A Review of Subject-object Dualism and its Impact on the Theories of Meaning in Social Sciences in the Light of Sadraian Theosophy

In what follows, the authors have revised different views on the origin of meaning in social sciences according to the subject-object relation, and then they have stated the position of Sadraian theosophy on the issue. In this course, three major approaches have been recognized: object-centered view, subject-centered view, structuralist view.     The first view seeks for the origin of meaning in the object and the second in the subject and its creations. Having considered the death of sense-making subject, the third view seeks for the structured meaning in the midst of cultural and historical relations. In contrast, Sadraian theosophy does not embrace the tie between the knowing subject and the object to be known according to the subject-object relation. Nevertheless, according to Sadra’s viewpoint, mankind has an earthly-heavenly identity whose relation with the meaning of his perceptions is developed according to the rule of union of the knower and the known on some scale, and on another scale, according to the mechanism of metaphor, man’s common nature, and his reserve of true meanings. Accordingly, the origin of meaning is from God who gives the forms, and man has the option to either turn to the Giver of forms or turn away from Him and thus decide about different worlds of meaning for himself. This viewpoint has its outcomes in social sciences: that we are not obliged to reduce meanings to the level of sensible objects, that we might embrace different systems of necessary meanings outside man’s inner being, that we may consider man’s unified and single identity, and that we may not reduce the identity of meanings to the merely conventional and social issues.