The Givenness of Personal Subjectivity
As I mentioned in the introductory post, when we approach the mystery of human life, we need to examine the meaning of being a person from two rather different perspectives—which though different are nonetheless tightly correlated—those of subjectivity and substantiality. Both must be taken together if we are to properly appreciate the significance of personal life, since taking either in separation from its natural complement would inevitably lead to a foreshortened and skewed understanding of the person. In this second essay of the series, I will focus on personal subjectivity, as this will bring to the foreground the distinctive peculiarity of being a person, and I will then devote the next to the substantiality of the person, as this will appropriately contextualize our prior attention to subjectivity within a well-grounded metaphysics. Yet, given the close correlation of the realities analyzed, neither essay should be read in isolation from the other; both are necessary for making sense of the person, or even just to make sense of the proper significance of each other.
We can come to a preliminary understanding of personal subjectivity by attending to the natural polarity of conscious experience: to the fact that experience exhibits a correlation of subject and object in each and every experiential act by necessity. The objective side is manifest in the presence of the conscious individual to what is other than itself, in the outward orientation of the self to the world and the things of the world in all acts of knowing, feeling, and willing. This is the objectivity of personal life, and it is this very objectivity that initially reveals the nature of personal subjectivity, for the first most basic feature of subjectivity is its outward openness to the world and its things. The subjective side of experience is then manifest in the simultaneous presence of the conscious individual to itself while maintaining its outward orientation toward the world in all acts of knowing, feeling, and willing. This is the subjectivity of personal life, and it is this very subjectivity that first reveals the distinctive peculiarity of subjectivity as such, for the second most basic feature of subjectivity is its inward openness to itself. Indeed, this inward openness is the very moment of personal life that makes the self a self. And just so we see both the objectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of subjectivity—or, that subjectivity is revealed in the simultaneous congruence of what is outward and inward in personal life.
Now, all this is evident in the most plain and common of experiences, those of knowledge, affection, and volition. Taking love as our example: When we articulate the act of knowing, we verbalize it with such simple words as, ‘I love coffee.’ This puts before us the structure of experience in grammatical form, with the grammatical subject, verb, and object representing the subject of experience, performing an experiential act, relative to some or other experienced object. Thus, while I as a loving subject turn my desire toward coffee as my beloved object, I am simultaneously aware that it is coffee that I desire and that it is me that desires coffee as a good that will animate my tired imagination. In this way experience reveals its two faces, the subjective and the objective, in each and every experience, whatever its experiential character. And it is precisely this duality that constitutes my being as a personal individual, inasmuch as this two-sidedness is the occasion of the appearance of the world and everything in it—for me and you. The very structure of experience then reveals us to ourselves in a powerful way, as it shows us that the personal subject is the kind of being that can be with what is other than itself without at all losing its presence to itself. This brings subjectivity into the light as something qualitatively different to everything and anything else.
Yet, when we alight upon this capacity for self-presence, embedded at the very heart of conscious experience, we must notice that this mode of presence is not at all a turning in upon oneself in a self-centered or selfish way. Rather, it is the discovery of oneself together with the discovery of the world and its things—a simultaneity of discovery wherein everything comes to resolution. Moreover, as a result of this capacity for self-presence, we see something interesting: Though I am present to all other things as my objects—objects of sensing and feeling, objects of knowing and loving, objects of understanding and rejoicing—I am present to myself in an utterly unique way—as my own subject. Whenever I am knowing, feeling, loving, I am inwardly aware that I am the one undergoing these experiences, and that all is given to me in experience as objects for my experiencing. I am always given together with all other givenness, whatever the object of givenness may be. Then, as a result of this experiential givenness of myself for myself, I can reflexively bend all of my experiential acts back upon myself, so that I can know, feel for, and love myself as my own object—a subjective object, or an objective subject.
From all this we can see that this capacity for self-presence reveals several dimensions of the personal subject (all of which I will formulate in the first-person):
1) I experience the objective world in all kinds of subjective acts, acts of knowledge, affection, love, etc., while simultaneously experiencing myself as the one performing these same acts relative to their distinctive objects.
2) I act out of myself with freedom toward the attainment of goodness, in the world and in myself, determining my own actions and the course of my life, while taking responsibility for these same acts and my life.
3) I possess an interior within which I abide, an interior both deep and wide, and I recognize the same interiority in others, even while I can’t access their interior in quite the same way as I have access to my own.
4) I receive the meaning and value of the world and its things into my interior, gathering into myself the meaning and value of its persons, things, and states of affairs, and these gradually become constituents of my inner life.
5) I experience my material body in ways characteristically different than I experience all other material bodies, experiencing my body from within as the subject of my sensation and motility, my expression and action.
Though this list is not exhaustive, it is certainly sufficient for grasping the centrality and nature of personal subjectivity—no revealed as the most basic feature of the specifically personal.
Personal subjectivity lies at the center of what it means to be human, and this is exactly why this feature of reality has been emphasized by personalist thinkers since the beginning of the personalist movement in philosophy (and theology). Accordingly, we can summarize by saying that the human person is objectively a subject and that personal subjectivity is an objective dimension of the structure of human nature; and moreover, that the dynamism of subjective experience is an objective feature of human life. Moreover, while we can definitively hold that there is more to being a person than possessing subjectivity, all of which can be understood from the perspective of the substantiality of the person (coming up next), we certainly miss the central feature of human life and experience if we fail to consider subjectivity in our investigation of the human person and its and corresponding presentation.
Therefore, when Wojtyła and other personalists say that subjectivity is irreducible, they are highlighting that without which we simply cannot understand human life, for personal subjectivity affords the ultimate vantage point upon absolutely everything—a vantage point beyond which there is no further vantage point, and thus nothing to which subjectivity could be reduced and by which it could be explained. And it is precisely because of this that we must ‘pause at’ and ‘dwell upon’ the irreducibility of subjectivity, in ourselves and in one another, if we are to recognize and rightly appreciate the corresponding significance of the human person, ourselves and one another, for all that is genuinely personal necessarily involves attending to personal subjectivity, and all genuinely personal encounters necessarily involves an encounter of free subjectivities, standing before one another, face-to-face, cor ad cor.
