My objective here is to talk about the "subject-object division"—that is, about dichotomy. I would have equally enjoyed talking about “medium.” For both belong together, yet their meaning is entirely different. Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Jaspers maintain that everything is divided. Everything is medium, argues McLuhan and the contemporaries. But not only these recent thinkers, as already Aristotle had recognized in contrast to the divider Plato, that in perception, light is refracted by air, medium diaphane. The medium unites and refracts. It is a mediator and a divider.
Speaking about media would be more modern. We live within and through the media. We also live in divisiveness, but we do not notice it. The division goes deeper. The medium is a surface, but as Paul Valéry says, everything is surface. Through division, everything that is other arguably is divided for good. But without the medium, how does the one know that it is not the other?
As philosophers we do not deal with media, as physicists would deal with electricity and magnetism and the ether, and foremost we do not deal with the so-called print media and their adversary, the digital media, as long as we after Norman Wiener do not know what information as medium is.
Jaspers calls the subject-object-division the "primal phenomenon of our consciousness": that as a subject I am directed toward an object. This intentional directedness is "incomparable," "irreducible," and "mysterious." It is "quotidian," and yet "nothing can elucidate it." In itself, it is identical with "becoming lucid in the world."
Jaspers addresses this position in his Philosophie, in his Von der Wahrheit, and in his other writings without deviating from it. The relevance for Jaspers of the thought concerning a primary division can never be overrated. All the more astonishing is that this valuation was not identified and has not become a subject for research. At least I am not aware of any work that addresses it. The importance of the thought concerning the subject-object-division can be discerned by virtue of the fact that it serves as the basic operation (Grundoperation) that contains the entire epistemology of Jaspers. This seeming triviality of a basic operation is perhaps the reason for the reticence of authors to engage with it.
Jaspers himself considers this phenomenon of the division to be so fundamental and indubitable, that whenever he addressed this topic he never considered it necessary to revise this thought. It appears to have been unthinkable to him that it is possible to doubt it; however, as we will see shortly, other thinkers of the same period of time, such as for example the Japanese scholar Kitarō Nishida, thought about the subject-object division in quite a different way.
It is unknown wherefrom Jaspers has taken his theory of the subject-object-division. As always and also here, he does not give any references regarding his sources. One tends to assume that he owes this thought, as so much else, to Kant. But the phrasing "division of consciousness" that is not being used by Kant in this way, points rather to Schopenhauer, who does speak in such bold terms. Jaspers puts into quotation marks Schopenhauer's phrase, "no subject without object, no object without subject" (W 232).
I have asked people to describe their experience when they replicate what I demonstrate to them as a philosophical division.
What is opaque and is barely conscious in a state without differentiation, and what prior to language is barely apparent, and only linguistically designates itself as subject and object, emerges and becomes lucid. By way of repetition the occurrence becomes more distinct, but without language there is no division and there is the danger that by talking about it the initial experience becomes a cliché. The words "subject"—"object" are divided, consciousness is not divided. There is no split, no division. There is nothing philosophical about it, only psychology. As a philosopher, I become incredulous. Only when I insist on it, I notice that I am "I" and that indeed, a non-I is opposed to me, and finally that all material being of this kind that I encounter is non-I, while I continue to uphold that I am "I." Finally I take Schopenhauer off the shelf and find the following: "No subject without object, no object without subject" and in Jaspers' Von der Wahrheit, I read that we are inside the subject-object division "and not on the one side of this division" (W 232).
One would expect that with his new philosophy of the encompassing, Jaspers would address the ancient classical problems. Therefore one would expect that the encompassing will present as highest instance the division as the deepest level and that, due to the irreversibility of the division, the divided cannot return again to its original oneness, nevertheless can be sublated in it.
However, this is not so. To begin with we get to know that the fundamental division of consciousness is not the only one, but rather there are additionally two further divisions: the one between oneness and multifariousness and the one between unity and generality. By way of this expansion of the concept of division Jaspers takes away from the subject-object-division its initially claimed unique character and he puts the object division—that is, the division leading to concreteness—on the same level with the albeit subordinated differentiation of oneness and multitude and of conceptual unity and conceptual generality.
Oneness and multitude are differentiations; they are not divisions that are preceded by a state of non-division. Singularity and generality are characterizations of concepts. All material being is subject to the division into subject and object, albeit not into singularity and generality, and not into oneness and multitude.
