Objectivity only exists if a subject exists to promulgate it. But that which is being objectivized may exist (have independent reality) without subjective explanation/inquiry and hence without objective explanation.

Maybe too simplified? — kazan

It’s certainly one aspect of it.

The additional difficulty is that, without an account of subjectivity, nothing homo sapiens may allegedly learn about the world and themselves can have any claim to justification -- there can be no reasons, since reasons are not part of the objective world. — J

Very good. And a real problem for the question per se, I think. Maybe they simply cannot come apart and our world still be seen to cohere.

For me, there's also a question of 'truth' here. We're talking justification and related concepts - but truth only applies to beliefs and thoughts about things that (theoretically) already are. So, in line with another recent thread I think 'nature' is taken to be true to avoid this issue. If there is, in fact, a state of affairs prior to any mind apprehending it, then that would be 'natural'. For that reason 'objectivity' seems to be a concept which could only apply to consensus.

So are you claiming that theoretical explanation is not within the purview of science? — Leontiskos

Not at all. I'm claiming that theories cannot be demonstrated to be true, they can only be provisionally accepted on the basis that what they predict is always reliably observed.

I think there is all manner of bleed between the two spheres. — Leontiskos

I agree, of course. I think philosophy, at least epistemology and ontology/ metaphysics if not ethics and aesthetics should be informed by science.

For that reason 'objectivity' seems to be a concept which could only apply to consensus. — AmadeusD

I'd change that to "unbiased consensus".

That's fair, as long as you're still making room for any an all degrees of error, whcih i assume you are :)

:up:

Well, it's only part 1! — Wayfarer

Understood!

I would hope that the reach of the argument is more than simply 'scientism', although that is certainly as aspect of it. — Wayfarer

Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that nothing more than Scientism is at stake. Hopefully the remainder of my post corrected that possible reading. My point about, "Scientism says X," is that I think your project needs more concreteness. Often enough you give your genealogical speech beginning with Descartes, but it feels as if there is no punch line or climactic turn. There needs to be a concrete conclusion, even if it is provisional, e.g., "It all began with Descartes... ...And that is why apple pie is now at risk of going extinct." Apple pie is a big deal, and anyone who slept through the first part will sit up straight and pay close attention once they realize what is at stake. :smile:

My time on TPF is making me wary of "Pontifications from 30,000 feet":

The trouble with the 30,000 foot view is that everyone is right in their own book at 30,000 feet, as it's just a matter of so-called ↪common sense (see my bio quote from Hadot on this point). — Leontiskos

The trick is to say something on the ground level, where people can engage and argue with it. It should be something that moves the needle but does not win the day. Small steps and concrete arguments that are able to carry others along or at least generate meaningful disagreements.

The danger is to simply reiterate over and over a 30,000 foot claim about 400 years of history, instead of breaking it down and moving step by step in a rigorous and transparent way.

And although I probably shouldn't be so frank after our recent political standoff, the reason everyone is wondering about part 2 is because we have all heard part 1 many times, albeit not marshalled so eloquently. In fact it is fairly common to rehearse one's starting point when one has not quite worked out where their ending point is. But I will await the continuation with everyone else (which I am assuming will occur within this thread).

If there is, in fact, a state of affairs prior to any mind apprehending it, then that would be 'natural'. For that reason 'objectivity' seems to be a concept which could only apply to consensus. — AmadeusD

Good post Amadeus. I hope I don't derail the thread, but I don't follow the reasoning of your last sentence. Cannot one have objective knowledge apart from a consensus? That even if only one person existed they could still know things objectively? It seems to me that placing objectivity in consensus puts the cart before the horse, and that the most important advances in knowledge tend to ignore the prevailing consensus.

So I would want to say that objectivity implies confirmability, and confirmability implies the plausibility of a consensus; but that to know objectively is something that we are capable of irrespective of any given consensus.

