"Subject - object" Relations in Humanities

Medvedev Vladimir Doctor of Philosophy Professor, Department of Philosophy and Sociology, Saint Petersburg State Marine Technical University 190008, Russia, Sankt-Peterburg, g. Saint Petersburg, Leninskii prospekt, 101, aud. 501 21medvedev.vl@gmail.com Other publications by this author

At first glance, the problem of the peculiarities of subject-object relations in social and humanitarian cognition is reduced to clarifying the specifics of the object being cognized. With the subject, at first glance, everything is quite simple: whatever we learn, the subject is man, and the same man learns both nature and society. However, there are different ways to understand a person as a subject. You can imagine his consciousness as a "blank slate", which is filled in during the experience with marks left by the real world (nature and society). This is what cognition looked like among the sensualists of the XVII–XVIII centuries. With this approach, it really seems that nothing in his activity fundamentally changes from what the subject learns – nature or society. But if we recognize the social nature of the subject and his consciousness, which was emphasized in Marxism and in many sociological theories of the XIX–XX centuries, then the situation changes.

This approach initially contained prerequisites for reconsidering the issue of the subject–object relationship in social cognition. After all, if a person formed by this very society is engaged in the knowledge of society, then his relationship with the object under study is more complicated than in natural science cognition. In the person of a social scientist, society learns about itself. In addition to this, Marxism spoke about the influence of social interests on social cognition, the theory of ideology as a false, illusory consciousness was developed. According to this theory, factors that distort the process of cognition systematically interfere in the relationship of a subject cognizing society with his object. Social theories do not so much reflect social reality as express social interests. At the same time, the analysis of ideology, the identification of the roots and causes of ideological illusions, K. Marx thought like an ordinary objective science. His critics (for example, K. Mannheim) rightly reproached him for inconsistency – that he discovered the social conditionality of thinking only in opponents and did not extend the principle formulated by him to his own teaching ^{[1, pp.230-231]}. Marx did not consider it an ideology. This means that all conclusions from the fact that a person studying society was formed by him were not made in Marxism. It turned out that for some subjects the principle of social conditionality of their views does not work – they are immune to the effects of socio-class interests and are able to impartially and objectively analyze other people's views and identify ideological distortions in them. Nevertheless, the recognition of the social nature of the cognizing subject had a revolutionary potential: taking into account this nature, the problem of the relationship between the subject and the object in social and humanitarian cognition acquires additional acuteness.

As for the object of social and humanitarian knowledge, its specificity seems to be obvious (again at first glance). People, unlike other objects of knowledge, are endowed with consciousness and will, and this is how they differ from them. Social life consists of the actions of people, and they act as conscious beings based on their motives, ideas, theories. Consequently, history and social life are not a spontaneous process regulated exclusively by objective laws, like weather or geological changes. However, attempts to see this as a fundamental difference between society and nature have been criticized in two ways. Firstly, according to many philosophers, the course of history does not obey the will of individuals, and their activities are also regulated by objective laws that do not depend on their consciousness. This is the point of view of Hegel, Marx and many other thinkers: the objective law of progress was recognized by O. Comte, G. Spencer (he, however, was talking about evolution rather than progress), the Russian sociologist N. I. Kareev and others. At the same time, opinions on the ability of people to influence the objective course of history differed significantly among various proponents of the theory of progress. Secondly, representatives of the naturalistic line in sociology and psychology tried to deny the specifics of man and society as objects of knowledge in general.