Furthermore: With the simple scheme of division and encompassing in front of us, we would expect that the encompassing encompasses the divide. The old problem of division that goes back to Kant's fundamental differentiation between thing-in-itself and apperception, and of course even further back to Platonism, would thus be solved with such a new philosophy of the encompassing. Instead, we get to hear: the encompassing that encompasses subject and object, and with it also encompasses itself tautologically, forbids itself all logical inquiry. "It remains the secret of this encompassing" (W 234), he says. A justification and an understanding are not possible; this is to say they are only possible in a tautological manner (W 234). However, instead of leaving this problem in a "dark abyss" (W 233), Jaspers declares "consciousness as such" to be the central instance; he states this even in a section heading, namely "Consciousness as such in its basic divisions" (W 231).
Here it is not being said that consciousness will be divided, rather he states several times, "consciousness as such" is divided. The concept "consciousness as such," that he adopted from Kant, is one of the modes of the encompassing. This teaching of the seven modes of the encompassing has severe consequences. Jaspers valued it highly, and I know from personal conversations with him that he expected new possibilities for philosophical speculation to come from their conceptualization. The thought becomes unbearable when the concept of existence is seen as one of the seven modes. How can existence, the most singular of all being, be encompassing! It does not encompass, not even itself!
The same holds true, of course, also for the six other modes, albeit not in the same clarity. Regarding the question as to what it is that is divided, Jaspers hence says now that it is not consciousness, but that it is rather consciousness as such. Yet, since consciousness as such is one of the seven modes of the encompassing, by virtue of this the encompassing is also divided. As a Jaspersian one cannot allow this. It is correct to say: The encompassing encompasses what is divided, but the encompassing does not get divided, also not as consciousness as such!
Through positing the seven modes of the encompassing, Japers fell back into polygarchy: An encompassing that is divided into seven modes and additionally is divided threefold as "consciousness as such." Yet nothing is encompassing other than solely the encompassing, and all gets divided, only the encompassing does not!
Jaspers prompts us repeatedly, not to retract from the problem of the subject-object division or to circumvent it, but rather to engage with this struggle. He rejects the giving up of the division and a flight into a unio mystica (W 245-6), he speaks of a course of reconciliation and ultimately of the "breakdown of all divisions by means of paradox" (W 251), whatever that might mean.
The division spurs toward overcoming, in order to reach beyond itself. But behind the encompassed is only what is being encompassed, and again an encompassing or nothingness. As he finds the nothing nevertheless to be too oriental, despite all admiration of it—think of his admiring distancing from Nagarjuna in his Great Thinkers—all that would be left is reflective repetition. After all, this repetition is nevertheless more than merely nothing. There are passages where he ventures to go near the nothing. In Von der Wahrheit he says: "The undivided is for our thinking practically nothing" (W 234). But the encompassing of the encompassing, the encompassing quality of what is being encompassed, that would be more than nothing, it would be reflection.
Albeit there are a handful of passages in his work where he speaks about reflection, about self-reflection: he speaks about the reflectivity of the contemplator, about the I-presentation of the representing I. But in Jaspers the reflection does never go any further than the next level. As if he were afraid of advancing any further, afraid of that to which he downright urges us. And where he draws on Kant, by reassuring himself concerning his reflection with reference to his master and by quoting him, this then is where Kant says that the representing I is indeed also solely an appearing I, it is not a thing in itself, and an appearing I is not capable of reflecting. And where Kant discontinues his questioning of the conditions regarding the possibility of transcendental knowledge, also Kant himself is stuck at the first level of reflection.
He does not ask about the conditions for the conditions of knowledge. Gottlieb Fichte was one of the many contemporaries who, with their infinite reflecting activity, went beyond it and advanced it further.
Jaspers has not considered, barely considered, reflection as being the actual quality to advance the subject-object-division, he has not viewed the turn from the object-contemplating to the subject-contemplating analyzing sciences, and with it the turn from interest in the object to interest in the subject. From this turn, all reflective sciences came about with which we are mostly dealing today.
In its anxious restraint, contemplation by Jaspers reaches only the level of traditional psychology, not even the psychology of psychology. It reaches the level of reflection of contemplating history, not even the history of historiography, that is practiced by the interesting historiographs of today who have now advanced hermeneutics to an infinite self-questioning (Kosseleck). It does not reach the reflection about the nature of number, of set, let alone the set of all sets, even though he uses this term (that he adopted from me) in one passage of Von der Wahrheit. (W 231: In a listing of puzzling things, such as the square root of negative 1).
