly entity, an unreliable narrator completely enmeshed in a concept-structured lifeworld-from-perspective. The story is not separable from the narrator, as if somehow written in another language which is no language at all. 'Deeper' than this discursive subject is the 'pure witness' which is no longer a witness really but just the fact that the world happens to gather around the flesh that therefore seems to host it. And this world includes feelings and fantasies as well as fountains and fawns.

Your <quote from Hobbes> is a propos. It is precisely the object that impresses itself upon the sense organ. To talk about sensation apart from an object sensed is a very different approach to the senses and perception. — Leontiskos

As Mach put it, we find functional relationships all the time between 'inner' and 'outer' things. This is the point of my Flat Ontology thread. It's all in a single causal-inferential nexus. I think this is Hegel's point, when he said no finite [ disconnected ! ] thing has genuine being. Things 'are' (to overstate it) their relationships with other things.
***
What Hobbes doesn't address is that those sense organs exist for other sense organs. So the being of matter in motion apart from all such organs is left indeterminate, hence Mill's attempted clarification, etc.

Thus it is quite different to talk about objects as things perceived rather than as possibilities of perception. Talk of "[permanent] possibilities of sensation" elicits the question as to why these possibilities are permanent (or semi-permanent). — Leontiskos

I still think possibilities of experience works in say Husserl or Sartre, but what catches my eye here is that elicited question. Now it is of course a good question, but, with my phenomenological cap on, I prioritize [merely ] clarifying the given, making it explicit. As Husserl put it, phenomenology is the genuine positivism (the point being its honesty about direct experience including prime numbers and 'transcendent' trombones --- and the horizonal lifeworld in general.-- as opposed to blind adherence to a sensedata tradition, etc.)

For context, I personally think there 'must' always be brute fact. At the end of any ascending chain of explanations there is 'just because.' If God did it, then why is God such as to want to do that ? If some physics formula is hyped as the final word, then why is the final word like that and not otherwise ? I agree with Wittgenstein that only impossibility is logical possibility, but that's a pseudo-proposition, a tautology if one understands it, perhaps an implicit definition of logical.

Given our fast-paced conversation, I would submit that an object is something like an existent thing (a wholeness or unity). Unperceived or even imperceptible objects are therefore possible.

For example, maybe someone believes in an imperceptible ghost or spirit that nevertheless possesses causal powers to influence the world which we are able to perceive. On my view this putative ghost is an object. For Mill it cannot be, having no possibility of sensation. (The notion at play here is object-as-causal-agent.) — Leontiskos

I think Mill was primarily just trying to make sense of matter, not limit all existence to sensation, but I'm not sure. This is an excellent issue in any case. Husserl tackles a related issue in his investigation of the meaning of the invisible entities of physics. For him, there's no problem though, because he acknowledges the reality of ideas. But it's crucial that such ideas are just part of the lifeworld. A table is not 'really' atoms or quarks. It is also atoms or quarks. The real table is not some gray shiny source code hidden 'behind' the one we sit at. We just 'look' at the table not only with our eyes but also with our entire mind and culture. Heidegger's historical-I is valuable here.

Note that your ghost, as entity in the conversation, already has some experiential content, and most ghosts will end up having a further role in the inferential nexus. 'The rain god is angry. So the rain will not come. But we will offer up a sacrifice.'

I think I addressed your object-as-causal-agent already [ Brandom's discursive/normative subject ] , tho I'd say object-as-responsible-agent. Such an agent is essentially temporal, a 'creature capable of making promises,' and held responsible for a coherent narrative, etc.

It all goes back to disagreement, and what to do about it, how to think about it. — baker

Yes, I think it's just natural human diversity. Can you imagine living in a society where everyone agreed about everything?

It's precisely disagreement, on various levels, that points in the direction that the mental is all we have to work with. Not that the mental is all there is. But that it is all we have to work with. — baker

The salient point about disagreement is that things, human experience, can be framed in various ways. Why should we expect there to be just one true way of framing things?

Traditional literary theory disagrees with you. — baker

Right, I said there is no way to demonstrate that there are objective aesthetic criteria, I didn't say that no one could think there were such.

