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Abstract
It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretrievably alienated from you. To allow the possibility of addressing oneself is to assume one of the following accounts of the second-person pronoun. Either one has to follow R. Heck and conceive it as a merely linguistic phenomenon whose content can be analyzed in terms of “the person to whom I'm now speaking”; or one has to internalize the second person and follow Ch. Korsgaard in taking its prior use to be entirely within and independent of its linguistic expression. But to account for the idea of mutual recognition requires a third view according to which address is an act of mind sui generis for which linguistic expression is essential.
Acknowledgements
I thank Anton Ford, Wolfram Gobsch, David Horst, Douglas Lavin, Alexandra Newton, Aaron Shoichet and the audience at Warwick for incredibly helpful discussions of an earlier version of this paper. I am especially grateful to Naomi Eilan and Guy Longworth for invaluable written comments.
Notes on contributors
Matthias Haase is Assistant Professor at the Universität Leipzig. He received his PhD at the Universität Potsdam (2007). He taught at the Universität Basel (2006–2010) and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh (2003–2006) and Harvard University (2010–2012). His research interests include philosophy of mind, action theory and ethics as well as Aristotle, German Idealism and Wittgenstein. His recent publications include: “The Laws of Thought and the Power of Thinking,” in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supplementary volume 35, Belief and Agency, edited by David Hunter, 2011, 249–297; “Three Forms of the First Person Plural,” in: G. Abel, J. Conant (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology, Walter de Grutyer, Berlin, 2012, 229–256; “Die Wirklichkeit meiner Tat,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 61(3), 2013, 419–433; “Life and Mind,” in: Thomas Khurana (ed.), The Freedom of Life: Hegelian Perspectives, August Verlag, Berlin, 2013, 69–109.
Notes
1. Heck characterizes the second person as “a special kind of demonstrative, one that always refers to the addressee” (Citation2002, 20, FN 39).
2. Compare Section 331 where we get the thought experiment of people who can only “think aloud” – like some people can only read while uttering the words.
3. These are, of course, the very conditions that the Gricean account of meaning and communication aims to satisfy. In fact, the reverse holds as well: the Gricean account of communication presupposes the possibility of a Heckian account of the second-person pronoun. The proposed analysis of meaning and communication would be hopelessly circular if the second person pronoun would mark an irreducible communicative act of mind and could not be eliminated from the thoughts that the account ascribes to speaker and hearer. On this point, see also (Thompson Citation2014; Rödl Citation2007, Chap. 6).
4. That Wittgenstein's own view on the matter is more intricate is suggested by Section 268 of the Philosophical Investigations.
5. We could, of course, imagine a use of ‘giving testimony to oneself’ that functions just like ‘informing oneself’.
6. The latter case is admittedly more intricate than the first, since Y might inform herself by asking X to inform her. But she might also go to take a look for herself so that the resulting knowledge is by observation rather than testimony.
7. For a critique of this distinction between forming and having beliefs and the picture of self-consciousness that comes with it, see Boyle (Citation2011).
8. This shows that it is a mistake to think that the interpersonal relation of the act of imparting is inscribed into the bit of knowledge imparted such that my current knowing rests on you. (For a view along these lines, see McMyler (Citation2011).) If I would have to defer to you in this way, my knowledge would vanish when you forget. Furthermore, making it a condition of knowledge by testimony that the one is in the position to name, point to or even remember one's informant would disqualify most things we know by hearsay.
9. As there is also the demanded action, we are actually dealing with a four-place predicate. I leave this aside here.
10. On this distinction, see Thompson (Citation2004).
11. Aristotle (Citation1999, 1138a19-21). The analogous point holds when one connects, as Aristotle does in the next paragraph, the idea of justice with the idea of retaliation. When the one who inflicts is the same as the one suffers, the act of injustice would be its own retaliation.
12. See Kant (Citation1996, 6:422): “It seems absurd to say that a human being could wrong himself (volenti non fit iniuria).”
13. See Kant (Citation1996, 6:417). Contemporary Neo-Kantians are often less worried about the concept of duties to oneself (see, for instance, Velleman Citation2006). For a critical discussion of the latter conception of self-related obligations, see Vogler (Citation2014).
14. Darwall takes it that one's “dignity” as a person must be independent from what anyone else is actually doing (Citation2006, 144). Furthermore, he thinks that other forms of agency cannot be ruled out (see Darwall Citation2006, 287).
15. See also Lavin's contribution in this volume.
16. The point comes up again when Kant argues that it is a confusion of the “concepts of reflection” to think that obligations could be had to anything other than rational animals. We are told that what occurs on the right side of the ‘owing to’-nexus has to meet two conditions: it must be a whole person and it must be “given in experience” (6:442).
17. On the connection between concept of right and stopping modals, see Anscombe (Citation1981, 142).
18. On this point, see Thompson (Citation2013, 247).