Pre-reflective Consciousness Sartre and contemporary philosophy of mind
Edited by Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer, and Clara Bravo Morando
» Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK
Contents
Notes on contributors Preface
Introduction: back to pre-reflectivity SOFIA MIGUENS, GERHARD PREYER, AND CLARA BRAVO MORANDO
PARTI Foundation of the mental
1 Why should we think that self consciousness
is non-reflective? MANFRED FRANK
2 is subjectivity first-personal?
TOMIS KAPITAN
3 Degrees of self-presence: rehabilitating Sartre's accounts
of pre-reflective self-consciousness and reflection KENNETH WILLIFORD
4 Sartre on pre-reflective consciousness: the adverbial
interpretation MARK ROWLANDS
5 Pre-reflective and reflective time-consciousness:
the shortcomings of Sartre and Husserl and a possible way out GERHARD SEEL
First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer and Clara Bravo Morando, editorial and selection matter, individual chapters, the contributors. The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers, Trademark notice Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Lilrary Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pre-reflective consciousness : Sartre and contemporary philosophy of mind / edited by Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer and Clara Bravo Morando. -l [edition). pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Philosophy of mind. 2. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1905-1980. 3. Consciousness. 4. Subjectivity. I. Miguens, Sofia, editor. BD418.3.P74 2015 1282092—dc23 2015013241
ISBN 978-1-138-92581-6 (bk) ISBN 978-1-315-68114-6 (ebk)
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Printed and bound in the United States of America by Publishers Graphics, LLC on sustainably sourced paper.
Contents vii
16 Sartre, enactivism, and the bodily nature of pre-reflective consciousness KATHLEEN WIDER
17 The body is structured like a language:
reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness DOROTHEE LEGRAND
407
18 Basic forms of pre-reflective self-consciousness:
a developmental perspective ANNA CIA UNICA
19 Ego disorders in psychosis: dysfunction of pre-reflective
self-awareness? ANDREAS HEINZ
439
PART V Historical philosophical background
453
20 Radical Epokhè on Sartre's concept of "pure reflection"
RAOUL MOATI
455
21 Sartre and Kierkegaard on consciousness and subjectivity
IKER GARCIA PLAZAOLA
476
22 Invisible ghosts: Les jeux sont faits and disembodied
consciousness JEREMY EKBERG
Index
vi Contents
PART II
I-knowledge, perception, and introspection
6 The zero point and I TERRY HORGAN AND SHAUN NICHOLS
7 A sketch of Sartre's error theory of introspection
MATTHEW C. ESHLEMAN
8 A pebble at the bottom of the water: Sartre and Cavell
on the opacity of self-knowledge PIERRE-JEAN RENAUDIE
9 Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness? Consciousness
and self-awareness in Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego DANIEL R. RODRÍGUEZ NAVAS
10 Perception and imagination: a Sartrean account
URIAH KRIEGEL
PART III Pre-reflectivity disputed
11 Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness? About
Sartre and Brentano ERIC TREMAULT
12 Sartre's non egological theory of consciousness
JOSHUA TEPLEY
13 The "of" of intentionality and the "of" of acquaintance
ROCCO J. GENNARO
14 A "quasi-Sartrean" theory of subjective awareness
JOSEPH LEVINE
PART IV Body as a whole, the other, and disorder of the mental
15 Pain: Sartre and Anglo-American philosophy of mind
KATHERINE J. MORRIS
7 A sketch of Sartre's error theory of introspection
Matthew C. Eshleman
We must not make of reflection a mysterious and infallible power, or believe that everything that reflection attains is indubitable because it is attained by reflection.
(Sartre, 2004a, p. 21)
Only a pure reflective consciousness can discover the For-itself reflected-on in its reality
(Sartre, 1956, p. 163)
While it was true in 1987 that "there were] few extended studies of the topic of introspection" (D.S.M. 1987), the same cannot be said today. A growing body of monographs and peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of introspection (e.g., its function, epistemic warrant, ontological status, and the methodological role it might play in the study of consciousness) have burgeoned over the last 15 years or so in both philosophy (e.g., Gertler, 2001, 2003; Schwitzgebel, 2004, 2008; Byrne, 2005; Elshof, 2005; Gallagher and Sørensen, 2006; Hurlbert and Schwitzgebel, 2007; Kriegel and Horgan, 2007; Fernández, 2009, 2013; Reuter, 2010; Smithies and Stoljar, 2012; Butler, 2013; Kriegel, 2013) and psychology (e.g., Jack and Rocpstorff, 2003, 2004; Hatfield, 2005; Price and Murat, 2005; Piccinini, 2009; Jäkel and Schreiber, 2013). This extraordinary revival of analysis and debate over introspection can, of course, be interpreted in numerous ways. As Matthew Boyle (2012) notes, "whether the story of this attraction is that of a doomed obsession from which self-respecting philosophers must break free, or of a comedy of errors that is bound to end in a happy reconciliation—this depends on who gets to tell the tale." These allegories of a "doomed obsession" and a "comedy of errors" parody two ends of a dialectical battlefield and potentially flatten a more complex spectrum of stories that one might tell. The following four interpretations of the introspection renaissance put a little flesh on these bare allegorical bones, and they help to measure the spectrum of positions that frame the aims of this chapter.
First, intransigent local skeptics with an exclusionary alliance to thirdperson method, e.g., behaviorists and logical behaviorists, may argue
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that cognitive science has reached a temporary impasse and that, for a momentary lack of any better ideas, doomed obsessions with introspection have, unfortunately, returned. These local skeptics say: What we need is an absolutely non-introspective approach to cognitive science. Study the brain, study what people do-but don't take people's introspective reports about what they do, perceive, or "think" very seriously. Successful arguments that show such reports are too unreliable and unverifiable to assist in empirical research have been around for a long time: see, e.g, the now classic criti cisms developed by Comte (1830) and the well-known contemporary case made by Nisbett and Wilson (1977). Alas, arguments do not easily cure doomed obsessions: perhaps only therapy will do. Short of that, wayward obsessions shall pass only after cognitive science emerges out of adolescence into maturity, and new generations of philosophers and scientists grow up in a new theoretical climate. One should, at most, enter the argumentative fray to put out smoldering fires. The sooner our doomed obsessions with introspection pass, the better off cognitive science will be
Second, open-minded general skeptics, e.g., Eric Schwitzgebel (2008, 2011; Hurlbert and Schwitzgebel, 2007), may interpret the recent revived interest in introspection as highlighting an apparently insurmountable joint impasse. "If there simply are no better methods, the scientific study of consciousness may prove wholly impossible in principle: vacuous without introspective report, intractably conflictual with it" (Hurlbert and Schwitzgebel, 2007, p. 5). Of course, a lot rides on the perceived lack of any "better methods." A Pyrrhonist skeptic keeps an open mind and does not insist that no such better method shall ever be forthcoming, only that none has been discovered so far. After all, the general skeptic's attitude results from a nonskeptical commitment to the simultaneous unreliability and inescapability of introspection (Schwitzgebel, 2008, p. 246; 2011, p. 118). Consequently, such skeptics live parasitic lives that require optimistic hosts for sustenance. Is this relationship symbiotic? While these skeptics rehearse well-worn challenges to the reliability of introspection, their frequently corrective diag. noses entail that there is (or at least that they still believe there may be) an element of truth delivered by introspection (Schwitzgebel, 2002, 2004). This opens a door to optimism.
Third, hesitant optimists like Uriah Kriegel (2013) cautiously defend introspection and the role it should play in the study of consciousness. True, the current state of affairs is not, in some key areas, particularly satisfactory. Hesitant optimists, nonetheless, interpret the revived interest in introspection as indicating progress, or at least as an initial step in the right direction. While introspection was for a long time scen to be overly unreliable, the cautious optimist argues that we have asked too much of introspection. If we can work towards a "hesitant defense" of "introspective minimalism" (Kriegel 2013), we may be able to pave a way forward--one small step at a time. Cognitive science requires a provisional, practical acceptance of introspection: at least when it comes to certain aspects of our conscious
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experience, it remains entirely unclear how cognitive scientists could even begin to know what to study without first-person reports (Sartre 2012, p. 129; Overgaard 2006, p. 231). So understood, introspection can provide insights in the context of discovery; but we should leave questions of justification to science (Kriegel 2013). Perhaps the best approach to consciousness cautiously sorts through the comedy of errors for a few nuggets of "inner" truth, without which cognitive science cannot progress to its full potential
Fourth, phenomenologists, i.e., contemporary philosophers nurt large measure on a diet of Husserlian thought, and who drawn
thought, and who draw methodological sustenance from later figures in the tradition, sometimes inhabit a fourth category: that of robust optimists (e.g., Lawler, Zahavi, and Gallagher).' They are the least surprised by the current renaissance in studies of introspec tion: after all, it has been, necessarily, just a matter of time. Until cognitive science properly coordinates first-person and third-person methods in the study of consciousness, certain inherent limits shall remain unsurpassable. Unfortunately, mainstream cognitive science, as currently practiced, cannot explicitly recognize the transcendental dimension of conscious experience; hence, it fails to recognize its most distinctive aspect: subjectivity. However, unlike hesitant optimists who accept that descriptive phenomenology can play an important role in the context of discovery, robust optimists maintain that the transcendental structures of consciousness render experience possible; hence, first-person analyses of these structures shall always take logical priority over and ground-every third-person approach.
