Me Ness

A memory lies utterly quiescent, merely a distant cameo of history until moistened by some sudden motion of the soul, stirred by a similarity or a poignant nostalgia. The residual powders of objectified emotions remain available as everyday potentials, but all the subjectivity, the me-ness has been cooked out of

Hillman argues that the alchemical operation of calcination removes the subjective, personal coloring — the me-ness — from emotion and memory, leaving an objective residue that retains potential for reactivation without the distorting weight of ego-identification.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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He uses the phrase to mean the implicit and nonreflective ‘forme-ness’ of conscious experience. For both Kriegel and me, the phenomenal character of experience is the compresence (to use his formulation) of qualitative character and subjective character (for-me-ness).

Thompson, following Kriegel, treats ‘for-me-ness’ as the irreducible subjective pole of phenomenal consciousness, constituting the implicit self-awareness present in every conscious mental state.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis

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I am thinking in terms of the It-ness and I-ness of contents. Ansichseiend thinking would then be a thinking in the status of ‘It,’ it would still have an It-character, that is to say it happens of its own accord and on a level beneath conscious intention, almost malgré the thinker (‘it thinks in me’).

Giegerich reframes Freud’s id/ego topology as a logical distinction between It-ness and I-ness, arguing that psychological integration corresponds to content acquiring the first-person, intentional character of explicit, owned thought.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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had they somehow seen or possessed such a book as mine — or were they, in some unimaginable way, themselves ‘seeing’ primes, in somewhat the same way as they had ‘seen’ 111ness, or triple 37-ness?

Sacks employs the suffix ‘-ness’ to denote an idiosyncratic perceptual quality apprehended by the twins, touching tangentially on how numerical essences are experienced as irreducible subjective givens.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985aside

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