The current subject of many animated philosophical debates is whether we humans are able to see ‘things as they truly are’. At issue are the perennial philosophical questions: What is real? and How can we come to know it? These are questions fundamental to philosophy and science alike.
— Wayfarer

Certainly we are able to see things as they truly are. There is no way the world is ‘in itself’ The world shows itself to us in our practical engagements with it. This world that we are already deeply and directly in touch with is the only world that will ever matter to us. — Joshs

Consider an allegory. Three men are viewing a parcel of land. One is a real-estate developer, one an agriculturalist, and one a geological surveyor. They all have different uses for that land, and would all develop it in different ways, with very different consequences. If what that land is, is entirely determined by the use it is eventually put to, does that mean the land itself has no reality independently of those uses?

Of course, this is only an allegory, but it raises the question: do these different perspectives fully exhaust the nature of what the land is? Or is there something more to it?

There needs to be a concrete conclusion, even if it is provisional — Leontiskos

Think of this part as the introduction. It is the statement of the issue. The ensuing sections will look at various ways to address it.

If there is, in fact, a state of affairs prior to any mind apprehending it, then that would be 'natural'. For that reason 'objectivity' seems to be a concept which could only apply to consensus. — AmadeusD

This was discussed in another thread, Why is Nature True? What is 'natural' turns out to be quite a difficult thing to nail down

Think of this part as the introduction. It is the statement of the issue. The ensuing sections will look at various ways to address it. — Wayfarer

Sounds good. :up:

Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.

It is difficult for me to understand this. Isn't it some kind of a big mind or trascendental ego? By the way, The essential structures of a transcendental ego are essential because they are discovered in an eidetic reduction of psychology. In such a case we are talking about an essence that belongs to every human being. But there is a continuity with what I am saying: the reduction is the product of an imaginary variation (method of phenomenology). It is a process that leads us to a repetition, finding this structure in all people, don't you think? It is something that we discover as repetition through a neutralization (imaginary variation).

This is too deep in fenomenology, you can ignore me. — JuanZu

I think you're on the right track in one way. The reason I introduced the distinction between the 'merely personal' and the 'subjective', is because of the way that the latter gets dismissed as being the former. What I meant was, Western culture has principled respect for the individual as 'freedom of conscience' - but at the same time, principles which are not objectively verifiable are treated as being subjective or personal, which kind of trivialises them. So yes, I'm pointing to something like the transcendental ego of Kant and Husserl. You get that right.

But I don't know if you're on the right track with the phenomenological reduction. I'm not expert at that subject, but it is not at all to do with repetition or the socialisation of belief. However, I will postpone responding to that, because Part 2, which I might as well go ahead and post soon, because it is already being anticipated in the commentary, will explicitly bring in phenomenology.

Kuhn’s paradigmatic model does not rely on personal perspective in the sense of a subjective representation of reality. — Joshs

Also wanted to add - yes, of course you're right about that. It was carelessly expressed on my part. But he does insist on the primacy of scientific paradigms, which are in some important sense, conceptual constructions.

Part 2 | Phenomenology Rescues the Subject


Phenomenology, a transformative philosophical movement that emerged in the early 20th century, seeks disciplined insight into the nature of lived experience by returning to ‘the things themselves’— referring to the direct experience of phenomena as they appear to the subject, rather than through their abstract, symbolic representation in thought. Founder Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) realised that the starting point for philosophy is not analysis of the objective world ‘out there,’ which is properly the role of natural science, but insight into the ways in which this world is disclosed to consciousness through paying close attention to the nature of experience, moment by moment. Husserl saw that rather than being a passive recipient of external data, the mind actively participates in the process of knowing shaped by underlying structures of consciousness. Through the method of the epochē, or ‘phenomenological reduction,’ Husserl reveals how these structures shape not only experience but the very foundation of our understanding of the nature of existence.