He does not know the Hilbert program of meta-mathematics that was much discussed back then in 1920, also not the semantic triangle in Ogden and Richards' Meaning of Meaning from 1923, and also not the liar paradox (Epimenides) that resulted from reflection. I do want to note that Jaspers did mention, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, albeit without calling it by name. "How in self-reflection, the mental reality that I want to observe, changes through the observation and how in physics final facts are in principle only determinable for the price of uncertainty of simultaneous other facts" (W 629). In some passages where Jaspers speaks of division, he also speaks of medium. As the object is not without subject, so to say it always points to an other, this could be an appropriate field for mediation; but he does not use this field for advancing further mediation in it, further reflections into the potential depth of infinite contemplation. It says it all: the word "meta" does not occur in his work, except in the concept "metaphysics."
Since the 1920s the word "meta-language" dominates modern linguistics. It has consequences that in the 1950s he still did not take note of the rise of the new Anglo-Saxon logic and theory of language. Jaspers was not modern. He does not progress to the meta-world, within which today we all are, albeit reluctantly so.
Modernity is reflexivity. Antiquity states things, while modernity reflects and lives in its meta-world created by reflexivity.
When Jaspers writes in his Philosophie that the encompassing subject-object-division is the medium within which it becomes necessary, that is, it manifests, what it is that has "being" for us (whereby he refers to his reality of objects), what is our actual, practical world of objects; then, so he claims, new being can enter into the new medium that resulted from enlargement, expansion, and multiplication of the object world (P1 34-5).
And it is the infinite that has entered into our new medium through the possibility of infinite repetition of reflection. The infinite has become a subject matter in science: mathematics has become a science of the infinite, just as informatics has become information science, although no one can say, no one knows what information is. The infinite, once subject to imagination and speculation, is today a topic in the most exact sciences. And if we take a glance at art: the so-called representational art has become abstract and thereby become art that is infinitely open; the same holds true for literature, that does not only consists of nonsense and senselessness. And in music which became hyper-loud and inaccessible. For example, John Cage's composition 4'33'' or the Estonian Arvo Pärt mean for music what Kasimir Malewitsch means for painting (nearly everything is possible at the level of reflection: museums of the museums).
For Schopenhauer, "no object without subject" is the main tenet of his philosophy. This is so not solely due to the frequency of mentioning it in his texts, but also when measured in respect to its significance in his system. When taken most rigidly, it means to him: Whatever we cognize as being an object, depends on us being the knowing subject. The sentence has an epistemological and ontological meaning:
epistemologically: the knowing subject's structure of cognition determines the cognized object's appearance structure, and
ontologically: the mere fact that there are subjects is the condition of the possibility for objects.
According to Schopenhauer's own words the motto does not stem from him, but from George Berkeley. Schopenhauer employs Berkeley's meaning in order to emphasize the phenomenality of the world that has such significance in his own philosophy. In Schopenhauer's Kant interpretation, Kant also advocated this phrase, albeit not distinctively enough.
Conspicuous and worth mentioning is, that from the complete motto „No object without subject, no subject without object" only the first half gets discussed and accepted in Schopenhauer to whom it is so often attributed. This makes sense insofar as contrary to the commonly accepted interpretations both halves have a quite different meaning. "No object without subject" means for Schopenhauer an ontological and epistemological dependency of the subject from the object, it means Berkeley, Kant, and idealism. "No subject without object" however signifies realism and science, albeit invoked a lot less frequently, and when construed in an extreme manner this means: There is no nothing. (The subject would have to negate itself.)
I could not determine when these two mottos started to get used. Schopenhauer states, that it is a position of Berkeley that "the object without subject is nothing," which is to say that the objective world exists only as our presentation of it.
Schopenhauer also does not speak about the subject–object division, but rather, at any rate in several passages, about the disaggregation (Zerfallen) of our consciousness into subject and object. In the renowned dissertation on the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, it is stated in §16, "Our cognizing consciousness, appearing as outer and inner sensibility, as understanding and reason, divides into subject and object and comprises nothing else." That is the simplest ontology that can be thought of. There is the subject, the object, and nothing apart from it. And after having named the substances, Schopenhauer also names their functions: "To be object for the subject and to be our representation are the same" (FRP 30). At first this appears to be symmetrical: All objects are presentations and all presentations are objects. Yet when taking a closer look we notice that the text says something different and turns out to be asymmetrical. It means: The objects are presentations of the subject, but it does not mean: the subject is a presentation of the object. In the motto, "No object without subject, no subject without object," this asymmetry is concealed.
