Subjective-Objective: Thinking of Holistic Cake and Eating it
'Our natural awareness of our own activities is holistic. We experience ourselves as embodied beings, complete organisms, directly perceiving physical objects, making choices, engaging in conversation with other people. The attempt to split the human being into a combination of immaterial self and physical body makes a coherent account of these processes impossible. As Heidegger says, “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.”35 Given the Cartesian conception of the “real world”, organisms are “really” mechanisms, while “choices” and “actions” have no place in a world where there are only events, subject to the laws of mechanistic cause and effect. The whole person becomes a metaphysical oddity, straddling two incompatible metaphysical realms.
A theoretical framework that renders the previously straightforward inherently problematic is by no means an unequivocal advance. Materialist authors have attempted to “solve” this problem by denying the reality of the subjective side of the Cartesian picture, replacing his dualism with radical metaphysical reductionism.36 Such authors insist that the “objective” world (still understood as something devoid of phenomenal properties, containing only causes and effects as understood in reductionist science) is all there really is. On this view, we do not have to bridge the gap generated by Descartes, between the subjective and the objective features of human life, because the objective features are the only ones that exist.' p.20.
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My Mind Subjective | My Body Objective |
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
