Chapter 11

Objectification and Alienation

So far, we have understood the object of thought as either an independent or dependent object of the external world, or at least a characteristic to be declared among other things—briefly, a thing in its narrowest meaning. But now we know that the focus of comprehension can also shift to the comprehending self, finally to the activity of comprehension and its product.

I can reflect on the thing, including the foreign self. I can reflect on the self-reflecting self. And finally, I can reflect on the process of reflection itself.

The objectification of the thinking self could be most easily visualized by bringing it once again to the place of the object. This would represent two things: the binding of the relational power to the comprehending self and its difference from the comprehended self.

For whoever grasps his self at this moment certainly does not think of the thinking within him at the same moment. If with expressions like "I think myself" or "I think my self," reflection distinguishes a conceived self from the thinking self, it follows the compulsion of reality in fundamentally the same way as in the separation of the self from the thing in statements like "I think of the moon" or "I see the tree."

The psychologists have repeatedly expressed that the comprehended self relates to the comprehending self like something past to the present now and is thus the, even if only by a quarter of a second, past self.

However, there is no indication of how one's own self can actually come to the object position without thereby losing its nature of relational power.

The German word "Gegenstand," formerly even "Gegenwurf," translated from the Latin "objectum," has repeatedly led philosophers to define the object as that which "stands opposite" or "stands against" the thinking mind.

However, since it was overlooked that an "opposite" or "against" would lose all meaning without the separation of opposing points, especially recent psychologists have presumed to support the ancient ideology of thinking psychologically with the claim that the achievement of the mental act consists in the fact that it juxtaposes something that exists only in the soul or perhaps in consciousness with the soul itself and thus actually creates reality itself.

However, if the mind is not even able to comprehend the property of continuity in separation, we must completely deny it the ability for such an achievement.

If we capture the situation in the equation: Mind + continuous medium = opposite of two relational points, and we eliminate the continuous medium on the left, then absolutely nothing remains on the other side, because everything collapses into the one and same point, which would be unlocatable as without position.

If we eliminate the mind, however, the relational points fall on the right, but the condition of the opposite remains, because the reality of separation would remain unchallenged, whether or not one marks points on it.

If it is now an experienced reality concerning which the marking of points can only be done by the mind, then it must belong to the experience of reality and consequently to every experience that in it lies a polar separation of the experiencing and an experienced.

The duality of self and thing, "subject" and "object," is based on the polarity of experiencing life to appearing events.

If there were no polarity between the appearance and the experience of the appearance in the reality of events, thus the mind would find no counterpart upon which its act of fixation could be directed.

The mind does not have the ability to create a counterpart, but rather to find something that encounters it in its own way, by tearing it away from the totality of the stream of reality and thus also from the connection with the experiencing soul.

Conversely, the event lacks the conceptual ability to find, because it can neither divide nor fix anything. But only in it do living life and the counterpart of the appearing reality exist.

We want to substantiate this with some examples. If I find myself below the level of the mind, thus in a mere state of experiencing, I am in a polar connection with something experienced, which in relation to the life process carries the character of foreignness and in many cases the external world. But I am not at all in a polar connection with my own experiencing.

We see colors, lines, shapes, hear noises, sounds, tones, smell scents, taste salty, sweet, bitter, sour, touch hard, soft, rough, smooth, dry, wet, warm, cold, and so on. But we do not see our seeing, hear our hearing, smell our smelling, taste our tasting, touch our touching.

So we experience not the experiencing, but an experiencing foreign counterpart, and we experience by virtue of its foreignness and by virtue of it alone the reality of the experienced—the reality of color, sound, warmth.

However, one must immediately account for the fact that reality cannot be the same as objectivity and that the determination of the objectivity of something real, or more briefly "existence," cannot be understood from the experience of reality alone.

If a life-bearer experiences something real, he is connected with the experienced and consequently also with the reality of the experienced due to his experiential process. But if a personal life-bearer thinks of something truly existing, he thereby knows himself to be separate from the object of his thinking, as he can, for example, think of existences that existed millions of years ago, such as the dinosaurs, or the solar eclipse that will occur in seven months.

His act of objectification is thus different from his experience of reality.

This is even more evident from the fact that objectification, purely in itself considered, would be incapable of distinguishing consciousness-foreign objects from consciousness-own objects. For the object of thought is not only the house, the table, the tree, but also objects of thought are mathematics, virtue, multiplicity.

The concept always has the same quality as the object of thought, whether we think about things and their properties, states, processes, whether spirits and souls along with their properties, whether finally concepts and comprehension.

So how did we begin to distinguish consciousness-foreign from consciousness-own objects based solely on objectification? Meanwhile, we already know that without alienation, objectification could not be carried out.

If we think of the dinosaurs, firmly convinced that they once really existed, we by no means must have experienced or perceived a dinosaur, but rather the space of appearance along with the manifold things in it, including the temporal sequence of events in it. And the space of appearance again with all that serves as its place of residence stands opposite to us due to the alienating function of experience.

But then the discovery of one's own self presupposes the process of alienation. If we call the comprehension of the thing the first step of reflection, then the second step of reflection, namely the comprehension of the self, has the character of retrospection.

