When Did the Modern Subject Emerge?

Alain de Libera

Abstract. This article offers a tentative deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the

“modern,” that is, the “Cartesian,” “subject.” It argues that subjectivity, understood
as the idea of some “thing” that is both the owner of certain mental states and
the agent of certain activities, is a medieval theological construct, based on two
conflicting models of the mind (nous, mens) inherited from ancient philosophy and
theology: the Aristotelian and the Augustinian (or perichoretic) one, developed
in connection with such problems as that of the two wills in the incarnate Christ.
Starting with Nietzsche’s criticism of the “superstition of logicians” (the belief that
“the subject I is the condition of the predicate think”) and Peter Strawson’s question
in Individuals (“Why are one’s states of consciousness ascribed to anything at all?”),
the article discusses Peter Olivi’s and Thomas Aquinas’s treatments of the problem,
as well as the principle invoked to resolve it: actiones sunt suppositorum, “actions
belong to subjects.” Against this background, the discussion refers to Heidegger’s
notion of “subjecticity” and Armstrong’s “attribute-theory” in order to reappraise
the Hobbesian and Leibnizian contributions to the history of the Self.

T
hought is subjective.1 Thought is personal. Subject and person be-
long together. This is the modern, our modern, common, ordinary
understanding of subjectivity. We speak of the subject of thought
in the sense of the agent of thought. We refer to a so-called “Cartesian subject,”
meaning: (1) an inner I, to which thoughts should be ascribed as psychological

1
This paper is a slightly expanded version of the Aquinas Lecture given at the University
of Dallas on January 28, 2008. I would like to thank Professors Lance Simmons (University of
Dallas), Philipp Rosemann (University of Dallas), William A. Frank (University of Dallas), James
J. Lehrberger, O.Cist. (University of Dallas), Dennis L. Sepper (University of Dallas), Jeremy
duQuesnay Adams (Southern Methodist University), Bonnie Wheeler (Southern Methodist
University), the audience, Marie Azcona (University of Dallas), and all the members of the De-
partment of Philosophy of the University of Dallas whose great sense of hospitality, intellectual
curiosity, and philosophical commitment helped make my Dallas lecture and seminars such an
enjoyable event. Professors Kevin Mulligan (University of Geneva) and Alexandrine Schniewind
(University of Lausanne) made very helpful comments on earlier drafts. My daughter Clémence
de Libera helped me in translating several passages. Their assistance has been invaluable.

©
2008, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 2
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

predicates, and (2) an inner eye, before which they pass in review in foro interno,
in an inner space called the “Cartesian theater.”2 For philosophers, however, all
this has become highly controversial. In the Continental tradition, the postmod-
ern idea of a subjectivity without the subject and the various deconstructions that
have given rise to the alleged “crisis” or “death of the subject,” go hand in hand
with a “no-subject” re-articulation of selfhood, agency, and personal identity. In
the analytic tradition, many philosophers would be reluctant to equate person-
hood with subjectivity and most, at least in the recent past, would deal with
the range of loosely related problems we call “problems of the self ”—“who am
I?” “what am I?” “how could I have been?” and “what matters?”—without even
mentioning the word “subject.” This holds true for the pioneering collection of
essays published in 1976 by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons.3
Indeed, why should we connect what Rorty calls “the idea of a person as a uni-
fied center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility”
with the idea of a subject in which all ideas inhere, and to which representations
and mental operations are to be attributed? Why in the first place should we
ascribe one’s states of consciousness to anything at all? To this question, raised by
Peter Strawson in Individuals,4 many philosophers would be inclined to answer
that there is no sound reason to ascribe our states of consciousness to anything
whatsoever. The friends of the so-called “Lichtenbergian approach” would
maintain with Moritz Schlick and, up to a certain point, with Wittgenstein
himself, that primitive experience is absolutely neutral, or that immediate data
“have no owner,” or that original experience is “without a subject,” or that the
pronoun “I” does not denote a possessor, or that no ego is involved in thinking.
Strawson has fiercely discussed this approach, the “no-owner” or “no-ownership
theory of the mind,” also called “no-subject theory.” His criticism of Schlick
does not involve a rejection of subjecthood—which makes him a noticeable
exception within the analytic tradition. Rather, he describes Descartes’s theory
of self or person as a dualism of two subjects or two types of subjects, that is, sub-
stances, “each of which has its own” exclusive “appropriate types of states and
properties,” to the extent that “states of consciousness belong to one of these
substances,” the mind, and not to the other, the body. And he characterizes
the Schlick-Wittgenstein approach, based on Lichtenberg’s famous Es denkt

2
R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 50.
3
See The Identities of Persons, ed. A. Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976). Also see A. Montefiore’s presentation of this book in “Identité personnelle, identité
du soi,” Critique no. 399/400 (1980): 751–64, at 752: “Le seul terme dont la pertinence par rap-
port à la discussion contemporaine est le plus remarquable en raison de son absence quasi totale
est sans doute celui de sujet.”
4
See P. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 90, 93, 94.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

dictum (“We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens”)5 as “a dualism of

one subject—the body—and one non-subject”—the ego or pure consciousness.6
The purpose of this lecture is not to answer the question of whether Strawson
and common usage are right or wrong in ascribing mental states to any subject
at all. I am not interested either in discussing all the various “emplotments” of
subjectivity that have been proposed in recent historical narratives linking the
emergence of the modern subject either to “the centrality and universality of
sentiment” in British eighteenth-century literature or to the “new inwardness”
that is supposed to “characterize Protestantism.” My goal is to try to determine
why, how, and when philosophers introduced the very notion of subject and
the conceptual scheme of what I will thereafter call subjecthood into psychology
and the philosophy of mind.7

I.

An answer to the question “why?” is provided by Nietzsche’s criticism of

what he calls “the superstition of logicians,” that is, the idea that “a thought
comes when ‘I’ wish,” based on the wrong assumption that “the subject ‘I’ is the
condition of the predicate ‘think.’” This criticism, which is part of Nietzsche’s
refutation of the Cartesian cogito, runs as follows: a grammatical habit, consist-
ing in “adding a doer to every deed” is the only ground for the pseudo-apriori
truth of our belief in the concept of substance, and consequently for the logical
superstition of the I, understood as the subject of thought.
There is thinking, therefore, there is something that thinks. This is the upshot
of all Descartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as “true a priori”
our belief in the concept of substance—that when there is thought there
has to be something “that thinks” is simply a formulation of our gram-
matical custom that adds a doer to every deed.8

5
See Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London/New York:
Penguin, 1990), 168: “To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it I think.
To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement.” Schlick refers quite enthusiastically to
Lichtenberg: “Lichtenberg, the wonderful eighteenth-century physicist and philosopher, declared
that Descartes had no right to start his philosophy with the proposition ‘I think,’ instead of saying
‘it thinks.’” See M. Schlick, “Meaning and Verification,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze (Vienna: VDM
Verlag Dr. Müller, 1969), 337–68.
6
Strawson, Individuals, 98.
7
Some of these questions are studied in greater detail in A. de Libera, Archéologie du sujet,
vol. 1: Naissance du sujet (Paris: Vrin, 2007) and vol. 2: La quête de l’identité (Paris: Vrin, 2008).
8
F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. Herbst 1887, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970), VIII/2, 215: “Es wird gedacht: folglich
gibt es Denkendes: darauf läuft die Argumentation des Cartesius hinaus. Aber das heißt unsern
Glauben an den Substanzbegriff schon als ‘wahr a priori’ ansetzen:—daß, wenn gedacht wird, es
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

According to Nietzsche, the very idea of a res cogitans is based on a fallacy:

M: Thinking is an activity.

m: Every activity requires an agent that is acting (that is, a subject that
is acting).

C: Therefore, if there is thinking, there must be something (that is, a

subject) that thinks.

Thus, the Lichtenbergian Es denkt would not escape Nietzsche’s argument ei-
ther. The it (thinks) is no real alternative to the I (think): the cogitatur is already
contained in the cogito. The Es denkt motto entails the same wrong assumption
as Ich denke. Better said, it is the weakest part of the cogito. As a matter of fact,
cogito means two things: (1) that “it is thinking,” and (2) that I believe that I am
the one who does the thinking. According to Nietzsche, both points are based on
articles of faith. Moreover, the truth of the second clearly presupposes the truth
of the first. My belief in I being the one who does the thinking presupposes that
thinking is an activity requiring a subject—call it “it” or what you please. This
is merely a matter of belief, grammatical belief. Both are wrong.
In jenem berühmten cogito steckt 1) es denkt 2) und ich glaube, daß ich
es bin, der da denkt, 3) aber auch angenommen, daß dieser zweite Punkt
in der Schwebe bliebe, als Sache des Glaubens, so enthält auch jenes erste
“es denkt” noch einen Glauben: nämlich, daß “denken” eine Thätigkeit sei,
zu der ein Subjekt, zum mindesten ein “es” gedacht werden müsse . . . .
Aber das ist der Glaube an die Grammatik.9

I will not discuss those claims as such—although it might be illuminating to

compare Nietzsche’s criticism of Descartes with Schelling’s dicussion of the cogito,
ergo sum in his 1833–1834 lectures On the History of Modern Philosophy, which
endorse a post-Lichtenbergian interpretation of the “I think” as “It thinks in me”
(es denkt in mir) or “there is thinking in me” (es wird in mir gedacht), clearly based
on a parallel with “it”-sentences (subjectless or logically-simple sentences) of the
form es träumte mir.10 My goal is not to determine whether or not the minor

etwas geben muß, ‘das denkt’, ist einfach eine Formulierung unserer grammatischen Gewöhnung,
welche zu einem Thun einen Thäter setzt.”
9
F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente. August–September 1885, 40 [23], Sämtliche Werke.
Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. G. Colli und M. Montinari (Munich: dtv, 1980),
XI, 639. On Nietzsche’s relation to Lichtenberg, see M. Stingelin, “Unsere ganze Philosophie ist
Berichtigung des Sprachgebrauchs.” Friedrich Nietzsches Lichtenberg-Rezeption im Spannungsfeld
zwischen Sprachkritik (Rhetorik) und historischer Kritik (Genealogie) (Munich: Fink, 1996).
10
As evidenced for instance in Johannes Brahms’s Lied, Op. 57 # 3 (based on a poem by
G. F. Daumer): “Es träumte mir, | Ich sei dir teuer; | Doch zu erwachen; | Bedurft’ ich kaum. |
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

premise of the “grammatical” syllogism merely reflects a bad habit. My goal is

to set out the archaeology of the claim. When and how was it put forward?

II.

Subject and subjecthood are everywhere in early modern philosophy.

Nietzsche’s criticism of the grammatische Gewöhnung is already to be found in
the eighteenth century. Consider, for example, Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s
criticisms of Isaac Watts. She criticizes Watts for ascribing to mere “logical ways
of speaking” what he calls “our prejudices against allowing a power of thinking to
subsist without a subject.” She replies to “this ingenious author” that “actions and
abilities . . . seem unavoidably to imply some subject of them, some being, that
exerts its powers in different ways of acting,” and then goes on to argue that “she
does not find herself so prejudiced by logical or grammatical ways of speaking”
when she says that she cannot “frame any idea of a power, without supposing
some being, to which it belongs.”11 So far, so familiar. But can we trace Catherine
Trotter’s plea for subject and subjecthood back any further? Can we trace it back
to Descartes himself? To the scholastics? To Augustine? To Aristotle?
The medieval contribution to the rise of the “subject” has been widely
overlooked. This holds true for A. Rorty’s survey of “the historical conditions
that gave rise to the view of the person as the ‘I’ of reflective consciousness,
owner and disowner of its experiences, memories, attributes, attitudes,” as well
as for her emplotment of the “philosophical conditions,” when she expeditiously
describes “the movement from Descartes’ reflective ‘I’ to Locke’s substantial
center of conscious experience, to Hume’s theater of the sequence of impressions
and ideas, to Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception and the metaphysical
postulate of a simple soul, to Sartre’s and Heidegger’s analyses of consciousness
as the quest for its own definition in the face of its non-Being.”12 As a historian
of medieval philosophy this hasty kind of historical scrolling seems to me all the
more unfortunate since the rise of the subject-self is perhaps, from a philosophical

Denn [schon] im Traume | Bereits empfand ich, | Es sei ein Traum.” Such sentences, “which it
is hard to treat within the terms of the standard (subject-predicate-copula based) combination
theories” (as Rojszczak and Smith say), were discussed by F. Brentano in 1883 in “Miklosich on
Subjectless Sentences,” translated in F. Brentano, The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong,
trans. R. Chisholm and E. Schneewind (London: Routledge, 1969), 98–108. See A. Rojszczak
and Barry Smith, “Truthmakers, Truthbearers and the Objectivity of Truth,” in Philosophy and
Logic: In Search of the Polish Tradition, ed. J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 229–68.
Nietzsche’s claim would be that the common interpretation of subjectless sentences involves an
unshakable belief in the subject-predicate-copula form.
11
Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Remarks Upon Some Writers, in Philosophical Writings, ed.
P. Sheridan (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2006), 87–146, at 101.
12
The Identities of Persons, 11.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

point of view, one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of the “long
Middle Ages” advocated by Jacques Le Goff. It is also an ideal opportunity to
stress the importance of theological debates in the history of philosophy. A fair
assessment of late ancient and medieval views on the subject is essential for any
reconstruction of a history of subjectivity with the subject.
Such an assessment, I suggest, is best made in two steps: (1) a discussion
of Heidegger’s account of the dominance of the subject in the modern age, an
account that is based on the distinction between “subjecticity” or “subjectness”
(Subiectität) and “subjectivity” (Subjektivität); (2) a study of the genealogy of
Nietzsche’s alleged grammatische Gewöhnung. The two steps are intimately con-
nected: the distinction between subjecticity and subjectivity and the “grammatical
habit” constitute two major components of a conceptual scheme I call “mental
attributivism,” whose rise and fall deserve a very thorough archaeological scrutiny
if we are to understand what exactly happened to the “subject” in early modern
philosophy. I will attempt to give an overview of both.

