Alain de Libera When Did the Modern Subject Emerge

2008, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2

When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?

Alain de Libera

Abstract. Th is article o ers a tentative deconstruction of Heideggers account of the modern, that is, the Cartesian, subject. It argues that subjectivity, understood as the idea of some thing that is both the owner of certain mental states and the agent of certain activities, is a medieval theological construct, based on two con icting models of the mind (nous, mens) inherited from ancient philosophy and theology: the Aristotelian and the Augustinian (or perichoretic) one, developed in connection with such problems as that of the two wills in the incarnate Christ. Starting with Nietzsches criticism of the superstition of logicians (the belief that the subject I is the condition of the predicate think) and Peter Strawsons question in Individuals (Why are ones states of consciousness ascribed to anything at all?), the article discusses Peter Olivis and Th omas Aquinass treatments of the problem, as well as the principle invoked to resolve it: actiones sunt suppositorum, actions belong to subjects. Against this background, the discussion refers to Heideggers notion of subjecticity and Armstrongs attribute-theory in order to reappraise the Hobbesian and Leibnizian contributions to the history of the Self.

Thought is subjective.1 Th ought is personal. Subject and person be-long together. Th is is the modern, our modern, common, ordinary understanding of subjectivity. We speak of the subject of thought in the sense of the agent of thought. We refer to a so-called Cartesian subject, meaning: (1) an inner I, to which thoughts should be ascribed as psychological

1Th is paper is a slightly expanded version of the Aquinas Lecture given at the University of Dallas on January 28, 2008. I would like to thank Professors Lance Simmons (University of Dallas), Philipp Rosemann (University of Dallas), William A. Frank (University of Dallas), James J. Lehrberger, O.Cist. (University of Dallas), Dennis L. Sepper (University of Dallas), Jeremy duQuesnay Adams (Southern Methodist University), Bonnie Wheeler (Southern Methodist University), the audience, Marie Azcona (University of Dallas), and all the members of the De-partment of Philosophy of the University of Dallas whose great sense of hospitality, intellectual curiosity, and philosophical commitment helped make my Dallas lecture and seminars such an enjoyable event. Professors Kevin Mulligan (University of Geneva) and Alexandrine Schniewind (University of Lausanne) made very helpful comments on earlier drafts. My daughter Clmence de Libera helped me in translating several passages. Th eir assistance has been invaluable.

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

predicates, and (2) an inner eye, before which they pass in review in foro interno, in an inner space called the Cartesian theater.2 For philosophers, however, all this has become highly controversial. In the Continental tradition, the postmod-ern idea of a subjectivity without the subject and the various deconstructions that have given rise to the alleged crisis or death of the subject, go hand in hand with a no-subject re-articulation of selfhood, agency, and personal identity. In the analytic tradition, many philosophers would be reluctant to equate person-hood with subjectivity and most, at least in the recent past, would deal with the range of loosely related problems we call problems of the self who am I? what am I? how could I have been? and what matters?without even mentioning the word subject. Th is holds true for the pioneering collection of essays published in 1976 by Amlie Oksenberg Rorty, Th e Identities of Persons.3 Indeed, why should we connect what Rorty calls the idea of a person as a uni- ed center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility with the idea of a subject in which all ideas inhere, and to which representations and mental operations are to be attributed? Why in the rst place should we ascribe ones states of consciousness to anything at all? To this question, raised by Peter Strawson in Individuals,4 many philosophers would be inclined to answer that there is no sound reason to ascribe our states of consciousness to anything whatsoever. Th e friends of the so-called Lichtenbergian approach would maintain with Moritz Schlick and, up to a certain point, with Wittgenstein himself, that primitive experience is absolutely neutral, or that immediate data have no owner, or that original experience is without a subject, or that the pronoun I does not denote a possessor, or that no ego is involved in thinking. Strawson has ercely discussed this approach, the no-owner or no-ownership theory of the mind, also called no-subject theory. His criticism of Schlick does not involve a rejection of subjecthoodwhich makes him a noticeable exception within the analytic tradition. Rather, he describes Descartess theory of self or person as a dualism of two subjects or two types of subjects, that is, sub-stances, each of which has its own exclusive appropriate types of states and properties, to the extent that states of consciousness belong to one of these substances, the mind, and not to the other, the body. And he characterizes the Schlick-Wittgenstein approach, based on Lichtenbergs famous Es denkt

2R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 50.3See Th e Identities of Persons, ed. A. Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1976). Also see A. Monte ores presentation of this book in Identit personnelle, identit du soi, Critique no. 399/400 (1980): 75164, at 752: Le seul terme dont la pertinence par rap-port la discussion contemporaine est le plus remarquable en raison de son absence quasi totale est sans doute celui de sujet.

4See P. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 90, 93, 94.


dictum (We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens)5 as a dualism of one subjectthe bodyand one non-subjectthe ego or pure consciousness.6 Th e purpose of this lecture is not to answer the question of whether Strawson and common usage are right or wrong in ascribing mental states to any subject at all. I am not interested either in discussing all the various emplotments of subjectivity that have been proposed in recent historical narratives linking the emergence of the modern subject either to the centrality and universality of sentiment in British eighteenth-century literature or to the new inwardness that is supposed to characterize Protestantism. My goal is to try to determine why, how, and when philosophers introduced the very notion of subject and the conceptual scheme of what I will thereafter call subjecthood into psychology and the philosophy of mind.7

I.

An answer to the question why? is provided by Nietzsches criticism of what he calls the superstition of logicians, that is, the idea that a thought comes when I wish, based on the wrong assumption that the subject I is the condition of the predicate think. Th is criticism, which is part of Nietzsches refutation of the Cartesian cogito, runs as follows: a grammatical habit, consist-ing in adding a doer to every deed is the only ground for the pseudo-apriori truth of our belief in the concept of substance, and consequently for the logical superstition of the I, understood as the subject of thought.

Th ere is thinking, therefore, there is something that thinks. Th is is the upshot of all Descartes argumentation. But that means positing as true a priori our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something that thinks is simply a formulation of our gram-matical custom that adds a doer to every deed.8

5See Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London/New York: Penguin, 1990), 168: To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it I think. To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement. Schlick refers quite enthusiastically to Lichtenberg: Lichtenberg, the wonderful eighteenth-century physicist and philosopher, declared that Descartes had no right to start his philosophy with the proposition I think, instead of saying it thinks. See M. Schlick, Meaning and Veri cation, in Gesammelte Aufstze (Vienna: VDM Verlag Dr. Mller, 1969), 33768.

6Strawson, Individuals, 98.7Some of these questions are studied in greater detail in A. de Libera, Archologie du sujet,

vol. 1: Naissance du sujet (Paris: Vrin, 2007) and vol. 2: La qute de lidentit (Paris: Vrin, 2008). 8F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1887, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.

G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), VIII/2, 215: Es wird gedacht: folglich gibt es Denkendes: darauf luft die Argumentation des Cartesius hinaus. Aber das heit unsern Glauben an den Substanzbegri schon als wahr a priori ansetzen:da, wenn gedacht wird, es


According to Nietzsche, the very idea of a res cogitans is based on a fallacy:

M: Th inking is an activity.

m: Every activity requires an agent that is acting (that is, a subject that is acting).

C: Th erefore, if there is thinking, there must be something (that is, a subject) that thinks.

Th us, the Lichtenbergian Es denkt would not escape Nietzsches argument ei-ther. Th e it (thinks) is no real alternative to the I (think): the cogitatur is already contained in the cogito. Th e Es denkt motto entails the same wrong assumption as Ich denke. Better said, it is the weakest part of the cogito. As a matter of fact, cogito means two things: (1) that it is thinking, and (2) that I believe that I am the one who does the thinking. According to Nietzsche, both points are based on articles of faith. Moreover, the truth of the second clearly presupposes the truth of the rst. My belief in I being the one who does the thinking presupposes that thinking is an activity requiring a subjectcall it it or what you please. Th is is merely a matter of belief, grammatical belief. Both are wrong.

In jenem berhmten cogito steckt 1) es denkt 2) und ich glaube, da ich es bin, der da denkt, 3) aber auch angenommen, da dieser zweite Punkt in der Schwebe bliebe, als Sache des Glaubens, so enthlt auch jenes erste es denkt noch einen Glauben: nmlich, da denken eine Th tigkeit sei, zu der ein Subjekt, zum mindesten ein es gedacht werden msse . . . . Aber das ist der Glaube an die Grammatik.9

I will not discuss those claims as suchalthough it might be illuminating to compare Nietzsches criticism of Descartes with Schellings dicussion of the cogito, ergo sum in his 18331834 lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy, which endorse a post-Lichtenbergian interpretation of the I think as It thinks in me (es denkt in mir) or there is thinking in me (es wird in mir gedacht), clearly based on a parallel with it-sentences (subjectless or logically-simple sentences) of the form es trumte mir.10 My goal is not to determine whether or not the minor

etwas geben mu, das denkt, ist einfach eine Formulierung unserer grammatischen Gewhnung, welche zu einem Th un einen Th ter setzt.

