Abstract
The authors argue that there is not a pre-reflective self-consciousness that accompanies every conscious state from birth. This is an empirically void construction, still reminiscent of the Kantian transcendentalism. The outcome of this discussion is that the most minimal form of self-consciousness is bodily self-consciousness, the capacity to construct an analogical and imagistic representation of one’s own body as an entire object, simultaneously taking this representation as a subject, that is, as an active source of the representation of itself. This is coherent with a view of the self in which a distinction (reminiscent of James) must be drawn between the I and the Me, that is, the self as the interminable objectivation process and the self as the multidimensional representation continuously updated by this process.
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, Freud follows Hume’s lesson when he sets up a contrast between the composite, non-monadical character of the mind and its unitary phenomenology. See above, Sect. 2.2.
- 2.
We are painfully aware that Hume’s (and Kant’s) scholarship is endless, and probably every single sentence written by these philosophers is open to contentious interpretation. In what follows we select certain interpretations and offer readings of them that are patently driven by the purpose of paving the way for a more fine-grained analysis of the self based on contemporary empirical research.
- 3.
For a more detailed analysis, see Fogelin (2009, Chap. 6).
- 4.
According to Strawson (1959), descriptive metaphysics aims to describe the most general features of our conceptual scheme; revisionary metaphysics, in contrast, attempts to revise our ordinary way of thinking and our ordinary conceptual scheme.
- 5.
Metzinger in his book Being No One writes: ‘…no such things as selves exist in the world. Nobody ever was or had a self’ (2003, p. 1). Here again the idea is that there is no explanatory role played by the notion of self. For Metzinger even to speak of the self as an illusion may be too much: ‘…there is no one whose illusion the conscious self could be, no one who is confusing herself with anything’ (p. 634). In this sense, he appears even more radical than Dennett.
- 6.
Before starting our analysis a disclaimer is due. The Kantian themes that we are introducing (such as the notion of the ‘I think’, the necessary unity of apperception, the formal nature of the self) have been the object of endless scholarly disputes. Our ambition here, however, is not philological accuracy. Rather we are mainly interested in providing a link between the authoritative tradition of analytical Kantianism inaugurated by Peter Strawson (already mentioned in the previous pages) and contemporary reflections about the self. For a recent discussion of ‘the project of advancing our understanding of the cognitive subject through examining Kant’s theory of cognition’ inaugurated by P. Strawson, see Kitcher (2011).
- 7.
As we shall see in Sect. 4.1.1, according to Locke, the concept of person is not an essence but rather a psychosocial attribute that is assigned to those subjects who possess a specific set of psychological capacities, which makes it possible the continuity of the self and the reflective appropriation of the subject’s actions.
- 8.
In a similar vein John McDowell writes: ‘We can say that the continuity of “consciousness” is intelligible only as a subjective take on something that has more to it than “consciousness” itself contains: on the career of an objective continuant, with which the subject of a continuous “consciousness” can identify itself’ (1996, p. 101).
- 9.
‘I shall mean by a non-solipsistic consciousness, the consciousness of a being who has a use for the distinction between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself or a state of himself, of which he has experience, on the other’ (Strawson, 1959, p. 69).
- 10.
Self-consciousness could be regarded as a particular form of object consciousness, the consciousness of that particular object which is the self. Yet, several developmental stages are required to attain even the most elementary forms of self-consciousness.
- 11.
See below, Sect. 3.3. There we will see that there are different types, or degrees, of self-consciousness. Of course, non-human animals and babies do not possess a narrative self.
- 12.
As Kriegel puts it, ‘…we may ask, Is for-me-ness one more phenomenal item, or merely a non-phenomenal precondition for phenomenality? That is, is there a phenomenology of self-awareness? A deflationist might hold that this for-me-ness is but a dispositional or functional property of conscious states, for example, their global availability to executive function modules; or that it is simply an artifact of the fact that conscious experiences must be someone’s experiences’ (2007, p. 120).
- 13.
See Sect. 3.1.3 above. To be sure, Zahavi distances himself from an anti-naturalist interpretation of phenomenology. He points out, for instance, that ‘[to] naturalize phenomenology might simply be a question of letting phenomenology engage in a fruitful exchange and collaboration with empirical science’ (2009, p. 8). However, it remains to be clarified how naturalized phenomenology can provide evidence for the phenomenally salient sense of mineness: that is our problem.
- 14.
For example, although there is no direct evidence for the activation of mirror neurons in neonates, Gallagher proposes the following hypothesis: ‘…when the neonate sees another person perform a specific motor act, for instance a tongue protrusion, the visual stimulus initiates the firing of the same mirror neurons that are involved in the infant’s own performance of that motor act’ (Gallagher, 2005, p. 77).
- 15.
- 16.
At most we are disposed to concede to Bermúdez that there might be some forms of pre-reflective self-consciousness (at the age of about 18 months), but merely in the sense that it is hard to say whether the representation of one’s own body as one’s own is definitely conceptual. On the nonconceptual versus conceptual character of self-consciousness, see Musholt (2013).
- 17.
To quote Dretske (1995, pp. 100–101), one of the most prominent advocates of first-order representational theories of consciousness.
- 18.
We have here a much thicker intuition than Zahavi’s. It includes, in addition to the primary ownership of the self, a sense of agency: in establishing any sort of active relationship with the world, the individual feels that she is moving from a center in her inner space. In this case the presence is not in the background; rather, it is a starting point, a base upon which the individual proudly sets her foot when she thinks she can say ‘I’.
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Di Francesco, M., Marraffa, M., Paternoster, A. (2016). Making the Self, I: Bodily Self-Consciousness. In: The Self and its Defenses. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57385-8_3
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