The arrival at an original or authentic condition is considered a virtue that calls for the taking up of structuring antagonisms and the production of meaningful expression that is simultaneously independent of any such structure yet informed by it somehow, all of which ought to be incidental in manner.

From Kant, that which limits is a binding judgement, not on our receptivity to the appearance of things which is a constant, but to how we judge these things in the light of our subjective condition in order to know them.

This distinction between sensibility and sense, inherited in common like that of a man-made instinct, doesn’t for all that go far enough in that 1) as axiomatic it is at the root of irrational fears and hysteria that get ahead of any really existing circumstance, 2) as proof of claims to a firstness of condition, it is at the root of a misplaced and outmoded sense of entitlement, 3) the trouble with which (its limitation) is that its acquisition doesn’t communicate the ability to function in the midst of adversity, which lack of protective aegis or ignorance gives 1), and 4) it leaves unaddressed the set of assumptions governing the notion that subjectivity is wholly a matter of individual discretion. The problem with this last notion is not that it presupposes individual essence, which question is here beside the point. Nor is the problem that it calls for the presence of a certain perspective which bears on the space in a qualitative way that is essential to the communication of sensibility. Rather it has to do with restrictions placed upon representations of the space itself that rely on certain structuring antagonisms and not the subjective condition per se.

From Kant, the ability to know a thing in advance of seeing it exists in the human mind. This ability has its seat in the subject only as the formal capacity of the subject’s being affected by objects. Implications stemming from the above widely accepted logical premise:

I am formally capable of being moved by the spectre of human suffering on a mass scale without it having to come to pass. But this formal capacity is more suggestive of an insensibility on my part rather than refinement of faculty in that, of all possible representations, only one moves me. Therefore, where a formal capacity to be affected by an object in just such a way is congenital, then you might be lacking, congenitally, in other faculties necessary to imagine otherwise.

There are also the earlier and stunted forms of development contained within an already developed class said to be contradictions whose existence adds nothing, per Marx in The Grundrisse. They cannot generate difference or express the difference, which difference belongs to its being in a place other than one’s own. In this vein, and on those occasions that it’s adventitious to say so, a contradiction continues to be held as an unproductive redundancy. The ‘arrival of the contradiction’ signals decay and destructiveness as the antithesis of productiveness. Elsewhere, it merely slows rates of production. Overall, however, where they are included in an original conception, then nothing more could be gained by knowing them as far as cogitative activity.

Human suffering on a mass scale is this redundancy whose appearance signals a degeneration of the mind in its formal capacity to know absent the playing out of the spectacle. It belongs with a system of outmoded concepts that, transcended in one sense, is fed back into a really existing system premised in inequalities, such that structuring contradictions in society are resolvable at their appointed hour.

Yet by the time such a contradiction does appear ‘objectively’, i.e. displays that side that is of interest, i.e. it’s vulnerability to your essentialist desire for signification, it hardly makes a difference that the object is merely dressed in the envelope (what attaches) of an obsolete set of conventions (subjective condition of sensibility) in which all were more or less immersed depending on the degree of remove.

In this way can an original cause be preserved as conception for designation and understanding but still can’t serve as explanation, since you never catch up with an original cause to inhabit it as you did the first time, this line of reason positing a civilizational check. But this would be a bastard originality as opposed to legitimate in the sense that W. C. Williams distinguished the term with respect to literary form.

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