9F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. AugustSeptember 1885, 40 [23], Smtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bnden, ed. G. Colli und M. Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1980), XI, 639. On Nietzsches relation to Lichtenberg, see M. Stingelin, Unsere ganze Philosophie ist Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs. Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-Rezeption im Spannungsfeld zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie) (Munich: Fink, 1996).

10As evidenced for instance in Johannes Brahmss Lied, Op. 57 # 3 (based on a poem by G. F. Daumer): Es trumte mir, | Ich sei dir teuer; | Doch zu erwachen; | Bedurft ich kaum. |


premise of the grammatical syllogism merely re ects a bad habit. My goal is to set out the archaeology of the claim. When and how was it put forward?

II.

Subject and subjecthood are everywhere in early modern philosophy. Nietzsches criticism of the grammatische Gewhnung is already to be found in the eighteenth century. Consider, for example, Catharine Trotter Cockburns criticisms of Isaac Watts. She criticizes Watts for ascribing to mere logical ways of speaking what he calls our prejudices against allowing a power of thinking to subsist without a subject. She replies to this ingenious author that actions and abilities . . . seem unavoidably to imply some subject of them, some being, that exerts its powers in di erent ways of acting, and then goes on to argue that she does not nd herself so prejudiced by logical or grammatical ways of speaking when she says that she cannot frame any idea of a power, without supposing some being, to which it belongs.11 So far, so familiar. But can we trace Catherine Trotters plea for subject and subjecthood back any further? Can we trace it back to Descartes himself? To the scholastics? To Augustine? To Aristotle?

Th e medieval contribution to the rise of the subject has been widely overlooked. Th is holds true for A. Rortys survey of the historical conditions that gave rise to the view of the person as the I of re ective consciousness, owner and disowner of its experiences, memories, attributes, attitudes, as well as for her emplotment of the philosophical conditions, when she expeditiously describes the movement from Descartes re ective I to Lockes substantial center of conscious experience, to Humes theater of the sequence of impressions and ideas, to Kants transcendental unity of apperception and the metaphysical postulate of a simple soul, to Sartres and Heideggers analyses of consciousness as the quest for its own de nition in the face of its non-Being.12 As a historian of medieval philosophy this hasty kind of historical scrolling seems to me all the more unfortunate since the rise of the subject-self is perhaps, from a philosophical

Denn [schon] im Traume | Bereits empfand ich, | Es sei ein Traum. Such sentences, which it is hard to treat within the terms of the standard (subject-predicate-copula based) combination theories (as Rojszczak and Smith say), were discussed by F. Brentano in 1883 in Miklosich on Subjectless Sentences, translated in F. Brentano, Th e Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong, trans. R. Chisholm and E. Schneewind (London: Routledge, 1969), 98108. See A. Rojszczak and Barry Smith, Truthmakers, Truthbearers and the Objectivity of Truth, in Philosophy and Logic: In Search of the Polish Tradition, ed. J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 22968. Nietzsches claim would be that the common interpretation of subjectless sentences involves an unshakable belief in the subject-predicate-copula form.

11Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Remarks Upon Some Writers, in Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Sheridan (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006), 87146, at 101.

12Th e Identities of Persons, 11.


point of view, one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of the long Middle Ages advocated by Jacques Le Go . It is also an ideal opportunity to stress the importance of theological debates in the history of philosophy. A fair assessment of late ancient and medieval views on the subject is essential for any reconstruction of a history of subjectivity with the subject.

Such an assessment, I suggest, is best made in two steps: (1) a discussion of Heideggers account of the dominance of the subject in the modern age, an account that is based on the distinction between subjecticity or subjectness (Subiectitt) and subjectivity (Subjektivitt); (2) a study of the genealogy of Nietzsches alleged grammatische Gewhnung. Th e two steps are intimately con-nected: the distinction between subjecticity and subjectivity and the grammatical habit constitute two major components of a conceptual scheme I call mental attributivism, whose rise and fall deserve a very thorough archaeological scrutiny if we are to understand what exactly happened to the subject in early modern philosophy. I will attempt to give an overview of both.

III.

To begin with, let us focus on Heideggers account of what he calls the emphatic positing of the subject in Modern Age.13 Th e term Subiectitt, which is rendered as subjecticity or subjectness in English translations,14 has a precise meaning: at rst blush it points to the very quality of being a sub-jectum, ontologically speaking; that is, according to the meaning of the Greek hypokeimenon, which it translates, to the quality of being that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.15 According to the concept of its essence, subiectum is in a distinctive sense that which already lies-before and so lies at the basis of something else, whose ground it therefore is.16 Heidegger never tires of repeating what is actually his most striking point: in this under-standing subject had rst . . . no special relationship to man and none at all to the I.17 We must thus at rst remove the concept manand therefore the concepts I and I-ness as wellfrom the concept of the essence of subiectum. Stones, plants, and animals are subjectssomething lying-before of itselfno less than man is.18 Yet man has become the primary and only real subiectum.

13M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, ed. David F. Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 96.

14On subjecticity, see F. Schlegel, Subiectitt bei Heidegger. Zu einem Schlsselbegri des seinsgeschichtlichen Denkens, Archiv fr Begri sgeschichte 40 (1997/98): 16075.

15M. Heidegger, Th e Age of the World Picture, in Th e Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977), 11554, at 127.

16Heidegger, Nihilism, 967.17Heidegger, Th e Age, 127.18Heidegger, Nihilism, 97.


Man has become that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man has become the relational center of that which is as such.19 When did this occur? Heideggers answer is cut and dried: with the Cartesian interpretation of man as subiectum. Since Descartes and through Descartes, man, the human I, has in a preeminent way come to be the subject in metaphysics. With the Cartesian interpretation of man begins the completion and consummation of Western metaphysics, which also cre-ates the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every kind and tendency.20 Th is claim must be taken literally: after Descartes there is no other subject, properly speaking, than the human subject transposed into the I. In other words: Heidegger does not limit himself to saying that with Descartes man is conceived as a subiectum; he pushes further by asserting that within Descartess metaphysics man comes to play the role of the one and only subject proper. Let us try to understand this claim and render it more precise.

According to Heidegger, the modern subject emerges with the Cartesian cogito sum. Descartess revolution consists in distinguishing the subjectum which man is to the e ect that the actualitas of this subjectum has its essence in the actus of cogitare (percipere)21so that eventually the human Mind becomes the only, the exclusive subject.22 In the Heideggerian reconstruction, Descartes plays the central role in the history of the subject because he completes the medieval transformation of the Greek hypokeimenon into subiectum by tying its actuality to a new, non-Aristotelian, dimension: perceptual activity.

Th e principle cogito sum, to the extent that it contains and expresses the essence of cogitatio, posits along with the essence of cogitatio the proper subiectum, which is itself presented only in the domain of cogitatio and through it. Because the me is implied in cogitare, because the relation to the one representing still belongs essentially to representing, because all

19Heidegger, Th e Age, 127.20Heidegger, Th e Age, 138. Heidegger continues: Th e essential modi cations of the

fundamental position of Descartes that have been attained in German thinking since Leibniz do not in any way overcome that fundamental position itself. Th ey simply expand its metaphysical scope and create the presuppositions of the nineteenth century, still the most obscure of all the centuries of the modern age up to now.

21Heidegger, Metaphysics as History of Being, in Th e End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 203), 154, at 31.

22Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in Nietzsche II (19391946), ed. B. Schillbach, Gesamtausgabe 6.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 395: Die mens humana wird daher knftig [gem dieser Auszeichnung ihres Vorliegens] als subiectum den Namen Subjekt ausschlielich fr sich in Anspruch nehmen, so da subiectum und ego, Subjektivitt und Ichheit gleichbedeutend werden. Ibid., 411: Wo aber die Subiectitt zur Subjektivitt wird, da hat das seit Descartes ausgezeichnete subiectum, das ego, einen mehrsinnigen Vorrang. Das ego ist einmal das wahrste Seiende, das in seiner Gewiheit zugnglichste.


representedness of what is represented is gathered back to it, therefore the one representing, who can thus call himself I, is subject in an emphatic sense, is, as it were, the subject in the subject, back to which everything that lies at the very basis of representation refers. Th at is why Descartes can also construe the principle cogito sum in the following way: sum res cogitans.23

Th us sum res cogitans does not mean I am a thing that is out tted with the quality of thinking, but, rather, I am a being whose mode to be consists in representing in such a way that the representing co-presents the one who is representing into representedness. Th e Being of that being which I am myself, and which each man as himself is, has its essence in representedness and in the certitude that adheres to it. On this interpretation of the principle Cogito sumaccording to which the certitude of the principle cogito sum (ego ens cogitans) determines the essence of all knowledge and everything knowable; that is, of mathesis; hence, of the mathemati-cal24truth now means, Heidegger argues, the assuredness of presentation-to, or certitude. Th us, because Being means representedness in the sense of such certitude, man, in accordance with his role in foundational representation, therefore becomes the subject in a distinctive sense. Having an exclusive claim on subjecticity the Cartesian man, conceived as the distinguished subiectum, secures the do-minion of the subject, by staking everything on his own priority as subject.25 Subjecticity thus becomes subjectivity: being is no longer merely created being (ens creatum); it is certain being, indubitable, truly thought, in a word: representa-tion (ens certum, indubitatum, vere cogitatum, cogitatio).26 Th e Cartesian shift from subjecticity to subjectivity may be summed up in four major claims:

(1) Man is subject in the sense of representing I-ness; (2) Th e beingness of beings is equivalent to representedness through and for the I-subject; (3) Truth means the same as secure conveyance of what is represented in the self-representing representation: truth is certitude; (4) Man is the measure of all beings in the sense of the presumption of the de-limitation of representing to self-securing certitude.27

Th us, on Heideggers view, Descartess metaphysics cannot be but the decisive beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in the modern age, because

23Heidegger, Nihilism, 114.24Ibid., 116. On mathesis see M. Heidegger, What Is a Th ing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and

V. Deutsch (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), 75: Th e mathematical (mathemata, what is learnable) is that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and as such things . . . the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things.

25Heidegger, Nihilism, 129.26Ibid., 117.27Ibid., 1367.


anticipating this ground in an authentically philosophical senseit grounds the metaphysical ground of mans liberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legislation.28 Such a positive, not to say bombastic, assessment of Carte-sianism did not come out of the blue. It was inherited from Heideggers own Schellingian interpretative pattern. Indeed, inasmuch as mans exclusive claim on subjecticity (which according to Heidegger is the metaphysical trademark of Cartesianism) is characterized by a liberation from the revelational certainty of salvation, which had to be intrinsically a freeing to a certainty [Gewissheit] in which man makes secure for himself the true as the known of his own knowing [Wissens], and was thus possible only through self-liberating mans guaranteeing for himself the certainty of the knowable,29 there is little doubt that the Hei-deggerian interpretation of Descartes heavily relies on Schellings post-Kantian reading of Cartesianism as a plea for freedom.30 Th e claim that the essential modi cations of the fundamental position of Descartes that have been attained in German thinking since Leibniz do not in any way overcome that fundamen-tal position itself,31 clearly transposes Schellings emplotment of the history of modern philosophy, based on Descartes rejection of Scholasticismthe true liberal spirit of the new philosophy being further con rmed by the fact that Descartes was in Bavaria at the time he posited the very foundations of modern philosophy.32 Th is being said, Heideggers account of the shift from Subiectitt to Subjektivitt has its own features and purposes.

First, it is supposed to point out a major event in the history of Being: the beingness of beings becomes ambiguous through subjectivity. By such an ambiguity Heidegger not only means that the rise of objectivity is a coess-ential part of the dominance of the subjective in the modern age; in other words, that in modern metaphysics, every being becomes an obiectum. He also means that every being becomes an object determined by a subiectum, so

28Ibid., 100.29Heidegger, Th e Age, 147.30On Heideggers reading of Schelling, see his Schellings Treatise on the Essence of Human

Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1984). Heidegger is perfectly aware of the Kantian dimension conveyed in his own Schellingian narrative of the history of Be-ing in the modern age. See Nihilism, 978: If we say pointedly that the new freedom consists in the fact that man himself legislates, chooses what is binding, and binds himself to it, then we are speaking Kants language; and yet we hit upon what is essential for the beginning of the modern age. In its unique historical form, this essence is wrought into a fundamental metaphysical posi-tion for which freedom becomes essential in a peculiar way (see Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, Med. IV).

31Heidegger, Th e Age, 138.32See F. W. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy [Zur Geschichte der neueren Phi-

losophie. Mnchener Vorlesungen, 1833/34], trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).


that however paradoxical and in every aspect arti cial it might seem, from Descartes onwards up to Nietzsche himself one must consider the subjecticity (not subjectivity) of the essence of man as the foundation for the objectivity of every subject (everything which is present). Accordingly the inner form of metaphysics, which is based on what may be called transcendence, is changed. With Descartess nding the subjecticity of the subject in the ego cogito of mortal man [die Subiectitt des Subiectum im ego cogito des endlichen Menschen], the metaphysical Gestalt of man as the source of the giving-of-meaning appears, which is the nal consequence of establishing the essence of man as its au-thoritative subject.33 Subjectivity is subjecticity/subjectness in a new guise: die Subjektivitt ist eine Weise der Subiectitt.34 Th e subjectivistic interpretation (guise) of the subjecticity of the essence of man, which is the basic feature of psychologism, is a consequence of Descartess transformation of the question what is the being? into a question about the fundamentum absolutum incon-cussum veritatis, the absolute, unshakable ground of truth; it does not belong to Cartesianism proper. Th e modern age is the age of subjectness, in which every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it knows it or not, in the metaphysics of subjectness.35 Th e metaphysics of subjectness is not reducible to the ontology of subjectivity in the sense of subjectivism. To be a subject is to be in the subject-object relation; to be in that relation is what constitutes the subjectness of the subject.36

A second feature of Heideggers account of the shift from Subjectitt to Sub-jektivitt is his highly critical assessment of the medieval contribution. Th e Middle Ages see all being from the point of view of creator and creatum. While opening new possibilities for thinking, by recognizing that self-representing co-constitutes the Being of the res cogitans, Descartes himself is unable to break through the scholastic patterns of thought. According to Heidegger, Descartess most central claim is that every ego cogito is a cogito me cogitare, that is to say, every I repre-sent something simultaneously represents a myself, me, the one representing (for myself, in my representing), such that every human representing is a self-representing.37 But this manner of speaking is easily misunderstood, and this is

33Heidegger, Th e Question of Being [= ber die Linie, GA 9], trans. J. T. Wilde and W. Kluback (Albany, N.Y.: New College University Press, 1958), 556.

34Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, 411: Versteht man unter Sub-jektivitt dieses, da das Wesen der Wirklichkeit in Wahrheitd.h. fr die Selbstgewiheit des Selbstbewutseinsmens sive animus, ratio, Vernunft, Geist, ist, dann erscheint die Subjektivitt als eine Weise der Subiectitt.

35Heidegger, Th e Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead, in Th e Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 53114, at 10102.

36Heidegger, Hegels Concept of Experience. With a Section from Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. K. R. Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 33.

37Heidegger, Nihilism, 106.


the case as well for the claim that I am a thinking thing. In both cases, there is a risk to reduce Descartess points to a mere con rmation of mans being an object-at-hand (Vorhandenes), with the simple result that the attribute thinking would be assigned to him as a distinguishing property.38 Nothing prevents us from such a reduction, since, Heidegger argues, Descartes himself o ers a super cial and inadequate interpretation of res cogitans, inasmuch as he speaks the language of the doctrines of medieval scholasticism, dividing being as a whole into substantia in nita and substantia nita. With substantia being the conventional and pre-dominant name for hypokeimenon, subiectum in a metaphysical sense, substantia in nita being God, summum ens, creator, and the realm of substantia nita being ens creatum (divided in turn into res cogitantes and res extensae), the new delineation of man through the cogito sum might easily be considered as simply sketched into the old framework (the so-called point of view of creator and crea-tum). Th e verdict is returned: guilty! Here we have the most palpable example of earlier metaphysics impeding a new beginning for metaphysical thought.39 Traditional language is the enemy. Th e language of substance is full of dangers. As the late Heiddeger writes in On Time and Being: If the fundamentum absolutum is attained with the ego cogito as the distinctive subiectum, this means: Th e subject is the hypokeimenon which is transferred to consciousness, what is truly present, what is unclearly enough called substance in traditional language.40 Th e reproach is not new. It was already central in Being and Time, where it is clearly stated that Descartes investigates the cogitare of the ego, within certain limitsleaving the sum completely undiscussed, even though it is regarded as no less primordial than the cogito. Th ose limits are obvious: basically they are all linked to the very idea of substantiality (Vorhandenheit, presence-at-hand) inherited from the Middle Ages. In Descartes the meaning of Being which the idea of substantiality embraces, or the character of the universality which belongs to this signi cation remains as unclari ed as it was in the ontology of the medievals. One should even say that in working out this problem ontologically, Descartes is always far behind the Schoolmen: indeed, he not only evades the ontological question of substantiality altogether; he also emphasizes explicitly that substance as suchthat is to say, its substantialityis in and for itself inaccessible from the outset [vorgngig]. Being itself does not a ect us, and therefore cannot be perceived. Th us the possibility of a pure problematic of Being gets renounced in principle:

