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However, the Kantian critique of the Cartesian "mirror-model" of self-consciousness depends on a particular, and limited, notion of self-inquiry: epistemology through rational introspection. We could call it rational empiricism, where reason attempts to view or reflect the "I" by objectifying it as "me," the phenomenal self. Meanwhile, the "I" as it is in itself, remains beyond reach, an unknowable source of knowing residing transcendentally in the numenon. Kant's method of self-inquiry, though a form of introspection (reason), nevertheless analytically objectifies the ego, and thus qualifies as a third-person perspective. But there are other modes of self-inquiry that do not rely wholly on reason. Meditative and contemplative disciplines, for instance, can transcend reason and logic to arrive at deep intuitive, or noetic, knowledge--a knowing that transcends the duality of "I" and "me" (Merrell-Wolff, 1983; Forman, 1990). Kant's dichotomy, therefore, of the transcendental ego and the phenomenal ego, which posits an insurmountable divide between the objectively-known self and the unknowable transcendental "I"-in-itself, is a result of his limited empiricism and epistemology. By engaging in contemplative practices, or inner empiricism (Needleman & de Quincey, 1993) the duality of "I" and "me" can be transcended. Such inner empiricism (distinct from rational empiricism) penetrates the essence of subjectivity, and thus qualifies as first-person perspective par excellence. And there is yet a third approach to self-inquiry: intersubjective empiricism, which avoids the Kantian impossibility of the "I' reflecting itself without objectifying itself as "me." By encountering others as loci of experiencing selves, just like our self, we can, indeed, come to know ourselves reflected in the other. Unlike the failed Cartesian one-way mirror-model of self-consciousness, the intersubjective approach involves a kind of "two-way mirror," where not only can we "see through" to the other self, we see our own spontaneous self reflected back through them--and this experience is itself constitutive of the experiencing "I." Part of who I am, who I experience myself to be, is formed, perhaps even created, by engaging with "you." This was Fichte's approach, modified by Humboldt and Kierkegaard, and taken up later by Habermas. Fichte's self-positing self. Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1907) attempted to augment Kant's transcendental ego by the notion of the "self-positing self." For Fichte, the ego creates itself through an existential act of self-choice and achieves individuality through intersubjective encounters with other egos. Its uniqueness is shaped by these encounters. Thus Fichte's existential self-positing-intersubjective ego has both transcendental and immanent aspects. It also presupposes a pre-existing self that engages other pre-existing selves. Thus Fichte's approach opens the way to account for what happens to the self-positing-self, to its forms or contents (weak/psychological intersubjectivity), but it does not advance our knowledge of consciousness or self as an ontological context (strong/philosophical intersubjectivity). Both Søren Kierkegaard and Wilhelm von Humboldt (see below) argued that Fichte's transcendental-immanent ego led to contradictions and paradoxes, and did not resolve the paralogisms of self identified by Kant. The problem, they believed, resulted from the notion of the transcendental ego. They rejected the transcendental ego altogether, and instead proposed a wholly immanent self, situated in the concrete world of life events and life histories (a view developed later, and along very different lines in John Dewey [1949], and Martin Heidegger [1978]). Kierkegaard's existential self-choice. Kierkegaard (1987) retained and reworked Fichte's notion of self-positing into an existential theory of self-choice--a self that authentically chooses its own particular life history, and thereby establishes its unique individuality. Kierkegaard's "self-choice" involves a performative rather than a descriptive concept of individuality, an idea later taken up by Jürgen Habermas (1992). In other words, when I choose myself as this person with this particular life history, and simultaneously assert and project myself into the world, what matters is not any third-person (or first-person) description of this self, but my claim to radical authenticity. Self, then, becomes not something to be described, but something to perform. The self is a claim: "I am who I am." But as a claim, the self must then be recognized or acknowledged, accepted, or rejected by other selves--by Other. For Kierkegaard, this Other was God (Kierkegaard, 1987). Humboldt's linguistic community. Wilhelm von Humboldt took a different approach. For him, the "other" became a community of other selves, united in a linguistic system. Instead of describing the self as an individual subject, he described encounters between speakers and hearers in a linguistic community--an exchange or meeting of perspectives, acknowledging, without objectifying, each other. Instead of Kant's transcendental subject, the locus of consciousness for Humboldt was a plurality of linguistic participants and perspectives. Unity in the participating community was achieved through "unforced agreement in conversation" without canceling diversity (Habermas, 1992, p. 163). Humboldt, thus, emphasized three elements that would later be essential to Habermas' theory of communicative action: the notions of "linguistic community," "intersubjectivity," and "unforced agreement in dialogue." Because of his emphasis on linguistic exchanges, Humboldt's position