@Arjuna,
Arjuna wrote:
Fido wrote:
Arjuna wrote:
Huxley wrote:
Would you characterize the subjective as more fundamental than the objective, then? (this is what I take from your last statement)
If you mean
is the subjective more real, no. It can't stand alone. Meaning requires both.
The subjective is always more immediate, and personal, so it is more real based upon the fundamental reality of all reality which is our own lives... It is like riding on a roller coaster at a high rate of speed, with falls, twists and turns and loops... Some people sit in the back and some people sit in the front... Some people look for the shared experience of life, taking their terror and excitment from the clues of others... Some people embrace the fierce immediacy of existence and realize that no amount of the sharing of meaning, which is what we share with communication, will ever share the actual experience of life....
Delightfully said. And I agree it's commonly overlooked: the only thing you really know is what it's like to be alive. Life is indeed a roller coaster. You can white-knuckle it the whole way or throw up your hands and scream. Realizing that it's your choice may come like a lightning bolt.. or through many experiences... each a drop of rain.
On the other hand, it may also come to one that subjectivity makes no sense without objectivity. Neither holds the ultimate truth. You can't have one without the other. Objectivity isn't a place out there to be touched and measured... it's an aspect of the psyche. It's part of the dualism that creates meaning. Knowing that
meaning depends on this dualism is to stand at the boundary of the mind. The mind can see no further than realizing that they're two halves of a whole. (At least my mind hasn't so far. ..)
Objective and subjective are judgements along a continuum... And while it may seem that what is scientific is the most objective in the way of truth, or experience, because in following it the same result can be reproduced for any number; what is really objective is our moment, right now, the unadulturated experience of the now... Life becomes memory by way of a subjective judgement of it... If we lived every moment with the intensity of a phenomenologist we might remember none of it, might never say whether or not it was real...
Because I think of everything, and so judge everything it has always been challenge to me to make love to my love as though it were the last act of my life, to live every moment in the moment, to not save any memory as mental pornography in which I could re-experience the experience... Love deserves such devotion of giving ones self to it entirely, to enjoy the moment as moment and cast away every thought of time or time pieces, or tomorrow, or ever, or never.... I have wished I had a zipper down my back so I could unwrap my skin and wrap her body in it, to feel her all at once, to touch her as though with a different hand for every part of her body... Can I say the feeling is real, or objective??? Such would be a judgement when all I want is more and more as fast as i can swallow, and more... In devotion, in gratitude, in hope, in emotion, in love, every pleasure can be pleasure... Would you pray for a miracle, and then ask: what is this miracle???
We can so seldom feel without the fear that our sensitivity will teach us pain... Live for the moments when pain will not matter, where death, and the thought of death does not concentrate the mind, but gives to love an even greater glory... As life gives to all things their reality, so the presence of death give reality its meaning...The only objective truth to one is the most subjective of truths to all others... If we would ever know anything we should never deny this most essential of truths... We Know how we feel, and our feeling is the beginning of knowledge, and we see this in science where all scientific instraments are extentions of the human senses
