Subject and subjecthood are everywhere in early modern philosophy. Nietzsche’s criticism of the grammatische Gewöhnung is already to be found in the eighteenth century. Consider, for example, Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s criticisms of Isaac Watts. She criticizes Watts for ascribing to mere “logical ways of speaking” what he calls “our prejudices against allowing a power of thinking to subsist without a subject.” She replies to “this ingenious author” that “actions and abilities . . . seem unavoidably to imply some subject of them, some being, that exerts its powers in different ways of acting,” and then goes on to argue that “she does not find herself so prejudiced by logical or grammatical ways of speaking” when she says that she cannot “frame any idea of a power, without supposing some being, to which it belongs.”11 So far, so familiar. But can we trace Catherine Trotter’s plea for subject and subjecthood back any further? Can we trace it back to Descartes himself? To the scholastics? To Augustine? To Aristotle?
Alain de Libera, “When Did the Modern Subject Emerge”