I mentioned a famous very-early lecture by Heidegger above, and I hunted down some passages that some of you might like.

What is immediately given! Every word here is significant. What does 'immediate' mean? The lectern is given to me immediately in the lived experience of it. I see it as such, I do not see sensations and sense data. I am not conscious of sensations at all. Yet I still see brown, the brown colour. But I do not see it as a sensation of brown, as a moment of my psychic processes. I see something brown, but in a unified context of signification in connection with the lectern. But I can still disregard everything that belongs to the lectern, I can brush away everything until I arrive at the simple sensation of brown, and I can make this itself into an object. It then shows itself as something primarily given. It is indisputable that I can do this.

Only I ask myself: what does 'given' mean here? Do I experience this datum 'brown' as a moment of sensation in the same way as I do the lectern? Does it 'world' in the brown as such, apprehended as a datum? Does my historical 'I' resonate in this apprehension? Evidently not. And what does immediately given mean? To be sure, I do not need to derive it subsequently like an extraworldly cause; the sensation is itself there, but only in so far as I destroy what environmentally surrounds it, in so far as I remove, bracket and disregard my historical 'I' and simply practice theory, in so far as I remain primarily in the theoretical attitude. This primary character is only what it is when I practice theory, when the theoretical attitude is in effect, which itself is possible only as a destruction of the environmental experience. This datum is conceived as a psychic datum which is caused, as an object, albeit one which does not belong to the external world but is within me. Where within? In my consciousness? Is this something spatial? But the external world is spatial, the realist will answer, and it is my scientific task to investigate the way in which something psychical can know the space of the external world, the way in which the sensations of various sense organs work together, from external causes, to bring about a perception of space.

But presupposing that realism could solve all these (to some degree paradoxically posed) problems, would that in any way amount to an explanation and justification of environmental experience, even if only a moment out of it were 'explained'? Let us illustrate this from the moment of spatial perception, an environmental perception. In the course of a hike through the woods I come for the first time to Freiburg and ask, upon entering the city, 'Which is the shortest way to the cathedral?' This spatial orientation has nothing to do with geometrical orientation as such. The distance to the cathedral is not a quantitative interval; proximity and distance are not a 'how much' ; the most convenient and shortest way is also not something quantitative, not merely extension as such. Analogue to the time-phenomenon. In other words: these meaningful phenomena of environmental experience cannot be explained by destroying their essential character, by denying their real meaning in order to advance a theory. Explanation through dismemberment, i.e. destruction: one wants to explain something which one no longer has as such, which one cannot and will not recognize as such in its validity.

https://ia903000.us.archive.org/33/items/ApolloHumanRightsBooks/36102337-17775771-Heidegger-Towards-the-Definition-of-Philosophy.pdf
You'll note at the end there a preview of what might be called existential or genuine or experiential space and time, which was also studied by Mach and James.

This is a related passage. The 'environmental' is developed throughout many lectures after this one before B&T arrives. Just noticing the environmental is hard for some of us brought up in a theoretical tradition that reality is 'really' [just/only] [the latest theoretical posit.]

Thingliness marks out a quite original sphere distilled out of the environmental; in this sphere, the 'it worlds' has already been extinguished. The thing is merely there as such, i.e. it is real, it exists. Reality is therefore not an environmental characteristic, but lies in the essence of thingliness. It is a specifically theoretical characteristic. The meaningful is de-interpreted into this residue of being real. Experience of the environment is de-vivified into the residue of recognizing something as real. The historical 'I' is de-historicized into the residue of a specific 'I-ness' as the correlate of thingliness; and only in following through the theoretical does it have its 'who', i.e. merely 'deducible'?! Phenomenologically disclosed!! Thing experience is certainly a lived experience, but understood vis-a-vis its origin from the environmental experience it is already de-vivification.

