Individual Responsibility and Society: A Subject Science Approach

Summary

This article questions the prevailing individualized notions of subjectivity, individuality and responsibility and points to their function in justifying restrictive conditions by reversing the causes and the consequences of suppression. It advances the notion of “meta-subjectivity” referring to the specific human potentiality of consciously influencing the conditions influencing us — only to be realized on a meta-individual level and necessarily implying our responsibility for societal development and thus also for the situation and behavior of others. This is elucidated using approaches explicitly criticizing traditional psychology’s individualism while replacing it by a more societal approach and showing how such approaches relapse into individualism when they ignore specific human “meta-subjectivity” and along with it the manifold obstacles to realizing it.