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The crisis issue in Western philosophy has been described as the problem of subject and object. The conceptions of consciousness that have pervaded the philosophical paradigms are embedded in a division of experience into these two terms. The subject is the one who registers the reality, object. This can be traced back to the pre-Socratic Anaximander's program for a natural history of the world. It appears in Plato's distinction between ideal and natural forms. It is in Locke's search for a physiology of mind emerging out of its separateness, and it is central to Berkeley's philosophical idealism. For purposes of our discussion, we can take Descartes as the pivotal and perhaps most articulate spokesman of subject-object split. Among his conclusions on perception, we find the following:
What now shall I say of the mind itself, that is of myself? … What am I to say in regard to this I which seems to apprehend this piece of wax so distinctly? Do I not know myself much more truly and much more certainly, and also much more distinctly and evidently, than I do the wax? For if I judge that the wax is, or exists because I see it, evidently it follows with yet greater evidence that I myself am, or exist, inasmuch as I am thus seeing it… if I judge that the wax exists because I touch it, it will follow that I am; and if I judge that the imagination, or some other cause whatever it be, persuades me that the wax exists, the same conclusion follows. And what I have here said regarding the piece of wax may be said in respect of all other things which are external to me…. if the apprehension of the wax has seemed to me more
* Presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Detroit, Michigan, May 1974.
Page 131determinate and distinct when sight and touch, and many causes besides have rendered it manifest to me, how much more evidently and distinclty must I now know myself, since all the reasons which can aid in the apprehension of the wax, or of any body whatsoever, afford