People, Our Perception, and Objects.

By [Pseudonym] = Rick.

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 (approaching us on the street, displayed on television, anytime really) we do not consider them as an integral object. Let me try to explain further. The human body is a complete object and, like any other object, it is made up of different parts; arms, legs, stomach, head, hair, organs, skin, ect. 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; 'boobs', 'stomach', 'ass', 'hair', 'smile', or any other part that appeals to our sexuality. This occurs very often between people, clearly the species must reproduce. Even so, I think sexual objectification is just one specific instance of this issue.

I have made a pretty impenetrable and abstract argument out of something obvious and natural, so I feel like I should now back off a bit. So far, I've been mainly concerned with perceptive issues concerning “passer-by” interactions. I admit that interactions with people are far more complicated and intricate than I have made it out to be. That being said, 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. I realize that 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 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.

The problems begin when we equate the objectified body to the person's identity. What I mean is that 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, we will have missed both the entire body and the entire identity. Examples of this include the extremes of sexism and racism, but there are also times we do this that seem far less harmless, and yet are just as dehumanizing. There is no instance when it would be advisable or virtuous to consider another person as an object, even if it is an object that is a part of their autonomous identity.

I'll leave you with the details. Consider you're own interactions with others, keeping your attention open to the possibilities I have mentioned. Further more, don't limit you're observations to the way in which you treat people you don't know. Look at how you treat you're friends and general acquaintances as well. There is the danger of our minds enacting the same mechanisms to people's identities as we do to their bodies: breaking them up into manageable objects.

[pseudonym] want you to write with questions and comments: [Email]