ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to explore the concept of the internal object as primordial intentional object for the primitive ego-subject, using the Hegelian category of the substance universal. It suggests that in the movement of 'finite' mind from the grasp of less to more adequate characterisations of the universal, the internal object be placed at the start of the progression. The chapter shows that the phenomenological tradition, despite its differences with Hegel, preserves a similar concern with unity, and a holistic conception of experience. There are varieties of holism; Donald Davidson's semantic and mental holisms, for example; but as Stem says, the holist-pluralist conflict has often been fought out on the terrain of a debate about objects and their ontology. The privileging of logic or any other discourse abstracted from the concrete whole of experience is the antithesis of holistic thinking.
