Individual and Collective

chapter 2 Individual and Collective

In the previous chapter I highlighted the agency of ‘the people’ as a political construction. In order to understand the formation of such a subject, this chapter briefly discusses the tension between individual and collective forms of subjec- tivity through an exploration of the philosophical roots of the modern concept of the subject.

Mind and Body

In modern society the dominant conception of the subject is the individual person. Ideologically this concept is expressed by laws and rights that consti- tute an individual human being as an actor in the civil and political sphere and by the prevailing paradigm of methodological individualism in the social sci- ences, especially economics and psychology. From a legal perspective, in most countries, being part of the human species is not a sufficient condition to qual- ify for subjectness – by which I mean the capacity to act as a subject. Whereas human subjectness has to manifest itself in an individual body, the body itself is not a subject. Age and mental health are additional parameters that distin- guish those members of society who are responsible for their own acts from those that are not. In order to be responsible, the individual has to act as a rational and self-conscious being. The individual subject has to be a knowing actor who reflects on his or her own nature as a subject and who directs its actions according to this cognitive process. The English word ‘subject’ had emerged in the fourteenth century in political and philosophical circles and was directly derived from the Latin subjec- tum, which, in turn, was a translation of Aristotle’s concept of hypokeimenon – meaning ontological substance (Blunden 2005/6). It was used to designate individuals that were subjected to the power of a sovereign, such as a monarch. Subjects formed the passive substance of a king’s active power. In the seven- teenth century, the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) coined the term subject as the individual cognizing actor, consolidating the humanist conception developed during the Renaissance of the individual philosopher, scientist, and thinker as the active and creative constructor of knowledge. For Descartes, the undeniable fact of his own, personal consciousness was the premise of his philosophy. The French philosopher could doubt the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004262669_004 Individual And Collective 29 input of his senses, but not the fact that he doubted – i.e., the consciousness of doubting. Descartes also pointed out that the movement of his consciousness was not of his own volition, that it reacted against and upon stimuli from ‘outside’. His rational approach established his individual consciousness and the world outside consciousness as facts. Inscribing himself within premodern dualist philosophical traditions, Descartes conceived of thought and the material world as radically different and even opposite substances. As part of the material world, the body was but the mechanical vehicle of the individual knowing subject. This line of thought, however, posed the problem of the relation between the mind and the body. How could the subject ever act if the thought-forms of her mind and the move- ments of her body could not correspond in any rational way, for they belonged to two opposite planes of existence? In principle, there could be no correspon- dence between thinking and acting, but in practice individuals continuously acted according to thoughts. The Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) solved the Cartesian problem in a manner “[…] brilliant in its simplicity for our day as well as his: the problem is insoluble only because it has been wrongly posed” (Ilyenkov 2008a, 31). Descartes’s initial premise, a consciousness separate from its body, was incorrect: “There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation – body and thought – but only one single object, which is the thinking body of liv- ing, real man […]” (Ilyenkov 2008a, 31). The mind thinks not for the body, operating it like a machine; it is the body itself that thinks. Conversely, thinking is not the causal product of a mechanical action, but a property of the action itself. At this point the problematic shifted from the relation between thinking and being within the individual human to the relation between the mind-body and the things external to it: “[…] why and how the thinking body feels and perceives the effect caused by an external body within itself as an external body, as its, and not as its own shape, configuration, and position in space” (Ilyenkov 2008a, 38–39). Thus the philosophical problem of the interaction between mind and body was sublated by the question of the relation between subject – i.e., the agent of cognition – and object – i.e., the external world of things.

Transcendental Subject

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) granted the subject its full modern content of unity between individual morality, cognition, and self- consciousness. Kant engaged with the barren debate between skepticists, who claimed that the only true source of knowledge was the individual sensory