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one — one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge.⁷

Husserl showed that every judgment about the world, even those based on scientific observation, depends on interpretive acts, must be understood as constituents of the ‘lifeworld’ (Lebenswelt)⁸, the domain of immediate experience that underlies theoretical abstractions, which had been previously ignored by an over-emphasis on the objective. The Lebenswelt is where objectivity and subjectivity interact — it is the shared foundation that makes objective inquiry possible. Husserl, in effect, had realised anew the role of the scientist in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

This insight reframes the question of ‘things as they truly are.’ If all experience is mediated by consciousness, then objectivity itself is always bound to the structures of subjectivity. Far from being an impediment, the subject is implicit in any coherent philosophy⁹.

To clarify this distinction, consider the act of looking out a window. Naturalism concerns itself with what you can see outside: the objects, events, and phenomena unfolding in the world. It aims to describe these with precision and detachment, focusing solely on their objective characteristics. Phenomenology, by contrast, is like studying the act of looking itself: the awareness of the scene, the structures of perception, and the way the world is disclosed to you as a subject. While naturalism investigates the external landscape, phenomenology turns the lens inward, asking how that landscape appears to and is interpreted by the observer. So it is characterised by a certain kind of detached self-awareness. This shift in focus introduces a self-awareness that naturalism, in its strict adherence to objective fact, often neglects.

Husserl’s phenomenology was to become the wellspring for many later developments in European philosophy, in particular that of Martin Heidegger and other existentialists. But it hardly need be said that Husserl was not the first or only philosopher of the first–person experience. For that, we can look back into the annals of philosophical spirituality. (That will be the subject of Part 3.)

------

7. Routledge, Introduction to Phenomenology, p139

8. The term Lebenswelt, translated as ‘lifeworld,’ refers to the pre-theoretical, lived world of everyday experience. For Husserl, this is the foundation upon which all scientific and objective knowledge is built. The Lebenswelt encompasses the cultural, historical, and experiential context in which phenomena appear to us and is often taken for granted or overlooked in the pursuit of abstract objectivity. A related concept is the Umwelt, introduced by biologist Jakob von Uexküll, which describes the subjective world as experienced by an organism, shaped by its unique sensory and perceptual capacities. Both terms emphasize that our experience of reality is always mediated by our cognitive and sensory structures, situating objective knowledge within a broader subjective context.

9. This was made abundantly clear by the ‘observer problem’ of quantum physics.

Additional references:

The Phenomenological Reduction IEP

Key Ideas in Phenomenology: The Natural Attitude

Phenomenology (…) is like studying the act of looking…. — Wayfarer

Not much rescuing of the subject there, insofar as the subject still has the functional necessity for understanding the content the study of looking implicates.

I know you knew, and thereby expected, such objection would arise; far be it from me to disappoint, donchaknow. (Grin)

In fact, this might be two distinct difficulties. First, as you say, subjectivity appears to be left out of scientism.
— J

I'm not sure what you mean by "scientism" here. Do you just mean science or the obviously incorrect idea that everything about humans and other living beings can be explained by physics? — Janus

Closer to the latter. Good science should say, re consciousness and subjectivity, "We just don't know. Stay tuned." Scientism, in contrast, rules out the non-physical, and favors mechanistic bottom-up explanation.

What does it mean to "have an opinion" if there is no subject to judge?
— J

There obviously are subjects (individuals) who make judgements, so what's the problem? — Janus

Well, it seems obvious to you and me, but it's very difficult for a physicalist to explain how or why this can be. What sort of thing is a "judgment"? Does it have propositional content? Truth-value? But what could such things amount to, if everything is physical? BTW, it's still a problem even if we agree that subjects are real -- the Hard Problem, in fact.

Subjectivity — or perhaps we could coin the term ‘subject-hood’ — encompasses the shared and foundational aspects of perception and understanding, as explored by phenomenology. The personal, by contrast, pertains to the idiosyncratic desires, biases, and attachments of a specific individual.