is a version of standard, consensual agreement, "intersubjectivity-1." Mead's intersubjective alter egos. From Kant, through Fichte, Kierkegaard, and Humboldt, the philosophy of consciousness progressively moved away from its moorings in the Cartesian subject-object dualism and the one-way mirror-model of self-reflective consciousness. However, even with Kant's transcendental ego, Fichte's self-positing ego, Kierkegaard's existential self-choice, and Humboldt's intersubjective linguistic community, no clear path had yet emerged by which the gap between first-person "I"-subjects and third-person "it"-objects could be bridged. George Herbert Mead (1967), social psychologist and social philosopher, introduced the crucial missing element: the second-person. With this innovation, Mead made it possible for the self to know itself by mirroring itself in an "object." But this was no ordinary third-person object; in fact, it was not an "object" at all. It was another self--a second-person, alter ego. Instead of the epistemological contortions of a first-person "I" attempting to adopt the third-person perspective of an external observer of itself, the self becomes known through the interactions of first-person and second-person perspectives of participants in active linguistic communication. Now, the self is not mirrored as an object from a third-person perspective, but as communicating egos mutually reflecting each other. My self, then, is perceived as the alter ego to your alter ego. I am "other," as a self, to you as another self: an encounter of mutually-acknowledging selves. I perceive you as a subject in the second-person, and "me" as your subject in the second person. From the second-person view, who I am--the self I experience myself to be--is shaped, or informed, by being with you. Given this circle of intersubjectivity, of mutually participant subjects engaged in linguistic communication, how do we account for individual subjects? Underlying the "intersubjective project"--common to theorists from Mead and Buber to Habermas--is a motivation to not only counteract the exaggerated subjectivist bias in philosophy of consciousness, but also to avoid swamping the individual in overwhelming social norms of the collective, thereby depriving the individualized person of his or her autonomy and spontaneity. Intersubjectivity aims to create a middle course between the extremes of Cartesian subjectivism and Marxist collectivism (Voloshinov, 1996). But if, as Mead argues, the self shows up only in the linguistic circle of intersubjectivity how do we account for the individual subjects that intersubjectivity would seem to presuppose? How can there be a circle of intersubjectivity unless there are subjects already present to start with? Mead recognized this problem and proposed as a solution that in the same moment the self encounters an alter ego-the moment "I" encounter "you"-the concrete organism establishes a relationship to itself. "The self, as that which can be an object to itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience" (Mead, 1962, p. 140). The self is thus "first encountered as a subject in the moment when communicative relations are established between organisms." (Hohengarten, 1992, p. xvi). The self, thus, has two components: the theoretical "me," my consciousness of myself, and the practical "me," the agency through which I monitor my behavior (such as speaking). "The 'I' is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the 'me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes" (Mead, 1962, p. 175). Hohengarten explains: This practical "me" comes into existence when the subject establishes a practical relation to herself by adopting the normative attitude of an alter ego toward her own behavior. . . . such a conventionally constituted self is nonetheless a precondition for the emergence of a nonconventional aspect of the practical self: the practical "I," which opposes the "me" with both presocial drives and innovative fantasy. . . . Yet the self is intersubjectively constituted through and through; the relationship to a community is what makes the practical relation-to-self possible (Hohengarten, 1992, pp. xvi-xvii. Italics added). Mead's emphasis on the intersubjective constitution of the self, of the subject's sense of continuity and identity, accounts for self as an "individualized context" for the contents of experience. But it still does not account for the "metacontext"--the non-individualized ontological context that underlies all contents of consciousness. Mead's "self," although a context for contents of individual experience, is itself a content within the ontological metacontext of consciousness-as-such. Mead's intersubjectivity still leaves unexplained ontological subjectivity--the fact that at least some loci in the universal matrix have a capacity for interiority, for a what-it-feels-like from within. It would still be possible, in Mead's theory, for a universe consisting wholly of objects to produce, via linguistic and social relations, what he calls "intersubjectivity." But this could logically be an "intersubjectivity" without any interiority, without any true subjectivity (in other words, intersubjectivity-1)--and therefore not truly intersubjectivity (as defined here) at all. Buber's 'I and Thou.' Probably the theorist most readily associated with the notion of intersubjectivity (as a mutual engagement of interior presences) is the philosopher-anthropologist and theologian Martin Buber (1878-1965). As he himself acknowledged, he picked up the germ of the idea, in 1843, from the philosopher of religion Ludwig Feuerbach: "The individual man does not contain in himself the essence of man either in so far as