Because Being is not in fact accessible as an entity, it is expressed through attributesde nite characteristics of the entities under consideration,

38Ibid., 115.39Ibid., 114.40Heidegger, Th e End of Philosophy and the Task of Th inking, in On Time and Being,

trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5573, at 61.


characteristics which themselves are. Being is not expressed through just any such characteristics, but rather through those satisfying in the purest manner that meaning of Being and substantiality which has still been tacitly presupposed. Substantiality is detachable ratione tantum; it is not detachable realiter, nor can we come across it in the way in which we come across those entities themselves that are substantially. Th us the ontologi-cal grounds for de ning the world as res extensa have been made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclari ed in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed o as something incapable of clari cation, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance. 41

Heideggers criticism of Descartes has been convincingly refuted by J.-L. Marion.42 I will not summarize the whole discussion here. I am only concerned with the questions that Heideggers general treatment of the tradition poses to the historian of philosophy. Th e concept of subjectness belongs to what Heidegger calls history. It is historical inasmuch as it pertains to the only kind of historical inquiry that is positively valued from an Heideggerian point of view: the inquiry into the history of Being. All further considerations are labeled historiological. According to Heidegger, historiological comparisons always block the way into history.43 In the case of Descartes a historiological report on the meaning and nature of Descartes doctrine is forced to establish results of the critical sort that have been brie y sketched here. A historical meditation on the inquiry proper, however, would strive to think Descartes principles and concepts in the sense he himself wanted them to have, even if in so doing it should prove necessary to translate his assertions into a di erent language. We have tried so far to account for both ways of dealing with the Cartesian materials in Heidegger. Heideggers program in the fourth volume of Nietzsche is clearly delineated:

History as Beingindeed as coming from the essence of Being it-selfremains unthought. Every historiological meditation of man on

41Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 20, 127.

42See J.-L. Marion, Questions cartsiennes II (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996), 10607.

43Heidegger, Nihilism, 98.On the di erence between history and historiology, see Being and Time, 428; Letter on Humanism, trans. F. A. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1993), 21366, at 239: History does not take place primarily as a happening. And its happening is not evanescence. Th e happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: it gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously.


his condition is therefore metaphysical, and thus pertains to the es-sential omission of the default of Being. It is necessary to contemplate the metaphysical character of history as a discipline if we are going to measure the impact of historiological thought, which at times considers itself authorized to enlighten, if not to rescue man, who is at stake in the age of the self-ful lling nonessence of nihilism.44

To put Heideggers major historical claimsthose directly linked with the distinction between Subiectitt and Subjektivittin a nutshell, one might say that according to him the very distinction allows one eventually to establish that the being as subjecticity omits the truth of Being itself in a decisive way, insofar as subjecticity, out of its own desire for surety, posits the truth of beings as cer-titude.45 In other words, subjecticity is part of a historical inquiry, teleologically oriented, which is entirely constructed or reconstructed from the viewpoint of the gradual concealment of Being by itself and of nihilism as the ultimate stage of metaphysics as the history of Being.

Heideggers reconstruction of the history of subjectivity (Subjektivitt) as a history of the successive generalizations of what he calls subjectness (Subiectitt) is most valuable. His account of the history of Being is, however, highly questionable. Instead of following Heideggers lead in opposing histori-cal and historiological inquiries, I will take another path here. I will endeavor to study from an archeological point of view Heideggers most fundamental claim, which as such has to be common to both history and historiology: Descartess revolution consists in equating mens humana and subiectumthe human mind becoming the only, the exclusive subjectso that eventually subiectum and ego, subjectivity and egoity became synonyms.46 Leaving aside the historical claim that Das Sein ist in seiner Geschichte als Metaphysik durch-gngig Subiecti tt,47 I will rather focus on the archaeology of the subject and of what I call subjecthood. Th e concept of subjecthood does not commit us to any historical scenario. It is primarily meant to (re)translate Heideggers assertions into a di erent language: the language of tradition, the language that Descartes and the schoolmen actually spoke. On this philological basis, I hope to show that the Heideggerian account of the historical (or merely historiological?) thread along which one could pursue the historical prov-enance48 of the dominion of the subjective in the modern age deserves a serious reconsideration.

44Heidegger, Nihilism, 241.45Ibid., 238.46Heidegger, Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, 395.47Ibid., 411.48Heidegger, Nihilism, 179.


IV.

Let me rst de ne what sujecthood is in traditional (that is, late ancient and medieval) philosophy. Inherence and predication are the two components of subjecthood. Th e notion of subjecthood links that of which there can be predicates, the so-called logical subject, and that in which there are accidents, the so-called physical subject. According to this distinction, Heideggers claim should be rephrased as follows: the modern subject emerged when this sub-jective patternthe subjecthood of the physical subject, which is a substrate for accidents in a change, and at the same time, the subjecthood of the logical subject, which is a substrate for the predicates in a propositionwas extended to the human mind, to a mental subject, thus subjecthood becoming subjectivity. Th is process could thus be described as the transformation of the ontological principle:

x is a logical subject of predicates and a physical subject in which physical accidents inhere

into a new principle, allowing for the conception of a mental subject of thought and volition:

x is a logical subject of predicates and a mental subject in which psycho-logical accidents inhere.

Th is transformation constitutes the Cartesian moment proper, that is, the moment when mens humana made an exclusive claim on the [term] subject.49

With such reformulation, Heideggers claim is rather unsatisfactory, I am afraid. If we are to study past philosophers on their own terms, it is clear that there is no Cartesian subject in Descartes. Th e Cartesian subject is the re-sult of a retrospective projection that started with Kant. For over two hundred years, Kant has lent credence to the idea that the subject was a Cartesian inven-tion, and thus encouraged even the greatest thinkersincluding Heidegger the Schellingianto look for traces of a semantic mutation of terms, such as subject, which the philosopher of the Meditations almost never used. Th e distinction between a logical (pros kategorian) and an ontological (pros hyparxin) subject, the two components of subjecthood, in the Aristotelian tradition is indisputable: it is well evidenced in the Greek Commentaries on the Categories. Its Latin aftermath is impressive: the medieval distinction between subiectum inhaesionis or inharentiae and subiectum attributionis was a standard one in the textbooks of the second scholasticism (Goclenius, Burgersdijk) and was still considered a logical commonplace in the Classical Age, including the Cartesian French scholasticism (Pourchot, Bary) and those John Locke once referred to

49Ibid., 96.


as the whole tribe of Logicians. Yet Descartes was certainly not the rst either to apply the conceptual scheme of subjecthood to the mens humana or to ap-ply the term subject to the mens, the I, or the egofor two reasons at least. One is obvious: others did it before him. Th e other is less obvious: Descartess overriding desire to avoid doing so. In other words, if the transition from sub-jecticity to subjectivity is to be Cartesian, it cannot possibly be based on the mere interpretation of the I as a hypokeimenon-subiectum, that is to say, on the extension of subjecthood to the mental, which would be at variance with the most genuine spirit of Cartesian philosophy. My aim is to show that, according to Heideggers own criteria, the decisive move was made both after Descartes, in the critical reception of the cogito, sum, and before him, in the Middle Ages, when medieval theologians re-introduced the Aristotelian hypokeimenon into the eld of psychology.

Let me de ne what I will hereafter call mental attributivism. By men-tal attributivism I understand any interpretation of the soul (or thought, or understanding, or mind) that contains or implies an assimilation of mental or psychic activities, operations, or dispositions to attributes or predicates of a subject de ned as an ego or an I. I say mental attributivism to avoid con-fusion with attributivism proper, the so-called attribute theory, that is, the theory interpreting the soul or mind as some sort of dispositional property of the body or the organism, a dispositional property being the capacity or abil-ity something has for engaging in a certain activity in certain circumstances.50 Attributivism being the doctrine in which the soul is conceived as a property, the opposite doctrine, substantialism, is the theory according to which the soul is conceived, not as a property but as a thing, a subject of properties.51 At-tributivism, substantialism, and mental attributivism are ultimately based on the same view: the substance-attribute view. According to attributivism, mind is an attribute and the body a substance; according to substantialism, mind is a substance and the body another substance. Attributivism is monist, substantial-ism, dualist. Combining these criteria we are left with four possible positions: (1) S1: substantialism (+), mental attributivism (+); (2) S2: substantialism (+), mental attributivism (); (3) A1: attributivism (+), mental attributivism (+); (4) A2: attributivism (+), mental attributivism ():

mental attributivismsubstantialism (S1) + (S2) attributivism (A1) + (A2)

50H. Granger, Aristotles Idea of the Soul (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 10.51Ibid., 12.