Faced with these options, which should we choose? This chapter advocates for a version of robust optimism committed to the following two claims: first, the full advance of cognitive science requires coordination between first-person and third-person methods (Chalmers 2010); second, since that coordination is necessary, one's preferred phenomenological method should be compatible with non-reductive attempts to "naturalize" our understanding of pre-reflective conscious experience (Gallagher 2012b). With that said, this chapter makes its case indirectly. Since phe nomenologists claim that we are all naturally bad at introspection, rather than meeting questions of epistemic reliability and operation head on, it sketches a topology of common errors that occur when we reflect upon our own conscious experience. By systematically showing how introspection goes wrong, when attempting to discern the essential structures that make conscious experience possible, I hope to encourage pessimists and hesitant optimists alike that what Sartre calls "pure reflection" can reliably go right.
This would be an overly ambitious task, were it not for the following plausible hypothesis. Most, if not all, introspective errors share a common core: namely that, when we think about our own conscious experience, we frequently try to adopt the perspective of another person. In our efforts to gain objective purchase upon ourselves we attempt to view ourselves as others view us, as if we could adopt a third-person perspective upon our
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own personal experience. Doing so, however, requires standing outside one's own perspective, which is a little like pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps. Sartre names this bootstrapping kind of effort "accessory" or "impure reflection," which consists in an abortive effort on the part of the for-itself to be another while remaining itself" (1956, p. 161). Otherwise put, impure reflection amounts to the failed effort to stand outside of oneself and adopt a third-person perspective upon one's essentially firstperson experience.
That impure reflection fails to achieve a genuinely third-person perspec tive upon itself should not be especially controversial in today's philosophical climate, at least not for those who accept that pre-reflective conscious experience involves an essentially first-person dimension. Even so, a puzzle remains. Those who recognize the impossibility of taking a third-person perspective on one's own first-person conscious experience, as one experiences it, are faced with the necessity of explaining the alternative: what can it mean to take a first-person perspective on one's own first-person perspec tive? In response to this question, I argue for two claims: first, that such a proposition doesn't mean anything coherent, since doing so is impossible; and, second, that the very attempt to take a "point of view" upon one's own conscious experience motivates many—if not most, or even all-errors made in our introspective efforts to understand consciousness better. To Kant's complaint that philosophers have for too long mixed empirical with transcendental claims, Sartre effectively adds that philosophers almost inevitably muddle the first-person vs third-person distinction when theorizing about (embodied) consciousness.
The rest of this chapter unfolds in five parts and a conclusion. The first part, Why Sartre? makes some general remarks that explain why Sartre motivates this project and it also serves as a programmatic introduction to Sartre's earliest philosophical works. The second part, Basic distinctions, provides a description of being absorbed in reading good fiction as a basis upon which to characterize several standard distinctions accepted by most phenomenologists. The third part, A topological sketch of introspec tive errors, sketches a general error theory that maps the central ways in which our thinking about thinking go wrong. The fourth part, The problem of purifying reflection, raises a challenge to Sartre's pivotal distinction between pure and impure reflection, necessary to showing how reflection can go right, and it offers a defense. The fifth part, An insuperable ambiguity, remarks on an insuperable ambiguity that is constitutive of selfawareness and that can, upon reflection, make self-awareness seem either paradoxical (Woodruff Smith, 1986) or mysterious (Kriegel, 2003).
Why Sartre? The choice of Sartre (instead of Husserl) as the subject of this chapter may seem unfortunate. Sartre rarely discusses methodology in any significant
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detail, his jargon can be impenetrable, and his views on consciousness appear to be highly revisionary and, hence, controversial. Consequently, looking to Sartre for resources to develop an error theory of introspection may seem like a dubious task that needs justification. Six points and an observation comprise this justification and will also serve as a programmatic introduction to Sartre's early philosophical writings.
First, Sartre's texts up to but not including Being and Nothingness read much more like rigorous academic philosophy, and they follow the spirit of Husserl's (1913) phenomenological method very closely. Sartre's incisive analyses based on astute descriptions shine through in these early works, and they sharply contrast his obscure language and hyperbolic claims that appear rather suddenly in Being and Nothingness. Thus, those sympathetic to careful applications of the spirit of Husserl's method, but who are understandably unwilling to suffer through the semantic jungle of Being and Nothingness, will find much more clarity in Sartre's earliest works. Of course, many of the contributions in this volume reinforce this point.
Second, Sartre read a great deal of research psychology from the nine teenth and early twentieth centuries (1936a, 1936b, 1939, 1940), and he was acutely aware of the debates over the epistemic reliability of introspec tion. He offers a rather weaker view of the epistemic reliability of claims derived from purifying reflection. On the one hand, while he holds that pure reflection can achieve apodictic certainty (2004a, pp. 10, 15, 1956, pp. 84, 156), the range of claims for which such certainty holds turns out to be very limited, namely, it holds only for claims about the stream-ofconscious experience (but not its objects) in the instantaneous moment. Yet such claims are sufficient to supply the evidentiary basis for situated, transcendental arguments from which to derive the basic structures of conscious human experience. On the other hand, he emphasizes that all claims about transcendent objects i.e., any intentional object for consciousness that is not essentially part of the stream of consciousness itself, even with regard to how such an object merely seems) cannot be trusted. In fact, if he goes too far in any one direction, it could plausibly be in the direction of unreliability. He includes the empirical ego or psyche in the category of transcendent objects, and, consequently, he maintains that our observations about our own empirical ego-including claims about our character and explanations for our motives, etc.--are, more often than not, mistaken.
Third, whereas Husserl took many transcendental claims to be true in an absolute sense (i.e., necessarily true for any conscious activity whatso ever, whether that of God or a dog). Sartre, at least in his better moments, employs a weaker sense of situated transcendental claims. On the basis of phenomenological descriptions, e.g., of our ability to imagine non-exist ent future states of affairs, Sartre transcendentally deduces various ontological structures that must obtain, as a matter of factual necessity, given
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the truth of those descriptions (see, e.g., Sartre 2004b, pp. 179-188). Insofar as Sartre establishes merely factual necessities, this entails that, for a being which enjoys a categorically different kind of experience, its ontological structures, as transcendentally entailed by those experiences, would, presumably, differ. Needless to say, Sartre's weaker view of situated transcendental claims is more straightforwardly compatible with a nonreductive approach to cognitive science (Gallagher 2012b). In fact, some cognitive scientists have already begun to adopt a similar transcendental method.
Fourth, even though Sartre is highly critical of psychology at the turn of the century, he accepts that a purely descriptive, first-person method needs to be supplemented by empirical research. This point comes out most clearly in the last two-thirds of The Imaginary, where Sartre abandons pure description and draws heavily, albeit critically, upon inductive inferences grounded in studies made by nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century psychologists like Galton, Binet, Messer, Flach, Tain, Leroy, and Spaier.? Sartre's appeal to such studies may be surprising, and while Sartre scholars can debate whether such sympathies were long-lasting, I think this appeal should come as a relief, for it helps to widen slightly the already open door to collaboration between phenomenology and cognitive science. In short, Sartre's early works make a better ally for those interested in a rapprochement between phenomenology and cognitive science than is generally supposed.
Fifth, all of Sartre's early philosophical works include sustained analyses of the various ways in which we go wrong when we reflect and report on our conscious experiences. As Jonathan Webber (2004) observes,
throughout The Imaginary, Sartre is concerned not only to refute this (perception-based) view of the mind, but also to understand the pressures that have pushed theorists in its direction. The acceptability of (Sartre's] alternative model will, at least in part, be a function of how well it dissipates these pressures or can explain why they should be resisted.
(p. xx)
My efforts below aim to sketch what "dissipates these pressures" in a programmatic way that goes beyond The Imaginary but also draws upon Sartre's other early works up to and including Being and Nothingness.
Sixth, despite all of Being and Nothingness' liabilities, in that text Sartre offers several astute analyses of how philosophers frequently mix claims derived from first-person introspection with third-person or quasi-thirdperson perspectives. These analyses provide good explanations for why several classic philosophical problems arise and remain unresolved. To take one relevant example, Sartre argues that the "false problem" of understanding how mind and body interrelate is due to the fact that people have
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wanted to link my consciousness of objects to the body of the Other" (1956, p. 305). Otherwise put, "I try to unite my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others" (1956, p. 303). Perhaps, in an analogous way, contemporary philosophers make a similar kind of mistake when discussing the so-called "mind-brain" and "body-body" problems. They try to unite their first-person conscious experience not with their own lived body, but with a brain that they've never directly experienced but have only studied via anatomy and neurophysiology (i.e., from a third-person perspec tive). These are two fundamentally different orders of description, or so it will be argued. If this criticism is correct, many discussions of the so-called mind-brain, mind-body, and body-body problems ride on a basic confusion between two irreducibly different orders of description.
