Index© Elizabeth Doyle, 1997.
Subjectivity is the appellation given to the study of the processes by which the awareness and acceptance of the individuality of a sentient being comes to fruition. There have been numerous arguments put forth to explain this process: humanism, psychoanalysis, the schools of structuralism and post-structuralism, to name but a few, each approaching subjectivity from significantly different perspectives. The aim of this essay is to show a basic understanding of subjectivity and its implications by comparing and contrasting two accounts of subjectivity: that of the humanist perspective, concentrating on the philosophy of René Descartes, with that of the psychoanalytical approach expounded by Sigmund Freud. The method employed to achieve this aim will consist of a brief account outlining each position followed by comparisons and contrasts that are apparent between the two perspectives, citing relevant texts where appropriate.
The French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes (1596 - 1650) believed that the commonly accepted knowledge of his time was doubtful because of the ambiguity of the underlying logic that was used in traditional scholarly arguments. He was determined to distinguish the true from the false and he found that he could doubt even the evidence that his senses provided him with. His method was to discard all existing knowledge and start with one basic axiom i.e. that he himself existed:
"Archimedes, in order to take the terrestrial globe from its place and move it to another, asked only for a point which was fixed and assured. So also, I shall have the right to entertain high hopes, if I am fortunate enough to find only one thing which is certain and indubitable." 1
and to move on to systematically prove more complex axioms. This led Descartes to discover that the essence of his existence lay in thought and culminated in the now infamous dictum: Cogito Ergo Sum, (I think, therefore I exist) which in itself implied a division between the mind and the body. An important point of clarification of Descartes' terminology here is that:
"…by thinking he meant not only conceptual thought, but all forms of conscious experience, including feelings, perceptions, pains and so on. This being so, it's not unfair to say that what he was really saying was: 'I am consciously aware, therefore I know that I must exist.'" 2
Descartes went on to argue that the body was a mechanism driven by the mind and that the mind was a purely human attribute and animals were mere automatons. The sum of Descartes' meditations lead to the definition of what we now term to be the liberal humanist subject.
Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was an Austrian physicist who pioneered the study of the unconscious mind and developed the method of free association and interpretation of dreams that are the basic techniques of modern psychoanalysis. Freud formulated the concepts of the id, the ego and the superego, which form the dynamic structure of the human psyche. The term id describes the drive to satisfy needs. In children, needs are a conglomerate of all the basic biological requirements of the body: eating, drinking, sleeping, elimination of bodily waste, avoidance of pain etc. and the ego is not formed until the passing of the oedipal drive (whereby the child becomes aware of its own subjectivity, as a separate being from its mother). The ego is where the pleasure principal meets reality and the child begins to learn to balance the various drives for the sake of self preservation. The superego is the regulatory mechanism whereby the id is mediated in order for the child to function in society.
The first comparison that can be made between the Cartesian and Freudian viewpoints of subjectivity is the basic premise that there is a division between the functions of mind and body and that the mind has predominance over the body. That is to say that physical actions are carried out through the control of the mind. In Descartes' theory, this is because he can doubt the sensory perception of his own physical existence and prove it by the introspective judgement of his mind. So, once he establishes his extra-sensory existence, he can rationalise that he has a body and thus that the body is driven by the mind. This division of mind and body, which is:
"…the thesis that man is a compound of two distinct substances - res cogitans, unextended thinking substance, or mind, and res extensa, extended corporeal substance, or body." 3
is known as Cartesian dualism. However, the logic begins to break down somewhat at the point where Descartes attempts to establish that the body and mind are connected by the pineal gland and that animals are automatons and do not possess minds.
Freud's theory accepts the dominance of the mind insofar as it agrees that behaviour is determined by the unconscious, thus conforming to the very basic principles of Cartesian dualism. However, this view is too simplistic to act as a true comparison to Freudian thinking. Behaviour is determined by the unconscious, but the unconscious is ultimately shaped by the repression of desires, which offers a more elucidatory and three-dimensional theory than the autonomous aspects of the Cartesian theory. It is from this repression that Freud's theory extends to include the analysis of dreams, which provide a pathway to the unconscious mind. His theories of condensation and displacement provide mechanisms by which latent, repressed desires become manifest and thus available for analysis and interpretation.
