  In order to understand why Heidegger thinks the aesthetic approach to art reflects and reinforces subjectivism, we need to know why Heidegger characterizes humanity’s ongoing attempt to master every aspect of our objective reality as “subjectivism” in the first  place.[20] We saw earlier that in the modern, post-Cartesian world, an “object” (Gegen-stand), is something that “stands opposite” a human subject, something which is “external” to the subjective sphere. This subject/object dichotomy seems obvious when one is theorizing from within the modern tradition, in which it has functioned as an axiom since Descartes famously argued that the subject’s access to its own thinking possesses an indubitable immediacy not shared by our access to objects, which must thus be conceived of as external to subjectivity.