III.

To begin with, let us focus on Heidegger’s account of what he calls the

“emphatic positing of the subject in Modern Age.”13 The term Subiectität,
which is rendered as “subjecticity” or “subjectness” in English translations,14
has a precise meaning: at first blush it points to the very quality of being a sub-
jectum, ontologically speaking; that is, according to the meaning of the Greek
hypokeimenon, which it translates, to the quality of being “that-which-lies-before,
which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself.”15 “According to the concept of
its essence, subiectum is in a distinctive sense that which already lies-before and
so lies at the basis of something else, whose ground it therefore is.”16 Heidegger
never tires of repeating what is actually his most striking point: in this under-
standing subject “had first . . . no special relationship to man and none at all to
the I.”17 We must thus “at first remove the concept ‘man’—and therefore the
concepts ‘I’ and ‘I-ness’ as well—from the concept of the essence of subiectum.
Stones, plants, and animals are subjects—something lying-before of itself—no
less than man is.”18 Yet “man has become the primary and only real subiectum.”
13
M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, ed. David F. Krell, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi
(New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 96.
14
On subjecticity, see F. Schlegel, “Subiectität bei Heidegger. Zu einem Schlüsselbegriff des
seinsgeschichtlichen Denkens,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 40 (1997/98): 160–75.
15
M. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1977), 115–54, at 127.
16
Heidegger, Nihilism, 96–7.
17
Heidegger, “The Age,” 127.
18
Heidegger, Nihilism, 97.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

Man has become “that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the
manner of its Being and its truth.” Man has become “the relational center of that
which is as such.”19 When did this occur? Heidegger’s answer is cut and dried:
with the “Cartesian interpretation of man as subiectum.” “Since Descartes and
through Descartes, man, the human ‘I,’ has in a preeminent way come to be
the ‘subject’ in metaphysics.” With the Cartesian interpretation of man “begins
the completion and consummation of Western metaphysics,” which also “cre-
ates the metaphysical presupposition for future anthropology of every kind and
tendency.”20 This claim must be taken literally: after Descartes there is no other
subject, properly speaking, than “the human subject transposed into the ‘I.’” In
other words: Heidegger does not limit himself to saying that with Descartes man
is conceived as a subiectum; he pushes further by asserting that within Descartes’s
metaphysics man “comes to play the role of the one and only subject proper.”
Let us try to understand this claim and render it more precise.
According to Heidegger, the “modern subject” emerges with the Cartesian
cogito sum. Descartes’s revolution consists in “distinguishing the subjectum which
man is to the effect that the actualitas of this subjectum has its essence in the
actus of cogitare (percipere)”21—so that eventually “the human Mind becomes
the only, the exclusive ‘subject.’”22 In the Heideggerian reconstruction, Descartes
plays the central role in the history of the “subject” because he completes the
medieval transformation of the Greek hypokeimenon into subiectum by tying its
“actuality” to a new, non-Aristotelian, dimension: perceptual activity.
The principle cogito sum, to the extent that it contains and expresses the
essence of cogitatio, posits along with the essence of cogitatio the proper
subiectum, which is itself presented only in the domain of cogitatio and
through it. Because the me is implied in cogitare, because the relation to
the one representing still belongs essentially to representing, because all

19
Heidegger, “The Age,” 127.
20
Heidegger, “The Age,” 138. Heidegger continues: “The essential modifications of the
fundamental position of Descartes that have been attained in German thinking since Leibniz do
not in any way overcome that fundamental position itself. They simply expand its metaphysical
scope and create the presuppositions of the nineteenth century, still the most obscure of all the
centuries of the modern age up to now.”
21
Heidegger, “Metaphysics as History of Being,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 203), 1–54, at 31.
22
Heidegger, “Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins,” in Nietzsche II (1939–1946), ed.
B. Schillbach, Gesamtausgabe 6.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), 395: “Die mens
humana wird daher künftig [gemäß dieser Auszeichnung ihres Vorliegens] als subiectum den Namen
“Subjekt” ausschließlich für sich in Anspruch nehmen, so daß subiectum und ego, Subjektivität
und Ichheit gleichbedeutend werden.” Ibid., 411: “Wo aber die Subiectität zur Subjektivität wird,
da hat das seit Descartes ausgezeichnete subiectum, das ego, einen mehrsinnigen Vorrang. Das
ego ist einmal das wahrste Seiende, das in seiner Gewißheit zugänglichste.”
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

representedness of what is represented is gathered back to it, therefore the

one representing, who can thus call himself “I,” is subject in an emphatic
sense, is, as it were, the subject in the subject, back to which everything that
lies at the very basis of representation refers. That is why Descartes can also
construe the principle cogito sum in the following way: sum res cogitans.23

Thus sum res cogitans does not mean “I am a thing that is outfitted with the quality
of thinking,” but, rather, “I am a being whose mode to be consists in representing
in such a way that the representing co-presents the one who is representing into
representedness.” “The Being of that being which I am myself, and which each man
as himself is, has its essence in representedness and in the certitude that adheres to
it.” On this interpretation of the principle Cogito sum—according to which “the
certitude of the principle cogito sum (ego ens cogitans) determines the essence of all
knowledge and everything knowable; that is, of mathesis; hence, of the mathemati-
cal”24—truth now means, Heidegger argues, “the assuredness of presentation-to,
or certitude.” Thus, “because Being means representedness in the sense of such
certitude, man, in accordance with his role in foundational representation, therefore
becomes the subject in a distinctive sense.” Having an exclusive claim on subjecticity
the Cartesian man, conceived as the “distinguished subiectum,” “secures” the “do-
minion of the subject,” by “staking everything” on his own “priority as subject.”25
Subjecticity thus becomes subjectivity: being is no longer merely created being (ens
creatum); it is “certain being, indubitable, truly thought,” in a word: “representa-
tion” (ens certum, indubitatum, vere cogitatum, cogitatio).26 The Cartesian shift from
subjecticity to subjectivity may be summed up in four major claims:
(1) Man is subject in the sense of representing I-ness; (2) The beingness
of beings is equivalent to representedness through and for the I-subject;
(3) Truth means the same as secure conveyance of what is represented
in the self-representing representation: truth is certitude; (4) Man is the
measure of all beings in the sense of the presumption of the de-limitation
of representing to self-securing certitude.27

Thus, on Heidegger’s view, Descartes’s metaphysics cannot be but “the decisive

beginning of the foundation of metaphysics in the modern age,” because—
23
Heidegger, Nihilism, 114.
24
Ibid., 116. On mathesis see M. Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr. and
V. Deutsch (Chicago: Regnery, 1967), 75: “The mathematical (mathemata, what is learnable) is
that evident aspect of things within which we are always already moving and according to which
we experience them as things at all, and as such things . . . the mathematical is the fundamental
presupposition of the knowledge of things.”
25
Heidegger, Nihilism, 129.
26
Ibid., 117.
27
Ibid., 136–7.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

anticipating this ground “in an authentically philosophical sense”—“it grounds

the metaphysical ground of man’s liberation in the new freedom of self-assured
self-legislation.”28 Such a positive, not to say bombastic, assessment of Carte-
sianism did not come out of the blue. It was inherited from Heidegger’s own
Schellingian interpretative pattern. Indeed, inasmuch as man’s exclusive claim
on subjecticity (which according to Heidegger is the metaphysical trademark of
Cartesianism) is characterized by a “liberation from the revelational certainty of
salvation,” which “had to be intrinsically a freeing to a certainty [Gewissheit] in
which man makes secure for himself the true as the known of his own knowing
[Wissens],” and was thus “possible only through self-liberating man’s guaranteeing
for himself the certainty of the knowable,”29 there is little doubt that the Hei-
deggerian interpretation of Descartes heavily relies on Schelling’s post-Kantian
reading of Cartesianism as a plea for freedom.30 The claim that “the essential
modifications of the fundamental position of Descartes that have been attained
in German thinking since Leibniz do not in any way overcome that fundamen-
tal position itself,”31 clearly transposes Schelling’s emplotment of the history of
modern philosophy, based on “Descartes’ rejection of Scholasticism”—the true
liberal spirit of the new philosophy being further confirmed by the fact that
Descartes was in Bavaria at the time he posited the very foundations of modern
philosophy.32 This being said, Heidegger’s account of the shift from Subiectität
to Subjektivität has its own features and purposes.
First, it is supposed to point out a major event in the history of Being:
“the beingness of beings becomes ambiguous through subjectivity.” By such an
“ambiguity” Heidegger not only means that the rise of “objectivity” is a coess-
ential part of the “dominance of the subjective” in the modern age; in other
words, that in modern metaphysics, every being becomes an obiectum. He also
means that every being becomes “an object determined by a subiectum,” so

28
Ibid., 100.
29
Heidegger, “The Age,” 147.
30
On Heidegger’s reading of Schelling, see his Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human
Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1984). Heidegger is perfectly
aware of the Kantian dimension conveyed in his own Schellingian narrative of the history of Be-
ing in the modern age. See Nihilism, 97–8: “If we say pointedly that the new freedom consists in
the fact that man himself legislates, chooses what is binding, and binds himself to it, then we are
speaking Kant’s language; and yet we hit upon what is essential for the beginning of the modern
age. In its unique historical form, this essence is wrought into a fundamental metaphysical posi-
tion for which freedom becomes essential in a peculiar way (see Descartes, Meditationes de prima
philosophia, Med. IV).”
31
Heidegger, “The Age,” 138.
32
See F. W. Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy [Zur Geschichte der neueren Phi-
losophie. Münchener Vorlesungen, 1833/34], trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994).
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

that however “paradoxical and in every aspect artificial” it might seem, from
Descartes onwards up to Nietzsche himself one must consider “the subjecticity
(not subjectivity) of the essence of man as the foundation for the objectivity
of every subject (everything which is present).” “Accordingly the inner form of
metaphysics, which is based on what may be called transcendence, is changed.”
With Descartes’s finding “the subjecticity of the subject in the ego cogito of mortal
man [die Subiectität des Subiectum im ego cogito des endlichen Menschen],” “the
metaphysical Gestalt of man as the source of the giving-of-meaning” appears,
which is “the final consequence of establishing the essence of man as its au-
thoritative subject.”33 Subjectivity is subjecticity/subjectness in a new guise: die
“Subjektivität” ist eine Weise der Subiectität.34 The “subjectivistic” interpretation
(guise) of the “subjecticity of the essence of man,” which is the basic feature of
“psychologism,” is a consequence of Descartes’s transformation of the question
“what is the being?” into a question “about the fundamentum absolutum incon-
cussum veritatis, the absolute, unshakable ground of truth”; it does not belong
to Cartesianism proper. The modern age is “the age of subjectness,” in which
“every analysis of the situation is grounded, whether it knows it or not, in the
metaphysics of subjectness.”35 The metaphysics of subjectness is not reducible
to the ontology of “subjectivity” in the sense of “subjectivism.” To be a subject is
“to be in the subject-object relation”; to be in that relation “is what constitutes
the subjectness of the subject.”36
A second feature of Heidegger’s account of the shift from Subjectität to Sub-
jektivität is his highly critical assessment of the medieval contribution. The Middle
Ages see all being “from the point of view of creator and creatum.” While opening
new possibilities for thinking, by recognizing that “self-representing co-constitutes
the Being of the res cogitans,” Descartes himself is unable to break through the
scholastic patterns of thought. According to Heidegger, Descartes’s most central
claim is that every ego cogito is a cogito me cogitare, that is to say, “every ‘I repre-
sent something’ simultaneously represents a ‘myself,’ me, the one representing
(for myself, in my representing),” such that “every human representing is a ‘self-’
representing.”37 But this manner of speaking is “easily misunderstood,” and this is
33
Heidegger, The Question of Being [= Über die Linie, GA 9], trans. J. T. Wilde and W. Kluback
(Albany, N.Y.: New College University Press, 1958), 55–6.
34
Heidegger, “Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins,” 411: “Versteht man unter Sub-
jektivität dieses, daß das Wesen der Wirklichkeit in Wahrheit—d.h. für die Selbstgewißheit des
Selbstbewußtseins—mens sive animus, ratio, Vernunft, Geist, ist, dann erscheint die ‘Subjektivität’
als eine Weise der Subiectität.”
35
Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God Is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, 53–114, at 101–02.
36
Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience. With a Section from Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit, trans. K. R. Dove (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 33.
37
Heidegger, Nihilism, 106.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

