Subjectivism

Subjectivity and Subjectivism

Subjectivity is understandable if we see how it develops over the phylogenetic scale. Lower animals' behavior is devoid of subjectivity. It is a direct, immediate association of a response with a stimulus. The response is determined by a biological program known as an instinct. More advanced animals progressively develop subjective processes that mediate between stimuli and responses and increasingly determine the animal's response to stimuli. Subjectivity reaches its highest form in humans who think, plan, remember, feel, dream, imagine, anticipate, symbolize, decide, understand, learn, and initiate action on a level that is far more sophisticated, complex, and active than any other animals. Subjective functions determine how humans react to stimuli. Stimuli do not directly determine human reaction as they do in lower organisms.

For subjectivity to mediate stimuli it must be different from them. This difference justifies examining it as a particular order of things, a distinctive phenomenon. This examination is what subjectivism does. It examines the interiority of subjectivity, the active processes that are subjectivity and that determine behavior.

Subjectivism is one conception of subjectivity. Subjectivism construes subjectivity as the product of the subject, or individual. In this view, what we think, imagine, feel, remember, expect, understand, and strive for is entirely the product of ourselves. Subjectivity may utilize worldly things, but always on its own terms, for its own purposes, according to its own processes and laws.

Subjectivism in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Subjectivism has been the dominant view of subjectivity in many fields of scholarship.

Rene Descartes and Bishop Berkeley expressed the core notion of subjectivism. Descartes proposed that mind is distinct from body and world and is a realm of its own. Berkeley expressed this in his classic statement that the world is as one sees it. One's perception does not represent the world. Rather, the world is an expression of one's subjectivity. The processes and principles of one's subjectivity determine how one sees the world; the world does not influence one's perception of it. The direction is entirely from inside one's mind to the outside world.

Immanuel Kant similarly proposed that subjectivity cannot know the world because the two are separate domains. Subjectivity contains its own intrinsic laws, such as ethical principles, that structure one's perception of the world.

Historical discussions, especially intellectual history, often present events as the unfolding of ideas that [Page 840]are freely decided by people. One hears that the prevailing outlook changed from a focus on national construction to a more international outlook. Philosophies, legal concepts, and marriage customs are thought of as exclusively rooted in thinking, perception, desires, motivation, and reasoning apart from conditions, structures, and resources.

Subjectivism is also a strong tendency in a branch of sociology known as microsociology. Erving Goffman proclaimed his work to be microsociological because it studied face-to-face social interactions. These he defined as interpersonal, face-to-face environments. His work is not about social organization and social structure that are the traditional concerns of sociologists. Anthony Giddens perceptively explains that Goffman's main concern throughout his writings involves individuals directly attending to what each other are saying and doing for a particular segment of time. Even when individuals are group members, their interactions are to be understood in terms of an immediate interpersonal encounter, not in terms of their membership of the group.

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