he is a moral being or in so far as he is a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man and man-a unity which rests upon the reality of the difference between 'I' and 'Thou' " (Quoted by Gabriel Marcel, in Buber, 1967, p. 42). Feuerbach, however, did not pursue the idea, and Buber's priority, rightly, rests on the fact that he devoted his professional career, and a long list of works, to developing the implications of Feuerbach's revolutionary insight. For Buber, Feuerbach's insight was comparable to the Copernican revolution, opening up new vistas in understanding about the nature of human beings, and not only with profound epistemological relevance but also ontologically revealing. In Buber's hands, these implications were worked out in great detail (1961; 1965; 1970). Specifically, the essence of human being was relationship, and Buber gave ontological status to the "between"--a mysterious force, "presence," or creative milieu, in which the experience of being a self arises. Relations, then, not the relata, were primordial, if not actually primary. "Spirit is not in the I but between I and You" (Buber, 1970, p. 89). Only when "I" respond to "you," a fellow locus of presence or spirit, does my own being transcend the "oppressive force which emanates from objects" (Marcel, 1967). According to Buber, human beings have two responses available to the world: to relate to what is present either as an object ("I-it" relationship) or as another responsible being ("I-thou relationship). When we engage with the "other" as I-thou, relationship is mutually co-creating. The ontological status of the relationship, the "between," is emphasized by Buber when he refers to I-thou as "one word," representing a fundamental human reality of mutuality. Buber's claim that a concrete reality may be related to as either an "it" or a "thou" raises some profound implications for philosophy of mind-particularly the issue of "other minds." As Charles Hartshorne (1967) observed, there are at least three options available if we choose to relate to some creature as a "thou": (1) animistically, as a sentient and perhaps conscious individual, with a "soul" of its own (animistic-panpsychism); (2) as part of, or a manifestation of, such an individual, such as some member of a "cosmic organism" (e.g. Plotinian emanationist idealism, or Spinozistic monism); or (3) as a collection, or unity, of sentient, experiencing individuals (panexperientialism). Science is incapable of determining whether any of these options is valid (we lack a "Chalmers' consciousness meter"); Buber's "I-thou" relationship may well extend beyond human interactions. Epistemologically, empirical validation of consciousness would require a major shift to the kind of radical empiricism advocated by William James (1977)--where all contents of experience (and only those), not just sense-mediated data, are legitimate data for a science of consciousness. It would require also a radical ontology that allows for the intrinsic reality of consciousness or experience all the way down (de Quincey, 1994). The process philosophies of both Hartshorne (1991) and A. N. Whitehead (1979), advocating a panpsychist or panexperientialist ontology, are deeply compatible with this aspect of Buber's vision-replacing the notion of substance with dynamic relations. However, Buber is not always consistent about whether the relationship, the "betweenness," is fundamental, or whether, as logic seems to require, any relationship must always be between some pre-existing entities. Philip Wheelwright (1967, p. 75) sums up Buber's position in Between Man and Man, which appears to support this latter view: "By nature each person is a single being, finding himself in company with other single beings; to be single is not to be isolated, however, and by vocation each one is to find and realize his proper focus by entering into relationship with others." Jacques' Tripartite Intersubjectivity. The primacy of relations, of intersubjectivity, becomes most explicit in the more recent work of Francis Jacques-perhaps the leading contemporary dialogue philosopher and linguist in France. His self-proclaimed project is to "found the conception of subjectivity on relations between persons . . . treating the relation as a primordial reality, a reality which constitutes one of the very conditions of possibility of meaning and which is prior even to I and you" (Jacques, 1991, p. xii). For Jacques, as for Habermas, "the self is a function of the communicative interaction which occurs in dialogue" (1991). Jacques has developed a theory of "being-as-speaking" and of the "being-who-speaks." He parts company with most other intersubjectivists, by presenting a tripartite schema of the subject--not just "I" and "thou," but one that includes also "he/she." Self-identity, he says, results from integration of the three poles of any communication: "by speaking to other and saying I, by being spoken to by others as you, or by being spoken of by others as a he/she that the subject would accept as appropriate" (Jacques, 1991, p. xv). He takes issue with Buber who claimed that human beings become I and derive their interiority only when they encounter a you. Jacques argues that a human being becomes a personal self only when, in addition to I-thou, the "otherness" of an absent third-party, he/she, is acknowledged. Besides the I and you, self-identity requires "taking account of the third person and integrating it into the identificational process . . . For when one speaks of someone else, he/she is not the same as it--a point that neither Buber nor Gabriel Marcel, nor Levinas appreciated" (Jacques, 1991 p. xv). Jacques' main point may be encapsulated in the paradoxical