Subjectivity, Reflexivity, and the Relational Paradigm

American, British and Canadian Studies, 2008

This paper is divided into three main parts. In the first one it characterizes the challenge of critical reflexivity in theoretical discourse today. It then proceeds to explore a paradox that is congenial to postmodernism as a whole, which can be approached as a disjunction between its discourse and its effects, i.e. postmodernism as a description versus as an event. This state of affairs is finally interpreted in the third part of the paper as resulting from a peculiar tension between Theory’s freedom and the limitations in the world of objects, a conflict that points to the specificity of Theory’s material conditions of production. That there is no theoretical way out of this impasse is what would closest resemble a conclusion.

The subject, the 'I' that experiences and interacts with the world is a central category of modern thought and it is constantly under question during postmodern period. Subjectivity has become a matter of conflict between competing theories and practices around which questions of ethics, politics and representation have continually voiced since Renaissance period. The contemporary critical theory taken up for discussions by postmodernism is the death of the subject itself, the end of bourgeois monad or ego or individual. The postmodernism has rejected the concept of the individual or subject as whole that has prevailed in Western thought for the last few centuries. For postmodernists, the subject is a fundamental

Issues of subjectivity and consciousness are dealt within very different waysw in the analytic tradition and in the idealistic phenomenological tradition central to continental philosophy. This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the contintent with English-speaking philosophers to address specific issues regarding subjectivity and consciousness. The issues range from acquaintance and immediacy in perception and apperception, to the role of agency in bodily 'mine-ness', to self-determination (Selbstbestimmung) through (free) action. Thus involving philosophers of different traditons should yield a deeper vision of consciousness and subjectivity; oe relating the mind not only to nature, or to first-perso authority in linguistic creatures Questions which, in the analytic tradition, are sometimes treated as exhausting the topic but also to many other aspects of mind's understanding of itself in ways which disrupt classic inner/outer boundaries.

The aim of this article is to take up three closely connected questions. First, does consciousness essentially involve subjectivity? Second, what is the connection, if any, between pre-reflective self-consciousness and subjectivity? And, third, does consciousness necessarily involve an ego or self? I will draw on the Yogācāra–Madhyamaka synthesis of Śāntaraks:ita (eighth century common era) to develop an account of the relation between consciousness, subjectivity, and the self. I will argue, first, that phenomenal consciousness is reflexive or self-illuminating (svaprakāśya). Second, I will argue that consciousness necessarily involves minimal subjectivity. Third, I will argue that neither the reflexivity nor the subjectivity of consciousness implies that there is any entity such as the self or ego over and above reflexive consciousness. Fourth, I will argue that what we normally think of as ‘the self’ is best understood as a complex, multi-layered process (ahaṁkāra, ‘I-making’) that emerges within the pre-egoic flow of subjective consciousness.

In this essay, I wish to examine contemporary Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kojima's ideas concerning the monad and intersubjectivity and to show how these ideas can be brought to bear on issues concerning the human relationship to the environment and, in particular, to non-human animals. Kojima, in his book Monad and Thou, proposes to reconcile the notion of 'individuality' and the notion of 'community' by redefining the I-Thou relation, first extensively investigated by Martin Buber, in terms of his new phenomenological ontology of the human being as monad. Kojima's conception of the human subject as monad is a resolution to the radical disagreement between Husserl's conception of the human subject as a pure consciousness and Heidegger's conception of the subject as Dasein, pure individuality. Kojima finds the contact point between these two radically distinct conceptions in the Being of the human body as Being seen from the inside and Being seen from the outside, or in the structure of the human body as Leib-Körper. He argues that this new conception of the human being brings into focus the 2 second person dimension (Thou) for the image of the human being as the center of life and that, therefore, life is tu-centric, rather than egocentric, as in Husserl and Heidegger, or relational, as in Buber. Ultimately, Kojima seeks to reinsert the body, as the intentional center of the monad, into our philosophical understanding of the subject, into our understanding of what constitutes intersubjective encounters and, ultimately, into our understanding of the ethical and spiritual life. Since Kojima's critiques of Husserl and Buber are central to the development of his own theories of subjectivity and of I-Thou relations, I will concentrate on these in this paper. First, I will discuss Kojima's response to some crucial problems that he identifies in Husserl's conception of the subject as 'consciousness'. I will, then, very briefly examine Kojima's response to Heidegger's notion of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. After this, I will discuss how Kojima successfully reconciles the two opposing notions of 'consciousness' and 'Being'. This will be followed by a brief account of Buber's conception of I-Thou relations, by a detailed discussion of Kojima's critique of Buber, and by an examination of how Kojima's own conception of I-Thou relations emerges from this critique and from his reconception of the subject as monad. Lastly, I will argue that Kojima's novel conception of I-Thou relations permits us to develop an account, more satisfactory than Buber's, of the possibility and nature of I-Thou relations between human beings and nonhuman beings. I conclude by examining the ethical implications of the above discussion, by examining how social spaces affect both the possibility of and our capacity for having I-Thou relations, and by discussing some of the ontological and ethical implications of constructing increasingly alienating spaces.

