Abstract
Review of Philosophy and Psychology has lately published a number of papers that in various ways take issue with and criticize my work on the link between consciousness, self-consciousness and selfhood. In the following contribution, I reply directly to this new set of objections and argue that while some of them highlight ambiguities in my (earlier) work that ought to be clarified, others can only be characterized as misreadings.
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Notes
In the following I will be using the terms ‘self-consciousness’ and ‘self-awareness’ interchangeably, as I have also done in previous writings. I don’t think there is any consensus in the philosophical literature concerning their distinction. Perhaps it would have been preferable to simply stick to one of the terms, but since the authors I am going to discuss tend to use either one or the other, I will do so as well, and typically adopt the term of their choice when discussing their work.
Let me emphasize that the minimal account of self currently under consideration is in no way intended as an exhaustive account of selfhood. Indeed, the label minimal (or thin) is partially employed in order to highlight how limited the notion is and how much more has to be said in order to account for the full-fledged human self (Zahavi 2014: 50).
There are obvious similarities between my own position and that of Strawson. One important difference, however, concerns the issue of diachronic persistency. Whereas Strawson has argued that each distinct experience has its own experiencer (Strawson 2009: 276), such that one and same human organism over its lifetime can be inhabited by a vast multitude of ontologically distinct short-lived selves, I have argued that the experiential self when understood as the ubiquitous first-personal character of experience is not identical or reducible to any specific experience, but rather something that can be shared by a multitude of changing experiences (Zahavi 2014: 72–77).
For a reply, see Zahavi 2011.
In earlier writings, I also suggested that episodes of thought insertion might involve a lack of sense of agency and a misattribution of agency to someone or something else (Zahavi 2005: 144). This proposal has been criticized by López-Silva and by Farrell and McClelland. López-Silva argues that the proposal that thought insertion merely involves a lack of a sense of agency is unable to distinguish the particular phenomenology characterizing episodes of thought insertions from the phenomenology characterizing other experiences with a disrupted sense of agency such as unbidden thoughts or obsessive thoughts (López-Silva 2017: 9). Likewise, Farrell and McClelland write that the idea that thought insertion might involve a lack of agency has been comprehensively rebutted since such an interpretation fails to differentiate cases of thought insertion from other cases where the subject supposedly lacks a sense of agency, such as cases of unbidden thoughts (Farrell and McClelland 2017: 6). What is odd about these criticisms is that they obviously misrepresent the proposal in question. The proposal was not that thought insertion is distinctly characterized by a lack of a sense of agency. The proposal was that thought insertion is characterized by a lack of a sense of agency and by a misattribution of agency to someone or something else. I assume the latter is sufficient to distinguish thought insertion from unbidden thoughts or obsessive thoughts. Just for the record, I no longer think that thought insertion can be understood simply as a case involving a disorder of sense of agency. I think this is too simplistic an account. But the aim of my discussion was never to offer a positive account of thought insertion, but simply to rule out what I took to be a mistaken account, namely the claim that thought insertions provided prima facie evidence for the existence of phenomenal states that lack for-me-ness. Pathological experiences continue to be characterized by a subjective presence and a what-it-is-likeness that make them utterly unlike public objects that in principle are accessible in the same way to a plurality of subjects. Regardless of how alienated or distanced the patients feel vis-à-vis the experiences, the experiences do not manifest themselves entirely in the public domain – whatever the patients might be claiming. This is what most fundamentally makes the experiences first-personal, and this is why even these pathological experiences retain their for-me-ness. Since this is a claim that Guillot and López-Silva are also endorsing, one might again ask what exactly they are objecting to.
Howell and Thompson present their view as Sartrean view. They note that Sartre not only denied that pre-reflective consciousness involves any awareness of or reference to a self or an ego, but also take him to be defending the same unreflective naïve transparency view as themselves, according to which experience makes no appearance on the pre-reflective level (Howell and Thompson 2017: 109, 111–112). This is, however, a misinterpretation, especially if one also considers Sartre’s position in Being and Nothingness. Not only did Sartre argue that self-consciousness is “the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something” (Sartre 2003: 10). He also argued that “pre-reflective consciousness is self-consciousness. It is this same notion of self which must be studied, for it defines the very being of consciousness” (Sartre 2003: 100). Indeed, as he points out in the chapter “The self and the circuit of selfness” in Being and Nothingness, consciousness is by no means impersonal when pre-reflectively lived through. Rather it is characterized by a “fundamental selfness” (Sartre 2003: 127), precisely because of its ubiquitous self-consciousness. As I read Sartre, his proposal is that rather than starting with a preconceived notion of self, we should let our understanding of what it means to be a self, arise out of our analysis of self-consciousness.
Thanks to Adrian Alsmith, Felipe León, Raphaël Millière, Matthew Ratcliffe and Galen Strawson for comments to an earlier version of this reply.
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Zahavi, D. Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Selfhood: a Reply to some Critics. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 703–718 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0403-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0403-6