According to Armstrong, a dualist theory holds that mind and body are distinct things, so that for a dualist a man is a compound object, a material thinghis bodysomehow related to a non-material thing or thingshis mind.52 Carte-sianism is one of the two main types of dualist theory: For the Cartesian Dualist the mind is a single non-material or spiritual substance somehow related to the body. Armstrong adds that, although the term Cartesian refers to Descartes, and we nd this view of the mind and body expounded by Descartes in his Sixth Meditation, the term, as he uses it, is not to be restricted to the exact theory put forward by Descartes, but is to be applied to any view that holds that a persons mind is a single, continuing, non-material substance in some way related to the body.53 Th e attribute theories of the mind argue that men, besides hav-ing physical properties, have further properties, non-physical properties, quite di erent from those possessed by ordinary physical objects, and that it is the possession of these unique properties that gives men a mind.54 When coming to historiological considerations that concern our present purpose, Armstrong seems more puzzled: he does not know exactly where to put either Aristotle or Aquinas. He says that Aristotles doctrine, put forward in De Anima, that the mind is the

52D. Armstrong, A Materialist Th eory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), 6.53Ibid. Th e second type of dualist theory is bundle dualism, the term bundle echo-

ing Humes notorious description of the mind as a bundle of perceptions. Th e bundle dualist takes the mind to be a succession of non-physical particulars or items distinct from, although related to, the body. According to Armstrong, this form of dualism characteristically arises out of re ection on the di culties of Cartesian Dualism (ibid., 7). Th is is certainly the case. But to consider Humean every bundle dualism would certainly be mistaken as well. Catharine Trotter Cockburns discussion of Edmund Law, for instance, represents another type of bundle dualism, more intimately related to the di culties of Cartesian Dualism. As a matter of fact, Laws two major claims that (1) the substance of spirit consists in the powers of thinking and acting and (2) the aggregate of the properties of any being is the being itself are both anti-Cartesian. See Cockburn, Remarks Upon Some Writers, 100. Cockburns answer to point (2) is a beautiful defense of subjecthood: I confess myself ignorant indeed of what the substance of that being is, but cannot think that a su cient reason to exclude it from existence, as this new philosophy would do, tacking properties and actions together, without any subject of either; somewhat unphilosophically, as it seems to me (ibid., 101). From an ontological point of view bundle dualism is already evidenced in Hobbess discussion of the Ship of Th eseus. It is implied in the third opinion on individuation discussed in the De corpore: x and y are the same, if, and only if, they are the same aggregate of accidents. See Elements of Philosophy, Part II, chap. 11, 7, in Th e English Works of Th omas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth (London: Bohn, 18391845), vol. 1, 135: Some place individuity in the unity of matter; others, in the unity of form; and one says it consists in the unity of the aggregate of all the accidents together. Th is being said, I guess that bundle dualism could be traced back either to Plotinuss sumfrhsij theory as evidenced in Enneads VI [44], iii, 8, 1623 and 307 or, more convincingly, to Porphyrys de nition of an individual, in Isagoge 7.1927, as a collection (qroisma) of properties which can never be the same for another.

54Armstrong, A Materialist Th eory, 11.


form of the body is perhaps a version of the Attribute theory,55 adding that, though he lacks the space to substantiate the accusation, he is inclined to see in Th omism an uneasy and somewhat confused oscillation between an Attri-bute theory and Dualism.56 I think that Armstrongs perplexity derives in part from the fact that he cannot see any clear and important way of sub-dividing Attribute theories.57 On my view, introducing mental attributivism makes it possible to supply such a clearand hopefully importantway of subdividing dualist, materialist, and compromise theories like the so-called attribute theory. My view strongly suggests to drop the charge against Aquinas as well.

In their standard versions both attributivism and substantialism are commit-ted to mental attributivism: in the standard version of substantialism, advocated by Descartes (S1), thought is the immediate (essential), principal, not to say unique attribute of the mind; in the standard version of attributivism advocated by Hobbes (A1), thought is an immediate attribute of the body. S2 and A2 seem at rst glance more di cult to instantiate. Th is is mainly due to the fact that the best-suited candidates would be ancient and/or medieval thinkers: Augustine for S2; Aquinas and Aristotle (at least on Aquinass interpretation) for A2.

V.

Leaving aside for the moment Augustine and Aquinas, let us resume the discussion of Heideggers interpretation of the role played by Descartes in pro-viding the point of departure for modern dominion of the subjective. From the viewpoint of what I call subjecthood, if Heideggers claim were correct, the word mind should denote for Descartes that subject in which the activi-ties or dispositions of knowing, willing, feeling, or desiring inhere; e converso the word subject should denote the mind or the I by which the activities or dispositions of knowing, willing, feeling, or desiring are accomplished or brought about. In order to meet all the requirements of a modern subject-centered philosophythat is, to provide us with a subject that could simultaneously be

55On this problem see J. Barnes, Aristotles Concept of Mind, Proceedings of the Aristo-telian Society (197172): 10114. Barness attribute theory has been criticized by C. Shields, Soul and Body in Aristotle , Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 6, ed. J. Annas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 10336, esp. 112. According to Shields, Barnes sees persons as material substances which none the less have immaterial properties which are causally or non-causally necessitated by physical states of the body (112). In other words: 1. Persons have some im-material states. 2. Th ese cannot be states of the soul, since it is not substantial. 3. Th erefore, they must be states of the body or compound [of body and soul], both of which are material (112). On Barness pseudo-materialism see R. Sorabji, Body and Soul in Aristotle, Philosophy 49 (1974): 6389, esp. 70.

56Armstrong, A Materialist Th eory, 12.57Ibid., 12.


understood both as a subject of thought and as a thinking subjectCartesian philosophy should display an extensive use of these two words, with those precise meanings. Now consider the rst claim. It is indisputable that the idea of the mind as a subject of thought, in the sense of a subject of attribution/inherence can be found everywhere in post-Cartesian literature. It is to be found in Kant, when he claims that by this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x, which is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from them, we can never have the slightest concept.58 It is also evidenced in the numerous texts of the Lockean or post-Lockean tradition, ranging from Catharine Trotter to William Hamilton, which argue that the subject or substance in which every psychic phenomenon inheres is in itself unknown. Pace Heidegger, however, it is not present in Descartes.

To the best of my knowledge, Descartess defense of S1 refers to the subject in only two texts. In both cases, the French philosopher borrows the word from his opponents. Th ese opponents are Th omas Hobbes, a major exponent of A1, and Henricus De Roy, better known as Regius.

In the third set of Objections to the Meditationes de prima philosophia Hobbes makes a striking point. He accepts the inference from I think (cogito, which he equates with sum cogitans) to I am (ego sum). But he challenges Descartess further inference that the thinking thing, the res cogitans, is undoubtedly mens, animus, intellectus, ratio. Th is, he says, amounts to saying, I am walking, therefore I am a walk. Descartes has confused the thing that understands and the act or power of understanding: Yet all philosophers distinguish the subject from its faculties and acts, that is, from its properties and essences (omnes tamen Philosophi distinguunt subjectum a suis facultatibus et actibus, hoc est a suis pro-prietatibus & essentiis).59 In brief, Descartes fails to grasp that I know only that ego cogito because we cannot conceive any act without its subject (sine subjecto suo). And he fails to grasp this because, up to a certain point, he precisely lacks a concept of the subject.60 Th e continuation of Hobbess argument is a canoni-cal exposition of attributivism. For Hobbes goes on to argue that a subject, in this case the subject of thoughtthat subject or substance in which the phe-nomena of knowing, willing etc. inherecan be conceived as only corporeal or material.61

58I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, A 346, B 404 (available online at http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html; accessed on March 28, 2008).

59R. Descartes, Th ird Objections, II, AT [uvres de Descartes, ed. Ch. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 19641974)] VII, 1723; IX, 134.

60See M. Moriarty, Early Modern French Th ought: Th e Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 1113.

61See AT VII, 173; IX, 135.


Descartess reply is based on common usage. He of course agrees that a walk (ambulatio) can never mean a walker; but, he says, mens, animus, intellectus, ratio are commonly understood to be capable of denoting both the faculties of reason and understanding, and the things endowed with these faculties. Th e core of his reply is thus concerned with the words a philosopher should use. His own terminology has, he argues, the merit of abstraction; it perfectly ts his philosophical purpose, since he seeks to purge his notion of substance of all that does not belong to it, whereas Hobbes uses terms as concrete as possible, to sug-gest that the thinking thing cannot be divorced from the body. In other words, subiectum is, for Descartes, a concrete term, along with materia and corpus,62 and for him, referring to the subject of thought can have only one practical goal: to mislead the reader. Why then should this term be used to de ne the essence of Descartess philosophy? It is certainly essential to Hobbess philosophy; it is not central to that of Descartes.

