Object

An object in this framework is the same kind of thing as a person, which is what the definition accomplishes by identifying it with an animus. An energy cluster held together by a dominant will describes a rock, a person and a nation equally, and the last clause, perceived as individuated, marks the separateness as a perception rather than a fact about the cluster. A will has to be exerted to bind a macroscopic object together, and that will need not be under conscious or emotional control, which is how a rock can be. What this rules out is the subject and object relation as a description of reality. Subjects and objects are a very particular feature of endoreality, and in an exosocial world an interaction with a thing is a two-way euphoric interaction rather than a subject regarding an object, which is why a home can fill someone with euphoria and why an instrument that belonged to a loved person is interacted with rather than used. Marsh reads Hegel's account as a description of the endosocial case, since the endo-ideal became a subject through reflection by another while the reflectors and negative image became objects. Objects also carry anima, so a euphoric object may produce euphoria in those linked to it, apathy in those with no connection and terror in enemies. The endoself relation to objects is the failure case. An endoself cannot enjoy an object they do not possess, and may covet a neighbour's couch and hate it until they own it.

Object-oriented ontology, particularly Graham Harman's, holds that objects exist independently of human perception and are not exhausted by their relations, and actor-network theory grants agency to non-human actants. Both refuse the subject and object hierarchy Marsh refuses. Buber's I-Thou against I-It makes the same distinction phenomenologically. Physics has its own long argument about whether macroscopic objects are fundamental or emergent. Marsh's version is unusual in supplying a criterion that unifies persons and things, since an animus held together by a dominant will covers both without analogy, and in making individuation something perceived rather than something the cluster possesses.