Transjectivity: Beyond the Objective and Subjective
Transcending the purely Subjective and Objective.
Ever heard phrases like “Its subjective”, or “This is objectively bad”? Whenever I heard these terms, I tended to internally cringe. But why? Proclamations about how “Art is subjective”, or “Morality is subjective”, aren’t necessarily incorrect are they?
Morality, Knowledge, Aesthetics, Metaphysics and Phenomenology. We see in philosophy how these components are seen increasingly as subjective. I want to demonstrate how this insistence of subjectivity, and even of pure objectivity, is a heinous mis-framing, which needs to be corrected.
The framing of understanding things in exclusively Subjective, and Objective categories as a dichotomy, causes many problems in understanding how we really construct meaning. To truly understand how to resolve this, we must understand the problem first, and the philosophical traditions that underpin their manifestation. We must look at the views pertaining to Universals, and Particulars, specifically at Nominalism, and Realism.
Nominalism
Nominalism is a philosophical tradition that holds that Universals and Abstract Objects do not exist other than being labels or names. For the Nominalist, an objects essence does not exist. There is no essence to a chair other than the name or label that we attribute to it. Particular chairs may exist, but the overarching category of “Chair” does not exist independent of the mind or social construction.
This leads into most Postmodernist philosophy, where we see the viewpoint of categories being socially constructed.1 This does away with the notion of objectively instantiated categories. We might argue that this is the current, dominant worldview in western philosophy and social hegemony.
Realism
Realism is directly opposed to Nominalism; in that it posits that universals are objectively embodied in the world around us. Said differently, this view holds that essences exist in the world; to the realist, the category or essence of “Chair” exists independent of the mind. This may be justified by many theoretical frameworks, many of them theological, axioms commanded from the bible which provides the universal instantiation of essences a priori. This view is also used to justify objective moral norms, objective truth and so on.
One can argue that since the “enlightenment”, post-Darwin, we see the crumbling of religious dogmas that perpetuated this type of divinely commanded, deontological, realist category justification. The death of God significantly weakened the philosophical justification for realism.
Pragmatic Truth and Transjectivity
Both of these philosophical traditions have important things to say, however, due to how they are constructed in our collective consciousness, manifest themselves as dichotomous positions. As I have said, this is a mis-framing, and we must break out of this frame to understand the golden mean, middle path, or synthesis of these forces.
Transjectivity
Truth is neither purely an Object, existing independent of the mind; nor is it purely Subjective to infinitely expanding malleability and deconstruction. PF Jung says that truth is a Trans-jective Tool.
“Truth is a Transjective Tool, and the Purpose, or Usefulness, or Meaning of that tool, exists in-between the objective world of facts and objects, and the subjective world of motivation and experience” -PF Jung
Grasp-ability and Relevance Realization
How John Vervaeke explains it is a bit different. In his work in cognitive science and 4E Cognition, John likes to explain Transjectivity through the lens of relevance realization in cognition and perception.
When I see a chair, why do I see a chair, and not a collection of parts that form a chair? Why do I not see the air around me? When I see the cup in front of me, why do I see the cup as separate to the table it is sitting on?
Because we perceive things and categorize things based on their relevance to us. A chair and a cup are relevant to us because we can pick them up, grasp them with our hands, manipulate them and use them to some pragmatic ends. Air, on the other hand, is not relevant to our attention, since we breathe unconsciously, and it is ubiquitous, (we do not need to go looking for air).
“Meaning is like the Grasp-ability… of that cup. Is that in me? No. Is it in the cup? No…There is a real relation, fittedness between me and this cup. Same thing for the adaptivity of an organism. Is the adaptivity of a Great-White-Shark in the shark? Drop it in the Saharah, it dies. Meaning isn’t “in” me… and it isn’t “in” the universe, it is a proper relationship (I’ve coined the phrase transjective), between the subjective and the objective.” -John Vervaeke
This ties into my article on Pragmatic epistemology. That truth is a tool, which is used by organisms to increase the proper relationship between them, and the world around them. This proper relationship is their “Fit-ness” or Fitted-ness (notice the etymology here).
The Emergence of Categories through Agent-Arena Interactions
We can see now that truth and meaning arises from this relationship of object and subject, and the quality of this relation determines the quality of the fit between them. What does this mean? The best quality of fit, is going to be produced by the things that are going to be useful, meaningful and purposeful to the subject. We make certain categories, perceive objects, enforce certain morals, and see a certain beauty in things because of this.
