Just Saying Something on Subjects and Objects

 

Cambridge Professor of Philosophy, Rae Langton, makes it very clear why she values people over objects. For whilst conceding that the former are a part of the phenomenal world of things, she insists that human beings (as subjects) have a uniquely rich inner life and a moral-rational capacity to make choices. To be an object, she writes, is to be something which isn't free; something that is stabilized and whose movements are all-too-predictable. She continues: 

"It is to be something incapable of the activities of knowledge, communication, love, respect. It is to be something that is merely a sensory appearance, something whose qualities are exhausted by how it can look, feel, sound, and taste to a perceiver. It is to be merely a body, something solid and extended in space. It is to be a tool, something whose value is merely instrumental, something which is a potential possession."

Obviously, as an object-oriented philosopher, I don't agree with this. For me, it's an anthropocentric conceit to believe that we belong to a superior ontological order to all other entities; be they organic or inorganic, natural or artificial, real or virtual objects. For me, our subjectivity is really just a peculiar way of being an object - much as life is simply a rare and unusual way of being dead (to paraphrase Nietzsche if I may). 

The question, I suppose, is why do so many thinkers like Rae Langton continue with this conceit? That is to ask, why do they continue to think of the object with such contempt and dogmatically privilege the position of the human subject?

Baudrillard, who has a far more interesting and philosophically provocative view of the object, provides us with a convincing explanation. Those who continue to support the fiction of an autonomous subject do so because it has "an economy and a history which is quite reassuring; it is the equilibrium between a will and a world ... the balancing principle of the universe". 

If we are more than mere objects, then we are not delivered up helplessly to a monstrous and chaotic universe of chance. Nor are we simply the unfortunate victims of surrounding forms or fascinating and fateful events that exist beyond our control.

In other words, to believe in ourselves as free-wheeling and free-willing subjects makes us feel safe and secure, as well as significant. That's comforting, but it's a lie. Perhaps a necessary lie that allows us to live and which it would be nihilistic to expose as such, but a lie nonetheless.

I'm just saying ...

Notes

Lines quoted from Rae Langton and Jean Baudrillard can be found in:

Rae Langton, Sexual Solipsism, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 329. 

Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, (Pluto Press, 1999), p. 112.