The description of experience has always the ambivalent element, to at once describe an object of experience and the way this object appears or is experienced. If it becomes purely a description of the object, it loses its main subject, experience, that it should describe, as, when looking at it only as a more or less accurate image of its object, it is merely this object, with a qualification of personal certainty or uncertainty to be right; if it becomes purely a description of the way of appearance or its experiencial qualities, it loses the object of experience, and by that again the experience itself, as experience is not merely a general kind of category of experience. Obviously, such general kinds of categories, be they transcendental or emprically-human bounds enclosing kinds of experiences we can make, exist; but they do not actually describe real experiences, only possible experiences, as extrapolated by extreme cases, such as all the various types of sensory or internal senses can exist or be experienced is extrapolated going backwards from the highest possible intensity being able to imgine, from blinding lights, deafening sounds and callapsing pain, to, looking back from that form a realm of possible, more or less intense experience. However, describing even all of that does not come close to really describe experience; as it lacks any real object being experienced, is the pure "experiencing" without any enactment of it being done in a real moment.
So how can I then describe an experience? I can simply describe both aspects. I can look at an experience and say, for example, that I saw a table, and that I generally can be dizzy, or might have been at that point; but when I say, that I saw the table dizzily, then I describe something else. I don't describe an external object and an abstract transcendental possibilty; I describe a connection of the two at a moment. Or in other words: I describe an object, that is actual, as fitting into a certain kind of possibility of experiencing; I undertake to describe an _actual object of experience_. How do I describe that in more than a mere apposition?
There are multiple aspects that we can put together, even admittedly more as a kind of apposition, to begin with, that may later explain their connection internally, but seem, as of now, as largely different aspects. Namely these are: a) the reality of the object of experience, or the difference between an object as element of research, about which things can be true, to the actual object, in relation to which truth even makes sense for (that is, the object or objective of theoretical desire); b) the reality of experience, or the difference between an experience as an element of a general kind of experience, of reflection on the possibility of mental self-relation, to the actual mental experience, the real subjective intuition, which also must appear in theory itself as the motivating fact, or as that act of thinking, that substantially creates its internal possibility to become its own object (the desire to think, and more generally the act of thinking and its motivation, as constitutive particular experience for any sense of universality); and c) the occasion of collision of thought and object, or the situation in which a real object becomes object of a real experience, and a real experience comes about to the occasion of an object appearing as real.
To come back to the above example: a) is the way in which the table is real, that it is a real table I experienced, not something in some way interpreted to be a table that might actually be anything and everything at all; b) is the way in which my dizziness is not a reflection on dizziness, is not a thought or reflection about it, but a concrete experience, over which I then can maybe realize that I can feel this way, but which is not merely the imagination, or hypothetical outcome, of such a theory, and c) is the situation, in which both appear, that is, not just the sum of these two factors as seperate realities, but the time and place the co-occur, and the way they can cause and influence each other.
It is interesting that the way we talk here about "reality" is quite different for thing and thought. The thing is real, in that it is not merely possible thing, but the thing as is present in the thought, as something that is that-what-it-is in a way that is present in the thought (even if maybe not all of it is present in it; I may have overlooked if the table is wooden or coloured plastic for example, but I should have seen a table, not a painting of a table). It's presence in thought however is the presence in _this_ thought: this table, not any table. Its reality is not so much "being in reality" in general, but its specificity, its groundedness to the occasion in which the thought occurs. For thought however, its again about not being any possible thought, but here it is about being one actually experienced, that has some kind of intensity. Thought vs. reflection on the possibility of that thought. This might seem like a purely internal distinction, such as between different levels of mental reflection, but that is not quite so. Because, while, when talking about higher levels of reflection, reflections and reflections of reflections are really different only within the theoretical realm, as a way of methodological strictness, that, what is not and in no way a reflection, does precisely not fall in its realm at all. The difference is that between pure theory, or abstract reflection itself, and its realization. And while for theoretical reflections their intentional objects are other thoughts or wishes, non-reflective thought have their intentional object outside of thought itself. I think about a tree, means, that the object of that thought really is the tree out there, not some reflection or perception of it, as much as I might need reflections or perceptions to even get something to be an intentional object to begin with. Therefore, the "reality" of the experience is about the presence of this intentional object, the thing, in my thought; specifically, the presence of this particular thing in thought, to make it real, not just any thing, that after all, as a kind of "any", would be shown to just have been another form of reflection, not pre-reflective reality. Thus, we have seen, even though that reality is quite different for the two, it is of the same form: the presence of a thing in _this_ thought, and the presence of _this_ thing in a thought. The co-occurrence therefore is no longer as mysterious, as strange an addition to these two elements; it simply menas the presence of _this_ thing in _this_ thought; or it is the occasion, the situation of experience itself. The three aspects reduce to one element; or their connection is the essence of that what it before seemed to merely have made to be coincided.