Hobbess major claim is that it is possible . . . that the thinking thing be the subject of mind, reason or understanding, and thus something corporeal (potest . . . esse ut res cogitans sit subjectum mentis, rationis, vel intellectus, ideoque corporeum aliquid).63 Obviously, Descartes and Hobbes do not share the same language. When Hobbes objects to Descartes that omnes . . . Philosophi distinguunt subjectum a suis facultatibus et actibus, hoc est a suis proprietatibus & essentiis, he is speaking a philosophical jargon that is entirely unacceptable to Descartes. For instance, this is how Hobbes de nes essence, form, subject, and matter:

Now that accident for which we give a certain name to any body, or the accident which denominates its subject, is commonly called the essence thereof; as rationality is the essence of a man; whiteness, of any white thing, and extension the essence of a body. And the same essence, in as much as it is generated, is called the form. Again, a body, in respect of any accident, is called the subject, and in respect of the form it is called the matter.64

An essence is that accident for which we give the thing, or the subject, its name; that accident whichlet me insist on this formulationdenominates its subject. Every subject is a body:

I de ne what it is we call essence, namely, that accident for which we give the thing its name. As the essence of a man is his capacity of reasoning; the essence of a white body, whiteness, &c., because we give the name of man

62See AT VII, 174; IX, 1356.63AT VII, 173; IX, 134.64Th . Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, II, Th e First Grounds of Philosophy, chap. 8 (Of

Body and Accident), 23, in Th e English Works of Th omas Hobbes, vol. 1, 118.


to such bodies as are capable of reasoning, for that their capacity; and the name of white to such bodies as have that color, for that color.65

Hobbess terminology involves a complete destruction of traditional ontology. It is based, however, on a very common scholastic principle: every accident denominates its subject (accidens denominat proprium subiectum). If there is an attributivist formulation of subjecthood, it is that introduced by Hobbes. Th e only Cartesian contribution to the emergence of the subject in its modern, Cartesian, sensethat is, the rst-person relationship between thought and existence, not to say personal identityis to accept the general axiom that we cannot conceive an act without a subject (that is, Nietzsches grammatische Gewh-nung) and to reject, as contrary to all linguistic usage and logic (contra omnem loquendi usum omnemque logicam), the idea that every subject should be material, when logicians and others commonly assert that some substances are spiritual, others corporeal.66 Th is is not enough to allow one to consider Descartes as the father of modern subjectivity. Descartess claim is that there are incorporeal substanceslet us say incorporeal subjects. Th is claim is not primarily con-cerned with the idea that the thinking thing should be I as a subjectsubject of thought, thinking subject. It is concerned with Hobbess thesis according to which the expressions incorporeal substance or incorporeal subject imply a contradictionin other words, that to say that x is an incorporeal substance amounts to saying that there is no x:

To men that understand the signi cation of these words, substance, and incorporeal; as incorporeal is taken not for subtle body but for not body, they imply a contradiction: insomuch as to say, an angel, or spirit is (in that sense) an incorporeal substance, is to say in e ect, there is no angel nor spirit at all.67

I hope it is now obvious why I previously spoke of Descartess overriding de-sire to avoid any assimilation of the thinking I to a subject of thought. In his own philosophical context or eld of presence68 a statement about a subject

65Th . Hobbes, Six Lessons of the Principles of Geometry, &c. to the egregious Professors of the Mathematics, one of Geometry, the other of Astronomy, in the chairs set up by the noble and learned sir Henry Savile, in the university of Oxford, lesson 2: Of the Faults that Occur in Demonstration, in Th e English Works of Th omas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. VII, 220.

66AT VII, 175; IX, 136.67Th . Hobbes, Leviathan, Part Th ree: Of a Christian Commonwealth, chap. 34: Of the

signi cation of spirit, angel, and inspiration in the books of holy scripture, in Th e English Works of Th omas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. III, 394.

68M. Foucault, Th e Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pan-theon Books, 1972), 57. By eld of presence Foucault understands all statements formulated elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknowledged to be truthful, involving exact description,


of thought or about mind as a subject had to refer to a body or a corporeal substrate. In short, Descartes was forced to accommodate the subject in his dualist approach of man. One may now show that Strawsons interpretation of Cartesian philosophy as a dualism of two subjects or two types of subjects is true to the extent that Descartess own assessment of a two-subject theory is a hapax legomenon, based on a further concession to the linguistic habits of the language of his second opponent: Regius.

In fact, the second occurrence of subject in Descartes takes place in his Notae in programma quoddam (Notes on a Program, also referred to as Comments on a Certain Broadsheet), that is: a pamphlet Descartes wrote during the winter of 16471648 in reply to the Explicatio mentis humanae, a broadside recently put out by his former disciple Henricus De Roy, who had by then become his adversary. In the Explicatio mentis humanae Regius had argued that there could perfectly be a single subject for thought and extension, intended as two di erent modes of the same substance. To prove his thesis, he claimed that there is no reason why the mind should not be a sort of attribute co-existing with exten-sion in the same subject.69 For Descartes, this was the second and apparently the last opportunity to deal with the question of subjecthood. To Regiuss claim Descartes responds that attributes which constitute the natures of things, as thought and extension do, cannot be said [to be] present together in one and the same subject; for that would be equivalent to saying that one and the same subject has two di erent naturesa statement that implies a contradiction, at least when it is a question of a simple subject . . . rather than a composite one.70 I have no space here for a minute description of the whole controversy. Be it su cient to call attention to some of Descartess most fundamental claims: (1) thought and extension are not two modes of the same substance; (2) they are essential or main or principal attributes of two di erent substances: mind and body; (3) two di erent modes can inhere in the same subject; (4) two essential or principal attributes cannot have the same subject; (5) each substance has only one essential or principal attribute; (6) there is no subject common both to thought and extension. M. Rozemond has described claim 5 as the Attribute Premise,71 which according to her is absolutely central in Cartesian dualism but is generally not at all explicit when Descartes argues for the real distinction72

well-founded reasoning, or necessary presupposition, those that are criticized, discussed, and judged, as well as those that are rejected or excluded (ibid.).

69AT VIII/2, 343; I, 2945; trans. G. MacDonald Ross (available online at http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk; accessed on March 28, 2008).

70AT VIII/2, 34950; I, 298.71M. Rozemond, Descartes Case for Dualism, Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (1995):

2963, now in Descartess Dualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).72Descartess Dualism, 36.


between mind and body. One exception: the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet. Th e rst claims are well explained in the following passage:

I am the rst person to have considered thought to be the distinctive at-tribute of incorporeal substance, and extension as the distinctive attribute of corporeal substance. But I have not said that these attributes inhere in them as if in subjects distinct from themselves. And here we must be careful not to understand attribute as meaning no more than mode (for we apply the word attribute to anything we recognise as belonging to a thing naturally, whether a variable mode or the very essence of the thing, which is obviously immutable). So: God contains many attributes, but no modes. Again, one of the attributes of every substance is its self-subsistence. Again, the extension of a given body can indeed admit of various modes, since its mode is di erent if the body is spherical from what it is if it is square; but the extension itself, which is the subject of those modes, considered in itself, is not a mode of corporeal substance, but the attribute which constitutes its essential nature. Finally, there are various modes of thought, since a rming is a di erent mode of thought from denying, and so on; but thought itself, as the internal principle from which these modes arise and in which they inhere, is not conceived as a mode, but as the attribute which constitutes the nature of a certain substance; and the present ques-tion is whether this substance is corporeal or incorporeal.73

We have already seen that, as far as the last claim is concerned, Descartes argues that attributes which constitute the natures of things cannot be said [to be] present together in one and the same subject; for that would be equivalent to saying that one and the same subject has two di erent naturesa statement that implies a contradiction, at least when it is a question of a simple subject . . . rather than a composite one. Two points are involved here: no one and the same simple subject has two di erent natures; composite subjects, however, may do so. According to Descartes, the di erence between simple entities and composite entities is the following: a composite entity is one which is found to have two or more attributes, each one of which can be distinctly understood apart from the other. Man is such an entity: Th at which we regard as having at the same time both extension and thought is a composite entity, namely a manan entity consisting of a soul and a body.74 Th is was exactly the thesis that Descartes had expressed in the Sixth Meditation: Peter Strawsons two-subjects theory. Man is not his soul. Man is not his mind. Man is a subject composed of two substances, mind and body, which are the simple subjects, substantially di erent, of principal or essential attributes that are in each case unique: thought and extension. Th us, there is no Cartesian

73Trans. G. MacDonald Ross.74AT VIII/2, 35051; I, 299.


subject in Descartes, both because the Cartesian theory of mind and thought lacks a concept of subjectthis was the core of Hobbess criticismand, paradoxically, because there are too many subjects in his philosophy: mind and body, the two substances whose composition constitutes the composite entity called man.