Invariance as Reality
But there is going to be a variation in this truth-making. In any population, if you ask them whether they think that the Mona-Lisa is beautiful, you might see that most people would say “Yes”. But you might also see some minority say “No”. Going out from the binary, you might see that most people would say the Mona-Lisa is beautiful, with a minority saying it is “Ugly”, and another minority saying it is “Divinely Beautiful”. This is Bell-curve, or Normal Distribution, or Gaussian distribution pattern. 2
How do we usually detect reality? What we do is we look at the invariance in the landscape of information. We sort invariance from noise. This gives us a proxy for something that exists in the reality. If I touch a cup, see a cup, smell a cup, and I move around and the cup keeps its form, then that’s robust enough evidence that the cup exists, it isn’t illusory. That robustness indicates invariance, which is the best we can do to detect real patterns that exist objective of the mind.
Datasets that have invariance are more likely to have ontological structures that cause that invariability. This is because structures are static, and don’t move. Structures are reliable, and so, we can “grasp” them more that we can grasp noise.3
The Agent and the Arena
As such, invariance represents a proxy for objective features. As a consequence, variance represents the subjective features, the things that are dependent on the subject itself. What does this mean? When we look at a bell-curve, those things in the mean that are invariant, say more about the objective structures that embody themselves in the subjects than the subjects themselves. When we look at the variation in the curve at the tails, that says more about the particular subjects than it says about the structure, since the structure embodies itself less at the tails, and more at the mean.
Yet, that invariance is only possible through the interaction between the subject and the object. (In this sense I am using subject in a third-person sense, not related to our own phenomenology but to those particular datapoints). The subjective elements (agents), and objective elements (the arena), co-identify. The world (arena) provides a context, and the subject (agent) navigates this context. Disrupt the environment and you confuse your existential identity.
And since the environment is never purely static, the agents much each change in order to go along with that proper, fitted, co-identified relation. Since truth is contingent on this relationship, truth is thus transient. Our experience of the world changes as our interactions with the world change. The meaning of things can shift as our goals, needs, or arenas change.4
Conclusions
In conclusion, the dichotomy between objective and subjective realities presents a fundamentally flawed framework that limits our understanding of truth and meaning. Rather than viewing the world through a binary lens of fixed external facts (objective) or internal perceptions (subjective), we should consider the relationship between agents and their arenas. Truth, meaning, and categories emerge not from one or the other but from the interaction between the two. The concept of transjectivity, as explored by thinkers like John Vervaeke, helps bridge this divide, demonstrating that truth is a relational property—a dynamic tool that arises from how well we, as agents, fit with the world around us. Through this lens, we recognize that meaning is neither purely in the object nor in the subject, but in the quality of fit between them, evolving as we adapt to and transform our environment.
What about non-linguistic categories?
Does everything in nature have this pattern? Or perhaps, that the very things that we selectively analyze, are analyzed because they are categories- and these things are already categories, because they have this pattern? If you analyze anything, the category you construct will influence your selection of things to include in that analysis. If I am analyzing the height of human males, I wont include the height of a Tiger in my dataset. So, we only include the things that we discern are inside our constructed category. But, at the same time, we the very REASON why we construct categories in the first place is because they are a set of objects that have a set of commonalities. A thing which has a category, will be useless if it doesn’t have things which are relatively close in character to itself. So, its no wonder that when we analyze a category, that we see the Gaussian distribution emerge. You can argue, in a sense, that we are measuring our own category construction. But what determines which categories we construct? How do we determine whether a thing has a “commonality” in the first place? What does that even MEAN? Commonality. One answer is that the things that we find as “commonalities” are those things that we find have properties that are relevant to us. What we see as “Commonality” is also a transjective phenomenon. From a detached perspective, an objective lens would not attribute commonalities to objects, that is an agential process. Therefore, “commonality” and “similarity” are characteristics or properties of phenomenology that we find relevant, and so they would form a normal distribution regardless of the object being analyzed. The observer creates a selection bias.
The problem with this type of perception and knowing, is that it isn’t able to detect ontological features that are transient and dynamic. Things which move, could be real, but we could be completely unaware of their existence simply because we cannot harness them, nor grasp them.
This is assuming that there are no purely invariant structures that we can detect. Perhaps there are.