Describing experiences therefore requires more than just descriptions of accurate or inaccurate observations of objects, or of more or less intense general kinds of passions or perceptions, but a description of the particular situations and occasions of "experiencing", of the relation of experience to reality in the relation of the person, that experiences, to a thing, that is experienced. All of this seems rather obvious in hindsight. What is the problematic aspect of this? Why should we bother to point this out?
The problem really comes in when we try to describe the object of experience without the experiencing of it, or this experience as an act without its object as a general form. That however happens constantly, and more importantly, it happens in a way that imagines itself to be the measure of singular, particular instances of experiencings of objects, and that use of this seperating shall be the topic of the rest of the text, especially as it applies to the subjective side, and its use to describe the qualities of the experiencing subject itself.
The most common use of this is as a form of description of a kind of totality of either objects or experiencial acts. Objects, outside of the context of experience, constitute what we might call the world, the totality of things and facts, of objects and relations as we might experience them, but will not for all things. As a theoretical construction, that is all well and good, and noone would fault say a cosmologist for describing the universe as something not directly object of experience, but as a real thing that we know how to measure, as an only possible object of experience. However, it is important in what relation this world is set to direct experience. Is the objective world its measure, or is the other way around experience the measure of the reality of this imagined "world"? This is an important question even for the most obvious horizon of experience, as within it, not everything can be explored or understood, simply due to the variety of things and kinds of focussing on them. With "measure" we here simply mean the way in which something can give to something else a scale of how close an understanding of it is correct; it refers to a measure of how far we can actually accurately describe it.
As said above, the reality of an object is tied to it being present in a specific thought, when we talk about an object as being real in experience. This however can only be true for specific experiences, not for general domains of objects that constitute parts of the world. If they get (as is typically implied in say scientific descriptions of the world) their reality in correspondence to experience, how is that "reality" passed down, if it can't be simply defined in relation to specific experiences? In other words: what is the principle justification of the truth of object permanence, and of believing in that we never saw?
Before we answer this in relation to the world (the totalized version of the object of experience outside of experience), let's look at an easier case, say a single object. How do I know this table exists when I'm not here looking at it? Because I do believe that, and not only as a kind of theorized reality (as say the reality of an electronic field, that I can only calculate, never myself experience). In some sense it is based on the always open _opportunity to experience_, but also to more than that. For example: would an object, that only I myself and noone else could see, establish in me the same confidence of its permanence? Or would I not exclude it in some sense from the world, and count it only for the side of its experience? But then we get into serious trouble if we actually understand the world _as_ possible experiences and their objects, relations and qualities. We create a secondary difference between objective and subjective world, which both however do have their own connection to subjectivity, individual and social.
My world is judged against both: the world, as in the objective world; and against my experience, the individual event, that can overthrow any general picture, as nice and simple as it might at first seem. The objective world however cannot judge itself against objective experiences, since there is no such thing; objectivity is a collation of subjective experiences, not the world from a "point of nowhere" (Haraway), from a divine perspective, or something like that, as that must become ideological and precisely not objective, if a certain subject just presumes itself to be that point at which objective experience is possible, and would maybe create a certain kind of "objectivity" we do not yet know if otherwise, but that is not then the objective world that could ever be the measure on the subject, as it would be subjectively inaccessible. Instead, the objective world judges itself only against the subjective worlds and their experiences; or, it is the totality not just of one person's experience, but, ideally, of all peoples'. The objective world then is the presumed totality of this connection, _whether it exists or not_. (This is the important part; it is seen as a measure on the subjective understanding of the world, since, within it, the subjective idea of such an objective world exists; if this objective world really exists, and can serve as such a measure, can only be seen in the success or failure of this attempt, where we at the same time have to judge about the objective worlds existence and its feasibility for use as a measure; hence, these two can never really be divided, which is the reason I believe it is basically impossible to prove or disprove the bare _existence_ of objectivity, apart from its subjective use or applicability.)
