Objectifying humans

Human objects

Science was invented in the renaissance and three of its main contributors were Copernicus, Newton and Descartes. Together they put together a way of seeing the world that enable power to them and to people that used scientific approaches. They wrestled influence away from the philosophers and the church as a way of seeing the world.

The combination of Newton and Descartes sees the construction of what Gendlin calls the unit model. The world is composed of discrete things, each of which has an indubitable essence, which are connected by external forces. Change happens by rearranging of these essences by the external forces. So as far as objects go, we have a perfect Laplacian system, in that all objects are determined in their interactions with each other from the beginning of time to eternity.

The key premises are that objects are definite they are what they are, there is no ambiguity. We can understand them by breaking them up into smaller and smaller pieces to find their essence. Mathematics is the central method in Newtonian science.

So whilst the world of science has created some truly amazing things, protected us from the elements, from disease, extended our life span, created unparalleled abilities of speed, and connection, where it falls short is when we apply it to ourselves to the inventor of science.

Humans are different from objects in this Newtonian way of thinking.  Firstly, we are not discrete, we are not just what we are. We have desire and want something else, not only that but we have a catalogue of desires and worse than that they conflict or can do. So, there is an essential incompleteness of humans that always directs to the future wanting something more. We never are discrete.

Secondly, we haven’t got an essence. If you chopped us up into smaller pieces you would lose humanness quite quickly. We are humans in so far as out of the complexity of all us, we exist. The similarity exists with music. If you took a piece of music and reduced it to mathematical relations, you would lose music. In the same way if you took a cake and reduced it to its constituent components, of fat, and starch, water and sugar again you would lose the cake in so doing.

Thirdly and probably most importantly we are creative, we imagine, we compare, we learn and then we create. From this unity of time and activity we focus our attention and build the world in a way that we want to see. Again, this action is so very different to the world of objects. It has freedom, it has temporality which needs to move through time rather than be fixed points of nows chugging through (see zeno paradoxes). Indeed we create ways of understanding, we create objects and we created science, it was one of our myriad behaviours.

The thing is though we treat ourselves, well I certainly do, very much as objects. We define what is important in our lives from the values constructed from our friends, family, society, culture and epoch. Then we create goals to achieve. Thus, I must be a clever man, a rich man, I must own a house, car and have suitable friends with similar attributes. In this action we define the properties we must have and then seek to create them. We are like a factory that manufacturers ourselves as an object. I guess you can see this most clearly in goal directed behaviour, that will be accompanied by directives such as “must”, “should” and “ought”.

We then might ruminate when we have taken choices that didn’t lead to us being the object we were after or we worry about things that might happen to threaten them. Of course, we don’t stop there, and we compare ourselves with others and decide we aren’t good enough objects or have made the wrong choices.

I guess seeing ourselves as objects that we create is handy, it provides a simple solution to the question of how should I live, in the face of the yawning abyss of nothingness, that would be its alternative.

It’s also tough though, we are born in a neo-liberal post enlightenment society and objectness is what we face.

I guess though there are alternatives even if a fundamentally radical solution would lead to incarceration in one of our establishments be in medical or penal.  One would be listening to yourself being led by the intricacy of yourself and what feels right to do. I guess the second one is whilst you are pushing the great Sisyphean stone of your goals up the hill to give yourself little breaks and to engage with the world as you find it, outside of the your goals.

References

Laplace:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities^[65]

Gendlin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Gendlin

Zeno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes