Abstract
In this paper, I contend that there are at least two essential traits that commonly define being an I: self-identity and self-consciousness. I argue that they bear quite an odd relation to each other in the sense that self-consciousness seems to jeopardize self-identity. My main concern is to elucidate this issue within the range of the transcendental philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. In the first section, I shall briefly consider Kant’s own rendition of the problem of the Ego-splitting. My reading of the Kantian texts reveals that Kant himself was aware of this phenomenon but eventually deems it an unexplainable fact. The second part of the paper tackles the same problematic from the standpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. What Husserl’s extensive analyses on this topic bring to light is that the phenomenon of the Ego-splitting constitutes the bedrock not only of his thought but also of every philosophy that works within the framework of transcendental thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from sources that are not available in English translation are the author’s own translation. Quotes from sources available in English translation make reference only to the page number of the English translation.
- 2.
Fichte expresses the same view as follows: “The self exists only insofar as it is conscious of itself” (Fichte 1982, 98). From this Fichte draws the conclusion that it is contradictory to ask what I was before I came to self-consciousness. The obvious answer is that I did not exist at all, for I was not a self, i.e. an I in the full-blown sense.
- 3.
Mohanty 1997, 53 makes a similar point by clearly distinguishing between consciousness and subjectivity. Therefore, even the unconscious counts as subjective, as belonging to the I in this specific sense.
- 4.
Mach 1914, 24. Needless to say, the reasons that triggered Mach’s rejection of the I-concept do not correspond to the ones laid out here.
- 5.
I do not consider here the strand of transcendental philosophies which admit no space for a constituting subject and that claim that the constitutional activity is performed (almost) exclusively by asubjective synthetic accomplishments. Cf. for instance Patočka 1991/1971.
- 6.
- 7.
Alfredo Ferrarin (1994) notices something similar in his reading of Husserl’s late reflections on the historicity of the pure ego. He states that there must be a tension in the transcendental conception of the ego that Husserl cannot solve, i.e. “the fact that consciousness must both be the originary consciousness of inner time and be constituted or synthetically unified in time: synthesis and the object of synthesis, activity and form”. To put it differently, the difficulty consists in the double requirement that the ego be the identical subject of its Erlebnisse and be the object of its concrete self-constitution in a history. If it has to constitute itself, it has in fact to be the subject of its self-objectification – in which case it has to presuppose itself for its own constitution (Ferrarin 1994, 655). Personally, I do not agree with this interpretation of the Husserlian doctrine, as I hope it shall gradually emerge between the lines of the present discussion.
- 8.
This reading of the Kantian transcendental self as activity has been recently purported by Melnick 2009. Martin Heidegger already anticipated this trend of Kant’s scholarship in his lecture course entitled Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where he points out: “thinking as acting is what is fundamentally in the manner of ‘I think.’ Thinking as such […] starts ‘from itself,’ from the self as itself. […] The ability character of my actions [thinkings] determines the mode of being of the subject” (Heidegger 1997, 234).
- 9.
For the meaning of transcendental, see Kant’s account in the appendix to the Prolegomena: “the word ‘transcendental’ […] does not signify something passing beyond all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make cognition of experience possible” (Kant 2001, 106 f.).
- 10.
- 11.
Here lies the reason why Kant often equates transcendental synthesis with the transcendental unity of apperception: “This amounts to saying, that I am conscious to myself a priori of a necessary synthesis of representations – to be entitled the original synthetic unity of apperception” (Kant 1998, B135). Unfortunately, I cannot dig into this topic any further. I rely in my understanding of Kant’s point here on Patricia Kitcher’s discussion in Kitcher 1982. Kitcher clearly points out why Kant is committed to postulate self-consciousness of the I as a necessary condition for experience and especially cognition. Due to its complexity, I shall not report the all argument here. It suffices to mention the following fundamental steps. Kant regards a relation of synthesis between the subject’s mental states as the condition of their representational feature: “We are conscious a priori of the complete identity of the self in respect of all representations which can ever belong to our knowledge, as being a necessary condition of the possibility of all representations. For in me they can represent something only in so far as they belong with all others to one consciousness, and therefore must be at least capable of being so connected” (Kant 1998, A116, italics are mine). But since for Kant a mental state is possible only as representational and I can acknowledge a relation of synthesis only if it is there, then a synthetic unity of all my mental states is both necessary and subsistent. This synthetic unity amounts to the possibility of ascribing every mental state to an “I think”, that is, I must be able (which means that actually I do not do it all the time) to acknowledge a relation between it and other mental states (Kant 1998, A116/B131–32).
- 12.
I am not negating that judgments predicating identity of something with itself generally do not pose the problem of splitting. My observation, as simple as it is, refers merely to the fact that in self-consciousness it is easier to become aware of the problem of splitting than it is referring to identity judgments. On a related note, that the latter involve great difficulties and mediations when rightly seized upon is most efficiently proved by the Fichtean system of the theory of science or Wissenschaftslehre.
- 13.
