Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything.
"When I die, the world ends."
The thought expressed by this sentence is not the absurdity that when a measly specimen of an animal species dies, the whole of nature collapses into nonbeing. The thought is that when I as subject die, assuming that I as subject will cease to exist, the entire universe ceases to be for me: it ceases to appear, this appearing being a necessary condition of anything having meaning for me and of anything being objectively knowable by me. (Note that while it is objectively certain that the animal that I am will die and thereby cease to exist, it is not objectively certain that I precisely as subject will cease to exist.)
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung wrote Arthur Schopenhauer in the first sentence of his magnum opus. "The world is my representation." He means by 'world' the world as object, the world as phenomenon in Immanuel Kant's sense, the world that appears to the subject and is knowable by the subject and is knowable only to a subject. No object without a subject. Herein lies the perennial, if partial, truth of idealism. It runs like the proverbial red thread (roter Faden) though the entire history of philosophy.
But the idealistic motif is partial and wants completion. The aporetician in me doubts that this completion is achievable here below. What do I mean?
One cannot reduce object to subject or subject to object; nor can one eliminate either. The objective point of view (POV) is a POV -- so it seems that the (transcendental) subject takes priority both in the order of being and in the order of knowing. But this subject, despite its transcendental spectator function, is undeniably a factical subject embedded in the natural and social worlds.
And so there is a strong temptation to say that the thinking and knowing subject 'emerges' -- to avail myself of that weasel word -- from the natural and social orders and can be understood only in terms of them. Thus is the priority reversed, at least in the order of being. If we adopt the objective POV, then the ontological prius is nature, the material universe splayed out in space-time. In the fullness of objective time certain highly advanced critters evolve with the power to know things, including themselves, and the power to pose the questions now being posed. This power 'emerges.' The weasel word papers over the how of the process of 'emergence' and is essentially only a naming of the puzzle as opposed to a solution it. It explains nothing.
So on the one hand you have the ontic and epistemic priority of the thinking and knowing subject while on the other you have the ontic. if not the epistemic, priority of the object which, as ontically prior, is not a mere object for a subject, but an independent real. (Note that if thinking and knowing could be adequately accounted for in terms of brain functioning, then the objective POV would enjoy both ontic and epistemic priority. That would consummate the marriage of realism with physicalism/materialism.)
The idealistic motif counters and is countered by the realistic motif. My natural tendency is to give the palm to the former. It has always seemed to me easier to get matter out of mind, than mind out of matter. Why? Well, I have the power to fictionalize and imagine. I can imagine material things that do not exist. Imagining them I imagine them to exist. Flying horses, talking donkeys. of course, I cannot make them exist by imagining them, but perhaps a divine intellect could. It makes sense -- whether or not it is true -- to say, as ome distinguished philosophers have said, that God is to creatures as fiction author to (wholly fictional) characters.
But I can attach no sense to the conceit that mind is a 'creation' of matter.
For now I end on an aporetic note. Despite what I just wrote, how do we integrate transcendental mind with the brain and CNS of this stinking animal that I am? The great Husserl sweated over a version of this puzzle but he could not solve it. It was questions like this one that made me appreciate the limits of phenomenology and convinced me that I had to come to grips with the bracing currents of the analytic-Anglophonic mainstream.
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