Intentional transaction

Abstract

The second person is often set in contrast to the first person. And there is a contrast. It does not reside in a difference of what is thought as I from what is thought as you. For that is not different. The contrast is that of monadic and dyadic predication, action and transaction. It is the contrast, not of I and You, but of I and I–You. The second person does not add a You to an I. It divides the I and makes it a relation. We consider, first, the form of predication that is common to first- and second-person thought. Then, we define the second person as a species of this form of thought. Last, we find the source and condition of this form of thought in a thought of this very form. This thought, being the source of its own form, is one of which one cannot be conscious from outside it. It is a last word, or, better, a first word.¹

Keywords:

• second person
• self-consciousness
• collective intentionality
• shared intentions
• interpersonal relations
• transaction

Notes on contributor

Sebastian Rödl is Professor of Philosophy at the Universität Leipzig, having serving as Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and as Ordinarius für Philosophy at the Universität Basel. He is the author of Self-Consciousness (HUP 2007) and Categories of the Temporal (HUP 2012).

Notes

1. Compare Thomas Nagel's notion of a last word (Nagel 2001). Nagel's development of the notion reveals no reason why he should call what is last a word. From what he writes in the book, one would think its title to be “The Last Thought”. (Indeed, chapter 2 bears the title “Why We Can't Understand Thought from the Outside”.) However, if the last thought is I–You, then the last thought is a word; indeed, it is the word. In reaching for “The Last Word”, Nagel may express an inchoate appreciation of this.

2. It is possible to express this – it has been expressed – by saying “I” is not a referring expression. This need not entail that, using “I”, one does not single out a particular subject from among a totality of subjects. It only entails that this is not a given totality, given independently of an act of self-thought. Indeed, we shall see that, thinking “I”, one does distinguish a subject, indeed, oneself, from any other subject; one does so as “I”, fundamentally, is “I–You”. The I-concept, the I–You-concept, is a thought in which any subject knows herself to be in transaction with any subject.

3. There is an extended discussion of this point as it applies to the subject's self-predication of action; the discussion departs from remarks of Anscombe's on practical knowledge (cf. Anscombe 2000, §§ 32 and 45).

4. More generally, information-based thought (cf. Evans 1982, ch. 5.4).

5. Fregean predicate logic reduces plural and generic predication to singular predication. There may be purposes for which this is useful. However, if our interest is in the forms of thinking and so in the forms of being – forms of being that are thought in thoughts of the corresponding form – then this reduction leads to error. (Compare Laycock (2006) on plural predication, and Thompson (2008) on generic predication.)

6. We may put this by saying that I is a Wechselbegriff – as Fichte does: Der Begriff der Individualität ist aufgezeigtermaßen ein Wechselbegriff, d. i. ein solcher, der nur in Beziehung auf ein anderes Denken gedacht werden kann, und durch dasselbe, und zwar durch das gleiche Denken, der Form nach, bedingt ist. Er ist in jedem Vernunftwesen nur insofern möglich, inwiefern er als durch ein anderes vollendet, gesetzt wird. Er ist demnach nie mein; sondern meinem eigenen Geständnis, und dem Geständnis des anderen nach, mein und sein; sein und mein; ein gemeinschaftlicher Begriff, in welchem zwei Bewußtsein vereinigt werden in Eins (Fichte 1979, p. 47f.).

7. Not only powers of intentional action, the power of intentional action is self-predicated. She who acts intentionally knows herself to have this power. The self-predication I am an intentional agent underlies and is contained in any dynamic self-predication I am doing A. Indeed, this self-predication is none other than the consciousness expressed by the word I in I am doing A. Once one recognizes this, it becomes much easier to read German Idealism.

8. I am indebted to Michael Thompson, who expressed this thought in conversation.

9. I am grateful to Anselm W. Müller and Michael Thompson for a conversation between them in 2009, conducted in the terms I here use, in witnessing which I first grasped the necessity of this answer.

10. It is an unhappy feature of the English language that its word “man” bears two meanings: it signifies the universal and the male sex. It is not the case that “man” only signifies the universal; it is also used to signify the male sex in contrast to the female sex. Whether it signifies the one or the other is determined by the context. In this regard, English differs from German (and many other languages), which has two words, “Mensch” and “Mann”. Throughout this text, I use “man” in the first sense. It would be good if English had a separate word for the universal, and people attempt to introduce one. But the attempts that I know I find unsuccessful. One is to use “human”, but this word, I believe, is not a noun. Another is to use “human being”, but this is unhappy, for it suggests that “human” specifies a genus “being”, which is in many ways misleading.

11. Compare Michael Thompson's discussion of the principle of justice (2004). We here offer a solution to the puzzle not contemplated by Thompson. It rejects his presupposition that the formal concept rational agent is distinct from the material concept man. Universal one-another-predication is the sublation of this opposition.

12. This was my reasoning in Rödl (2007, ch. 6): Thinking myself through a universal self-predication, I think the possibility of other individuals who partake of the same universal. Thus I think them in self-consciousness, namely through a general self-thought.

13. Moreover, it remains mysterious how the consciousness of mistake can be included in self-thought. In consequence, it appears as though self-consciousness can only be universal.

14. This is in fact Kant's position. Fichte, by contrast, conceives the unconditional activity, which returns to itself, that is, self-consciousness, the I, not as monadic, but as universal one-another-predication.