The Invention of Subjectivity and the Philosophy of Suspicion. Part 1. The Invention of Subjectivity, or The Taming of Dionysus

Abstract

The first part “The Invention of Subjectivity, or the Taming of Dionysus” of the article “The Invention of Subjectivity and the Philosophy of Suspicion” deals with the formation of the modern concept of subjectivity in European intellectual tradition from antiquity to the present day. According to the author, this process begins with an event that can be called an anthropological turn in ancient philosophy. This event occurs primarily thanks to Socrates and the Sophists. Here, first of all, it is worth recalling the statement of Protagoras “Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not”, which leads not so much to epistemological relativism as to the fact that, from then on, the attention of ancient thinkers was focused on the phenomenon of man. Despite Socrates' criticism of the Sophists, this motif of their philosophy obviously remains important for his thinking. An important moment in this process was Aristotle's creation of the concept of “ύποκείμενον”, which was translated into Latin as “subjectum” and, through Latin, entered all modern European languages, including Ukrainian, in the form of the concept of “subject.” The next step in the formation of the modern concept of subjectivity is the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Relevant to the topic of the study are the interpretation of the experience of the first Christians in Friedrich Nietzsche's The Dawn of Day and the description of the impact of the destruction of the ancient political system on the formation of ideas of eternity and immortality in Hannah Arendt's Human Condition. The principle of subjectivity finally established in the philosophy of René Descartes, namely in his statement “Ego cogito ergo sum” and reaches its apogee in Immanuel Kant's transcendentalism in the form of the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. But almost immediately, the principle of subjectivity is criticized, as discussed in the second part of the article.