A final observation: a complete account of Sartre's error theory of introspection would require taking into consideration both its existential and technical aspects. Whereas the existential aspects motivate errors, the technical aspects explain their theoretical shapes. These two dimensions of error can and should be kept separate; indeed, Sartre did not strongly press the motivational aspects of error until Being and Nothingness. Otherwise put, even though in Being and Nothingness Sartre maintains that discomfiting aspects of life motivate many, if not most, theoretical errors, the existential aspects of these errors are generally too controversial to meet any widely acceptable justificatory standard. Thus, Sartre scholars will make better inroads into contemporary debates surrounding the philosophy of mind by emphasizing and explaining the technical aspects or shapes of Sartre's error theory as a propaedeutic to Sartre's account of embodied consciousness.
Basic distinctions Ordinarily we easily distinguish between explicitly self-directed experiences and lived experiences. Examples of engrossment, like reading good fiction, provide paradigmatic examples of the former. As one becomes imaginatively absorbed in the details of a captivating novel, every explicit sense of oneself as reading entirely disappears. One imagines the poplar trees, a blood-stained white coat, the axe grooves in the dirt; one feels trepidation and then horror at the tangled body, suddenly headless ... and then empathy and sorrow for the parent's loss, as if the fictional victim were one's own child. When engrossed, the story becomes the focal aspect of experience, and, correlatively, the contours of one's body along the couch, the faint music from the other room, fade into an increasingly indeterminate, unat tended background. Something similar, but not identical, happens to one's explicit sense of self during engrossment.
In sharp contrast, if someone enters the room and asks, "What are you doing?" attention naturally shifts from the story to one's experience of reading it. Engrossed experience comes to an end and (in response to the
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question) reflection upon one's current conscious activity begins: "I am reading an amazing book about the South at the turn of the century, where a young white girl was raped and gruesomely murdered by an elderly white farmer. An innocent young black teenager was falsely accused and then lynched before the trial ended." Only upon reflection does one's sense of being a discrete agent of an activity, possessing an experience, become explicit. Only then can one make the following kinds of distinctions, organized here in five points.
First, most people, except the self-obsessed, spend considerably more time living life (pre-reflectively) than (reflectively) thinking about the life that one lives. This suggests that explicit self-awareness arises in specific contexts. Five common (but not comprehensive) cases motivate reflection: (1) When environmental anomalies interrupt implicit expectations, e.g. when something goes wrong (like the car won't start or there's no hot water in the shower), this can motivate reflective efforts to understand and integrate such anomalies into our lived experience. (2) When we learn new physical activities (e.g., dancing or sewing) we initially tend to reflect upon what to do while trying to do it, as opposed to spontaneously performing it. (3) When we feel like someone is watching us, we frequently experience explicit self-consciousness. (4) When we puzzle through major life decisions, this tends to motivate reflection over our motives and reasons for various possible choices. (5) Finally, most relevantly, when we theorize about consciousness we tend to reflect upon our pre-reflective conscious experience in our efforts to understand ourselves better.
Second, reflection typically does not discover anything genuinely new (Sartre, 1956, p. 155) about itself qua reflected upon. One does not have an anonymous pre-reflective experience, e.g., "someone is reading" and then infer from (or discover upon the basis of) that anonymous experience that
This suggests that reflection renders implicit aspects of pre-reflective experience explicit. Otherwise put, in reflection we recognize what we pre-reflectively already implicitly comprehend (Sartre, 1956, pp. 155-156), namely that we were enjoying a lived reading experience." It follows, then, that reflective consciousness is not surprised by what it renders explicit (Sartre, 1956, pp. 155-156)-e.g., by the fact that I am reading. More strongly put, if reflection makes explicit what one already implicitly comprehends, reflection never discovers anything genuinely new or surprising about its pre-reflective experience."
Third, prior to reflection, while engrossed, no explicit or genuine positing of oneself (qua agent) as distinct from one's activity (of reading) as distinct from the object (the story) takes place. Insofar as these relations remain implicit, so too do various distinctions that one might make about them. This raises a thorny question about what happens in the process of making implicit aspects of conscious experience explicit (see below). The point here, however, is that one's implicit sense of self-awareness contrasts with explicit, reflective self-awareness in four ways. (A couple of these differences
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require justification that goes beyond description and must be stated here without argument.) Unlike explicit self-awareness that can operate as a kind of voluntary "self-observation," intrinsic self-awareness is (1) non-voluntary, (2) non-observational; (3) non-inferential; and (4) non-intentional. What follows amplifies each of these four points.
Implicit self-awareness is non-voluntary. It takes no effort. It's not some thing that we deliberately will, and it always seems to accompany our prereflective conscious experience. Second, it is non-observational. It does not require second-order, reflective acts to observe and, hence, constitute it. Rather, implicit self-awareness makes "self-observation" in the reflective sense possible (Sartre, 1956, p. lii). Thus, reflective acts do not cause or lead to self-awareness; they merely make implicit self-awareness explicit Third, it's non-inferential, insofar as it is unmcdiated by secondary acts. We generally do not have anonymous experiences and then, on that basis, infer possession of them. Rather, we experience implicit self-awareness as inescapably built into our pre-reflective experience, not as added on. Finally, implicit self-awareness does not require doubling intentionality. Otherwise put, the best theoretical explanation for implicit self-awareness should not posit twofold intentional content, i.e., an inner representation of self and an outer representation of the world. (This last point requires amplification and justification, given below.)
Fourth, we can abstractly distinguish between two dependent parts (or moments) of pre-reflective conscious experience: (1) non-positional selfawareness-what I have been calling "implicit self-awareness, and (2) positional acquaintance with an intentional object. Unlike the non-positional dimension of self-awareness, our positional grasp of intentional objects frequently (not necessarily) includes predication. For example, we prereflectively know that the boy (the subject) in the story is falsely accused of murder (the predicate). In contrast, it will be argued below, our imaginary terror does not, at the pre-reflective level, form an object of experience at all. Rather, it's a constitutive feature of that which illuminates intentional objects as meaningful.
If correct, our account of "what it is like to be acquainted with an object should sharply differ from the kind of account required by our description of the object with which we are acquainted. For example, it is one thing to describe the boy's response to the false accusations (in the novel) and wholly another to describe "what it is like to live imaginatively through the boy's terror at the false accusations (and yet still another to give an account of actual lived terror, e.g., what it is actually like to be falsely accused in a racist context on pain of death). This suggests that we should not straightfor wardly align pre-reflective consciousness with the first-person perspective. Rather, pre-reflective consciousness includes both a first-person dimension (implicit self-awareness of "what it is like to experience an object), and a proto third-person dimension (acquaintance with the intentional object experienced).15
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Fifth, locating the first and third-person dimensions of perspectivity within pre-reflective consciousness indicates an insuperable ambiguity, to be further discussed in the conclusion. Whereas pre-reflective consciousness enjoys implicit self-awareness that does not explicitly posit itself as a subject of experience, in reflecting upon pre-reflective self-consciousness one can simultaneously feel like observer and observed, an observer-observed," so to speak, and this constitutes a truly unique experience. We experience nothing in the world that is at all or in any way like this: nothing else gives rise to this peculiar observer-observed feel. Although the unusual character of this feel motivates philosophers to describe self-awareness as either paradoxical or mysterious, this chapter concludes that the peculiarity of implicit self-awareness made explicit is best characterized as ontologically (and not merely cpistemically) ambiguous.
Finally reflection modifies (but does not necessarily distort) pre-reflective experience. Two qualitative aspects typically characterize this modification: (1) an explicit sense of ownership that the recent and current experiences reflected upon are mine and (2) an explicit sense of agency that I am the source of my activity, e.g., reading. Although reflection can involve the kind of doubling noted above, i.e., the simultaneous observerobserved feel, pure reflection is best characterized as amplifying that about which we are always already implicitly aware. Since that implicit awareness never includes being an object for ourselves, the peculiar observer-observed feel (noted above) amounts to a special kind of illusion (discussed below). Consequently, Sartre adds (3), that there are two kinds of reflection. On the one hand, impure reflection both modifies and distorts (by doubling) that upon which it reflects and, hence, it adds more than evidence serves. On the other hand, purifying reflection merely amplifies or makes explicit what is already implicitly comprehended (prior to reflection).
A topological sketch of introspective errors On the basis of these observations the following preliminary distinctions have been drawn: (1) pre-reflective conscious experience vs non-conscious objects of experience; (2) non-positional vs positional moments of prereflective conscious experience; (3) pre-reflective conscious experience vs reflective conscious experience; (4) implicit self-awareness vs explicit reflective self-awareness; and (5) impure vs pure reflection. These distinctions provide the basis for a nearly comprehensive list, as found in the work of Sartre, of all of the kinds of errors made when we reflect upon conscious experience:!?
(1)
The projection error. Sometimes we illicitly project aspects of reflective consciousness on to pre-reflective consciousness. Sartre does not label this error as such, but he describes it in several places (2004b, pp. 52, 69; 2004a, pp. 10, 14, 17, 27).
