Do people develop personal relationships with their cars because cars appear to have faces? The urge to anthropomorphise in this way seems fairly independent of our rational faculties as in the case of this academic friend of mine who posted a lament for his car on facebook.

It’s a mass-produced object that has acquired an individual soul from its experience in a particular family. But is the car a reciprocal agent in this transaction or just a passive bearer of human projections? Are our human relationships similar in kind or different from relationships with objects? I lean towards the latter conclusion, and think what this facebook poster expressed was a sentimental attachment to a part of his identity that was about to change, namely his car. He also felt like he was letting his old self down in some way, because of circumstances beyond his control that made him have to replace his car. There’s a curious indistinction between self and world here.

I don’t like the reductionistic perspective that says people and things are fundamentally alike and that cars have subjectivity that’s not different in kind from human subjectivity. I also don’t like the equal and opposite reductionism that says our subjectivity as humans occludes the reality of all other people and things, and makes them screens for our own projections. However, as this facebook post suggests, there are objects in the psyche that operate independently of our conscious intention, whose purpose is not to flatter us, and that seem to have at least as much autonomy as whatever the car might be as a thing in itself.

The metaphysical question about the thing in itself and the psychological question about why it has meaning for us are bound up in a little package here that I’m still trying to unwrap, currently with the help of Jung’s Alchemical Studies, but I’ll leave that discussion for another day.