Abstract
This paper focuses on the connection between meaning, the specific field of phenomenological philosophy, and mattering, the cornerstone of personal identity. Doing so requires that we take a stand on the scope and method of phenomenological philosophy itself. I will argue that while we can describe our lives in an “impersonal” way, such descriptions will necessarily omit what makes it the case that such lives can matter at all. This will require distinguishing between “personal” identity and “self” identity, an idea well-established in the phenomenological literature – for instance, in Husserl’s distinction between the “transcendental ego” and the person -- but I will argue that self-identity is a normative achievement whose clarification requires a move into second-person phenomenology. The argument moves through three sections. First, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch’s “non-egological” conception of consciousness and will explain the most important reason Husserl rejected this view in his transcendental phenomenology. Second, I will discuss some contemporary approaches to Husserl’s distinction between person and ego (personal identity and self identity). Third, I will argue that these approaches testify to an ambiguity in Husserl’s account of being “true” to oneself that requires us to understand selfhood as having the structure Heidegger called care. The importance of this will be demonstrated phenomenologically in a critical examination of Paul Ricoeur’s ontology of selfhood, particularly his interpretation of the second-person phenomenology of conscience.
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Notes
Here I only stipulate that Ricoeur’s distinction tracks Husserl’s transcendental one. In Section 3, however, I will argue that the way Ricoeur understands the ontological unity of idem-identity and ipse-identity is, like Husserl’s own, insufficiently attentive to the aforementioned problem for phenomenology.
Bernard Williams took note of this problem, arguing that “an endless life would be a meaningless one; and that we could have no reason for living eternally a human life” (Williams 1973, 89). More recently, Martin Hägglund (2019) has explored the wide-ranging implications of this thesis for the basic concepts of our personal, ethical, and political life.
Since Gurwitsch cites Sartre here, it might be thought that we should turn to Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37) to explore the phenomenology of a non-egological conception of consciousness. However, since I intend to explore the implications of Husserl’s approach in some detail in Section 2, and since Gurwitsch’s view remains closer to the letter of Husserl’s phenomenology than does Sartre’s, the anachronism seems justified.
Husserl’s own description of the ego as a “transcendence in immanence” is worth noting here: Under the transcendental reduction, consciousness appears as a stream of “pure” mental processes. The ego is neither a mental process nor any part of a mental process, yet it “appears to be something essentially necessary” and “something absolutely identical.” Thus the ego is ontologically peculiar: it is neither “immanent being” (consciousness) nor, since it “is not constituted,” is it “transcendent being” in the sense of “reality” (Husserl 1983, 132). This “transcendence within immanence,” then, demands a new ontological category, one that specifies the kind of identity possessed by the ego as distinct from personal identity, which is a constituted unity of meaning.
Here the term “object” is used in the formal-categorial sense of etwas überhaupt, which pertains to any “theme” of scientific investigation, no matter what specific “regional ontology” governs that science.
When faced with the same problem, Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, modified his earlier view and argued that all consciousness of objects involves a “pre-reflective consciousness (of) self,” where the parentheses indicate the non-objectifying character of such self-consciousness (Sartre 1956, 13–14). As we shall see below, Husserl too posits something like this in his account of time-consciousness. But nowhere, as far as I know, does he clarify the relation between this “mineness” of experience and the ego as a “transcendence in immanence.”
Does this suggest that creatures who cannot commit themselves cannot experience meaning at all, that nothing matters to them? Must we not recognize something like what Merleau-Ponty calls a “sens sauvage” that would be correlated to any form of embodied consciousness? I cannot address this question in detail here, but in what follows I will be using the term Sinn in what I take to be its phenomenologically primary sense, one that entails the ability to be responsible for normative commitments. As a methodological matter, the sort of “meaning” that we can attribute to the experience of agents that do not possess this ability can be approached, as Husserl says, only “privatively” (Husserl 2008, 478, 510). For an elaboration of this point, see Crowell (2014). This leads to questions about the transcendental status of genetic phenomenology, but these too I must leave aside here.
Thus Zahavi (2005, 127) rightly argues that Parfit’s description of what experiences are fails to note the fundamental difference between first-person and third-person descriptions of how experiences are given.
This mereological approach goes back to Sokolowski (1974, 9–10).
It might be thought that a problem remains, since the minimal self has so far been defined as a structure of conscious experience. Husserl was aware of this problem and responded by arguing that because the minimal self is the form of a concretum, we must acknowledge, even in dreamless sleep, a certain minimal level of consciousness, which he labels Dumpfheit (dullness, apathy) (Husserl 2003, 140–43). In the present context, where the theme is our phenomenological sense of personal continuity, this suffices to connect the world I experience upon awakening with the one I left behind in sleep and so highlights the artificiality of appealing to Lockean “memory,” a specific conscious act that is rarely involved in our sense of continuity. Still, Husserl admits that this leaves the metaphysical problem of identity open as a “limit-problem” for phenomenology, and he (tentatively) draws some rather spectacular conclusions from the idea of the apodictically given existence of the flow, including the metaphysical impossibility of its beginning or ending (Husserl 2014, 145–153). Our present theme is not metaphysical, however, but phenomenological.
