Non-Objectifiable
Without going into unnecessary details, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done (a pretty extensive field of competition) was to pose for some tasteless photographs to earn some money back in my college days. It’s something I regretted almost immediately afterwards and it certainly contributed to some years of self-loathing. However, it may also have encouraged me to have some empathy particularly with women who object to being objectified in our culture. It may also have prompted, alongside other painful influences, the self-doubt that lead me to really think about the problems of identity, the body/mind/activity/environment etc etc complex and what is actually in question with this issue of identity. We put, and are increasingly encouraged to put so much emphasis on identity, be it ethnic, communal, sexual, national, individual, collective and to grasp onto these abstracts as if they were more real than the concrete conditions of life. Now that I’m far past any danger of anyone wanting to pay to get lewd photos of me, I can look back and say it was a very stupid thing to have let myself do, but the angst I felt for many years after has gone. Still, the questions of who we really are and of objectification and graspabity of the ‘self’ are relevant and often urgent.
What is this ‘self’?
Another person looks at me, sees my form and says “that’s you”. They could show me a photograph, hold up a mirror, or even show me a cat-scan or brain scan. What they see and what they show me will be their objective perspective. When I look at the photo, or mirror, or brain-scan, those too will be objective, only they will be in the objective field of two consciousnesses, namely mine and the other person’s. What does not appear there in the objective field is the subject, either mine or theirs. The other is an object to my subject, I am an object to their subject. What we have described here is the way the world is presented on a field of consciousness wherein all things appear as differentiated and are relative to each other. But now, how does the subject see the subject? What appears objectively when I think to see myself is necessarily an object, not a subject.
They (subject and object) cannot be the same thing, yet they seem to appear within the same general area linked to the body. However, even this body is really only distinct from it’s environment as a relative phenomenon. All the components and processes, constantly in motion and change both internal and external to any body appear objectively, and yet subjective consciousness is somehow intimately associated with them, but is not objectively to be found in them. If we reflect subjectively we find that we are not even aware of most of what is going on in our bodies that supposedly produce this subjective consciousness.
At the ground of our subjective consciousness is that which is not subjective consciousness, yet not separate from it, and not objective either. Is it simple unconsciousness? If we say it is unconsciousness, that is simply objectifying it. And again, what is objective cannot be the ground of the subjective. These two poles appear everywhere in consciousness whether external or internal. They are never separate from each other and yet are not the same.
Therefore we must conclude that ordinary consciousness presents relationships that are mutually dependent. Where then is the real ‘I’ , or the ultimate identity? Is there any at all?
What we must do to reach this ultimate point of subjectivity is to see the relative, fluctuating, dependent, and thus empty nature of all the designated phenomena that appear objectively, including most importantly our objectified ordinary representation of our ‘self’. Thus, whatever appears to consciousness, including the objective views presented to us by others looking at us from their subject position, we must say that our subjectivity is ultimately not this, not this, on and on. We find that subjectivity always vanishes whenever anything objective appears. It recedes and cannot appear objectively to itself. It is ungraspable and yet we feel it is always there as our truest ‘self’.
When we find it impossible and simply beyond our grasp we may realise that this ordinary ego-consciousness we have assumed to be ‘us’ is actually a projection from a subjectivity that is simply outside of the consciousness which differentiates appearances into this and that, self and other, even now and then. Outside, un-objectifiable, and yet not separate, not even by positing another (itself simply another object) substance.
Further in realising the ungraspability of self in our instance, we realise the ungraspability of self in anything objective too. The entire differentiation of the phenomenal world is revealed to be a projection of an ungraspable subjectivity which is not separate from what is appearing. Differentiation is projection by consciousness over what is therefore undifferentiated.
So there appears two worlds that are not the same (in fact, are the contradictory aspects of each other) namely the differentiated and the undifferentiated, are not different (being aspects of the same reality) and are present in and as what we think of when we look for the ground of our existence. This is where words begin to break down and experience takes precedence.