A few weeks ago, we read and discussed a Gebser essay, “The Grammatical Mirror” (Cosmos Café: Gebser's "Grammatical Mirror" [2018.03.13]) in which Gebser looks at poetry and other linguistic samples for clues about the ‘structures of consciousness’ (behind or underlying the words, as it were) which he argues our language reflects.
I found the essay to be a bit dated on the ideas and examples (coming before post-structuralism, the 60s, etc.) but the overall point still valid and worthwhile. When I think “object”—because the word is really a mental (in Gebser’s schema) grammatical abstraction, turned into a philosophical category—I can’t help feeling (my actual first-person experience) that I am nowhere near to anything ‘in itself’, but rather in a mental, abstract space, not a full-bodied experience of some real thing.
In fact, Heidegger has a great essay called “What is a thing?” where he distinctly deconstructs the notion of the ‘thing’ as ‘object’, showing how (in language itself, through root resonances) the word ‘thing’ actually evokes a whole gestalt of relations—a worlding world—where temporal events, spatial objects, and matters of concern all coincide. The word “thing” seems to me a lot more open than “object,” which is why I think an “object-oriented philosophy” can’t help but be reductive. It’s one thing to say that “things are objectively real,” which is a great philosophical starting point, which I share, but another to say that “every thing is an object.” This then puts you in the position having to reintroduce subjectivity into objectivity, by saying that objects are really subjects. I appreciate that this allows you to decenter the ‘human’ (first-person, I) as the principal subject, but I think the easier way to get there is to drop the ‘object-orientation’ from the outset.
If we let things be things, and events be events, then there’s no need to say that objects are really events, or that things are objectively real. Then subjects can be subjects, and objects objects, within their grammatical domains, but this abstract duality doesn’t colonize all of reality. Knowledge by identity (what it’s like to be something—which Aurobindo writes about, btw, which I’m eager to read) then becomes something much more like the kind of ‘I-Thou’ dialogue you describe between yourself and the world (including everything from trees to pebbles, to computer networks to political movements—Latour calls these nature-culture ‘hybrids,’ or quasi-objects—see We Have Never Been Modern) since you can then let a more fluid, multifaceted, ‘aperspectival’ grammar (& ontology) arise from the experience itself.
Contra OOO, I would say that reality is not ‘objective’ but symbiopoetic. This allows, I believe, for a more fluid account of novelty, relations, and events, since we can observe how emergence happens through creative processes involving (first-, second-, third-, and n-) persons and things—and it’s inherently obvious why this concern us.
That’s my two Litcoin. Thanks for the thought-provoking dialogue, @jfmartel!