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For-Me-Ness, For-Us-Ness, and the We-Relationship

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Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality. I start by pointing out some ambiguities in claims pursued by critics that have recently pressed on the relationship between the two notions. I next articulate a question concerning for-me-ness and sociality that builds on the idea that, occasionally at least, there is something it is like ‘for us’ to have an experience. This idea has been explored in recent literature on shared experiences and collective intentionality, and it gestures towards the question of the extent to which some social interactions make a difference in the phenomenal character of their participants’ experiences. Finally, I present a construal of for-us-ness that complements the received understanding of for-me-ness, by drawing on Alfred Schutz’ concept of the we-relationship, and on the idea of second-personal awareness, i.e. awareness of a ‘you’ (as distinguished from awareness of a ‘she’ or ‘he’). The current proposal provides a suitable account of some basic forms of phenomenally manifest social connectedness, in a way that is cognitively undemanding and without incurring the costs of a sui generis plural pre-reflective self-awareness.

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Notes

  1. For some recent discussions, see (Guillot 2017; Garfield 2016; Schear 2009; Dainton 2016; Zahavi 2019; Zahavi and Kriegel 2016; Kriegel 2005, 2011a).

  2. Challenging the idea that “experiences in-themselves” can be characterized “in terms of feelings of ‘mineness’ or ‘first-personal giveness’” without appeal to intersubjectively acquired concepts, Hutto and Ilundáin-Agurruza ask: “what entitles us to employ these sorts of characterization in describing the felt character of such experiences to experiencers who lack the ability to make such conceptual distinctions?” (forthcoming, p. 19) This line of questioning seems to leave unexplained, though, wat would entitle us to talk of experiencers in the first place.

  3. Although some of these critics discuss minimal selfhood and not for-me-ness, I will make in the following the important assumption that the two notions are co-referential (Zahavi forthcoming, p. 9, 2014, p. 88). I take it that when the critics address the most basic aspects of selfhood and subjectivity, the strongest and most interesting way to understand their claim is as targeting for-me-ness. It is of course an open possibility to deny that the notions of for-me-ness and minimal selfhood capture the same phenomenon. However, a consequence of this denial would be that the aspects of minimal selfhood discussed by the critics would not speak to the idea that for-me-ness is fundamentally determined by social interactions.

  4. The model of a state is understood in this context along the lines of the free energy framework, as a probabilistic and inferential model that is updated according to the incoming information to the system (Friston 2010; Fotopoulou and Tsakiris 2017, p. 7).

  5. Perhaps one possible move to make here, congenial to enactivist and extended approaches to cognition, would be to put pressure on a too strong distinction between causation and constitution (Kirchhoff 2015). However, the pertinence of that denial in the present context would have to be made explicit and substantiated.

  6. For further discussion of recent criticisms to for-me-ness and minimal selfhood that focus on the issue of sociality, see (Zahavi 2010, 2014, p. 85, 2016, 2017; Zahavi and Rochat 2017).

  7. Campbell thinks of the shift in question primarily as a change in the functional role of the experience, insofar as being part of a joint attention relation opens up new action possibilities, but he also acknowledges that joint attention is not exhausted by its functional roles (Campbell 2005, p. 294). A classic example of an action possibility enabled by joint attention is the ‘coordinated attack’ scenario. On one version of it, it involves two subjects, A and B, who are playing a war game displayed on a screen in front of them. A and B are allies and, according to the rules of the game, if they attack the same target, a limited payoff is guaranteed, whereas, if either attacks a target without the other attacking the same target, the outcome is disaster. Campbell remarks that, in an ordinary situation, it is perfectly possible for A and B to attack the same target. Their joint attention to the same target is out in the open for both of them: “[y]ou point and I nod. Straightway we hit the buttons” (Campbell 2011, p. 417). Campbell’s critical point is that no n level of iterative common knowledge is sufficient to rationalize the coordinated attack. He proposes that it is in virtue of being responsive to the three-place experiential relation of joint attention that the co-attenders can be successful in attacking the same target. For a recent discussion of the coordinated attack scenario, see Blomberg (forthcoming).

  8. Most notably, the topic seems to be absent in Kriegel’s rich and detailed treatment (2015).

  9. As far as I can see, the locution ‘for us’ in the context of discussions on phenomenal consciousness was introduced by Schmid, who writes: “In the case of shared feelings—shared grief, worries, and joys—there is a sense in which it is simply not the case that “I can’t really know how you feel,” because my feeling is your feeling, or rather: my feeling isn’t really mine, and yours isn’t yours, but ours. Shared feelings are conscious experiences whose subjective aspect is not singular (“for me”), but plural (“for us”)” (Schmid 2014b, p. 9).

  10. “The father and the mother stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the ‘same’ sorrow, the ‘same’ anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common. A’s sorrow is in no way ‘objectual’ for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who joins them, and commiserates ‘with them’ or ‘upon their sorrow’. On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the self-same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it. The sorrow, as value-content, and the grief, as characterizing the functional relation thereto, are here one and identical”. (Scheler 2008, pp. 12–13, translation modified.)

  11. As Naomi Eilan writes, “[t]here is something utterly simple and basic about the transparency of our minds to each other in the case of joint attention which this whole account [Schiffer’s] misses. The very idea that we have to iterate beliefs ad infinitum in order to capture the phenomenon of mutual awareness only gets going because of an assumption of basic opacity as a starting point” (Eilan 2005, p. 3).

  12. “It is constitutive of the phenomenon [of joint attention] that when it occurs its occurrence is mutually manifest to the co-attenders” (Eilan 2015, p. 1); “when joint attention occurs everything about the fact that both subjects are attending to the same object is out in the open, manifest to both participants” (Eilan 2005, p. 1); “whatever else is true of it, joint attention has an ‘openness’ about it—there’s some sense in which the situation is ‘open’ to both attendees in a case of joint attention” (Campbell 2011, p. 417); “when there is full joint awareness between subjects, there is awareness of full joint awareness” (Peacocke 2005, p. 303); See also (Carpenter and Liebal 2011, p. 160; Schilbach 2015, p. 132; Moll and Meltzoff 2011b, p. 290).

  13. To be fair, Schmid does not discuss mutual awareness of co-presence. I am extrapolating and adapting arguments of his to the case at hand.

  14. One problem is how to account for inter-individual phenomenal differences if sharing involves one token-identical experiential episode. For a criticism of the token-identity view, see Zahavi (in press); León et al. 2017.

  15. Thanks to Dan Zahavi, Anne-Sofie Munk Autzen, Olle Blomberg, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Independent Research Fund Denmark for financial support to the project ‘You and We: Second-person Engagement and Collective Intentionality’, DFF—7013-00032).

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  1. Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 8, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Felipe León

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León, F. For-Me-Ness, For-Us-Ness, and the We-Relationship. Topoi 39, 547–558 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9556-2

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