The Ontological Status of Subjectivity from a Historical-Culturaland Lukácsian Perspective

Abstract

This paper discusses the ontological status of subjectivity from a historical-cultural and Lukácsian perspective, articulating the Marxist foundations of Vygotsky, Lukács, and González Rey. It examines the critique of modern and postmodern conceptions that reduced subjectivity to internal or merely discursive phenomena, denying it an autonomous ontological status. Likewise, it argues that, within Soviet psychology, Activity Theory objectified the psyche by privileging activity as its central explanatory category, ultimately preserving the dichotomy between the internal and the external. Lukács, by proposing an ontology of social being, advanced by recognizing the subjective activity in teleological positing, yet remained tied to the theory of reflection. González Rey transcends this limitation by conceiving subjectivity as a symbolic-emotional quality of human processes, socially configured, and historically situated. His theory proposes a configurational logic of subjectivity, composed of subjective senses and subjective configurations that intertwine individual and social dimensions in constant tension and reconstruction. The emergence of the subject occurs when individuals or groups create their own paths of subjectivation, which may or may not promote subjective development. The analysis concludes with an understanding of subjectivity as a constitutive dimension of social being, whose symbolic-emotional production integrates objectivity and subjectivity, overcoming classical dualisms and enabling a dialectical and creative reading of human experience