Each living being must interact with its environment in order to survive. For living beings, vital contact between organism and environment must always be maintained—in the face of all the risks of breaking away, in a manner of “continuous discontinuity,” so to speak. We can call this principle of sustaining contact the “Subject” of life in the precise etymological sense of subjectum, which designates what lies at the base of all living behavior. In so far as the “Subject” can be effective only as long as the organism continues to live, it certainly belongs to this organism, but it by no means resides inside of it. Its place of being is between the organism and the environment, therefore in a certain sense outside the organism. What we are referring to here with the term “organism” is not limited to a single individual. Nearly all living creatures, including human beings, live and act in groups of the same species. Each of these groups must pursue “subjective behavior”—in our sense—in interface with an environment in order to maintain survival as a whole. Which kind of group will eventually emerge may depend on the interests of its members, e.g., procreation, childcare, change of living place, and so forth. In highly complex human societies, each individual simultaneously participates in a number of groups, e.g., the married couple, family, community, church, nation, up to the totality of humankind, although at any given moment, he can consciously engage with only one of them. But at the same time, each group member also has to pursue his or her own individual concerns in order to survive. We may say, then, that the behavior of living organisms, including human beings, is necessarily ruled by a dual subjectivity—an individual as well as a collective one. (Kimura 2001, 334)
References
Kimura, Bin. 2001. “Cogito and I: A Bio-logical Approach.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8 (4): 331–36. doi:10.1353/ppp.2002.0019.