Posted by zeugma on November 28, 2005, at 20:24:21
In reply to Re: reverse objectification » zeugma, posted by alexandra_k on November 25, 2005, at 18:44:30
> > i don't know about Kant's rather absolutist (IMO) ethics.
>
> Hmm.
> I guess I prefer 'universal' to 'absolutist' but yeah, I guess...
> I don't know much about ethics in general...
> But I do remember having to read about Kant... >>I remember having to read Kant. (The sense of obligation). Reading about Kant was better, because not put in that 'packing-crate prose' that Heine talked about. I should have said 'universal,' not 'absolutist,' as absolutism is way off base with regard to Kant.
>
> For example...
> If you are thinking about performing an act then you need to decide which maxim / law captures the act.
> (Problems here with respect to how you DESCRIBE the maxim).
> So... Suicide. Lets say you are deciding whether it would be morally acceptable to top yourself.
> The relevant maxim is supposed to be UNIVERSAL (to apply to all people, situations, times etc)
> So... One description of the relevant maxim may be...
> 'It is morally acceptable for someone to kill themself'.
> Now...
> The criterion...
> COULD YOU WILL THE MAXIM TO BECOME A UNIVERSAL MORAL LAW???
> (aka: could you will (intend) that everybody live by that maxim?)
> Kant thought that IT WAS LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for someone to will that maxim to be a universal moral law because...
> If everybody killed themself, then there wouldn't be any people left to act on the universal moral law.
> And thus... He considers that the maxim would be CONTRADICTORY.
> And... That is his criterion. If you can will the maxim to be a universal moral law (that everybody followed) WITHOUT CONTRADICTION then the maxim is a universal moral law. If you are led to contradiction then it can't be a universal moral law (so you SHOULDN'T do the act covered by the maxim because you (logically) CANNOT will the maxim to be a universal moral law.
>
> (Hence ethics is a matter of logic / reason, not of desire / emotion)
>
> Works best for promise breaking IMO.
> You can't will 'it is okay for people to break their promises' because if everybody broke their promises then there wouldn't be any such thing as promises. The very notion would self-distruct becasue of the contradiction...
>I agree. And there are implicit promises in many things we do, so I don't think that puts Kant on the margins. Although...I am sympathetic to a form of moral realism stronger than Kant's highly 'performative' and individualistic theory (i.e. the agent considering whether her actions can satisfy a maxim rational for everybody to follow). As a matter of fact i tend to agree with Hume, that desires and emotions take precedence in the moral sphere, and that morality may be more akin to perception than to reason, or at least that it comprises the two elements (thus providing for objects to have 'moral qualities,' a possibilty I don't see kant as allowing for).
> Thoguh... We can surely imagine cases where someone might need to be later than they promised in order to save a drowining person on the way to the meeting...
>
Easy to imagine that.
> > I will say that the experience of depersonalization is one in which one views oneself as an object.
>
> Yes.
> I have read something (a while back now) on borderline personality disorder... more specifically... on de-personalisation - objectification - and self injury.
>
> I remember reading about how in de-personalisation you don't see yourself as a 'subject' (of experience) rather you see yourself as an object.
>
> But who is the 'yourself' that is being objectified?
>
> It seems to be an experience of ones subjectivity being dissociated / split off from ones physical body. Typically ones experiecne of ones subjectivity embraces ones body. Sometimes... Ones experinece of ones subjectivity becomes narrowed. The boundary or limit of ones subjectivity becomes restricted. The physical body is seen as 'other' or 'foreign' or 'ego alien' or... as an object. The subjectivity has been split from being intimately associated with the body.
>This is about right.
> Self injury... One function of it can be to help 'ground' oneself back in ones body. The experience of bodily pain... Is hard for ones subjectivity to ignore... And thus self injury can function to enlarge the boundaries of the subjectivity to encompass the body once more...
>
> (I'm not recommending that as a strategy. Though some people finding holding a cube of ice... A less injurous way of achieving the same thing).>>I used to inflict pain intentionally on myself (picking hangnails and such) as a way to feel sensation. I still do on occasion, since it doesn't leave scars the way skin picking on the face does (which I try not to engage in, despite the fact that it meakes me feel 'there.' Oh, the wonders of stimulants and antidepressants. It's easier to be rational about these things when they are in your system.) It's the desire to feel some sensation, any sensation. It also reduces anxiety because the feeling of having perceptual experience completely dulled is frightening. One can get in a lot of trouble that way (we either have to have functional sensory systemns, or well-developed coping mechanisms, such that blind people use to get through daily life).
>
>
> > it makes relationships in the sexual asense impossible.
>
> Hmm.
>
> Yeah. I'm not sure what Kant was thinking... But what I took from the seminar seemed to be a little different to what most other people took.
>
> Most people came away thinking that mututal objectification (between consenting parties) was just fine and Kant was a little too uptight.
>Kant WAS uptight, but that doesn't mean mutual objectification is OK. Actually I take the phrase to be oxymoronic. 'consent' can be made only by a subject, or so i would think; it's a kind of promise.
> I came away thinking that IT IS possible for sex to be an activity between two subjects rather than two objects.
>
It certainly is.
> And Kant just didn't quite manage to get himself to there...
>
> Though I'm still thinking about the *object* / *mere object* thing...
>well, i think, as i hinted above, that what i don't like about Kant's theory is that there is no room for a 'moral sense' or perhaps more precisely, 'moral perception.' So I think it's less that a person treating another as an object is acting irrationally, so much as acting immorally, and to say that one must be covered by a maxim that is unversalizable ignores the uniqueness of each situation (as for instance breaking a promise to meet someone for dinner in order to save someone from drowning). Likewise, I would hold objectification to be a kind of abstraction, i.e. considering a person qua sex object rather than qua friend or lover or whatever. Apart from morality here, the issue of perception would be, Do you know what aspect is being considered when the person views you? And morally, is the way in which the person views you right or wrong? This is complicated by the fact that a person is viewed in many ways simultaneously; that's where i think a moral sense comes in, to perceive the specifically moral, as opposed to psychological characters of the situation.
> > if one simply has a shaky sense of the first person, then the relations one can enter into with others are ambiguous at best. One has trouble relating to oneself. I suppose everyone has trouble with that, to some degree.
>
> Yeah. I have trouble...
>
> So... You think of other peoples bodies as 'containing' (or being intimately associated with) subjectivity...
> But... You don't think of your body as 'containing' (or being intimately associated with) subjectivity...
>
> ?
>i think my body contains subjectivity, but it is difficult to access. depersonalization is a dissociative state, characterized in particular by phenomena such as autoscopy (seeing oneself from a vantage point outside one's own body). i believe it relates to an inability to process information from an egocentric (not in the pejorative sense merely in the subject-centered sense) as opposed to allocentric (centered via coordinates outside one's body) point of view. I don't have autoscopy these days, but the extreme frequency of hypnagogic hallucinations (which I take medication to suppress; otherwise they are intolerable) and their peculiar form, of simulataneously being aware of my own position in bed and being subjected to sensations of being somewhere else (i.e. in a dream) suggests a weakness in the ability of the egocentric pathway to maintain a coherent picture. The egocentric pathway is associated with subjectivity, definitely. I look at others, and see that they are 'there' in a sense that is very difficult for me to maintain.
-z
>
poster:zeugma
thread:579342
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/relate/20051031/msgs/583158.html