The Roots of European Subjectivity

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How did the "I" of common discourse, as it flourished on European soil, come to think of itself as a "subject", complete with an autonomous sphere, and even more as the substance par excellence, more knowable than any other and without which the existence of the world would not itself be knowable?

"It’s Descartes’ fault" would say Kant and Hegel. But the question is more complex than that; even Descartes himself did not talk about a "subject". To trace this obscure family tree, the researchers brought together by Olivier Boulnois in this book take up the story at the beginning, with Saint-Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century and the philosophical world he inhabited composed of Greek concepts (essence, substance, accidens) reworked in Latin by the likes of Boetius and Saint Augustine.

The first surprise encountered by a reader of Saint Anselm (father of the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God) is that the subject does not exist. The I is clearly a substance (as are all individuals and not simply God) but conceptually resembles an essence rather than being simply a substrate on which are grafted accidents (Aristotle’s non-essential properties). In this way the subject as a set of properties is meaningless, explains Kristell Trego, in the face of the primacy of word and of action in determining what is this entity that is acting and thinking. The I is an intellectual construct which brings qualities or properties together rather than a framework to which they are attached. Will and thought are therefore as external to us as are our actions, and the "subject" that unites all of this is for the most part indeterminate. Even in the ethical realm this subject does not gain any consistence (as opposed to what Kant tried to establish); since it has no direct relation to the will it has no more control over it than it does over external acts. This conception can be can be traced back to the ancient Greek predilection for a fundamentally passive notion of the I.

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