Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First‐Person Perspective.

Dan Zahavi Cambridge, MA, and London, UK: The MIT Press, A Bradford Book, 2006. Pp. vii, 265. ISBN 0-262-24050-5 In Subjectivity and Selfhood Zahavi puts the phenomenological tradition into dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy and psychological research to argue for a conception of self-consciousness and consciousness of others. The book is remarkable for the range and variety packed into its relatively modest length, and for its success in bringing so many (sometimes disparate) voices into a unified discussion. Though a more sustained treatment of many of the issues would be needed for full defense of his position, Zahavi provides a valuable example of how continental and analytic traditions can be combined with one another and with empirical research to help define and support a far-reaching and forward-looking philosophical viewpoint. First and foremost, Zahavi believes we need to see that essential to all phenomenally conscious experience is a “minimal” form of “non-objectifying” self-consciousness—a “pre-reflective self-consciousness,” a kind of “self-acquaintance” or “familiarity”—that is distinct from the sort of “thematized,”“conceptualized” reflection involved in “objectifying” thoughts about oneself and one’s own experience. A recognition of this is essential, Zahavi maintains, to understanding both consciousness simpliciter and the kind of reflective, objectifying self-consciousness that must be distinguished from it. Further, this minimal self-consciousness brings with it a minimal type of selfhood that makes available other, more advanced (e.g., narrative) forms. Finally, turning to intersubjectivity, Zahavi argues we need to recognize basic forms of awareness of others that must be distinguished from the forms derived from them—as when we try to infer others’ states of mind from our observations. Zahavi begins with a sympathetic exposition of Sartre’s claim that all consciousness is “pre-reflective consciousness” of itself, along with his associated “non-egological” view of consciousness. Arguing from these and related ideas found in Husserl, Zahavi makes the case that all consciousness is (non-objectifying) self-consciousness. He relies importantly on two lines of reasoning—an “argument by elimination,” (p. 24) and an examination of regress problems associated with consciousness (pp. 24–29). The former argument turns on the idea that it is impossible to “consciously experience something without in some way having access to or being acquainted with the experience in question.” Higher-order theories of consciousness fail in their efforts to account for this essential first-person givenness in terms of objectifying thoughts or inner perceptions directed upon one’s mental life, because they fail to properly distinguish cases where we attend to our own conscious experiences from those where we do not. Thus we are left with recognition of an essential non-objectifying self-acquaintance as the only viable option. Zahavi’s use of regress considerations here is complex; its most distinctive feature lies perhaps in its appeal to the idea (derived from Shoemaker) that self-awareness requires “self-reference without identification” (pp. 27–28). Zahavi uses this to argue that self-reference presupposes a non-objectifying self-acquaintance. The notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness that Zahavi develops in Chapters 1–3 forms an important basis for the rest of his discussion. In Chapter 4, he considers a challenge to first-person reflection as inevitably bringing a distortion of the (necessarily unobjectifiable) subjective character of experience. He endorses something like what he sees as Heidegger’s response to Natorp’s articulation of this concern. While reflection can distort one’s experience, a non-distorting, “hermeneutical” kind of thought about experience is possible that proceeds appropriately from one’s pre-reflective self-understanding (which Zahavi identifies with first-person givenness). In Chapter 5, Zahavi’s central concept of first-person givenness plays a critical role in explaining different notions of self. He distinguishes what he calls the “minimal” or “core” self—“the self as an experiential dimension”—both from the (Kantian) notion of self as a identical possessor of changing experiences, and the (more recent) notion of self as the subject of (and perhaps “construction” out of) a narrative or life-story. Zahavi defends his notion of the minimal self, and puts it forward as a “replacement” for the Kantian notion of self, and a necessary condition of the narrative variety. Appealing to the idiom of analytic philosophy of mind, Zahavi holds that to have conscious experience in the phenomenal, “what it’s like” sense is for experience to be first-personally given in his sense, and this is also just what it is to have a minimal or core self. He argues that having such a minimal self provides a needed “experiential support” for the narrative self, without which one’s narrative would be an unconstrained confabulation (pp. 110–112, 129–130). He also applies his notion of the minimal self to empirical work, interpreting certain schizophrenic symptoms as revealing a disturbance in the first-personal givenness of experience (pp. 133–145). In his last two chapters (6 and 7) Zahavi combines his views of subjectivity and the minimal self with a treatment of intersubjectivity, to consider how we are conscious of others—not as mere objects, but as other subjects of experience. He first provides a useful tour of several themes from the phenomenological literature (all of which he finds voiced to some extent in Husserl’s writings). We have Scheler’s critique of the “argument from analogy” and his claim that we experience others’ affective and other mental states in perceiving their expressive behavior, and do not merely infer minds from bodily movements. Building on this, there is the (Merleau-Pontyan) notion that our capacity to perceive others’ bodies as expressive—and thereby “read” their minds—depends on our experience of our own bodies (and so, on a kind of “embodied subjectivity”), and on our possessing from infancy the capacity to respond in imitative and other coordinated ways to the eye movements, voice, gestures, and facial expressions of others. Our awareness