What does this again have to do with our previous conception of reality? The "reality" of a thing is in a specific, in "this" thought; however, not of a specific thing. The reality of a thing is in fact not tied to its substanciality. Substance is, in the opposite, something general, and not tied at all to if the thing is real. When I say: this table, this tree, this house; then I refer to particular observations, to the particularity of the subjective side, not to its moments in the object; not: this kind of tree, this kind of house; that would be substantialization, looking at its qualities, and what of those, for a particular purpose of description, seems noteworthy. So the reality of the world, if we see it as the side of things, not thoughts, in experience, is based on the possibility of this meta-thing, the world, being present in a specific thought: _this world_, not _this kind of world_. But can we point at the (subjective, objective, etc.) world and say: it's this one? And what then about: _this_ multiverse, _this_ space of possible worlds? Do we here not simply repeat the Kantian antinomy?
The world consists of particularities; can it itself be one? Can, among other things, also the world exist in itself? Or _is_, insofar the world is, it outside of this realm of particularities; has it to be necessary (by a kind of strange necessity to necessity by proof of exhaustion, if indeed the world _is_ in some form)? And how is that necessity then connected to the subject? - Or is it maybe, in the reverse, necessarily particular and thus in itself as its own strangest particularity to be?
All these questions however escape a very simple fact: it is in fact a very particular instance that we think about if the world exists. Insofar as we talk about the concept "world", as it emerged in a particular kind of philosophical discussion, or even the idea of a world, that is meant with it, and appears in a kind of general ephiphany of existence, is concerned, it is certainly part of it, and thus any ontology or cosmology at least theoretically self-including; however, as the world itself, and its reality, is concerned, it is different. And I think here we can get closer to what we could call the necessity of the world.
The world itself - as a kind of gargantuous meta-thing-in-itself - is at the same time a kind of universal and a concrete reality. It is in fact the universal of its own concreteness. Unlike other universals, like beauty itself, justice itself etc, it has this form of concreteness, of us imagining it, and thinking we can point to it, and say: this! But that is not part of the world itself. Even in the objective world, the "this" we point to is _ourselves_ oberserving it, is the pointing to the subjective worlds. The world itself, outside of our conceptions and visions of it, can't in the same way be particular, as it escapes this very basis of particularity, of the _this_ of this experience, of this relation to the world, to what is experienced as _this world_ but thus is more like _this conception of the world_, a thought as particular as any other one.
The return to a simple transcendental picture however is barred too. Our perceptions of the world aren't simply false appearances of what must be truly a kind of infinite process of observations; rather, they are the true reflections of each of our (subjective) worlds. Each of them, as infinite as they might be, are centered arount the subjective possibility of construction; they are not beyond experience, or beyond the subject, but merely the imagination of permanence, or memory. This problem, as we see, lies in the understanding of the world as a concrete thing before and as a measure for all experience, as the only kind of world that would be that, would be the world itself, objective, but outside the subjective worlds, and that world, the "real world" as some people might want to call it, not understanding they too are referring to their own subjective worlds, even when they think they're not, in fact has the least reality, is the most inaccessible; measure it is only in absence. The whole of experience is present not as world, but as memory; that is, it is present precisely as the other side, as thought. The collated presences of all things in a particular this-thought then has the "this" as thinking as its basis; its common basis is a subject, that can be there, and can then even have a concrete thought, a conception of the world, in which it might hypostasize its own act of object identification into a thing, and point at it, and say: here is the world, here is reality! That is the image, or our memory of truth, from the beginning.
Now we shall come to the actual reason we started to think about all this in the first place: the totality of experiences, or thoughts, and in what way that totality is used as a measure against a single experience, now seen without an object, or as a form; in other words, the problem of the formalism of epistemology, and of the general description of the mind as something different to its acts of thinking and percieving, its transformation from activity to pure potential, and to the description of these potentialities as tools for a then imagined inner subject, or for a kind of natural process that still however supposes a kind of will that was just described away by it for the outer subject it is now supposed to serve for as its element of directionality, or as its left over principle of the will, as the will to will, or the value of the decisions for values as such. But we shall begin again in a much simpler form and come back to these questions later.
