Objectivity and Subjectivity: an Argument for Rethinking the Philosophy Syllabus

Abstract

An analysis of the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity at work in standard introductions to philosophy reveals an oversight of self-knowledge and tracing the move from a common-sense culture to a scientific one throws up the idea of self-appropriation as the hidden heart of modern thought. The aftermath of the rise of modern physics has been a picture of reality as alienated from our commonly experienced sense of purposes, aims, and intentions as defining our everyday lives, what we may call our “subjectivity”. The existentialist reaction to this has been stifled by this Cartesian dichotomy but the non-sceptical neo-Thomist approach of Bernard Lonergan uncovers the element of self-reflective judgment in knowledge and grounds an act of self-affirmation, thematizing responsibility and agency. I present, with critique, influential moments in the genesis of the received notions of objectivity and of subjectivity, and argue for the inadequacy of Nagel’s problemati-zation of these categories of contemporary thought. With the aim of suggesting a rethink of how philosophy questions are framed in our syllabus I argue two recent papers by colleagues exhibit this very oversight of self-knowledge.     

Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence

Book Information Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence. By Michelle Boulous Walker. Routledge. London and New York. 1998. Pp. x + 235.     

Social Psychology and the Empirical Body: Rethinking the Relationship

Although social science work on the body has demonstrated its thorough socialisation, social psychology has barely recognised the mutual interdependence of the physical body and the social world. Accordingly, we propose that social psychology might be enriched and extended by detailed investigation of changes in the activity of the empirical body alongside processes of meaning-making during social interaction. We illustrate our proposal with a case study of changes in blood pressure during conversation, explored in conjunction with analyses using four discursive frames: gaining voice, identity negotiation, joint action/knowing of the third kind and positioning theory. We argue that this approach challenges the artificial separation of social psychology from other sub-disciplines, might inform social psychological analyses of emotion and belief and allows it to address substantive topics, such as psychopathology, which it typically largely excludes.     

Against Educational Humanism: Rethinking Spectatorship in Dewey and Freire

In this essay, I investigate the human act of spectatorship as found in the work of John Dewey and Paulo Freire. I will show that each is thoroughly anti-watching when it comes to educational practices. I then problematize their positions by looking at their spectatorial commitments in the realm of aesthetics. Both Dewey and Freire have a different opinion about spectatorship when it is a matter of watching art. I claim that this different in opinion derives from the practice of ‘educational humanism’. By educational humanism, I mean the tendency to posit stock human traits that derive from pedagogical practices. Ultimately, I will take a stand against educational humanism, against the process of back-forming, from educational circumstances, the desirability, or the undesirability, of human traits.     

Lived Body vs Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity

Toril Moi has argued that recent deconstructive challenges to the concept of gender and to the viability of the sex/gender distinction have brought feminist and queer theory to a place of increasing theoretical abstraction. She suggests that we should abandon the category of gender once and for all, because it is founded on a nature–culture distinction and it tends incorrigibly to essentialize women's lives. Moi argues that feminist and queer theories should replace the concept of gender with a concept of the lived body derived from existential phenomenology. In this essay I take up and develop this suggestion, and argue that there are several advantages that a category of the lived body has over a category of gender for feminist and queer theories: (1) no nature–culture distinction is necessary but the body can be described as historically and socially specific; (2) it is not necessary to break out a gendered and "raced" part of identity with this category; (3) differences of sexual desire can be described without recourse to an "inner core" of identity or "sexual orientation." I go on to argue, however, that it is important to retain a concept of gender for a theoretical purpose beyond that which Moi and those she criticizes conceive. In recent years feminist and queer theories have tended to conceive their theorizing as restricted to identity and subjectivity. How large scale social structures differentially position people in relations of privilege and disadvantage has been ignored, relatively. This essay argues then that theorizing structural processes and inequalities is crucial, and that a concept of gender is important for such theorizing. I propose three aspects of gendered social structure that are irreducible to one another: (1) a sexual division of labor (2) normative heterosexuality, and (3) hierarchies of power. In each case I illustrate the social theoretical work these categorizations of gendered structure can and should do.     