It is difficult for me to understand this. Isn't it some kind of a big mind or trascendental ego? — JuanZu

Compare the difference between psyche and pneuma in Classical Greek, or "soul" and "spirit" in Christian theology.

Husserl saw that rather than being a passive recipient of external data, the mind actively participates in the process of knowing shaped by underlying structures of consciousness. — Wayfarer

Here's a good description of what Husserl opposed, from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (also quoted by Bernstein in the book you cited):

What characterizes objectivism is that it moves upon the ground of the world which is pre-given, taken for granted through experience, seeks the "objective truth" of this world, seeks what, in this world, is unconditionally valid for every rational being, what it is in itself. It is the task of episteme, ratio, or philosophy to carry this out universally. Through these one arrives at what ultimately is; beyond this, no further questions would have a rational sense. — Husserl, 68-69

Bernstein goes on to make an interesting point. He says that Husserl "fails to stress the dialectical similarity" between objectivism and transcendentalism:

Both share the aspiration to discover the real, permanent foundation of philosophy and knowledge -- a foundation that will withstand historical vicissitudes . . . and satisfy the craving for ultimate constraints. — Bernstein, 10

What Bernstein makes of this would throw us off course, so I'll stop here, as the discussion has been nicely focused thus far.

Consider an allegory. Three men are viewing a parcel of land. One is a real-estate developer, one an agriculturalist, and one a geological surveyor. They all have different uses for that land, and would all develop it in different ways, with very different consequences. If what that land is, is entirely determined by the use it is eventually put to, does that mean the land itself has no reality independently of those uses?

Of course, this is only an allegory, but it raises the question: do these different perspectives fully exhaust the nature of what the land is? Or is there something more to it? — Wayfarer

It’s not just that the different uses of the land bring with them their own real dimensions of meaning. The concept of parcel of land is itself already a discursively produced normative meaning. But just because our materially real meanings already move within some set of discursive practices or other doesn’t mean that the practices themselves are static. They are, in Joseph Rouse’s words, temporally extended. This means that practices only exist by being repeated, and the repetition itself, in partially shared circumstances, is always anticipatory, oriented toward new directions of understanding. As Rouse explains:

Norms are not already determinate standards to
which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

Is there more to the nature of things than this? Let me put it this way, if there is, it can never be anything that we articulate, since any way we formulate this idea already presupposes some prior practical stance toward and engagement with what is claimed to be independent of us.

To clarify this distinction, consider the act of looking out a window. Naturalism concerns itself with what you can see outside: the objects, events, and phenomena unfolding in the world. It aims to describe these with precision and detachment, focusing solely on their objective characteristics. Phenomenology, by contrast, is like studying the act of looking itself: the awareness of the scene, the structures of perception, and the way the world is disclosed to you as a subject. While naturalism investigates the external landscape, phenomenology turns the lens inward, asking how that landscape appears to and is interpreted by the observer. So it is characterised by a certain kind of detached self-awareness. This shift in focus introduces a self-awareness that naturalism, in its strict adherence to objective fact, often neglects. — Wayfarer

Something seems to be missing here. This description focuses solely on an ‘inner’ mental aspect of perception, as though there were the objects out there and the representing of them in here. This reminds me of Dreyfus’s cognitive science misreading of Husserl. The subjective pole of consciousness does not just process and interpret. Through intentional acts , it constitutes the objects as what they are and how they are. This does not mean that it invents them out of whole cloth, but neither does it mean that there is any aspect of the object that simply independent of the subject. The object gets itself sense from an inseparable synthetic co-construction effected between the noetic-egoic and the noematic-objective sides of an intentional act.

The ego pole projects an anticipatory sense forward , a form of belief, and the object assimilates itself into this anticipated meaning while simultaneously completing the intentional act by obliging the ego to accommodate its anticipated sense to what is novel in the object. Thus, spatial objects are ‘real’ for Husserl as idealizations constituted via synthetic acts of consciousness on the basis of the adumbration of similarities of sense. We don’t ever actually see spatial objects as persisting identities, and have no basis for assuming the ‘reality’ of such unities besides our sciences, whose notions of objects as self-identities in externally causal interaction are themselves abstractions and idealizations derived from phenomenological acts.

