Reflections on Mind and the Image of Reality by Jason Brown

Author:Jason Brown [Brown, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498240925
Publisher: Resource Publications
Published: 2017-06-06T07:00:00+00:00

PART III

The Political Animal

How do we maintain our individuality while remaining part of society?

Conflict

The battle between ideas tends to be fought in the world, not in the mind where it belongs

Subjectivity results in the objectification of the person and the world. Even in objectification, in conformance, opposition or abeyance, the person is an occasion of self, in which habit collides with an insistent potential for renewal. To treat a person as an object is to malign, to marginalize or exploit. It is also a denial of value; the individuality of the person is worthless. Conversely, to say a person or thing has value (quality of internal feeling), or to say what the person is worth (quantity of external value), is a perspective, as in praising the beauty of a diamond or discussing its cost. A person or any object can be observed aesthetically (subjective process) or as a product (final actuality). The subjective judgment has one foot in the world, while the objective judgment is fully external. Each mode of valuation has a common origin, one a category in which the object is an end, the other in which the object is a means, but the categories are successive (earlier and later) segments in the mind/brain state.

The other can be monstrous, but monsters, tyrants, leaders, celebrities, holy men, arise out of personal disposition and the needs of followers. They do not fall out of the sky but embody a conscious or unconscious tradition and the will of acolytes. Individual bias intensifies the support of like-minded groups. Dostoevsky wrote that we all have within us a child murderer. Victor Hugo wrote, “ nous sommes deux au fond de notre esprit ”, by which he meant good and evil in every heart. We have leaders and adversaries who we are primed to fight or follow, but the embedded relation with others generally shares attributes of a group. Self and other, Hegel wrote, arise in a single act but others are multiples and the self is specified out of a manifold. The other appears in the act of self-creation. It is well to keep in mind that objects and others have two faces, one the mental image we create and one that is authentically theirs, i.e. subjective quality and material reality.

Subjectivism does not imply relativism. Dewey said facts are irreducible values. The fact is not independent of the feeling that makes it relevant. This does not mean absolute truth is unknowable or that different truths are equivalent. It implies that consensus and social forces, whatever they may be, enter into the adaptive world of thought. Adaptive process in humans can facilitate or vitiate uniformity, but across cultures and environments it allows for distinctions in thought, language and action. The Darwinian struggle is less an internal adaptive process than its extra-psychic consequences, that is, it is a population effect, not a process in the individual organism. Still, the outcome of the clash of need with reality is a person in conflict or in harmony with an objectified world.

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