Here it is appropriate to recall E. Durkheim, who called for studying social facts as things, separating their thinking and perceiving people. Durkheim considered it necessary to record these facts by external observable signs, without trying to reason about the motives or aspirations of the participants ^{[2, pp.65,78-79]}. Another supporter of the naturalistic ("logical-experimental", as he called it) approach in sociology, V. Pareto, wrote that the methods of studying people should not differ from the methods of studying and classifying insects, plants and rocks ^{[3, p.8]}. Similar ideas were developed by behaviorist B. Skinner, who opposed explaining people's actions by motives, ideas, aspirations. All this, from his point of view, prevents us from perceiving the observed behavior as the only worthy object of study ^{[4, pp.36-39]}. In philosophy, the naturalistic approach was justified in the works of representatives of logical positivism. R. Carnap and O. Neurath proved the possibility of sociology and psychology in a physicalist language in which only external observable signs and movements would be recorded ^{[5; 6]}.

The question of whether sociologists-naturalists were able to withstand such an approach in their specific studies, we will discuss later. Opponents of the naturalistic line, in contrast to them, argued that social phenomena cannot even be determined without reference to the motives of the participants. M. Weber, in particular, included motives in the subject of sociology. For him, this subject is social actions, which are always internally motivated and for these reasons correlate with the actions of other persons ^{[7, pp.602-603]}. And G. Simmel wrote that external social actions are understandable to us if we know the underlying internal motives ^{[8, pp.6-7]}. In philosophy, the specifics of the humanities ("sciences of the spirit") it was founded, as is known, by V. Diltay. He saw this specificity both in the object and in the methods of cognition used by us (subjects). In historical and social reality, there is no causality in the natural-scientific sense, when one event automatically produces another. The main categories of the sciences of the spirit, therefore, are not cause and effect, but purpose, value and meaning ^{[9, p.132–133; 10, p.140]}. As for the ways of cognition, a person is not given to himself as an ordinary external object – we know ourselves in inner experience. And when cognizing others, the main method is understanding, which Dilthey interpreted extremely irrationally – as an intuitive feeling into someone else's inner life, empathy, transferring–oneself-to-another's place, etc. ^{[10, pp.145-146]} In the twentieth century, the anti-naturalistic approach was grounded in the phenomenological sociology of A. Schutz and the hermeneutic philosophy of H.-G. Gadamer. They will be discussed later.

So far, we can raise the first essential question: is it really possible to fix social phenomena and human behavior as objects of cognition solely by external observable signs, how do we define natural phenomena, or do the motives of the actors necessarily need to be taken into account simply even in order to fix what is happening? For proponents of the naturalistic approach, understanding is just a heuristic prelude to explanation. But their opponents propose to distinguish between understanding-what and understanding-how. First, understanding what is happening, what is taking place, is much more fundamental. And it always relies on our experience of social life, our involvement in certain forms of life activity. R. Carnap, for example, hoped that the class of beckoning hand movements could be described in physicalist language ^{[5, p.182]}. How can we imagine this: we fix the permissible angles of bending of the fingers, the amplitude of their movement, at which the movement remains inviting? It seems that even if you do this, this approach does not overlap in any way with the practice of people perceiving each other's actions. Not to mention that different cultures have different ideas about which gestures are respectful, which are familiar, and which are dismissive. And here only the included observation can teach us to distinguish such nuances.

How, based on the observed external movements, to distinguish punishment from other actions related to causing pain and inconvenience to others? The same Skinner recognized that it is impossible to determine a priori on the basis of objective characteristics which stimulus is a positive reinforcement and which is a negative one ^[11]. Food is a reward for an animal, but for a hungry one, etc. In human society, the generalized reinforcement is money. But even here we can say that the same amount of money has different meanings for different people, depending on the situation, values, biography and financial situation. Therefore, it is hardly possible to fix that in one case there is encouragement, and in the other – punishment, by external observation. People react not to objects and situations by themselves, but to their meaning, and it is associated with a lot of unobservable things – including the goals and values of the actors, their motives, level of knowledge, subjective definition of the situation, etc. How to determine that a lecture is taking place in this case? It is unlikely that we can fix this on the basis of external features: one speaks, the rest are silent (in a large stream it is almost impossible to ensure that all students are silent all the time), record (also not all), etc. The lecture is made by a lecture rather by a system of mutual orientations that exists between students and the teacher. One can also recall how P. A. Sorokin wrote that on the basis of external movements it is impossible to determine, for example, which actions are solidary and which are hostile: spatial convergence is not a criterion for solidary actions in the case of, say, the convergence of armies on the battlefield ^{[12, p.201]}.

