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Wednesday, 22 March 2017



This which is going on is either the happening itself or is the happening within the mind. The focus of attention can be shifted slightly and what was just now the thing going on becomes the thing going on as appearing in mind. This is a very odd kind of displacement and it is available at any moment. Whatever is happening is happening for me. If it is a direct or unreflected experience this is clear, and if it is indirect or mediated then its happeningness is the activity of a web of beliefs, and the entertaining of these beliefs is happening to me. But - to take the reverse road from phenomenology - what happens for me first merely happens. That which happens for me is a subclass of what is happening determined by the addition of some factor of witnessing imbuing it with for-me-ness. And even that elusive factor is just happening. Indeed, the very 'me', the putative locus of this event is merely happening. So what is it that appears specially distinguished about the 'me' part of happening, what is it that is strong enough to make the distinction seem such a clear demarcation? Clearly, nothing at all. For the distinction of subject and object, or neosis and noema, to hold up there must be a definitive experience of the border between them, but there cannot be such an experience since it would exist entirely in objectivity, or on the noematic side. There is no experience of the subjective as such, only different modes of the objective, and the only things which differentiate these are their associated beliefs, frame, and colouring, their different lines of association. There is no direct experience of a cogito, an 'I am', only a certain persistent structure of thoughts around this notion.

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