John Russon
The modern interpretation of our existence as “subjective” is of a piece with the recognition that our experience is inherently interpretive or “hermeneutic.” The history of European philosophy from Descartes to the present marks the progressive deepening of insight into the nature of subjectivity and, with it, the progressive transformation in the recognition of the place of interpretation within experience. In particular, the study of subjectivity in European philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has shown that we should understand interpretation, not primarily as what an individual subject does, but as the processes of emergent meaning through which an individual subject is formed.
It is characteristic of our normal experience to recognize a world of nature, and to recognize ourselves as participants in it. We can identify various species of natural organism—bees, olive trees, tuna—and, similarly, we can recognize ourselves as a natural species: the human. Straightforwardly, then, we typically ask ourselves what is characteristic of this, our natural species: what is our human nature? Aristotle's profound study of human flourishing in his Nicomachean Ethics is precisely his answer to this question, and his definition of the human being as “zōion logon echon,” “the animal having logos,” is precisely his attempt to specify how exactly the human being participates in the world of nature.1 On this interpretation, we, as human beings, are to be understood within the terms of reference that the natural world provides, and by contrast with other species. Aristotle's definition, first, locates us within the world of animals, which means we are living, bodily organisms, in contrast to inorganic “heaps” like water and earth, and we are capable of sensation, desire, and local motion, in contrast to plants, whose behavior is limited to nutrition, growth, and reproduction.2 His definition, second, differentiates us from other animals by virtue of our distinctive function of logos or “taking account”: whereas other animals enact an instinctive form of life, the human relates to its world dynamically and critically, by calculating, determining causes, reasoning, and holding itself accountable to higher values. The words of the second stasimon of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone echo this basic recognition:
A cunning fellow is man. His contrivances
make him master of the beasts of the field
and those that move in the mountains.
…
and speech and windswift thought
and the tempers that go with city living
he has taught himself.
…
He has a way against everything,
and he faces nothing that is to come
without contrivance.
…
If he honors the laws of the earth,
and the justice of the gods he has confirmed by oath,
high is his city
(Sophocles 1991).
From the point of view of an observational biology that takes its starting point from the world of nature, this ancient Greek interpretation of our existence is a rigorous and insightful account, and rightly earned its central position in the history of human self-interpretation. It is precisely in contrast to this view, however, that we should understand Descartes’ revolutionary transformation of philosophy and, correspondingly, of human self-interpretation.
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy of 1641 is emblematic of the “modern” era which it helped to form. In this work, Descartes offers an interpretation of himself (and, consequently, of each of us) as res cogitans, “a thinking thing,” an interpretation that challenges and radically transforms the Aristotelian vision. With his identification of the act “cogito,” “I think,” as definitive of our existence, Descartes defines us as “subjectivity.”
In his first meditation, Descartes (famously) demonstrates that we have reasons to doubt the veracity of our experience of all objects, whether sensory qualities, perceptible bodies, mathematical truths, or even God Himself. In his second meditation, he demonstrates, performatively for himself and for any of us who take up his exhortation to carry out parallel meditations for ourselves, that the fact of our own self-conscious awareness cannot be doubted. This is typically construed as an epistemological argument but, though this is certainly correct as far as it goes, it is more fundamentally an ontological argument: it is the definitive characteristic of how we exist that we are perspectives: each of us exists as an act of experiencing, and all the objects of our experience are mediated by our self-experience as a perspective.
Diego Velazquez captures this reality well in his painting, commonly referred to as Las Meninas. The painting portrays a painter—Velazquez himself—in the act of painting a portrait of someone, but the one he portrays would be located precisely in the position that we, as spectators, occupy: he portrays, in other words, what one would see if one were having one's portrait painted. Whereas the “content” portrayed in the painting is Velazquez himself viewing his subject, the painting is in fact more truly a painting “of” subjectivity: it is a portrayal of the experience of being a perspective. Velazquez's painting helps us to capture the ontological weight of Descartes’ account of subjectivity: a perspective is not something one has—it is something one is. As Descartes writes,
What therefore did I formerly think I was? A man, of course. … It occurred to me first that I have a face, hands, arms, and this entire mechanism of bodily members. … It also occurred to me that I eat, walk, feel and think; these actions I used to assign to the soul as their cause. … But now what am I? … Here I discover that thought is an attribute that really does belong to me. This alone cannot be detached from me.
