• Angelo Cannata
    353
    From a critical point of view, both concepts of being and not being objects aren't free at all from uncertainty. Strictly speaking, we don't even know the ultimate meaning of being an object. I am going to deal with my question from an existential point of view. In an existential context it is clear that frequently we feel ourselves as acting just like machines: I eat because the machine of my body needs food, I even think because the neurons of my brain make me think. But I don't like to perceive myself like a machine, even if it can be enjoyable. Philosophers have thought a lot about ways that should help us to better fulfill the best of our being humans. We can think, for example, of Heidegger's concept of authenticity. But thinking that I am a being towards death doesn't make me so interested in not being an object: is it really better than just enjoying life passively? Something that I find more interesting is my self perception of being me. Given the criticism I mentioned before, I am not going to consider this as a truth, a reality, but just as a perception, a feeling, which as such can even be completely illusory. However, there is a reasoning that seems able to make our self perception tenable, although not ultimately completely free from criticism, as I said before. Let's consider this reasoning now.

    When we describe things, it is impossible to talk about things or aspects that are absolutely and completely unique. Even the expression "absolutely unique" is made with words, concepts, that aren't at all absolutely unique. This means that, whenever we talk about individual persons or things, we always talk about things that are shared among them. If you want to talk about me, you can only talk about things and concepts that in me are shared with other people or things. As a consequence, it is ultimately impossible to talk specifically about me as the unique and specific person which I am. It is impossible even to myself: I can't talk to myself about specifically myself. However, here is a paradox, a bizarre and puzzling experience: despite this radical inability to talk to myself about the specific myself, I feel like I can feel it. Here is the puzzle: I am used to the idea that I can describe a lot of things that I can feel, and other people are able to give me feedbacks that make me think that we are talking about the same thing. But, if the topic is my feeling myself (not the feeling themselves of everyone, but the feeling specifically me that I only have in this world) then there is no way of talking about it.

    After all, this is somehow understandable, with reference to what I said: language is able to talk about shared things and concepts only. There aren't words to describe anything unique in this world, such as that specific flower. Even if I say "That specific flower in that moment and in that space", this is far from making use of any unique concept: it makes use of a combination of shared concepts that try to capture the object into a cage of coordinates, but they are just coordinates, each of them shared with other objects, they are not a unique name for that unique object.
    Because of that, this feeling of uniqueness, unexpressible by principle, seems able to escape any risk of objectivation, it seems to me that this could be the root, the reference point to make me a non-object, a pure subject, a pure human.

    There are, obviously, infinite degrees and ways of mentally and existentially living this feeling of uniqueness. In other words, this is just the root, but human life cannot be made of roots only: we also need objects, connections, relationships, mixtures, but it seems to me that that feeling could be the root.
    In this context I disagree with the buddhist concept that our individuality should be conceived as something whose destiny is to melt with the whole: this seems to me just metaphysics.

    If I am right, this could be the root, the reference point for authentic human existence and also for respect, appreciation and interest of humans between each other.

    What do you think?
  • J
    388
    I'm using two contexts to try to understand you: First, the Kierkegaardian questions about how a self can escape from rational objectification. Second, a puzzle voiced by Thomas Nagel as to whether the statement "I am Thomas Nagel" is a fact about the world. They both consider "uniqueness" as possibly irremediably subjective.

    I'm not at all sure I've understood you, though. If this is off track, please ignore.
  • Angelo Cannata
    353

    Can you please explain better how "both consider uniqueness as possibly irremediably subjective"? it souds very close to my idea, but at the same time I am afraid there could be some important difference. Moreover, I am not so expert about both of them, so I am not even sure which books of them I should look at.
  • J
    388


    Sorry, I should have provided references but, as I said, I wasn’t sure I was even on track with your OP.

