philosophical essay about the self

Philosophical Perspective of Self Essay

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Introduction

Rene descartes, meditations on first philosophy, second meditation summary and analysis, analysis and definition of “i”, other definitions of self, works cited.

Throughout history, the philosophical perspective of “self” has received myriad descriptions and analyses from many philosophers, researchers, and even scholars. In gaining this understanding, these people are important in explaining how the knowledge of this concept affects the world and how people perceive themselves and their ultimate relationships with others.

An understanding of “self,” therefore, affirms a person’s identity in a social environment, allowing him/her to recognize others besides oneself (Sorabji 13). In other words, the way human beings socialize solely depends on how they perceive themselves and others through daily social interactions.

Innumerable philosophers, including Socrates and Aristotle, have immensely contributed towards gaining clarity in defining “I.” Yet, it is believed that some have been quite outstanding with regard to their input. In this category lies Rene Descartes, whose findings remain essential in defining the concept of “self” and how this definition affects people’s thinking and interactions.

This paper goes far ahead in synthesizing Descartes’ findings to achieve a concise definition of the word “I” that seems reasonable and critical from a philosophical perspective of the “self.” This essay further digs into several research findings unearthed by renowned scholars and experts who have devoted their time and resources to studying and exploring the definition and how it influences interpersonal relationships in one’s life.

By compiling ideas from an array of thinkers, this philosophy of “self” essay intends to explore the implications of defining “I” in a given manner and how such a stance would affect our self-reflection and perceptions of ourselves or how we treat ourselves. The survey also focuses on how these definitions would affect our knowledge of ourselves and the world outside our “selves.”

Born in 1596 in France, Rene Descartes was a great philosopher, thinker, writer, and mathematician who spent his adulthood in the Republic of Dutch. He has arguably been dubbed as the father of modern philosophy with special emphasis on the Western school of thought (Smith 1).

As a result, his pieces of writing remain key reference materials for scholars across the global plane. For example, meditations continue to serve as principal textbooks in most universities’ philosophy departments today. His contribution to mathematics set unbeaten records, with his efforts being widely applied in calculus and geometry. In the development of natural sciences, his input cannot go unnoticed.

He believed philosophy was a mega entity encompassing all aspects of knowledge expressed through it. Although most of the works and thoughts have been widely considered, there has been a strong emphasis on Meditations on First Philosophy. As mentioned before, this essay will emphasize the second meditation in defining the concept of “I,” also known as “self.”

These meditations are considered the origin of modern Western philosophy. In this coverage, Descartes criticizes most of Aristotle’s arguments and designs questions that have remained debatable in the world of philosophy today. He breaks from the norm created by Aristotle that knowledge is achieved through human senses and that mental statuses usually resemble what they are. As such, Descartes is able to develop brand new concepts about the mind, ideas, and matter (Frankfurt 185).

In this portion of his findings, Descartes explains the nature of the human mind and that it is better than the body. His research revolves around the search for certainty and ignores every idea that carries any slightest doubt. Throughout his memory, Descartes believes that whatever he happens to see is actually meaningless and may not ever exist in real life (Descartes 17).

As a result, we can view place and movement as mistaken notions in human life since lack of certainty is the only certain thing that exists in his life. This is essential in defining ourselves and our existence.

Is it possible for Descartes to believe that he does not have a body and senses, yet he exists? What about the nonexistence of the physical world, as proposed by the author? Ironically, he can only posses these doubts of nonexistence if he truly exists.

In other words, one can only be misled by the devil from within if he does exist. As such, “I” has to exist in order to doubt and be deceived by the evil one. Nevertheless, it can generally be viewed that “I” is a necessary and true preposition when suggested by somebody or conceived in one’s own mind (Descartes 72).

After conceiving the existence of “I,” the mediator does not stop at this particular point but aims at defining and explaining the meaning of the “I am.” This approach makes it possible to be certain that we possess a soul which augments our thinking, nourishment, movement, and sensibility. Furthermore, human beings have a body (Frankfurt 185).

Regardless of these initial doubts, many people sink into a ditch of doubts and hang on to the fact that one has the ability to think. In other words, our existence does not solely depend on the above-mentioned attributes of human beings, but we have no doubt about our breathing power.