(Descartes 1979, 18)
With Aristotle, we imagine first a world of natural beings, and then construe “perspective” to be a characteristic that one of those organisms has. What Descartes and Velazquez draw our attention to, on the contrary, is that each of us is an act of being aware, and that “things,” natural or otherwise, exist for us first as objects: nature itself is an object of our experience, and thus, rather than interpreting ourselves based on nature, as does Aristotle, we must, on the contrary, recognize that nature exists for us only as a phenomenon of our subjectivity.3
To emphasize that we are subjects is to emphasize that we are sources of choice and interpretation. When we think from the perspective of nature, we think of something else as setting the terms for our lives: setting the terms for how we perceive and act, as species-specific instinct sets the terms for an animal in its relationship to its environment. To recognize ourselves as subjects, however, is to recognize that we determine for ourselves how we will see things and how we will act. This recognition of our subjectivity in Descartes’ philosophy is integral to the scientific revolution, and is precisely a validation of the power of individual subjects to think for themselves, using the power of mind to investigate nature without regard for the dictates of scripture or the rule of the church. This recognition of the irreducibility of our individuality also entails that we are not transparent to each other, which is why, among other things, we cannot presume to judge on behalf of others, but must get from them their consent, which is the fundamental principle behind the political insistence of the rights of individuals articulated at almost the same time in Locke's Second Treatise of Government, (1689).4 In these ways, the interpretation of ourselves as “subjects” is definitive of the emergence of the modern world.
To say that our individual experience is subjective is to say that it is always interpretive: we see things as this or that, according to the parameters of our perspective. For this reason, we tend immediately to think of a perspective as “subjective” in the sense of only revealing our private interests. When we adopt such a view, however, we typically assume that the basic parameters of our existence—that we are individuals living in the real world—are fixed and given, and that what is subjective is our interpretation of something in that world. What is striking with Descartes, and especially with the European philosophers who followed him, is the recognition that those founding parameters themselves cannot be “given” independently of subjectivity, and thus must themselves be matters of interpretation as well. What is nonetheless true, however, is that the world of our experience is experienced by us as real, as existing independently of our perspective. We are thus confronted with two undeniable truths: all of our experience is interpretive, and yet our experience is given as objective. Even if nature is a matter of “subjectivity”—a matter of interpretation—it is nonetheless not something that I am able to experience differently. How subjectivity can thus be objective is the defining theme of Descartes and the European philosophers who followed in his wake.
Primarily, what subsequent thinkers show is that subjectivity is not simply a matter of the deliberate acts of choice of a reflective ego. On the contrary, subjectivity is more like a power of interpretation working “behind the back of consciousness,” as Hegel was later to describe it (Hegel 1977). As Descartes shows in his famous “wax” argument, we have the experience of externally existing bodies, but this would not be possible were the meaning of something intrinsically real—“substance”—not already integral to our experience: such an idea must be a source informing our experience, rather than a learned content of experience (Descartes 1979, 20–21, 25–26). Descartes’ own analysis of this dimension of our subjectivity in terms of “innate ideas” is more fully and rigorously developed in the “transcendental idealism” of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
It is definitive of our subjectivity that our actual experience is always finite: I see this side of the house from this angle at this time, and so on. In any actual experience, we see only a “profile” [Abschattung] of our object, in the language of Edmund Husserl.5 If our experience were simply a matter of external information impressing itself upon us, our knowledge would thus necessarily be exclusively finite: we would, as Hume argued, know only and exactly the finite list of contingent, determinate experiential features we happen to have encountered (Hume 1993). In fact, however, the world as we experience it is not limited to the terms of our finite experience; indeed, we experience aspects of the world as infinite and necessary. In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant documents these various infinite and necessary aspects of our experience. Three such aspects are particularly significant for the study of subjectivity.
