/lit/ - Literature

>>18947805
Knowledge is a relation between two terms: Subject and Object. In a knowledge relation, the Object-term exhibits a formal and material character that is relative to the Subject-term. The Object’s formal character is Subject-implying, and its material character is both Subject-implying and Experience-implying.It is absolutely necessary for the Object-term of a knowledge relation to have both a formal and material character. If the Object of knowledge was naked, and clothed in neither form or substance, then the fact of “Objectivity” would be none other than a fact about a void—pure nothingness—absent of quality, aesthetic value, purpose, and meaning.

It would be a fact about nothing, yet such a fact would fail to live up to its name as “fact.” A fact is a fact only insofar as it is significant; and to be significant is to signify; and to signify is to signify an Object; and without an Object to signify, a fact could hardly be called a fact. Rather than having a fact about Objectivity, we would have a nothing about a nothing—and this is absurd. One cannot even conceive of an Object without said Object having a formal and material character. Objectivity, like Subjectivity, is a fact. It is a fact that one cannot dismiss without performative contradiction. To argue against the existence of Objectivity would itself be an act in pursuit of an Object—an intended aim, a meaningful purpose, a qualitative and substantive “what” and “that;” and this Object would itself be the insistence of the non-existence of Objectivity (i.e., the non-existence of the very fact of there being Objects; which solidifies the fact of the performative contradiction taking place).

All discursive Objects selectively attended to in Conscious Experience bear the stamp of a “What” and “That;” a “character” and an “existence.” To enter the realm of Reflective Experience and to subtract the “Whatness” from the “What-That” unity of a particular Object, “X,” and to assert the independence of X’s “Thatness,” or to assert the independence of X’s “Whatness” from X’s “Thatness,” is to commit oneself to the reality of a violent abstraction without any legitimate grounds to justify it. Indeed, it cannot even be accomplished without a demonstrable fallacy. In fact, one cannot even conceive of a “That” without predicting the “That” a “What,” or a “What” a “That.”