A World of Existence Outside of Expierence

Blackadder is flummoxed: "I confess I find Oakeshott's statement mystifying. What is self-contradictory about the idea of there being a world of existence outside experience?"

This is a tricky question to answer. To an extent, I view it as similar to one of those trick pictures, where you can see either a lady or a rabbit. If someone just doesn't see the rabbit, there is no "argument" you can make that will convince them it is there. (And once they see it, they need no argument.) But perhaps you can give them hints that can lead them to the viewpoint where they do see it for themselves. In any case, no harm in trying.

So let us begin by assuming that there is an objective world standing totally apart from experience. If we can imagine that there is such a world with many objects in it, it is surely even easier to imagine such a world with only one object in it. So let us do that: we posit a world containing only one, solid sphere of "stuff" (whatever stuff it is you want to posit inhabits this world standing apart from experience).

Now, let us consider what it means for something to "exist." I will happily claim that the chair I am sitting on as I write this post exists, and that my claim is "objectively" true. Why do I claim this? Well, I can see the chair. I can feel it. I can smell it. I can sit on it. And I can invite you into my room here, and I am confident that you, too, will see this chair, that you, too, can feel it, that you, too, can sit on it. I gladly proclaim that this chair exists, and "objectively" exists, because we can see its color, feel its texture, be happy when it supports our weight when we are tired and choose to sit down, and so on. The "external" world is real, it exists, and it is the very world you and I experience every day. In short, it is a world of experience.

But what of this posited sphere in an "objective" world standing entirely apart from experience? In what sense does it "exist"? Does it have a color? Well, no, it does not, because colors only exist in the interaction between subjects and objects. Does it have a feel? No, again, and for the same reason. Does it make any sounds? Of course not. Can someone, perhaps, grab it, and throw it at someone else? Well, no, because we have posited that it exists in a world totally divorced from experience.

And thus, if we can grasp the significance of these considerations, we see that the idea of "objects" entirely divorced from experience is a mere abstraction, and while abstractions certainly exist in a sense, their existence is completely parasitic on the world of concrete experience from which they are abstracted. In the world in which we actually live, we never find a bare subject, entirely without objects of which it is aware. Nor do we ever find objects which are not objects for some subject.

Let us be good empiricists here: We come to consciousness to find ourselves in a world of objects of which we are conscious. It is not ridiculous to analyze certain aspects of our experience as "subjective," and other aspects as "objective": we can make distinctions based upon the degree to which our experiences are more or less accessible to others. Such abstractions can be useful. But as abstractions, they are always derivative of the concrete totality of experience from which they are abstracted. A map of Connecticut can help us drive around that state. But to claim that a map of Connecticut can exist independently of there being a real Connecticut from which it is abstracted is absurd: one may have a piece of paper upon which a bunch of lines are drawn, but those lines are not a "map of Connecticut" unless they are abstracted from a real, concretely existing place called Connecticut. Similarly, distinguishing the "objective world" and the "subjective world" can at times be useful, but to posit that either can exist entirely independent of the other is lift an abstraction above that from which it is abstracted.