We will do best to start out with a treatment of the idea in question as it occurs in everyday parlance. Subjectivity is generally seen as something to overcome, something to rise out of. Objectivity, subjectivity’s opposite, is the proclaimed goal of newspaper editors, jury members, laboratory scientists, and parents wishing to resolve disputes between screeching siblings with inflated senses of entitlement. The objective, in short, is the way the world actually is, while the subjective is only the way it seems to you, because you have a limited grasp of what is really going on, because your sense organs and memory mislead you, because you have a vested interest in the world’s being a certain way that prevents you from seeing that it is in fact otherwise.
But what would a truly objective apprehension of the world be like? This writer has only ever seen the world from various perspectives. No matter how hard he strives to pay attention to the results of scientific inquiry, to read impartial media, and to compensate for the dimness of his senses by comparing what they tell him with what other more reliable instruments like thermometers and telescopes report, he still brings his particular, inescapable, and often quirky perspective with him to everything he perceives or thinks. He’s never enjoyed what Thomas Nagel (1937-) has called “the view from nowhere.” The recognition that there simply is no view from nowhere might easily lead one to conclude that the demand for objectivity is an unreasonable one, since one can never really arrive there. But philosophy, science, law, journalism, for better or worse, continue to try.
In the most general sense in which the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity has been employed in philosophy, the subjective is whatever is proper to the subject, whatever is internal to some self or mind. The objective is whatever is not a self or mind, but rather part of the furniture of the world experienced by selves or minds. The objective is whatever can be looked into, investigated, taken as an object before the mind. On this understanding, the body too is objective, since it is as much a part of the world as a rock or a couch is, and the self is therefore not identical to the body.
This expression of the subject/object dichotomy, while anticipated dimly in some strains of ancient philosophy, comes to be central to philosophy only in the 17th century, with René Descartes’ (1596-1650) radical separation of the world into two entirely unconnected domains of being: extended matter on the one hand, and thinking minds on the other. Prior to the early modern period, a sort of naïve realism reigned concerning the “fit” between the mind and the world. Why, after all, would thinking creatures be set loose in the world equipped only with inadequate tools to apprehend that world as it truly is? With the scientific revolution’s distinction between the qualities of the world, on the one hand, that make themselves apparent to the senses, and on the other hand the more foundational properties of the things behind these appearances —matter, figure, and motion were the most fitting candidates for this status— a gap between mind and world emerged that most of the rest of modern philosophy would seek in various ways to either bridge or deny.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) thought that the world could consist in nothing but subjects, which he identified as souls or soul-like entities analogous to the ‘I’. Descartes’ suggestion of an external world consisting in brute, passive, extended matter made no sense to him; in order for something to participate in being, he thought, it must be an active substance, and activity can only originate spontaneously from the mental or mindlike activity of monads. Thus, there is not a world of brute stuff standing over against the minds that perceive it, i.e., the subjects that take it as an object. Rather, there are just subjects, who in their mental activity give rise to a world that is consequently phenomenally experienced by these subjects themselves as a world of material stuff. Leibniz’s approach —a variety of idealism— represents one of the more promising ways of dealing with the gap between the mind and the world imposed by his early modern predecessors. There can be no such gap if everything just is mind, and objectivity is transformed into a sort of intersubjectivity.
Motivated by very different concerns than those that occupied Leibniz, later German idealists such as Gottlob Fichte (1762-1814) and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) would seek in similar ways to root experience of the ‘not-I’, or of nature, in the primordial act of free self positing. For Fichte, the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ comes only in this reiterated act of self-positing. In Schelling, the philosophy of nature and transcendental idealism (which, stemming from Kant, holds that our theoretical knowledge is limited to the systematization by a priori mental faculties of spatiotemporal appearances), are themselves just two complementary aspects of what he calls the “System of Absolute Idealism.” In this system, thought and being are a unity within the “Absolute,” which is taken as the starting point and ultimate presupposition of all knowledge. G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), similarly, would seek to bridge the gap, holding that the dichotomy between thought and being, as well as a great number of other dichotomies that had troubled earlier philosophers, could be “sublated” [aufgehoben], or overcome while still in a sense being preserved, through a dialectical development in which concepts that at one stage appear to be opposites subsquently come out as identical.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) would ridicule all the efforts of these German idealists to restore some primordial unity between the I and nature, or between subject and object, as so much story-telling driven by so much wishful thinking. For him, we are all just “existent human beings,” which, in his special sense of the term “existence,” means first and foremost that we are hopelessly cut off from eternal reality, and the finality that is advertised as coming with the systems of absolute idealism turns out to be a mere boast. For Kierkegaard, though, the inescapability of our limitedness as human beings is by no means a reason for retreat into skepticism, as it may have been for earlier thinkers such as David Hume (1711-1716). Kierkegaard agrees with the skeptics that there is no resolution for many questions through reflection alone, but insists that one can nonetheless emerge from uncertainty by an act of will. For him, certainty is a state that one attains not intellectually, by arriving at some conclusion about how the world is, but rather by making a decision motivated by passion. Kierkegaard holds, then, that the ultimate truth, the deepest truth, is subjective. We may indeed by right about something we believe about the world, e.g., we may believe that the world is round and it may in fact be round, but in some sense this “truth” does not matter, since it does not arise from inwardness or subjectivity and is hardly motivated by passions, such as faith or love, that are, for Kierkegaard, the true source of value and meaning in a human life.
