(23) The Subject-object relation

The distinction between a “reality in itself” opposed to “appearances” is as old as philosophy itself.  This is to be expected since theoretical thinking gives us a view of reality quite different from our ordinary experience.  As soon as theory gets going one has to consider how these two views relate.  We exist within the world as an active participant shaping and being shaped by the relationships given to us and into which we enter.  Our experience is not primarily of isolated objects or dimensions but of an indissoluble coherence of a rich variety of facets which impress themselves on us, or recede from our consciousness depending on our concerns and interests at each moment.  First the ray of sunlight, or the sound of an alarm clock, that wakes us from sleep, our thoughts organizing the priorities of the day, the cost of utilities as we read the latest bill.  While each of these experiences has a certain focus, say the economic dimension of the gas bill, nevertheless each experience displays a coherence of many dimensions.  The bill is in a language we understand, set out spatially at the size appropriate to our perceptual capacities that only function by virtue of the continuing health of our bodies as a living organism and so on.  Our experience of reality then can be described as an integral coherence of a rich diversity of aspects or modes of being.  We do not experience any of these aspects on their own, we have no experience of a purely economic reality for example, but neither do we experience pure space, or pure movement.  It is only in theoretical thought that reality appears split us.  The integral character of reality and our place within it become replaced as the focus of our attention with a deliberately chosen, that is not real, opposition between our act of thought and its object of analysis.

However it might be objected that there seems to be something wrong in this analysis for surely there are many things in this world that lack features that have been identified as part of human experience.  For example moral worth, or economic value, even perception of colour and taste, cannot be seen to inhere in reality.  Such things have a first-person ontology.  This view comes from an understanding of nature that arose from the development of modern science where reality is approached exclusively in terms of its physical aspect of mechanical motion, and later that of energy, so that all natural phenomenon must be understood within these terms.  A classic example is Galileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities of a thing.

The subject-object distinction is usually understood as a structural relation where the subject stands opposite the object as two independent elements of reality.  In terms of what we have already said this means that the subject-object distinction takes the opposition between our act of thought and the object of analysis it has chosen, through abstraction, to be a real opposition between two separate entities instead of a deliberately chosen stance or attitude.  So both sides of the relation, the analytic focus of our thinking and the object of analysis, are artificial and not simply given in reality.  We can, however, speak of a natural subject-object relation which crosses over the whole diversity of meaning rather than cutting it in two.  In this sense we should understand the term ‘subjective’ as relating to the active side of a connection while ‘objective’ relates to the passive side.  This distinction refers to concrete reality rather than to the modal aspects so it is not the case that certain aspects are passive whereas others are active, as is the case with Kant’s opposition between the spontaneity of the understanding (Reason) and the passivity of the forms of intuition (senses). The term subject has the meaning of a thing which makes something happen. This means that by its own nature it brings about some possibilities which are available through the functioning of some modal aspect. In this sense objective refers to when such possibilities are actualised in a thing by some other creature. When a rock is crafted into a beautiful diamond and sold human activity realises passive aesthetic and economic functions of the rock making it an aesthetic and economic object. Since many creatures, and not just humans, make things happen, there can therefore be many different kinds of subject-object connections.

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