Experience has clearly a subjective element; that is, that there is a self, that experiences something, and that has a certain side of qualia, of direct experiences, that are not necessarily or clearly located in that what is experienced. Total experience, as the totality of these experiencial contents and forms, has the characteristics of abstracting from the reality of the content of experience, leaving only a general kind of object, without a specificity in its representation: _this_ thing in thought; that is, an object, that is seen as specific, in a thought that can represent it differently, in different kinds of experience, or contents associated to it. The reality of experience, apart from the reality or presence of its object, is the connection between experiences, to be about the same object or topic; it is this connection that describes the _concreteness_ of a notion without its appearance in the world. It's a totality of possibility and of essences, without any reality outside of its presence for itself.
This kind of letting go of all believe into the world, of only being left with experiencial contents, not things (called Epoché or phenomenological reduction by Husserl), leaves us with the strange situation of experiences without objects. Obviously there is in some sense an object-experience, where we take the experiences of an object, without necessarily having to believe this object to exist - similarly to how the subjective world doesn't include subjective qualia, but includes all objects, relations and predicates seen from a subject, but without the subject - but outside of that, if we really commit to the reduction, and don't allow the focussing of experiences around objects, what is their content about? What is this purely subjective or experiential side of experience itself (the flip side of the "objective world" in the case of objects, if you like)?
The important thing here is that it's not simply a form of experience, in as much as the world doesn't include formal objects, only objects that are experienced, but without their experiencing; so here we have experiences without their objects, but as something not even focused around them. In other words: we search for the subjective side of the act of experiencing itself.
I think that we can find two primary elements of this, and their connection, which might again coincide, but which is as of yet at least not obviously true. That is a) the real continua of experience, like colors, smell, or internal continua like irritation or enjoyment, or understanding and confusion; b) the way in which these really are experienced, especially the modus of stress and endurance towards the sensory and intellectual experiences; c) the fittingness or mismatch between these experiences with their processing, i.e. questions of attention, dissociation of experience, or of the ability to categorize and put something into words. We shall look at each of them, and how much they are conncted to or disconnected from the thing-experiences, how much they can form a part of this absolute subjectivity as founded in its own form, or if they can do so at all.
So then we begin with a), or with the question of the qualia or qualitative experiences of reality, and how much they are focused on the specificity of the experience, of the thing, as opposed to a pure act of accepting its contents as such. When thinking about this we have to keep in mind what the _reality_ of experiencing here really means: it means the real experience of the subjective connection to things. This might seem absurd, if we are to expand to a view outside of thing-experiences, but is precisely analogous to the situation of the concept of the world, which is originally the connection of all things as connecting to a subject; the world, that something is in, is a for-someone, and in generalizing that to a for-everyone we gather an objective world sense of the object to exist. Similarly, the subject also sees itself as opposed to objects, its an at-them, and in generalizing to a kind of at-everything it transcends itself towards a generalized subject, to a subject that doesn't only constitute itself in the moment of experience. In other words, the goal here is to answer the question of subjective identity between experiences; in that way, the significance of this question becomes obvious. However, it also becomes obvious that precisely at the immediate level, say of the generalized experience of colors or sound, it touches the most difficult aspect of it. Take sound: can I "hear", without hearing sounds? When I hear sounds, then these aspects or experiences of hearing are part of object-experiences. To really move to absolute subjectivity, I would have to simply percieve, not percieve something. I would have to fulfill, what the activity of meditation only promises spiritually and practically, in the realm of theoretical research. In how lost a position do I not already maneuver myself in with that?
Maybe in not such a lost place as it might at first appear. Importantly, I never said that I can't hear anything, just not any object. This might seem like a trivial difference, but it is not. The kind of meditation that promises focus on experience, also often promises lifting the bonds to thinking and reflecting, something I emphatically do not. So it seems obvious: I shall reflect on my experiences, instead of having them! But caution: is that even possible? And on what shall I reflect on in it, if not precisely on the very object of experience I was trying to avoid reifying again?
