Subjectivity.

“Who am I?”
As i flipped through the first few pages, these words caught my sight, dragging me back to the unfathomable accounts of epiphanic moments where i questioned this to my aware self. Who am I really?
We live in an era in which we are commonly asked to rethink, express, and explain our identities by a wide variety of authority figures and institutions. We are widely led to believe that we have the freedom and ability to create and re-create our “selves” at will, if we have the will, but at the same time are presented with a suspiciously narrow range of options and avenues that will allow us to fit comfortably into society and our particular gendered, religional, ethnic, sexual subset of it.
Half an hour and i was already through few pages of the chapter.
Donald E. Hall’ book on Subjectivity talks about self in a very subjective sense.

“If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

To understand subjectivity, we need to look at the objective and subjective.
The words objective and subjective comes from ‘object’ and ‘subject’. An object is something that exists independent of our perception of it. Something which is there, metaphysical, real and existing.
If you believe that sound is objective, then you think that a tree falling in the woods make a sound even if no one hears it.
Whereas, a subject is something that could form opinions, observes. It means that it is our perception of the particular object that gives it particular properties.
If you believe that sound is subjective, that the idea of making a sound was only something that we as subject invented, then you would think that if no one heard the tree falling in the woods, it would not make a sound.