If I am able to think "there stands a tree here," I can also reflect "I see, believe, mean, think, judge that a tree stands here." In doing so, I have turned back from the thought thing to that which was already present in the thinking of the thing, but did not yet "come to consciousness."

I am able to do this because through the thinking of the thing the bond was broken that previously linked my experience to the appearance. Hence from now on any arbitrary thing can occupy the position of object, including the self separated from the thing in the act of thinking.

This matter is recounted with unsurpassed sharpness in the foreign word "reflection." A thought is reflective or reflecting insofar as it refers back to the thinker, and the ability to think at all is revealed in this reflective thinking.

Therefore, a primarily object-related or "naive" thinking must nevertheless be distinguished from a primarily self-related or, in a narrower sense, "reflective" thinking. The former would primarily be outwardly directed, the latter forms a side of inwardly directed thinking.

We first deduce from this that self-comprehension can only take place via the detour of object comprehension and thus is just as dependent on the reality of appearance as the comprehension of the thing.

Due to the polar connection with a reality to be experienced, every experience is conditioned in its direction. Due to the breaking of this connection, the thinking mind has the ability to freely choose the direction it wishes to take. It is able to determine on its own where it wants to turn, whether from one thing to another or from the thing back to the thinking self.

The controllability of the directions of reflection is mainly to be considered in view of the selection of volitional goals as well as the direction of the so-called attention. Indeed, we must distinguish a strongly controlled from a relatively uncontrolled thought process. However, if we imagined the control power completely abolished, we would thereby have robbed the life bearer of the ability to think itself.

Here is an opportunity to explain why we consider colors and seeing, sounds and hearing, scents and smelling to be polar opposites.

Everyone recognizes the impossibility of the cognitive demand that would impose the following word combinations on us: invisible colors, inaudible sounds, unsmellable scents. And would thereby have admitted that not only can there be no seeing without colors, no hearing without sounds, no smelling without scents, but there can also be no colors without visibility, no sounds without audibility, no scents without smellability.

Appearance and experience belong inseparably together. However, they are essentially dissimilar, which has been fundamentally proven by the fact that we can see colors, but we do not see the act of seeing.

Since the life process is often confused not only with the mental act but also with physical processes, such as seeing being considered a molecular movement in the nervous system and thus fundamentally similar to the visible color, we prove it indirectly through the reflection on the result of awareness.

Due to the inevitable presence of the thing-point, the original objectivity takes on the character of thingness. It seems surprising why the mind, when it by means of a reflective act makes the referent into the referred and thus places it in the position of the thing, is not at all compelled to regard it as something alien to consciousness.

Although the history of the mind offers entire pattern cards of false reifications, there is no doubt that they are not inevitable. Whoever reflects on the mind or on thinking is aware or can at least be aware of referring to determinations of inwardness and not perhaps those of a possible external world.

The complete neutrality of the object position regarding what occupies it does not exclude sharply separating objects foreign to consciousness from those inherent to consciousness. However, this would remain incomprehensible without the polarity of experience.

We conclude this investigation by stating a third and indeed final step of reflection, which can follow self-reflection just as it follows object reflection: the awareness of the relation of the thing-point to the self-point, or the reflection on understanding and the concepts.

Object reflection is followed by self-reflection, and finally conceptual reflection.

Externally considered, conceptual reflection is indeed nothing but the other side of self-reflection, because an understanding consciousness is inseparable from the concept. More profoundly, however, it represents a fundamentally higher level of abstraction than any other kind of objective or self-reflection.

When focusing on the thing, I look away from the self. When focusing on the self, I look away from the thing. When focusing on the concept, I look away from both.

To the thing belongs an associated event, to the self an associated experience, to the concept as such belongs neither directly, but indirectly both, since now both self and thing have become associations.

As something completely detached from reality, only conceptual reflection has the extraordinary capacity to "oversee" everything and to tackle the question of the relationship between the mind and life. But for that very reason it is in danger, like no other type of reflection, of losing sight of the dual dependency of understanding—namely on the one hand from the spirit, on the other hand from life—thus unnoticeably denying reality and considering the concept as the creator of the world.

Socrates began this, and modern logistics celebrates its triumphs in it.

The three steps of reflection stand out with wonderful clarity in the history of Greek thought. The Ionian materialists philosophized based on objective consciousness. The Sophists, especially Protagoras, based on self-consciousness. Plato based on relational consciousness.

Unfortunately, Greek thought already fell into the fatal misstep of confusing the preferred object with reality itself and dissolving the worldview into concepts of being. From which those three basic types of philosophical system formations emerged which subsequently repeated incessantly: from predominant objective consciousness "Materialism," from predominant self-consciousness "Spiritualism," from predominant relational consciousness "Idealism."

All three are branches on the trunk of the same fundamental error, according to which over the mere substratum the essentia was forgotten, over the cogitare the vivere, over the existere the fluctuare.

When reaching the end of the path that the Eleatics began with the denial of reality, the logistician no longer has the slightest consciousness of having denied another world for the sake of his belief in a world of mere noumena.

Melchior Palágyi states: "The source of the possibility of all human misguidance is to be found in the fact that we can consider as spiritual what is merely alive, and as alive what is merely spiritual."

Everything we have fought against ultimately proves to be caused by the same compulsion to distort reality into a spiritual act due to the confusion of experience with recognition.