What do I hear when I'm only hearing? Sounds, clearly, not acts of hearing. But there is a huge difference when hearing sounds, if I think of them as the cause of hearing or as its content. When I hear say a bell ringing, it is one thing to think of this as me hearing the bell, and quite another as me hearing the sound of the bell. The sound is not itself a thing; it is a quality of a thing, created or constituted precisely through listening, for example, by selection of those frequencies in the air, caused by it, that fall in my range of hearing. The connection to things are in this sense, quite literally, the senses. But the same is true in any way of interaction, as abstract as it might be. Of the thing it is merely a part I can ever percieve, if I am not to become it (and even then, things don't clearly understand themselves). And what parts I percieve is not up to the thing, but to me, and to my connection to capabilities to perception. So then, is the answer really that simple? Is the transcendence towards a general subject just a chart of sense organs?
Not so fast. Because, these charts are still made in relation to things, and by the study of another thing, the body, not the experience itself, i.e. it tries to be objective, not subjective. What we actually need is a general kind of descriptions of senses, a kind of transcendental sensology, but precisely only for _actual experience_, not for some general _possible experience_. But what would such a sensology say? Would it not be itself speechless again, only being able to take its vocabulary from medicine, much like the transcendental sociology of old did borrow from ethnographers to define the "human nature"?
Again, this is only true if we think of the Epoche that happens as a prohibition, not as a gradual process. Compare this with the concept of the world: if we would define the poblem of finding an objective view of the world in terms of creating a view of the world without any subjective experience to begin with, we would rightfully be at quite a loss: why would then anything exist at all? But if we allow these subjective elements, and think of objectivity as a slow transcendence of experience towards the object of experience, then only we can in fact begin to even find it. If our reduction here is similarly trying to find absolute subjectivity as a slow transcendence of experience towardas the subject of experience, then we are not in any way prohibited to start with thing-experiences, much as the objective world starts with concrete experiences of a subject, and then objectifies more and more. We here are then before the task of subjectifying experience in the first place, in which, truthfully understood, the subjective and objective aspiration for reality are equally strong, and, as shown above, amounting to the same claim of the reality of the experience itself as their intersection. We need to move from that to a kind of autonomous subjective form, but not as a premise to actual experience, but as its consequence. Or rather: in exactly the same way, as the objective world is in itself a condition for subjective experience of things, but for us is only constituted by it, the absolute subjectivity of experience is also in itself the condition for thing-experiences to arise, but for us is only understandable through and after them, as a reflection of their horizons and modes not just of possibility, but of actuality. That is therefore the place we must begin to think about qualia or contents of experiences as such.
So we actually can move from thing-experiences to this subjective form itself, at least proximately. If we think of the subjective content of things like the senses, like color, sound or smell, they first represent properties that cause them, but then specifically the experience of having them, of the capacity of sensation, as we said. And this must now be not taken as an objective stament - not as a sense organ chart, in other words - but as a field of subjective experience itself, ever more abstracting from the concrete object of experience; actual experience without an actual object. This means for example that I recognize, that in seeing, I see both colors and things, and that the thing-seeing is itself based on a description of differences between things, both in terms of moveability, but also in recognizing patterns and seeing contrast. So I can then see all these things: color, contrast, moveability, even perspective differences; and can see that as something independently of the objects themselves, independently of these thing-experiences, as participation of this whole vision picture itself. Similarly, I can listen to sounds, and regonize differences in pitch, loudness, contrast / intervalls, sound shape (sinus vs sawtooth), or directionality, without having to attribute it to things and their behaviour. In this way, we can actually get a picture of the continua of experience. They are now continua, because they are not tied to things, but say to color vision in our whole visual field, whether there is a thing there or not, or maybe also an eye irritation or the color of glasses we wear; what we now look at is this continuum itself. And that is, although produced of things, not part of their thing-experiences, but abstracted from them.