Both Descartes' and Freud's work was based within the framework of the individual. Descartes' individual was himself: all his meditations formed a purely personal introspective, but because he accepted the validity of his own logic, Descartes applied it generously to the sum of human knowledge. Freud also attempted to analyse the individual by interpreting all the processes by which the individual is formed. He believed that early experiences added to the sum of the personality, and his methods were practised and refined on many patients, giving credence to Freud's theories.
Descartes' work was based on individual self-scrutiny and Freud's work encouraged scrutiny through the framework of psychoanalysis, but that is where the similarity peters out. Where Descartes' individual is autonomous, implying that it is self-contained and independent and that nothing in its social context affects its existence, Freud's individual is wholly a sum of its life experiences and conscious / unconscious battle with repressed desires, which is to acknowledge the individual's identity in relation to other individuals and to accept it as being socially contexted. Although it is possible to assert that Descartes' meditations on his own subjectivity can be roughly equated with the point at which the ego of Freud's id-based individual is formed, once the child passes through the Oedipal stage, where its primary love-object is its own mother, it begins to realise that it is a separate being and thus becomes aware of its own subjectivity and the expectation that it must learn to interact with others in a specific way (manners, laws, etc.) and to repress its own desires in the face of the appropriate conformist behaviour.
Descartes' theory presents the liberal humanist subject as being a unitary rational subject: a stable entity whose entire perspective is formed from a logical standpoint and everything is rationalised in order to be understood, as discussed by Wendy Hollway:
"The humanist position tends to see the individual as the agent of all social phenomena and productions, including knowledge. The specific notion of the individual contained in this outlook is one of a unitary, essentially non-contradictory and above all rational entity." 4
Freud also rationalised his patients problems, but not from the unitary rational standpoint. The essence of his work dealt with neuroses and mental illness, the presence of which obviously discount the possibility of the subject being either unified or rational. According to James Strachey, Freud found that in the unconscious:
"…there is no sort of organisation or coordination: each separate impulse seeks satisfaction independently of all the rest; they proceed uninfluenced by one another; contradictions are completely inoperative, and the most opposite impulses flourish side by side…associations of ideas proceed along lines without any regard to logic…and have no rational basis." 5
So at this point, not only is there an inherent contrast between Descartes and Freud, there is total opposition as to what exactly it is that that constitutes a subject. Descartes propounds the logical and rational subject while Freud insists that the subject cannot be logical and rational about itself while there are so many contradictions and conflicting impulses, but that through psychoanalysis, the way in which the subject is formed can be broken down, rationalised and understood.
Developing from this point of the stable entity is the notion of the subject's identity being consistent. The Cartesian theory of autonomy results in the implication of the subject being static and unalterable or, God-given, since Descartes adheres to the belief that God created man in his own image and thus to the concept of original sin, which remains with the believer throughout his life. Freud, once again, is in total opposition to Descartes on this point. Freud saw religion as infantile and neurotic, with God as the father-image and projection of repressed wishes, which is not a satisfactory basis for the static hypothesis. In psychoanalysis, there is no concept of a consistent identity, although personality is accepted to be relatively fixed from the experiences of the first five years of life. The very nature of the unconscious, for Freud, has always been dynamic - a place where the id, the ego and the superego are constantly in battle with each other and where the repressed desires of the unconscious continually threatens to spill over into the realms of the conscious, as dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue (so-called 'Freudian slips') and forgetting. This highly dynamic quality of the unconscious sometimes allows the id to become stronger than the ego and superego and thus result in self-indulgent, anti-social or criminal behaviour and/or mental illness. In An Introduction To Psychology, it is stated that:
"The individual's approach to a problem situation reflects his or her manner in coping with the conflicting demands of the id, the ego, and the superego." 6
At face value, the work of both Descartes and Freud appear to be incredibly egocentric. Descartes, especially:
"…brought it about that philosophy started from the question 'What can I know?' rather than questions such as 'What is there?'…the question is not 'What can be known?' or even 'What can we know?' but 'What can I know?'…it starts from a first-person egocentric question." 7
which narrowed down the traditional borders of philosophy incredibly when compared to the forefathers of philosophy, who tended to deal with much larger issues. This egocentric position relies on total rationality, so we can begin to appreciate how consistent Descartes' logic was. All his positions so far have had a cohesive unity and remained that way. Freud, on the other hand, changed his views on many aspects of his work as time passed. This view of the egocentricity of Descartes' work is very reminiscent, however, of Freudian psychoanalysis. Perhaps it is wrong to judge the standards of the father of modern philosophy from the viewpoint of one of his descendants, but, at the same time, it allows a much deeper interpretation to be made: since one cannot possibly be totally objective about anything, it is best to search all the alternatives in order to come to a deeper understanding.