In the analysis of the meaning of the two passages in the further text the difference becomes apparent. For the second and decisive sentence in Schopenhauer's epistemology states that the subject cannot cognize itself. Hence the subject cannot become an object of cognition. The subject solely knows its seemingly objective world. Yet by putting the focus on itself, it discovers its self-limitation that is in no way less fundamental, and, Schopenhauer thereby finds himself on the selfsame track as Kant, namely, the knowing self is itself only an appearance (deceiving itself). Just as the object belongs to the phenomenal world so does the subject. "The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of knowledge, who becomes an individual only through his identity with it." Its function is the cognition of the object, not the cognition of the subject. What holds true for the knowing of the objects does not hold true for the knowing of the subject. The subject has only the function of knowing, and does not have the function to be known. (The phenomenal self-knowledge of phenomenality is a contradiction in its own terms.) Thought and its categories ought not be applied to itself. Reflection (that is, the subject cognizing the subject) gets eliminated. "Like an eye, which sees everything except itself" (FRP 148).
For adherers and admirers of the Jaspersian logic of the encompassing it is very interesting that in one of the Schopenhauerian rationales of disallowing the self-application of cognition (to cognition) we are told, that for the whole is not valid what is valid for its parts (FRP 150).
What Kant designated to be an inner sense that was intended to be the counterpart to the external sensory perceptions has not advanced a deep understanding—academic psychology went its own ways that were not the fruit of the Kantian inner sense—also Kant's reflection upon the I was not seminal. The abysmal appearance-character of the subject impeded any kind of acquisition of further knowledge. Not solely in philosophy does the subject have a bad reputation.
As we know from his doctoral dissertation, Schopenhauer's principle for the explanation of the sufficient reason has merely four roots. If there were a fifth root, it would lead back to the reflection and to the reflection of the reflection. The Kantian thing in itself and Schopenhauer's "will that wants itself" have instead become obstructive boundaries to knowledge that were never taken seriously. After all, Schopenhauer entertains in earnest the thought of a fifth root. In §33 of the writing on the fourfold root he speaks about "representations of representations, quasi of a higher power" (VWG 55).
Similarly as in Kant the intelligible character, that is, what is brought to appearance by a person, is neither knowable nor can it be questioned, so is the coming about of the appearance not a conceivable subject of knowledge.
That one can think beyond this factuality of the limited functions of cognition, Kant himself reminds us in his Critique of Pure Reason:
But why our understanding has this peculiarity, that it a priori brings about unity of apperception only by means of the categories, and only by just this kind and number of them—for this no further reason can be given, just as no reason can be given as to why we have just these and no other functions in judging, or why time and space are the only forms of our possible intuition.
Therefore, what is without a compelling reason could also have been different. In place of things in themselves that are merely seemingly known, there could have been reflection, an infinite reflection.
Kitarō Nishida (1870-1945) was and is still today perceived as Japan's most renowned philosopher. Already during his lifetime everyone talked of him, at least every philosopher did so. His oeuvre is available in a 12-volume edition; respectively it is unavailable, as in translation it can only partially be obtained.
The first attempts of translation into German we owe Robert Schinzinger, who translated writings related to intellectual intuition that were published in 1943.
In the 1950s when I had been teaching in Japan at Sendai University and at the University of Tokyo, the entire world already spoke of him, just as it spoke of Jaspers and Heidegger. But no one had read him, as there had been no single line in translation yet.
Since 2001 Nishida's Zen no kenkyû, which is considered to be a major work, is available in German translation by Peter Pörtner.
For our present topic will be used the chapters "Pure Experience," "Thinking," "Will," and "Intellectual Intuition."
Undoubtedly Nishida adopted these concepts from occidental thought. His entire oeuvre is an interaction between Western and Chinese thinkers. In Zen no kenkyû he does not cite any of the Japanese thinkers. He belonged to the new Tetsugaku School in Kyoto, whereby one needs to know that philosophy in Japan has been called "Tetsukagu" only since the second half of the nineteenth century. Most certainly he did not adopt the concept "pure experience" from the Marburg School, but rather from the Americans, from William James, whom he cites often (IG 10, 13, 33, 52). His fundamental ontological intuition is: Esse est percipii (IG 44). Jaspers he does not know.
