We Objectify Ourselves
“I was never taught to listen within myself. Instead I was taught to listen to the outside to parents, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, professors, bosses, the church, the government, psychologists, science-almost any outer source of instruction in how to live my life.” - James Bugental
I’m not very good at being sick. Or sitting still. Or “just relaxing.” But the other afternoon, after a particularly exuberant morning, my body declared we had reached our limit. The most physical effort I was capable of was periodically flopping into a different position while I read. Despite this, some part of me couldn’t help periodically poking myself with an internal stick to say well-meaning things like, “Why not tidy the living room?” Nope. Sorry. Flop. That’s all I got. A few minutes later, helpfully: “The brush in the backyard needs to be broken down.” Erm. Nope. Flop.
Me trying to do all the things, as depicted in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
In a moment of literary serendipity, the book accompanying my flopping held a mirror up to my internal chides. It was James Bugental’s “Art of the Psychotherapist.” Bugental’s book is a work of applied philosophy that guides therapists understand, and maybe help others towards, a more humane and less objectified life. The irony dawned on me: despite the complete inappropriateness of timing, I was objectifying myself into a kind of drone.
How does one objectify oneself? Perhaps you remember subjects and objects vaguely from elementary grammar lessons. In philosophy, not so differently from grammar, the subject is someone who acts, who observes, who has agency. An object is a thing passively observed or acted upon, or that is expected to do or provide something. We turn ourselves into objects when we reject our immediate needs and experience in favor of expecting ourselves to perform a function.
Objectification can happen in countless contexts, in all kinds of relationships between ourselves and others. The best-known of these processes is sexual objectification especially that of women; but other examples include objectifying people as workers (especially under capitalist structures), and as sources of emotional or other support– as one client of mine said, “I feel like —— treats me like an emotional vending machine.” Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has identified seven different characteristics involved in objectifying a person: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. There is probably no version of humanity in which we don’t sometimes simplify one another into functions for the sake of time and focus, but understanding the value of subjectivity can prevent us from rigidly locking ourselves into objectifying relationships.
Of course, the most widely recognized form of objectification is sexual objectification: the breaking down of a person into body parts, as this PETA ad shows in a most cringe-worthy way.
The antidote to self-objectification is to re-translate ourselves into a subject again. This means a periodic backing away from tasks and accomplishments, and a willingness to ask more questions about what is really going on “in there”, with our thoughts, feelings, and reactions. This might mean asking ourselves what we really want to be doing and making some room for that rather than being guided solely by the checklist. Some things have deadlines, but lots of things can wait–or at the very least go a little more slowly. Even the chores can get done with a little more humanity. Slow down and as Buddhists say, “when walking, just walk.” When flopping around with a good book, just do that.
The quote at the beginning of this post sums up how we get here. To some extent it is a natural pitfall of development. As children we don’t know how to think about ourselves, so we take the cues we’re given. We are rewarded for productivity and accomplishments. We understandably turn further towards this as our guiding principle, and with not a whiff of encouragement or even a good name for it, how could we ever honor this thing Bugental calls “subjectivity”? Or what you could call simply: my own self, and its experiences, needs, and wants
Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to a class of high school students, with a beautiful and heartfelt urging for them to engage in art as a way to stay in touch with their own subjectivity.
It is a hard thing to learn to trust this “self”, even when we are ready to find a way back to it. How do I know it has value? How do I know it is worthwhile to give this self-experience more space, in the same way I know it is useful to clean my kitchen cleaned or mow my lawn? For me, it helps to do small experiments to learn the true cost. I can do chores all day and have a fabulously tidy house. Or, I can take some of that time to write blog posts like this one. Or see my friends. Or read and daydream. These all have real benefits to me, worth recognizing in how much differently I feel at the end of the day, about my day, and eventually about this accumulation of days that make a life.
I am happier of course when I take some time out from the tasks. I am more at ease, more absorbed in living, more likely to wake up happy the next day. I am not a drone powered by pre-programmed to-do lists, if I don’t want to be. I am more myself because of the circular reinforcement that I am treating myself as someone free and whose freedom and subjectivity is worth respecting.