Auto-gnosis, Subjectivity, and the Role of Maxims in Philosophical Reflection

 

Philosophy triumphs over past ills and ills to come,

but present ills triumph over philosophy.

                                                                                

 —  Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

      Sitting outside late into the night and starring into the infinitely vast array of star clusters, nebulas, and galaxies the amateur astronomer becomes privy to the sublimity of space and time. However, the real joy and beauty of the aforementioned transcends mere scientific respect for the laws of astro-physics. Scientists explain questions of space and time through quantification of one form or other. Yet the fundamentally vital concern in all of this is the realization that the awe and wonder of space and time does not pertain so much to that reality itself, but to the fact that there should be a subject that can fathom such things. To scrutinize this reality in mere scientific terms amounts to a detriment to this particular human experience — making it an incomplete experience, at best. What is the role of the subject in this respect?  Instead a broader concern has to do with the vital nature of subjectivity and its relationship to the metaphysics of existential autonomy.

      The introspective qualities of this question subsequently lead me to ask: How come that most works of philosophy, with a few marked exceptions outside the thought of the ancient stoics, and modern thinkers such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and movements like philosophy of life, phenomenology and existentialism have not allotted the question of subjectivity – a more prominent role as the seat of differentiated human existence? 

Historical examples abound where what is truly addressed is not man as a differentiated cosmic and reflective subject, but rather as a theoretical and elusive collective mankind that, quite frankly, cannot help but to remain faceless. My pre-occupation with this subject matter — that is, my immediate and vital interest here is not necessarily in understanding the historical whereabouts of mankind — our origins in space and time, our collective sub-conscious or other such commonly held anthropological conceptions of man.

       I suppose there is a place — even a special place in the history of ideas for a detailed and scientific consideration and treatment of this subject. However, the pressing necessity for today is to recognize that the overwhelming treatment of this question has taken place in an inane positivistic manner. The inability of positivistic theories to recognize man as a transcendent being has played itself out to such a degree that it can longer make sense of individual, differentiated man in a technological age. Today we have the vitally pressing need for an understanding of man that allows for the recognition and further development of man as an autonomous being. Perhaps the great irony of our time is that man has never been in greater need of embracing a genuinely felt and sincere autonomous personality and form self-expression.

      I must confess that I have never encountered “man” — at least not in the impersonal, abstracted form which science, and lately, the social sciences have constructed. Scientific renditions of man have fashioned man into a phantasmagoric specter that no longer recognizes itself. This clay caricature has invaded the sublime places were man once dwelled and in so doing has depleted man’s reservoir of meaning in all of its configurations.

My concern, then, has to do with subjectivity and how this is embedded in the structure of autonomous persons. The question of subjectivity and individual autonomy can only retain a genuine connection to reality when it is proposed by the subject itself. This activity is no other than the genuine calling forth of personal vocation. Leszek Kolakowski pinpoints the scope of this problem best when he writes in Modernity on Endless Trial:

                   Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life. A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to various people various theories are convincing and scientific. Therefore we need a number of theories. The alternative to not-gardening without a theory is to garden. However, it is much easier to have a theory than actually to garden.