Subject and subjectivity: the history of the gap

Abstract

This article deals with the gap between the subject and subjectivity and with the attempts of different philosophers to use different strategies in trying to understand, explain or overcome this gap.

In the Plato's philosophy, we can see the tendency to establish the subject as the basis of the world order. When Plato speaks of the knowledge of geometry, he has in mind the knowledge that links the opinions by the cause-effect relations, the knowledge that is drawn for the slave by his master and may be understood as an objective knowledge, which already exists in the mind of the slave, and besides that is universal. Plato does not speak about the subject, but it is the subject who estimates the objective world, delineates its boundaries and creates a basis for an order. However, subject's own existence eludes him. It may be granted to the subject only by the means of mystic revelation.

For Descartes the subject was the basis for the creation of knowledge, which would be obvious. In the attempt to build a system of knowledge as a reliable foundation of life, the world was increasingly objectified, leaving the subject just a role of an empty point of coordinate reference. However, the subject for Descartes has its own evidence, it is a thinking thing that becomes obvious after the rejection of any possible ideas about itself, it is obvious in the subtle and often invisible for the thought phenomenon - in the existence.

From Leibniz to Kant philosophers were trying to find the subject in the mind. Nevertheless, it was impossible to discover or recognize it there. Sartre argued that there is no me (or something like me) in the experience of consciousness, reflection, me that would be inherent to the acts of consciousness, so the subject is gradually virtualized. Now in search of a subject, philosophers increasingly turn to the idea of transgression, the idea of the Other and the idea of transcendent beginning. The existence of the Other becomes a condition of my existence.

The subject transforms into sign, symbol of the unity of subjectivity. The very subjectivity could be presented in different ways: as the Monad, which has vague and clear presentations in itself (in the philosophy of Leibniz), as productive capacity of imagination (in Kant's philosophy) and as the will to power (in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche).

Today, the crisis of the subject and the gap between the subject and subjectivity reached the extreme limits. Fight with the subject is a fight with the limiting structures, which objectify the Self. At the same time, the permissiveness of the Self is also considered ambiguously by the modern philosophers, and causes many social problems of modern society. On one hand the subject virtualizes, on the other hand subjectivity virtualizes too.

Modern problems of loss of evidence of the existence, the problem of loneliness and isolation in the human inner world, depletion of external reality are directly related to the crisis of the subject, to the fading of its kenotic evidence, evidence that was acquired in the kenotic doubt.