Rein Raud - Being in Flux

4 4 I will be using the term in a way similar to that of Robert A. Wilson, who constantly emphasizes that a cognitive procedure is not something that spontaneously reflects the world, but ‘an activity that individuals perform in extracting and deploying information that is used in their further actions. It involves an agent enmeshed with the world not prior to or following but in the very act of representing’ (2004: 183–4).

5 5 The privilege accorded to the human perspective has caused a shift in the meaning of the word ‘objective’, from ‘what exists unperceived’ to ‘what exists as perceived by humans also when not perceived by any human’. Needless to say, I will not be using the word in this latter sense.

6 6 I use the word ‘entity’ to refer to singular things extracted from the reality process by something or someone external to them and forming a relationship with them through this act, while the word ‘object’ is reserved for the traditional view of stable, self-identical and continuous things that exist as they are in the world independent of any mind and gaze. As said, I think that discourses relying on the existence of pre-given objects impose a structure on the world that is not really there, but which reifies and naturalizes the human perspective of things as the only correct one.

7 7 Alva Noë, introducing his highly convincing critique of this view, formulates as the doctrinal consensus of most neuroscientists the claim that ‘for every experience there is a neural structure or substrate whose activation is sufficient for the experience’ and therefore ‘experience supervenes on the brain’ (2006: 209). He goes on to show how this view is produced by an unwarranted shift from claiming that experience as a whole is partially dependent on the brain as a whole.

8 8 This is reflected in Aristotle’s theory of change, which is the actualization of a potentiality a thing has in itself that comes about as a result of a contact with an agent of change (Physics III, A201a9–202a13). Consequently, ‘only in a fixed thing-like substratum, which must first be given, can the logical and grammatical varieties of being in general find their ground and real application … The category of relation especially is forced into a dependent and subordinate position by this fundamental metaphysical doctrine of Aristotle’ (Cassirer 1953: 8). While Cassirer (as well as many others) has gone on to point out the incompatibility of this view with modern mathematics and natural science (1953: 36ff.), the Aristotelian view has proved to be remarkably resilient. Thus, Graham Harman, for example, formulates the ‘Rule No. 1’ of his ontology as ‘Things pre-exist their activity rather than being created by it’ (2016: 114).

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