On the subject part II: what does the subject do?

Abstract

This article analyses the “subject” as a cybernetic process driven by animation’s urge towards a “transcendental ideal:” an absolute of “survival,” “consciousness” and “freedom” that completes and transcends our spatiotemporally limited, causally compatible experience of “vitality,” “awareness” and “agency.” The dual nature of subjective awareness made of awareness of a subject (“self”) and awareness of an object (“outer world”) results in an “antinomy” (contradiction or paradox) in the mind’s construction of reality: both subject and object must and cannot be substantial. Practically, this antagonism of a bilateral claim to absoluteness leads to a struggle between the subject’s law to emerge and the object’s law to fall apart. Instinctively and analytically, all subjectivity is inherently “urged” to overcome this “antinomy.” Through the work that the subject thus performs on the object, local organisms interlink and higher levels of subjectivity, i.e., awareness and agency, can emerge from organization and connectivity. However, the idea that the subject is thus striving towards appears from the split of subjective being from the objective world in animation and emergence. As an “antinomy of practical reason” causing a “transcendental ideal,” it resides in the phenomenal structure of subjective perception alone. In analogy to Kant’s “antinomy of pure reason,” it is a mirage of the mind that perceives and the “urge” it causes in subjective being is an “inevitable illusion” of animation.