objects beyond the subject

A great post from Thomas McDonald on thinking about objects beyond Descartes' subject-object split from the Dialog-net list:

In the modern tradition duality is considered as the impasse between a thing as it appears in relation to the thinking I and a thing as it must be in and of itself. In Being and Time Heidegger seeks a way out of the modern subject-object split by developing a way of thinking 'beneath' the high-falutin ego constructs of the philosophy of the subjects.

His turn is very much in the spirit of Aristotle who, after Plato's interpretation of beings as having their true being in Ideas, seeks to return to the beings themselves to engage them again in a felt, concrete way.

First he needs to deflate the modern egocentric conception of thinking developed from Descarte to Kant and Hegel. This is done by understanding the act of questioning in the most fundamental sense of intention, as arising from the simplest, immediate sense of 'being there', which must be 'something' prior to modern concepts of 'the mind' or any culturally-historically acquired logocentric interpretations we may begin to place upon this sense. By doing this
Heidegger hopes to bring modern thining back to an object-oriented approach which engages with beings themselves and not merely with concepts.

However, with this move, Heidegger has already unearthed a new duality. A difference between the sense of the being there understood as a fixed presence and the sense of the being there understood as something prior, something accessed in a way without the need of explicit thought. This is the 'al-ready-to-hand' of beings, their way of being already involved with each other prior to their getting rendered by a modern thinker as conceptualized presences with shared linguistic meanings. What Heidegger has essentially uncovered is that beneath the skeptical dualism of modern egocentricities, there is a deeper way of thinking of beings. The contexture of reference between beings is not merely a conceptualized relation of 'presences' by the human mind but is rather the unthought totality of involvement of beings with each other in the very 'worlding' of what appears conceptually as 'world' to human Da-sein. The equipmental totality of reference is the acting of formal bodies upon each other in a universe of composing, decomposing, and recomposing seemingly without the need of thinking to call them present.

I suspect there's a way forward, to get past the problems of reification in software.