of others is also implicit (Heidegger maintains) in our sharing with them a world of “equipment” whose norms of use we tacitly understand. And we are aware of others (as Sartre emphasizes) through ourselves becoming the objects of their gaze, and (as Levinas urges) the focus of their ethical demands. All this paves the way (in Zahavi’s last chapter) for a very interesting discussion of the “theory of mind” debate, and research on child development and autism. Nicely summarizing salient aspects of this research, Zahavi argues against psychologists who use it to assimilate our primary understanding of minds to scientific theory construction that infers unobservables to explain data. The developmental and clinical evidence, he says, actually better accords with phenomenological ideas earlier outlined. Before young children can pass “theory of mind tests” (such as false belief tasks) they have a pre-reflective but distinctively first-person experience of their own mental lives, as well as ways of understanding the emotions and intentions of others. And it is a deficiency in these fundamental ways of relating to others that leads autistics and schizophrenics to try to figure out their fellow creatures by cobbling together “theories of mind” as a pathological compensation for their lack of normal understanding. Zahavi is to be applauded for economically bringing this diverse material together to form an accessible, plausible, and intellectually stimulating whole. Few readers will come to the work with his breadth of knowledge of relevant phenomenological writings, philosophy of mind, and psychology. Reading this book will almost inevitably teach one something significant about the unfamiliar, or freshly illuminate the already familiar. Zahavi’s book should prove thought-provoking and instructive to a broad audience interested in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, and the cross-fertilization occurring among them. Criticism of Zahavi’s account might center on his key concept of “minimal self-consciousness.” Though his text abounds with equivalent phrases for this notion—“first-personal givenness,”“access,”“acquaintance,”“familiarity”—it is questionable whether this is adequately explained and defended. We may find ourselves vaguely agreeing that one cannot consciously experience something without “in some way” having distinctively first-person “access” to, or “familiarity,” or “acquaintance” with the experience. But what does this mean? Although clearly Zahavi would not see it this way, perhaps talk of “access” here should be taken to commit us to no more than the claim that, provided one has the general capacity to think first-person thoughts about one’s phenomenal experience, one is able to form some such reflection on whatever experience one actually has, thereby “accessing” it in thoughts that would then be understood in a way no thoughts about others’ experience can be. But from this it doesn’t follow that (as Zahavi would hold) there are two species of “self-consciousness”—reflective/objectifying and pre-reflective/non-objectifying—such that the latter is essential to consciousness of anything whatsoever. More attention also needs to be given here to the potential ambiguities in the claim that my experience is given or experienced “as mine.” Though Zahavi relies considerably on this sort of talk (pp. 16, 61, 124, 132), it could be interpreted in ways that do not support his views. Higher-order theorists will find in it an indication of ubiquitous “monitoring” representations of one’s own representations—a “higher-order experience” of some sort. Others may demur from finding in talk of “experiencing an experience”—e.g., experiencing a feeling of some sort—any necessary implications of self-consciousness with regards to one’s own experience (one’s feeling). And they may suggest that one’s feelings are always experienced as one’s own, only in the sense that what it’s like for one to have a feeling could not characterize some hypothesized “owner-less” feeling (a case in which it supposedly simply felt some way, but not to anyone). So—“my experience is experienced as mine:” that is to say, it is experienced in a manner that makes it mine; in other words, it has experiential character that makes it someone’s (and not nobody’s)—and in this case the someone is me. But to say that experiences are in some such sense necessarily self-possessed, is not to say they are necessarily self-conscious. Given that so much in Zahavi’s account rides on “access” and “givenness,” without more attention to these alternative interpretations, his case will remain incomplete. There are also key moves in some of Zahavi’s central arguments that need more shoring up. For example: granted that the self-reference involved in first-person thoughts about experience do not (and cannot) require “self-identification” (in Shoemaker’s sense)—why suppose they do require, as distinct from the self-referring thought, some additional, special form of self-consciousness? Zahavi’s erudition in phenomenology is unquestionably impressive. But one may note there is also room for critical probing with respect to the more exegetical part of his work. One may worry that, in Zahavi’s zeal to show that classical phenomenologists universally endorse his central claim, important differences among them get neglected. For example, is Husserl’s early view of consciousness really “non-egological” in the manner of Sartre—or is he instead offering a (non-Kantian) conception of what it means to say that experiences “belong to an ego?” Or when Heidegger says (as Zahavi quotes, p. 83) that “the self is always there for the Dasein … before all reflection,” is it clear that this signals allegiance to the notion that one is always in some sense self-conscious with respect to one’s own experience? Zahavi does, of course, furnish textual evidence on these and other points, sometimes appealing to sources likely to be unfamiliar to Anglophone readers. But Zahavi’s efforts here to draw together thinkers whose commentators have often been keen to set apart will undoubtedly stir interpretive controversy. That Zahavi does not pursue all these questions in detail does not, however, prevent his book from constituting a significant achievement in broadening and unifying contemporary philosophical discussion and renewing the phenomenological tradition.