VI.

On the basis of these conclusions, let us return to the question, When did the subject emerge in its common, modern, psychological sense? I think that at this point, we may safely answer: not with Descartes. If the question is to decide whether Descartes contributed in a prominent way to the emergence of the term subject in its contemporary sense, the answer has to be negative. Th e modern idea of the subject was not Descartess child. Even if we take Heideggers interpreta-tion ad litteram, Descartes would not be the one who introduced the subject in dealing with thought, will, or desire, but only the one who restricted subjectic-ity to the mental, the human Mind becoming the only, the exclusive subject. Yet even this thesis is at variance with the two-subjects interpretation, which I consider much more convincing and supported by the texts. Now, if someone should be celebrated as the one who introduced the subject into early modern psychology, Hobbes would certainly be the best candidate. But, conversely, this subject would certainly not be the I, the ego, or the pure consciousness of an ego-based psychology, it would be a body subjectthe Nietzschean, anti-Cartesian subject in Heideggers account of the history of subjecticity.75

Now, if the question is to decide whether Descartes invented mental at-tributivismwhich is quite another questionthe answer would have to be negative as well. Mental attributivism was invented and immediately rejected by a distinguished advocate of S2 centuries before Descartes: Augustine.

Augustine is unquestionably a substantialist. His substantialism, however, bears very little resemblance to S1. Th is is because substance, as he understands it, is not reducible either to Aristotles rst substance or to Heideggers Vorhan-denes (present-at-hand),76 in a word: to a subject. Augustines theory of mind,

75See Heidegger, Nihilism, 132: does not Nietzsche argue against the concept of subject as Descartes thinks it? At any rate, Nietzsche says that the concept of the I as subject is an inven-tion of logic; ibid., 133: In Nietzsches thought, however, the argument against subjectivity in the sense of the I-ness of conscious thought nonetheless accords with the absolute acceptance of subjectivity in the metaphysical sense of subiectum, an acceptance that is of course unrecognized. For Nietzsche, what underlies is not the I but the body: Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul (WM, 491).

76From Being and Time onward, Heidegger continually criticized Descartess account of res cogitans and res extensa as present-at-hand entities, and Descartess understanding of the self as of an object present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). From an Augustinian point of view one must underline that Heidegger also expounds in terms of being-present-at-hand what he calls Sein in, the being-in,


following the perichoretic model77 of mutual immanence or mutual indwelling of the divine Persons, is borrowed from his Trinitarian theology and rmly based on the rejection of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon. Th is point was completely overlooked by Heidegger. Subjecthood is not the only pattern available in ancient philosophy for dealing with the mental. Th ere is a competing paradigm, born in Trinitarian theology: Persons are not subjects, but hypostases. Th e assumption of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon-based model, mirrored in Heideggers subjecticity and presence-at-hand, would lead us to reduce mental states, dispositions, or activities to mere accidents of the mind, a viewmental attributivismthat Augustine strongly opposed, just as he rejected the reduction of the three divine Persons or hypostaseis to accidents of the one divine substance (ousia). Th e Aristotelian idea of subjecthood does not hold for God, because it presupposes the Aristotelian concept of an ousia conceived as a hypokeimenon-subiectum taking on accidental forms, that is to say, sub-jecting accidents or accidental properties or dispositions. Th ere is no inherent nor inherence in God. Just as it would be un tting to say of God that He stands beneath His own goodnesssee On the Trinity, III, v, 10: It is forbidden to say that God subsists and stands under His own goodnessit would be un tting to say of the soul that it stands beneath its own acts or states. In the same manner in which the three Persons mutually indwell each another in the one being of God, the mental faculties, dispositions, and activitiesthat is: mind or memory, knowledge, and lovemutually indwell in the one being of the soul. If the structure of the soul parallels that of the triune God, there is no room for an Aristotelian subject either in the Trinity or in the soul. Neither the soul nor the mind can be conceived as subjects.

As Augustine writes in On the Trinity, IX, iv: love and knowledge are not contained in the mind as in a subject (non amor et cognitio tanquam in subiecto insunt menti), but these also exist substantially, or better said essentially, as the mind itself does (sunt, sicut ipsa mens). Love and knowledge are by no means accidents of the soul, because accidens non excedit subiectum in quo est, that is, accidents cannot go beyond their subjects (whereas all mental acts are intentional, that is: tran-scendental):

traditionally understood as being in something. Th is kind of Being which an entity has when it is in another one is obviously the kind of being ascribed by Aristotle to the accidents, in Catego-ries, 2, 1 a 201 b 10, namely, inherence, n pokeimnJ enai, esse in subiecto (vs. kaq pokeimnou lgesqai, dici de subiecto). Vorhandenheit thus characterizes both substances and accidents.

77Th e term perichoresis goes back to John of Damascus. For a survey of the patristic sources and Damascenes own use, see G. L. Prestige, Perichoreo and Perichoresis in the Fathers, Journal of Th eological Studies 29 (1928): 24252. Th e most substantial study is the one by R. Cross, Peri-choresis, Dei cation, and Christological Predi cation in John of Damascus, Mediaeval Studies 62 (2000): 69124. For the meaning of the terms circumincessio and circumsessio in Latin theology, see A. Dene e, Perichoresis, circumincessio, circuminsessio, Zeitschrift fur katholische Th eologie 47 (1923): 497532.


Similar reasoning suggests to us, if indeed we can in any way understand the matter, that these things [i.e. love and knowledge] exist in the soul, and that, being as it were involved in it, they are so evolved from it as to be perceived and reckoned up substantially, or, so to say, essentially. Not as though in a subject; as color, or shape, or any other quality or quantity, are in the body. For anything of this [material] kind does not go beyond the subject in which it is; for the color or shape of this particular body can-not be also those of another body. But the mind can also love something beside itself, with that love with which it loves itself. And further, the mind does not know itself only, but also many other things. Wherefore love and knowledge are not contained in the mind as in a subject, but these also exist substantially, as the mind itself does.

In book XII of the Confessions (xi, 12), Augustine uses the perichoretic model in his outline of what might be termed the psychic or mental life by invoking the triad of esse, nosse, and velle. In this model, Trinitarian relations permit a formal description of the interacting equalities that de ne the incomprehensible unity of the ego:

I am, I know and I will. I am a being which knows and wills; I know both that I am and that I will . . . In these threebeing, knowledge and willthere is one inseparable life, one life, one mind, one essence; and therefore, although they are distinct from one another, this distinction does not separate them.

In the description of the mens-notitia-amor triad (On the Trinity IX, v, 8) the doctrine of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity is evoked even more directly in order to conceptualize the mutual indwelling of mens and its acts:

Th e mind, love and knowledge . . . each is a substance in itself, and all are found mutually in all, or each two in each one, consequently all are in all . . . Th ese three, therefore, are in a marvelous manner inseparable from one an-other; and yet each of them is a substance, and all together are one substance or essence, while the terms themselves express a mutual relationship.

Th is is exactly what the Aristotelian hupokeimenon pattern would and could not allow. Yet in the Middle Ages, the two con icting patternsthe perichoretic and the Aristotelianmerged into a single one, giving rise to the concept of a mental subject, mentally active, in a modern sense.78 What made such a change possible in these two conceptions? Time has come to summon our medieval witnesses.

78Paradoxically enough, this is con rmed by the fact that Brentanos invention of inten-tionality was also based on a perichoretic interpretation of Aristotle. See de Libera, Naissance du sujet, 13354, and F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A. C. Rancurello,


VII.

Although it is always dangerous to give a date for the appearance of new theories in the Middle Ages, we can advance the hypothesis that one of the rst thinkers to attest to the subjective mutation of subjecthood was the somewhat unorthodox Augustinian Peter Olivi (Petrus de Olivi).79

Th is controversial Franciscan was reacting to a speci c situation: the re-formulation of the peripatetic doctrine, which had become standard in the late thirteenth century, according to which the intellect knows itself in the same way in which it knows other things, and that it does so on the basis of its knowledge of those other things. Th is view was already at variance with the Augustinian principle stating that the mens cannot be regarded as the subject of its own acts. Moreover, according to it, man was assumed to arrive at an understanding of his own mind (mens) and of the nature of his own ability to think (natura potentiae intellectivae) on the basis of his acts (per actus eius) and the objects of those acts (per cognitionem objectorum). Such a knowledge was reputed to be merely conjec-tural: it was supposed to be the product of a process of reasoning which, taking objects as its starting point, would work back to acts by postulating (a) that these acts subsist (manant) only because of a power that supplies their substrate (ab aliqua potentia et substantia), (b) that they therefore exist in a subject (sunt in aliqui subjecto), (c) which would allow us to conclude that we have a faculty that ensures the subsistence of those acts (Unde et auctores huius positionis dicunt quod nos devenimus in cognitionem nostre mentis et nostre potentie intellective

D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 88: Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in judgment something is a rmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. In a footnote that Brentano added to the second edition, he argues that Aristotle himself spoke of this psychical indwelling (psychische Einwohnung), that St. Augustine in his doctrine of the Verbum mentis and of its inner origin touches upon the same fact, and that, in the same manner, St. Th omas Aquinas teaches that the object which is thought is intentionally in the thinking subject, the object which is loved in the person who loves, the object which is desired in the person desiring (88).

