Every moment of our lives we experience the presence of “now.” This personal now experience is what Heidegger calls dasein. Dasein refers to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. According to Heidegger, Dasein is not a fixed, static entity but a dynamic, constantly changing mode of being. He argued that dasein is defined by its relationship to the world and that it is constantly engaged in a process of interpreting and making sense of the world around it. If we generalize dasein as being not just for humans but for all things with a brain, I refer to this as the Subjective.
The Subjective Discourse
When people hear the word subject, it directs the mind to something that can typically be pointed at: like a person, a place, or a thing. It may seem like a replacement for a noun. The subjective discourse is very different. Yes, it is a noun in that it describes a plane of discourse but what it directs to is a verb as in the process of “being”. This discourse is for all “Beings” such that if a living thing is receiving and processing information through consciousness, it is included in the subjective discourse as a Subject. Think of the subjective discourse as trillions of separate subjects happening all at the same time being run by separate biological machines. I would imagine that these being’s experiences vary wildly in scale and in function. I would also pose that there are many similarities in subjectivity from one life to the next due to the lineage and origins of consciousness through the evolution of the animal branch in the tree of life.
Ontologically speaking, Heidegger explores the subjective through the concepts developed from dasein and being. He understood that by themselves, beings exist in the space of nothing and those beings connect to the world (being-in-the-world) and other beings (being-with-others), which both I call the intersubjective (which will be explored in a future article). The intersubjective is outside the subjective in that the subjective does not depend on information from the intersubjective to exist. Dreaming of being unconscious would be an example of non-intersubjective information which is not a being-in-the-world nor a being-with-others. The subjective is built upon the biological which requires space to exist. However, the subjective does not require space in its functionality. The subjective absorbs experiences and then sorts and stores the information as memory in the biological.
What is Subjectivity for?
In some lifeforms, the intersubjective and the biological can work in relation without needing the subjective. A tree is an example of this. A tree does not have a subjective seat of consciousness, but it does have biological responses to the outside world, which I call the intersubjective. Without being, life would not be able to marshal all of its awareness being bombarded by a vast array of conflicting signals and signs in a sense such as seeing. The being discerns signs of the world to preserve its complexities of directives, like movement, for better survival and evaluation. One of the closest general words to this type of directive activity is teleology.
Teleology is the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. Think of teleology as one of the programming languages of subjectivity – a rather advanced language with directives baked-in from the biological discourse. I don’t know how consciousness itself has a directive to the teleology of being. However, I believe it’s safe to assume that Darwin’s evolutionary genetics blindly discovered the expression of being as a boon to survival.
The Evolution of Consciousness
I find it rather fascinating that in the Paleozoic Era (541 Million Years Ago) that the eye was developed during the Cambrian explosion. Some think that a steep rise in oxygen sparked the change, whereas others say that it sprang from the development of some key evolutionary innovation, such as optical perception. The precise cause remains elusive in part because so little is known about the physical and chemical environment at that time.1 It is my position that eyes require consciousness to process its abstract information effectively. This information is abstract because this is light information that is pulled from reality is not necessarily true. There are many complexities and illusions created by observing three-dimensional space. There is a vast array of heuristics involved in processing sight information from things like object permanence to contrast. Heuristics are like little programs that process information about the world to help guide the consciousness with discernment (heuristics and natural guides will be studied in a future article). But I digress, all this processing of light information is why a big section of our brain is dedicated to receiving and processing sight information.
The faculty of a brain is required for the seat consciousness to manifest. Therefore, subjectivity was biologically developed as a requirement for the effective processing of abstract information. This then became a boon to all animal life that possessed this superpower. I liken subjectivity to software and biology to hardware. The software can be programmed in seconds with a brain, whereas hardware is programmed in biological generations with each iteration of its genetics.
As Heidegger explored “being” he found the word ‘being’ was too limiting in its scope, which is why he came up with the term dasein. Under similar reasoning, I developed subjective as the term to be more accurate in describing dasein for all conscious life. This article only scratches the surface by describing what the subjective is. In future articles, I will explore its limits, its relationship to other discourses, its contrast to existentialism, its relation to psychology, and its compatibility with evolutionary psychology.
1: What Sparked the Cambrian Explosion? – by Douglas Fox Scientific American Feb. 16, 2016