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Saturday, 1 June 2019


Objective reality is usually taken to mean the third-person perspective, but in fact the objectivity that is correlative to the subjective first person is what is known as the second-person perspective. As I see you, so am I seen by you, whether you are looking or can look, whether you are another self or merely an inanimate object. All of the things that populate my world are known in the second person, as direct objects. If you and I agree about the object we are seeing that does not make it any the less my object and so is still viewed in the second mode. The third is indirect, is what is not present but is inferred for the sake of coordinating and completing, of suturing, the second-person world. So what needs to be dissolved is this ghostly superstructure of the third-person world, it needs to be accorded only the inferior grade of reality that belongs to working hypotheses to thought experiments. We are trapped not in a dream but in a thought experiment that has usurped the privilege of the full reality which belongs only to direct experience, to the interplay of the first and second persons.

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