Calls to fix social phenomena on the basis of observed external characteristics are associated among naturalists with an empiricist and anti-fundamentalist orientation. Motives, aspirations, ideas, meanings are all unobservable mental entities, so references to them do not meet the criteria of scientific statements, at least how these criteria are interpreted in logical positivism. Carnap wrote that if psychology and sociology want to be sciences ("real"), they must be expressible in physicalist language. But, if so, won't such sciences miss something fundamental and essential in their objects? According to Carnap, in order to learn psychology, statements with psychological terms should be replaced with statements with exclusively physiological terms: instead of "X is excited", statements about the chemical composition of blood, pulse rate, blood pressure, etc. should be formulated ^{[5, p.170-174]}. A representative of the same – positivist – tradition in the philosophy of science A. Ayer wrote on this occasion that the idea of synonymy of statements about psychological states to statements about physiological processes reminds him of the simulation of anesthesia ^{[13, p.21]}. Indeed, each of us knows what excitement is from our inner experience, and many of us have no idea how the chemical composition of the blood changes during this state. The statement "X is excited" is a statement about an internal psychological state, which is perfectly familiar to any person from their own internal experience. By replacing the statement about excitement with a physiological one, we radically change its meaning.

The most important of all the terms rejected by naturalists for social and humanitarian cognition is the concept of meaning. We live in a world of meanings, we react to the meaning of objects and situations, meaning makes a stimulus positively or negatively reinforcing. Since childhood, in the process of primary socialization, we learn ways of understanding the meanings of objects, situations, and actions of other people that are characteristic of our culture. Meaning is a new side of reality that arises in it in connection with the appearance of purposefully acting beings. Objects and phenomena acquire significance in relation to our goals. Animals are also purposefully acting beings, but they are unlikely to realize the meaning. Unlike people, for whom the means of understanding meanings is language. It seems that it is impossible to describe social reality, ignoring the world of meanings. At the same time, we lose one of its most important components: the social world is precisely the world of meanings. This is the most important difference between social reality and natural reality as an object of cognition. And meaning as the most important component of social reality is something that must be understood. So understanding as the way of cognition that distinguishes humanitarian cognition from natural science is required precisely in connection with this peculiarity of man and society as objects of cognition. An explanation is a summation under a general law. Understanding of meanings does not fit into the scheme of scientific explanation. A. Schutz wrote that understanding is not a feeling, or introspection, and not a special method of social sciences, but a practical skill that every person living in society masters in the process of primary socialization ^{[14, pp.57-59]}.

The same Schutz and his followers – representatives of phenomenological sociology – drew attention to another feature of social reality as an object of cognition. The social system and social phenomena in general do not have independence in relation to our ideas about them. Social facts are produced using the methods of understanding and interpretation traditionally practiced in this society. The social world is the accepted intersubjective world of everyday meanings. It does not exist independently of our activity of description and explanation ^{[15, pp.36,53,123-124]}. Therefore, our ideas about social reality are the most important part of it itself. If we undertake to describe the state of, for example, our society at some point in its existence, a necessary part of this description should be a description of what people thought about their society at that time, how they evaluated it. One can recall the arguments of Bulgakov's Professor Preobrazhensky about where the devastation begins – in the outside world, or in the heads. Our ideas about nature are not part of it. And there is no crisis without a sense of crisis forming in people. A pre–election sociological survey is like a temperature measurement, which by itself is unable to change the state of nature. And the publication of the results of the pre-election poll turns out to be a new factor changing reality. People find themselves in a society where the X party is likely to win the elections. This new component of reality will influence their behavior: for example, the survey participants who answered that they were not going to go to the polls, learn from it that, according to forecasts, Party X will win them, and change their decision to prevent this.

