Somewhere This Side of the View from Nowhere: On the Phenomenological Prepredicative Grounding of the Idea of Objectivity

Although objectivity is mainly accounted for in terms of linguistic thought and communication, in this article I will aim to show that at least one condition of possibility for our understanding of objectivity is grounded on a prepredicative, i.e. pre-linguistic and pre-communicative, level. I will endorse a Husserlian viewpoint on the issue， and I will try to develop some aspects of the Husserlian account of three-dimensional thing-perception by means of which I will show how prepredicative experience can actually offer us a fundamental element of our common understanding of objectivity． In doing this, it will be necessary to acknowledge thing-perception as being primarily intertwined with indeterminacy. I will claim that only on the basis of such an intuitive and prepredicative access to the things as partially indeterminate, first, and as determinable, second, is it possible to have an understanding of the world as something (at least partially) independent from the intuition( s) all subjects can have of it. By means of the addition of a consciousness of the thing as accessible to other subjects，o ne achieves a vision of the thing as fully determinate in itself. This“vision”, however, takes one to be aware of the determination of the thing as lying beyond any intuitive grasp of it. The result will, thus, be that the prepredicative constitution of our basic sense of objectivity leads us to intend the world as something which should be accounted for (also) by means of sources different from intuition.