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As is well known, the contemporary notion of subjectivity is rooted in the Cartesian position. It takes this fundamental question ideally as its starting point: What am I? As is well known, Descartes gives the following answer to such a question: I think, therefore I am. I am therefore a thing that thinks.
The answer is much more problematic than it seems, because between the assertion I think therefore I am and the assertion I am a thing that thinks some implied premises have been insinuated, and these should be made explicit. And yet as a preliminary we must recognise that in doing this Descartes is performing a move which we can consider to all intents and purposes phenomenological. In fact, by answering the question what am I? with the assertion I am a thing that thinks, he by no means reduces thought to an object (for example, to neuronal mechanisms - that is, cerebral states; nor to artificial mechanisms - that is, functional states); or even more to behavioural mechanisms, that is observable states. Thought is activity of thought, activity which cannot be denied except at the cost of my very existence. In other words, Descartes foregrounds and makes fully legitimate the descriptive approach. The appeals to notions of pure and apodictic evidence, of clarity and absolute certainty, are appeals which refer everything to the ideal of a descriptive philosophy, which makes its principal task the complete adherence to what manifests itself: I discover myself in an absolutely evident manner as a thinking thing.
In this sense, it is therefore with Descartes that phenomenology begins, understood as description of that which manifests itself exactly as it manifests itself. I am simply that which it seems to me that I am by immediate observation. I am exactly what I think I am: between the thought and what I actually am, there is no distance.
So, what is a thing that thinks? Let us try to sketch out a possible answer that actually goes beyond what was proposed by Descartes.