This implies that thinking is essential for a person to exist regardless of whether he has other qualities like body and soul, among others. By the fact that thinking defines “self,” it is possible to relate it with human existence and consider it inseparable from being. From a general perspective, we can view one’s self as simply “thinking something.”

The definition of “I” is enshrined in Descartes’ cogito argument based on its formulation in Latin, “cogito ergo sum,” translated as “I think, therefore, I am.” This line is quite famous in the history of philosophy and is most probably regarded as the origin of Western philosophy and other schools of thought that developed after Descartes. In this line, the mediator gets in touch with a grip of certainty after his continuous disbelief is manifested in the First Mediation (Frankfurt 186).

In essence, the cogito exposes a different view of the world and states that the mind is the only thing in the world that can know itself. Notably, understanding our mind first before any other thing has remained rooted in Western philosophy, even though the main point of contention has been the connection between the mind and the real world. From this perspective, the mind is no longer an aid to understanding the world but an internally locked thing (Frankfurt 186).

In analyzing Descartes’ Second Meditation, it is of immense significance to note the existing differences between “I think, therefore I am” as described in the Discourse Method from the general formulation derived from meditations.

At this point of the synthesis, it is imperative to mention that the proposition “I am, I exist” holds only when it is put forward by a specific individual and conceived by the person’s mind. The mediation is further divided into an argument of three steps, which are: whatever thinks exists, I think therefore, and I exist (Frankfurt 188).

However, in understanding “self” through syllogistic reading and analysis, denied by Descartes in other pieces of writing is the fact that there is no reason why “whatever thinks exists” should not be doubtful as portrayed by the mediator. This reading approach further analyzes the cogito as a conclusion that has been reasoned out at a specific point in the doubtful mind of the mediator, even when inferences that have been well reasoned out are called to doubt (Frankfurt 189).

The question we need to ask ourselves in this definition of self is the path somebody takes to know the cogito when everything else is doubted. As a result, several proposals have been put forth as reading formats and methodologies aimed at simplifying this reading process and step (Frankfurt 202). It would be impossible for a person to say he/she exits or even thinks of existence without being in a real state.

Consequently, the truth is achieved by the utterance concerning the concept of existence. In this line of thought, it can be argued that the existence of a person can only be confirmed by oneself in the present tense, “I am.” It is also important to double emphasize the fact that cogito can only work when one is talking about thought. One cannot say: “I sleep, therefore I am,” since the act of sleeping can be doubted. In explaining this, one cannot doubt the act of thinking because doubt on its own is a form of thought.

Besides cogito , the mediator also affirms that he “thinks,” leading to an argument commonly referred to as sun res cogitans (Rorty 215). This comprises three controversial views regarding one being a “thinking thing.” In this approach, it is essential to comprehend the meaning of “thing” and “think” to establish their definitive relationship with “I am.”

There are two approaches to defining “self” at this point. This can be done both epistemologically and metaphysically. In other words, body and mind cannot be one since one has got either to know both of them or none of them. As a matter of fact, the existence of the body ceases since one is a “thinking thing with delinked body and mind. This gives way to the conclusion that one is a “thing that thinks.”

With preciseness, “I” can be defined as the “thing that thinks.” In addition, “I” possesses other attributes besides being able to think, understand, and be willing to do certain things. These qualities include but are not limited to imagination and the use of the senses. In the understanding of “I,” it is worth noting that senses and imagination cannot be trusted (Rorty 214). This is because imagination can trigger all forms of things that may not necessarily be real.

How can one identify wax? This is made possible through a sense of taste, color, smell, size, shape, and hardness, among others. When heated, the wax changes some properties but can be identified despite the deviation from the initial form. Due to the fact that wax can be identified even when its shape is infinitely changed, it suffices to mention that this cannot be possible via imagination but through the intellect alone and proper mental scrutiny.

Based on this argument, it can be concluded that the mind knows better than the body. In this approach, the human view is that one has to know the mind more than any other thing in his or her life as a way of understanding the self better (Rorty 214). There is no doubt in perceiving the identity of something, and these actions of thought clearly imply that the item exists in reality. Therefore, confirming one’s existence is the core of ascertaining the nature of the mind through the intellect alone.

