Neither objective facts nor subjective associations capture an object as it is experienced

Evidence

What, then, is a cup of coffee? I might define it in terms of its chemistry and the botany of the coffee plant, and add a summary of how its beans are grown and exported, how they are ground, how hot water is pressed through the powder and then poured into a shaped receptacle to be presented to a member of the human species who orally ingests it. I could analyse the effect of caffeine on the body, or discuss the international coffee trade. I could fill an encyclopaedia with these facts, and I would still get no closer to saying what this particular cup of coffee in front of me is. On the other hand, if I went the other way and conjured up a set of purely personal, sentimental associations — as Marcel Proust does when he dunks his madeleine in his tea and goes on to write seven volumes about it — that would not allow me to understand this cup of coffee as an immediately given phenomenon either. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 139

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what the phenomenon is NOT: neither scientific facts nor Proustian memory associations.
• XREF: Parallels the madeleine passage in Proust and resonates with Zen/meditative ‘first thought’ emphasis on direct present experience found in Deep Listening. — connects to: No experience is ever purely subjective, being always object-directed.; Facticity neither determines who we are nor resists us independently of consciousness — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 343; The concept’s determinate form distinguishes subjective in-itself from submerged objectivity (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Facticity neither determines who we are nor resists us independently of consciousness #expands (0.85) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 343
• The concept’s determinate form distinguishes subjective in-itself from submerged objectivity #expands (0.75)