Thus, scientific naturalism, what Husserl calls the natural attitude, doesn’t differ from a phenomenological analysis by being oriented toward the ‘outside world’ while phenomenology is interested in inner experience, as though the external landscape would still be what it is without the participation of intentional acts. Phenomenology shows us that the ‘outside’ is already an idealization constituted within transcendental consciousness. In other words, the very distinction between outside and inside is an artifact of the naive thinking of the natural attitude.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“Indeed, perhaps it will turn out later that all externality, even that of the entire inductive nature, physical and even psychophysical, is only an externality constituted in the unity of communicative personal experience, is thus only something secondary, and that it requires a reduction to a truly essential internality.” (Husserl 1977)

Also wanted to add - yes, of course you're right about that. It was carelessly expressed on my part. But he does insist on the primacy of scientific paradigms, which are in some important sense, conceptual constructions. — Wayfarer

If I understand the aim of your OP correctly, you’re trying to get to the bottom of the relation between subject and world. Inn order to do so, we must grapple with the nature of subjectivity, and thisn requires an understanding of notions like conceptual construction and consciousness. I follow Thompson in tracing the origins of consciousness and cognition to the goal-directed normativity of the simplest living systems. Put simply, we don’t have to remain at the level of human conceptuality. By understanding what an object is for a bacterium, how their active interactions with their world constitutes what its reality is by reference to how it matters to them, we have already come a long way toward solving the mystery of what is real and how we come to know it.

What is objective is understood to be just so, independent of your or my or anyone’s ideas about it. ‘Reality’, said Philip K. Dick, ‘is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.’ — Wayfarer

There is a classic mistake that is often made in using the term objectivity. Objectivity and subjectivity refer to knowledge, but sometimes they are confused with references to truth. Knowledge is not truth. Knowledge is a system of logic applied to a circumstance that produces the most reasonable outcome that is not contradicted by reality.

The easiest is subjective knowledge. Your experience is something you know. Currently there is no way for another person to know your subjective viewpoint of the world as it is limited to only the being that is having the subjective experience.

Objective knowledge is a logical claim about the world that can be understood and known apart from subjective experience. For example, I can introduce the concept of math and teach it to someone else. I can demonstrate and prove scientific concepts like gravity. Whether I exist to subjectively experience it is irrelevant to the fact that the objective notions and proofs can be taken, learned, and concluded in the same way by any being with the necessary minimal intelligence.

Truth is simply 'what is'. There really is no objective or subjective truth, and its a misapplication of the terms. There is objective and subjective knowledge. Its true that a person can have objective and subjective knowledge. And it may be true that one's subjective knowledge actually does not capture truth, while one's subjective knowledge may capture what is true. There is no objective or subjective truth. Just knowledge.

Further confusion sometimes results in people thinking that 'objectivity' is some thing out there independent of a subject. Objectivity is an approach to knowledge, and knowledge can only be held and understood by something that can realize what it has, or a subject itself. The difference in subjectivity and objectivity are again the limits of human logic and provability. I cannot logically prove to someone else what it is for me personally to experience 'redness'. But we can objectively note that a wavelength of X frequency is red. It is about whether the knowledge we have can be packaged to others provably, or remains a private outlook.

The point is, for all of its objective power, science also contains a fundamental lacuna, a gap or an absence, at its center. How, then, can we expect it reveal what is truly so? What kind of ‘truth’ are we left with, if we ourselves are not part of it? — Wayfarer

We do not have truth, we have knowledge. No science or valid methodology of knowledge asserts that it has the truth. It contains what is most reasonable to conclude within the logical and applicable limits we have. Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is.

