A subject is a being who has a unique consciousness
and/or unique personal experiences, or an
entity that has a relationship with another
entity that exists outside itself (called
an "object").
A subject is an observer and an object is
a thing observed. This concept is especially
important in Continental philosophy, where
'the subject' is a central term in debates
over the nature of the self. The nature of
the subject is also central in debates over
the nature of subjective experience within
the Anglo-American tradition of analytical
philosophy.
The sharp distinction between subject and
object corresponds to the distinction, in
the philosophy of René Descartes, between
thought and extension. Descartes believed
that thought (subjectivity) was the essence
of the mind, and that extension (the occupation
of space) was the essence of matter.
== German idealism ==
Subject as a key-term in thinking about human
consciousness began its career with the German
Idealists, in response to David Hume's radical
skepticism. The idealists' starting point
was Hume's conclusion that there is nothing
to the self over and above a big, fleeting
bundle of perceptions. The next step was to
ask how this undifferentiated bundle comes
to be experienced as a unity – as a single
subject. Hume had offered the following proposal:
"...the imagination must by long custom acquire
the same method of thinking, and run along
the parts of space and time in conceiving
its objects.Kant, Hegel and their successors
sought to flesh out the process by which the
subject is constituted out of the flow of
sense impressions. Hegel, for example, stated
in his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit
that a subject is constituted by "the process
of reflectively mediating itself with itself."Hegel
begins his definition of the subject at a
standpoint derived from Aristotelian physics:
"the unmoved which is also self-moving" (Preface,
para. 22). That is, what is not moved by an
outside force, but which propels itself, has
a prima facie case for subjectivity. Hegel's
next step, however, is to identify this power
to move, this unrest that is the subject,
as pure negativity. Subjective self-motion,
for Hegel, comes not from any pure or simple
kernel of authentic individuality, but rather,
it is
"...the bifurcation of the simple; it is the
doubling which sets up opposition, and then
again the negation of this indifferent diversity
and of its anti-thesis" (Preface, para. 18).The
Hegelian subject's modus operandi is therefore
cutting, splitting and introducing distinctions
by injecting negation into the flow of sense-perceptions.
Subjectivity is thus a kind of structural
effect – what happens when Nature is diffused,
refracted around a field of negativity and
the "unity of the subject" for Hegel, is in
fact a second-order effect, a "negation of
negation". The subject experiences itself
as a unity only by purposively negating the
very diversity it itself had produced. The
Hegelian subject may therefore be characterized
either as "self-restoring sameness" or else
as "reflection in otherness within itself"
(Preface, para. 18).
== Continental philosophy ==
The thinking of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud
provided a point of departure for questioning
the notion of a unitary, autonomous Subject,
which for many thinkers in the Continental
tradition is seen as the foundation of the
liberal theory of the social contract. These
thinkers opened up the way for the deconstruction
of the subject as a core-concept of metaphysics.
Sigmund Freud's explorations of the unconscious
mind added up to a wholesale indictment of
Enlightenment notions of subjectivity.
Among the most radical re-thinkers of human
self-consciousness was Martin Heidegger, whose
concept of Dasein or "Being-there" displaces
traditional notions of the personal subject
altogether. With Heidegger, phenomenology
tries to go beyond the classical dichotomy
between subject and object, because they are
linked by an inseparable and original relationship,
in the sense that there can be no world without
a subject, nor the subject without world.Jacques
Lacan, inspired by Heidegger and Ferdinand
de Saussure, built on Freud's psychoanalytic
model of the subject, in which the "split
subject" is constituted by a double bind:
alienated from jouissance when he or she leaves
the Real, enters into the Imaginary (during
the mirror stage), and separates from the
Other when he or she comes into the realm
of language, difference, and demand in the
Symbolic or the Name of the Father.Thinkers
such as structural Marxist Louis Althusser
and poststructuralist Michel Foucault theorize
the subject as a social construction, the
so-called poststructuralist subject. According
to Althusser, the "subject" is an ideological
construction (more exactly, constructed by
the "Ideological State Apparatuses"). One's
subjectivity exists, "always already" and
is discovered through the process of interpellation.
Ideology inaugurates one into being a subject,
and every ideology is intended to maintain
and glorify its idealized subject, as well
as the metaphysical category of the subject
itself (see antihumanism).
According to Foucault, it is the "effect"
of power and "disciplines" (see Discipline
and Punish: construction of the subject (subjectivation
or subjectification, French: assujettissement)
as student, soldier, "criminal", etc.). Foucault
believed it was possible to transform oneself;
he used the word ethopoiein from the word
ethos to describe the process. Subjectification
was a central concept in Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari's work as well.
== Analytic philosophy ==
In contemporary analytic philosophy, the issue
of subject—and more specifically the "point
of view" of the subject, or "subjectivity"—has
received attention as one of the major intractable
problems in philosophy of mind (a related
issue being the mind–body problem). In the
essay "What is it like to be a bat?", Thomas
Nagel famously argued that explaining subjective
experience—the "what it is like" to be something—is
currently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry,
because scientific understanding by definition
requires an objective perspective, which,
according to Nagel, is diametrically opposed
to the subjective first-person point of view.
Furthermore, one cannot have a definition
of objectivity without being connected to
subjectivity in the first place since they
are mutual and interlocked.
In Nagel's book The View From Nowhere, he
asks: "What kind of fact is it that I am Thomas
Nagel?". Subjects have a perspective but each
subject has a unique perspective and this
seems to be a fact in Nagel's view from nowhere
(i.e. the birds-eye view of the objective
description in the universe). The Indian view
of "Brahman" suggests that the ultimate and
fundamental subject is existence itself, through
which each of us as it were "looks out" as
an aspect of a frozen and timeless everything,
experienced subjectively due to our separated
sensory and memory apparati. These additional
features of subjective experience are often
referred to as qualia (see Frank Cameron Jackson
and Mary's room).
== See also ==
=== Philosophers ===
Rudolf Carnap
René Descartes
Edmund Husserl
David Hume
C. L. Stevenson
Søren Kierkegaard
Daniel Kolak
== Notes ==
== Bibliography ==
Butler, Judith (1987), Subjects of Desire:
Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century
France, New York: Columbia University Press,
ISBN 0-231-06450-0
Alain de Libera, "When Did the Modern Subject
Emerge?", American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2, 2008, pp. 181–220.
Robert B. Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity.
On the Kantian Aftermath, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject. Self-Consciousness
and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
== External links ==
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