Abstract
For centuries, one of the staples of Western thought has been a rather specific conception of what a human person is. On this conception, the person is understood, as Clifford Geertz has put it, as “a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background.”1 Though Descartes was by no means the father of this conception of the human person, the self, the Cartesian cogito provided it with a powerful and influential articulation. In the wake of Descartes, Enlightenment thought in its various dresses has often exalted the self to quasi-divine status, or at least ascribed to it an angelic independence from the physical and cultural context in which it acts.
James Bernauer’s comments on earlier version of this essay were most helpful.
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Notes
Cliffort Geertz, “From the Native's Point of View,” in Interpretive Social Science, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 229.
See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 29. Hereafter cited as CP.
See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970), 180-189. “The structure is immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term,..the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects …. [The structure] is merely a specific combination of its particular elements, is nothing outside its effects”(188-189). For a good overview of this and other continental analyses which claim to undercut the distinctiveness of the self, see CP, 9-48.
See Samuel Ijsseling, “Hermeneutics and Textuality,” Research in Phenomenology 9 (1979): 10.
Anthony Kenny defended this position in the untitled paper he read at the “Continental and Anglo-American Philosophy: A New Relationship?” conference at the University of Chicago, May 11-13, 1984. See also G.E.M. Anscombe, “The First Person,” in Mind and Language ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) 59.
CP, 70.
CP, 55-56.
See William Wimsatt, “Robustness, Reliability, and Multiple Determination in Science,” in Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences, ed. Marilyn M. Brewer and Barry E. Collins (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1981) 124-163, esp. 126-128. Hereafter cited as RR.
RR, 144-147.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 67-69. Hereafter cited as BT.
BT, 68. See also Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundation of Logic tr. Michael Hein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 188-189. Hereafter cited as FL.
BT, 303.
BT, 308.
Heidegger, “Was Heisst Denken?” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967), Vol. 2, 3; Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 345.
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981), 96-97. Hereafter cited as, AV
AV, 89. My insertion.
AV, 91.
See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, tr. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) 7. Hereafter cited as RM.
Ricoeur himself suggests something of this “rebound” effect. See RM, 87-89.
See in this connection Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern,” in her Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1965). Hereafter cited as PF.
For a discussion of this issue from another angle, see my “Authors, Audiences and Texts,“ Human Studies (1982) 137-146.
H.-N. Castaneda, “On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I,” Akten des XIV Internationalen Kongresses für Philosophie, Wien, 1968, 261. Husserl, it should be recalled here, speaks of the “primal ‘I’ … which can never lose its uniqueness and indeclinability.” See his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) 185. Hereafter cited as TC.
TC, 266.
Colin McGinn, The Subjective View (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) 53–55. Hereafter cited as SV. He explicitly criticizes here G.E.M. Ancombe's position referred to above, and thereby implicitly attacks the Kenny thesis I have mentioned.
SV, 91.
SV, 91.
SV, 91 fn. 32.
SV, 93.
McGinn does deal, under another heading, with the dimension with which I am concerned. He recognizes that his position poses problems for physicalist accounts of experience. He himself, though, does defend a specific version of physicalism. See SV, 137-145.
This argument parallels MacIntyre's contention, discussed above, that a full account of determinism would have to be couched in a “neutral” language, but that no such neutral language is either available or in prospect.
See in this connection Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 14. Hereafter cited as YW.
See in this connection, Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1976) 22.
The possibility of shifting emphasis between the topic and the audience also makes possible the historical distinction between rhetoric and science. However much one might today want to attenuate this distinction, it is hard to claim that all discourse has the same manifest emphasis. Styles of discourse differ from one another and are deployed at the discretion of the speaker.
YW, 10-11 and 30.
For more detailed argument, see my Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), esp. 54-82. Arendt makes a comparable point in terms of thinking and its independence from space-time. See PF, 13.
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, tr. Albert Hofstradter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982) 171. See also H-G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, tr. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). Gadamer says: “Self-understanding only realizes itself in the understanding of a subject-matter and does not have the character of a free self-realization” (55).
Emmanuel Mounier makes something of this same point from another standpoint. See his Personalism, tr. Phillip Mairet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952) 39, 59-64.
CP, 56-57.
CP, 84.
For an interesting account of the self, see Edward Ballard's Man and Technology: Toward the Measurement of Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978) esp. 124-129, and his Principles of Interpretation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1983), esp 216-225. See also FL, 139.
My conclusions about selves mesh well with those reached by Paul Ri-coeur in his Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990).
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Dauenhauer, B.P. (1991). I and Mine. In: Elements of Responsible Politics. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3564-1_6
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