What we now still have to think about are the continua of internal experiences. Here the "things" the thing-experiences are about, are themselves often internal events, like situations of being irritated or annoyed or liking something, as an experience with something, as a relation with a actual object, but in an internal subjetive mode of experience. The "continua" then are precisely these experiences themselves, or our subjective actualized capacities to have them. It is important though to not, because these experiences are internal, to think of them as less real, as more potential an some form. This is the main reason we did not start out with subjective internal experience as our main example, since we too easily confuse here actuality with impression of actuality, or present potentiality. The "continua" are elements of actual experience, and thus related to actual objects of experience, but without the actuality of these objects, in order to be part of the absolute subjective constituation of the image or form of reality for itself. They are however not related to some kind of abstract form of reality as it might possibly be; they are not transcendentals or existentials, in other words. My continuum of frustration is bigger or smaller, depending on how frustrated, and how completely empty of frustration, I ever could experience a situation. How far that is, depends as much on the world as it does on me, because it depends on that what is the basis of both the idea of the world and of me, namely on the situations of positions of experience itself, on the intersections of the reality of thing and thought. The experience however of these continua then is not intuitive; it is itself a reflection on my memories of real experience, not possible experience; and must thus include even experiences thought impossible, outside of transcendental limits, but within the reality of internal actual experiences of concrete situations of life.
We can move from here quite fittingly to b), or to the description of the subjective experiences of these contiua themselves, or rather, to their underlying situations of experience. When we want to look at how these experiences are experienced, how stressing or how relaxing sensory or intellectual stimulation and reaction can be, we must take not a theoretical reflection towards these experiences, sorting them and fitting them into a kind of continuum of its kind, but a practical kind of reflection, a direct experience of experience in the most visceral sense. When, for example, I throw up because of a too intense light or smell, then I do in fact not compare this sensory input to what else happend, but to what I can stomach. Thus, I compare it to what I can possibly experience safely. In other words: I compare it to this specific kind of transcental horizon of possible things of experience, that reduces it of these things of experience I actually experience but don't think of as possible outside of their situations of experience. The way of experience is a practical reflection, that describes the imagination of possible, not actualized experience, and its confrontation with actual experience as fitting or not fitting in this situation. However, as practical, it does not reveal this contrast, or this idea of what seems possible, in the situation of its experience; the pain I feel when throwing up because of sensory overload is utterly concrete and unreflective. And thus, there is not much more for me to reflect on in them, besides this mismatch itself, this practical, absolutely non theoretical strife between content and form sought possible for it.
But is that really all of it? We can experience the experiences themselves this way, yes, but we are still tied heavily to these experiences. The situation of this or that sensory memory, overload etc are precisely our "thing-experiences" in this context; so the question is, if we can create a kind of general form of experience of appropriateness or deemed impossibility for experience; if the subjective judgement of a sensore experience, to deem it more or less impossible, can be abstracted to become itself a continuum of experience. In other words: how actualized is this potentiality? Or is it yet already idea, abstracted from the realm of such internal experience to be, far behind of its pure possibility, actualized form, or form of actualities? (And is maybe here the key, in the difference between the actual form and the form of the actual?)
It's clear that all such experiences of relating to other experiences are obviously themselves experiences, and belong as such to the internal continua sketched out by a); but that's not what we want to know here, since looking at them as pure experiences takes out their practical reflexive element from them, makes them into things that just happen, rather than things that happen in relation to other, already categorized experiences or actualities; in other words, it takes away their semantic meaning and intentional reference and makes them at most into indecypherable symbols of mystical reference to other experiences, into abstract internal visions (a kind of immediate mode of reflection, void of its reflectedness). And in some sense, that _is_ how they appear, when thought of as pure mood, pure stress etc, but as such they are, again experienced, empty of their content of experience, to be form or relation. How can we then experience them as relation, and specifically, as relation towards experience itself?
I think the easiest way to think about how they don't fit in the schema of continua, when experiencing too their content, is the relation towards those continua themselves. When I say find a certain level of light painful, then this experience is relating equally to the internal experience of pain and to the light experienced thus; it is, as a single experience, the relation of two whole continua; or rather, the expression of one example of a consequence of such a relation. In a sense, the tying to thing-experiences happens, because this relational experience is the experience of the object-relation tying the various continua, experienced on a single object, togehter. Their abstraction therefore must not be a continuum, but a relatedness or connection of continua themselves as fitting or non-fitting, and specifically also of the continua of actual and possible experiences of reality.
The general, or abstracted way of experiencing these experiences, is the experience of the relatedness of continua of experience, is the actuality of the form of the actual as continuum. It is the connectedness of senses that we could call the sense of reality; the sense for not just an abstract thing-in-itself of a single experience, but of the continuum of continua even without that; of the theoretical power of synesthesia. This connectedness of things then is not a thing in itself, but outside and out-to itself; its the opposite of the into itself of thing-experience, by forming a meta-thing of experience, that is this connection, or relation of the various types of real and imagined experience itself; that thing, that then we just call our "experience" of life.
