Subjectivity

The history of the phenomenological understanding of subjectivity can be understood, negatively, as the history of a progressive turning away from a metaphysical conception of the human subject. It is, positively, also the history of a continuous broadening of the scope of subjectivity. The subject becomes less metaphysical when one considers its incarnation and bodily instincts, its personal characteristics and habitual styles of behavior, its depending on other subjects, its social and ethical life, its immersion in the world and in the history of humanity, its birth and death, and so on. Welcoming new phenomena, and, correlatively, opening new possibilities for subjective life, also creates new concerns. First, what sort of a phenomenological subject is involved in these diverse phenomena? Second, what sort of phenomena require an explicit consideration of subjectivity, and what sort of phenomena can do without it?