the case as well for the claim that “I am a thinking thing.” In both cases, there is a
risk to reduce Descartes’s points to a mere confirmation of man’s being “an object-
at-hand” (Vorhandenes), with “the simple result that the attribute ‘thinking’ would
be assigned to him as a distinguishing property.”38 Nothing prevents us from such
a reduction, since, Heidegger argues, “Descartes himself offers a superficial and
inadequate interpretation of res cogitans, inasmuch as he speaks the language of
the doctrines of medieval scholasticism, dividing being as a whole into substantia
infinita and substantia finita.” With substantia being “the conventional and pre-
dominant name for hypokeimenon, subiectum in a metaphysical sense,” “substantia
infinita” being “God, summum ens, creator,” and the realm of substantia finita
being ens creatum (divided in turn “into res cogitantes and res extensae”), the new
“delineation of man through the cogito sum” might easily be considered as “simply
sketched into the old framework” (the so-called “point of view of creator and crea-
tum”). The verdict is returned: guilty! “Here we have the most palpable example
of earlier metaphysics impeding a new beginning for metaphysical thought.”39
Traditional language is the enemy. The language of substance is full of dangers. As
the late Heiddeger writes in On Time and Being: “If the fundamentum absolutum
is attained with the ego cogito as the distinctive subiectum, this means: The subject
is the hypokeimenon which is transferred to consciousness, what is truly present,
what is unclearly enough called ‘substance’ in traditional language.”40 The reproach
is not new. It was already central in Being and Time, where it is clearly stated that
Descartes “investigates the ‘cogitare’ of the ‘ego,’ within certain limits”—“leaving
the ‘sum’ completely undiscussed, even though it is regarded as no less primordial
than the cogito.” Those limits are obvious: basically they are all linked to the very
idea of substantiality (Vorhandenheit, presence-at-hand) inherited from the Middle
Ages. In Descartes “the meaning of Being which the idea of substantiality embraces,
or the character of the universality which belongs to this signification” remains
as “unclarified” as it was in “the ontology of the medievals.” One should even say
that “in working out this problem ontologically, Descartes is always far behind the
Schoolmen”: indeed, “he not only evades the ontological question of substantiality
altogether”; he also “emphasizes explicitly that substance as such—that is to say, its
substantiality—is in and for itself inaccessible from the outset [vorgängig].” “Being
itself does not ‘affect’ us, and therefore cannot be perceived.” “Thus the possibility
of a pure problematic of Being gets renounced in principle”:
Because Being is not in fact accessible as an entity, it is expressed through
attributes—definite characteristics of the entities under consideration,

38
Ibid., 115.
39
Ibid., 114.
40
Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being,
trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 55–73, at 61.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

characteristics which themselves are. Being is not expressed through just

any such characteristics, but rather through those satisfying in the purest
manner that meaning of “Being” and “substantiality” which has still been
tacitly presupposed. Substantiality is detachable ratione tantum; it is not
detachable realiter, nor can we come across it in the way in which we come
across those entities themselves that are substantially. Thus the ontologi-
cal grounds for defining the ‘world’ as res extensa have been made plain:
they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclarified
in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed off as something incapable of
clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial
property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance. 41

Heidegger’s criticism of Descartes has been convincingly refuted by J.-L.

Marion.42 I will not summarize the whole discussion here. I am only concerned
with the questions that Heidegger’s general treatment of the “tradition” poses
to the historian of philosophy. The concept of subjectness belongs to what
Heidegger calls “history.” It is “historical” inasmuch as it pertains to the only
kind of historical inquiry that is positively valued from an Heideggerian point
of view: the inquiry into the history of Being. All further considerations are
labeled “historiological.” According to Heidegger, “historiological comparisons”
always “block the way into history.”43 In the case of Descartes “a historiological
report on the meaning and nature of Descartes’ doctrine is forced to establish
results” of the critical sort that have been briefly sketched here. “A historical
meditation on the inquiry proper, however,” would “strive to think Descartes’
principles and concepts in the sense he himself wanted them to have, even if
in so doing it should prove necessary to translate his assertions into a different
‘language.’” We have tried so far to account for both ways of dealing with the
Cartesian materials in Heidegger. Heidegger’s program in the fourth volume of
Nietzsche is clearly delineated:
History as Being—indeed as coming from the essence of Being it-
self—remains unthought. Every historiological meditation of man on

41
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper & Row, 1962), § 20, 127.
42
See J.-L. Marion, Questions cartésiennes II (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996),
106–07.
43
Heidegger, Nihilism, 98.On the difference between history and historiology, see Being
and Time, 428; Letter on Humanism, trans. F. A. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray, in Basic Writings, ed.
David F. Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1993), 213–66, at 239: “History does not take place
primarily as a happening. And its happening is not evanescence. The happening of history occurs
essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It,
Being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: it gives itself and refuses itself
simultaneously.”
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

his condition is therefore metaphysical, and thus pertains to the es-

sential omission of the default of Being. It is necessary to contemplate
the metaphysical character of history as a discipline if we are going to
measure the impact of historiological thought, which at times considers
itself authorized to enlighten, if not to rescue man, who is at stake in the
age of the self-fulfilling nonessence of nihilism.44

To put Heidegger’s major historical claims—those directly linked with the

distinction between Subiectität and Subjektivität—in a nutshell, one might say
that according to him the very distinction allows one eventually to establish that
“the being as subjecticity omits the truth of Being itself in a decisive way, insofar
as subjecticity, out of its own desire for surety, posits the truth of beings as cer-
titude.”45 In other words, subjecticity is part of a historical inquiry, teleologically
oriented, which is entirely constructed or reconstructed from the viewpoint of
the gradual concealment of Being by itself and of nihilism as the ultimate stage
of metaphysics as the history of Being.
Heidegger’s reconstruction of the history of subjectivity (Subjektivität)
as a history of the successive generalizations of what he calls “subjectness”
(Subiectität) is most valuable. His account of the history of Being is, however,
highly questionable. Instead of following Heidegger’s lead in opposing histori-
cal and historiological inquiries, I will take another path here. I will endeavor
to study from an archeological point of view Heidegger’s most fundamental
claim, which as such has to be common to both history and historiology:
Descartes’s revolution consists in equating mens humana and subiectum—“the
human mind becoming the only, the exclusive ‘subject’—so that eventually
subiectum and ego, subjectivity and egoity became synonyms.”46 Leaving aside
the historical claim that Das Sein ist in seiner Geschichte als Metaphysik durch-
gängig Subiectität,47 I will rather focus on the archaeology of the subject and
of what I call “subjecthood.” The concept of subjecthood does not commit
us to any historical scenario. It is primarily meant to (re)translate Heidegger’s
assertions into a different language: the language of tradition, the language
that Descartes and the schoolmen actually spoke. On this philological basis,
I hope to show that the Heideggerian account of the “historical (or merely
historiological?) thread along which” one could “pursue the historical prov-
enance”48 of the “dominion of the subjective” in the modern age deserves a
serious reconsideration.

44
Heidegger, Nihilism, 241.
45
Ibid., 238.
46
Heidegger, “Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins,” 395.
47
Ibid., 411.
48
Heidegger, Nihilism, 179.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

IV.

Let me first define what “sujecthood” is in traditional (that is, late ancient
and medieval) philosophy. Inherence and predication are the two components
of subjecthood. The notion of subjecthood links that of which there can be
predicates, the so-called “logical subject,” and that in which there are accidents,
the so-called “physical subject.” According to this distinction, Heidegger’s claim
should be rephrased as follows: the modern subject emerged when this sub-jective
pattern—the subjecthood of the physical subject, which is a substrate for accidents
in a change, and at the same time, the subjecthood of the logical subject, which
is a substrate for the predicates in a proposition—was extended to the human
mind, to a mental subject, thus subjecthood becoming subjectivity. This process
could thus be described as the transformation of the ontological principle:
x is a logical subject of predicates and a physical subject in which physical
accidents inhere

into a new principle, allowing for the conception of a mental subject of thought
and volition:
x is a logical subject of predicates and a mental subject in which psycho-
logical accidents inhere.

This transformation constitutes the Cartesian moment proper, that is, “the
moment when mens humana made an exclusive claim on the [term] subject.”49
With such reformulation, Heidegger’s claim is rather unsatisfactory, I am
afraid. If we are to study past philosophers on their own terms, it is clear that
there is no “Cartesian subject” in Descartes. The “Cartesian subject” is the re-
sult of a retrospective projection that started with Kant. For over two hundred
years, Kant has lent credence to the idea that the subject was a Cartesian inven-
tion, and thus encouraged even the greatest thinkers—including Heidegger
the “Schellingian”—to look for traces of a semantic mutation of terms, such
as “subject,” which the philosopher of the Meditations almost never used. The
distinction between a logical (pros kategorian) and an ontological (pros hyparxin)
subject, the two components of subjecthood, in the Aristotelian tradition is
indisputable: it is well evidenced in the Greek Commentaries on the Categories.
Its Latin aftermath is impressive: the medieval distinction between subiectum
inhaesionis or inharentiae and subiectum attributionis was a standard one in the
textbooks of the second scholasticism (Goclenius, Burgersdijk) and was still
considered a logical commonplace in the Classical Age, including the Cartesian
French scholasticism (Pourchot, Bary) and those John Locke once referred to
49
Ibid., 96.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

as “the whole tribe of Logicians.” Yet Descartes was certainly not the first either
to apply the conceptual scheme of subjecthood to the mens humana or to ap-
ply the term “subject” to the mens, the I, or the ego—for two reasons at least.
One is obvious: others did it before him. The other is less obvious: Descartes’s
overriding desire to avoid doing so. In other words, if the transition from sub-
jecticity to subjectivity is to be Cartesian, it cannot possibly be based on the
mere interpretation of the I as a hypokeimenon-subiectum, that is to say, on the
extension of subjecthood to the mental, which would be at variance with the
most genuine spirit of Cartesian philosophy. My aim is to show that, according
to Heidegger’s own criteria, the decisive move was made both after Descartes,
in the critical reception of the cogito, sum, and before him, in the Middle Ages,
when medieval theologians re-introduced the Aristotelian hypokeimenon into
the field of psychology.
Let me define what I will hereafter call “mental attributivism.” By “men-
tal attributivism” I understand any interpretation of the soul (or thought, or
understanding, or mind) that contains or implies an assimilation of mental or
psychic activities, operations, or dispositions to attributes or predicates of a
subject defined as an “ego” or an “I.” I say “mental attributivism” to avoid con-
fusion with “attributivism” proper, the so-called “attribute theory,” that is, the
theory interpreting the soul or mind as “some sort of dispositional property of
the body or the organism,” a dispositional property being “the capacity or abil-
ity something has for engaging in a certain activity in certain circumstances.”50
Attributivism being the doctrine in which the soul is conceived as a property,
the opposite doctrine, substantialism, is the theory according to which the soul
is conceived, not as a property but as a “thing,” a subject of properties.51 At-
tributivism, substantialism, and mental attributivism are ultimately based on
the same view: the substance-attribute view. According to attributivism, mind is
an attribute and the body a substance; according to substantialism, mind is a
substance and the body another substance. Attributivism is monist, substantial-
ism, dualist. Combining these criteria we are left with four possible positions:
(1) S1: substantialism (+), mental attributivism (+); (2) S2: substantialism (+),
mental attributivism (–); (3) A1: attributivism (+), mental attributivism (+); (4)
A2: attributivism (+), mental attributivism (–):
mental attributivism
substantialism (S1) + (S2) –
attributivism (A1) + (A2) –

50
H. Granger, Aristotle’s Idea of the Soul (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 10.
51
Ibid., 12.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

According to Armstrong, a dualist theory holds that “mind and body are distinct
things,” so that for a dualist “a man is a compound object, a material thing—his
body—somehow related to a non-material thing or things—his mind.”52 Carte-
sianism is one of the two main types of dualist theory: “For the Cartesian Dualist
the mind is a single non-material or spiritual substance somehow related to the
body.” Armstrong adds that, “although the term ‘Cartesian’ refers to Descartes,
and we find this view of the mind and body expounded by Descartes in his Sixth
Meditation, the term,” as he uses it, “is not to be restricted to the exact theory
put forward by Descartes,” but “is to be applied to any view that holds that a
person’s mind is a single, continuing, non-material substance in some way related
to the body.”53 The attribute theories of the mind argue that men, “besides hav-
ing physical properties, have further properties,” non-physical properties, “quite
different from those possessed by ordinary physical objects,” and that it is “the
possession of these unique properties that gives men a mind.”54 When coming to
historiological considerations that concern our present purpose, Armstrong seems
more puzzled: he does not know exactly where to put either Aristotle or Aquinas.
He says that “Aristotle’s doctrine, put forward in De Anima, that the mind is the

