Blatter: subject-object schema

The main thrust of division I of Being and Time   is that the philosophical tradition   has misunderstood human experience by imposing a subject-object schema upon it. The individual human being has traditionally been understood as a rational animal, that is, an animal with cognitive powers, in particular the power to represent the world around it. The relationship between the cognitive powers of mind and the physical seat of the mind in the brain is, of course, a vexed issue (the so-called Mind-Body Problem), but whatever position one takes on that issue, the notion that human beings are persons and that persons are centers of subjective experience has been broadly accepted. If left rather vague there is no harm in such a way of talking about our experience. Where the tradition has gone wrong is that it has interpreted subjectivity in a specific way, by means of concepts of “inner” and “outer,” “representation” and “object.” (p. 8)