As such, we can't truly communicate the subjective. We can attempt to. I can talk about red and how I like it, and you can only take your subjective experience about red and believe that in some way its similar to another. But communication of a subjective experience is a nebulous endeavor sustained on faith and shaped by the subjective world lens of every individual. The only way out of it is to find some common outside variables that we can all logically agree are most reasonable, which is of course objectivity.

So we do include experiences where we can like, "Happiness, sadness, etc." We see there is enough commonality in behavior and expression and biological reactions that we can create a broad approximation that allows the variety of subjective human experience to relate to it. But that's currently the best we can do.

Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is. — Philosophim

Completely agree, and partly why I have never really understood what Wayferer is trying to push with his perspective and what precisely he is saying is lacking or what that has to do with science.

Phenomenology shows us that the ‘outside’ is already an idealization constituted within transcendental consciousness. In other words, the very distinction between outside and inside is an artifact of the naive thinking of the natural attitude. — Joshs

I’d agree with that. The example of ‘looking out the window’ was simply to make a distinction between naturalism, which only considers what is seen, and phenomenology, which also takes into account the act of looking.

If I understand the aim of your OP correctly, you’re trying to get to the bottom of the relation between subject and world — Joshs

I very much appreciate your remarks. But what motivated the essay is the sense that objectivity, what is objectively the case, is the sole criterion of truth. That whatever really exists is ‘out there somewhere’ as the saying goes. I think that will become clearer in the following sections.

By understanding what an object is for a bacterium… — Joshs

We will have a much better grasp of the nature of cognition generally, agree. But to me the principle subject matter of philosophy is the human condition.

Is there more to the nature of things than this? — Joshs

Whatever that might be may not be made subject to propositional knowledge, which already is a matter of implicit consensus, but it may be a subject of insight which is conveyed symbolically or by gesture or in art. Besides, this is where I feel that Husserl’s ‘wesen’ (essence) is significant. Granted they’re not self-existent platonic forms, but they’re still an underlying reality in some important sense, that are not grasped by objectivism. (I will come back to that.)

Whether I exist to subjectively experience it is irrelevant to the fact that the objective notions and proofs can be taken, learned, and concluded in the same way by any being with the necessary minimal intelligence. — Philosophim

‘Any being’ presumably meaning a ‘human being’, in that so far as we know, we are the only beings with such capabilities.

We do not have truth, we have knowledge. — Philosophim

Knowledge is not truth. — Philosophim

Those are rather sweeping statements. As it happens, I do believe that the grasp of, insight into, what is truly so is attainable and is the proper subject for philosophical contemplation.



Further to the distinction between the structures of subjectivity and the merely personal, a snippet from the IEP article on Phenomenological Reduction (a very detailed and deep article, I will add, and one I’m still absorbing)

Thus, it is by means of the epochē and reduction proper that the human ‘I’ becomes distinguished from the constituting ‘I’; it is by abandoning our acceptance of the world that we are enabled to see it as captivating and hold it as a theme. It is from this perspective that the phenomenologist is able to see the world without the framework of science or the psychological assumptions of the individual. — IEP

The same distinction I made between the subjective and the merely personal.

Thanks all for the very constructive feedback, I’m away from desk for today look forward to further remarks and criticisms.

Is there more to the nature of things than this?
— Joshs

Whatever that might be may not be made subject to propositional knowledge, which already is a matter of implicit consensus, but it may be a subject of insight which is conveyed symbolically or by gesture or in art. Besides, this is where I feel that Husserl’s ‘wesen’ (essence) is significant. Granted they’re not self-existent platonic forms, but they’re still an underlying reality in some important sense, that are not grasped by objectivism. (I will come back to that.) — Wayfarer

You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. Husserl shows us the difference between how the world looks to us after we have constituted it through objectivizing intentional syntheses (what he calls constitutive time) and how the world is ‘in itself’ prior to such constituting acts (what he calls constituting time).

