Comment by DiscourseFan

Subject and object are originally grammatical terms, though. In Sanskrit grammar, there is no “Subject” or “Object,” there is the “Kartr” and “Karman,” the “thing doing the action” and the “thing being acted upon,” and this goes along with the distinction between “Akarmaka” and “Sakarmaka” verbs, those that are “without (transitive) action” and those that are “with (transitive) action.” This means that there are sometimes cases where, because the grammar is not restricted by a subject agreeing with an object, there are clauses without a “subject” (Kartr), because the intransitive verb is agreeing with an “object” that is not taking a subject or rather the subject is “abstractly implied” (hence the name, “Bhave Prayoga” or “Abstract Construction”). This is only possible because Sanskrit Grammar is based on a logic of action rather than one of internal/external, subject/object difference.

In a scientific world where we have already acknowledged that perception itself can change the quality of the objects observed, that the obsever himself stands within an economy of the material he is observing, why is there an insistence here on a strong subject/object distinction? I think this is only because of a misunderstanding of “oriental” philosophy against “western” philosophy. But there is a reason Oppenheimer qoutes the Bhagavad Gita, it wasn’t arbitrary—if you read the text yourself, you will find the distillation of the grammatical principles above as an ontology.

In the Gita, there is a “detached,” method of accessing being, but it is moreso reccomended for those who are not capable of living in the world, whose Dharma is not to live a life of activity. As Krishna tell Arjuna, nobody cannot avoid acting at any moment, the world is composed of myriads of actions and reactions, the results of which we cannot ever fully know and should live at a remove from. This would be an embrace of an “objective” universe, an unpredictable universe, a universe full of movement and energy—far more objective, I would say, far more immersed in the object, than any “subjective” understanding could possibly fulfill. But here there are no subjects, there are no objects, there are only, as Latour might’ve said (though he abandoned it later), actors and actants, there is only activity.