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Embodiment and Self-Awareness – Evans, Cassam and Husserl1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2018
Abstract
In recent years there has been a general attempt – inspired by P. F. Strawson – to naturalise Kant's notion of the transcendental self. The argument being that self-consciousness should refer to neither a kind of noumenal nor mental self but that the self-conscious subject must conceive of itself as an embodied entity, a person among persons that regards itself as an element of the objective order of the world. While Kant does not make room for the notion of an embodied transcendental self, this is where we need to go as our bodily awareness is central both for self-knowledge and the possibility of cognition and thus a transcendental condition for knowledge claims. In this paper I should like to single out Quassim Cassam's work Self and World to see whether such a position is tenable. Cassam's main claim is that we can only become aware of ourselves as subjects if we are at the very same time aware of ourselves as objects located in the spatio-temporal world. We could not be self-conscious and ascribe experiences to ourselves unless we are also aware of ourselves as a physical object among other physical objects in the world. The central claim is that when we self-refer we do not refer to two distinct entities, one possessing only mental, and the other possessing only physical features, rather we refer to a subject that is both mental and physical at the very same time. Awareness of ourselves qua subject is just awareness of ourselves qua object. This paper will focus on this claim alone and will ask whether it is tenable. The answer will be negative. Drawing on the work of Edmund Husserl, I shall argue that there is an inherent flaw in Cassam's position which he has inherited from Gareth Evans’ depiction of the self. The contention will be that our awareness of ourselves qua subject is not compatible with the awareness of ourselves qua object.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018
Footnotes
1
I should like to thank Steven Kupfer for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
References
2 Wittgenstein, L., The Blue and the Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 66 Google Scholar.
3 Wittgenstein, L., The Blue and the Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 408–9Google Scholar.
4 Cf. ibid., 67.
5 Anscombe, G.E.M.: ‘The First Person’ in Cassam, Q. (ed.) Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 154 Google Scholar. Shoemaker has taken up the distinction and argues that the word ‘I’ does refer albeit in a different way than it does in its use ‘as object’. He does not point to a private language argument, rather suggests that we can know our own present thoughts, attitudes and sensations in a way that is fundamentally different from the way we know of the mental states of other people or indeed ourselves as object of thoughts. The reason one is not presented to oneself ‘as an object’ in self-awareness is that self-awareness is not perceptual awareness, it is not that sort of awareness in which objects are presented’ (Shoemaker (1984):105. I am much in agreement with this view. See Alweiss, L., ‘Kant's Not so ‘Logical’ Subject’ in Harvard Review of Philosophy Vol. 21 (2014), 87–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Evans, G., Varieties of Reference, McDowell, J. (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 256 Google Scholar.
7 Ibid., 220–21.
8 Ibid., 222.
9 Once we realize that the subject is embodied Evans believes that he can show that ‘I’ thoughts are subject to both the generality constraint and Russell's principle as the ‘subject's capacity to locate himself in the objective spatial order is exploited’ (Evans, Varieties of Reference, 256). Evans concedes that there are however cases where misidentification is possible. We could for example imagine that our arm is hooked up with someone else's so when we say our arm is moving it is actually someone else's. However, Evans dismisses these kinds of error. If the subject is registering proprioceptive information from someone else's body without realizing it, and if she as a result does not know that her arm is moving, then she ‘does not know anything on this basis’ (ibid., 221). A certain kind of error is in place but one which ‘cannot be regarded as a mistake of identification’ (ibid., 188). I find it questionable whether it is IEM that makes I thoughts distinctive. However this is a topic for another paper.
10 G. Evans, Varieties of Reference, 100.
11 Ibid., 104.
12 Ibid., 222.
13 G. Evans, Varieties of Reference, 212.
14 Ibid., 213.
15 Cassam, Q., Self and World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 71 Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., 30.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 36.
19 Ibid., 29.
20 Cf. ibid, 53–4.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 47.
23 Cf. ibid., 46, 79.
24 Ibid., 48.
25 Ibid., 53.
26 Ibid., 30.
27 Ibid., 40.
28 Ibid., 198.
29 Ibid., 30.
30 Ibid., 72.
31 Ibid.
32 Cf. ibid., 60–71.
33 Husserl, E., Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy; Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Rojcewicz, R. and Schuwer, A. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), §36, 144–145 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Ibid., §40, 155.
35 Cf. Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, C. (London: Routledge, 1962), 93 Google Scholar. Merleau-Ponty therefore calls the lived body ‘a third genus of being’ (ibid., 350). He concludes: ‘I know myself only in ambiguity’ (ibid. 345).