notion of "presence of absence"--the felt presence of the departed other as an indispensable constituent of the sense of self. The absent third-party (not to be confused with third-person it) does not stand outside the intersubjective or interlocutive process. The other person is simply not present in the moment of dialogue, but has a decisive influence nonetheless. Just think, for instance, how even an absent spouse or boss hovers in the background of many conversations. In a paradoxical way, their absence is a felt presence. Jacques, with his tripartite interlocutive model of self-identity, has addressed head-on the subject-object "impasse" characteristic of modern philosophy of consciousness. In a comparable way, though from a different angle, Jürgen Habermas has developed a thoroughgoing intersubjectivity based on the centrality of language to consciousness. I will now spend a little more time on Habermas than I have on other theorists because, I believe, Habermas is arguably the most influential contemporary philosopher for whom the idea of intersubjectivity is central to his work. I will also explain why, despite Habermas' immensely valuable contribution to second-person, dialogic philosophy, his version of "intersubjectivity," relying on linguistic communities, still falls short of intersubjectivity as "engaged presence." Habermas: Language and Consciousness Building on Mead's view of the subject in Mind, Self & Society, and incorporating developmental ideas from Piaget and Kohlberg, Jürgen Habermas emphasizes that the process of individuation of the self depends on the development of a postconventional identity--a subject who simultaneously is shaped in intersubjective communicative action and who transcends the otherwise binding norms of that linguistic society. Although the claim of radical authenticity depends on the recognition (though not necessarily the acceptance) of others, by the imaginative act of projecting a "universal community of all possible alter egos" the subject authentically retains autonomy-remaining a true subject within a creative web of intersubjectivities: The idealizing supposition of a universalistic form of life, in which everyone can take up the perspective of everyone else and can count on reciprocal recognition by everybody, makes it possible for individuated beings to exist within a community--individualism as the flip-side of universalism (Habermas, 1992, p. 186). Habermas is pre-eminently concerned with the role of language in shaping who we are as human beings. But his concern is not limited to an analysis of the structure or grammar of language, to its propositional content--he is not a linguistic analyst. Habermas is concerned with the real-world speaking of language, to its impact on who we take ourselves to be, and on how we act in the world. He is hardly interested in the theory of language, but is emphatically concerned with the practice of language--with its performative function. Language engages speakers and hearers in such a way that both participate and risk themselves in communication. In the process, consciousness intersubjectively creates and reveals itself. We can identify three central elements of Habermas' work--the three "Ps": (1) emphasis on practice away from theory; (2) the public or intersubjective origin and role of language and meaning; and (3) the performative function of language. From Theory to Practice. Habermas is concerned to show that philosophy, to have any value and meaning, must engage with the world. Abstractions without the meat and muscle of practical action are little more than intellectual self-indulgence. Such philosophy can do nothing for us. In this earlier phase of his work, Habermas displays the deep influence of Western Marxism in his thought and political engagement. (Habermas was active in German student political action in the Sixties.) The Public Sphere. Later, Habermas reveals what has become a consistent theme throughout all his work: that language is first and foremost a public or social enterprise. At this stage, Habermas' central concern is political rather than philosophical (although in his work the two are never far apart). His focus is on working out an intellectual and practical basis for public discourse so that everyone, not just the bourgeois elite, would participate in effective control of public policy. Communicative Action. Implicit in his political stance of discourse in the public sphere is a philosophical insight that he later made far more explicit: Meaning is not dependent on the grammatical structures or private "monological" subjective intentions of a speaker's language; meaning is derived from interaction of intersubjective communication. Language and meaning unfold from the "dialogical" reciprocity of "I-speakers" and "you-listeners." The two most dominant influences on Habermas here are pioneer linguist-philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt and philosopher-psychologist George Herbert Mead. Language and meaning are products of the "public sphere," not the creation of individual, lone-operating subjects. Habermas' central concern is to argue that all language involves a performative function. That is, language does not merely describe the world but engages the subject with the world through the listener. Intersubjective Meaning. While Habermas agrees that meaning cannot be understood independently of the conditions of its occurrence, he denies that these conditions are determined exclusively by structures of power and dominance, as claimed by deconstructive postmodernists. Instead, Habermas argues, the conditions for "interpretant relations" (that is, meaning) are dependent on conditions of intersubjective