As mentioned before, various authors have defined and described the concept of “self” throughout history. According to Sorabji, the idea of “self” is real in human history. He argues that the “self” comes to play when the owner of a body is intertwined with existing psychological states (Sorabji 13).

He further notes that in explaining the “self,” there is a stream of consciousness that lacks the owner. In his description of this analogy, Sorabji asserts that his definition of “self” fits other members like animals as embodied owners of the body. Based on this approach, Sorabji further double emphasizes the fact that there is a need to protect the human way of life and not only base it on its relationship with the “self” or the interaction between members of a given stream (Sorabji 13).

The broadness of “self” also encompasses the picture of human beings developing into male or female, baker or teacher, son or daughter, Indian or American, among other development attributes. Importantly, these cannot be visualized through the metaphysical conceptualization of the “self” because of its narrowness in determining the nature of the pictures to be adopted. Additionally, the pictures are not considered to be essential and are likely to be altered under extreme pressure (Sorabji 14).

However, visualized pictures are important in describing a complete image of selfhood, even though they can be philosophically studied differently. “I am” is also described by the use of unique features, which make human beings different from other creations (Sorabji 14). In essence, thoughts and actions people execute are usually a result of the self. It can be described as a substance that persists through time. This is to say that actions and thoughts experienced at different times of the day or in life may also concern the “self.”

In most cases, philosophical definitions of “self” are discussed based on the first-person attributes. This is because third-person definitions do not identify unique identification properties. Viewed from a different point, the “self” can be principally described through the discourse and conduct of a person.

As a result, intentions can only be deduced from something being observed through actions undertaken by an individual. Of great significance is the fact that the characteristics of a given “self” have the full potential of determining its real identity (Rorty 215).

Based on this analogy, it can be argued that “I” can be divided into various concepts as defined by specific qualities and attributes. For instance, the “self” can be viewed as an illusion (Sorabji 17). This is common in ancient spiritual traditions in which the human identity is conceived as a mere illusion for the existence of individual human beings. This identification further ensures that there is a boundary between humanity and other forms of creation, especially in terms of characteristics and abilities.

In general, individual existence is considered as the representation of a human being and advocates fighting for its rightful position in the world (Rorty 216). Moreover, “self” is linked with time and mind, which determine obsessive thinking based on the future than emphasizing the present. Most religions advocate for the dissolution of humans for human nature to prevail in the world. This is commonly known as nirvana, presence, or enlightenment.

Besides viewing the self as an illusion, other philosophers approach the concept by considering the “self” as an activity. Among these philosophers were Aristotle and Plato, who defined the human soul as the principal essence of humanity but posited against differences in existence.

Unlike Plato and other religious traditions who supported separate existence, Aristotle viewed the human “self” as an activity of the body which lacks the properties of becoming immortal (Sorabji 17). To be specific, the soul is viewed as the activity of any living body. In defining the soul, Aristotle divided his argument into four major parts, including the desiderative, calculative, rational, and scientific parts.

Another renowned philosopher and psychologist today who defines “self” is Dr. Phil. He believes that a person dwells on a state of fictional self or authentic self as created by the Supreme Being. According to Dr. Phil, most people define who they are by explaining what they are doing, where they are, or their role in society.

However, Dr. Phil argues that one’s authentic self encompasses the genuine existence of a person’s identity (McGraw 1). This is to say that an authentic self demonstrates core human qualities. Additionally, the self is made up of the part of an individual that is not defined by profession or a given role in society. It consists of an individual’s talents, skills, and wisdom.

The psychologist further argues that an authentic self revolves around a person’s uniqueness, including abilities, rather than what he/she is expected to do or become. This, therefore, implies that when an individual does not live to the standards of his authentic self, he adopts a fictional self that has emptiness and incompleteness (McGraw 1).

It is doubtless that the definition of “self” has a wide range of implications. For instance, this knowledge affects the way human beings view themselves differently from animals. It gives them an understanding of their uniqueness and potential in using their senses to recognize their surrounding and their imagination ability.

Additionally, the definition of self impacts how we interact with and perceive others. In other words, human beings are able to appreciate others regardless of their shortcomings and differences since each one of them possesses unique qualities and attributes.

