Abstract
The question of the relation between material reality and the immaterial subject has been a recurring theme in Western philosophy. This chapter introduces key features of the idealist philosophies of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel pertaining to the subject and its relation to the material world. All three are presented as giving primacy to the ideational, immaterial over the material. The Cartesian subject is introduced to serve as a background before which other conceptualizations of the subject can be characterized, and Kant’s and Hegel’s German idealism is summarized and their notions of subject and materiality explicated.
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- 1.
In recent theoretical interventions regarding the notion of the subject in post-modernity, the ‘centered’ Cartesian subject has served as an antidote to the decentered, fissured, and in some regards impotent subject that emerged with the rise of structuralism. Negri, Žižek, as well as Badiou have called for (different versions of) a return to Descartes (cf. Negri 2007; Badiou 2013; Žižek 2000; Zima 2007).
- 2.
Foucault would later call this subject ‘a strange empirico-transcendental doublet, since he is a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible’ (Foucault 2002, p. 347).
- 3.
Ascribing the world external to the thinking subject the status of empirical reality, while simultaneously emphasizing its transcendental ideality, resembles the characterization ‘reality’ will undergo in (post-)structuralist theories presented in Chap. 5. As Fredrick Jameson remarks, in semiological thought, for instance, the whole of reality becomes problematical and might appear as ‘a formless chaos of which one cannot even speak in the first place’ (Jameson 1974, p. 33). Similarly, Lacan uses the concept of the Real to indicate that there is something, which lies outside the Symbolic Order (cf. e.g. Fink 1995, p. 24).
- 4.
And which is why, if we want to follow his own metaphysics, Hegel couldn’t become Marx.
- 5.
For a thorough and helpful commentary on this passage, see (e.g. Atkins 2005b).
- 6.
The other one is mechanistic causality, which he describes as ‘Cartesian in origin’ (Althusser and Balibar 1997, p. 186).
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Beetz, J. (2016). Prelude: The Cartesian Subject and German Idealism. In: Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59837-0_2
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