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(2) The reification error. Sometimes qualities of objects for consciousness
are applied to conscious experience itself (1956, pp. 103, 163, 206; 1967, p. 127). Since the primary objects for conscious experience are most frequently material objects, this misleads us into attributing predicates suitable for material objects to our conscious experience.
(Sartre most commonly calls this error bad faith.) (3) The illusion of immanence: A subspecies of the reification error leads us
mistakenly to attribute spatial qualities to consciousness, as if it were like a receptacle that contains ideas, representations, and psychic objects (2004b, pp.5, 53, 87, 138). The warping of thought: Sometimes when we think we are describing some aspect of conscious experience we surreptitiously introduce claims based on subtle but misleading analogies; Sartre calls this the warping of thought (2004b, pp. 116-117). The illusion of the primacy of knowledge: Sometimes we confuse claims produced by positional observations for aspects of non-positional self-awareness (1956, p. liv). This leads us mistakenly to characterize pre-cognitive aspects of experience as cognitive (1956, p.x). The standpoint error: Most of the time when we reflect upon our conscious experience, in our effort to gain objective purchase upon our selves, we try to take a point of view" upon our viewpoint (1956, pp. 43, 155, 161). We attempt to adopt pseudo third-person perspec tive on our essentially first-person experience.
(6)
The projection error involves a confusion of the essential struc reflective acts with those of unreflective acts" (2004a, p. 17). Descartes' cogito offers the most famous instance of the projection error. In charac terizing Descartes' mistake, Sartre follows Husserl and distinguishes prereflective doubt from reflective doubt. Whereas pre-reflective doubt occurs spontaneously (e.g., when one suddenly doubts that a coil of rope in the shadows is what it seems to be, namely a snake), reflective doubt occurs deliberately (e.g., in the application of a method of inquiry). Thus, prereflective doubt only concerns intentional objects it cannot doubt its own
e due to its essential object orientation whereas reflective doubt attempts, but necessarily fails, to doubt its existence. So understood, when Descartes arrives at his famous observation every time I am thinking, I exist (1637, Discourse IV)—he does so via reflective doubt that renders implicit self-awareness explicit.18
In arriving at the cogito, Descartes makes two separate (but related) errors. Descartes mistakenly concludes (1) that the "T" resides at the level of pre reflective consciousness (the projection error) and (2) that thinking is an attribute of a non-extended substance (a conceptual variation of the reification error). With regards to (2), Descartes hypostasizes selfawareness into an ego substance, qua source of thought, and then pro jects it into pre-reflective consciousness. In this way, Descartes confuses
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pre-reflective consciousness, which does the thinking, with the reflective level of consciousness, which constitutes the ego. Otherwise put, "the (reflective) consciousness that says 'I think' is precisely not the (pre-reflecLive] consciousness that thinks" (2004a, p. 10).
This analysis motivates Sartre's observation that "the reason why Descartes moved from the Cogito to the idea of thinking substance is that he believed that the I and think' are on the same level" (2004a, p. 14/34). In projecting a reified ego into the heart of consciousness, Descartes characterizes thought as an attribute of a non-extended substance and, in so doing, unnecessarily multiplies theoretical entities. Sartre's parsimonious alternative shows why the introduction of any sort of thinker/thought, subject/ object, or substance/attribute distinction into pre-reflective consciousness not only generates unnecessary theoretical complexity, but also that it tends to leave the structure of implicit self-awareness unexplained. Sartre reaches his minimalist view on both descriptive and argumentative grounds.
On descriptive grounds: when we reflect on pre-reflective consciousness, in a purifying way, we don't find anything in or behind conscious experience, Otherwise put, Sartre's account parallel's G. E. Moore's (1903) account of consciousness as diaphanous. As Kenneth Williford helpfully puts it,
consciousness is phenomenologically diaphanous: one is aware of the objects and their qualities; there seems to be nothing literally in con sciousness or behind it, and nothing between it and its objects. Still, it is distinguishable. The consciousness of an object is not (typically) the object of that consciousness.
(Williford, 2004, p. 149)
This way of putting matters suggests that Hume rightly saw that the kind of self putatively discovered" and frequently posited to account for personal unity amounts to an illusion (based on reification). However, in pointing out this illusion, Hume was looking for the self in the wrong place" (Woodruff Smith, 1986, p. 149). From the fact that Hume could not discover a self in introspection, Hume mistakenly supposed that the self must be part of the content of experience. What Hume plausibly failed to appreciate is that self-awareness is built into pre-reflective conscious experience in such a way that it does not-even cannot represent itself to itself. (An argum this claim returns below.)
To be sure, reflection upon implicit self-awareness often generates a curious switching phenomenon. Like the well-known duck-rabbit optical illusion that sometimes looks like a duck and sometimes looks like a rabbit, yet cannot look simultaneously like both, a similar shifting can arise when we reflect upon conscious experience. When grasped reflectively, it can appear either diaphanously (and seem like nothing) or opaquely (and seem like something). This switching phenomenon forms two horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, like Descartes, in making itself into an observed object,
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consciousness arguably reifies itself into something that it is not. For in rep resenting itself as an object, it cannot grasp itself as a subject. On the other hand, sometimes, like Hume, when you go looking for yourself, while you may never find yourself, you cannot escape the fact that conscious experience always ineluctably feels like it is your own. Call this Hume's dilemma. It returns in the conclusion.
The reification error includes a subspecies of error that Sartre labels "the illusion of immanence." This illusion results from "our habit of thinking in space and in terms of space" (2004b, p. 5), and this habit misleads us to "constitute the world of the mind from objects very similar to those of the external world and which, simply, obey different laws" (2004b, p. 6). Doing so motivates mistakenly locating ideas or thoughts inside of conscious activity (or, analogously, of locating consciousness inside of a body). There is, however, nothing literally inside of consciousness (and consciousness does not stand "inside of its body). If correct, the Latin roots of "introspection" mislead us into thinking that when we think about thought this literally involves looking inside of our minds. Words with spatial meanings, however, are, at best, misleading colloquial metaphors-more the province of philologists than phenomenologists.
Sartre gives a broad explanation for all three of these errors that characterizes how we arrive at pensée spatialisée. Sartre calls this "the warping of thought" and he claims that it is one of the most frequent causes of error, particularly in psychology and philosophy" (2004b, p. 117). Warping occurs on the basis of illicitly introducing subtle analogical reasoning where one believes oneself to be giving a purely descriptive account. To put this matter in overly simplistic terms, the surreptitious analogy moves from either spatial qualities or quasi-spatial qualities, e.g., of imaginary objects or representations of spatial schema, and then attributes them to acts of consciousness themselves. In this way, via implicit analogical reasoning, one attributes spatial qualities to non-spatial thoughts and then to the activity of thinking itself.23
While the first four kinds of errors all relate to our natural proclivity to construe self-conscious experience in objectified, spatialized terms (a strategy Sartre adapts from Bergson), the illusion of the primacy of knowledge stands, on the surface, in a different category, and it is more difficult to unpack in its details. Most broadly put, this illusion results either when we construe our most basic relationships (to ourselves, the world, and others) in entirely cognitive terms (in the sense of being inherently conceptual, e.g., in the Kantian sense that all intelligible experience is already schematized) or, more broadly, when we suppose that epistemology should take theoreti cal primacy over ontology (as most modern philosophy does). The latter broader supposition cannot be fully discussed here for reasons of brevity.
Sartre addresses the narrower portion of this error in the context of making an argument that the necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object, is that it be consciousness of
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itself as being that knowledge" (1956, p. lii). Sartre proceeds by way of a two-pronged dilemma. On the one hand, if there were no self-consciousness of knowing X, then it would be a consciousness unconscious of itself, which, Sartre claims, is contradictory. On the other, less controversial, hand, if one construes the relation constitutive of intrinsic self-awareness as involving a known-known dyad, an infinite regress results: the knower that knows needs another knower to know the first knower knowing ... Sartre concludes that, in order to avoid this infinite regress, the transcendental ground for our knowing X requires "a non-cognitive relation of the self to itself" (1956, p. liin).
This means, according to Sartre, that self-awareness does not posit itself as an intentional object. Consequently, no concepts can be attached to it, insofar as there is no subject to attach predicates (1956, p. 354). In this sense, its grasp of itself is non-cognitive or, perhaps better put, pre-conceptual. So understood, implicit self-awareness is necessary to know objects but it does not know itself knowing them.26 Another way to come at the non-cognitive dimension of conscious experience is to note that many of its constitutive components are not intentional objects. Like intrinsic self-awareness that does not represent itself to itself qua intentional object; neither do any other of these non-positional aspects of conscious experience, and, thus, they function pre-predicatively. 27
To help to clarify this matter, Sartre offers a few astute phenomenological descriptions: living through thirst (1956, pp. 82, 87), pain (1956, pp. 330-332), and fatigue (1956, pp. 453-459). Take the example of pain. When reading for a very long period of time the words may begin to tremble and quiver, as their meanings become increasingly difficult to comprehend (1956, pp. 332-333). At the pre-reflective level, it's the story that comprises the intentional correlate of painful reading, where pain is neither a thematic object represented in the content of experience nor something in addition to one's eyes. Rather, one's eyes exist in a painful way constitutive of the pre-reflective troubled-reading experience. We can, of course, turn our attention away from the story and reflect upon the pain and locate it in our eyes, but Sartre notes that doing so transforms pain into an object (1956, p. 355).
