The subject as a "system": perspectives of the contemporary philosophical debate

The researches of Louis Sander and Ed Tronick have re-proposed, in the psychoanalytical field, the topicality of systems theory, based on topics such as procedural behaviour, SOC (States of consciousness), DSC (Dual states of consciousness) and DEC (Diadic expansion of consciousness). Isn't this perhaps a new guise of the old positivism, which reduces man to a machine and the subject to something determined? In order to answer this objection, the thoughts of Edgar Morin, Kurt Goldstein, Alois Riegl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are examined, highlighting their convergence towards an anti-mechanistic idea of life and nature: to put a continuity between man and nature does not mean to absorb the first term in the second. To consolidate this assert, the sense of freedom is then deepened: a concept of freedom not absolute, but conditional, a freedom not as a decision, but as "letting be" is the other side of a concept that does not put jumps between life, animal and man and can serve as the basis of a new concept of subject, very different from the metaphysical one of modern philosophy.