Abstract

In the modern history of philosophy, the two concepts of "substance" and "subject" play an important role. Their meaning and their relationship, however, are conceived in a manifold way. In the beginning of th 19th century, Descartes is regarded as the inaugurator of modern philosophy and of philosophy of subjectivity, because he makes the "subject" the fundamental basis of philosophy. He is not concerned with clarifying the structure of the "subject", but is interpreting the "subject" as "substance", i.e., the eternal and immortal substance of the soul. Kant, on the other hand, purifies the "subject" from its Cartesian substantiality, but conceives of the "subject" only as a logical principle of synthesis, as the intellectual representation of spontaneous activity. Hegel's philosophy is often regarded as a "philosophy of subjectivity" and therefore in line with Kant's, but it is "philosophy of subjectivity" in an entirely different way: for Hegel, as for Spinoza, "substance" means actuality as a whole, and to conceive this "substance" as "subject" means to grasp the internal structure of actuality as the structure of subjectivity: as activity, as the teleological movement of becoming itself, as realization of knowing itself in its highest forms: in art, religion and philosophy