If dualism had placed the self in opposition to the world, making the true subject something that is not in any way a consequence of its world-bound and embodied history, more recent theories of subjectivity plausibly maintain that subjectivity emerges as a consequence of embodiment. In other words, our coming into the world as breathing, digesting, leaking things, things which in their beginning are not yet selves in any interesting sense, fundamentally shapes the way we subsequently enter into selfhood. 20th-century theories of subjectivity, in particular psychoanalysis and some strains of feminism, have returned in a certain respect to a sort of hylomorphism about the self, according to which who a person is cannot be understood without taking into consideration what that person, through the vehicle of the body, does, and what is done to them.
This much, it may seem, should have been obvious all along. Clearly, I was desiring with my body long before I was contemplating set-theoretical paradoxes. Even now, my high-minded endeavors can easily be cut short by sudden toothaches or intestinal pains. Indeed, I may be just as absorbed in and determined by my corporeal circumstances as I was when I first started out. According to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), all of our adult relationships, which in a broad sense determine our understanding of who we are in the world, can be traced back to our early efforts to deal with some of the biologically determined limitations we experience in our effort to satisfy our infantile sexual desires. Boys and girls both desire their mother. The girl lacks the phallus necessary for the mother’s satisfaction, and so, usually, resigns herself to a passive and inferior role. The boy has it, but still finds it’s not much when compared with his father’s endowment. Seething jealousy infects the intimate family unit. And the rest of our lives, as women and men, are spent reliving these primordial experiences.
Whether this account is right in its details or not, it seems uncontroversial to maintain that our personalities emerge in large part from our early experiences. Since our lives do not, at the outset, consist in broad social networks, it seems reasonable to hold also that many of these early experiences are of the presence or absence of our parents and siblings, of eating and waste excretion, and of the reaction of our parents to these humble first things we find ourselves capable of doing.
Feminist theorists, notably Julia Kristeva (1941-) and Luce Irigaray (1932-), have expanded upon Freud’s insight that our objective existence as bodies contributes in a fundamental way to our subsequent emergence as subjects. They emphasize, in particular, the way in which early experience as women in a world in which masculinity is taken as the default way of being for humans ultimately produces a very different sort of subjectivity than the sort traditionally recognized within philosophy. In particular, some feminist theorists have argued that the identification of the true self with the faculty of reason, and the simultaneous association of reason with masculinity, has led to a distortion whereby men are seen as more fully human, and women, associated with emotion as opposed to reason, are seen as falling short of the standard or ideal of humanity. In contrast, some contend, the greater rationality of men, as well as the superiority of reason over emotion in human life, has been little more than a conceit of male philosophers, who have been driven all along not just by their sharp reasons and love of truth, but also by such mundane things as vainglory and ambition, rooted in a lust for power, while power, for its part, might be seen as a good thing to have in so far as it facilitates the satisfaction of less abstract desires, like the desire for backrubs, or for breakfast in bed, served with a smile.
The subjective perspective from which this writer has confessed to perceiving the world, then, might be thought to result not just from the fact the he is only capable of detecting sounds within a very narrow range of frequencies, and of seeing objects only within a certain very narrow range of sizes, but also by the fact that he is a he, and has for his whole life been treated as such by a society that takes this personal pronoun to reveal something very important about him. I am a man, and can’t even begin to make sense out of counterfactual thought experiments that begin: “If I were a woman, I would…” If I were a woman, I simply wouldn’t be me, and so I have no idea how to finish such a sentence. In this sense, as some in the still nascent area of queer theory have suggested, gender transformation, whether through cross-dressing or gender-reassignment surgery, is of philosophical interest precisely because it represents a willful creation of one’s own identity through manipulation of those features of one’s identity that have generally been thought to be the least open to choice.