Although numerous philosophers have devoted their lives to defining the “I am” concept, Rene Descartes is regarded as the father of Western philosophy and a great contributor to several schools of thought. In particular, Meditations on First Philosophy has widely been used as learning at teaching materials across the globe.

Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy . Sioux Falls: NuVision Publications, LLC, 2007. Print.

Frankfurt, Harry. Descartes’ Discussion of His Existence in the Second Mediation. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2004. Print.

McGraw, Phillip. “Self Matters.” Dr. Phil , 2012. Web.

Rorty, Amélie. Essays on Descartes’ Meditations . California: University of California Press, 1986. Print.

Smith, Kurt, “Descartes’ Life and Works.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. Web. < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/descartes-works/ >.

Sorabji, Richard. Graeco-Roman Varieties of Self. New York, NY: Springer, 2008. Print.

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Thomas Aquinas – Toward a Deeper Sense of Self

Therese scarpelli cory.

“Who am I?” If Google’s autocomplete is any indication, it’s not one of the questions we commonly ask online (unlike other existential questions like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What is a human?”). But philosophers have long held that “Who am I?” is in some way the central question of human life. “Know yourself” was the inscription that the ancient Greeks inscribed over the threshold to the Delphic temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom. In fact, self-knowledge is the gateway to wisdom, as Socrates quipped: “The wise person is the one who knows what he doesn’t know.”

Thomas Aquinas

The reality is, we all lack self-knowledge to some degree, and the pursuit of self-knowledge is a lifelong quest—often a painful one. For instance, a common phenomenon studied in psychology is the “ loss of a sense of self ” that occurs when a familiar way of thinking about oneself (for example, as “a healthy person,” “someone who earns a good wage,” “a parent”) is suddenly stripped away by a major life change or tragedy.  Forced to face oneself for the first time without these protective labels, one can feel as though the ground has been suddenly cut out from under one’s feet: Who am I, really?

But the reality of self-ignorance is something of a philosophical puzzle.  Why do we need to work at gaining knowledge about ourselves?  In other cases, ignorance results from a lack of experience.  No surprise that I confuse kangaroos with wallabies: I’ve never seen either in real life.  Of course I don’t know what number you’re thinking about: I can’t see inside your mind.  But what excuse do I have for being ignorant of anything having to do with myself?  I already am myself !  I, and I alone, can experience my own mind from the inside.  This insider knowledge makes me—as communications specialists are constantly reminding us—the unchallenged authority on “what I feel” or “what I think.”  So why is it a lifelong project for me to gain insight into my own thoughts, habits, impulses, reasons for acting, or the nature of the mind itself?

This is called the “problem of self-opacity,” and we’re not the only ones to puzzle over it: It was also of great interest to the medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose theory of self-knowledge is documented in my new book Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge .  It’s a common scholarly myth that early modern philosophers (starting with Descartes) invented the idea of the human being as a “self” or “subject.”  My book tries to dispel that myth, showing that like philosophers and neuroscientists today, medieval thinkers were just as curious about why the mind is so intimately familiar, and yet so inaccessible, to itself.  (In fact, long before Freud, medieval Latin and Islamic thinkers were speculating about a subconscious, inaccessible realm in the mind.)  The more we study the medieval period, the clearer it becomes that inquiry into the self does not start with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”  Rather, Descartes was taking sides in a debate about self-knowledge that had already begun in the thirteenth century and earlier.

For Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.

Aquinas begins his theory of self-knowledge from the claim that all our self-knowledge is dependent on our experience of the world around us.  He rejects a view that was popular at the time, i.e., that the mind is “always on,” never sleeping, subconsciously self-aware in the background.  Instead, Aquinas argues, our awareness of ourselves is triggered and shaped by our experiences of objects in our environment .   He pictures the mind as as a sort of undetermined mental “putty” that takes shape when it is activated in knowing something.  By itself, the mind is dark and formless; but in the moment of acting, it is “lit up” to itself from the inside and sees itself engaged in that act.  In other words, when I long for a cup of mid-afternoon coffee, I’m not just aware of the coffee, but of myself as the one wanting it .  So for Aquinas, we don’t encounter ourselves as isolated minds or selves, but rather always as agents interacting with our environment.  That’s why the labels we apply to ourselves—“a gardener,” “a patient person,” or “a coffee-lover”—are always taken from what we do or feel or think toward other things.