There is a famous "Thomas theorem" in sociology. One of the founders of American sociology, William Isaac Thomas, formulated it as follows: what the participants in the events consider real is real in its consequences ^{[16, p.572]}. After all, not only the objective characteristics of the situation are important, but also how people define it for themselves. Our estimates act, as R. Merton wrote, as self-fulfilling prophecies ^{[17, pp.605-624]}. Banks fail due to rumors that they are insolvent, salt shortages arise again due to rumors that there is not enough salt, and blacks are forced to work during strikes as strikebreakers due to the fact that they are not accepted into unions, considering them potential strikebreakers, etc. This also suggests that social reality does not confront us as an object outside of our position. Our ideas about it, our assessments, the theories we build about it are the most important part of this reality.

All this concerns the specifics of social reality as an object of cognition. But this also speaks about the specific position of the subject, who knows society and himself. In social and humanitarian cognition, we do not deal with an external object that is beyond our reach. What we study is also the most important part of the subject. Society, culture is what has shaped us as subjects and what participates in our cognitive activity. This point is emphasized in the hermeneutical philosophy of H.-G. Gadamer. We cannot take a position outside of them in relation to our society, our epoch and our culture and study them as an ordinary external object. At least because it is impossible to fully realize their impact on us, on our cognizing consciousness.

Classical rationalism considered the possibilities of self-knowledge unlimited. One can recall the famous reasoning of R. Descartes. The great philosopher did not doubt the ability of our mind to see through itself and separate everything doubtful from the undoubted in itself. Non-classical philosophy evaluates the possibilities of self-knowledge and self-awareness much more skeptically. Since the XIX century, it analyzes the factors that determine the activity of our consciousness and limit its sovereignty. For A. Schopenhauer, the activity of the mind is conditioned by the will; according to S. Kierkegaard, our immersion in existence and the worries and anxieties that are associated with it prevents a person from becoming a "pure knowing spirit"; from the point of view of K. Marx, social consciousness is determined by socio-class interests. For Z. Freud's consciousness is a mechanism of lies and self–deception (rationalizations, inversions, projections, etc.). In the twentieth century, the topic of the dependence of consciousness on language became popular. The problem is that if we recognize all these dependencies, it radically changes our status as subjects of cognition.

If we are talking about the conditioning of consciousness by class interests, then this principle cannot be used exclusively to expose other people's ideological illusions. It will have to be extended to ourselves. Based on Marx's ideas, Mannheim proposed a project for a new discipline – the sociology of knowledge. He considered its task to systematically study the social conditionality of theories and types of thinking, to identify the dependence of social ideas on social status ^{[1, pp.219-220]}. But such identification is no longer possible to imagine as an objective science. The question will certainly arise about who can be the subject of such an enterprise – after all, the principle of social conditionality of our ideas applies to everyone. Therefore, the subject of the sociology of knowledge cannot present himself as a disinterested individual with a consciousness unclouded by social interests, a subject subjecting the ideas of others to objective analysis and revealing their socio-class conditionality. The sociologist does not observe the social drama from the auditorium, we all live in a society and are bound by certain social interests. It is hardly possible to accurately calculate this conditionality and put it out of brackets while doing socio-scientific research. Being, as Gadamer wrote, exceeds awareness: the power of history over the finite human consciousness is also manifested when a person denies his own historicity ^{[18, p.357]}. To what extent are my arguments conditioned by the fact that I am a representative of Russian culture, a person of a certain generation, belonging to a certain social group? It is not possible to calculate this and put it out of brackets so that an exclusively objective remainder remains in them.