52
D. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1993), 6.
53
Ibid. The second type of dualist theory is “bundle” dualism, “the term ‘bundle’ echo-
ing Hume’s notorious description of the mind” as a “bundle of perceptions.” The “bundle”
dualist takes the mind to be “a succession of non-physical particulars or items distinct from,
although related to, the body.” According to Armstrong, “this form of dualism characteristically
arises out of reflection on the difficulties of Cartesian Dualism” (ibid., 7). This is certainly the
case. But to consider Humean every “bundle” dualism would certainly be mistaken as well.
Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s discussion of Edmund Law, for instance, represents another
type of “bundle” dualism, more intimately related to the difficulties of Cartesian Dualism. As
a matter of fact, Law’s two major claims that (1) the substance of spirit consists in the powers
of thinking and acting and (2) the aggregate of the properties of any being is the being itself
are both anti-Cartesian. See Cockburn, Remarks Upon Some Writers, 100. Cockburn’s answer to
point (2) is a beautiful defense of subjecthood: “I confess myself ignorant indeed of what the
substance of that being is, but cannot think that a sufficient reason to exclude it from existence,
as this new philosophy would do, tacking properties and actions together, without any subject of
either; somewhat unphilosophically, as it seems to me” (ibid., 101). From an ontological point
of view “bundle” dualism is already evidenced in Hobbes’s discussion of the “Ship of Theseus.”
It is implied in the third opinion on individuation discussed in the De corpore: x and y are the
same, if, and only if, they are the same aggregate of accidents. See Elements of Philosophy, Part
II, chap. 11, § 7, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth (London: Bohn,
1839–1845), vol. 1, 135: “Some place individuity in the unity of matter; others, in the unity of
form; and one says it consists in the unity of the aggregate of all the accidents together.” This being
said, I guess that “bundle” dualism could be traced back either to Plotinus’s sumfÒrhsij theory
as evidenced in Enneads VI [44], iii, 8, 16–23 and 30–7 or, more convincingly, to Porphyry’s
definition of an individual, in Isagoge 7.19–27, as “a collection (¥qroisma) of properties which
can never be the same for another.”
54
Armstrong, A Materialist Theory, 11.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

‘form’ of the body is perhaps a version of the Attribute theory,”55 adding that,
though he lacks the space “to substantiate the accusation,” he is “inclined to see
in Thomism an uneasy and somewhat confused oscillation between an Attri-
bute theory and Dualism.”56 I think that Armstrong’s perplexity derives in part
from the fact that he “cannot see any clear and important way of sub-dividing
Attribute theories.”57 On my view, introducing mental attributivism makes it
possible to supply such a clear—and hopefully important—way of subdividing
dualist, materialist, and compromise theories like the so-called attribute theory.
My view strongly suggests to drop the charge against Aquinas as well.
In their standard versions both attributivism and substantialism are commit-
ted to mental attributivism: in the standard version of substantialism, advocated
by Descartes (S1), thought is the immediate (essential), principal, not to say
unique attribute of the mind; in the standard version of attributivism advocated
by Hobbes (A1), thought is an immediate attribute of the body. S2 and A2 seem
at first glance more difficult to instantiate. This is mainly due to the fact that the
best-suited candidates would be ancient and/or medieval thinkers: Augustine for
S2; Aquinas and Aristotle (at least on Aquinas’s interpretation) for A2.

V.

Leaving aside for the moment Augustine and Aquinas, let us resume the
discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of the role played by Descartes in “pro-
viding the point of departure” for modern “dominion of the subjective.” From
the viewpoint of what I call “subjecthood,” if Heidegger’s claim were correct,
the word “mind” should denote for Descartes that subject in which the activi-
ties or dispositions of knowing, willing, feeling, or desiring inhere; e converso
the word “subject” should denote the mind or the I by which the activities or
dispositions of knowing, willing, feeling, or desiring are accomplished or brought
about. In order to meet all the requirements of a modern subject-centered
philosophy—that is, to provide us with a subject that could simultaneously be

55
On this problem see J. Barnes, “Aristotle’s Concept of Mind,” Proceedings of the Aristo-
telian Society (1971–72): 101–14. Barnes’s attribute theory has been criticized by C. Shields,
“Soul and Body in Aristotle ,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 6, ed. J. Annas (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1988), 103–36, esp. 112. According to Shields, Barnes sees persons as material
substances “which none the less have immaterial properties which are causally or non-causally
necessitated by physical states of the body” (112). In other words: “1. Persons have some im-
material states. 2. These cannot be states of the soul, since it is not substantial. 3. Therefore,
they must be states of the body or compound [of body and soul], both of which are material”
(112). On Barnes’s pseudo-materialism see R. Sorabji, “Body and Soul in Aristotle,” Philosophy
49 (1974): 63–89, esp. 70.
56
Armstrong, A Materialist Theory, 12.
57
Ibid., 12.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

understood both as a subject of thought and as a thinking subject—Cartesian

philosophy should display an extensive use of these two words, with those precise
meanings. Now consider the first claim. It is indisputable that the idea of the
mind as a subject of thought, in the sense of a subject of attribution/inherence
can be found everywhere in post-Cartesian literature. It is to be found in Kant,
when he claims that “by this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is
represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x, which is known
only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from them,
we can never have the slightest concept.”58 It is also evidenced in the numerous
texts of the Lockean or post-Lockean tradition, ranging from Catharine Trotter
to William Hamilton, which argue that the subject or substance in which every
psychic phenomenon inheres is in itself “unknown.” Pace Heidegger, however,
it is not present in Descartes.
To the best of my knowledge, Descartes’s defense of S1 refers to the “subject”
in only two texts. In both cases, the French philosopher borrows the word from
his opponents. These opponents are Thomas Hobbes, a major exponent of A1,
and Henricus De Roy, better known as Regius.
In the third set of Objections to the Meditationes de prima philosophia Hobbes
makes a striking point. He accepts the inference from “I think” (cogito, which
he equates with sum cogitans) to “I am” (ego sum). But he challenges Descartes’s
further inference that the thinking thing, the res cogitans, is undoubtedly mens,
animus, intellectus, ratio. This, he says, amounts to saying, “I am walking,
therefore I am a walk.” Descartes has confused the thing that understands and
the act or power of understanding: “Yet all philosophers distinguish the subject
from its faculties and acts, that is, from its properties and essences (omnes tamen
Philosophi distinguunt subjectum a suis facultatibus et actibus, hoc est a suis pro-
prietatibus & essentiis).”59 In brief, Descartes fails to grasp that I know only that
ego cogito because we cannot conceive any act without its subject (sine subjecto
suo). And he fails to grasp this because, up to a certain point, he precisely lacks
a concept of the subject.60 The continuation of Hobbes’s argument is a canoni-
cal exposition of attributivism. For Hobbes goes on to argue that a subject, in
this case the subject of thought—that subject or substance in which the phe-
nomena of knowing, willing etc. inhere—can be conceived as only corporeal
or material.61

58
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, A 346, B 404 (available online at
http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html; accessed on March 28, 2008).
59
R. Descartes, Third Objections, II, AT [Œuvres de Descartes, ed. Ch. Adam and P. Tannery
(Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974)] VII, 172–3; IX, 134.
60
See M. Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003) 11–13.
61
See AT VII, 173; IX, 135.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

Descartes’s reply is based on common usage. He of course agrees that a

walk (ambulatio) can never mean a walker; but, he says, mens, animus, intellectus,
ratio are commonly understood to be capable of denoting both the faculties of
reason and understanding, and the things endowed with these faculties. The
core of his reply is thus concerned with the words a philosopher should use.
His own terminology has, he argues, the merit of abstraction; it perfectly fits his
philosophical purpose, since he seeks to purge his notion of substance of all that
does not belong to it, whereas Hobbes uses terms as concrete as possible, to sug-
gest that the thinking thing cannot be divorced from the body. In other words,
subiectum is, for Descartes, a concrete term, along with materia and corpus,62 and
for him, referring to the “subject of thought” can have only one practical goal:
to mislead the reader. Why then should this term be used to define the essence
of Descartes’s philosophy? It is certainly essential to Hobbes’s philosophy; it is
not central to that of Descartes.
Hobbes’s major claim is that “it is possible . . . that the thinking thing be the
subject of mind, reason or understanding, and thus something corporeal (potest . . .
esse ut res cogitans sit subjectum mentis, rationis, vel intellectus, ideoque corporeum
aliquid).”63 Obviously, Descartes and Hobbes do not share the same language.
When Hobbes objects to Descartes that “omnes . . . Philosophi distinguunt
subjectum a suis facultatibus et actibus, hoc est a suis proprietatibus & essentiis,”
he is speaking a philosophical jargon that is entirely unacceptable to Descartes.
For instance, this is how Hobbes defines essence, form, subject, and matter:
Now that accident for which we give a certain name to any body, or the
accident which denominates its subject, is commonly called the essence
thereof; as rationality is the essence of a man; whiteness, of any white
thing, and extension the essence of a body. And the same essence, in as
much as it is generated, is called the form. Again, a body, in respect of
any accident, is called the subject, and in respect of the form it is called
the matter.64

An essence is that accident for which we give the thing, or the subject, its name;
that accident which—let me insist on this formulation—denominates its subject.
Every subject is a body:
I define what it is we call essence, namely, that accident for which we give
the thing its name. As the essence of a man is his capacity of reasoning; the
essence of a white body, whiteness, &c., because we give the name of man

62
See AT VII, 174; IX, 135–6.
63
AT VII, 173; IX, 134.
64
Th. Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, II, “The First Grounds of Philosophy,” chap. 8 (“Of
Body and Accident”), § 23, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, vol. 1, 118.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

to such bodies as are capable of reasoning, for that their capacity; and the
name of white to such bodies as have that color, for that color.65

Hobbes’s terminology involves a complete destruction of traditional ontology.

It is based, however, on a very common scholastic principle: “every accident
denominates its subject” (accidens denominat proprium subiectum). If there is
an attributivist formulation of subjecthood, it is that introduced by Hobbes.
The only Cartesian contribution to the emergence of the subject in its modern,
“Cartesian,” sense—that is, the first-person relationship between thought and
existence, not to say personal identity—is to accept the general axiom that we
cannot conceive an act without a subject (that is, Nietzsche’s grammatische Gewöh-
nung) and to reject, as contrary to all linguistic usage and logic (contra omnem
loquendi usum omnemque logicam), the idea that every subject should be material,
when logicians and others commonly assert that some substances are spiritual,
others corporeal.66 This is not enough to allow one to consider Descartes as the
“father of modern subjectivity.” Descartes’s claim is that there are incorporeal
substances—let us say incorporeal subjects. This claim is not primarily con-
cerned with the idea that the thinking thing should be I as a subject—subject
of thought, thinking subject. It is concerned with Hobbes’s thesis according to
which the expressions “incorporeal substance” or “incorporeal subject” imply a
contradiction—in other words, that to say that “x is an incorporeal substance”
amounts to saying that “there is no x”:
To men that understand the signification of these words, substance, and
incorporeal; as incorporeal is taken not for subtle body but for not body,
they imply a contradiction: insomuch as to say, an angel, or spirit is (in
that sense) an incorporeal substance, is to say in effect, there is no angel
nor spirit at all.67

I hope it is now obvious why I previously spoke of Descartes’s overriding de-

sire to avoid any assimilation of the thinking I to a subject of thought. In his
own philosophical context or “field of presence”68 a statement about a subject