communication oriented toward mutual understanding. This is a picture of language relations, and the consequent role of reason, very different from that of postmodernists such as Derrida (1967) and Foucault (1970). Instead of individual and separate subjects engaged in interminable power struggles, Habermas' theory of communicative action refers to communities of subjects who partially create each other, and therefore strive for mutual understanding. Reasoning, thus, becomes a public enterprise. In Postmetaphysical Thinking, Habermas observes that language performs three distinct, but intimately and invariably interconnected, functions: (1) a speaker comes to an understanding with (2) another person about (3) something in the world. In turn, these three functions of language correspond to three types of validity claims. In Habermas' theory, meaning is not a product of any "picture theory of language" (as early Wittgenstein believed in the Tractatus); it is not a description of a correspondences between words and facts or states of affairs. There is no independent subject unilaterally turning out "word pictures" that match some objective reality. Nor is meaning a matter of Humpty-Dumptyesque arbitrary choosing what words mean. Nor is meaning an indefinite and indeterminate deferral of différance, forever sliding beyond reach, so that nothing really has any meaning at all (as Derrida and his deconstructionist followers would have it). Rather, says Habermas, meaning is constituted in the shared speech-acts of a communicating community of mutual-determining, uncoerced subjects. Language, then, on this view, is a pragmatic, holistic act. Its smallest unit is not some disembodied or abstract sign, word or phoneme, but an utterance that involves three mutually interacting components--the speaker, the hearer, and the world in which they are situated. Each language utterance, or speech act, is like a token that the speaker offers to a listener (or community of listeners). This "token" expresses an experience of the world claimed to be true, right, and sincere by the speaker, and it may be either rejected or accepted by the hearer. In either case, the validity claims of "true," "right," and "sincere" can be tested by the community of speakers and hearers. It is here, in Habermas, where "intersubjective agreement" (through linguistic tokens) and "intersubjective co-creativity" (through shared experience) come together. The first is a foundation for consensual scientific knowledge established between communicating individual subjects (Velmans, 1992). The second is true intersubjective mutual beholding--where the experience of self, of consciousness, arises as a felt experience from the encounter. A final quote from Habermas sums up his intersubjective position: The ego, which seems to me to be given in my self-consciousness as what is purely my own, cannot be maintained by me solely through my own power, as it were for me alone--it does not "belong" to me. Rather, this ego always retains an intersubjective core because the process of individuation from which it emerges runs through the network of linguistically mediated interactions (Habermas, 1992, p. 170). The Missing Perspective: Why Intersubjectivity is Transparent In this paper, I have introduced key ideas of a handful of philosophers who have attempted to focus on what I take to be a conspicuous oversight in Western philosophy in general and in philosophy of mind in particular. With these few exceptions--such as psychologist George Herbert Mead, theologian Martin Buber, and contemporary scholars such as Jürgen Habermas in Germany and Francis Jacques in France--I know of no philosopher in the Western tradition who has systematically approached the problem of subject-world relation, and particularly the question of consciousness, by invoking the second-person perspective as an alternative to the first-person perspective of subjectivists and idealists, and the third-person perspective of the objectivists and materialists. (5) Because of his inclusion of the "interior-social (cultural)" in his detailed four-quadrants model, Ken Wilber (1995) should also be included as a scholar who recognizes the importance of dialogic relationship in any comprehensive study of consciousness. However, unlike Habermas, Jacques, Buber, or Mead, intersubjectivity is not a central concern for Wilber. The standard approaches to the study of consciousness have bifurcated along apparently irreconcilable methodologies derived, respectively, from Cartesian-inspired philosophy of the subject (first-person epistemology) and from Hobbesian-inspired philosophy of matter (third-person objects). In the first case, knowledge of the objective world remains problematic; in the second, knowledge of the knowing subject (of consciousness)--and therefore of all knowledge--is inexplicable and radically problematic. Hardly anyone, it seems, in philosophy of mind has been drawn to approach the study of consciousness from a second-person perspective (of mutually engaged subjects). For a long time, I have wondered why there is this glaring omission. We all use all three ways of knowing--objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity--in one form or another most of the time. We all deal with external material objects, we all feel what it is like to be a being from within, and we all participate and communicate with other human beings. But whereas, for centuries, both objectivity and subjectivity have been investigated as ways of knowing in Western science and philosophy, intersubjectivity has been ignored for the most part--particularly with reference to exploration of consciousness. Why? |
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