I’ve decided it might be worthwhile to share some of my thoughts earlier in their larval stages, if only to demonstrate that none of my essays arrive fully formed from the head of Zeus. Far from it. Most of my ideas ricochet around my skull for weeks, months, years – occasionally decades – before deciding to cooperate. Even the ones that appear spontaneous usually have a long archaeological tail if I bother to dig.
I also hold, rather unfashionably but quite firmly, that all knowledge is a derivative remix. No one escapes this, least of all me. My own work is stitched from whatever intellectual scrap I‘ve encountered along the way. This is why I’ve never been persuaded by the sanctity of ‘originality’ or the mythology of intellectual property. Ideas don’t respect fences. They migrate, hybridise, and reappear wearing different hats. Claiming exclusive rights over them feels more like territorial anxiety – Territorial Pissing – than epistemic necessity — though that, admittedly, is a polemic for another day.
The point is simply this: I’m documenting this particular idea not because it arrived perfect, but because I can see the threads that led to it. And because the genealogy is often more revealing than the polished conclusion.
What follows is one of those threads.
A recent exchange with Thomas on Mastodon forced me to articulate a phrase that arrived mostly as an intuition but seems to have legs: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity. Put briefly, subjectivity (S) is always perspectival, always bound to a particular point of view, but never free from the pressures of its relative environment (R). No subject springs forth pristine; it is continually formed and re-formed by the linguistic, social, institutional, and affective structures in which it is embedded.
As a minimal sketch:
R → S
∴ S₀ → S₁
as the subject metabolises the influence of R and becomes something other than its prior configuration.
This is neither the usual bogeyman of ‘relativism’ nor the heroic Cartesian subject polishing its autonomy in splendid isolation. It is a subject that is contingent without being dissolved, formed without being mechanistic, and embedded without being determined. In a way, this is an echo of the causa sui argument, that no S can be self-caused.
If one wanted an analogue, the Mediated Encounter Ontology (MEOW) provides it. In the same way that encounter-events are mediated through biological, cognitive, linguistic, and institutional tiers, subjectivity itself can be seen as a kind of slow-form encounter – one whose centre drifts as the mediating structures press upon it. The subject is not the neutral observer of these tiers; it is the ongoing outcome of their interaction. In this sense, the ‘relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity‘ is simply what a MEOW-adjacent ontology would predict once applied to the subject rather than the event.
Whether this deserves a full essay depends on whether I can demonstrate that the idea is genuinely new rather than a recycled fragment of Berger–Luckmann, Rosen, or post-Kantian anthropology. But at first glance, the conceptual terrain appears fertile – at least fertile enough to justify a longer wander.
Philosophics 