We always find ourselves already exposed in space: space is not an optional object of our experience, but the experience of a spatial world is rather the form all of our experiences takes. And space, as it appears in experience, is, as Kant writes, an “infinite given magnitude,” that is, we experience every particular space as belonging to a space that exceeds it, such that, were we to investigate further, we would find that further space.6 Space is something that appears within our perspective, but it is given in a way that could not simply be the result of the history of contingent, determinate experiences. The “interpretation” that is involved in experiencing our world as spatial thus cannot be matter of a deliberate act, but is, rather, something that I find forced upon me: though this dimension of experience is necessarily subjective, it is a subjectivity that precedes and founds the subjectivity of my personal, reflective identity. I, as an empirical subject, experience an empirically real spatial world because of the founding acts of interpretation of a “transcendental” subjectivity, an interpretive power that is pervasively formative of the very fabric of my experiential life.7
Transcendental subjectivity is the domain of the founding acts of interpretation by which the ongoing flow of our experience is given to us as a meaningful world.8 With space, we see this operative at the level of intuition, that is, that dimension of our experience in which we are immediately struck by our object: even at its most immediate, in other words, experience is always meaningful and not just brute data. The “always already” meaningfulness of our object of our experience goes beyond the level of simple intuition, though. We do not just find ourselves exposed to a spatial world: we also find that world to be the causally self-defined world of nature. This recognition of causal self-organization is not a matter of intuition, but a matter of understanding, that is, we recognize about the world that, in order to be known, it needs to be understood, and that understanding it will require that we learn the terms on which it operates rather than the terms of our own private interest: the world, in short, calls for science.9 Both at the immediate level, then, and at the level of understanding, the object of our experience is encountered by us as already formed, as already presenting us with terms to which we must answer.
Beyond intuition and understanding, which are the powers we deploy to grasp and comprehend the specific things that populate the world of our experience, reason is also a power that defines our subjective experience. When we reason, we deal with truths that are unconditioned and absolute: truths that obtain regardless of the specifics of a situation. Cognitively, Kant argues, reason is instrumental rather than substantive; that is, we require that our efforts at knowing follow a rational form, but reasoning itself does not supply any novel cognitive content. In practical life, however, reason plays a more substantive role. Specifically, we find ourselves exposed to the weight of moral meaning analogously to the way we find ourselves exposed to space and causality. Our subjectivity is such that our experience is inherently charged with the unconditional imperative that we precisely respect the inherent worth of other subjects.10 Whether or not we abide by this imperative, it is meaningful to us; that is, while obeying it is a matter of deliberate choice, the experience of our world as “charged” with this imperative is not.
Because we are subjects, our world is a world of meanings. Our subjectivity is such, though, that we find ourselves already subject to meanings, prior to our experience of actively determining meanings for ourselves. From Descartes, and in contrast to Aristotle, we see that our experience is inherently interpretive, inherently hermeneutical. Kant shows, however, that this interpretation is not so much something we do as something that we undergo. On this account, then, we should not appeal to a natural reality “outside” us to understand the objectivity characteristic of our experience, but to the transcendental subjectivity that subtends and sets the terms for our everyday experience.
The turn to subjectivity at the beginning of the modern period, most strikingly in Descartes and the continental rationalist tradition, but also prominently in Hobbes, Locke, and the British empiricist tradition, began as the recognition of our irreducible individuality and the validation of individuality, both cognitively and politically. With the development of the notion of transcendental subjectivity in Kant, though, it begins to become clear that there is something “before” the individual, and that individual subjectivity, rather than being the source of interpretive meaning in experience is rather the product of deeper interpretive powers.
The insufficiency of the individual standpoint to account for itself was already remarked by Spinoza in the Ethics (published posthumously in 1677):
A baby thinks that it freely seeks milk, an angry child that it freely seeks revenge, and a timid man that he freely seeks flight. Again, the drunken man believes that it is from the free decision of the mind that he says what he later, when sober, wishes he had not said. So, too, the delirious man, the gossiping woman, the child, and many more of this sort think that they speak from free mental decision, when in fact they are unable to restrain their torrent of words. So experience tells us no less clearly than reason that it is on this account only that men believe themselves to be free, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.