Although the act of objectification doesn't necessarily falsify pain, where it should be admitted that Sartre isn't especially clear on what distinguishes successful from unsuccessful objectifications, doing so requires introducing a third-person viewpoint and requires that we abandon our lived experience (see below). In reflecting upon pain in an objectifying way we adopt a position similar to how an ophthalmologist might examine and diagnose it. Thus, we shift the locus of experience away from the original intentional correlate (the increasingly unintelligible story) to an aspect constitutive of the experiential side, namely my painful eyes. In the process, we can overlock what lived pain is like in deference to objectified pain or mix claims about the two orders of description together.
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That lived "pain is notoriously difficult to describe" (Gallagher and Nikolic, 2012, p. 139) does not result solely from the fact that painful experience is so specific to the individual, that our concepts are insufficiently fine-grained. Rather, pain is a constitutive feature of the non-cognitive dimension of our pre-reflective experience and comprises a pre-linguistic horizon that defies well-formed definitions. This explains why, in our best efforts to describe lived pain, we frequently employ metaphor, poetic alle gory, and analogy. To think that one can give well-formed definitions is to succumb to the illusion of the primacy of knowledge.
This brings us to the crux of the matter. The reflective effort to take a position upon non-positional aspects of our conscious experience frequently involves the standpoint error. Due to its importance and complex ity, this error will be approached in two stages. The first stage discusses embodiment, where it is easier to mark out the first/third-person distinc tion. The second stage addresses the issue of reflective consciousness, where the first/third-person distinction becomes murkier. The analogy from the case of embodiment to consciousness only goes so far, for reasons that should become clear below.
Stage one
As seen above, Sartre argues that the "false problem" of understanding how the mind and body interrelate results from the fact that people have wanted to link my consciousness of objects to the body of the Other" (1956, p. 305). It's easy to see how this can arise in the case of my body: I can straightforwardly look at my body as Others see it, e.g., by looking at it in a mirror. When I look at my body in a mirror, however, I'm not experiencing it qua lived. As Sartre puts it, “either (the body) is a thing among things, or else it is that by which things are revealed to me. But it cannot be both at the same time" (1956, p. 304).
Sartre reaches this asymmetry by way of a now familiar analogy tied to a transcendental argument. Here's the analogy: just as the eye cannot see itself qua seeing, we cannot know our body qua living it (1956, pp. 304-305, see also p. 316). Although I can look at my eyeball in a mirror, doing so does not capture the "what it's like aspect of seeing; rather, it captures the eyeball as an object seen. So when we look our body in a mirror, qua thirdperson perspective, we abandon our first-person, lived perspective (1956, p. 318). Otherwise put, our inhabited viewpoint vanishes as soon as we try to take an exterior viewpoint upon it.
Thus, in a way similar to non-positional dimensions of conscious experience, Sartre argues that "the body is lived but not known" (1956, pp. 324, see especially pp. 354–855). Our lived body is not, first and fore. most, an intentional object of experience; thus, it is not an object sub ject to predicates qua lived. For example, while absorbed in typing, I do not apprehend my hands. Rather, the words and sentences unfold on the screen as to-be-finished within an affective horizon of urgency: late again
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to meet a deadline. When understood in this lived way, my body isn't something in addition to or over and above my self-conscious experience of typing. So understood, my lived body is not a contingent feature added on to consciousness; rather, “it is the permanent structure of my being and the permanent condition for the possibility of my consciousness as consciousness of the world" (1956, p. 328, translation slightly altered). Qua lived, embodiment supplies a necessary condition for the possibil ity of having the kind of practical, spatially oriented experiences that we enjoy; hence, it conditions the range and meanings of our lived experience (1956, p. 328).
Stage two
Unlike the case of our bodies, the case of pre-reflective consciousness turns out to be only roughly analogous. Sartre argues that we cannot ever take a genuinely third-person perspective upon it. We cannot look at our conscious experience, as we do our bodies, in a mirror, as it were. Although Sartre employs an array of optical terms, e.g., reflection, reflecting, reflected, that can make it seem like reflective consciousness can take some kind of per spective on itself, Sartre denies that any non-distorting reflection can take a perspective upon itself.
He puts the matter like this: Reflective consciousness cannot "detach itself completely from the reflected-on, and (hence] it cannot grasp the reflected-on from a point of view" (1956, p. 155). Sartre's analysis contin. ues as follows:
Actually the consciousness reflected-on is not presented" yet as something outside reflection, that is, as a being on which one can take a point of view, in relation to which one can realize a withdrawal, increase or diminish the distance which separates one from it.
(1956, p. 155)
Reflection and reflected being one and the same entails that reflection cannot stand outside of itself in order to take a viewpoint on itself. It would be something like standing outside of one's body in order to see it seeing, which is impossible, if not conceptually, then factually. Otherwise put, reflection cannot detach itself from itself (qua reflected upon) and take a position independent of itself. It is itself what it tries to grasp in the very activity of grasping. Now, what Sartre says next is very interesting
In order for the consciousness reflected on to be "viewed from without" and in order for reflection to be able to orient itself in relation to it, it would be necessary that the reflective should not be the reflectedon in the mode of not being what it is not this scissiparity will be realized only in existence for others.
(1956, p. 155)
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In our failure to stand reflectively outside of ourselves, we resort to intro ducing the separation experienced with regard to others. This allows us to approximate a quasi-third-person perspective upon ourselves and leads us to reify consciousness and constitute it in terms of psychic objects. This is impure reflection, i.e., bad faith.
Here arises a serious problem. If we cannot reflectively take a perspective on our inhabited perspective, i.e., if we cannot grasp implicit self-awareness as an intentional object, without abandoning that perspective, then what does purifying reflection grasp in a non-distorting way? Kathleen Wider (1997) raises this worry and argues that Sartre has no satisfactory answer. It will be helpful, then, to answer this question by way of responding to Wider's worry
The problem of purifying reflection
Wider argues that Sartre fails to distinguish adequately pure reflection from pre-reflective consciousness "without at the same time destroying the distinction he draws between pure and impure reflection" (Wider, 1997, p. 80), Wider poses her worry as a twofold dilemma. On the one hand, if pure reflection grasps itself qua object, then pure reflection does not differ from impure reflection. On the other hand, if pure reflection does not grasp itself in as an object, then it becomes indistinguishable from the actual selfconsciousness of pre-reflective consciousness" (Wider, 1997, p. 81). Wider diagnoses this problem in epistemic terms. "(Sartre) fails to develop a the. ory of consciousness's non-cognitive presence to itself that allows him to
tinguish when this self-presence is reflective from when it is not" (Wider, 1997, p. 92). The reason for this is that Sartre doesn't have a "clear enough notion of a knowledge that isn't a subject object relation' (Wider, 1997, p. 85). So, if purifying reflection cannot grasp itself in any non-object-like way, and if Sartre gives us no clear account of epistemic relations that do not invoke a subject/object form, then the explicit self-awareness of pure reflection seems to no different than implicit self-awareness. So in his effort to avoid the error of multiplying theoretical entities, he has multiplied empty conceptual distinctions.
Sartre's entire position hangs in the balance. If impure reflection necessarily distorts what it grasps, Sartre needs a clear account of a nondistorting kind of reflection that is tied to an epistemic framework that does not employ a subject-object form. Unfortunately, Sartre says very little about pure reflection; thus some of what follows must be reconstructive, if not somewhat speculative. To complicate matters, as Wider notes, Sartre equivocates in his epistemic language at a crucial juncture. In a context unspecified in terms of whether it's pure or impure reflection, Sartre claims that reflection achieves knowledge of itself qua reflected upon (1956, p. 151). Here the context concerns the certainty of my existence. A few pages later, however, he claims that reflection does not
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achieve knowledge but rather that it amounts to a form of recognition (1956, p. 156).
These two claims that seem to be at odds with one another can be straightforwardly reconciled. It would have helped had Sartre clarified his epistemic claims in the following way: reflection achieves apodictic knowledge that it exists but this knowledge does not extend to what it is. Indeed, the context of the second passage bears this out: it concerns reti to understand its nature, as opposed to the mere fact of its existence. Once more, when Sartre claims that reflection achieves recognition, this makes good sense, since, as seen above, reflection merely makes explicit what it already implicitly grasps. Hence, it achieves some kind of re-cognition.
Putting matters this way is fine, so far as it goes, but Wider rightly wonders how this re-cognized form of self-awareness differs from implicit selfawareness. What does making self-awareness explicit amount to in epistemic terms? If it's not self-knowledge, then what is it? The spirit of Sartre's answer goes like this: the non-cognitive, non-positional dimension of experience should not be construed in terms of knowledge but in terms of (pre-judicative) comprehension (see, e.g., 1956, pp. 7, 17, 66, and 289). Thus, what pure reflection delivers must be an amplification that makes implicit, prejudicative comprehension explicit, a point that returns below.
