What can it mean for events to happen to a chair or a rock or a tree? Well, science certainly conceives of a universe of purely physical things that events happen to. The chair falls over, the rock heats up, and the tree dies. There is even a long history of events that happened to these nonconscious things that exists somehow. But in what sense?
The phenomenal being of a purely objective being like a chair or a rock or a tree is utter blankness. There is no passivity there to react or respond to its environment in any way. Think about being a chair. All blankness inside, with no possibility of being the subject of some happening. But the events must therefore be objective in themselves, existing somehow in time without the need for passive experients. This is the concept of objective time.
So to save itself from panexperientialism, in which all things are subjects as well as objects, the events of time are conceived by science to occur and persist on their own as objective facts in themselves. The whole history of what has happened in the universe must somehow still exist, perhaps stored in the interstices of space itself. Not just a recording of the past even, but the past as it actually and eternally IS.
But I still have trouble imagining a past of events still existing FOR a chair or a rock or a tree. Do we not even refer to these things as subjects by calling them "it" or "they"? "The rocks fell in the avalanche and THEY piled up at the bottom of the hill." Yes, we assume subjectivity in even nonconscious things. This is how events can happen to them and remain attached to them as histories. There can be no pure object to which events happen and to which the past persists or even to which a future of possibilities can be said to exist. There MUST be some rudimentary subjectivity there by which that object can be said to have undergone some process or passage of time. A purely objective entity would be totally isolated from the universe, incapable of interacting with anything around it. To be is to be a subject, capable of having events happen to you in time and space.
Anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote:
"We touched on the vital dualism of experience- the fact that all objects have both an inside and an outside- and we promised to talk about it at more length. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe, that has intrigued man since remotest times. It is the basis of the belief in souls and spirits. Man discovered it and elaborated it because of his own self-reflexivity, the real and apparent contradiction between the inside of his body - his thoughts and feelings, and the outside. But theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner, known as one of the fathers of psychophysics or experimental psychology, wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter - something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? If you take a slow motion film you can see this happening. We don't know what is going on inside it, but it must register some internal reaction to experience. At the bottom of the scale, the objects with least interiority would be rocks; probably they would have no more inner life than the idling of their atomic structures, but in these, as physicists have taught us, there is anything but repose.
These are hardly new or startling thoughts, but they help us to introduce the problem of man's distinctive interiority. When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature, of creation as having both an inside and an outside, is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors- physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private secret self. We are in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body..."=="The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.
The phenomenal being of a purely objective being like a chair or a rock or a tree is utter blankness. There is no passivity there to react or respond to its environment in any way. Think about being a chair. All blankness inside, with no possibility of being the subject of some happening. But the events must therefore be objective in themselves, existing somehow in time without the need for passive experients. This is the concept of objective time.
So to save itself from panexperientialism, in which all things are subjects as well as objects, the events of time are conceived by science to occur and persist on their own as objective facts in themselves. The whole history of what has happened in the universe must somehow still exist, perhaps stored in the interstices of space itself. Not just a recording of the past even, but the past as it actually and eternally IS.
But I still have trouble imagining a past of events still existing FOR a chair or a rock or a tree. Do we not even refer to these things as subjects by calling them "it" or "they"? "The rocks fell in the avalanche and THEY piled up at the bottom of the hill." Yes, we assume subjectivity in even nonconscious things. This is how events can happen to them and remain attached to them as histories. There can be no pure object to which events happen and to which the past persists or even to which a future of possibilities can be said to exist. There MUST be some rudimentary subjectivity there by which that object can be said to have undergone some process or passage of time. A purely objective entity would be totally isolated from the universe, incapable of interacting with anything around it. To be is to be a subject, capable of having events happen to you in time and space.
Anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote:
"We touched on the vital dualism of experience- the fact that all objects have both an inside and an outside- and we promised to talk about it at more length. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe, that has intrigued man since remotest times. It is the basis of the belief in souls and spirits. Man discovered it and elaborated it because of his own self-reflexivity, the real and apparent contradiction between the inside of his body - his thoughts and feelings, and the outside. But theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner, known as one of the fathers of psychophysics or experimental psychology, wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter - something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? If you take a slow motion film you can see this happening. We don't know what is going on inside it, but it must register some internal reaction to experience. At the bottom of the scale, the objects with least interiority would be rocks; probably they would have no more inner life than the idling of their atomic structures, but in these, as physicists have taught us, there is anything but repose.
These are hardly new or startling thoughts, but they help us to introduce the problem of man's distinctive interiority. When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature, of creation as having both an inside and an outside, is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors- physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private secret self. We are in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body..."=="The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.