This beautiful passage is also worth quoting:

But philosophy can progress only through an absolute sinking into life as such, for phenomenology is never concluded, only preliminary, it always sinks itself into the preliminary. The science of absolute honesty has no pretensions. It contains no chatter but only evident steps; theories do not struggle with one another here, but only genuine with ungenuine insights. The genuine insights, however, can only be arrived at through honest and uncompromising sinking into the genuineness of life as such, in the final event only through the genuineness of personal life as such.

A little further down from that chapter: ‘at the very moment when radical anthropomorphism set in and man could know only his own work, he had to learn to accept himself as merely a chance occurrence, just another “fact”’. Yet it is within that very context that the ‘primacy of the objective’ is clung to with such determination. That is what the OP seeks to address.

- :up:

- This feels a bit Buddhist!

Thanks for your responses and your quotes from Mill. They have helped clarify things. We seem to be pretty close, even though it would be possible to quibble over this or that. I am going to step away from this thread due to a shortage of time. I will keep an eye out for Brandom's work. Your quotes from Sartre have also been interesting. I wasn't aware of his "non-continental" work, so to speak.

Yes, I think it's just natural human diversity. Can you imagine living in a society where everyone agreed about everything?
/.../
The salient point about disagreement is that things, human experience, can be framed in various ways. Why should we expect there to be just one true way of framing things? — Janus

Disagreement is fine, as long as it is about trivial things. It's not fine once your job or your freedom is on the line.

I'm thinking of using Rashomon and As I Lay Dying as explications of the nondual perspectivist position. Both narratives give us the-world-for-characters. We never get the External Aperspectival World, and I've been claiming that such a thing is a round square, a seductive empty phrase, for we all get the world only as such characters. The world we know is the-world-for-characters. — plaque flag

I'm not disagreeing. But my worry is that such an outlook makes a person unfit for living in the world where people typically take for granted that there is an external aperspectival world (and that they have intimate knowledge of this world).

One can dismiss all those "Well, that's just your opinion but not the truth" only for so long until getting in trouble with other people.

Disagreement about non-trivial things is inevitable in a pluralistic society. There seems to be almost universal agreement about the most important moral injunctions, but when it comes to things like where should the funding be applied, disagreement is inevitable simply because different people value different things.

On further reflection, it occurs to me that an Aquinas would not endorse the notion of a 'mind-independent object'. Why? Because in his philosophical theology, particulars derive their being from God — Wayfarer

Accordingly, in Aquinas, the ontological status of material particulars is contingent, dependent on God's creative and conserving act. My argument is that materialism grants material objects inherent existence, sans any 'creating and conserving act' of God. — Wayfarer

the classical view of divine concurrentism is going to explicitly stop short of Occasionalism — Leontiskos

I actually stumbled upon something that fills the historical gap. The sort of Occasionalism you are tending towards does have a premodern patrimony, but such an idea gained more momentum in the Islamic world than the Christian world:

With these three theses in hand, I turn now to a broad description of the empiricist alternative. To begin with, it is worth noting that so-called ‘empiricist’ accounts of causality did not in fact originate with Hume or Berkeley or Kant or even with Malebranche, who, though usually classified as a ‘rationalist’, influenced both Hume and Berkeley in their reflections on causality. Malebranche was in fact following the lead of those medieval Islamic and Christian occasionalists who had perceived a ‘heathen’ threat to God’s sovereignty over nature, as well as a spiritual danger for believers, in the Aristotelian attribution of causal powers and actions to natural material substances. The medieval occasionalists made a strict distinction between causality as attributed to God (and to spirits subordinated to God, such as intelligences and human souls) and ‘causality’ as attributed to material substances. God and other spirits are genuine agents exercising genuine causal powers, but they are the only such agents and their powers are the only such powers. In contrast, our ordinary and ubiquitous attributions of power and action to material substances are strictly speaking false; whatever truth they might embody is best captured, according to the occasionalists, by a reductive analysis that replaces notions such as causal efficacy, action, causal power, and causal tendency with metaphysically tamer notions such as constant conjunction or counterfactual dependence, which do not presuppose agency on the part of material substances. — Alfred J. Freddoso, Causality and Ontotheology: Thomistic Reflections on Hume, Kant, and their Empiricist Progeny

So although Hume came after Aquinas, in his own day Aquinas (and others) rejected the Occasionalism that Hume was reviving. This is not unrelated to the point that got Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) into so much trouble in his Regensburg Address.