It is somewhat surprising that Wider, who reads texts very closely, misun. derstands the centrality of Sartre's distinction between comprehension and knowledge, since comprehension employs the very epistemology that Wider finds lacking. After all, Sartre almost always employs the term prejudicative comprehension and comprehension simpliciter) in contexts that involve putatively objectless epistemic relations, e.g., when we enjoy lived experiences of nothingness (1956, p. 17), contingency (1956, p. 80), non-existent future possibilities (1956, p. 100), being for itself (1956, p. 147), freedom (1956, p. 439), and, most relevantly, "being myself" (1956, p. 289).2 Since there is strictly speaking, no extant "object" in any of these cases but only absences or non-beings, there is no positive thing or being to predicate straightforwardly and, hence, know. So what then does one comprehend when it comes to oneself?
In answer to this question Sartre's clearest example concerns the experience of shame, which
encloses within it an implicit and non-thematized comprehension of being able-to-be-an-object on the part of the subject for whom I am an object. This implicit comprehension is nothing other than the consciousness (of) my "being myself"; that is, of my selfness reinforced.
(1956, p. 289)
This passage does not describe an impure grasp of oneself as an object. Rather it describes an implicit comprehension of the possibility of my being objectified by others.
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This implicit recognition can, however, formally be made an explicit judgment via pure reflection. I can explicitly realize the ever-present possibility of social objectifications, e.g., pressures to conform to social roles that I must live but, ultimately, cannot know. Since this judgment concerns a possibility and possibilities do not, strictly speaking, exist in Sartre's technical sense, comprehension of this non-existent fact does not involve a subject-object relation. Sartre's point is not simply that I cannot know myself as others grasp me (1956, p. 242), but also that I cannot but live these objectifications by freely interiorizing them into my projects (1956, p. 467).
If correct, one thing pure reflection makes explicit concerns the ineliminable social dimension of my sense of being myself." In fact, according to Sartre, it could not be otherwise, because "I cannot confer on myself any quality without mediation or an objectifying power which is not my own" (1956, p. 274). Consequently, the Other is the necessary condition of all thought which I would attempt to form concerning myself" (1956, p. 271, see also p. 236). Unfortunately, it would take this discussion too far afield to develop the details that undergird Sartre's transcendental deduction for the social dimension of self-comprehension. Fortunately, this point conveniently sets up my initial thesis in a programmatic way: all introspective errors involue attempts to take a third-person perspective upon oneself. In short, because social relations necessarily mediate all thoughts that I form concerning myself, it's a natural, nearly inevitable fact that I try and take a third-person perspective upon myself—I try to see myself as I see others or as others see me.
So what then does pure reflection comprehend? It turns out not to be very much, where just a little makes a considerable difference (Sartre, 1956, p. 159). Pure reflection merely makes explicit or amplifies that which we already tacitly comprehend: the interminably fleeting tempo ral flux of our experience, our implicit self-awareness, intentionality, etc. Although when we impurely reflect upon ourselves we feel like we grasp ourselves qua observed, pure reflection cannot represent itself to itself qua observed. Thus, pure reflection merely amplifies our sense of the organized activity of being self-consciously engaged in the world. It does so without giving an accurate representation of ourselves qua observed: no such representation is possible (Sartre, 1956, pp. 241, 270). Introspection, then, should not be understood as self-observation but rather as an amplification of self-awareness and other non-positional aspects of our experience, without shifting them into the third-person position. On my reading, then, it is upon the basis of veridical descriptions of purified experience that we can, according to Sartre, transcendentally deduce the necessary ontological structures that make those experiences possible. It may not be much, but if implicit self-awareness makes reflection possible, without pure reflection the basic distinctions required by the philosophy of mind would be impossible.
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An insuperable ambiguity Earlier it was claimed that implicit self-awareness simultaneously seems to be everywhere and somehow nowhere. We cannot escape self-awareness, we cannot representationally grasp it as an object, and we cannot discover it in the content of any experience. This truly puzzling phenomenon constitutes Hume's dilemma. It is this evanescence of self-awareness that arguably moors philosophers upon either the Charybdis of paradox (Rosenberg, 1981; Woodruff Smith, 1986) or the Scylla of mystery (Kriegel, 2003, p. 178). Self-awareness can seem paradoxical in the sense that when we try to grasp ourselves (qua observers) we seem to transform ourselves into something we are not (observed subjects). Thus, the very self-awareness that makes introspection of oneself possible also makes oneself simultaneously inapprehensible.
Alternatively, as Kriegel (2003) suggests, our account of self-awareness might require collapsing the gap between ourselves understood as subjects (observers) and objects (observed). For it can seem as if the self is represented both as subject and object." Kriegel admits that "one may protest that this would make self-awareness quite mysterious, and will attribute to it a unique intentional structure. But then self-awareness is quite mysterious, isn't it, and its intentional structure is indeed unique" (Kriegel, 2003, p. 178). Kriegel effectively replaces the paradoxical experience of the self constantly slipping away from one's best effort to grasp it with a mysterious phenomenon: a self that represents itself as both subject observer) and object (observed).
Sartre suggests how the simultaneous observer-observed feel is possible but illusory. It's a reification of the experience of being seen by Others that turns out to be a misrepresentation. To be sure, implicit self-awareness made explicit comprises a truly unique experience but rather than claiming that it is either paradoxical or mysterious, Sartre argues that an insuperable ambiguity besets it. This ambiguity lies at the heart of self-conscious experience. Sartre's risky conceptual analysis goes like this. On the one hand, if we begin with a conceptually basic, ontologically simple object in the sense of literally having no parts, abstract or otherwise), there would be no relations, and, hence, no possibility of self-awareness. On the other hand, every theoretical account that posits two extrinsically related, independent objects (mental states) fails to explain self-awareness. The reason for this parallels the infinite regress problem discussed above: the observer state that grasped a non-self-conscious observed state would itself need another observer to become aware of itself qua observer, and so on ad infinitum.
Sartre concludes that self-awareness is not simply implicit (a descrip tive claim) but intrinsic, i.e., it necessarily structures consciousness (an ontological claim). Consciousness just is self-consciousness. This, however, requires an ambiguous duality built into a conceptual unity. It cannot be two, otherwise we end in regress. It cannot be one, otherwise no relations
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and, hence, no self-awareness would be possible. Sartre's proposed solu tion temporally distends one object (being in-itself) in order to arrive at the ambiguous, intrinsic relation that is temporally distended and constitutive of self-consciousness (being for itself). Thus, self-awareness cannot be represented qua object, since doing so destroys the intrinsic relation that makes it possible. Neither should it be represented as a subject (that does the thinking), since this unnecessarily multiplies theoretical entities and threatens an infinite regress.
Conclusion If philosophers, for a long time, masqueraded about as if they could adopt a view from nowhere, when, as a matter of fact, they inevitably take a view from somewhere, then the problem of introspection inverts this game of charades. In our effort to gain an objective purchase on ourselves, we try to stand outside of the viewpoint we ineluctably inhabit. We find ourselves stranded in between two impossible positions: taking a view from nowhere and trying to adopt a view from somewhere other than our own. We try to adopt a third person perspective on an essentially first-person phenomenon and in so doing we vitiate our inhabited perspectivity. Yet, we can not take a first-person perspective upon ourselves. We can no more grasp ourselves from nowhere than we can from somewhere else. We can only amplify implicit features of our lived experience and make them explicit
As David Chalmers once noted as a graduate student,
perhaps the most important duality in the philosophy of mind is that between the first-person and third-person views of mental events. Some might say that the fundamental duality is that between mind and brain, or between subjective and objective_but all of these reduce to the first person/third-person duality. 29
The spirit of Chalmers' claim is well taken, insofar as my aim has been to show that muddling this most fundamental distinction constitutes the error of all introspective errors. Of course, if what I've said is correct, the letter of Chalmers' claim is mistaken: you cannot take a first-person perspective on your so-called mental states, since those mental states are constitutive of your first-person perspective. It's the very effort to adopt a first-person perspective on mental states that creates most, if not all, of our theoretical confusion about the structures of pre-reflective conscious experience.
Notes
I It's not always entirely clear who, amongst philosophers, defends the possibil ity and efficacy of an absolutely non-introspective approach. Lowe (2004) fol lows tradition and includes logical behaviorists as belonging to this category, but, as Schwitzgebel (2008) points out, philosophers who deny the existence of
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consciousness frequently accept something like "introspection" as a kind of inner sense perception; see, e.g., Churchland (1985, 1988).
2 In recent years Schwitzgebel comes across as highly skeptical (2007), and oth ers like Hill (2011) label him a radical skeptic about introspection. However, Schwitzgebel doesn't sound, and hasn't always sounded, like a radical skeptic. He tentatively defended training people to improve introspection skills (2004). He explicitly criticizes "naive introspection" (2008), leaving the door open to sophisticated introspection, and he offers an especially interesting account of why we get things wrong when we introspect certain visual images (2002). Schwitzgebel's correcting tendencies suppose that an observer som things right and, at least some of the time, he seems to do so because he carefully reflects upon his own experience, i.e., he strikes me as good at introspecting Thus, Schwitzgebel frequently teeters towards tentative, non-egalitarian optimism, if one looks past all of the skeptical bluster.