65
Th. Hobbes, Six Lessons of the Principles of Geometry, &c. to the egregious Professors of the
Mathematics, one of Geometry, the other of Astronomy, in the chairs set up by the noble and learned sir
Henry Savile, in the university of Oxford, lesson 2: “Of the Faults that Occur in Demonstration,”
in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. VII, 220.
66
AT VII, 175; IX, 136.
67
Th. Hobbes, Leviathan, Part Three: “Of a Christian Commonwealth,” chap. 34: Of the
signification of spirit, angel, and inspiration in the books of holy scripture, in The English Works of
Thomas Hobbes, ed. W. Molesworth, vol. III, 394.
68
M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1972), 57. By “field of presence” Foucault understands “all statements formulated
elsewhere and taken up in a discourse, acknowledged to be truthful, involving exact description,
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

of thought or about mind as a subject had to refer to a body or a corporeal

substrate. In short, Descartes was forced to accommodate the subject in his
dualist approach of man. One may now show that Strawson’s interpretation of
Cartesian philosophy as a dualism of two subjects or two types of subjects is
true to the extent that Descartes’s own assessment of a two-subject theory is a
hapax legomenon, based on a further concession to the linguistic habits of the
language of his second opponent: Regius.
In fact, the second occurrence of “subject” in Descartes takes place in his
Notae in programma quoddam (Notes on a Program, also referred to as Comments
on a Certain Broadsheet), that is: a pamphlet Descartes wrote during the winter
of 1647–1648 in reply to the Explicatio mentis humanae, a broadside recently
put out by his former disciple Henricus De Roy, who had by then become his
adversary. In the Explicatio mentis humanae Regius had argued that there could
perfectly be a single subject for thought and extension, intended as two different
modes of the same substance. To prove his thesis, he claimed that “there is no
reason why the mind should not be a sort of attribute co-existing with exten-
sion in the same subject.”69 For Descartes, this was the second and apparently
the last opportunity to deal with the question of subjecthood. To Regius’s claim
Descartes responds that “attributes which constitute the natures of things,” as
thought and extension do, “cannot be said [to be] present together in one and
the same subject; for that would be equivalent to saying that one and the same
subject has two different natures—a statement that implies a contradiction, at
least when it is a question of a simple subject . . . rather than a composite one.”70
I have no space here for a minute description of the whole controversy. Be it
sufficient to call attention to some of Descartes’s most fundamental claims: (1)
thought and extension are not two modes of the same substance; (2) they are
essential or main or principal attributes of two different substances: mind and
body; (3) two different modes can inhere in the same subject; (4) two essential
or principal attributes cannot have the same subject; (5) each substance has
only one essential or principal attribute; (6) there is no subject common both
to thought and extension. M. Rozemond has described claim 5 as “the Attribute
Premise,”71 which according to her is absolutely central in Cartesian dualism but
“is generally not at all explicit when Descartes argues for the real distinction”72

well-founded reasoning, or necessary presupposition,” “those that are criticized, discussed, and
judged, as well as those that are rejected or excluded” (ibid.).
69
AT VIII/2, 343; I, 294–5; trans. G. MacDonald Ross (available online at http://www
.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk; accessed on March 28, 2008).
70
AT VIII/2, 349–50; I, 298.
71
M. Rozemond, “Descartes’ Case for Dualism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (1995):
29–63, now in Descartes’s Dualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
72
Descartes’s Dualism, 36.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

between mind and body. One exception: the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet.
The first claims are well explained in the following passage:
I am the first person to have considered thought to be the distinctive at-
tribute of incorporeal substance, and extension as the distinctive attribute
of corporeal substance. But I have not said that these attributes inhere in
them as if in subjects distinct from themselves. And here we must be careful
not to understand “attribute” as meaning no more than “mode” (for we
apply the word “attribute” to anything we recognise as belonging to a thing
naturally, whether a variable mode or the very essence of the thing, which
is obviously immutable). So: God contains many attributes, but no modes.
Again, one of the attributes of every substance is its self-subsistence. Again,
the extension of a given body can indeed admit of various modes, since
its mode is different if the body is spherical from what it is if it is square;
but the extension itself, which is the subject of those modes, considered
in itself, is not a mode of corporeal substance, but the attribute which
constitutes its essential nature. Finally, there are various modes of thought,
since affirming is a different mode of thought from denying, and so on;
but thought itself, as the internal principle from which these modes arise
and in which they inhere, is not conceived as a mode, but as the attribute
which constitutes the nature of a certain substance; and the present ques-
tion is whether this substance is corporeal or incorporeal.73

We have already seen that, as far as the last claim is concerned, Descartes argues
that “attributes which constitute the natures of things cannot be said [to be] present
together in one and the same subject; for that would be equivalent to saying that
one and the same subject has two different natures—a statement that implies a
contradiction, at least when it is a question of a simple subject . . . rather than a
composite one.” Two points are involved here: no one and the same simple subject
has two different natures; composite subjects, however, may do so. According to
Descartes, “the difference between simple entities and composite entities” is the
following: a composite entity “is one which is found to have two or more attributes,
each one of which can be distinctly understood apart from the other.” Man is such
an entity: “That which we regard as having at the same time both extension and
thought is a composite entity, namely a man—an entity consisting of a soul and
a body.”74 This was exactly the thesis that Descartes had expressed in the Sixth
Meditation: Peter Strawson’s two-subjects theory. Man is not his soul. Man is not
his mind. Man is a subject composed of two substances, mind and body, which
are the simple subjects, substantially different, of principal or essential attributes
that are in each case unique: thought and extension. Thus, there is no “Cartesian
73
Trans. G. MacDonald Ross.
74
AT VIII/2, 350–51; I, 299.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

subject” in Descartes, both because the Cartesian theory of mind and thought lacks
a concept of subject—this was the core of Hobbes’s criticism—and, paradoxically,
because there are too many subjects in his philosophy: mind and body, the two
substances whose composition constitutes the composite entity called “man.”

VI.

On the basis of these conclusions, let us return to the question, When did
the “subject” emerge in its common, modern, psychological sense? I think that at
this point, we may safely answer: not with Descartes. If the question is to decide
whether Descartes contributed in a prominent way to the emergence of the term
subject in its contemporary sense, the answer has to be negative. The modern idea
of the subject was not Descartes’s child. Even if we take Heidegger’s interpreta-
tion ad litteram, Descartes would not be the one who introduced the subject in
dealing with thought, will, or desire, but only the one who restricted subjectic-
ity to the mental, “the human Mind becoming the only, the exclusive subject.”
Yet even this thesis is at variance with the two-subjects interpretation, which I
consider much more convincing and supported by the texts. Now, if someone
should be celebrated as the one who introduced the “subject” into early modern
psychology, Hobbes would certainly be the best candidate. But, conversely, this
subject would certainly not be the I, the ego, or the pure consciousness of an
ego-based psychology, it would be a “body subject”—the Nietzschean, anti-
Cartesian subject in Heidegger’s account of the history of subjecticity.75
Now, if the question is to decide whether Descartes invented mental at-
tributivism—which is quite another question—the answer would have to be
negative as well. Mental attributivism was invented and immediately rejected by
a distinguished advocate of S2 centuries before Descartes: Augustine.
Augustine is unquestionably a substantialist. His substantialism, however,
bears very little resemblance to S1. This is because substance, as he understands
it, is not reducible either to Aristotle’s first substance or to Heidegger’s Vorhan-
denes (present-at-hand),76 in a word: to a subject. Augustine’s theory of mind,

75
See Heidegger, Nihilism, 132: “does not Nietzsche argue against the concept of ‘subject’
as Descartes thinks it? At any rate, Nietzsche says that the concept of the I as subject is an inven-
tion of logic”; ibid., 133: “In Nietzsche’s thought, however, the argument against subjectivity in
the sense of the I-ness of conscious thought nonetheless accords with the absolute acceptance of
subjectivity in the metaphysical sense of subiectum, an acceptance that is of course unrecognized.
For Nietzsche, what underlies is not the ‘I’ but the ‘body’: ‘Belief in the body is more fundamental
than belief in the soul’ (WM, 491).”
76
From Being and Time onward, Heidegger continually criticized Descartes’s account of res
cogitans and res extensa as “present-at-hand entities,” and Descartes’s understanding of the self as of
an object present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). From an Augustinian point of view one must underline
that Heidegger also expounds in terms of being-present-at-hand what he calls Sein in, the “being-in,”
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

following the perichoretic model77 of mutual immanence or mutual indwelling

of the divine Persons, is borrowed from his Trinitarian theology and firmly based
on the rejection of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon. This point was completely
overlooked by Heidegger. Subjecthood is not the only pattern available in ancient
philosophy for dealing with the mental. There is a competing paradigm, born in
Trinitarian theology: Persons are not subjects, but hypostases. The assumption of the
Aristotelian hypokeimenon-based model, mirrored in Heidegger’s subjecticity and
presence-at-hand, would lead us to reduce mental states, dispositions, or activities
to mere accidents of the mind, a view—mental attributivism—that Augustine
strongly opposed, just as he rejected the reduction of the three divine Persons or
hypostaseis to accidents of the one divine substance (ousia). The Aristotelian idea
of subjecthood does not hold for God, because it presupposes the Aristotelian
concept of an ousia conceived as a hypokeimenon-subiectum taking on accidental
forms, that is to say, sub-jecting accidents or accidental properties or dispositions.
There is no inherent nor inherence in God. Just as it would be unfitting to say of
God that He stands beneath His own goodness—see On the Trinity, III, v, 10:
“It is forbidden to say that God subsists and stands under His own goodness”—it
would be unfitting to say of the soul that it stands beneath its own acts or states.
In the same manner in which the three Persons mutually indwell each another
in the one being of God, the mental faculties, dispositions, and activities—that
is: mind or memory, knowledge, and love—mutually indwell in the one being
of the soul. If the structure of the soul parallels that of the triune God, there is
no room for an Aristotelian subject either in the Trinity or in the soul. Neither
the soul nor the mind can be conceived as subjects.
As Augustine writes in On the Trinity, IX, iv: “love and knowledge are not
contained in the mind as in a subject (non amor et cognitio tanquam in subiecto
insunt menti), but these also exist substantially, or better said essentially, as the
mind itself does (sunt, sicut ipsa mens).” Love and knowledge are by no means
accidents of the soul, because accidens non excedit subiectum in quo est, that is,
accidents cannot go beyond their subjects (whereas all mental acts are intentional,
that is: tran-scendental):

traditionally understood as “being in something.” This “kind of Being which an entity has when it
is ‘in’ another one” is obviously the kind of being ascribed by Aristotle to the accidents, in Catego-
ries, 2, 1 a 20–1 b 10, namely, inherence, ™n ØpokeimšnJ enai, esse in subiecto (vs. kaq’ Øpokeimšnou
lšgesqai, dici de subiecto). Vorhandenheit thus characterizes both substances and accidents.
77
The term perichoresis goes back to John of Damascus. For a survey of the patristic sources
and Damascene’s own use, see G. L. Prestige, “Perichoreo and Perichoresis in the Fathers,” Journal
of Theological Studies 29 (1928): 242–52. The most substantial study is the one by R. Cross, “Peri-
choresis, Deification, and Christological Predication in John of Damascus,” Mediaeval Studies 62
(2000): 69–124. For the meaning of the terms circumincessio and circumsessio in Latin theology,
see A. Deneffe, “Perichoresis, circumincessio, circuminsessio,” Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie
47 (1923): 497–532.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

Similar reasoning suggests to us, if indeed we can in any way understand

the matter, that these things [i.e. love and knowledge] exist in the soul,
and that, being as it were involved in it, they are so evolved from it as to
be perceived and reckoned up substantially, or, so to say, essentially. Not
as though in a subject; as color, or shape, or any other quality or quantity,
are in the body. For anything of this [material] kind does not go beyond
the subject in which it is; for the color or shape of this particular body can-
not be also those of another body. But the mind can also love something
beside itself, with that love with which it loves itself. And further, the
mind does not know itself only, but also many other things. Wherefore
love and knowledge are not contained in the mind as in a subject, but
these also exist substantially, as the mind itself does.

In book XII of the Confessions (xi, 12), Augustine uses the perichoretic model
in his outline of what might be termed the “psychic or mental life” by invoking
the triad of esse, nosse, and velle. In this model, Trinitarian relations permit a
formal description of the interacting equalities that define the incomprehensible
unity of the ego:
I am, I know and I will. I am a being which knows and wills; I know
both that I am and that I will . . . In these three—being, knowledge and
will—there is one inseparable life, one life, one mind, one essence; and
therefore, although they are distinct from one another, this distinction
does not separate them.

In the description of the mens-notitia-amor triad (On the Trinity IX, v, 8) the
doctrine of the circumincession of the Persons of the Trinity is evoked even more
directly in order to conceptualize the mutual indwelling of mens and its acts:
The mind, love and knowledge . . . each is a substance in itself, and all are
found mutually in all, or each two in each one, consequently all are in all . . .
These three, therefore, are in a marvelous manner inseparable from one an-
other; and yet each of them is a substance, and all together are one substance
or essence, while the terms themselves express a mutual relationship.

This is exactly what the Aristotelian hupokeimenon pattern would and could not
allow. Yet in the Middle Ages, the two conflicting patterns—the perichoretic and
the Aristotelian—merged into a single one, giving rise to the concept of a mental
subject, mentally active, in a modern sense.78 What made such a change possible
in these two conceptions? Time has come to summon our medieval witnesses.

78
Paradoxically enough, this is confirmed by the fact that Brentano’s invention of “inten-
tionality” was also based on a perichoretic interpretation of Aristotle. See de Libera, Naissance du
sujet, 133–54, and F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. A. C. Rancurello,
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

VII.