The comment in the previous paragraph about objectivity is one of the key issues in the subjectivity / objectivity divide. Subjectivity has had a negative connotation when compared to objectivity. It is seen as biased, even narrow minded, while there is an assumption that there exists outside of a question a true and correct answer. Once again, we hark back to Descartes and his search for the first basic axiom - his discarding of all knowledge and the reconstruction of it from the foundation of the Cogito. He seems to have striven to reach a truly objective philosophical vantage point, which almost discredits his liberal humanist position. However, as we come to terms with the implications of Freud's work, we can begin to appreciate that we can never be truly objective: everyone is a product of their relationships with other people, of their interaction within society, of their life experiences. Even Descartes' attempted 'objectivity' was subjective, because it was formed as the negation of everything commonly held to be true. Just because he inverted philosophy does not mean that it necessarily becomes objective, rather it is a case of the resulting perspective being all the more subjective.
Both Descartes and Freud laid evident significance on dreams. John Cottingham describes the effect that dreaming had on Descartes:
"After a day spent in intense philosophical speculations, Descartes fell asleep still in a state of great mental excitement; he then had three vivid dreams which he later described as having given him a sense of his mission in life." 8
Descartes' philosophical direction came from these dreams; he obviously placed significance in what he found in his dreams and despite his meditations, where he wonders whether in fact he might be dreaming at any moment that he accepts to be conscious, he qualifies this doubt by assuming that dreams are made up of elements drawn from real life. This is incredibly coincidental, given that Freud was not to produce his dream work for more than two hundred years, saying basically the same things and laying great significance on the interpretation of dreams. Dreams, for Freud, were where latent repressed desires or fears manifested themselves, condensed and displaced in order to disguise themselves, possibly because the true wish might shock the dreamer. Owing to Freud's pioneering work in the field of dreams, an entire new method of interpretation evolved. It is now possible to examine texts of all kinds from the Freudian psychoanalytical method. One wonders what would have resulted from an analysis session of Descartes by Freud!
Having examined the work of René Descartes and Sigmund Freud in order to provide comparisons and contrasts in line with the aim of the essay has led to the conclusion that it would be wrong to attempt to offer an opinion as to the validity or correctness of either party. Although we can look at his work in hindsight and find faults with his logic, Descartes' revitalisation of the philosophy of the seventeenth century was an important foundation for the notion of subjectivity. Descartes' meditations provided a hypothesis: the starting point for a debate. Without innovation there would be no progression in the formation of new ideas and new methods. Freud, although offering a basically different theory owes much to the fact that he had the works of those who preceded him to refer to, either in agreement or disagreement, either way, a debate of high quality is ensured. An incredibly apt assertion on the nature of subjectivity was found in Signs of Performance:
"Human beings are sense-making animals. That is not to say we necessarily understand, or even believe we understand, all that we perceive. Rather, subjectivity, consciousness, is built of the positions we take up in discourse, consists of our adoption of ways of making meaning." 9
and it can be said that this is possibly the best perspective one can take when considering subjectivity. No matter what method one uses to understand the nature of subjectivity, it is the very fact that one uses them to attempt to make any meaning at all that defines one's subjectivity.
Index