3 The text from which this quote is taken is co-authored. Here is a similar claim made by Schwitzgebel, writing alone: "One must go surprisingly far afield to find major thinkers who unambiguously hold, as I do, that the introspection of current conscious experience is both (i) possible, important, necessary for a full life, and central to the development of a full scientific understanding of the mind, and (ii) highly untrustworthy" (2008, p. 246). Incidentally, one actually need not go so very far to find philosophers who hold (i) and (ii). Most phenomenologists fall into or come very close to falling into this category, especially, as
argued below, the earliest Sartre.
4 Robust optimism need not be limited to philosophers trained as phenomenolo gists. David Chalmers arguably maintains a robustly optimistic view about the role introspection should play in consciousness studies, see, e.g., 2010, especially
Chapter 2.
5 An early draft of this chapter spent considerable time distinguishing between two different non-egalitarian approaches to introspection, i.e., views that begin with the assumption that we are not all equally good at thinking about our conscious experience. It did so, in part, to show why what phenomenologists call "reflective analysis" differs from what nineteenth-century research psychologists called "introspection" and how these differences mitigate, in advance, a series of traditional skeptical challenges. This material interrupted the flow of the chapter and has now become an independent essay. Suffice it to say, the simplest way to capture the main difference is that, unlike early research psychologists, phenomenologists are not so much concerned with the particular content of experience, e.g. perceptual thresholds, as they are with the essential or univer sal structures that make conscious experience possible, e.g., intentionality, temporality, self-awareness. Otherwise put, whereas skeptics like Schwitzgebel spend a lot of time showing how introspective claims about the content of conscious experience are susceptible to error, e.g., whether a penny looks round or oval at arms-length, phenomenologists not only insist on this kind of susceptibility to
error but they argue that it is an essential, i.e., incscapable, susceptibility
6 Oizumi et al., for example, take the phenomenology of consciousness as pri mary" in the effort to understand how neurological mechanisms allow conscious ness to process information (Oizumi et al. 2014, p. 1). To be sure, Oizumi et al. admit that integrated information theory employs "the opposite of the approach usually taken in neuroscience," which typically starts with neural mechanisms
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first "and (only then) asks under what conditions they give rise to consciousness" (Oizumi et al. 2014, p. 2). Oizumi et al. reverse the usual picture: they begin with phenomenological axioms and asks what neural mechanisms could possibly bring that kind of experience about. Needless to say, today such an approach is
an outlier-but what about tomorrow?
7 For an exemplary and meticulous treatment of Sartre's relationship to psychol.
ogy around the turn of the century, see Flajolict (2008).
8 Anthony Hatzimoysis (2010) makes a similar case grounded in The Transcendence of the Ego.
9 For example, Sartre argues that reflective awareness of freedom and contin gency leads to an overwhelming anxiety in the former case) and to nausea (in the latter), both of which motivate bad faith: that is, a form of deceiving oneself with some awareness of the deception as it takes place, but in a way that nonetheless, ameliorates the initial discomfit. Sartre gives the example of belief in psychological determinism as a paradigmatic example of bad faith, since the false belief that one lacks freedom mitigates the anxiety experienced due to free dom (BN, p. 40). Thus, Sartre implies that theoretical accounts of determinism are supported by an underlying existential motivation to believe that one is not free, or, as is practically almost always the case, to believe oneself less free than one really is (Eshleman, 2008). While it could be true that determinism finds its roots in a self-imposed illusion, this kind of claim immediately runs amok, since Sartre's account of bad faith is, at least on the surface, as controversial as deter minism is speculative. The point here is that, even if Sartre were correct, no one outside of Sartre studies should find these putative existential motivations and self-deceptive efforts to conceal them initially illuminating. To argue that deter minists are in bad faith would be like disagreeing with a Freudian on some theo retical issue and then being told you are resisting or exhibiting transference. In both cases, the objection stands within a theoretical system, and depends upon
that system's validity for its meaning.
10 It's tempting to suppose that explicit self-awareness recedes into the background or periphery of conscious experience, as, e.g., Kriegel (2003, p. 177) claims. This requires a strong analogy between intrinsic self-awareness and extrinsic awareness of objects. Although one can shift attention from the contours of one's body on the couch to the background music to the story, etc. and one can switch between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, the two "shifts" differ in at least one crucial way. When one attends to the story, the pressure of one's body on the couch recedes from explicit awareness; however, that pressure still exists-it's just unattended. The analogy does not always hold for explicit selfawareness. During engrossment, there simply is no explicit self-awareness. It's not lying obscurely on an indeterminate horizon; it comes into existence with
the activity of reflection.
11 Bernecker (2011) gives the following case that might seem to suggest a coun terexample to this claim that we don't have anonymous experiences that are then somehow personalized: "Consider, for example, the case of R.B., a 48 year old male who suffered a serious head injury in a car accident. Almost immediately following his accident, he was able to remember events from the past, yet his recollection of those events was compromised-he could not remember the events as having been personally experienced. His memory of these events was no different from what it would have been had they happened to someone else
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(pp. 111-112). As RB notes about his memories before the accident: "it was the same sort of knowledge I might have about how my parents met or the history of the Civil War or something like that" (ibid.). Clearly the accident causes RB to have an attenuated sense of personal identity. It's as if he takes a wholly third-person perspective on the content of his pre-accident memories. Notice, however, that RB does not fail to understand that he possesses the activity of remembering (ie, experiences himself as an agent remembering), only that the content presents itself anonymously. So understood, this example amplifies a point made below, namely that one essential aspect of content susceptible to third-person claims is that they are about something or someone other than
oneself, albeit with some necessary qualifications.
12 Here, a qualification is necessary: while impure reflection gives rise to "a new object" (TE, p. 9), namely the ego, Sartre argues that the ego is neither a part of consciousness nor is it something discovered. It's constituted on the basis of patterns of past actions and future anticipations, frequently with systematic distortions; consequently, it doesn't give rise to new information. To the contrary, at least in Sartre's view, the putative (reflective) exploration of one's psychic life tends not to be genuinely about self-discovery; rather, it's an activity of selfcreation and most frequently an activity of self-concealment. Thanks to Joshua
Tepley for motivating this footnote.
13 When performing a habituated, repetitive activity for a long period of time, like driving for many hours, one can suddenly experience a kind of surprise, namely that one has been driving while daydreaming. This kind of case might seem like an obvious counterexample to the claim that reflection is never surprised by its own pre-reflective activity. However, when one reflects upon the startling fact of driving while daydreaming, one does not discover being startled or surprised. Nor does one discover the fact that one was daydreaming. The surprise already happened pre-reflectively when you nearly drove off of the road. Why do they put vibration bumps on the side of highways? The sudden, surprising vibration bump experience motivates reflection. When things go smoothly (or habitually), one typically does not reflect. Incidentally, this kind of daydreaming while driving example has been employed to show that self-awareness does not accompany all conscious acts (Wider 1993). Although discussion of this worry would take matters too far afield, it might be noted here that the ubiquity thesis about self-awareness does not require an awareness of non-conscious aspects of e.g. perception and habituated activity. The daydreaming driver might not be able to say what sign she just passed on the highway but she can tell you what she was daydreaming about while driving. After all, she does not discover her daydreaming via reflection, since she was implicitly aware of daydreaming all along. Needless to say, there are many autonomic and habituated activities that require no conscious attention. This obvious fact does not tell against the ubiq
uity thesis.
14 By "genuine" I mean, in part, the opposite of merely linguistic acis. For exam ple, someone might utter the sentence "I am reading" while daydreaming or under hypnosis. These utterances would not count as genuine, since they are not accompanied by the explicit sense of self possession distinctive to reflective acts. It is tempting to say that mere utterances are purely semantic (i.e., they have a sense but no genuine reference), and that they amount to what Husserl calls empty intentions. To be sure, the question of reference with regard to
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first-person language turns out to be very complicated. See Thomas Kapitan (1999) for a clear account of the complexities surrounding first-person refer ence and a view very similar to Sartre's.
15 Zheng (2000, 2001) and Webber (2002) have been especially helpful in char acterizing this hybrid account that maintains that pre-reflective consciousness enjoys both conceptual and pre-conceptual dimensions
16 A skeptic might apply pressure to the qualification "typically." Shaun Gallagher
(2012a) offers interesting analyses of cases where senses of agency and owner ship seem to come apart. For example, a schizophrenic who experiences thought insertion may experience a sense of ownership, insofar as she comprehends it is she who hears voices; however, insofar as she does not recognize herself as the source of the inserted thoughts, the schizophrenic experiences an attenuated sense of agency. Gallagher also examines cases where we experience agency without clear ownership, e.g., Olaf Blanke's experiments where "you feel your
clf several feet in front of your actual location" (p. 256). This kind of distorted self-ownership, as regards features of embodiment, does not undermine an underlying sense of embodied agency. Gallagher concludes that, although these kinds of examples require some qualifications to our implicit senses of agency and ownership that are characteristic of pre-reflective experience (and, thus, to what has come to be known as the principle of immunity to error through misidentification), some aspects of self-specific, first-person experience remain immune to such errors, e.g., the schizophrenic recognizes that she hears the
inserted voice.
