Douglas Lain just posted something interesting on Twitter, something related to my book on causality. I was somewhat fooling around, describing the Obama years as like a bad trip. Like when you realize you are in a nightmare, very fresh and vivid. Man the last few weeks of “debt ceiling negotiations” have certainly been very much like that. In Buddhist terms, samsara to the power of two. Makes you see where you are...
Versus the Bush years, which seemed like heavy Valium, a woozy fuzzed out near-death dream of wrong. I remember the impact that Oliver Stone's movie made a few weeks before the election (good timing, sort of like a lucid dream). It was like, “You are in a nightmare.”
So Doug tweeted back that you just can't argue against subjective states. Now this got me thinking. I wasn't exactly making an argument, if by argument we mean deliberation or forensic analysis (in the old rhetorical sense). This was more demonstrative rhetoric—where art lives, the rhetoric of praise and blame, props and dissing.
Since however for me, where the art lives is the causal dimension, the difference between “subjective” and “causal” is nonexistent.
In a Kantian universe, definitely, we would not be able to distinguish subjective states as superior or inferior or whatever. We can only do that about empirical data and selves are not empirical data but transcendental facts. In this universe, aesthetic experience is real and tangible yet unspeakable.
Now in an OOO universe, this Kantian aesthetic is a little island in a larger ocean. The ocean is the causal ocean. For sure you can compare and contrast different kinds of aesthetic “experience.” Indeed, this accounts for how psychoactive drugs work in the first place. They disprove by their very existence the rigid line between subjective and objective facts. They act causally on your brain, that is, aesthetically, producing all kinds of phantasm. The way they act can be very accurately described and differentiated.
What we call subjectivity is just a causal event that “happens to us,” that we snatch out of the aesthetic continuum of causality and call meaningful, human, whatever.
So sure, you can compare and argue about subjective states. I'd rather be tripping and awake with Obama than hypnotized with W.