In some sense we can now move quite fittingly to c), because that is, in some sense, the experience of precisely this "experience" as the meta-thing connecting various continua of experiencial elements. How do we experience this connection itself, as (in)coherence, or (dis/dys)-connection? What does it mean that they match that what they experience? And are things like attention, dissociation and categorization/expression abilities really related to a thing as abstract as the experience of the experience of connection of continua of other experiences?
Think about what it means to pay attention to something. There is no special sensation connected to it. Rather, it relates to a kind of focus placed on the connection we have to this things reality. We see it as real, we actually experience it. I think, that this is precisely the experience of the relatedness of its various aspects. We pay attention to it, if we don't move from this things color, shape, sound, smell, to memories of other such sensations, if we don't focus on one or the other aspect, but on their connection. And so, while we may not focus on this whole life experience as an idea, we practically refer this experience in experiencing ourselves as more or less attending to a thing. In other words: much like how the way of experience was practically relating to continua, not theoretically, and only has these abstract continua in its own abstractions, so too the concrete experience of attention has specific experiences of specific continua and their (dis)connection in it, and only in the abstract idea of attention itself it connects to the general idea of experience of continua of experiences itself.
Dissociation similarly connects, in each situation, to the different elements of experience, but in the subjective, inner side. Inner experience splits up between say time experience and experience of self; and we get other kinds of descriptions of dissociation in the same way, as descriptions of discontinuities of inner experience, as a kind of non-fittingness of specific experiences to this idea of a general connection point of the continua of experience as such. This however is a much more difficult topic, and I shall leave it to a further discussion as to how closely related dissociation is, in its various forms, to the experience of the disconnection of the idea of connection of continua from a specific situation, that seems internally unrelated, since that is a more specific situation, that may only relate to a subset of what we today call dissocation (although a particularly important one and precisely that, what we wanted to think about here).
When it comes to the question of expressibility of experience finally, it seems less obvious that there is this relation, and here we must look at the question of what language is in general. I don't want to go into this in detail as well for the moment, but the most important element for this discussion, is that I think that linguistic symbols, and words in particular, are _immediately mediated_, i.e. have their function, to not mean themselves, as a part of their immediate perception (i.e. they are immediately not percieved to be what they are; the name does appear as the named idea/thing, not as the sound). Connection of experience is a mediation, but not an immediate one; it is a mediation through thing-ness. This can be expressed in sentences which try to mediate, to create judgements instead of bare predicates. The failure of the sentence to transcendend the singular predicate, to be more than name or empty symbol, is in this one with the impossibility to express experience itself into sound; to not be able to voice it in a kind of speech that eventually tries to substantialize it, and that makes out of the need of the expression of difference in relation the undifferentiated expression of substantivisation. The substantive of action, the gerund, is the most succinct expression of this; in the -ing loses the experiencing its "to" of "to experience"; it pretends to be more than a representation, to be presentative, but necessarily falls back into a representative register. This specific inability, and the dynamics expressed in it, are a specific experience of "experience" as a whole, conflicting with the specific experience of language and its ambition to express reality as such, and not merely represent it in an empty, meaningless symbol.
All of this is however still bound to that specific thing as a control device: this thing I attend to, this experience I dissociate over, this sentence I embue with meaning. Is there something in it beyond this thing-experience form of the experience of all of reality? I think there is. But this transcendence towards the subject of experience in this case produces something quite peculiar: the relation of the whole of experience to a singular experience as such; or, the relation of universal and particular.
Universal and particular are experienced in some sense differently, as an actual experience on the one hand and as the universality of all experience on the other; maybe also as a particular transcendental horizon of what is deemed possible. But in any way, the specific connection here is in this confrontation, to see in one thing all of reality, or the connections of all of the elements of reality. But what is that connection? What is that ultimate point of subjective experience?
Well, it has to be a point which is not just a theoretical connection point of all real continua of experience, but an actual confrontation with this connection as a reality. And that confrontation _is_ the thing of experience itself!