The relevance of the distinction between an “own” body and a bodily organism for the problem of personal identity is explored in Čapek (2019). As he puts it: “Once we strip the body of the fact of its being a body belonging to someone” – as in metaphysical approaches – “we can no longer properly claim to be dealing with the problem of personal identity;” instead, we have in view “the continuous existence of an organism” (2019, 268).
Of course, the person is not the same as a perceptual object; it is founded in such an object: the body. But the further constitution of the person, which includes empathetic recognition of other persons, communicative communalization, and many other aspects, does not alight on any ultimate ground or “identity” that would be necessarily fixed across time. As in the case of a perceptual object, the person’s identity is contingent, dependent on the further course of experience which either confirms or disconfirms that the person has remained “the same.” Husserl emphasizes that the phenomenology of personhood begins in the “personalistic attitude,” not the transcendental (Husserl 1989, 194–99), and we will have more to say below about the problems that arise when Husserl tries to think about how regional categories such as “person” and “life” relate to transcendental categories.
Husserl recognizes another kind of freedom – the “I can” – that underlies the norm-responsive freedom I am describing here. But either this belongs to a person (and so already is taken up into norm-responsive freedom), or it is equivalent to the body’s ability to respond to the affordances in its environment, and so belongs to any embodied conscious being. In the latter case, “freedom” is ambiguous. As Levinas (1969, 84–89) puts the point, it is not yet “invested” (i.e., norm-sensitive) and so is indistinguishable from “inclination” in Kant’s sense. We might say that such freedom “expresses” the conscious being in the sense of giving us the basis for inferring its inclinational pattern, but we cannot say that it is “legible,” meaningful as something that the agent intends, i.e., something that is at issue in a normative way.
Husserl too, as we noted, denies that the ego is part of the stream of experience, and he denies that it “endures” like a worldly object or “abides” like my habitualities. Further, in Ideas II he treats the ego functionally as the agent responsive to “motivations of reason” and so responsible for evidential decision-making (1989, 231–33). However, because Husserl does not adequately distinguish between self identity and personal identity, the unchanging nature of the self as “author” remains ontologically (categorially) unclarified.
Husserl hoped that these two approaches could be unified in what Sophie Loidolt (forthcoming) calls an “existential rationalism.” Such unification, in which the ethical tension between the two approaches is overcome, depends on a teleological metaphysics culminating in the Absolute Person supposedly entailed by the (otherwise inexplicable) faktum of rationality in a contingent world. See, for instance, Husserl (2014, 228–258). Though I do not think that these efforts are successful, I cannot pursue the matter here. We will encounter something like them again in Ricoeur.
For a recent discussion, see Melle (2002).
For some suspicions about the phenomenological notion of “formality,” see Hopkins (2020) and Hopkins (2011). Here I can only flag the fact that I understand the formality of phenomenological categories as formale Anzeige in the early Heidegger’s sense. My “Husserlian” account of this Heideggerian term can be found in Crowell (2001, ch. 7).
The most extensive and nuanced exploration of the tension between the transcendental and the “natural” (in a broad sense) – of which the paradox of human subjectivity is only one among many instances to be found in Husserl’s writings – is provided by Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (2003), who advances what she calls “Mediane Phänomenologie” to address them. For my own approach, see Crowell (2014) and Crowell (2012).
For Ricoeur, Hegel is the figure who most explicitly proposes a synthesis of Kant and Aristotle and so motivates a “speculative” dimension in Ricoeur’s own ontology. But since our concern here is with personal identity as a phenomenological problem, I will leave this speculative dimension alone.
For my account of the origin of this notion (as pertains to phenomenology) in Aristotle, Kant, and neo-Kantianism, see Crowell (2001).
This should not be taken to entail that where care is absent there is only mechanism or causality. There is certainly a kind of “motivation” at the passive level, as Husserl argues. However, he also sharply (and rightly, in my view) distinguishes between such motivation and “motivations of reason,” active stand-taking (Husserl 1989, 231–33). The latter is an example of the sort of meaning that, I argue, is phenomenologically primary, one that is grounded in responsiveness to norms as norms. But it is not the only example; our lives are pervaded by norm-responsiveness, and not all such responsiveness is an instance of “motivations of reason” in Husserl’s sense.
Here I can only sketch the conclusions for which I argue extensively in Crowell (2013).
And I’m not entirely alone in this: Irene McMullin (2019) shows how it is possible, within a Heideggerian ontology, to do justice to the kinds normative claim that the world, and others, make on me. She thereby preserves the phenomenological validity of much of what, in section 2, we found to characterize the Husserlian approach to the person.
“Der Ruf kommt aus mir und doch über mich” (1962, 320).
For the details of the argument, see Crowell (2020).
I would like to thank the editors of this Special Issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences for some trenchant criticisms of an earlier draft of this chapter. Alas, I could only address some of them, and perhaps inadequately, but their attention was most welcome and has shown what more must be done.
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Crowell, S. On what matters. Personal identity as a phenomenological problem. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 261–279 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09695-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09695-x