During the formation of sociology as a science, its first classics called for a distinction between objective research and a value approach. In particular, M. Weber wrote a lot about this. But in order to implement this principle, it is necessary to be fully aware of your value position and guaranteed to "turn it off" while doing research. Is it possible? Weber himself, arguing about this, writes that the assessment depends on the value position, while a correct scientific analysis will be significant for a person with any values, as he writes, "and for a Chinese" ^{[7, p.354]}. The example is clearly unfortunate: in traditional Chinese culture, rationality and logic did not have the status of undoubted value – such as they had in European culture. In the book "Tao te Ching" it is explicitly stated: "The Knower does not prove" ^{[19, p.138]}. It turns out that Weber, being a representative of the European cultural tradition, is inclined to consider the values of his culture universal, although in this case they are not. This can serve as a good example of the fact that it is not easy to fully understand the influence of culture and epoch on one's own reasoning. As Gadamer wrote, reflection puts before your eyes some of what was behind your back, some, but not all ^{[20, p.38]}.

Another example of the additional complexity of subject-object relations in social and humanitarian cognition can be the analysis of language. Its special status is revealed when we raise questions about the relationship between language and thinking, language and consciousness. Classical philosophy did not see any particular problems in posing such questions. For her, thinking in language is just expressed. Language, of course, affects thinking, but she sees this influence as something that needs to be overcome. Ideally, language should become an obedient tool of our mind, a pure expression of sovereign thinking. However, the question arises: how can we talk about thinking in addition to language, if it is found only when it is expressed in language? We cannot talk about the influence of language on thinking from the outside. If this influence exists, then it also takes place when we try to subject it to analysis. Even criticism of the expressive possibilities of language, as Gadamer wrote, is carried out in it ^{[18, p.467]}.

All this suggests that social and humanitarian cognition has a transcendental character. I. Kant considered the task of transcendental philosophy to analyze the universal conditions of cognition, i.e., what determines our cognitive activity, and moreover continues to do so even when we ourselves make these conditions the subject of analysis. As a representative of classical philosophy, Kant included among these conditions only that which is connected with the structure of our consciousness – a priori forms of sensuality and reason. Non–classical philosophy includes among the universal conditions of experience those external factors that determine the activity of consciousness - social interests, language, etc. Sociology of knowledge, or philosophy of language, from this point of view, undoubtedly have a transcendental status. They relate to the conditions of our experience of cognitive activity, since they affect the question of the functioning of the subject itself. It is not just that the subject of the sociology of knowledge is within the scope of the law formulated in this discipline. After all, we are also within the scope of the law of universal gravitation. But the difference lies in the fact that the principle of social conditionality of social ideas calls into question the very ability of the subject of social cognition to give objective universally valid knowledge. And the law of universal gravitation does not affect our ability to study it in any way.

Therefore, in relation to the sciences of man and society, we can talk about the double mutual penetration of the subject and the object. Our ideas about society are an essential part of society as an object of cognition. And on the other hand, society and culture are the most important component of the subject of cognition, the fact that it has formed and continues to condition its cognitive activity. For this reason, attempts to think of the subject–object relationship in the humanities according to the traditional technological model cannot be accepted. Many sociologists-naturalists imagined the tasks of the social sciences to themselves – to study people as an object in order to better manage (manipulate) them. But people are a special object of knowledge. They are able to assimilate knowledge about themselves and change their behavior. Therefore, they are fundamentally able to resist manipulation, including ideological. Even if a huge part of people do not use this opportunity, we have a fundamental opportunity. The technological model of knowledge would be applicable in the sciences of man and society if it were possible to divide society into two parts that do not communicate with each other. The minority would study the rest scientifically and on the basis of this would give rational recipes for managing them. But most of those studied and managed would need to be deprived of access to knowledge about themselves. Only then would the subject-object relations in the humanities approach what we have in the natural sciences.