Each individual object (each unity, whether immanent or transcendent, constituted in the stream) endures, and necessarily endures -that is, it continuously exists in time and is something identical in this continuous existence, which at the same time can be regarded as a process. Conversely: what exists in time continuously exists in time and is the unity belonging to the process that carries with it inseparably the unity of what endures in the process as it unfolds. The unity of the tone that endures throughout the process lies in the tonal process; and conversely, the unity of the tone is unity in the filled duration, that is, in the process. Therefore, if anything at all is defined as existing in a time-point, it is conceivable only as the phase of a process, a phase in which the duration of an individual being also has its point. Individual or concrete being is necessarily changing or unchanging; the process is a process of change or of rest, the enduring object itself a changing object or one at rest. Moreover, every change has its rate or acceleration of change (to use an image) with respect to the same duration. As a matter of principle, any phase of a change can be expanded into a rest, and any phase of a rest can be carried over into change.

Now if we consider the constituting phenomena in comparison with the phenomena just discussed, we find a flow, and each phase of this flow is a continuity of adumbrations. But as a matter of principle, no phase of this flow can be expanded into a continuous succession, and therefore the flow cannot be conceived as so transformed that this phase would be extended in identity with itself. Quite to the contrary, we necessarily find a flow of continuous "change", and this change has the absurd character that it flows precisely as it flows and can flow neither "faster" nor "slower." If that is the case, then any object that changes is missing here; and since "something" runs its course in every process, no process is in question. There is nothing here that changes, and for that reason it also makes no sense to speak of something that endures. It is nonsensical to want to find something here that remains unchanged for even an instant during the course of its duration.”

“Can one speak in the strict sense of change in a situation in which, after all, constancy, duration filled out without change, is inconceivable? No possible constancy can be attributed to the continuous flow of appearance-phases. There is no duration in the original flow. For duration is the form of something enduring, of an enduring being, of something identical in the temporal sequence that functions as its duration. In the case of processes such as a thunderstorm, the motion of a shooting star, and so on, we have to do with unitary complexes of changes in enduring objects. Objective time is a form of "persisting" objects, of their changes and of other processes involved in them. "Process" is therefore a concept presupposing persistence. But persistence is unity that becomes constituted in the flow, and it pertains to the essence of the flow that no persistence can exist in it. Phases of experience and continuous series of phases exist in the flow. But such a phase is nothing that persists, any more than a continuous series of such phases is. To be sure, in a way it is also an objectivity. I can direct my regard towards a phase that stands out in the flow or towards an extended section of the flow, and I can identify it in repeated re-presentation, return to the same section again and again, and say: this section of the flow. And so too for the entire flow, which in the proper way I can identify as this one flow. But this identity is not the unity of something that persists and it can never be such a unity. It belongs to the essence of persistence that what persists can persist as either changing or unchanging. Every change idealiter can pass over into a condition of constancy, every motion into rest and every test into motion, and every qualitative change into a condition of qualitative constancy. The duration is then filled with "the same" phases.

As a matter of principle, however, no concrete part of the flow can make its appearance as non-flow. The flow is not a contingent flow, as an objective flow is. The change of its phases can never cease and turn into a continuance of phases always remaining the same. But does not the flow also possess, in a certain manner, something abiding, even if no concrete part of the flow can be converted into a non-flow? What abides, above all, is the formal structure of the flow, the form of the flow. That is to say, the flowing is not only flowing throughout, but each phase has one and the same form. This constant form is always filled anew by "content," but the content is certainly not something introduced into the form from without. On the contrary, it is determined through the form of regularity only in such a way that this regularity does not alone determine the concretum. The form consists in this, that a now becomes constituted by means of an impression and that a trail of retentions and a horizon of protentions are attached to the impression. But this abiding form supports the consciousness of constant change, which is a primal fact: the consciousness of the change of impression into retention while a fresh impression continuously makes its appearance; or, with respect to the \"what\" of the impression, the consciousness of the change of this what as it is modified from being something still intended as "now" into something that has the character of "just having been." (The Phenomenology of the Constitution of Internal Time, Appendix 6)

Through intentional acts, [the subjective pole of consciousness] constitutes the objects as what they are and how they are. This does not mean that it invents them out of whole cloth — Joshs

I think this is largely correct. And it foregrounds the conceptual challenge: If we do not invent objects out of whole cloth, what are the constraints put upon the way we constitute them? Will the lifeworld allow anything? Or, said another way: If we did invent objects out of whole cloth, how would we be able to tell the difference between doing that and merely constituting them through intentional acts? What would mark one or the other description of what we do as being the correct one?

You want to know what is out there as the underlying reality for Husserl, apart from iintentionally constituted objects? An utterly formless, structureless flow of change. — Joshs

This was posted seconds before my post above, responding to a similar concern. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow nevertheless constraining, in some degree, of what we can constitute as an object or event? How is this flow not "whole cloth," as it were?

Science has little to say about your subjective experience as it is impossible to capture. Its not just science, but anyone. Even the closest person in your life doesn't know what your actual subjective experience is.
— Philosophim

Completely agree, and partly why I have never really understood what Wayferer is trying to push with his perspective and what precisely he is saying is lacking or what that has to do with science. — Apustimelogist

Everything science says is a statement of subjective experience. Your subjective experience sits smack dab in the very heart of scientific concepts, by way of the intersubjective interaction which transforms subjective experience into the flattened , mathematicized abstractions that pretend to supersede it, while in fact only concealing its richness within its generic vocabulary.

Those are rather sweeping statements. As it happens, I do believe that the grasp of, insight into, what is truly so is attainable and is the proper subject for philosophical contemplation. — Wayfarer

I do as well, but the best we can do in that is use knowledge. You might want to check out my post here https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1

Sure, but there is no way to communicate about qualitative experiences in a way that is any different to what science, or any other intellectual field, does when it constructs knowledge and talks about things. You can't really go any deeper.

First of all, you are an excellent writer.

To clarify this distinction, consider the act of looking out a window. Naturalism concerns itself with what you can see outside: the objects, events, and phenomena unfolding in the world. It aims to describe these with precision and detachment, focusing solely on their objective characteristics. Phenomenology, by contrast, is like studying the act of looking itself: the awareness of the scene, the structures of perception, and the way the world is disclosed to you as a subject. — Wayfarer

I have a tiny idea you might find useful. You look out the window and Naturalism focuses on the “out there”. Phenomenology can focus on the glass itself, which represents the subject, and is simultaneously colored by the “out there” as it vaguely reflects your own face on the inside of the window pane - the subjective imposed on the objective, in one simultaneous view.

I don’t know. It’s where I thought you were going when you said consider the act of looking out a window. Tiny idea thought you might make use of.

Closer to the latter. Good science should say, re consciousness and subjectivity, "We just don't know. Stay tuned." Scientism, in contrast, rules out the non-physical, and favors mechanistic bottom-up explanation. — J

I can't see how science can deal with the non-physical. And I also can't see how it can factor into any of our thinking, although I suppose it depends on what you mean by "non-physical".

I don't understand top-down explanations, explanations in terms of global laws and constraints as being non-physical.

Well, it seems obvious to you and me, but it's very difficult for a physicalist to explain how or why this can be. What sort of thing is a "judgment"? Does it have propositional content? Truth-value? But what could such things amount to, if everything is physical? BTW, it's still a problem even if we agree that subjects are real -- the Hard Problem, in fact. — J

I think the so-called Hard Problem is overrated, overplayed. It is a prejudice of mechanistic thinking that matter could not possibly perceive, experience, think and judge. Granted we don't understand how it happens, but the question being asked is perhaps an impossible one. If it is to be answered, I can't see how it could be anything but science that answers it. If it is unanswerable, then what conclusions could we draw from that?