§ 15 Using things well
With regard to the question “how should that which has been objectified be used well?”, we come to speak about worthiness and the critical instrumentalisation of that which is thought to be understood.1
Our analysis of things objectifies them.
To objectify a human being is full of risk. The story goes that the objective analysis of a human being can lead to using such a human being as an enslaved person. How does this work?
I do not know how it works. In fact, I suspect it cannot work that way, and that the way we speak about such things stems from a lack of clarity about the issue.
The objective analysis of human doings is just that: treating a human being like an object for the purpose of understanding how a human being, or any (intentional) doing of a human being, forms a whole of working parts.
To subject someone to my will or to reduce a human being to bondage, more needs to be done.
The bonding, employment or enslavement of a person entails various forms of subjectification.
A person is thereby, either willingly or unwillingly, subjected to the will of another.
To reduce someone to bondage or employment, a person has to set themselves up as a leader or master and subject the population, employee or enslaved person to their will, indeed in the same way that a craftsman or a machine operator, or indeed as an owner of animals subjects the tools, machines and their livestock to their own will.
Naturally, the conditions under which an employee is subjected to an institution by contractual agreement are very different to the conditions under which an enslaved person is subjected to a master.
Nevertheless, both involve relationships of power.
Since Hegel’s famous passage on the master-slave relationship and the way that Marx and Engels took this to the next level, much has been made of the objectifying and subjectifying tendencies in human relationships.
Frantz Fanon, following on from Sartre, blamed the objectification of men and women for their instrumentalisation.2
The existentialists were not prepared for a human being to be treated like an object. And indeed, it sounds somewhat offensive to say, ‘They treat me like an object’.
For what it is worth, I shall argue that to reduce a person to a slave and to set yourself up as master are, when taken together, acts of extreme subjectification whereby an analytical understanding of the working of a relationship is not reciprocally balanced with a wise or sympathetic critical instrumentalisation of that understanding.
To relegate a person to a status of inferiority and to treat them as a standing reserve to be ordered about and thereby to set yourself up as superior, worthy of doing the ordering, nevertheless demands a critical stance: we, after all, subject things to our use.
For Hegel, the master emerged in the fact that the master is fearless, that their identity is not dependent upon their life, but on transcendent concepts such as honour, leadership, strength, and courage.
The bondsman or enslaved person, fearing death and fearing pain, loses the battle unto death and subjects themselves to the master, finding a role in the production of goods for the master.
At this moment, a curious reversal appears to happen.
In the production of goods, the servant/bondsman/slave discovers a way to self-mastery; they find a way to find themselves.
The master, on the other hand, being a master only on the condition of being recognised as such, seeks recognition but can find it only in their inferior, which they cannot decently recognise as an authority.
After all, to be dependent upon an enslaved person for recognition sets the master up as a servant of his slave.
The dialectic of the master-slave relationship can continue in various directions, with all options open to artistic, technological, philosophical, and religious exploration, ranging from cruelty and autocracy to various regulated forms such as democracy and so forth.
“Humanity”, writes Hegel in a later text, “has not liberated itself from servitude but by servitude.”3 Never a truer word was said. The ideal of a ruler is, in fact, to be a servant to their people. Good masters become good when they no longer have a problem being servants to their servants, acknowledging their responsibility as leaders.
Service, as in the proper instrumentalisation of individuals to the benefit of society, is liberating, just as the aspirations of, conformance to, and the servicing of fair law-making and enforcing are liberating.
As such, reform in society is an affair of constantly recalibrating our understanding of the way things work, ethically, aesthetically and alethically, to the critical stance by which we instrumentalise everything about us, including ourselves.
But the secret to this instrumentalisation lies in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, in which he advises people never to treat any other person as a mere means.
I would add to that, never treat anything as a mere means. For something to flourish as a means, it has to be seen as an end in itself, something capable of flourishing.
Good use requires us to constantly consider and maintain the precarious balance between means and ends.
Only flourishing is an end in itself for each entity that uses and is used in some way.
Every other end is also a means, and every means has its own end. For a thing to flourish, it must provide a means to perform within its environment in such a way that it can do what it is capable of, restrained only by the notion of the good, which, in societal terms, also means being restrained by notions of fairness and justice (at least in my book).
To serve oneself and one’s environment well and to be served well by oneself and one’s environment, that is the reciprocal balance we ought to seek.
The symmetry of serving and being served needs to be the constant object of correcting tendencies toward the asymmetries that emerge in the standoff between fear and fearlessness, competence and incompetence, knowledge and ignorance, work and rest, intellectual labour and manual labour, and so forth.
And this is done by aligning our analytical understanding with a critical matching of ends and means, and finding the reciprocal balance between the two.
The point is this: instrumentalisation is not in itself a reason to treat instruments badly.
In fact, everyone knows that treating machines and other instruments or tools badly stops them from working.
Good use is a well-balanced team-spirited working together of analytical understanding and critical instrumentalisation, matching ends and means for the benefit of all and everything.
Those craftsmen and machine operators who treat their machines well see them live long, fruitful lives; in fact, they often see the tools and machines outlive their useful lives, so that they can be retired with dignity as museum pieces or useful for recycling.
To be of use is no sin per sé. Personally, I love being of use to my students, my friends and family, my colleagues, and people lost in the city. Being an instrument is in itself not a problem; being an object is not a problem.
The problem is being treated badly and treating others and things badly. And the problem becomes worrisome when that bad treatment is systemic.
As such, where the enslaved person and the master polarise into hierarchical roles, something has gone amiss in the balance between analytical understanding and critical instrumentalisation.
We have to re-subjectify our understanding of the world in use.4 And do so with care and love.
© Jacob Voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, TU/e (2024) For the concept of worthiness I follow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia translated by Robert Hurley (Penguin Classics 2009, originally published 1972) about ethics being about worthiness ↩︎
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks translated by C.L. Markmann (Pluto Press 1986) originally published in 1952. ↩︎
- Philosophie der Weltgeschiche, pag.875, Lasson Edition, Leipzig 1917-20, (“Es ist die Menschheit nicht sowohl aus der Knechtschaft befreit worden, als vielmehr durch die Knechtschaft”. ↩︎
- Martin Buber and Daniel Dennett each argue in their own way that it makes sense to think of things as beings, as living and thinking subjects (if only by proxy) because that makes it easier to grasp their behaviour when we look at that behaviour with reference to some purpose. See Martin Buber, Ik En Jij (Bijleveld 1998); Daniel C Dennett, “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works”, (1981); Margit van Schaik and Jacob Voorthuis, “The Relevance of Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance to the Design Process” (unpublished, 2016).] ↩︎