The Temple of Apollo at Delphi, © 2004 David Monniaux

But if we “see” ourselves from the inside at the moment of acting, what about the “problem of self-opacity” mentioned above?  Instead of lacking self-knowledge, shouldn’t we be able to “see” everything about ourselves clearly?  Aquinas’s answer is that just because we experience something doesn’t mean we instantly understand everything about it—or to use his terminology: experiencing that something exists doesn’t tell us what it is . (By comparison: If someday I encounter a wallaby, that won’t make me an expert about wallabies.)  Learning about a thing’s nature requires a long process of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions, and even then we may never fully understand it.  The same applies to the mind.  I am absolutely certain, with an insider’s perspective that no one else can have, of the reality of my experience of wanting another cup of coffee.  But the significance of those experiences—what they are, what they tell me about myself and the nature of the mind—requires further experience and reasoning.  Am I hooked on caffeine?  What is a “desire” and why do we have desires?  These questions can only be answered by reasoning about the evidence taken from many experiences.

Aquinas, then, would surely approve that we’re not drawn to search online for answers to the question, “Who am I?”  That question can only be answered “from the inside” by me , the one asking the question.  At the same time, answering this question isn’t a matter of withdrawing from the world and turning in on ourselves.  It’s a matter of becoming more aware of ourselves at the moment of engaging with reality, and drawing conclusions about what our activities towards other things “say” about us.  There’s Aquinas’s “prescription” for a deeper sense of self.

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About The Author

Therese Scarpelli Cory is the author of Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge. She is assistant professor of philosophy at Seattle University....

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You are a network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. an emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.

by Kathleen Wallace   + BIO

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. ( Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

H ow do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.

Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book , The Network Self ) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

F igures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process .

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or .

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

T he network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.

Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self -determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

To read more about the self, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

History of ideas

Philosophy of the people

How two amateur schools pulled a generation of thinkers from the workers and teachers of the 19th-century American Midwest

Joseph M Keegin

Virtues and vices

Make it awkward!

Rather than being a cringey personal failing, awkwardness is a collective rupture – and a chance to rewrite the social script

Alexandra Plakias

Metaphysics

Desperate remedies

In order to make headway on knotty metaphysical problems, philosophers should look to the methods used by scientists

Political philosophy

Citizens and spinning wheels

For Indians to be truly free, Gandhi argued they must take up traditional crafts. Was it a quixotic hope or inspired solution?

Benjamin Studebaker

Psychiatry and psychotherapy

For those who hear voices, the ‘broken brain’ explanation is harmful. Psychiatry must embrace new meaning-making frameworks

Justin Garson

C L R James and America

The brilliant Trinidadian thinker is remembered as an admirer of the US but he also warned of its dark political future

Harvey Neptune

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Self to Self

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Self to Self brings together essays on personal identity, autonomy, and moral emotions by the distinguished philosopher J. David Velleman. Although each of the essays was written as an independent piece, they are unified by an overarching thesis, that there is no single entity denoted by 'the self', as well as by themes from Kantian ethics, psychoanalytic theory, social psychology, and Velleman's work in the philosophy of action. Two of the essays were selected by the editors of Philosophers' Annual as being among the ten best papers in their year of publication. Aimed primarily at professional philosophers and advanced students, Self to Self will also be of interest to psychologists and others who theorize about the self.

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Frontmatter pp i-vi

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Contents pp vii-viii

Acknowledgments pp ix-x, sources pp xi-xiv, 1 - introduction pp 1-15, 2 - a brief introduction to kantian ethics pp 16-44, 3 - the genesis of shame pp 45-69, 4 - love as a moral emotion pp 70-109, 5 - the voice of conscience pp 110-128, 6 - a rational superego pp 129-155, 7 - don't worry, feel guilty pp 156-169, 8 - self to self pp 170-202, 9 - the self as narrator pp 203-223, 10 - from self psychology to moral philosophy pp 224-252, 11 - the centered self pp 253-283, 12 - willing the law pp 284-311, 13 - motivation by ideal pp 312-329, 14 - identification and identity pp 330-360, bibliography pp 361-378, index pp 379-385, altmetric attention score, full text views.

