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Home > Subject (philosophy)

In philosophy, a subject is a being which has subjective experiences or a relationship with another entity (or "object"). A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed.

The following are examples of my subjective experiences:

• What the color green looks like to me;
• What a musical tone sounds like to me;
• What pleasures and pains feels like to me.

Contrast these with the objects of these subjective experiences:

• The green surface;
• The musical instrument producing oscillations in air;
• The things that induce pleasure or pain.

The object is the thing perceived; the subject is the one who perceives.

For some ways of thinking, subjectivity implies not simply a passive relationship to the world and the sense impressions it causes in subjects, but also agency, an active engagement with that material. Agency might be thought to occur simply in the act of interpretation of sense data, making choices about how to allocate meanings to those data. Or it might be thought to occur in a stronger sense, acting upon the world and changing its organization to suit the subject's goals. In the latter case, a feedback loop of modified world - new sense data - new modification might be established, with open-ended consequences. Baldwinian evolution may be a candidate instance of such a feedback system.

In critical theory and psychology, subjectivity is also the actions or discourses that produce individuals or 'I'; the 'I' is the subject -- the observer.

1 Epistemic subjectivity

The word subjectivity is also used to refer to the antithesis of objectivity as an epistemic virtue: one who judges according to personal feelings or intuitions, rather than according to objective observation, reasoning, and judgment, is judging subjectively.

2 Subjectivism

Subjectivism is a philosophical tenet that accords primacy to subjective experiences. In an extreme form, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends only on someone's subjective awareness of it.

3 Metaphysical subjectivism

Metaphysical subjectivism is the theory that perception creates reality, and that there is no underlying, true, reality that exists independent of perception. One can also hold that it is consciousness rather than perception that creates reality. This is in contrast to metaphysical objectivism.

This holding should not be confused with the stance that "all is illusion" or that "there is no such thing as reality." Metaphysical subjectivists hold that reality is real enough, and that physical objects do exist. They conceive, however, that the nature of reality as related to a given consciousness unit is created and governed by that consciousness.

3.1 Subjectivism and panpsychism

One of the ways a subjectivist might attempt to respond to that thought experiment is to argue that there was subjective consciousness within the volcano all along. Perhaps the camera itself or its component parts have a subjective side. Or, perhaps the volcano's own rocks do.

In this way, though, subjectivism morphs into a related doctrine, panpsychism, the view that every objective fact has an inward or subjective aspect.

3.2 Criticisms

The invention of machines that can "see", "hear", or otherwise observe and record events provides a thought experiment (offered by Winston ChurchillChurchill" redirects here. For other meanings, see Churchill (disambiguation). The Right Honourable Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill KG, OM, CH, FRS ( November 30, 1874 January 24, 1965) was a British politician, best known as Prime Minister of the U, who is not otherwise known as a philosopher) that is difficult for subjectivists to explain. Let us set up an automatic camera to record events in a place that no human (or other creature reasonably considered "conscious") can observe. Say that it is set inside a volcano, for example. The camera is later retrieved and its photographs, with date markings, are observed. Did the events recorded in the photographs really happen even though no one consciously observed them? Did the conscious observation of the photographs themselves somehow suddenly cause them to depict events that apparently happened at an earlier time?

One explanation of this scenario from a subjectivist perspective is that the events in the photographs didn't really happen at all. Only the photographs came into existence as the observer went to collect the results of their test.

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Topics: Subject (philosophy) Subjective Subjectivism Subjectivist...

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