(Spinoza 1992)
What both Spinoza's anecdotes and Kant's study of the fabric of experiential life reveal is that what we usually think of as “the subject”—the one observing herself being painted in Velazquez's Las Meninas, the self-reflective ego who embarks upon a practice of doubting in Descartes’ first meditation, or the consenting individual of Lockean liberal democracy—is itself the product of other, deeper powers, and that it is to these that we must turn if we want to understand the nature of meaning in our experience. Heidegger, in particular, develops this insight that the modern choosing individual who interacts with an objective world is a misrepresentative reflection of the more basic reality that constitutes our existence.
In order to avoid invoking the presumptions of either Aristotelian naturalism or Cartesian subjectivism, Heidegger introduces a new term to designate our existence: Dasein.11 How should we understand Dasein if not as “human being” or “individual subject”? Our being, Heidegger maintains, is “being-in-the-world” [In-der-Welt-sein].12 Our experience as it is lived is primarily a non-self-reflective engagement with a situation in which subject is not distinguished from world nor individual from others: proximally and for the most part, we are in-the-world with-others, and it is only in exceptional circumstances—precisely situations of interruption and conflict—that we take up an alienated stance to the world or to others: “objectivity” is neither the universal nor the definitive form of experiential life.13 We should, therefore, not understand the meaningfulness of experience on the model of the interpreting individual subject, but on the model of the “life-world,” the originary happening of pre-individual relationships that are as much “enworlded” as they are subjective.
This “world” that precedes the formation of the alienated subject remains perspectival: it remains a matter of meaning, a particular “clearing” [Lichtung] of being. Thus, the world of the ancient Greeks differs, for example, from the world of early modern Europeans. In fact, it is primarily in language that, as Heidegger puts it, “the world worlds”: prior to the language that is the instrument of daily commerce, there are originary acts of expression, the founding events through which a shared way of being-in-the-world is articulated.14 We live within the terms of meaning opened up by these founding expressions, and thus our very identity as individual subjects is something constituted by and through language. As Derrida and others thinkers argue, “subjectivity” can thus be understood to be a semiotic reality, something brought into being within the reality of language.15 The political stakes of this idea that individual subjectivity is derivative of a more basic reality, finally, are thematized in figures such as Marx and Foucault.
Marx, like Heidegger, argues that our subjectivity is rooted in the dynamism of language:
Only now, after having considered … four aspects of the primary historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses ‘consciousness’; but, even so, not inherent, not ‘pure’ consciousness. From the start the ‘spirit’ is afflicted with the curse of being ‘burdened’ with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sound, in short, of language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. … Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product.
(Marx 1978)
Before being a collection of self-reflective individual subjects, the human life form exists as a collective, practical navigation with the physical world, and self-reflective consciousness, like language, emerges as a way of relating to our experience so as to facilitate the successful carrying out of our affairs. In other words, our self-experience as individual subjects is not original, but is itself a response to deeper behavioral and social forces. These social forces, however, are not neutral, Marx argues, but are typically oppressive and exploitative. The modern “individual” subject, in particular, is a product of the material conditions of labor characteristic of industrial capitalism and the ideology of competitive individualism that is articulated through the institutional organization of the capitalist social world.16
Foucault, similarly, demonstrates that different forms of self-experience are correlated with different forms of social power and shows, in particular, that the modern conception of the self-responsible, individual subject is itself a product of what he calls a “disciplinary” regime. The organization of social life according to the timetable and the regular practice of testing, the institutional organization of space into uniformly divided, homogenous enclosures constantly subjected to surveillance, and related material and social practices of the modern age push us to interpret ourselves as discrete individuals (Foucault 1995). How we interpret ourselves is thus a political matter, and the interpretation of ourselves as metaphysically and experientially discrete subjects—the premise of modern subjectivity—is itself ultimately integral to the exploitative political life of modern global capitalism according to the analyses of Marx and Foucault, or to the destructive “enframing” of the world by modern technology according to Heidegger.17
The revolution of modern philosophy is the recognition that our experience is inherently interpretive or “hermeneutic.” The ongoing philosophical study of subjectivity, however, reveals that the processes of interpretation that shape our experience are not deliberate acts of individuals, but are precisely the processes that give rise to individuals. The processes are themselves collectively enacted and realized as the linguistic, institutional, and material articulation of a world. How we thus enact our subjectivity is a matter of fundamental political importance.