EDIT: People, Our Perceptions, and Objects

Our interactions with people are the most important part of living. Spanning the gamut from love to hatred, almost every emotion we have must be directed towards a social interaction. Indeed, I could imagine arguing for the position that all of our identity is composed in relation to our interactions with other identities. The mechanics of this process seem very natural and obvious. Upon further investigation, however, it seems that the mechanisms involve dramatic and disconcerting perceptive elements that have far reaching effects towards social and personal norms. In other words, the way we see other people has an effect on how we interact with them.

Consider the words printed on this paper. You do not realize that every word you read is a combination of letters and punctuation. You simply recognize series of symbols that you have been trained to ascribe meaning to. The mental process by which you are creating an integrated and coherent meaning are the same for almost everything else. When you see a car,you do not, at first, recognize the wheels, door handles, or taillights. What you're brain recognizes is “that's a car”. It takes no consideration of the objects that add up to the perceived mental translation.

It seems that, in our initial interactions with other people, we do the exact opposite. When we see another person we do not consider them as an integral object. To elaborate, the human body is a complete object and, like any other object, it is made up of different parts. But unlike other objects (the car, for example), we do not recognize the entirety of the body as the perceived mental realization at the expense of the details, we instead realize the details at the expense of the entirety. We 'objectify' the parts in lieu of the whole.

This is easily pointed out in regards to sexual assessment. We don't asses the sexual attractiveness of someone as a complete body-object. We instead focus on details and aspects; any part that appeals to our sexuality. This occurs very often between people. Clearly, the species must reproduce. Even so, sexual objectification is just one specific instance of this issue.

So far, I've been mainly concerned with perceptive issues concerning “passer-by” interactions. The issue that I have brought up, although subtle, is important to the way in which we integrate people's bodies together with their over-all identities. Recognizing a friend, for example, has a much deeper perceptive impact than recognizing a foreign identity whom you don't know personally. In the former case, we recognize a person much like a word or a sentence. We don't consider the details of their face, we simply see, "a friend". So it seems that we move on from initially breaking apart people's bodies to fully accepting the integrity of their bodies and recognize their bodies as having an ascribed meaning: their identity.

Some problems can begin right at this point. We may equate the objectified body to the person's identity. There are instances when we never move beyond the aspects of a persons body, even when we begin to know their personal identities. We assume that they ARE the object we are focusing on. In these cases it is clear that we have marginalized both the body and the identity; two united conceptions that pivot on a single fulcrum of perception. In other words, we will fail to perceive both the entire body and the entire identity. Examples of this include sexism and racism.

Finally, we move to the most pervasive of these problems; objectifying the identity. It maybe that, for the most part, we keep our minds open to other bodies. But there is still the danger of objectification even after one has arrived at the point of recognition. In these cases, we limit our perceptions of others into a functional criteria that pivots on our own identity. Examples of this most notably include the specialization of the term 'friend'(classmate, work-friend, teammate). Whenever you limit someone to a boundary, you cease to accept their integrity, their wholeness.

Consider your own relationships. Keep your mind open to what I have mentioned.