    For Kierkegaard, I had in mind the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Part Two, Chapters I, II, and III. I won’t even pretend to give a summary! But his stance, briefly, is that Hegel’s philosophy (which was very much in vogue at the time, and which SK calls “the System”) can give an account of absolutely everything except SK himself. He is left understanding all that can be known (he’s being a little sarcastic here) but the one thing he wants to understand best, his own being, is left out of “the System.” And this must necessarily be so, since there is no room for anyone’s subjectivity in an objective account of what is. The “uniqueness” angle might be that “the System” treat only things which are not unique, because they must be shareable and rationalized. Whereas any given self is, arguably, a one-off, a hapax – so how can it be made an object of knowledge?

    The Nagel reference is more specific. In The View from Nowhere, p. 54, Nagel writes of what he calls the “centerless” objective world:
    Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one very large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself. What kind of fact is that? What kind of fact is it – if it is a fact – that I am Thomas Nagel? — Nagel

    So again, subjectivity is posed as a problem for the objective viewpoint. (The puzzle is only a puzzle when expressed in the 1st person.) I think the “uniqueness” question here is more or less the same as in Kierkegaard – Nagel is uniquely Thomas Nagel, and this is of extraordinary importance to him, not in some egotistical way, but simply as a plain matter of getting around in his life. How do we fit such a vital fact into our “System” of non-unique things?

    Hope this helps.
  • 180 Proof
    15.2k
    How can we humans avoid being just objects?Angelo Cannata
    I think the place to start is by exercising our 'massively distributed' modes of agency in solidarity to struggle against political-economic-cultural systems which minmize and/or eliminate the social agency of any humans anywhere possible for us to do so. In other words, to the degree we humans are emancipatory and disutilitarian with respect to all humans (as swell as nonhuman species) is the degree to which, imo, we become more than "just objects" (i.e. atomized beasts of burden, cattle, sheep, etc). :death: :flower:
  • NOS4A2
    9k
    The principium individuationis is the principle of individuation Schopenhauer used to describe space and time. So describing the location of the object at any given point in time and space should suffice to differentiate or individuate the object from the conceptual nets we tend to apply to a multitude. Objects can easily share names and descriptions but it is difficult to share a location.

    From there I wager we can sweep away the notion of the universal essence, or other imagined connections, which presuppose a sort of ectoplasm between human beings. We can stop tying human beings together with false concepts and words to achieve an artificial basis of value, and discover value in the unique and original properties of each human being.
  • Angelo Cannata
    353

    I think you are in the perfect context by connecting what I said with Kierkegaard and Nagel. Thank you for these references. But it seems to me that both of them fall in the problem they want to avoid: by talking about subjectivity they automatically objectify it. I think that true subjectivity is not the kind of subjectivity that we all share: since it is shared, it is an objectified subjectivity. I think that true subjectivity for me in this moment is exclusively the unique subjectivity that I can feel, I can perceive in myself. Other people's subjectivity can never be, for me, true or pure subjectivity, because I cannot think of it without objectifying it. Actually even now, the moment I talk about my unique subjectivity, I have automatically objectified it, so that what the word means is not anymore my true subjectivity even to myself: I cannot think about my own unique subjectivity without objectifying it, because even just thinking means objectifying. I can feel my subjectivity, I cannot think or talk about it.
    I think that there are two ways to escape this impossibility to think and talk about it. One way is forcing language, which essentially means doing art, which is talking in artistic, subjective ways, hoping that listeners will be able to find in themselves what I am talking about. The other way is considering that subjectivity has connections with objectivities; by talking about these connections we can hope, again, that listeners will find in themselves their unique feeling of subjectivity, instead of being distracted by the connected objectivities I am talking about.
  • J
    388
    Just out of curiosity -- why would we want to talk about subjectivity in the first place, on your view? Is the talking meant to provoke in the listener a deeper experience of their own subjectivity, somehow?
  • Angelo Cannata
    353

    I think that a reason cannot be found and we even shouldn't look for it. Since this topic is all about the purest roots of subjectivity, it would be like asking why we want to practice art, music, poetry, or even philosophy, or even why we should exist. None of these things is ultimately needed for some objective reason. We just find ourselves existing, a lot of people like music, other people don't. I just like to explore such things like my unexpressible subjectivity.
  • J
    388
    OK, fair enough.
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