Nishida loves the German mystics and quotes Jacob Böhme, "the God prior to revelation—an objectless will—reflects on Godself, that is, makes Godself a mirror; therefore subjectivity and objectivity are separated and God and the world develop" (IG 169). Instead of the sentence, "no subject without object, no object without subject," Nishida writes, "just as there is no world without God, there is no God without the world" (IG 168).
Even though Nishida thinks in a mystical mode and debates in a psychological mode, he relates everything to metaphysics. Up to this point philosophy stood on the fundament of the factual sciences, yet he aimed to build it on the fundament of psychology. The philosophical epistemic value of mathematics he holds in high regard, and he values especially Luitzen Brouwer's intuitionism.
Nishida does not think in nihilistic terms, as to him there is a reality that is experienced in "pure experience" (IG 167) and the universe "is established according to spiritual meaning" and there is a "unified advance of the universe" (IG 172).
Pure experience is a state of mind in the overall process of intellect, in which there is no subject and no object, no thought and no judgment, no inside and no outside, no self-realization, and no self-consciousness.
But who does have such pure experience?
Small children and great minds have it. He quotes Johann W. Goethe who versifies while dreaming, and Sesshū Tōyō, who became one with his paintings. In a state of pure experience everything forms a unity. It makes no difference whether Sesshū has painted nature, or whether "nature painted itself through Sesshū" (IG 135).
Within the system of pure reality, that comes to be known in pure experience, there must come about a division, though, due to a consequence of conflicts that are within this system as well as a necessary moment in the process of its unfolding, namely in the form of the so-called "reflection" (IG 170). We do not hear anything further about the nature of such a necessity and a more precise origin of this so-called reflection. Through it, "that which was actual becomes conceptual, that which was concrete becomes abstract, and that which was one becomes many" (IG 169). If one side is the "I," then the other side is the object world. One side is related to the other, and they oppose one another.
Reflection is comparable to a fall. "The fall of humans occurred not only in the distant time of Adam and Eve but is taking place moment by moment in our minds" (IG 170). The content of pure experience is analyzed and dissected only through being the object of knowledge and reflection. In the process of unfolding, a totality becomes apparent and reflects itself in contradictions and conflicts.
The process of division and reflection has yet another aspect. When described in such a way it is only one half of the differentiation. There is a deeper unity concealed behind it. Since reality unfolds only through contradiction and conflict, each conflict is based on the differentiation of reality. In order to express the more profound aspects behind the divided unity, Nishida turns to Gutoku Shinran: "If even a good person attains rebirth in the Pure Land how much more so does an evil person" (IG 170). And simultaneously he turns to Christian salvation theory. "For God to manifest God's most profound unity, God must first differentiate Godself" (IG 170). (The division had to happen. Think of the prodigal son.)
There are two specific means to unite the divided: the willpower to attain one's desired object along with intellectual apperception, which is unachievable in Kant and desired by Friedrich W. J. Schelling and in German idealism; and there is a highest unification in goodness, which is the endpoint of Nishida's oeuvre.
For Nishida the idea of division is fundamental, yet at the same time the appearances and disappearances of subject-object-divisions are to be understood as relative occurrences. He considers an ontologically irresolvable division to be a form of dogmatism. Kant, at whom this might well be directed, though he does not mention him, and Schopenhauer's pure intuition without will he regards as being nothing special, what matters is our state of pure experience, not the state of everyone and not at all times (IG 32).
If it matters for all subjects that they are subject for an object, and if it matters for all objects that they are object for a subject, then according to Nishida's logic of topos we are randomly born through chance into a divided relation of subject and object.
The classical doctrine of the subject-object-division is, as it were, the epistemological warning of the skeptic to the seeker of truth, to take knowledge not as truth per se, but taking it only as true for the knower himself. What tries to pass subcutaneously as being objective, is merely subjective.
With regard to the radical and relative nature of the subject-object division in Jaspers and Nishida, the difference regarding some of its aspects is so great that one is surprised that Nishida calls the segmentation of his pure state of consciousness a subject-object division.
The decisive difference with regard to Jaspers is that while the split—the divide—is for Jaspers a necessary experience incurring to each reflecting and thinking subject, for Nishida it is a phenomenon that occurs in the stream of universal experience: Wherever and whenever pure experience occurs, its split can occur.