That is, the ultimate reality of the connectedness, or fittingness, of the contents of experience to the general form of the continua of acutal experience and their (dis)connection, _is_ the actual object of experience, out of which the experience itself was abstracted from. In much the same way, as the ultimate object, or content, of the objective world, is the subjective element in the derivation of mathematical physics, the ultimate content of absolute subjectivity is the object that sustains it. The dialectics of thing and thought closes its curtain.
What are we then to make of this strange duality? A few thoughts to close this discussion. First of all, we need to ask why this construction of absolute subjectivity falls back into the object; and secondly, we need to try to understand what this means for the search of true and actual experience as such.
First of all, the problem of this analysis is not at all its intermediate stages. They are in some sense necessary, both methodologically, and for the sake of reflection. However, we need to ask ourselves where they fail to sustain themselves. This can be seen at various stages, which would require a secondary analysis I am myself unsure how to exactly conduct; however, the ultimate failure of this structure is clearly, both in its objective and subjective side, the disconnect to the real situation of its general perception. Every objective world has its subjective basis, its mood and goals, and every subjective understanding a personal basis. Theoretical desire as well as biography bind the sides to real situations; the reality of actual experience acts like a bounding box for both of their reality, a subjective limit of objectivity and an objective limit of subjectivity, in as much as their reality is one, and their opposition is in the way of reaching their reality, by moving away from the other, only at the end being able to recognize this abstract idea of the other (as opposite say from the real alter or foreign body) as the essence of the self not knowing itself. The self however is not that abstract idea, of connection to itself, and disconnect even to its own (self/foreign) experience, but the reality of the confrontation with that experience, that is, with the other thing and actual experience. This was in some way clear from the beginning; if the self is experiencing self, then it is experiencing _something_; in losing its something it already is losing itself. This shows that this "problem", that the present analysis is describing, is not a problem of the analysis as a mistake of description; rather, it is the mistake in the act of _description as such_, and thus, as much as it is also immanent to this specific act of exerting itself methodically, not a mistake of itself, but, as a mistake, its honest reflection and self-expression as contradiction.
What can we do practically in this situation? Is this a hopeless place for knowledge? Not at all, I think. Practical knowledge does exist in its concrete form, and abstract understanding of both the world and the subject remain important, even if their ultimate essence are in their abstract identification. However, this gives us a kind of abstract mode of transportation or transposition; the oppositionality of subject and world creates the necessity of a mirroring of objective knowledge back into absolute subjectivity. It creates a new knowledge of the self as a kind of inverted epistemology, similar to the mirroring say of algebra into topology. As much as algebraic topology did not make geometry and number theory in themselves irrelevant, this expedition also does not touch the importance of the general concepts of the subject and the world; but it gives us a mode of expressing them through each other, by connecting them, in the actual experience of an actual object of experience, generalized in the abstractness of pure subjectivity and an objective world, to their very basis they were trying to explain, as the dialectics of its essence, of the combined split of objectivity and subjectivity in experience itself. And maybe, we can hope, this can inspire experience itself to percieve itself more in this split form; to be the split of its own reality.
The practical consequence however transcends the practical goal of theory. If we are for example trying to explain subjective states per se, we need to explain a pure subjective side; this necessarily fails. If however we move to the objects of that experience, we can explain them, not only as the origin of the experience, but as the content of the experience as such, even if formerly reduced. The inspiration of this practical effect, that the Epoche is not forever, that its rest is broken in the truth of its sleep, can help self-perception to move past description of experience; to see in this description itself an object of its experience. In other words, to see in our helpless attempts to describe how we really experience the world, the very confrontation with the world, and of that, in its general form, the world itself, now united, in its generality, as objective and as absolute subjectivity. This practical experience then could give the impetus to say, that what we "feel", or know to experience, like pain or joy, is not a measure on the qualities of experience, is not a how-I-am of stress and of experienes outside of things; its quantity or strength of experience, its real stress, is not merely one of my experience; it is itself the experience of a situation, or of a world. It's not a measure on what is real; it is the reality, to which both the self and the world merely are mesures of the expression of their interconnected form and content of the intensity of being, or of the presence of reality as such; of seeing, that that _all_, or the idea of _everything_, has its truth not in a bare possibility of substances, but in the actuality, and before that, in the _act_ of being real.
(And let's be real, this was way too long up to this point, so we will finish it here - Diotima)