Publication Details

Abstract

The question of the character of object and subject and their mutual relation is being studied. An analysis of some works by Slovak and Czech authors of recent years, writing about the dialectics of these categories, serves as the present author’s starting point. In the first chapter, the gnoseologistic conception of subject and object is analysed; this conception sees in them exclusively or predominantly gnoseological categories. In the second chapter, an analysis is given of the ontologistical conceptions according to which both the categories are exclusively or predominantly a matter of ontology. The third chapter states, first of all, that the author dealing with subject and object on ontological and gnoseological level has not succeeded in a desirable gnoseological-ontological synthesis. In the conclusion of the same chapter, it is inferred that a dialectical synthesis of both the types of conceptions can be only that one which takes into account an inter-disciplinary character of the relation between them, and that with regard to the close connection of materialistic-dialectical ontology and gnoseology and their mutual pervasion. The category of object in the totality of all its shades of meaning is an ontological category, which does not eliminate that one of its aspects of meaning, viz. the object of knowledge, i. e., the object that is just being known, is a gnoseological category par excellence. The category of subject, with regard to the dialectical structure of all its meanings, is a gnoseological category, which does not at all exclude that subject as an actual active bearer of activity, understood as something existing, is — by this aspect of its meaning — an ontological category. It follows from the conception of matter as a potential object, and from that of human psychical sphere, especially consciousness, as a potentional subject, that the complex of all relations between object and subject is gnoseologico-onio/ogical in character.