Journal of Italian Philosophy (Newcastle University), 2022

Contrary to the progress of the Postmodern condition – first recognized by J. F. Lyotard – the last century’s philosophical scenario saw the establishment of a new philosophical current shunning any kind of relativism and proposing a form of renovated realism. This realism opposes the Nietzschean maxim, acknowledged by Postmodernism, according to which there are no facts, but only interpretations, and contrary to that maxim it holds true that reality is “unamendable” (Ferraris). A lively debate has thus sparked off in the last decade over the status of reality and of truth, involving the great part of the exponents of our philosophical scene. This paper wishes to contribute to the unfolding of such debate, which indeed revives the classical question on the objective or subjective nature of truth and reality: it does so by appealing to the philosophy of Carlo Sini and specifically to the notion of subject developed by this philosopher in the course of his intellectual trajectory. To this purpose the paper pursues two main goals. Firstly, we wish to expound the notion of subject as developed in Carlo Sini’s philosophy; especially we should point out the unique form that the subject assumes in this philosopher’s thought of practices: which is – essentially – a sort of hermeneutical pragmatism. The second goal is to assess the significance of Sini’s notion of subject in the current debate between New Realism and Postmodernism. More specifically, according to the thesis here argued, we can recognize, in the philosophy developed by Sini, a unique form of the subject-reality relationship which neither reduces the latter to a mere product of the former, nor raises it to something absolute and enfranchised from the subjective sphere of experience. This mode of the world-man relationship can provide a new approach to the question on the nature of reality distinct from both Postmodernism and New Realism.

The perspective of critical realism in the reflection on a ‘human being’ excludes any constructivist or subjectivist concepts of the ‘black hole’ of language. This seems essential, in philosophy and psychology, but also in sociology. My point of departure is Émile Durkheim’s concept of homo duplex on the ground of realistic phenomenology (Roman Ingarden, Edith Stein). However, I believe that the problems require the perspective of critical realism. They find their resolution in Margaret Archer’s concept of human being, which is the most outstanding theoretical thought of the contemporary humanities. This leads me to reflect on the sense of the concept of subjectivity, which gives the opportunity to grasp the sense of humanity in realistic terms. I am proposing a three-fold formula for subjectivity that leads beyond the important, but not the only dimension, which is that of the agency. This approach may be useful in this time of civilizational crisis.

Stan Rzeczy, 2017

Martin Heidegger pointed out that in every fear there is the recognition of our vulnerability, our mortality, and that anxiety, that feeling of finding ourselves cast adrift, nothing supporting us, nothing to hold on to, is a premonition of what dying will be: a being cast from existence into the void, into nothingness. This termination, he argued, is what gives us and our undertakings determinateness. We live in an environment of implements, paths, and objectives. To live is to see possibilities about us, some brought out by our own projects, others visibly outlined by other agents. But the very multiplicity of possibilities extending indefinitely before us produces inaction: what I can do others can do, have done, will do or might do. What, in the outlying field of possibilities that are possible for anyone, outlines the zone of possibilities that are possible for me is the

Trans-Humanities, 2009

This paper is to launch a discourse on subjectivity as betweenness illusorily presented as the self and to seek out its traces in science literature, especially in evolutionary biology and cognitive science. A hope between the lines of this text is most of all to bridge the religious and philosophical subjectivity to these scientific fields via betweenness discourse. Betweenness is argued to be a basic structure in which the self, the sense of the "I," is produced. Originally it derives from the transliteration of the Chinese character, (human betweenness). Betweenness does not refer to person or subject, but it is a condition under which subjectivity may arise. Discourses in evolutionary biology contain this sense of betweenness-being between genes, organism and environment. Through the interaction of and between them, individuality arises. The ways to explain the emergence of the sense of the self out of the interaction would be different, but it is agreed that individual subjectivity comes out of the interaction. With regard to the subjectivity issue, cognitive science materials also show the sense of betweenness in its frameworks of the computationism (Pinker 1997) and the enactionism (Varela 1993) models. From the perspective of the enactionism, the interaction between genes and environment creates the sense of the "I." All these say that betweenness is the condition for the emergence of subjectivity.