The desire to ignore the difference between subject-object relations in social and humanitarian cognition is usually expressed in attempts to build an "objective" knowledge about a person and society according to the type of natural sciences. Such an attempt was classical structuralism. K. Levi-Strauss sought to identify the fundamental structure that determines the activity of our consciousness. At the same time, he proudly admitted that he did not see the difference between the study of nature and the study of human consciousness, he wanted to study people like ants ^{[21, p.308]}. This approach ignores the transcendental status of humanitarian knowledge. If such a structure exists, then it determines our reasoning about it itself. Consequently, its analysis cannot be thought of as an ordinary objective science. Critics of structuralism drew attention to this, in particular, U. Eco ^{[22, p.24]}. If such a structure exists, then it cannot be detected and known from the outside – where will the metalanguage for its description come from? Or it will not be the last and fundamental one – one that determines all our languages and all our spiritual activities. In poststructuralism, the scientist claims of Levi-Strauss are no longer accepted. For example, for J. Derrida the sign system has no exterior, we cannot view it from the outside as an ordinary object. We always think from the inside ^{[23, p.408]}.

Another attempt to ignore the specifics of subject-object relations in human cognition can be considered cognitive science. If our Self (perception of reality in the first person) is an illusion formed by neurophysiological processes, as T. Metzinger believes, then this idea also affects the status of his own reasoning. Then they, too, are just a manifestation of the dynamics of neurons. In contrast, Metzinger does not abandon the point of view of the first person setting goals and talking about values, formulating ethical appeals. The undoubted value for Metzinger is the autonomy of consciousness, the ability to psychic self-determination ^{[24, pp.313-331]}. But how is it possible if the radical physiological determinism defended by the author is recognized? Then exclusively objective neurophysiological processes determine our goals and values. If our Self (our subjectivity) is an illusion, then it is unclear to whom his ethical appeals are addressed.

In all these examples, a characteristic feature of naturalistic approaches to man and society is manifested: their supporters are unable to consistently maintain the objective approach recommended by them. Durkheim called for fixing social facts by external observable signs, without taking into account motives and meanings. But his critics from the camp of phenomenological sociology drew attention to the fact that in specific cases he resorts to references to meaning. For example, when explaining the fact that the suicide rate of educated Jews is not higher than that of the uneducated, although it is higher for the rest of the educated French ^{[15, p.92]}. Explaining this, Durkheim writes about the special importance of education for Jews in a situation where there were restrictions for them: those who were able to receive it already perceived their life as a success. It was already mentioned above that Skinner recognized that regardless of the situation, it is impossible to determine which incentive is positive and which is not based on objective criteria alone. Metzinger calls for defending the autonomy of consciousness.  But if all conscious processes are only an expression of neuromuscular mechanisms, then there is simply no Self capable of perceiving these calls and consciously directing its efforts to achieve a certain goal. The dynamics of neurons will determine what we will strive for and what to do.

This means that if we take seriously the difference between a person as a conscious being from the rest of the world, then we cannot imagine social and humanitarian cognition on the model of natural science. In the technological model of knowledge, into which natural science cognition fits, we study an external object for the purpose of subsequent manipulation. But, as already mentioned, people are a special object of knowledge that has a fundamental ability to resist manipulation. In addition, in the sciences of man and society, we study what has shaped us as subjects and continues to influence our knowledge of him and our knowledge of ourselves in an undetectable way. Therefore, the purpose of such disciplines is to deepen our self-understanding. Psychoanalysis, sociology of knowledge, philosophy of language have a transcendental status: they are a means to understand oneself better and deeper. In all these disciplines there is something of the focus of Baron Munchausen: we are trying to pull ourselves out of the swamp of ideological illusions (according to the Marx-Mannheim method), self-deceptions of individual consciousness (with the help of psychoanalysis), language patterns, etc. We will not get out on this path to objective knowledge about some object beyond our reach, knowledge, allowing to develop effective ways of practical manipulation of this object. But we will understand something about ourselves, our culture and our society, which have shaped us and our ability to know. Therefore, the double interpenetration of the subject and the object of socio-humanitarian cognition, which was mentioned above, changes the situation significantly. Social and humanitarian cognition is not the cognition of an external object beyond our reach, but a means of deepening our self-understanding.