The Body of Christ: Rethinking a Classic Ecclesiological Model

Abstract:   The image of the church as the body of Christ is deployed by Karl Barth and Robert Jenson in the service of very different and equally unsatisfactory ecclesiologies. While Barth's concern for divine freedom causes him to accentuate the distinction between head and members to the point of positing two churches, Jenson's stress on Christ's objective presence in the world risks collapsing Christ into the church. Against both positions, attention to the fact that human bodies can be encountered in what may be distinguished as second- and third-person modes allows the image of the body of Christ to be deployed in a way that precludes both any confusion of divine and human agency and any separation of Christ from the earthly-historical community.     

反人本主义:马克思主义最重要的基本原则--析阿尔都塞的主体哲学批判

本文对阿尔都塞在理论逻辑意义上拒斥人本主义和历史主义,以及把“主体”视为意识形态的建构并应以“过程”概念取代之等极易引发误解的观点进行深层解读,澄清了阿尔都塞关于反人本主义、反历史主义和反对一切主体哲学作为马克思主义哲学基本原则的内涵,并作出自己的批判性分析。     

The Subjectivity of Certainty and the Subjectivity of Uncertainty

Based on the acknowledgment of what I have designated as cracks in our theoretical models, I have advanced some hypotheses that account for the constitution of social, familial, and individual subjectivity. I have attributed great significance to the concept of the unforeseeable. The unforeseeable is tied to uncertainty, which is related in turn to the flow of interpersonal relations. I have also discussed new forms of suffering that stem from conditions imposed by the social context, in this case, the expulsion from one's territory. I chose this phenomenon because of the importance I attach both to the feeling of social belonging and to subjects' need to create stable places in a world in constant flux. Some clinical vignettes illustrated these reflections.     

论构成的主体性与意动的主体性

先验主体性与客体性尽管在概念上相互对峙,但作为人类经验与实践的出发点,它们在运作上却从一开始就是浑然一体的。构成主体性是让在时空中对象化了的客体呈现在主体面前并获得意义的意向结构,意动主体性却是让主体获得目的性并将目的在与客体的相互作用中对象化的意向结构。在构成主体性和意动主体性之间的互动中协辩理性的介入,是使规范伦理学有可能在交互主体性的平台上展开的先决条件。     

I Am Yourself: Subjectivity and the Collective

This paper suggests that social and historical forces play an unconscious yet decisive role in our lives. Telling the story of a conversation between Israeli parents about the prospect of their children becoming soldiers, and of an analytic relationship between two Israelis, the paper aims to bring to light a hidden balance of power between family bonds and collective attachments. The paper uses ideas developed by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari in the field of critical theory to examine the ways in which families function as social agents, that is, as socializing institutions. It suggests that, as a result, in some situations, families may face a conflict of identifications, a dilemma between responsibility to kin and responsibility to the collective. If the dilemma commonly persists unheeded, it becomes painfully evident in extreme situations. Such is the case when parents are asked to allow their children to become soldiers, or when individuals strive to care for themselves against a binding ethics of communal and intergenerational responsibility. The paper examines the effect of the collective trauma underlying the dominant discourse of the Israeli society, and the hypercollectivity of the Israeli Kibbutz, in generating powerful unconscious conflicts that haunt subjective and family life. The paper argues that collective affiliations and consequently, collective politics are inseparable from individual psychology and interpersonal relations. It suggests that, for this reason, political awareness and political exchange can play a crucial, liberating role in the therapeutic relationship, and life in general.     

Semiotic Regulation in the Construction of Maternal Bond: From Body Experience to the Semiotic Field

The objective of this paper is to analyze how the maternal bond in first-time pregnant women emerges from bodily experiences in the pre-semiotic level and leads to the emergence of the semiotic field. The bond as a sign field is internally structured and enables the regulation of connections with other signs outside the field. As a result of the dialogue between biological and sociocultural imperatives, sociocultural meanings are turned into personal meanings and presented by women through behavior. This study is based on longitudinally-collected interview data consisting of six interviews with women from the time they were pregnant until their child turned one year old. During this period, three ruptures as turning points in the formation of the bond were identified. Based on idiographic analyses, it was concluded that body signals caused by the development of the fetus are coded by women into signs of various kinds, which define the status of mother and create the foundation for the mother-child relationship which continues throughout the lifespan.     