I follow Eduard Marbach (2012, 236) in translating the German Vergegenwärtigung and vergegenwärtigen with “representification” and “to representify”, on the one hand, and Gegenwärtigung and gegenwärtigen with “presentification” and “to presentify”, on the other.
- 14.
Husserl’s analyses of recollection notably focus on one specific type of remembering, i.e. what cognitive psychology nowadays calls “episodic memory”, the memory of an event I experienced in the past. However, there are other forms of remembering like the so-called “semantic memory”, which is the memory I have for example of the date of Caesar’s murder – an event I did not directly experience. Cf. Fernández 2006 and critically Naylor 2011.
- 15.
Husserl explicitly purports a non-egological conception of consciousness in his Logical Investigations (1900–1901) in which the relation between the experiences or acts and the (phenomenological) I – intended as the bundle of all lived experiences – is considered as not phenomenologically proven (Husserl 2001, 85 f.; cf. also Marbach 1973, 5–22). Later he changed his view, when he realizes that the I represents an essential moment of every act of consciousness actively lived through. For a recent reconstruction of the development of Husserl’s theory of the I, see Lohmar 2012.
- 16.
This more static form of identity is due to an inner constituent of experiencethat Dan Zahavi famously calls “minimal self” (cf. Zahavi 1999).
- 17.
For a much broader assessment of the problems related to Husserl’s phenomenology of pure phantasy, especially with regard to the phenomenon of the ego-splitting, see Cavallaro 2017. In this section of the present paper, I mostly draw on the analyses laid down in that article.
- 18.
In Ideas I Husserl defines phantasy “the neutrality modification of ‘positing’ presentification, therefore of memory in the widest conceivable sense” (Husserl 1983, 260, translation modified). Yet, the identification of phantasy with a “modification” of a pre-given act is highly problematic, as Husserl himself will recognize in his later manuscripts published in Husserl 2005, 689–708. For an assessment of this issue see Cavallaro 2017, 167–171.
- 19.
Would consciousness become conscious only dependently on a second intentional experience, one would have to postulate a further intentional experience that makes the latter equally conscious, and so on ad infinitum. Hence, in order to forestall the regress one must consider self-consciousness an intrinsic feature of any experience whatsoever.
- 20.
Husserl himself reaches a similar conclusion in Experience and Judgment where he refers to the specific character of phantasy time as detached from the absolute time of perception (cf. Husserl 1975, § 39).
- 21.
It is thus not my intent here to unveil the much debated topic of the split between the phenomenological, natural, and phenomenologizing I first identified by Eugen Fink in Fink 1933. For a recent valuable discussion of this topic see Varga 2011.
- 22.
In the same vein, Zahavi interprets reflection as an act that, when it sets in, “initially grasps something that has just elapsed, namely the motivating prereflective phase of the experience. I remain affected by that which is no longer present, and I therefore have the possibility to react on the affection and to thematize the backward sinking phase of experience” (Zahavi 1999, 117).
- 23.
Thus, also simultaneity between the phantasying and the phantasied experience and their respective I’s is ruled out. Temporal categories are relative categories of things (objects, events), which means, they hold true only if they are taken all together as possible predicates of one individual at a time.
- 24.
This is a central thesis in the works of Dan Zahavi. See for instance Zahavi 1999.
- 25.
Julien Farges (2015, 99) emphasizes how reflection according to Husserl opens up a verticality in the essence of the I, a sort of original depth which produces a qualitatively infinite diffraction of the original split. I agree that the Ego-splitting allows difference and thus verticality to penetrate the essence of the I. However, I cannot see why this splitting should proceed ad infinitum, as Farges seems to suggest. The split must be recognized as the condition of possibility of the self-thematization of the I. This self-thematization, if we consider it in a non-methodological sense as self-consciousness which accompanies (or must be able to accompany) every and each experience, needs to be completed: in other words, its realization entails that the Ego-splitting finds eventually an end and becomes reunified by the synthesis of coincidence. In this precise sense, one might draw a distinction between reflection as a methodological means for Husserl’s phenomenological analyses and reflection as transcendental condition of possibility for experience. A distinction Farges’ article fails to draw. Christoph Durt (forthcoming) correctly pointed out that the splitting of the I is not a peculiarity of transcendental consciousness, but it occurs also in ordinary consciousness.
- 26.
I am thankful to Tim Burns, Emanuela Carta, Christoph Durt, Nikos Soueljis, and Paul Zipfel for their insights into a previous version of this paper. In particular, Emanuela motivated me to dig much deeper into Kant’s philosophy of self-consciousness, whereas Nikos’ comments helped me a lot to clarify in my mind some central issues in Husserl’s phenomenology of the I. I want to thank also Andrea Staiti and the participants of the Writing Seminar at Boston College for their helping suggestions in improving my argument. The work for this paper has been carried out in the context of a Ph.D. program generously funded by the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne: I am very much indebted for its support during this time. The English has been revised by Penelope Allsobrook, to whom I finally wish to express my gratitude.
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Cavallaro, M. (2020). Ego-Splitting and the Transcendental Subject. Kant’s Original Insight and Husserl’s Reappraisal. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_7
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