Subject

The subject (Latin: subiectum; Greek: ὺποκείμενον hypokeimenon "the underlying") has been conceptually understood in different ways in the history of philosophy. Today it is largely taken as an expression of the conscious, self-determining individual I, which confronts the objects, the non-I. Insofar as the subject thereby seems to have exclusive access to its inner world, i.e. to its own thinking and thus also to the motives of its actions, in epistemology and ethics one speaks of the first-person perspective, which is fundamentally inaccessible to an external observer from the third-person perspective.

„The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "Mind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the first person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person. Such phenomena include some famous philosophical bugbears: subjective experience, qualia, consciousness, and even mental content...“

– David Chalmers: The First-Person and Third-Person Views

What the subject experiences subjectively cannot claim general validity at first. Subjectivity is therefore largely avoided in the sciences and considered a possible source of error. This is especially the case when it is a mere personal opinion. Here, at least, intersubjectivity is required. Irrefutable knowledge is also not given by the formation of theories that are conceptually clear, but still built on hypotheses and logically founded. Here, too, truth is not yet confirmed beyond doubt; the principle of falsifiability applies. Only by becoming aware of the idea within reality is true knowledge given through the direct insight into its essence, which expresses itself in man, and thus one-sided subjectivity is overcome.

Literature

• Karl von Meyenn (Hrsg.): Wolfgang Pauli. Wissenschaftlicher Briefwechsel, Band III: 1940–1949. Springer. Berlin (1993) Brief #929, S. 496
• Hans Jonas: Macht oder Ohnmacht der Subjektivität? Das Leib-Seele-Problem im Vorfeld des Prinzips Verantwortung, Suhrkamp Verlag 2000, ISBN 978-3518380130
• Rudolf Steiner: Einleitungen zu Goethes Naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften, GA 1 (1987), ISBN 3-7274-0011-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Goethes Weltanschauung, GA 6 (1990), ISBN 3-7274-0060-9 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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