phenomenality

The key issue here is one that permeates the entire metaphysics of materialism: all we ever truly have are the contents of consciousness, which philosophers call “phenomenality.”

That this phenomenality somehow arises from something material, outside consciousness—such as networks of firing neurons—is a theoretical inference, not a lived reality; it’s a narrative we create and buy into on the basis of conceptual reasoning, not something felt.

Indeed I am not even existence any longer, since by knocking thing out of being I have forfeited my own reality, and consent henceforth to be pure personality, i.e. phenomenality.

At the same time the conclusion is also given up, that the Ego submits unconditionally and directly to phenomenality and to causal necessity, while the same Ego, once more, in the same way, as a whole, from another point of view, is subordinate to freedom and autonomy, that is, self-constitutive through ideas.

It is an intolerable, violent contradiction, and it is no solution of this contradiction to refer the empirical Ego to appearance, and the intelligible Ego to actuality existing in itself, if the operations of the intelligible Ego, also a constituent part of what takes place in the soul, occur in time and so relapse irrecoverably into phenomenality and its mechanism.