Concept

Subjectivism

Overview

In philosophy, subjectivism is the doctrine that "our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience", instead of shared or communal, and that there is no external or objective truth.

While Thomas Hobbes was an early proponent of subjectivism, the success of this position is historically attributed to Descartes and his methodic doubt. He used it as an epistemological tool to prove the opposite (an objective world of facts independent of one's own knowledge, ergo the "Father of Modern Philosophy" inasmuch as his views underlie a scientific worldview). Subjectivism accords primacy to subjective experience as fundamental of all measure and law. In forms like solipsism, it may hold that the nature and existence of every object depends solely on someone's subjective awareness of it. One may consider the qualified empiricism of George Berkeley in this context, given his reliance on God as the prime mover of human perception.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Subjectivism is discussed.

Marcus Aurelius, enacting good laws in order that he might be virtuous, is not an attractive figure. Subjectivism is a natural outcome of a life in which there is much more thought than action: while outer things are being remembered or desired, not actually experienced, they seem to become mere ideas. What they are in themselves becomes less interesting to us than the effects which they produce in our own minds.
Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
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Subjectivism means recognition of the principle of free personality: the self as creative, occupied not with an external world which limits it from without, but, through its own self-consciousness, finding a world within itself; and having found the universal within itself, setting to work to recreate itself in what had been the external world, and by its own creative expansion in industry, art and politics to…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
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The conception of desires as peculiarly individual and subjective is a survival of the very isolation which is the source of the difficulty with truth and error. Hence the appeal to this isolation, made alike by idealism and realism, in charging instrumental logic with subjectivism is an elementary _petitio_.
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
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Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8] No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that I proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail…
William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
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My second reason for distrusting subjectivism is based on the particular content of experience. Our historical knowledge tells us of ages in the past when, so far as we can see, no living being existed on earth. Again it also tells us of countless star-systems, whose detailed history remains beyond our ken. Consider even the moon and the earth. What is going on within the interior of the earth, and on the far side…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
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