79See S. Piron, Petrus Johannis Olivi. Impugnatio quorundam articulorum Arnaldi Galliardi, articulus 19, Oliviana (http://oliviana.revues.org/document52.html), consulted March 28, 2008. Th e Impugnatio quorundam articulorum Arnaldi Galliardi was written in 1282, as an answer to Arnaud Gaillards question An scientia evacuetur in patria, which was based on Aquinass claim that modus scientie huius vite est quod at mediante fantasmate et cum successione et tempore. Th e peripatetic doctrine rebuked by Peter is thus linked to Th omism. On this text, see O. Boulnois, tre et reprsentation. Une gnalogie de la mtaphysique moderne lpoque de Duns Scot (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999), 151221.


per actus eius, et in cognitionem actuum per cognitionem obiectorum). Arguing against Augustine, the Peripatetics posited the existence of a potentia subjectiva in order to demonstrate the existence of a subject of knowledge acts that are oriented toward objects. According to Olivi, this conjecture, which certainly would look to moderns like a decisive step toward subjectivity, lacked what the Augustinian model was meant to supply: self-certainty, certitudo infallibilis sui esse (Coniicimus enim ratiocinando quod actus illi quibus obiecta cognoscimus manant ab aliqua potentia et substantia et sunt in aliquo subiecto, et sic per hunc modum deprehendimus nos habere aliquam potentiam a qua manant). Indeed, it actually says nothing about the ego or the I; it makes it possible to posit that my acts have a subject, but it does not establish that I am that subject. In Nietzschean terms, it posits that it is thinking, without supplying evidence that I am the one who does the thinking. Nothing in the peripatetic argument allows me to be certain that I am, that I am alive, and that I am thinking; on the contrary, it merely posits that my acts subsist thanks to a certain power and that they are inherent in a certain subject.

If we carefully examine this way of thinking, we will see not only that it cannot be beyond doubt, but also that no one can use it to arrive at any certainty that he is what he is, that he is living, and that he is thinking, even though he can therefore be certain that these acts subsist by virtue of a certain power and that they reside in a certain subject.80

In order to arrive at the self-certainty of the moderns, one would have to take one more step: assume that I can directly intuit that I myself am the subject of my acts. One should, in a word, go back to Augustines perichoretic concep-tion of the soul and adapt the peripatetic language of subjecthood to it. Th is twofold maneuver would of course bring about a forced synthesis and betray both parties, the resulting thesis being, at bottom, neither Augustinian nor Ar-istotelian. But that would precisely mark the beginnings of subjectivity, or at least one of the preconditions for those beginnings. I think that this is the step taken by Peter Olivi when he expressly makes the perception of my acts depend upon my prior perception of myself as subject of those acts. Th is leads him to formulate the theorem that in the perception of my acts, the perception of the subject itself [that is to say, of me as the suppositum of my own acts] comes rst according to the natural order of things (Nullus enim est certus scientialiter de aliquo nisi sciat se scire illud, hoc est nisi sciat quod ipse est ille quod hoc

80Impugnatio quorundam articulorum, art. 19, fol. 47ra: Si quis autem bene inspexerit istum modum, reperiet quod non solum potest in eo contingere aliqua dubietas, sed etiam quod nunquam per hanc viam possumus esse certi nos esse et nos vivere et intelligere. Licet enim certi simus quod illi actus manant ab aliqua potentia et sunt in aliquo subiecto, unde per hoc sciemus quod illud subiectum sumus nos et quod illa potentia est nostra?


scit. Et hec certitudo de supposito currit universaliter in omni apprehensione actuum nostrorum. Nunquam enim apprehendo actus meos, actus scilicet vi-dendi et loquendi et sic de aliis, nisi per hoc quod apprehendo me videre, audire, cogitare et sic de aliis). In my view, expressions such as certituo qua sumus certi de supposito omnis actus scientialis, or in hac apprehensione videtur naturali ordine praerire apprehensio ipsius suppositi signal the encounter between certainty and subjecthood, or, to use a better (Scotistic and Leibnizian) term, suppositality, which gives rise to the modern notions of subjectivity and subjective certainty. Th ey also introduce one last basic feature: acts are compared in every respect to attributes or predicates of the subject-ego.

In a way that I nd amazing Olivi answers the key question raised by Peter Strawson in Individuals: Why are ones states of consciousness ascribed to any-thing at all? His answer is among the clearest formulations of mental attributivism ever devised. Th e main thesis is: Our acts are perceived by us only as predicates or attributes (actus nostris non apprehenduntur a nobis nisi tamquam praedicata vel attributa). According to Olivi, the subject is perceived rst because accord-ing to the natural order of things, the subject is perceived before the predicate is attributed to it as such (Et certe naturali ordine prius apprehenditur subiectum quam predicatum ei attributum in quantum tale)a psycholinguistic fact. With this claim, the subjectivation of the mind is now complete in every dimension, including the assumption of the linguistic or logical form of predication, which is backed up by the introduction of the word ego into the analysis of linguistic communication. As a matter of fact, although the term is unnecessary in Latin, Olivi stresses that, when we wish to signal the existence within us of some mental state, we put the subject rst by saying I think that or I see that (quando volumus hoc aliis annunciare praemittimus ipsum suppositum dicentes: ego hoc cogito, vel ego hoc video). We may safely describe this as a rst medieval theorization of subjectivity. We are authorized to do so, because Peter Olivis theory clearly merges substantialism and mental attributivism. Indeed, it entails the idea of immediate self-intuition, intuition of I or me as a substance, which is at the same time subject and principle (subjectum et principium), as well as the idea of an experiential and almost tactile sensation (sensus experimentalis et quasi tactualis) in the inner sense that I am a permanent subject. According to Olivi, we can further intuit, thanks to the same inner sense, that my acts are so many attributes that are distinct from my substance, without being mere accidents of what I am when I am acting. Th ey subsist thanks to this inner sense that is mine and/or me, and exist within me in a becoming mode:

When we apprehend our acts through inner sensation, and make so to say an experiential distinction between the substance whence they derive their subsistence and in which they exist, and the senses or sensations


themselves, this means that we perceive through [inner] sense that those acts subsist by virtue of that substance and depend on that substance, and that it does not depend on them, and that this substance is some-thing stable that subsists in itself, whilst its acts are in a permanent state of becoming.81

From a modern point of view, Olivis subject satis es all the requirements set forth in ego-based psychology. It meets the requirement of a doer for every deed. Olivis theory states that if there is thinking, there must be something that thinks. But it also establishes that I am this something. Th ere is a grammatical move, a logical move, and a theological move.

Th e most outstanding feature of Olivis criticism of the peripatetic model of indirect, conjectural, inferential knowledge of the I or the ego consists in equating the Aristotelian ontological subiectum with the so-called suppositum as the immediate subject of self-certainty. Of course, suppositum is a key word in medieval grammar, referring both to the term that is the logical subject in a sentence or a phrase, suppositum locutionis, and to that about which one speaks, the subject matter of discourse, that which is subjected to the locutio: suppositum locutioni. Moreover, it is clear that subiectum and suppositum, praedicatum and appositum correspond to the terms subject and predicate in modern logic and grammar. But suppositum, the Latin rendering of the Greek hypostasis, is also a key word in Trinitarian theology: hypostasis, subsistentia, persona, and suppositum are synonyms.82 In order to grasp the full import of this equationsubiectum equals suppositum equals personfor the genealogy of subjectivity a last step is necessary: an archaeological inquiry into the principle which has been labeled a mere gram-matical custom by Nietzsche. Professor Rosemanns study of the principle omne agens agit sibi simile, every agent causes something similar to itself, is a paragon of such an approach.83 Th e same kind of study is required for the subject, in order

81Ibid., fol. 50ra: Quando etiam nos apprehendimus nostros actus quoddam interno sensu et quasi experimentaliter distinguimus inter substantiam a qua manant et in qua exis-tunt et inter ipsos actus; unde et sensibiliter percipimus quod ipsi manant et dependent ab ea, non ipsa ab eis et quod ipsa est quoddam xum et in se manens, ipsi vero actus in quodam continuo eri.

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