Technology and the Time-Image: Deleuze and Postmodern Subjectivity

Abstract

This article develops an argument about the time-image in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, and relates it to a broader Continental philosophy of technology and culture, including Kant, Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Antonio Negri. After grounding a consideration of Deleuze in relation to Heidegger’s thesis concerning technology, a constructive interpretation of the time-image is developed in the context of Deleuze’s work. The time-image is related to Deleuze’s early work on Kant’s philosophy and his book Dfference and Repetition, as well as to his important books on cinema, in which the time-image is opposed to the movement-image. The time-image is seen to make up the heart of subjectivity, because it concerns not only external technologies, but also how the self relates to itself internally. This understanding of the time-image is then contrasted with the work of Baudrillard and Virilio. Finally, the contrast between the time-image and the movement-image is shown to possess political implications, partly with the help of Negri.     

The Assembly as the Body of Christ: A Case Against the Omission of LBW's Offertory Prayers

Abstract : This article examines the offertory prayers in ELW, comparing them to the two prayers found in LBW. The author argues that the prayers in ELW have lost the spirituality of stewardship suggested by the prayers in LBW, and no longer maintain the important connection to Pauline theology, whereby the Christian understands his/her whole life, including time, talents, and money, to be offered back to God as a living sacrifice.     

Subjectivity: Locating the First-Person in Being and Time

It is often held that, in contrast to Husserl, Heidegger's account of intentionality makes no essential reference to the first-person stance. This paper argues, on the contrary, that an account of the first-person, or 'subjectivity', is crucial to Heidegger's account of intelligibility (world) and so of the intentionality, or 'aboutness' of our acts and thoughts, that rests upon it. It first offers an argument as to why the account of intelligibility in Division I of Being and Time , based on a form of third-person self-awareness, provides a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for intentionality. It then shows that Heidegger provides a further necessary condition in his analysis of the collapse of the one-self in Division II. This condition is 'conscience', which is both a genuine first-person mode of self-awareness and, it is argued, the origin of reason as that which distinguishes factic 'grounds' from normative 'justifications'.     

Computers and girls: Rethinking the issues

A perspective is developed about emerging sex differences in the use of computer technology in education. Computers tend to be conceptually assimilated to the category of science/mathematics/technology, and thus acquire some of the traditional qualities of differentiated interest among boys and girls. Findings from several research projects are reported which point to patterns of difference in educational settings. It is argued that sex differences emerge in relation to the functions computers serve and the organization of learning settings of which they are a part.The preparation of this article and the research reported was supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Department of Education, and the National Institute of Education. The author would like to thank Kathy Clement, Carla Freeman, Peggy Heide, Moni Homolsky, Midian Kurland, Ron Mawby, Roy Pea, and Karen Sheingold for their comments and suggestions about the perspective presented here.     

Subjectivity and environmentalism

The main thesis of this paper is that the most cogent demands of subjectivity, at least with respect to questions concerning the contents of our thoughts, can be accommodated within an objectivist framework. I begin with two theses: (1) Subjectivity: I can know (the contents of) my own thoughts without appeal to any knowledge of features external to my mind; (2) Environmentalism: (The contents of) my thoughts are determined by features external to my mind, at least in this sense: without causal and/or social interaction between my internal states and various external features, these internal states would not have the particular contents they have and therefore would not be the mental states they are. Section I proceeds by elucidating various lines of environmentalism, an overtly objectivist thesis. Section II considers and refutes one purported environmentalist challenge to subjectivity, namely, that, according to it, thoughts are not in the head. Section III discusses a central subjectivist thesis, namely, thoughts do not admit of an appearance/reality distinction. Tyler Burge and Hilary Putnam, two environmentalists, seem to endorse such a distinction. It is argued that the two most reasonable routes of escape open to them require a retreat from environmentalism. This leaves us with an apparent dilemma: reject either subjectivity or environmentalism Section IV defends environmentalism. Section V considers and criticizes a maneuver Donald Davidson makes to preserve first‐person authority over thought‐contents. Section VI concludes with a brief defense of environmentalism which rests largely on rejecting a deeply entrenched epistemic model about how we access our own thoughts. It is argued that it is this bad epistemic model and not subjectivity per se, which has created whatever tension there appears to be between subjectivity and environmentalism.