Perhaps the bodily origins of our personalities have been obvious all along, just not to philosophers. For philosophy has, for the most part, sought to discover the deepest truth about the world and our place in it somewhere grander than in our lived, bodily experience. Perhaps the Western philosophical tradition’s true moment of origin was the Pythagorean denunciation of the body as a prison for the soul. For most of philosophy’s subsequent history, embodiment has been seen as more of a misfortune, even an embarassment, than a key to figuring out why we think what we do and why we experience the world the way we do. As Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) observe in The German Ideology, a biting critique of the grand German philosophical tradition of their day, when philosophers see a mob of scrofulous, half-starved, miserable men, they comfort themselves by interpreting these men as a mere reflection of the Idea or species, Man. But in fact, for Marx and Engels, there is nothing other than particular men (which appears to include, for them, women), and the reference to an abstract, lofty Idea beyond them is only a way of ignoring the need to relieve these particular men of their misery.
For a Marxist, consciousness must begin as consciousness of one’s immediate sensuous environment. This involves, at first, consciousness of a limited connection with people and things outside of oneself, and subsequently grows into self-consciousness as well. The differentiation of social roles comes about gradually in history through increasing human productivity and a consequent increase in needs. Eventually, the division of labor brings about a distinction between mental and physical activity, and theory emerges as something distinct from practice in the form of theology, philosophy, morality, etc. But, according to Marx and Engels, “it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own,” what matters rather is how consciousness relates to the forces of production and the state of society. In their view, German Idealism represents an extreme case of philosophy’s irrelevance, as it ignores the ultimate rootedness of all mental life in sensuous experience and in activity, most importantly, the activity of labor.
This rootedness makes the conscious existence of a person, his or her subjectivity, if you will, into a result of that person’s place in his or her society’s division of labor. Identity can only ever be class identity. In other words, just as my sense of who I am and what my place in the world is is fundamentally rooted in the fact that I perceive only objects of a certain size and hear only sounds of a certain frequency, and by the fact that I am biologically a man and am expected to act accordingly, so too is my subjectivity in great part a consequence of the fact that I’ve never had to go to a factory and get grease under my fingernails in order to keep food on the table (though I also am not an owner of the means of production, unless we count those mutual-fund shares that came with my retirement plan). While the rigid separation of the industrial world into bourgeois and proletariat no longer seems realistic, as it may have in 19th-century England, it does not seem unreasonable to contend that who I am has a good to deal to do with whether I am exploited or rather a beneficiary of exploitation.
Other distinctions than Marx’s two classes have emerged to describe some of the more salient fault lines in contemporary global society, notably the distinction between center and periphery made by some scholars in the field of post-colonial studies. One might, of course, raise the objection that the bourgeois/proletarian, masculine/feminine, center/periphery dichotomies all bear a suspicious outward similarity to the dualism of subject and object or of mind and world these were initially contrived to overcome. In all of these, there is something beyond oneself that serves to set out the limits of who one is. Even liberal democratic theory, which purports to a thoroughgoing all-inclusiveness, still has something outside of it against which its advocates are able to define themselves, namely, those who reject liberal democracy and refuse to participate in it, fundamentalist theocrats, for example. As some anthropologists have argued, oppositional thinking may just be the only way we know how to approach the world. Long before there was the subject/object dichotomy in philosophy, there were right/left, clean/unclean, sacred/profane. Many other animals, evidently, maneuver through the world with the help of the friend/foe opposition. A large part of what it’s like to be a bat, to speculate on a notoriously difficult question, must involve the opposition between solid surface and open space ahead, revealed by echolocation, by means of which the bat manages to orient itself in space.
We humans need to orient ourselves not just in physical space, but also in our families, in society, in the classroom, in workplace hierarchies, in intimate and/or sexual relationships. All of the factors entering into the way we orient ourselves in all of these may be said to be what makes up our subjectivity. As with the lowly bat, the importance of our sense organs and the external world about which they report is not to be underestimated in any effort to come up with a full account of what it is like to be a human. As Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and other currents of philosophy to develop since the early modern era have shown, though, significant attention must also be paid to the way in which class membership, gender identity, economic relations, and many other factors still, all contribute to the formation of identities.
Bibliography
Carr, David. The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Tr. and Ed. James Strachey. (Macmillan, 1964-).
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is Not One. Tr. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. (Cornell University Press, 1985).
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. (Princeton Unviversity Press, 1992).
Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. (Columbia University Press, 1986).
Mansfield, Nick (Ed.). Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York University Press, 2001).
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology (Prometheus Books, 1998).
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. (Oxford University Press, 1989).
Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83, 4 (1974): 435-450.
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