The subject as user..

[Magical Realist]

All too often we define the self or subject solely as a passive experient of its perceptions of its world. Thus the subject takes on the quality of an infinitely vaccuous void absorbing information from its environment. We feel disembodied and external to physical reality.

But lets not forget that the subject is also actively engaged with the world as a user. It uses the objects and systems of its domain to extend its intent into the world.

The subject then as both passive experient as well as active agent. We transcend passive conscious being by acting upon the realm of objective and useable being. We do this by using the apparati of being in the world as a means of achieving our purposes.

We exist objectively as bodies because we utilize and act upon physical things "ready at hand" to us. We exist to the extent that we are always already pre-engaged with the events that surround us. At every moment we are already caught up in the goings-on of our world. Heidegger called this "equipmental comportment". Sartre alluded to it with the motto: "Existence precedes essence." Only intermittantly, when we pause from this engagement and seem alienated from the world, do we assume the semblance of a totally passive and free-floating percipient.

[C C]

[...] We exist objectively as bodies because we utilize and act upon physical things "ready at hand" to us. We exist to the extent that we are always already pre-engaged with the events that surround us. At every moment we are already caught up in the goings-on of our world. [...]

Leibniz was one of the few thinkers to wonder how any kind of interaction was actually possible. So much so that he had the internal experiences of his monads synchronized with each other, so that it only appeared that they were spatially and reciprocally connected, rather than that externally being the case. 

The materialists of his era depicted bits of matter as solid, puzzle-like pieces that could interlock with each other. But it was gradually realized that even a proposed "solid substance" offered no explanation of why it was impenetrable to begin with. That prompted a trend toward re-conceiving the situation as consisting of attractive and repulsive forces or agencies (occurring maybe in some fluid-like or field-like medium). But that in turn was just passing the buck on to something else: The attractive and repulsive responses simply boiled down to brutely happening in predictable ways, like reliable magic. Or as if _X_ was aware of _Y_ and how it was supposed to react in _Z_ situation.