Abstract
Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.
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Notes
Sartre (1957, p. 49).
Zahavi (2006, p. 16).
Sydney Shoemaker (1968).
Zahavi (2006, p. 127).
Compare Hubert Dreyfus’s recent charge against John McDowell in their exchange in the pages of Inquiry. See Dreyfus (2007, p. 372).
Zahavi (2006, p. 21), my italics.
Compare Charles Siewert’s dicussion of the ‘conscious-of’ trap in Siewert (1998).
Shaun Gallagher says on the back of Zahavi’s book: “Zahavi delivers a critical phenomenological account of the subjectivity of experience that shows how phenomenology is not just a description but an analysis that can contribute to explanations of consciousness, self, and intersubjectivity.”
Zahavi (2006, p. 69).
Zahavi (2006, p. 24).
Zahavi (2006, p. 124).
Sartre (1957, p. 46).
See Urial Kriegel (2007) for the philosophical modesty of what he calls the “method of contrast.”
Heidegger (1986), p. 152.
I thank Steven Delay, Hubert Dreyfus, Wayne Martin and Dan Zahavi for helpful comments on and reaction to this essay. I am especially indebted to Charles Siewert for several instructive conversations on self-consciousness and for his illuminating work on the topic.
References
Dreyfus, H. (2007). Response to McDowell. Inquiry, 40(4), 370–377.
Heidegger, M. (1986). Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer; Being and time (Macquarrie & Robinson, Trans. 1962). Oxford: Blackwell.
Kreigel, U. (2007). The phenomenologically manifest. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(1–2), 115–136.
Longuenesse, B. (2007). Self-consciousness and self-reference: Sartre and Wittgenstein. European Journal of Philosophy, 16(1–2), 1–21.
Sartre, J.-P. (1936). La transcendence de l’ego. Paris: Vrin; The transcendence of the ego (F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick, Trans. 1957). New York: The Noonday Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1976). Being and nothingness (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Philadelphia Library.
Shoemaker, S. (1968). Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy, 65, 556–579.
Siewert, C. (1998). The significance of consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Zahavi, D. (2006). Subjectivity and selfhood: Investigating the first-person. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
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Schear, J.K. Experience and self-consciousness. Philos Stud 144, 95–105 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9381-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9381-y