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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I shall first attempt to criticize Zahavi's notion of the “experiential self” as the latter is presented and developed in his book Self and Other (2014). I will argue that Zahavi's “experiential self” is so thin that its connection with the pre-reflective dimension of selfhood at the distinctively human, conceptual, “space of reasons” level becomes problematic. Second, I shall suggest that an alternative account of self-consciousness first developed by Kant and refined by Sellars, which I shall call the “Kant-Sellars” thesis about self-consciousness, which stresses the distinction between sentient and sapient self-consciousness, can help us do justice to the insights contained in Zahavi's account of experiential self, while at the same time avoiding its more problematic features. Finally, I shall offer a brief response to the objection that by dropping the phenomenological “bridge” between the normative and empirical-material dimensions of the pre-reflective self, the above “Kant-Sellars” account of self-consciousness leaves us with an essentially bifurcated conception of pre-reflective self-consciousness. I will suggest that what unites those two dimensions of the pre-reflective self can be best described not as a phenomenological unity but rather as a “dialectical” normative-functional unity, whose ultimate raison d’être is practical in nature.
Notes on contributor
Dionysis Christias is an adjunct Lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. His research interests include epistemology, metaphilosophy, the debate between naturalism and normativism, the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars and post-Sellarsian philosophy (McDowell, Brandom).
Notes
1 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of response on Zahavi's behalf.
2 Perhaps Zahavi would be reluctant to make this move, as it would imply some kind of discontinuity between animals and humans but what I tried to show is that there is a price to pay for this reluctance: a commitment to an “additive” conception of self-consciousness.
3 Thus, the second part of this article (Sections 4–5) can be understood as an extended attempt to justify this thesis mainly from its ability to account for something that its phenomenological competitor cannot (the unity of the sapient and sentient dimensions of the pre-reflective self).
4 It must be stressed here that our notion of sentient self-consciousness is broader and far less committal than Zahavi's analogous notion of the minimal experiential self. As we shall see in Section 5, it aims to capture the non-normative dimension of the self, which is not transparent to itself without empirical-scientific investigation of its structure. It makes no commitments as to the specific material structures that “realize” the sentient self, and is even compatible with views according to which the sentient self can have a “social” dimension (e.g. in can be understood as non-normatively actualized in background settled attitudes that inform our actions within a social context).
5 Consider here Kant's key notions of “self-affection” and the “productive imagination”, as the latter are reinterpreted by Sellars (Citation1978). The mind, considered at the level of sentient self-consciousness, by being in certain non-conceptual states, “affects itself”, and through the construction of perspectival image-models of external objects and of oneself-in-the-environment by the productive imagination, yields the “self-world” correlational structure (i.e. sapient self-consciousness), where the mind represents itself as surrounded by a-perspectival physical objects (considered as substances) existing in physical space and time, causally interacting with other objects in a system that includes a self.
6 To suppose that this cannot be the case, i.e. that conceptual capacities cannot be operative at the pre-reflective level, one must hold that conceptual capacities are operative in perception or action only through creating a reflective distance from which the subject can “monitor” what he perceives and does. But this account of conceptual capacities is at best optional and at worse simply wrong. It amounts to what McDowell calls “the myth of the mind as detached” (McDowell Citation2013).
7 Here, I use the term “normative-functional” as opposed to “causal-functional”. The claim is that the “self” in this sense (as indeed all normative phenomena according to this line of thought) are functional roles that are normatively individuated (e.g. mutatis mutandis, as are pawns in chess). The causal-functional dimension, as we shall see, concerns the material realizers of those normative functional roles.
8 Note that all distinctions at play here (manifest-scientific self, normative-descriptive/explanatory self, sapient-sentient self) refer to different dimensions within the domain of the pre-reflective self.
9 Let us give some examples of the regulative ideals in question: At the epistemic dimension, this regulative ideal can be expressed in terms of an individual and collective commitment for playing the “game of giving and asking for epistemic reasons” that produces a systematic, unified and stratified body of empirical knowledge capable of yielding arbitrarily general pictures of the world and our place in it at an arbitrary level of specificity in detail. In the practical dimension, this ideal can be expressed in terms of an individual and collective commitment for playing the “game of giving and asking for practical reasons” in such a way as to place the “in-order-to” relations in which our actions are caught up into ever-more self-actualizing practical identities. And in the ethical dimension, this ideal could be construed in terms of participating in the “game of giving and asking of ethical reasons” which aims at promoting our common good.
10 Note here that the dialectical interplay in question is between two structures of pre-reflective self-consciousness, not between a pre-reflective and a reflective consciousness. Appearances to the contrary may be due to the fact that the discovery, the making explicit of this sentient dimension of the pre-reflective self can only be achieved through scientific descriptive-explanatory tools (which initially conceive of the “I” as an object of empirical knowledge), and in this sense, the whole process of unearthing this sentient dimension of the self contains a necessary “moment” of reflection. Yet, this does not mean that what one is thereby describing-explaining is the reflective self. We make explicit (through reflection by means of scientific descriptive-explanatory concepts) something -namely the sentient self – that was always already at work at a pre-reflective level (albeit, without our being hitherto aware of it as the kind of thing it is).
11 Note that our example here (the unconscious adoption of racial and gender stereotypes) is not glossed as an example of a divergence in one's beliefs about himself. Thus, it is consistent with Gendler's analysis of implicit bias in terms of associative and a-rational habitual propensities to respond to a situation in particular way. Gendler calls these representational-affective-behavioral clusters “aliefs”, an example being “Black man! Scary! Avoid!” (as opposed to the belief that “that is a black man” which is not fixed to any particular feeling or behavior) (Gendler Citation2008).
12 I take it that those kinds of skillful coping could, in principle, be accounted for in scientific-image evolutionary-functional terms, i.e. as kinds of adaptive habits that have occurred under specific functional pressures in particular environments through evolution-by-selection (where the learning process needed for the transmission of these skills to others can itself be understood in terms of the evolution-by-selection of a population of habits). Note, moreover, that although this kind of sentient self-consciousness, being a part of “what we are”, is actualized as such in our practices (e.g. in background settled attitudes and commitments that immediately inform our actions within a social context), its mode of actualization is such that it can know itself determinately only with the aid of non-platitudinous, heavily theory-laden, novel concepts and categories provided by empirical-scientific investigation.
13 It seems to me that what is revealed in those perfectly ordinary situations is the existence of a “dialectical” interplay between the pre-reflective “formal” “I” and the “I” conceived as an object of empirical knowledge -at least if we suppose that those “two” I's are in an important sense different dimensions of the same “I”. The same goes for the less ordinary but particularly revealing situations in which one realizes that a “part” of him performed what by his own lights are socially controversial or downright unjust actions, of which he was completely unaware.
14 In this way, paradoxically, the disenchantment of the “I”, the loss of phenomenological “selfhood”, far from diminishing or extinguishing personhood or agency, could well hugely empower the latter where it really counts: in its concrete occurrent expression in embodied behavior.
15 An early version of this paper was presented in the international conference “Reflection and Non-positional Self-consciousness” at the University of Patras (2017). I would like to thank the participants and audience for many helpful comments and suggestions.