Although it is always dangerous to give a date for the appearance of new

theories in the Middle Ages, we can advance the hypothesis that one of the first
thinkers to attest to the “subjective” mutation of subjecthood was the somewhat
unorthodox Augustinian Peter Olivi (Petrus de Olivi).79
This controversial Franciscan was reacting to a specific situation: the re-
formulation of the peripatetic doctrine, which had become standard in the late
thirteenth century, according to which the intellect knows itself in the same way
in which it knows other things, and that it does so on the basis of its knowledge
of those other things. This view was already at variance with the Augustinian
principle stating that the mens cannot be regarded as the subject of its own acts.
Moreover, according to it, man was assumed to arrive at an understanding of his
own mind (mens) and of the nature of his own ability to think (natura potentiae
intellectivae) on the basis of his acts (per actus eius) and the objects of those acts
(per cognitionem objectorum). Such a knowledge was reputed to be merely conjec-
tural: it was supposed to be the product of a process of reasoning which, taking
objects as its starting point, would work back to acts by postulating (a) that these
acts subsist (manant) only because of a power that supplies their substrate (ab
aliqua potentia et substantia), (b) that they therefore “exist in a subject” (sunt in
aliqui subjecto), (c) which would allow us to conclude that “we have a faculty that
ensures the subsistence” of those acts (“Unde et auctores huius positionis dicunt
quod nos devenimus in cognitionem nostre mentis et nostre potentie intellective

D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 88: “Every mental
phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional
(or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously,
reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning
a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within
itself, although they do not all do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in
judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.”
In a footnote that Brentano added to the second edition, he argues that “Aristotle himself spoke of
this psychical indwelling” (psychische Einwohnung), that “St. Augustine in his doctrine of the Verbum
mentis and of its inner origin touches upon the same fact,” and that, in the same manner, “St. Thomas
Aquinas teaches that the object which is thought is intentionally in the thinking subject, the object
which is loved in the person who loves, the object which is desired in the person desiring” (88).
79
See S. Piron, “Petrus Johannis Olivi. Impugnatio quorundam articulorum Arnaldi Galliardi,
articulus 19,” Oliviana (http://oliviana.revues.org/document52.html), consulted March 28, 2008.
The Impugnatio quorundam articulorum Arnaldi Galliardi was written in 1282, as an answer to
Arnaud Gaillard’s question An scientia evacuetur in patria, which was based on Aquinas’s claim that
“modus scientie huius vite est quod fiat mediante fantasmate et cum successione et tempore.” The
“peripatetic” doctrine rebuked by Peter is thus linked to Thomism. On this text, see O. Boulnois,
Être et représentation. Une généalogie de la métaphysique moderne à l’époque de Duns Scot (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1999), 151–221.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

per actus eius, et in cognitionem actuum per cognitionem obiectorum”). Arguing

against Augustine, the Peripatetics posited the existence of a potentia subjectiva
in order to demonstrate the existence of “a subject of knowledge acts that are
oriented toward objects.” According to Olivi, this conjecture, which certainly
would look to moderns like a decisive step toward subjectivity, lacked what the
Augustinian model was meant to supply: self-certainty, certitudo infallibilis sui
esse (“Coniicimus enim ratiocinando quod actus illi quibus obiecta cognoscimus
manant ab aliqua potentia et substantia et sunt in aliquo subiecto, et sic per
hunc modum deprehendimus nos habere aliquam potentiam a qua manant”).
Indeed, it actually says nothing about the ego or the I; it makes it possible to
posit that my acts have a subject, but it does not establish that I am that subject.
In Nietzschean terms, it posits that “it is thinking,” without supplying evidence
that I am the one who does the thinking. Nothing in the peripatetic argument
allows me “to be certain that I am, that I am alive, and that I am thinking”; on
the contrary, it merely posits that my acts “subsist thanks to a certain power and
that they are inherent in a certain subject.”
If we carefully examine this way of thinking, we will see not only that it
cannot be beyond doubt, but also that no one can use it to arrive at any
certainty that he is what he is, that he is living, and that he is thinking,
even though he can therefore be certain that these acts subsist by virtue
of a certain power and that they reside in a certain subject.80

In order to arrive at the self-certainty of the moderns, one would have to take
one more step: assume that I can directly intuit that I myself am the subject of
my acts. One should, in a word, go back to Augustine’s perichoretic concep-
tion of the soul and adapt the “peripatetic” language of subjecthood to it. This
twofold maneuver would of course bring about a forced synthesis and betray
both parties, the resulting thesis being, at bottom, neither Augustinian nor Ar-
istotelian. But that would precisely mark the beginnings of “subjectivity,” or at
least one of the preconditions for those beginnings. I think that this is the step
taken by Peter Olivi when he expressly makes the perception of my acts depend
upon “my prior perception of myself as subject of those acts.” This leads him to
formulate the theorem that “in the perception of my acts, the perception of the
subject itself [that is to say, of me as the suppositum of my own acts] comes first
according to the natural order of things” (“Nullus enim est certus scientialiter
de aliquo nisi sciat se scire illud, hoc est nisi sciat quod ipse est ille quod hoc
80
Impugnatio quorundam articulorum, art. 19, fol. 47ra: “Si quis autem bene inspexerit
istum modum, reperiet quod non solum potest in eo contingere aliqua dubietas, sed etiam quod
nunquam per hanc viam possumus esse certi nos esse et nos vivere et intelligere. Licet enim certi
simus quod illi actus manant ab aliqua potentia et sunt in aliquo subiecto, unde per hoc sciemus
quod illud subiectum sumus nos et quod illa potentia est nostra?”
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

scit. Et hec certitudo de supposito currit universaliter in omni apprehensione

actuum nostrorum. Nunquam enim apprehendo actus meos, actus scilicet vi-
dendi et loquendi et sic de aliis, nisi per hoc quod apprehendo me videre, audire,
cogitare et sic de aliis”). In my view, expressions such as certituo qua sumus certi
de supposito omnis actus scientialis, or in hac apprehensione videtur naturali ordine
praerire apprehensio ipsius suppositi signal the encounter between certainty and
subjecthood, or, to use a better (Scotistic and Leibnizian) term, suppositality,
which gives rise to the modern notions of subjectivity and subjective certainty.
They also introduce one last basic feature: acts are compared in every respect to
attributes or predicates of the subject-ego.
In a way that I find amazing Olivi answers the key question raised by Peter
Strawson in Individuals: Why are one’s states of consciousness ascribed to any-
thing at all? His answer is among the clearest formulations of mental attributivism
ever devised. The main thesis is: “Our acts are perceived by us only as predicates
or attributes (actus nostris non apprehenduntur a nobis nisi tamquam praedicata
vel attributa).” According to Olivi, the subject is perceived first because “accord-
ing to the natural order of things, the subject is perceived before the predicate
is attributed to it as such (Et certe naturali ordine prius apprehenditur subiectum
quam predicatum ei attributum in quantum tale)”—a psycholinguistic fact. With
this claim, the “subjectivation” of the mind is now complete in every dimension,
including the assumption of the linguistic or logical form of predication, which
is backed up by the introduction of the word ego into the analysis of linguistic
communication. As a matter of fact, although the term is unnecessary in Latin,
Olivi stresses that, when we wish to signal the existence within us of some mental
state, “we put the subject first by saying ‘I think that’ or ‘I see that’ (quando
volumus hoc aliis annunciare praemittimus ipsum suppositum dicentes: ego hoc cogito,
vel ego hoc video).” We may safely describe this as a first medieval theorization
of subjectivity. We are authorized to do so, because Peter Olivi’s theory clearly
merges substantialism and mental attributivism. Indeed, it entails the idea of
immediate self-intuition, intuition of I or me as a “substance,” which is at the
same time subject and principle (subjectum et principium), as well as the idea
of an “experiential and almost tactile sensation (sensus experimentalis et quasi
tactualis)” in the inner sense that I am a permanent subject. According to Olivi,
we can further intuit, thanks to the same “inner sense,” that my acts are so many
“attributes” that are distinct from my substance, without being mere accidents
of what I am when I am acting. They subsist thanks to this “inner sense” that is
mine and/or me, and exist within me in a “becoming mode”:
When we apprehend our acts through inner sensation, and make so to
say an experiential distinction between the substance whence they derive
their subsistence and in which they exist, and the senses or sensations
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

themselves, this means that we perceive through [inner] sense that those
acts subsist by virtue of that substance and depend on that substance,
and that it does not depend on them, and that this substance is some-
thing stable that subsists in itself, whilst its acts are in a permanent state
of becoming.81

From a modern point of view, Olivi’s subject satisfies all the requirements set
forth in ego-based psychology. It meets the requirement of a doer for every deed.
Olivi’s theory states that if there is thinking, there must be something that thinks.
But it also establishes that I am this something. There is a grammatical move, a
logical move, and a theological move.
The most outstanding feature of Olivi’s criticism of the peripatetic model
of indirect, conjectural, inferential knowledge of the I or the ego consists in
equating the Aristotelian ontological subiectum with the so-called suppositum
as the immediate subject of self-certainty. Of course, suppositum is a key word
in medieval grammar, referring both to the term that is the logical subject in a
sentence or a phrase, suppositum locutionis, and to that about which one speaks,
the subject matter of discourse, that which is subjected to the locutio: suppositum
locutioni. Moreover, it is clear that subiectum and suppositum, praedicatum and
appositum correspond to the terms “subject” and “predicate” in modern logic and
grammar. But suppositum, the Latin rendering of the Greek hypostasis, is also a key
word in Trinitarian theology: hypostasis, subsistentia, persona, and suppositum are
synonyms.82 In order to grasp the full import of this equation—subiectum equals
suppositum equals person—for the genealogy of subjectivity a last step is necessary:
an archaeological inquiry into the principle which has been labeled a mere “gram-
matical custom” by Nietzsche. Professor Rosemann’s study of the principle omne
agens agit sibi simile, “every agent causes something similar to itself,” is a paragon
of such an approach.83 The same kind of study is required for the subject, in order

81
Ibid., fol. 50ra: “Quando etiam nos apprehendimus nostros actus quoddam interno
sensu et quasi experimentaliter distinguimus inter substantiam a qua manant et in qua exis-
tunt et inter ipsos actus; unde et sensibiliter percipimus quod ipsi manant et dependent ab ea,
non ipsa ab eis et quod ipsa est quoddam fixum et in se manens, ipsi vero actus in quodam
continuo fieri.”
82
Contrary to M. McCord Adams I am not convinced that “in writing his short treatises on
Trinity and Incarnation, Boethius drew easily and readily on Aristotelian conceptualities” (M. McCord
Adams, “Aristotelian Substance and Supposits. I. What’s Metaphysically Special about Supposits?
Some Medieval Variations on Aristotelian Substance,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 79:1
[2005]: 15–52, at 22). Boethius’ definition of “person” as “an individual substance” or “subsistence”
“of a rational nature” is certainly not Aristotelian. The question remains whether medieval definitions
of the person as “an intellectual supposit” (Adams, 38) are rooted in the “Categories scheme” (ibid.,
39) or already presuppose the merging of the two conflicting models of substantiality.
83
See P. W. Rosemann, Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics
(Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1996).
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

to trace the historical roots of the principles used by modern philosophers who
have made our common understanding of the subject possible.

VIII.

There are many principles that enshrine Nietzsche’s “grammatical custom.”84

One is of particular relevance here. Leibniz calls it “the widely received axiom
that actions belong to subjects.”85 It has several forms in Aquinas:
(1) Actiones sunt suppositorum et individuorum (ST III, qu. 7, art. 13, resp.)
(2) Actiones sunt suppositorum singularium (In III Sent., dist. 18, qu. 1, art.
1, arg. 2 and ad 2m)
(3) Actiones sunt singularium (De unione Verbi incarnati, art. 1, arg. 16)
(4) Actus sunt suppositorum (ST I, qu. 39, art. 5, ad 1m; I, qu. 40, art. 1, ad 3m)
(5) Actus sunt suppositorum et singularium (ST III, qu. 20, art. 1, ad 2m)
(6) Actus sunt singularium (In III Sent., dist. 1, qu. 1, art. 2, ad 6m; Contra
gentiles II, cap. 72, § 3; ST I, qu. 57, art. 2, resp.; De veritate, qu. 16,
art. 2, arg. 2; Sententia libri Metaphysicae, V, lect. 3, § 18)
(7) Actus sunt individuorum (In II Sent., dist. 32, qu. 1, art. 2, resp.; In IV
Sent., dist. 4, qu. 2, art. 1, qc. 3, ad 2m).
The principle plays a pivotal role in the definition of person. As a matter of fact,
if the equivalence of hypostasis, suppositum, and individua substantia (a Thomistic
commonplace) is granted, the principle that actions belong to subjects brings
about everything required for a concept of person or personality. It makes pos-
sible the interpretation of man as subiectum which Heidegger considered to be
the exclusive trademark of Cartesianism. Such a concept includes three main
elements: subsistence, individuality, and rationality.86 They are combined by
Thomas in the following way: every substance is a suppositum, every suppositum
is an individual (an individual substance), but it is not the case that every indi-
vidual (individual substance) which is a suppositum is a person: only the supposita
having dominion over their own actions, which can act of themselves (that is,
rational individuals) are persons. The core of the argument is the principle ac-

84
For example: Illud quo primo aliquid operatur est forma operantis,” “Eius est potentia sicut
subiecti, cuius est operatio,” “Cuius est potentia, eius est actio,” “accidens non excedit subiectum in
quo est,” “denominationes sunt suppositorum,” “omne accidens denominat subiectum,” “accidens
denominat proprium subiectum,” “subiectum denominatur a propria actione”.
85
G. W. Leibniz, “Annotated Excerpts from Cordemoy’s Treatise” (A VI, iv, 1799), in The
Labyrinth of the Continuum. Writings on the Continuum Problem, 1672 to 1686, ed. and trans. R. T.
W. Arthur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 277.
86
See Thomas Aquinas, Super II Sent., dist. 3, qu. 1, art. 2.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

tions belong to singulars. Nothing can act or be acted upon but a singular. Among
the singulars, only those quae habent dominium sui actus, et non solum aguntur,
sicut alia, sed per se agunt deserve a special name. That is the reason why human
beings are called persons. There can be no persons but subjects which can act of
themselves, that is to say, which can both be considered and consider themselves
as subjects-agents of their own actions.87
What is the subject in man? It is certainly not his own soul. Soul is not
even the subject of man’s thought. One may of course say in a loose sense that
“the soul understands, as the eye sees;” but “it is more correct to say that man
understands through the soul”—the body being “necessary for the action of
the intellect, not as its origin of action, but on the part of the object; for the
phantasm is to the intellect what color is to sight.”88 To this extent, men’s actions,
including thought, must be ascribed to persons, not to their souls. Man is not
his soul. Thus Aquinas’s doctrine is immune to the criticism expressed by the
French Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain Régis:
C’est une maxime communément reçue parmy les philosophes que les
Actions procèdent des suppots: cependant, quand il s’agit des actions de
l’homme, au lieu de les attribuer à la personne, la plupart les attribuent à
l’âme qui n’en est qu’une partie; ce qui est la source d’un grand nombre
de difficultés, qui procèdent visiblement de ce qu’on n’a qu’une notion
obscure et confuse de ce qu’on appelle personne dans l’homme.89

