Objectivity and Intersubjectivity

Some excerpts from (and comments on) a somewhat One Cosmos-ish article called The Natural Path to the Transcendent, by George Stanciu:

The great discovery of ethology is that animals do not perceive what things really are; an animal’s perception is limited to a few key elements that will cause it to act.... An animal’s world is not the world we see but more closely resembles “a small, poorly furnished room.”

Other animals essentially live in their neurology, which provides only a kind of crude model projected onto the world. One might say that their engagement with the world is on a need-to-know basis. 

Frogs, for example, don't even need to know about insects per se, but only "small moving objects." The frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement." 

How did -- and do -- human beings escape from this representational sub-world? Of course, Kant maintained that we do not and cannot. Rather, just like any other animal, we exist in our own projected categories. They may be more subtle or sophisticated, but we are ultimately no more in touch with reality -- itself unknowable -- than any other animal.

Well, first of all, like anyone could even know that:

If man is subjective and has no way of knowing anything objectively, then how did Kant come to know that man lives in his own subjectivity and is confined to it? In other words, how can a man imprisoned in his own subjectivity proclaim an objective truth about everyone, including himself? (Bina & Ziarani)

As Schuon rightly says, 

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

But the second -- or maybe even tied with the first -- would be the miracle that is objectivity, which is to say, the conformity of our own intelligence to the objects of the world.   

The prerogative of the human state is objectivity.... The intelligence is objective to the extent that it registers that which is.

Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and object coincide... (ibid.).

Back to Stanciu: 

Of all the natural creatures, only human beings can grasp the whole. The study of animal perception re-discovered the spiritual nature of Homo sapiens -- the capacity to be connected to all that is, a fundamental principle of every wisdom tradition.

Also true, but by virtue of what principle? For Schuon,

God has opened a gate in the middle of creation, and this open gate of the world towards God is man... 

Agreed, but how did and does the gate open? Stanciu affirms the One Cosmos view that it has to do with the unique conditions of earliest childhood: 

as the human infant emerges from the womb, it looks for a human face and listens for a soprano voice. Nature directs the infant to seek its mother. The very first experience in a person’s life is connecting himself or herself to another person.

In short, it is precisely our neurological immaturity that becomes the means of induction into the world of intersubjectivity and relatedness to others, eventually mediated by language:

Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Helen Keller, you, and I were born with would not have developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of a chimpanzee or a bonobo.

Being subjectively "open systems" is precisely what lifts us out of the condition of being trapped and confined to our own subjective perceptions, which is the fate of other animals. 

But even then, it is possible to reify our own subjectivity and confuse the particular with the universal, which goes to the problem of mind parasites: 

The curse of social living is that every society implants ideas and instills habits of thinking and feeling that limit its members to a particular perspective, one that, as a general rule, is contrary to human nature and destructive to neighboring societies. The paradox is that social living greatly extends our capabilities and yet limits us.

Which is why "Homo sapiens is the only species that can act contrary to its nature." 

Running low on time, but this vertical enclosure is a Big Problem, and it is symbolized by the timeless events of Genesis 3, whereby man foregoes relationship with God in favor of sealing himself in his own pseudo-absoluteness. Is there a way up and out? Yes, but only one assoul at a time:

Of course, the unborn within me, my true self, was a complete mystery, so after stumbling around for years exploring Hinduism and Buddhism, I turned to the deepest understanding of the human person that Christianity offers.

To be continued...