17 There is one prominent error found in Sartre's early works that is not listed below. The seventh error might be called the "reversal error." Sometimes we believe that the world causes aspects of our experience (or acts emanate from our egos) that actually result from the spontaneous, meaning constituting activ ity of (embodied) consciousness. Sartre argues, e.g., that my example of the story about the falsely accused boy doesn't cause sadness; rather our sadness constitutes the lived meaning of the story. Unfortunately, there won't be time to
discuss this error.
18 So understood, the cogito does not consist in a syllogistic argument with a sup ise. Rather, reflective doubt grasps what one already implicitly comprehends.
19 Sartre's account of the relationship between reflective and pre-reflective con sciousness departs from The Transcendence of the Ego in Being and Nothingness in several ways. Most relevantly, in TE, Sartre frequently makes it sound as if prereflective consciousness and reflective consciousness are two separate and distinct acts of consciousness, as suggested by the quoted passage. Sartre rejects this heterogeneity view in B&N, where reflecting and reflected conscious are construed as one and the same consciousness. Below we will see how hetero
geneity kinds of views can motivate the standpoint error.
20 I take Williford's qualification that consciousness of an object is not "typically" an object for consciousness to mean that sometimes, perhaps under atypical con ditions, the object for consciousness is consciousness itself. Although Husser! accepts putting matters this way, this kind of claim, in the case of Sartre, needs qualification. According to Sartre, consciousness as such can never straightforwardly be an "object" for itself, without falsification, in part, because it is not at all or in any way object-like (BN, p. 241). Needless to say, a great deal rides
201
on what we mean by "object." Husserl employs the term "object" in a broadly logical sense, namely as any subject susceptible of bearing true predicates; thus, insofar as one can make true claims about consciousness, it's an object in this most gencral, logical sense. In the case of Sartre, one can make two different sorts of interpretative moves. First, one can offer a deflationary reading of Sartre as employing "object" in a narrower sense than Husserl and allow that we can talk about consciousness qua object in a broadly logical sense, but not in a more narrowly construed ontological sense. Second, one can offer a robust reading and interpret Sartre as grounding logic in ontology. So understood, in a fashion akin to Aristotle, the rules of logic are what they are because reality is structured in the ways that it is. On this reading, the term object is, first and foremost, an ontological term that correlates to the mode of being in itself. Since self-identity characterizes being in itself, Sartre grounds the logical principle of identity (and, on that basis, the principles of excluded middle and non-cond in this mode of being. In contrast, the mode of being-for-itself does not instantiate self-identity and, for this reason, it is not object-like. So understood, if the mode of being in itself grounds traditional logic, since the mode of being for itself is not object-like, it requires a non-traditional logic (Morris, 1976). If the robust reading is correct, then Husserl's broadly logical construal of "object" illicitly imports ontological implications that Sartre aims to resist. Consciousness is not the attribute of an underlying substance and, hence, it cannot, straightfor wardly, be considered subject that bears predicates, at least not in a traditional
logical sense
21 An alternative account of Hume holds that, from the absence of a self in the content of experience, Hume denied that self-awareness exists (Kriegel, 2003, p. 178). This would be a truly unusual position that seems to be contradicted by nearly every one of our waking moments. My preference is for Woodruff Smith's
interpretation given above, even if it leads to a dilemma, discussed below.
22 As noted above, Sartre maintains that the best descriptive evidence supports a diaphanous view of consciousness. This motivates in my view) a qualified version of content extemalism, namely that there is nothing literally inside of conscious ness. See Rowlands (2003, 2011) for helpful exposition of Sartre's externalism,
though see Zahavi (2008) for some well-placed, complicating considerations.
23 This is a rather attenuated account of Sartre's analysis, which isn't always easy to follow. Sartre discusses warping in the context of analyzing the relationship between thoughts, images and concepts (IPP, pp. 112-120/216-231). Sartre gives a nuanced three-stage account of concept formation, but the gist of it comes down to this. In our efforts to achieve purely formal concepts on the basis of imagination, we sometimes attribute quasi-spatial aspects of images to less than pure concepts. For example, in describing the spatial schema employed to explain spatial representations, early psychologists who were influenced by Kant sometimes attributed spatial qualities to the schema itself. Thus, they transferred the spatial qualities of the things represented by the spatial schema to the spatial schema itself, or so Sartre argues (IPP, p. 53). This roughly amounts to suppos
ing that the concept "space" itself has spatial qualities.
24 Many contemporary philosophers of mind will reject this admittedly controver sial claim. Sartre's rejection of unconscious mental states largely rides on his ubiquity thesis about self-awareness. All consciousness is intrinsically aware of itself as consciousness of the world. Sartre can easily admit that many things go
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on, e.g., in our brains, about which we are not consciously aware. It's just that he won't call these mental states. My hunch is that debate over whether consciousness is essentially self-aware or whether there can be unconscious mental states is largely semantic, though this linc cannot be pursued here for reasons
of time.
25 Commentators have not all found Sartre's account of this aspect of non
positional self-awareness especially lucid (Wider, 1997); and others correctly note that Sartre leaves much unexplained (Webber, 2002). See Zheng (2000) for an inventory of the widely varying interpretations of Sartre's account of non-positional self-awareness. That there can be considerable disagreement about this aspect of Sartre's view results, in part, from the fact that much of his analysis of the non-positional aspects of consciousness is not descriptive. Rather he arrives at these kinds of claims via arguments and some admittedly obscure
conceptual analysis (see below).
26 For this reason, the relation constitutive of ipseity does not contra Kriegel (2003),
enjoy both inner and outer intentional content. It is not a thinker that represents itself to itself, via an "internal intentional object, in addition to "representing an external intentional object. To think otherwise potentially commits the illusion of immanence and it also unnecessarily multiplies superfluous theoretical entities, as, for example, Descartes does when he posits a thinker (or subject) behind every thought. This multiplication of theoretical entities arguably results from a misleading analogy derived from reflective experience. In reflection, we explicitly grasp intentionality (i.c., the relational aspect of positional consciousness to its object); we then mistakenly project intentionality (a structure of the positional aspect of consciousness) on to the non-positional aspect of conscious ness. To come at this point in another way, when Kriegel claims that explicit selfawareness recedes into the background or periphery of conscious experience (2003, p. 177) this forms too strong an analogy between self-awareness and perceptual objects. Sartre rejects this analogy between intrinsic self-awareness and objects of experience implied by Kriegel's claim. As pointed out in fn. #9, it's not that explicit awareness recedes into the background in the way that perceptual objects do when they move from the figure to the ground of perception. Rather, self-awareness simply becomes implicit in a non-representational way. Perhaps Kriegel's model that holds self-awareness moves into the unattended horizon in an analogous similar manner to perceptual objects motivates his claims about twofold intentional content. If one thinks that explicit self-awareness is represen tational, then it can seem as if implicit self-awareness should also be representa
tional. Needless to say, Sartre rejects self-representation at both levels.
27 Sartre builds desire, value, affectivity, and motivation all into the non-positional dimension of conscious experience. Time will not permit analysis of these
aspects, so the below concrete example of pain will have to suffice.
28 Although Sartre's admission of absences, non-being, and negative facts into his broad-minded ontology may be controversial today (but see, e.g., McDaniel, 2010 and 2013), it's standard fare in the phenomenological tradition, as is the distinction between knowledge and comprehension. What follows does not however, directly require invoking non-being as such. We can construc the non cognitive dimension of self-awareness in non-object terms that shouldn't offend
positivist sensibilities.
29
http://consc.net/notes/first-third.html.
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30 A lot of people have made this chapter possible, though none of them is respon sible for its many mistakes. I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Gerhard Preyer, Sophia Miguens, and Clara Bravo Morando for all of their work and supererogatory patience. An excerpted version of this chapter was presented at the Thinking with Scrire Today conference held at La Maison française d'Oxford on January 30th and 31st, 2015. I'd like to thank the audience members for their helpful questions, especially Sarah Richmond's incisive remarks. Thanks go to Joshua Tepley and Henryk Jaronowski for their comments on early drafts of this chapter, and Matthew Ally was especially helpful in offering a comprehensive commentary on the final draft. A special thank you also goes to Tom Flynn for all of our many conversations about Sartre.
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... In attempting to reflectively adopt a third-perspective upon one's own lived experience, one ends up assuming a quasi or impure-third-person perspective (otherwise known as bad faith) and this quasi-perspective either falsifies or distorts features of first-person experience. Thus, Sartre's descriptive strategy can be well understood as an effort to purify impure reflection of all third-person elements, quasi or otherwise, and make the implicit features of lived experience explicit (Eshleman 2016). It's worth interjecting here that, in many instances, Sartre tries to show how failures to keep these distinctions clear generates some classic philosophical problems; see Chapter XX, this volume, for an explication of this error when it comes to the mind-body interaction problem. ...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330761981_Sartre's_Error_Theory_of_Introspection