One last point. (1) The various versions of the principle mentioned by Aquinas
are generally ascribed by him as well as by the schoolmen to Aristotle. (2) Yet the
actiones sunt suppositorum version has a theological use and purpose that could
hardly be regarded as Aristotelian. Let us take a closer look at the theological
import of the principle that actions belong to subjects. The principle often serves
as a justification of monothelism, the doctrine maintaining that, although there

87
See Thomas Aquinas, ST I, qu. 29, art. 1. See also In I Sent., dist. 25, qu. 1, art. 1; dist.
23, qu. 1, art. 1; In II Sent., dist. 3, qu. 1, art. 2, ad 4m; Contra gentiles, Book III, chaps. 128 and
130; IV, chaps. 26 and 52; De potentia, 9, 2 and 8, 4, ad 5m.
88
See Thomas Aquinas, ST I, qu. 75 art. 2, ad 3m. Latin Averroists made the same claim.
See Siger of Brabant, De anima intellectiva, ed. B. Bazán, in Siger de Brabant, Quaestiones in ter-
tium De anima, De anima intellectiva, De aeternitate mundi (Louvain: Publications universitaires;
Paris: BéatriceNauwelaerts, 1972), 70–112, at 84–5: “cum intellectus dependeat ex corpore quia
dependet ex phantasmate in intelligendo, non dependet ex eo sicut ex subiecto in quo sit intelligere,
sed sicut ex obiecto, cum phantasmata sint intellectui sicut sensibilia sensui”; M. Giele, Trois com-
mentaires anonymes sur le Traité de l’âme d’Aristote (Louvain: Publications universitaires; Paris:
Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1971), 75: “[intelligere] eget . . . materiali corpore ut obiecto, non ut subiecto
suo; et pro tanto est dicere hominem intelligere.” Of course, the claim has a different import in a
doctrine in which the intellect is only virtually part of the soul.
89
P.-S. Régis, L’usage de la raison et de la foy (Paris: J. Cusson, 1704), 17.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

were two natures in Christ, there was but one will, namely, the divine. I do not
want to consider here either the long and difficult history of monothelism, or
Aquinas’s specific account of the Catholic doctrine of the two wills in Christ.90
I only want to substantiate my claim.
An argument introduced in In III Sent., dist. 18, qu. 1, art. 1, arg. 2, il-
lustrates my two points:
Praeterea, actiones, ut dicit philosophus, suppositorum singularium sunt.
Sed in Christo est tantum unum suppositum. Ergo tantum una actio.

It should be considered in conjunction with another principle (In III Sent., dist.
18, qu. 1, art. 1, arg. 3):
Praeterea, cujus est esse, ejus est agere. Sed in Christo propter unitatem
hypostasis est tantum unum esse. Ergo tantum una actio.

The same principle is mentioned in the Disputed Question concerning the Union
of the Word Incarnate (De unione Verbi, art. 5, arg. 5):
Praeterea, suppositorum est agere. In Christo autem non est aliud supposi-
tum nisi suppositum aeternum, de quo non potest dici quod agat virtute
naturae humanae; quia sic acciperet aliquid ab humana natura, et haberet
esse et actualitatem per humanam naturam. Quia unumquodque agit in
90
A standard—anti-Lockean—view is summed up in Charles Coppens, S.J., A Brief Text-Book
of Logic and Mental Philosophy (New York: Schwartz, Kirwin, & Fauss, 1891), Mental Philosophy,
Book I, chap. 3, art. 1: “55. A complete substance is called a supposit; a supposit endowed with
intellect is a person. As a human soul is not a complete substance, it is not a person. . . . Since
accidents exist in their substance, actions, which are accidents, belong to their supposit; the
supposit it is which acts, actiones sunt suppositorum; the parts and powers of the supposit are not
so properly said to act as to be the instruments by which the supposit acts. Thus we say ‘A man
walks,’ not ‘His feet walk’; ‘I am thinking,’ rather than ‘My mind is thinking’; ‘We see with our
eyes, feel with our hands,’ etc. 56. Since actions properly belong to the person, and the person
who assumed human nature in the mystery of the Redemption is the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity, all the acts which He performed in His assumed human nature are really the acts of a
Divine person, of God; they are Divine, and therefore of infinite merit. In becoming man He
took upon Himself a complete individual human nature, i.e., a soul and a body like ours, but
not a human personality; He is not a human person, for person is the ultimate substratum of an
intellectual nature. If, therefore, the ultimate substratum or person in Christ were human, then
we could not say with truth what all Christians profess who recite the Apostles’ Creed, viz., that
the ‘only Son of God was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, . . . was crucified; died, and was
buried,’ etc., nor could St. John have written in his Gospel, ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt
amongst us.’ 57. Personal identity consists in the permanence of the intellectual supposit, not
in the continuity of his consciousness; for even when we are totally unconscious we are still the
same individual persons. Mankind has never believed that a man on losing consciousness ceases
to be a person or becomes another person. On this point Locke, like many other philosophers,
has written much that common sense does not support.”
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

quantum est ens actu. Ergo nulla actio est in Christo nisi quae fit virtute
divinae naturae. Non sunt ergo duae actiones in Christo secundum duas
naturas, scilicet divinam et humanam.

There, it is linked to another philosophical Aristotelian principle, actions belong

to the composite (art. 5, arg. 7):
Praeterea, operationes sunt coniuncti; unde philosophus dicit in I de anima,
quod qui dixerit animam intelligere, simile est ac si dixerit eam texere vel
aedificare.91 Sed Christi est una persona, in qua coniuncta est humanitas
divinitati. Ergo in Christo est una tantum operatio.

The principle is also put forward to deal with the question whether the union
of the Word incarnate was brought about in the person or in the nature (art.
1, arg. 16):
Praeterea, actio attribuitur supposito vel personae: quia actiones singularium
sunt, secundum Philosophum. Sed in Christo sunt duae actiones, ut
Damascenus probat in libro iii. Ergo sunt ibi duae personae. Non ergo
facta est unio in persona.

I will not consider Aquinas’s response to the arguments, but insist on the fact
that, as the De fide catholica nicely puts it: “authority has a wax nose that can be
molded into different meanings.”92 My point is the following: the axiom actio-
nes sunt suppositorum cannot be found in Aristotle. It is an adage formulated in
the Middle Ages on the basis of the only genuine Aristotelian axiom, stated in
Metaphysics, Book I, chap. 1 (981a16–17):
actions and generations are all concerned with the individual (aƒ d pr£xeij
kaˆ aƒ genšseij p©sai perˆ tÕ kaq’ ›kastÒn e„sin).

It is explained and justified there by the fact that “the physician does not cure
man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates or some other called
by some such individual name, who happens to be a man” (981a18–20: oÙ
g¦r ¥nqrwpon Øgi£zei Ð „atreÚwn ¢ll’ À kat¦ sumbebhkÒj, ¢ll¦ Kall…an À
Swkr£thn À tîn ¥llwn tin¦ tîn oÛtw legomšnwn ú sumbšbhken ¢nqrèvpJ

91
See Aristotle, De anima, I, 4, 408b11ff., trans. M. Durrant, in Aristotle’s De Anima in
Focus, ed. M. Durrant (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 19: “Yet, even then, to speak
of the soul as angry is as if one should say that the soul weaves or builds. Doubtless it would be
better not to say that the soul pities or learns or thinks, but that the man does so with the soul:
and this, too, not in the sense that the movement occurs in the soul, but in the sense that the
movement sometimes reaches to, sometimes starts from the soul.”
92
R. Dragonetti, Le mirage des sources. L’art du faux dans le roman médiéval (Paris: Seuil,
1987), 45–8, quoting Alain de Lille, De fide catholica, 1.30.
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

enai). The Translatio Iacobi reads at 981a16–17: “actus autem, et generationes

omnes circa unumquodque sunt”;93 the Translatio media: “actus autem et omnes
generationes circa singulare sunt.”94 The obvious meaning of the principle (which
is also mentioned in Politics, 1267b23–1269a29, esp. “for what is written must
be universal [in nature], whereas actions are concerned with individuals”) is
that actions and generations bear on individuals, or that what results from an
action or a generation can only be an individual. In the statement that every
action is of an individual, “of ” must be read as an objective genitive, meaning
“about,” peri, circa. As Charles Bennett puts it: an objective genitive “denotes
the object of an action or feeling” as in metus deorum, “the fear of the gods,” or
amor libertatis, “love of liberty.”95
The medieval adage, however, states just the opposite. Actiones sunt sup-
positorum means actions are “of ” individuals in the sense of subjective genitive,
which denotes “the person who makes or produces something or who has a
feeling,” as in dicta Platonis, “the utterances of Plato,” or timores liberorum, “the
fears of the children.”96 Suárez was perfectly aware of this difference:
Ad Aristotelem, dicendum est illum nunquam tractasse hanc quaestio-
nem quam nos modo disputamus; nam, si alicubi, maxime in dicto loco
VII Metaph., c. 6, vel 11; ibi autem non tractat hanc quaestionem, ut
statim explicabo. Non habuit autem Aristoteles, ut ergo opinor, princi-
pium aliquod ad distinguendum suppositum a natura singulari; nec nos
haberemus illud, nisi, mysteriis fidei edocti, occasionem habuissemus
investigandi illud, et ideo Aristoteles ubique eodem modo loquitur de
individua substantia, quidditate ac natura, et de supposito. Nam quae
ex illo adduci solent, actiones esse suppositorum, non naturarum, et quod
humanitas non net aut ambulat, sed homo; aut quod alia substantia est
quidditas, alia hypostasis; haec (inquam) et similia non reperiuntur apud
Aristotelem his modis, sed I Metaph., c. 1, dixit actiones versari circa
singularia, quod exponit quia medicus non curat hominem nisi per ac-
cidens, per se autem Calliam aut Socratem.97

93
Aristoteles Latinus, vol. XXV.1–1a: Metaphysica, lib. I–IV.4. Translatio Iacobi sive “Vetustis-
sima” cum Scholiis et Translatio Composita sive “Vetus,” ed. G. Vuillemin-Diem (Brussels and Paris:
Desclée De Brouwer, 1970), p. 6, ll. 9–10.
94
Aristoteles Latinus, vol. XXV.2: Metaphysica, lib. I–X, XII–XIV. Translatio Anonyma sive
“Media,” ed. G. Vuillemin-Diem (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), p. 8, ll. 6–7.
95
C. Bennett, New Latin Grammar, § 200 (available online at http://www. thelatinlibrary
.com/bennett.html; accessed on March 28, 2008).
96
Ibid., § 199.
97
F. Suárez, Disputatio XXXIV, sectio III, § 18: “An distinctio suppositi a natura fiat per accidentia
vel principia individuantia” (available online at http://www.telefonica.net/web2/salcascu/d34.htm;
accessed on March 28, 2008).
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

How could such an incredible change from objective to subjective genitive oc-
cur? My guess is that the passage in Metaphysics, Book I, was conflated with the
quotation from De anima, I, 4, 408b11, cited in Aquinas, De unione Verbi, art.
5 arg. 7. Suárez gives us a clue when he explains that, just as Aristotle says that
the physician does not cure man, a universal, but Callias, a singular, so he does
not refer to humanity, a universal, but to the soul, an individual, when he denies
the power of weaving webs or building houses:
Et I de Anima, text. 64, non de humanitate, sed de anima dicit quod
non net aut ambulat.98

This is not about molding a wax nose. This is rhinoplasty. Vásquez rejected
the Aristotelian paternity of the principle. John Poinsot mentions it in his Phi-
losophia naturalis:
Ex dictis colliges veritatem illius axiomatis apud philosophos communis:
“Actiones sunt suppositorum,” quod negat P. Vasquez a. p. 1. tom. disp.
21 cap. 3, eo quod Philosophus 1. Metaph. cap. 1 solum dixit, quod
actiones sunt singularium, id est non versantur circa universalia, sed
circa singularia.99

So does Juan de Lugo in his Disputationes scholasticae de Incarnatione dominica:

P. Vazquez in praesenti cap. 3 late impugnat hanc communem ratio-
nem, negatque illud commune axioma, Actiones sunt suppositorum esse
Aristotelis.100

As for Suárez, he further explains that whatever Aristotle actually said or might
have said, it is irrelevant, since he knew nothing of the theological distinction
between nature and hypostasis, which pertains to faith:
Denique, V Metaph., c. 8, dividit substantiam prout significat quiddita-
tem, cuius ratio est definitio, vel prout significat substantialia supposita
seu individua; inter significationem autem individuae naturae vel suppositi
nunquam distinxit. Quidquid vero ipse in hoc senserit, non refert, quia
mysteria fidei, ex quibus haec disputatio maxime pendet, ignoravit.101

98
Ibid.
99
J. Poinsot, Philosophia naturalis, Ia Pars, qu. 7, art. 2 (Rome: Marietti, 1931–1965), vol. I, 123.
100
Juan de Lugo, Disputationes scholasticae de Incarnatione dominica (De meritis praecedentibus
mysterium Incarnationis), sectio 1, § 2 (Lyons, 1633), 139b: “Utrum humanitas Christi mereri
potuerit unionem ad Verbum.”
101
F. Suárez, Disputatio XXXIV, sectio III, § 18: An distinctio suppositi a natura fiat per accidentia
vel principia individuantia (available online at http://www.telefonica.net/web2/salcascu/d34.htm;
accessed on March 28, 2008).
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Genuine or not, the Aristotelian axiom became what Leibniz called “the widely
received axiom that actions belong to subjects,” and played a conclusive role in
the emergence of the modern subject. How? Why? When?