36 In a beautifully written article on Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty illustrates how this ambiguous mode of existence, for example, shaking hands, makes intersubjectivity possible. ‘My right hand was present at the advent of my left hand's active sense of touch. It is in no different fashion that the other's body comes to life before me when I shake another man's hand or when I just look at it’ (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 168, translation slightly altered). With this prior to analogical reasoning, the other body arises out of inter-corporeity. The co-presence of the two hands, which are both felt (sentir) and feeling (sentant), is extended to the other person. There is an aesthesiological community which founds intersubjectivity and not reason, analogy or indeed communication.
37 Q. Cassam, Self and World, 95.
38 Cf. ibid., 72.
39 Evans, Varieties of Reference, 266.
40 Ibid. Cassam echoes this view when he observes: ‘According to some writers in this tradition [i.e. the ‘Continental’ tradition LA], in being intuitively aware of oneself as a bodily subject one is not thereby intuitively aware of this subject as what Sartre describes as ‘a thing among other things’ (ibid., 304). As with Schopenhauer's account of self-consciousness, the worry seems to be that there is a conflict between awareness of something qua subject and awareness of it as an object among objects, so the body which is presented subject of one's perceptions is a ‘phenomenal’ rather than an ‘objective’ body’ (Cassam, Self and World, 9). Cassam rejects Sartre's view ‘about the body that ‘either is a thing among other things, or it is that by which things are reveals to me. But it cannot be both at the same time’ (ibid., 56).
41 Evans, Varieties of Reference, 241.
42 It is important to note that Evans does not exclude the possibility of misidentification. In a similar way as it is possible to misidentify our body (we only need to think of a subject linked via electrodes to another body or body transfer illusions such as the rubber hand illusion) it is also possible to misidentify ourselves in the past. My brain may be linked up with that of another and I mistake the other brain's memory with mine. Yet according to Evans all these instances do not question the way we normally make judgments. ‘This possibility merely shows the possibility of an error it does not show that ordinary judgments of the kind in question are identification-dependent’ (Evans, Varieties of Reference, 221). Mistakes are possible, however the point is that in ordinary memory judgments we do not say: 1) that man was in front of a burning tree 2) I am that man (ibid., 242). If we were to argue that these instances show that the subject cannot know whether her arm is outstretched on the basis of proprioceptive sensations, then we have to conclude that she cannot know anything on this basis (Cf. ibid., 188; Cassam Self and World, 66).
43 Cf. Evans, Varieties of Reference, 237.
44 Cf. Cassam, Self and World, 68.
45 Ibid., 71.
46 Ibid., 68.
47 Ibid., 71.
48 Whether IEM is actually crucial for our awareness of a self is something I leave undiscussed, what matters at this stage is merely that Cassam clearly believes it is cf. Cassam (1997): 61ff.
49 ‘Das Erfahren des Physischen (der Objekte als res extensa, als raumzeitlich realer) setzt waltende Leiblichkeit voraus’, Husserl, E., Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität; Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 433 Google Scholar.
50 Cf. E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, 166; cf. also cited by Cassam Self and World, 53.
51 Cassam, Self and World, 53.
52 Husserl, E., Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Cairns, D. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, §51,143 / 113.
53 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, §25, 105.
54 Ibid., §25, 105.
55 It should be noted that Husserl believes that we should never equate the pure Ego with the lived body (cf. Husserl Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, §25, 105). This is however a topic for another paper.
56 Cassam, Self and World, 72.
57 Anscombe, G.E.M., ‘The First Person’ in Cassam, Q. (ed.) Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 152 Google Scholar.
58 Evans, Varieties of Reference, 216 n21.
59 Ibid.
60 I find it hard to understand how we can be disposed to this if we are body blind from birth, i.e. do not have a sense of having a body and lack any proprioceptive and kinaesthetic sense; I can understand the position more if there is a sudden loss of our body sense as we could still recall the sense of hereness we had in the past or it could ‘make him wonder, for example, why he is not receiving information in the usual ways’ (Evans, Varieties of Reference, 125).
61 Indeed the thrust of the discussion focuses on the fact that we have a egocentric notion of space which Evans attributes to our proprioceptive and kineasthetic sense.
62 Evans, Varieties of Reference, 169.
63 Ibid., 152.
64 Ibid., 216.
65 Ibid., 165f.
66 Ibid., 152–3.
67 Ibid., 164–8.
68 Ibid., 169.
69 Cf. ibid. 153.
70 Ibid., 153–4.
71 O'Brien, L., Self-Knowing Agents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 Ibid., 43.
73 I leave here aside the question whether we can make sense of this sense of ‘hereness’ if we were no longer embodied. How can reference be fixed in the absence of embodiment? Evans tries to avoid that question by claiming that we still remember what it was like to be embodied; whether that is sufficient to counter Anscombe's challenge is questionable.