Human Subjectivity in Crisis

               Human Subjectivity in Crisis* 

“Denying a person of his subjectivity reduces him to an object. How many times have we reduced people into objects?”

Dr Abe V Rotor

Our keen sense of values, like unity and harmony, is threatened by 

loss of human subjectivity. Painting in acrylic by the author.

Today numbers are synonymous to persons and objects, the doing of human institutions and computers.

A person is worth his material possessions and is diminished by the loss of them. Identity is in code and losing that code detaches one from the world. Many get lost in the massive network of human society.

But sometimes you have to get lost. Just like when my telephone line was severed by road diggings, I had one of the best vacation leaves in my life for two months.

How frail is life’s numerical system! And how selfish! I think I have more than enough which carry identities and possessions with only a part at fingertip recollection. I have the feeling that very little room is left to record other people. They, too, have accumulated numbers to keep them in touch with the world.

The problem really is that we use a universal yardstick to measure people and objects. The distinction often lies on a thin line. When we pay an accident victim, we are dealing with material compensations. The character and nature of life may be a good bargaining tool, but we cannot equate honesty and virtue with money.

“If life is merely equated with material values, then logic would suggest that an individual’s death enhances everybody’s life.” says John Donne.

The more who die off, the more space and materials there will be for those who remain. This is the game of numbers in the economic sense, devoid of moral value. But would not wish to die even if my time has come, if I can afford it. With millions I can have an expensive heart or kidney transplant and live for the next ten years. I do not care if my money would mean saving the lives of 1000 people or the well being of 10,000.

Where does subjectivity come in? I quote John Donne** (PHOTO) in Time Magazine essay, “Do you feel the death of strangers?” on the poisoning of 2,500 Indians by toxic gas and the death of hundreds of Mexicans in a gas explosion, as follows:

“Any man’s death diminishes me xxx makes me smaller less than I was before I learned that death, because the world is a map of interconnections. As the world decreases in size, so must each of its parts.”

Here the law of numerical is interpreted subjectively. It touches feelings, in fact, values. It is mathematics in the subjective sense, subtraction based on human philosophy. Since the entire world suffers a numerical loss at an individual’s death, then one must feel connected to the entire world to feel the subtraction equally.

The equation permeates with deeper meaning. Everyone represents “a world within
himself” that he can manage through his will. It is this internal and individualistic world that we can share our concern for others, for the bigger world outside ours.

It is in this small world from which we send aids to victim of circumstances, or nurture compassionate feelings for them. It is the seat of a quiet world that we can control in order to prevent the death of other people, on the least minimize the sufferings of others.

Perhaps I have gone too far to illustrate my point as distinguished from objectivity. When I step on the toes of someone, I also offend him as a person, as a subject. When we use a person as a tool in perpetuating our ultra motives we use him as an object, a license.

“Man is the only being that can reduce the world into object.” says Scheler*** . “He can dominate the world, and the world becomes an object. In fact he can even dominate his psychic life, controls his urges and drives. In short, he is capable of self-consciousness to the point that he can detach himself from himself and therefore, master of himself. The only aspect of his being which he cannot objectify is his spirit.

But we do abuse this power of intellect and will. We abuse other people as well as ourselves. Rape for example reduces a person into a mere object. It is immoral, a violation of divine and spiritual values. It is an act of dehumanizing and depersonalizing a person. In a communist society it is exploitation, which is highly punishable as violation of the constitution.

A modern Narcissus by the lake with images of materialism and fantasy. Painting by Leo Carlo Rotor, author's son.  (circa 1989)

We tend to comprehend less and less about human feelings as we amass material things and power. It is as if the more things we possess the less we know others. The inequality of rich and poor is more than a question of material values. But we are consoled by the fact that irrespective of material and social status, happiness equally sets the premises of acquisition. People who have less in life find happiness with the same opportunity with those who have more. In fact they may even be happier because their source of happiness is simpler and easier to find.

Take affection. We do not attach affection only on beautiful and luxurious things. We do with ease to simple things. To the ordinary person. To a small pet. The untouched landscape no matter how barren it may look. Affection is subjective; the object merely symbolizes its essence.

The absence of real beauty would be the major problem of modern life. When we talk of beauty, the requirement is a perceived harmony or integrity both within the object and between the object and ourselves.

What affection can you find in 

this pastel drawing of an 8-year old?

It is desolating to see something new that we only despise or that we have no feeling for it and to recall with pleasure whatever it displaced – or to see nothing where something once cherished stood. Our affection attached to that which is not there but we are there. Thus, the absence of things of value becomes a form of self-hate.

Thus, reflected the work of Matthew Arnold *(PHOTO), “Dover Beach.” Arnold expressed lament about his country’s destructive confidence.

“The eternal note of sadness in the sea xxx the rolling of the pebbles xxx the ebb and flow of human misery tale for industrial England.” His disillusionment is complete in the last part of the poem. “To lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new xxx neither joy, nor love, nor light ... nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

But why was Arnold disillusioned about his country when it was the riches, most powerful, more industrially sophisticated at that time? He knew that no industry disinvented poverty or starvation. In fact many inventions only threaten to deface the earth into waste. He knew that affluence destroys people. Wealth is a product of material exploitation.

The strange disease in modern life is in numbers, the numericals of material values, the inaesthetics of things around us. We seemed to have sold ourselves to such objects, losing our subjectivity.

Likeness of Dover Beach in postmodern art. AVR  

As I carry my load of numbers to turn ultimately to face the sea, I imagine Arnold looking across the English Channel on Dover Beach that calm evening more than two centuries ago. For I have learned to like the sea, the edge of human habitation. That it seems to be the last place on earth to find recourse. Its rugged rocky shores or its monotonous sands, the never-ending remind me that the sea is the cradle of aesthetic beauty, the arena of human submissiveness, the proof of God’s mysterious processes and immense power.

I would like to cast away my load of numbers, but then, between the sea and me is a chaos of resorts, laughter, fishing boats, beer cans and oil slicks. I perceive the alienation of life itself. ~

* Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and cultural critic. Dover Beach is one of the most read poems in the school. 

*Edited and updated article published in Grains, magazine of the National Food Authority, February 1985
** John Donne is considered to be the preeminent metaphysical poet of his time. He was born in England in 1572 to Roman Catholic parents. 

*** Max Ferdinand Scheler (1874-1928) was a German philosopher known for his work in phenomenology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology.