What is an object. A few philosophical remarks

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:43

In philosophy, the concept of an object was finally formed only by the middle of the 4th century BC, in the classical era of Plato and Aristotle. Prior to this, numerous philosophical studies concerned mainly the explanation of cosmological and ethical issues. The problems of cognition of the surrounding world were not particularly touched upon. Interestingly, before the birth of Plato's ideal world, none of the Greek sages shared the world in which a person lives and the individual perception of this world. In other words, the surrounding things, phenomena and actions of people in the pre-Platonic era were not "external" in relation to the philosophizing ancient observer. Accordingly, neither object nor subject existed for him - in the epistemological, metaphysical or ethical meaning of these concepts.

Plato made a mental revolution when he managed to demonstrate that in fact three worlds independent of each other coexist: the world of things, the world of ideas and the world of ideas aboutthings and ideas. This approach forced us to consider the usual cosmological hypotheses in a different way. Instead of determining the primary source of life, a description of the world around us and an explanation of how we perceive this world come to the fore. Accordingly, there is a need to explain what an object is. And also what is his perception. According to Plato, the object is what a person's gaze is directed to, that is, "external" in relation to the observer. The individual perception of the object was taken as the subject. From here it was concluded that two different people can have opposite views on the object, and therefore the outside world (objects of the world) are perceived subjectively. Objective, or ideal, can only be the world of ideas.

Aristotle, in turn, introduces the principle of variability. This approach is fundamentally different from Platonic. When determining what an object is, it turned out that the world of substances (things) is divided, as it were, into two components: form and matter. Moreover, “matter” was understood only physically, that is, it was described exclusively through empirical experience, while the form was endowed with metaphysical properties and related exclusively to the problems of epistemology (theory of knowledge). In this respect, the object was the physical world and its description.

Such a dual understanding of the object - physical and metaphysical - did not change over the next two millennia. Only the accents of perception have changed. Take, for example, the medieval Christian mentality. The world is heremanifestation of the will of God. The question of what an object is was not raised at all: only God could have an objective view, and people, due to their imperfection, had only subjective positions. Therefore, material reality, even if it was recognized as such (Francis Bacon), still turned out to be subjective, disintegrating into separate, autonomous from each other, substances. The concept of an object was born later, in modern times and the era of classicism, when the surrounding reality was no longer perceived solely as an object of philosophizing. The world has become objective for rapidly developing science.

Today the question "What is an object?" is more methodological than philosophical. An object is usually understood as a field of study - and it can be either an object or a thing, or a separate property of it, or even an abstract understanding of this property. Another thing is that the object is often described from a subjective standpoint, especially when determining the essence of new phenomena. By the way, think: interactive communities and Internet networks - what is the object in this case, and what is the subject?

And in this sense it is understandable: the question of what an object is, comes down solely to the problem of scientific legitimacy. If the proposed concept or theory is accepted, then we can witness the birth of a new object. Or, conversely, deobjectivization of a thing or phenomenon. Everything is relative in this world.