Video transcription

To begin this brief excursus on the nature of Objectivity, here is a passage from Hegel’s Encyclopedia:

“In general, everyone agrees that thought is the object of Logic. Yet one may hold a very low opinion of thought, or a very high one. On the one hand, one says: ‘This is only a thought’, thereby meaning that thought is merely subjective, arbitrary, and contingent, and is not ‘the thing itself’, the true, the actual real. On the other hand, one may also hold a high opinion of thought and understand it in such a way that only thought attains what is supreme, the nature of God, whereas through the senses no knowledge of it can be had.”

Hegel tells us here that thought, far from being “suffocated” within the limits imposed by Psychology, may aspire to reflect the “logic of reality”, or the “Divine Mind”, if we are willing to use that theologically misleading term.

For the ancient idealists, Objectivity is the conformity of human thought to binding and intelligible connections, the Logos, whose origin is transcendent, that is, situated in a dimension lying beyond individual consciousness.

From this standpoint, the logical constraints felt by the human mind are not intrinsic to it; rather, they are a reflection of archetypal constraints, as Proclus notes in the Platonic Theology:

“The intelligible transcends mind, insofar as it subsists of itself, and yet the intelligible is not outside mind. There is an intelligible correlated with mind, intelligible which, being subordinate to the ‘transcendent’, is ‘immanent’, being subordinate to the ‘unparticipated’, is ‘participated’, being subordinate to the ‘pre-existent’, is ‘existent’, being subordinate to the ‘unitary’, is ‘multiple’.”

In this passage, the logical structure at the root of the four analogies proposed by Proclus emerges with great clarity. The dialectical opposition between two concepts rests upon an archetypal structure of Forms, to which two terms are “fastened”, one superordinate and one subordinate.

Proclus affirms that, while we can indeed find the Forms as “reflections” within our mind, their origin lies elsewhere, in a dimension that transcends the mind, non-existent yet subsistent.

To return to our familiar metaphor, the problem may be framed by a simple question: where do the rules of chess reside? In the thoughts of the players, or in a dimension apart?

The question concerning that “spatial location” of rules is not as childish as it may appear. For if the rules resided in the thoughts of the players, then, when the physical brain disintegrated and individual consciousness were extinguished, the game of chess, though pieces and board remained intact, would have to vanish from reality.

Yet even if the human race were to become extinct, the rules of chess, in themselves, would not be extinguished, since they possess no materiality that can be disintegrated. They would continue to subsist in the dimension of possibilities offered by reality.

If they have manifested at least once, this means they are always latent within the dimension of possibilities. The dimension in which every logical possibility resides is therefore subsistent in relation to the dimension of manifested actuality.

To understand where Objectivity truly resides is to resolve the problem of the legitimacy of true Metaphysics and to define the limits of Psycho-Logic.

This is why Kant’s transcendental position, as well as Husserl’s phenomenological one, are ambiguous positions. They seek to distance themselves from “psychologism” through their aspiration to a “pure logic”, objective and impersonal, yet without noticing that what they seek lies beyond the very boundaries they themselves impose.

Both, that is, continue to analyse the image produced on the surface of the mirror instead of inferring the form of the bodies that produce the image. The image, as representation, is subjective. The body that produces the image is objective.

Being a reflection, the image may be returned in a deformed manner owing to imperfections in the mirror’s surface, and to the optical perspective relative to the body that produces it. Yet if one does not assume the presence of a “body” producing the image, it is impossible to understand how much deformation the mirror has introduced into its reflection.

The Objectivity to which the philosopher aspires is therefore not to be sought in the reflection, but in something more “solid” than what resides on the mirror’s surface.

Something that, however, can be reflected adequately only if the mirror undergoes a rectification, that is, if the mind submits to a process of logical reconfiguration.

Objectivity is often taken as something unproblematic, spoken of as though it were simply one more “capacity” of the mind.

Yet possibility is not a mental whim; it is the field of options reality itself affords—what can occur and what cannot—according to laws. But where do these laws reside?

Where, then, is the normativity of Kant’s mental a priori to be located, if, in presenting itself as “objective”, it claims to transcend the singularity of an individual consciousness? Kant writes:

“Objective validity and necessary universality for everyone are therefore reciprocal concepts. And although we do not know the object ‘in itself’, when we consider a judgment as universally valid, and therefore necessary, we affirm that it has objective value.”

Yet without being able to know the object “in itself”, that is, the body that produces the reflection, what Kant defines here is not objectivity at all, but inter-subjectivity: an agreement based on analysing all the surfaces that reflect a body declared “unknown” to us.

What, then, is Objectivity if not a constraint imposed by reality itself?

For the Realist Idealism of Pythagoras and Plato, the positions of Kant and Husserl are compromised positions. They never succeed in rising above the “psychologism” from which they would like to distance themselves, because they deny that thought can truly “transcend” its own starting dimension when it aspires and tends towards Objectivity.

Plato maintains that, when consciousness climbs to the summit of the Divided Line, thought and reality come to converge, to identify with one another, because the apex of the Line marks the moment when consciousness has finally conformed itself to the logical constraints of reality.

This identification between mind and reality will become one of the foundations of Hegel’s Idealism.

We cannot deny that scepticism towards this position is understandable and, to a degree, justifiable. To embrace Realist Idealism unsettles and destabilises, because if reality and the human mind were somehow to coincide, one might spontaneously imagine a “fluctuating” reality, different for every individual consciousness, since one instinctively attributes to an individual mind a free recombinative faculty.

This conclusion forgets, however, that for Plato thought and reality converge and identify if-and-only-if the individual mind conquers Objectivity through arduous discipline. That is, it becomes “universal thought”, structured by relations bound by mathematical necessity.

For Plato, individual consciousness and its sub-logic conforms to the super-logic of universal consciousness only when singular and subjective thought becomes universal and objective according to Reason.

To clarify this passage from subjectivity to Objectivity, in the next video we shall use the archetypal diagram, showing the four human cognitive faculties framed within the Platonic perspective. “To the Principle!”