IX.

The modern subject emerged through the combination of two conflicting

models of subjecticity (Subiectität) that had been steadily proposed, opposed, and
eventually combined in late scholasticism: the Aristotelian (“peripatetic”) concep-
tion of subjecthood, based on the hypokeimenon-accidents relationship; and the
Augustinian perichoretic conception, based on the ousia-hypostases relationship,
the mutual indwelling of the three hypostases, their mutual immanence, and the
hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ. Heidegger’s Subiectität is histori-
cally valuable only if it is interpreted as involving the two competing components
inherited from late ancient philosophy and theology—hypokeimenon and hypos-
tasis—thus enabling us to grasp the “modern subject” as a “bridging” entity. It is
a compromise notion, combining the two conceptual schemes of inherence and
attribution. It determines what it takes to be a subject in terms of subjecthood, but
conceives what it takes for an I or an ego to be an agent of thought and volition in
terms of the idea of the person “as a unified center of choice and action,” that is to
say, as characterized by intentionality and spontateinity. Descartes did not bring
about a comprehensive concept unifying subjecthood, personality, identity, egoity,
agency, and causality under the single word “subject.” Such a concept had been
delineated in the Middle Ages. My guess is that it was formulated in full-fledged
form by Bayle’s most talented opponent: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.
Leibniz’s discussion of Pierre Bayle’s philosophical anthropology has received
little attention. Yet it is an important event in the history of modern subjectivity.
Bayle’s two major claims were (1) that human beings are not the efficient cause
of either their thoughts or their wills or their actions (“nous ne sommes la cause
efficiente ni de nos pensées ni de nos volitions ni de nos actions”), and (2) that
man is only a passive subject (“l’homme n’est qu’un sujet passif ”).102 Leibniz
maintained just the opposite. In order to do so, he made extensive use of the
theological notion of suppositum borrowed from Aquinas and the schoolmen:
suppositum intelligens, suppositum agens. He also elevated the principle “actions
belong to the subjects” (supposita) to a prominent, unexpected rank.
J’appelle Substance un Étant subsistant par soi. Un Étant subsistant
par soi, de l’accord unanime des Scolastiques, est la même chose qu’un

102
G. W. Leibniz, Essais de théodicée, III, § 300, in Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W.
Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), vol. VI, 295–6, and see de Libera,
Naissance du sujet, 122.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

Suppôt. Car le Suppôt est individu substantiel (tout comme la Personne

est individu substantiel raisonnable), ou une Substance individuelle-
ment. Or l’École affirme communément que le propre du Suppôt est
d’être lui-même dénommé par l’action; d’où la Règle: les actions sont
actions des Suppôts. D’où il est manifeste que Suppôt, Substance, Étant
subsistant par soi, qui sont la même chose, sont correctement définis,
au sens même des Scolastiques: ce qui a en soi un principe d’action, car
autrement il n’agira pas mais sera l’instrument de l’agent.103

A suppositum is a subject and an agent, an individual substance, and a person

persisting as the same over time. A suppositum is the individual subject resulting
from the metaphysical union of a soul and a body according to the doctrine of
pre-established harmony:
Car quoyque je ne tienne point, que l’ame change les loix du corps, ny
que le corps change les loix de l’ame, et que j’aye introduit l’Harmonie
préetablie pour eviter ce derangement, je ne laisse pas d’admettre une
vraye union entre l’ame et le corps, qui en fait un suppôt. Cette union va au
metaphysique, au lieu qu’une union d’influence iroit au physique.104

In contemporary terms, Leibniz’s suppositum resembles Strawson’s person con-

ceived as the unique subject of both M-predicates and P-predicates.105 But this
is by far not the whole picture. As a substantial individual, as a subject that is a
person, the suppositum owns a whole set of predicates or attributes, which con-
stitutes its “complete notion” in God’s thought, mind, or foreknowledge. The
Leibnizian suppositum is some one who has a biographical definition.106 I am not
103
G. W. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1962),
vol. VI/1, 511. On this text see M. Fichant, “Actiones sunt suppositorum. L’ontologie leibnizienne
de l’action,” Philosophie 53 (1997): 135–48.
104
Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée I, § 55 (vol. VI, 81); also see § 59 (vol. VI, 135): “Plusieurs
modernes ont reconnu qu’il n’y a aucune communication physique entre l’ame et le corps, quoyque
la communication metaphysique subsiste tousjours, qui fait, que l’ame et le corps composent un même
suppôt, ou ce qu’on appelle une personne.”
105
See Strawson, Individuals, 102: “The concept of a person is the concept of a type of entity,
such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness [= P-predicates] and predicates ascrib-
ing corporeal characteristics, a physical situation & co [= M-predicates] are equally applicable to
a single individual of that single type.”
106
Thus, although he still speaks “the language of the doctrines of medieval scholasticism,”
Leibniz’s definition meets the ultimate requirement for selfsameness posited against Descartes by
E. F. Kaelin in Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reading for Readers (Tallahassee: University Press
of Florida, 1988), 91: “as that which was thought to underlie the contingent experiences of the
human animal, the soul-substance was considered as subjacent to those experiences and as con-
stituting the basis for our being subjects. But a subject is not necessarily a self. That notion came
from another property of substances—that of maintaining selfsameness (identity through change),
however great the changes might be. But the selfsameness of the thinking substance was likewise
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

a thinking thing “outfitted with the quality of thinking.” I am not even the one
thinking that I am I. I am an I, this I, a singular I: a subject including a set of
action-attributes that make him/her an individual episode in the (best possible)
world story. Leibniz’s new conception of the “subject” does not merely consist
in equating suppositum, substance, and individually subsisting being. It is also
firmly grounded in a set of agency principles. One is the principle stating that
“actions belong to the suppositum.” Another is the principle maintaining that
subjects are denominated by their actions, acts or activities: subiectum denomi-
natur a propria actione. This is Leibniz’s praxeological answer to the Hobbesian
ontological principle according to which “an essence is that accident for which
we give the thing—the subject—its name,” the scholastic Accidens denominat
proprium subiectum. The third principle states what one could call “metaphysical
attributivism”: Praedicatum inest subiecto.

X.

Let us conclude. Up to a certain point, Heidegger did acknowledge Leibniz’s

contribution to the emergence of the modern subject. Occasionally, still following
Schelling’s lead, he invites the reader to “ponder the fact that the metaphysics of
subjectivity has its decisive beginning in the metaphysics of Leibniz.” For Leibniz,
“[e]very being is subiectum, a monad.”107 “Through Leibniz all being becomes
‘subjectival’—that is, in itself eager to represent, and thus effective.”108 “Eager to
represent” means that “according to Leibniz all being is defined by perception
and appetites, by the representing urge which presses for the placing-before, the
‘representation,’ of the whole of beings, presses for their being first of all and only
in such repraesentatio and as such repraesentatio.”109 “Effective” points to “Aristotle’s
distinction between dynamis and energeia.” “The essence of actuality is effectiveness
(vis); the essence of objectivity as representedness is visuality (idea). Leibniz brings
the interpretation of subiectum (substantia as monas) in the sense of the vis primitiva
a postulate of the cogito argument. Personal histories, which are likewise selves, offer little of the
necessary properties established in the Cartesian deduction because, tied to worldly events, their
only necessity is to be contingent.”
107
Heidegger, Nihilism, 179–80: “Being means objectivity and at the same time actuality;
one stands for the other, and both belong together. The essence of actuality is effectiveness (vis);
the essence of objectivity as representedness is visuality (idea). Leibniz brings the interpretation
of subiectum (substantia as monas) in the sense of the vis primitiva activa (effectiveness) into
contrapuntal relation with the medieval differentiation of potentia and actus, in such a way of
course that vis is neither potentia nor actus, but is in an original way both at once—as the unity
of perceptio and appetitus. The differentiation of potentia and actus points back to Aristotle’s dis-
tinction between dynamis and energeia. Furthermore, Leibniz himself often explicitly indicates
the connection between the vis primitiva activa and the ‘entelechy’ of Aristotle.”
108
Ibid., 181.
109
Ibid., 65.
 When Did the Modern Subject Emerge? 

activa (effectiveness) into contrapuntal relation with the medieval differentiation of

potentia and actus, in such a way of course that vis is neither potentia nor actus, but
is in an original way both at once—as the unity of perceptio and appetites.”110
Contrary to Armstrong, whose interpretation reduces Leibnizianism to a
somewhat harsh sort of mentalism, treating all “material objects” as “colonies of
rudimentary souls” and the “whole material world” as “really mental or spiritual
in nature,”111 Heidegger’s view singles out the new relation established by Leibniz
between representedness and effectiveness: “Since Leibniz, beings appear to think-
ing in such a way that each and every ens, qua ens, is a res cogitans and in that sense
a subject.”112 But at the same time, “the essence of energeia” is transformed “in
the direction of modern subjectivity,” to the extent that “effectiveness (actuality)
is conceived as knowing will (or willful knowing)”; that is to say, as “reason” and
“spirit.” Although he follows the Schellingian scheme linking Leibniz to Ger-
man Idealism, Heidegger has his own Ariadne’s thread: the will to power. Thus,
it is in trying to determine the stages in a history of being “attempting to think
power in its essence,” that he reshapes the modern history of subjecticity, along
the sequence leading from Leibniz up to Nietzsche, and thence to the “letting
loose of beings” and “devastation”: “Being as actuality. Actuality as Subjecticity.
Subjecticity as will to power. Will to power as being. Being as power. Power as
machination. Machination as letting beings loose on themselves.”113 In doing
so, after so many contrasting, if not contradictory, assessments of the role of the
two alleged fathers of modern metaphysics, Heidegger eventually identifies two
stages in the emergence of the modern subject: the Cartesian one (Subjectivität
a) and the Leibnizian-idealist one (Subjectivität b).
perceptum Subjectivität a
(Vor-gestelltheit, representedness)
obiectum
(Gegenständlichkeit, objectivity)
Wirklichkeit Subjectivität b
(™nšrgeia—vis primitiva activa, Leibniz)
Wille und Vernunft (deutscher Idealismus)114

110
Ibid., 180.
111
Armstrong, A Materialist Theory, 5.
112
Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 32.
113
Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, ed. P. Trawny, Gesamtausgabe 69 (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1998), § 26, 26.
114
Ibid., § 58, 72–3. The sequence “Seyn, fÚsij, „dša, oÙj…a, ™nšrgeia, actus (Wirklichkeit)”
precedes Subjectivity a. Subjectivity b is followed by “Macht (Nietzsches Wille zur Macht), Ma-
chenschaft, Seinsverlassenheit.”
 American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

On my view, this reconstruction, how suggestive it might seem, has several major
shortcomings: Heidegger overlooks the quasi-absence of the subject in Descartes
(that is, the fact that Cartesian subjecticity should, at best, be characterized as
subjecticity without the subject); he does not acknowledge the distinction between
subject and hypostasis, thus leaving aside the conflict between the Augustinian
and the Aristotelian patterns, which has shaped the various theories of mind,
soul, and person from late antiquity to the eighteenth century at least; he mis-
represents the role and the impact of the medieval contribution, and severely
underestimates—not to say entirely ignores—the import of theological debates
in the genealogy of the subject; last but not least, he pays no attention at all
to the Lockean and post-Lockean tradition, as well as to British early modern
philosophy and theology.
Like many French philosophers I have for decades been whirled between a
Cartesian Charybdis and a post-Nietzschean Scylla. Nevertheless, I hope to have
been able to give sufficient proof that a history of subjectivity with the subject
cannot disregard authors like Olivi or Aquinas, and that here, as in many other
fields, one still has good reasons to penser au Moyen Âge.

Université de Genève
Geneva, Switzerland