Say, rather, that it is a toy theatre, much like the one above. We should picture a child making it, putting the various players on stage (or in the wings, ready to make their entrances), preparing backdrops for the changes of scene, so that all seems ready to begin–

but there is a problem.

The child looms gigantically over the tiny theatre and the little cut-out figures  – how is she to relate to them? she is much too large for their little world. With a child’s ingenuity, she solves it – taking a spare piece of card, she cuts out another figure and colours it in, setting it down before the stage, an ideal spectator.

‘That’s me,’ she says.

The Platonic-Aristotelian worldview – the standard Western model still in use today – has a similar flaw: our actual experience is of being in the world and responding to it emotionally as it is made known to us by our senses, but the Platonic worldview is expressly designed to exclude the testimony of the senses (as unreliable), and with it, the Subject.

Instead, the world must be apprehended intellectually as a transcendent reality of unchanging forms or ideas of which the myriad variety we experience by our senses are mere instances – or, put more simply, we should view the world in general terms, through language, setting aside the specific detail.

But where do we, as experiencing subjects, fit in?

The short answer is that we do not: instead, we project ourselves into the model, as the child puts her representation into the theatre, but in doing so we cease to be Subjects and become objectified along with the rest of the model, ideal spectators, the passive observers of an independent reality that exists whether we are there or not.

The place of the Subject (what each of us experiences from moment to moment) is taken in the Platonic model by the general idea of an onlooker, whose role is passive apprehension.