Abstract
By highlighting an often-neglected detail of Plato’s allegory of the cave, this essay puts to the test the conceptual resources of Husserl’s understanding of self-variation and weighs its relevance with respect to the concept of self-awareness. After a methodological introduction, a reminder of the relevant passages of Plato’s Republic, and a survey of the manner in which Husserl articulates self-variation and self-awareness, it shows which of these layers are revealed by the Platonic fiction of the cave and how fictions in general reveal selfhood in its different layers of contingency: a fiction according to which, in Plato, the prisoners are aware of themselves as shadows among shadows. The essay ends with a series of remarks about the meaning and scope of fictional self-awareness as a whole.
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Notes
- 1.
The most convincing advocates of this view are Zahavi and Gallagher (2008).
- 2.
- 3.
Some authors advocating “phenomenological self-awareness” describe the phenomenological method by adding “eidetic variation” to the “epochê” and the “reduction” (Zahavi and Gallagher 2008, 30). Strictly speaking, however, none of the examples discussed by them involve any phantasy variation. They are all examples of actual or actually possible empirical case studies, either ordinary or scientific.
- 4.
The detail was, however, not unknown to Brunschwig (1999).
- 5.
I use here Cornford’s 1941 translation, only with some minor modifications.
- 6.
Breaking the first illusion signifies knowing the world as it is, both in its becoming and true being, and therefore discovering the origin of the illusion itself; breaking the second signifies knowing oneself, and therefore realizing that one is not a shadow among shadows, not even a thing among things. Only in this way could the freed prisoner finally decide to go back to the cave to free other prisoners. Here I will not provide any interpretation of this allegory in the wake of those mapped, for instance, by Blumenberg (1998).
- 7.
On this point, see De Santis (2020).
- 8.
See also Husserl 1973, 152–153.
- 9.
- 10.
It should be readily apparent that the problem here is not that of the “how is it like to be a bat” (how does a factual animal of the order Chiroptera experience its surrounding world), but rather how fictional transformations of oneself guided by the linguistic stipulations of a poetical fiction might end up revealing the various layers of contingency of one’s own selfhood.
- 11.
Due to space constraints, I will have to neglect all the “personalistic” aspects of Plato’s picture, which include the communicative interaction among prisoners who should constitute a community of persons; their common reference to a spiritual surrounding world, whose relevant objects are endowed with practical-axiological predicates; and the problems related to the personal self-awareness of each prisoner.
- 12.
An example of a fictional character devoid of concordant self-awareness is Italo Calvino’s Gurdulù, appearing in the novel Il cavaliere inesistente (1959). Gurdulù is a peasant who has no lasting position takings, no enduring convictions, whose thoughts and behaviors constantly shift in parallel with the things he sees (a pear tree, a duck, a frog) or the people he meets (Charlemagne).
- 13.
The linguistic self-ascription exceeds the pre-linguistic self-awareness to which Husserl is referring. Nonetheless, although they have an equine-body, the Houyhnhnm are still varieties of “human selves,” precisely because Swift stipulates that they have to be imagined as being able to ascribe to themselves bodily as well as psychic properties.
- 14.
The Ich-Mensch is not the homo sapiens, although, conversely, the homo sapiens is a factual example of Ich-Mensch. Whether other non-human animals are also factual examples of Ich-Menschen is a question that only the empirical sciences could settle. Additionally, in Husserl’s account, nothing is said about the features of the Ich-Mensch’s living body, its sensory organs, shape, limbs, biology, etc. The four-armed, four-legged, two-sexed, roundish bodied, and androgynous creature described in Plato’s Symposium (2008, 189c2–193d5) is just as much an Ich-Mensch as Socrates.
- 15.
The way in which the fictional equine-body of a Houyhnhnm might constitute itself as the unity of a vast field of localized sensations depends on the manner in which one imagines its physiology. However, the fact that the Houyhnhnm’s living body is constituted as a real living body by incorporating tactile sensations is out of the question.
- 16.
I promised that I would not venture into any putatively “phenomenological” interpretation of the allegorical meaning of Plato’s cave. Let me note, however, that it is only once they are freed from their ghostly embodiment that the prisoners’ human selves become real. The way out of the cave is thus the path from the static vision of moving shadows to talk about (among which one finds the shadow of oneself) to the moving vision of things to explore, up to the moving vision of the ideas, and finally of the idea of the good to be motivated by in one’s action. A path that is only possible thanks to constitution of a real human body: a body experienced in localized sensations and pain, fully embedded in a natural surrounding world, able to explore such environment by freely moving, following the track from the effects to their causes, etc. The path towards the ideas can only be taken by a real ensouled-embodied human self.
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Majolino, C. (2023). Husserlian Shadows in Plato’s Cave: Layers of Contingency and Fictional Variations on Self-Awareness. In: Geniusas, S. (eds) Varieties of Self-Awareness. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 121. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0_1
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