Renaissance Intrasubjectivity and Intersubjectivity

Abstract

This chapter begins by exploring the notion that a subject was composed of multiple agencies, with the consequent uncanniness of the self as well as the world. This is followed by an exploration of various forms of sharing of agency or identity between multiple subjects, through love, friendship, service and nationhood. Both the need of and a tension about the extent to which our cognitive processes involve other subjects are evident, just as there is a tension about the extent to which multiple agents operate internally in our cognitive processes, with Renaissance thinkers suggesting the delicate balance that is required between internal self-reflection and external social interaction. The next section briefly discusses various modern critical models of Renaissance subjectivity, in order to consider their relation to the position taken in this work and to succinctly evoke an image of the Renaissance subject which appears through this perspective. In the following section there is discussion of a number of issues concerning the Renaissance subject, including: the practice of inferring mental states from behaviour, body and clothes; theatre’s arousing fascination with and anxieties about the composite nature of the subject; the diversity of perceptual and phenomenological experience; and the extent to which such experience occurs in a fissured and extended subject. Finally, the last section considers the nature of the mirror, as a technological instrument and literary conceit for exploring and explaining subjectivity and cognition. Mirroring by a tool or another subject became understood in terms of one another. Extended subjectivity and reflexivity was part of a continuing literary tradition and of a human mode of operation that the mirror was understood in relation to and that the mirror-motif was used to represent. The mirror crystallises many of the issues raised by these chapters through its relation to Renaissance models of perception, the mind and the subject.