> People _are_ objects. They occupy space, they have mass, they have
> definable shapes and boundaries. The fact that one can interact with
> other humans to a highly complex degree does not make them _not_
> objects.
Shane Mage replied:
> This is pure sophistry. It takes a situational reality--that
> individual people, dogs, cockroaches, plants, microbes--can
> by viewed as objects by other entities--and gives it an
> altogether false ontological sense. In and for themselves,
> living beings are subjects. Insofar as they are subjects,
> they are not objects. But they are subjects (entities
> acting upon their environment) for every moment of their
> living existence. Their potential objectness is merely
> the necessary implication of their actual subjectness.
I don't see the contradiction between humans as subject or object as long as subject and object are understood in an epistemological, not ontological, sense. Other people appear to me only as objects of my consciousness, and I can only appear to other people as an object of their consciousness. AFAIK, this is simply an application of the phenomenological doctrine that consciousness must always have a content--"No subject without an object."
On the other hand, merely because the contents of one's consciousness are objects *in this sense of the term object* does not entail that one can treat all objects equivalently--just the opposite is the case. In particular, other humans are objects--entities grasped via consciousness--that are also subjects--beings with their own consciousness and volition.
As far as ontology goes, I don't see how the fact that humans are subjects is a precondition of the possiblity of their being objects--unless one holds some kind of idealist ontology. On the other hand, if one holds a materialist/naturalist position, humans' materialiality is a precondition of their consciousness--and consciousness then is reduced to a material process itself.
But the sum of all this is that I don't think the epistemology or ontological concerns matter for how we treat others--on the contrary, it seems that asserting the relevance of the possible possitions always leads to problems. If you assert the priority of humans as subjects, then how do you deal with questions of the rights of people with terrible cognitive deficits? On the other hand, the priority of the body seems to leave the door open to justifications of ideological conformity, not to mention the abuses that a normative notion of body would enable.
-- Curtiss