Learning to ❤ theory #4: Subject and object
Subject and object is useful to talk about theory; sometimes (problematically) seen as agency and structure. If you consider a way to see the world (ontology!) then you can see it through the individual (subject) or through the world and society (object; everything not-subject).
This division emerged with the horrid Cartesian subject-object divide (I think therefore I am — cogito ergo sum) which has plagued most of Western thought since. In contrast, consider the African philosophy of Ubuntu: I am what I am because of who we all are.
So, subject is individual and object is the world/society, but what then in terms of the theories? It can be useful to see subjective theories as based on free will and objective theories as based on determinism. A theory doesn’t have to be just one or the other, but that becomes a great deal more complex. Subject and object is of course much more complex than what is said here and this post is only partially correct, but for now maybe a shallow understanding is all that is needed.
The Cartesian dichotomy, and indeed all the binary categorising of the world that have followed (and preceded) its enunciation, are perhaps linked to our psychology – the world is easier to understand when it’s broken down into opposites.
Others have written more cogently about this than me – however, it cheered me greatly when an esteemed speaker at a conference I recently attended stated that he thought post-modernism’s greatest contribution to our intellectual thought was to fundamentally call into question the hierarchical, dichotomous ontologies that characterise Western thought.
Good point about the psychological, but the further implication of the subect-obect divide is that you can fool yourself into thinking that you are (or hypothetically can be) free!
I’ll take post-modern thinking over rational choice any day
Though post-modern (and in part post-structural) work often operates within the radically subective let-me-rant-about-my-bias-without-anything-empirical-and-blame-modernity ontology.