#subject-object

[noosphe-re]

The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable and that in the past have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all.

Robert Pirsig, Lila

[athousandgateaux]

This reversal of subject-object relations means that what is ostensibly an object for a human – a book, or a car – reveals another side that is no longer dependent on the human gaze. In each case, matter is alive, as the priest says: ‘He lives in the atom. He lives in all things…’ Not in an animistic rapport with humanity, but in an anonymous and brute way. This is the horror of the Levinasian il y a -- the horror of the it which refuses to reveal itself as an I, except as a symptom or a dream. In this vision of horror, matter exceeds the confines of the flesh, and thus subjectivity itself. Doing so, the structure of reality loses definition

Dylan Trigg, The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror, pg. 101

[theemotionmachine]

The more one concentrates upon any individual thing, the more it turns out to involve the whole universe.

Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East & West

[papirene-royzn]

Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data, 91.

[daily-klingon]

Prefixes

The standard verb prefix table from The Klingon Dictionary looks like this.

Here’s a table showing the subject-object verb prefixes, putting each subject-object relationship alongside the reverse relationship; e.g. I-you and You-me.

[charlottejohanne]

I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name. I am merely ‘Neville’ to you, who see the narrow limits of my life and the line it cannot pass. But to myself I am immeasurable; a net whose fibres pass imperceptibly beneath the world.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

[feelingpolitical]

So the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity cannot rest on a distinction between psyche and soma, meaning that it cannot rest on a distinction between ideas and matter. What prohibits the assimilation of the psyche/soma, ideas/matter distinction to the subject/object distinction is, above all, the fact of feeling, and the existence of affects. The first discerns the second. Both feeling, as a process of sensing affects, and the transmission of affects, are material processes. We cannot distinguish between them, any more than we can distinguish between subject and object, by any criteria to do with materiality as opposed to ideality. The distinction can only be drawn on the basis of the nature of the feelings and affects involved. Feelings connect logically (consistently with the information provided by the flesh). The negative affects divide one person from another and then remake connections inaccurately from the subjective standpoint.”

Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 93-4