outback to jungle

Musings on experiences of volunteering in Papua New Guinea with some gratuitous domestic social and public comment

Thursday, July 20, 2006

confusion of subject and object

When I was at school, a subject was a thing that was studied like Science or History. Sometimes I might have been the subject of a conversation. Then at University I was told my writing was too subjective. Academic writing is removed from the subject and it is a discussion of independent objective facts. In Philosophy subjectivism is a theory about knowledge's being in the mind of the beholder. If I objectify a person, I treat them not as a subject with feelings but as an object incapable of humanity. So why is a subject that has independent existence such as History not called an object? Why am I not the object of a discussion? The philosophers and linguists need to sort that out. As for me, I am the subject and what I see around me is the object. If you are around me, are you a subject? Not from my perspective. But that does not mean I am acting on you as an object without personal values and feelings. Does it?
Anyway, for my purposes I am the philosophical and linguistic subject whom I want to know better as a result of this experience. In that last sentence just to add to the confusion, the word "subject" is the object to which the objective relative pronoun "whom" refers. I might just stick with reading "Noddy".

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