Freddoso writes a fair bit on this topic (link).

Thanks! That's interesting, although the polemical point I was attempting was to challenge the idea that material objects have mind-independent reality. In that, I've been influenced more by Buddhist philosophy, which says that particulars are absent 'own-being' (svabhava) but exist dependent on causes and conditions. (There's also a Buddhist philosophy called Yogācāra which is comparable to Western idealism.) Whereas scientific empiricism tends to regard the sensory world as real in its own right. That said, I can see a (tenuous) connection with 'occasionalism'.

I also found some correspondence in Leibniz' 'monadology'.

The ultimate constituents of the world are individual substances (I would prefer 'subjects'), which Leibniz calls monads. These are minds, or mind- like. Each of them represents the world in some way. They include God, you, next-door’s cat, and countless much less sophisticated monads corresponding to various material features of the world. But none of them is itself, strictly speaking, material. […] For neither space nor time is an ultimate feature of reality…rather, space and time are features of how reality appears to certain of these monads. Leibniz is an idealist.” — 3 Concepts from Leibniz

Thanks! That's interesting, although the polemical point I was attempting was to challenge the idea that material objects have mind-independent reality. In that, I've been influenced more by Buddhist philosophy, which says that particulars are absent 'own-being' (svabhava) but exist dependent on causes and conditions. (There's also a Buddhist philosophy called Yogācāra which is comparable to Western idealism.) Whereas scientific empiricism tends to regard the sensory world as real in its own right. That said, I can see a (tenuous) connection with 'occasionalism'. — Wayfarer

Okay thanks, that's interesting. You're right that Buddhism is a rather different question. I think Yogācāra could subscribe to something approximating Occasionalism with it's alternative notion of Sunyata, but the stricter Madhyamaka progeny could certainly not do so, nor the Theravada stream.

@Joshs I copied in this passage from the thread in which you provided it as it has relevance here:

The question

Is the existence of the world absolutely or only relatively real? — Joshs

Introduces a passage from Husserl:

Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental­ phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.

In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual prog­ression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains think­able, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection. — Husserl, Ideas II

Here I illustrate some convergences between Mind-Created World and Husserl's 'phenomenological idealism':

He distinguishes subjective and phenomenological idealism:

...phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly...

As do I:

...there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — The Mind-Created World

Then he introduces the transcendental subject:

...the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity.

Which corresponds with:

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. — The Mind-Created World

The 'inextricably mental aspect' I am referring to is the transcendental subject.

...there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — The Mind-Created World

My first impression is that for Husserl the empirical is the product of an intersubjective constituting process, which itself is built out of the constituting processes of individual subjectivities. So to say that something is empirically true is to refer to a relative product, which could be otherwise, of the concordant experience in conscious subjectivity. The reality of the Universe as independent of minds must also be considered a conclusion that is relative and could be otherwise. Put differently, the mind-independence of the external world is itself a product of a mind-dependent constituting process. Mind-independent empirical nature for Husserl is this relative product of constitution, a mere hypothesis.

if we could eliminate all spirits from the world, then that is the end of nature. But if we eliminate nature, "true," Objective-intersubjective existence, there always still remains something: the spirit as individual spirit. It only loses the possibility of sociality, the possibility of comprehension, for that presupposes a certain Bodily intersubjectivity. We would then no longer have the individual spirit as a person in the stricter, social sense, a person related to a material and, consequently, to a personal world as well. Nevertheless we still have, notwithstanding the enormous impoverishment of "personal" life, precisely an Ego with its conscious life, and it even has therein its individuality, its way of judging, of valuing, of letting itself be motivated in its position takings.” (Ideas II)

“All that exists for the pure ego becomes constituted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "transcendent” has its own particular constitution. Transcendence in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, constituted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. If transcendental subjectivity is the universe of possible sense, then an outside is precisely nonsense. But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non- sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight.