OBJECTIVE ABSTRACTIONS: PERSONS AND PHENOMENA
Extreme Philosophy of Abstractions & Minds Who Have Them by A.G.
I. EXPERIENCE IS ABSTRACT: THE SELF IN PHENOMENAL SPACE
A person’s mind has to integrate many separate things together to form a unified experience of self and of the world. This fundamental experience also requires a lot of cognitive processing, of auditory data, visual data, and other data from the organs of sense-perception. We have to integrate thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and all of that is always in motion.
The individual is almost, I would say, a continuum. That is, one’s consciousness is more like a river or stream than a physical thing or object like a chair or a tree (seen from the outside). (Is it subjective or objective?)
Experience, it seems to me, needs a certain space in which to “happen”. It’s also not just a question of mental or cognitive space. There are many spaces. The human body is a kind of “multispace”. It exists in only one physical space at any given time, but experience also happens stretched out over time.
Yesterday’s me is not today or tomorrow’s me. Experience happens somewhere in between, in the transitional space of being-in-the-world. My contention is that experience is abstract: We experience all of these things in phenomenal space, and we make abstractions of our experiences.
So experience happens in phenomenal space, and then we take awareness of it. It is in this taking awareness of experience that we form abstractions of experience. It’s a doubling or folding over of experience upon itself.
Experience, therefore, it could be said, is abstract, is made up of abstractions. All of the sensory data, the thoughts, feelings, and all of the motions and movements of all the individual parts, is abstract. It is topological. (Is human experience MATHEMATICAL?)
And remember, it all happens across many kinds of space. We have a space where our ears hear, a space where our eyes see, a space where our mouths feel, where our hands and fingers, legs and feet feel, all these kinds of spaces. We have an internal space where things like hunger and digestion take place, or the space where the heart beats or where feelings feel.
All of these spaces are unique and must all be integrated into one unified experience. Experience is heterogeneous in this sense, we experience a heterogeneity of separate things, but it also forms a kind of homogeneity, in the homogeneous space of the experience of being human, of our humanity, of being-in-the-world.
Then we have the awareness of all of these disparate things, and awareness of experience itself. It could be said that humans are the only animal with this kind of awareness that is doubled over, folded over itself. And as far as we know, at least at the human level, we are the only animal that really forms abstractions (“abstractions of experience”). The human experience is abstract, but it is also concretely real. Objective AND subjective.
Direct, firsthand experience, the only experience we can really bear witness or testimony to, is the only thing that’s really, concretely real. Everything else is not really observable directly. It requires mediation.
II. ONLY INDIVIDUALS AND PHENOMENA EXIST
Only individuals and phenomena exist and are concretely real. Everything else is virtual. Concepts such as “society” are real abstractions, but do not really exist, phenomenologically speaking. “Society” is not a phenomenon, it cannot be experienced fundamentally, subjectively, as an individual.
The effects of Society can be observed, measured, quantified, but Society itself is not an experience one can have, phenomenologically speaking. One can experience the Other, that is, another person or individual, and at best, one can experience several other individuals. Society, however, implies millions if not billions of other individuals. The mind cannot form a direct abstraction-as-phenomenon of this, as a direct, fundamental experience.
Therefore, abstractions which we form in our minds, such as “Society”, are even more abstract than what if in our fundamental experience, the direct experience of the disparate phenomena which we integrate into our unified experience, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and movements of the whole.
(Is it subjective or objective?) There can be no real transcendence, and there is ONLY transcendence. Both are real and true: we have a mystery or paradox. Experience is immanently real, is immanence itself. Experience happens in a field, a unique “multispace”, an interconnected Space with many separate spaces, continuously being integrated and processed into a Whole.
We are always moving, in movement. In the Cosmos, nothing ever truly sits still. We have known this since ancient times, since Heraclitus. But the many abstractions we make of our fundamental experience of ourselves and the world, are consolidated into a single, unified Whole. Our being is One. Our experiences, multifarious, Many. We are a walking, talking paradox.
Try to find anything that is concretely real that isn’t linked to your fundamental experience, your bearing-witness, your first-witness testimony. History itself, at the source, is made up of unique, individual experiences. The rest is secondary. History is the RECORD OF EVENTS, all of which were experienced fundamentally at the individual level, by Selves like us.
Only individuals exist, and individuals experience PHENOMENA, in the phenomenal space, which is a multispace. The only way to resolve the mystery or paradox of being is to make a binary choice, to take the leap of faith, into TRANSCENDENCE (or that which can never be transcended).
You decide. Are you really experiencing this or are you not? One must do a work of BASIC TRIAGE, of the multifarious heterogeneity of unique experiences of being, of self, and of the world. And one must integrate, all while being in constant motion. No one can ever succeed and yet EVERYONE is constantly succeeding in this activity. It is the only thing which is really real. Everything else is noumenal, cut off from the phenomenological experience of the only, single, lived reality.
Any thoughts? These abstractions are objectively real, to me at least. I know of nothing else that exists, deep in that solitary, inward multispace of being. And being is happiness, it is JOYFUL BEING. And it is a MYSTERY.
Any thoughts? Please leave them in a comment where they can be seen.
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