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6.2 Self and Identity

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Apply the dilemma of persistence to self and identity.
• Outline Western and Eastern theological views of self.
• Describe secular views of the self.
• Describe the mind-body problem.

Today, some might think that atomism and Aristotle’s teleological view have evolved into a theory of cells that resolves the acorn-oak tree identity problem. The purpose, or ergon, of both the acorn and the oak tree are present in the zygote, the cell that forms when male and female sex cells combine. This zygote cell contains the genetic material, or the instructions, for how the organism will develop to carry out its intended purpose.

But not all identity problems are so easily solved today. What if the author of this chapter lived in a house as a child, and years later, after traveling in the highly glamorous life that comes with being a philosopher, returned to find the house had burned down and been rebuilt exactly as it had been. Is it the same home? The generic questions that center on how we should understand the tension between identity and persistence include:

• Can a thing change without losing its identity?
• If so, how much change can occur without a loss of identity for the thing itself?

This section begins to broach these questions of identity and self.

The Ship of Theseus

Consider the following thought experiment. Imagine a wooden ship owned by the hero Theseus. Within months of launching, the need to replace decking would be evident. The salt content of sea water is highly corrosive. Accidents can also happen. Within a common version of the thought experiment, the span of one thousand years is supposed. Throughout the span, it is supposed that the entire decking and wooden content of the ship will have been replaced. The name of the ship remains constant. But given the complete change of materials over the assumed time span, in what sense can we assert that the ship is the same ship? We are tempted to conceptualize identity in terms of persistence, but the Ship of Theseus challenges the commonly held intuition regarding how to make sense of identity.

Similarly, as our bodies develop from zygote to adult, cells die and are replaced using new building materials we obtain though food, water, and our environment. Given this, are we the same being as we were 10 or 20 years ago? How can we identify what defines ourselves? What is our essence? This section examines answers proposed by secular and religious systems of belief.

Write Like a Philosopher

Watch the video “ Metaphysics: Ship of Theseus ” in the series Wi-Phi Philosophy . You will find five possible solutions for making sense of the thought experiment. Pick one solution and explain why the chosen solution is the most salient. Can you explain how the strengths outweigh the stated objections—without ignoring the objections?

Judeo-Christian Views of Self

The common view concerning identity in Judeo-Christian as well as other spiritual traditions is that the self is a soul. In Western thought, the origin of this view can be traced to Plato and his theory of forms. This soul as the real self solves the ship of Theseus dilemma, as the soul continuously exists from zygote or infant and is not replaced by basic building materials. The soul provides permanence and even persists into the afterlife.

Much of the Christian perspective on soul and identity rested on Aristotle’s theory of being, as a result of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas . Aquinas, a medieval philosopher, followed the Aristotelian composite of form and matter but modified the concept to fit within a Christianized cosmology. Drawing upon portions of Aristotle’s works reintroduced to the West as a result of the Crusades, Aquinas offered an alternative philosophical model to the largely Platonic Christian view that was dominant in his day. From an intellectual historical perspective, the reintroduction of the Aristotelian perspective into Western thought owes much to the thought of Aquinas.

In Being and Essence , Aquinas noted that there was a type of existence that was necessary and uncaused and a type of being that was contingent and was therefore dependent upon the former to be brought into existence. While the concept of a first cause or unmoved mover was present within Aristotle’s works, Aquinas identified the Christian idea of God as the “unmoved mover.” God, as necessary being, was understood as the cause of contingent being. God, as the unmoved mover, as the essence from which other contingent beings derived existence, also determined the nature and purpose driving all contingent beings. In addition, God was conceived of as a being beyond change, as perfection realized. Using Aristotelian terms, we could say that God as Being lacked potentiality and was best thought of as that being that attained complete actuality or perfection—in other words, necessary being.

God, as the ultimate Good and Truth, will typically be understood as assigning purpose to the self. The cosmology involved is typically teleological—in other words, there is a design and order and ultimately an end to the story (the eschaton ). Members of this tradition will assert that the Divine is personal and caring and that God has entered the narrative of our history to realize God’s purpose through humanity. With some doctrinal exception, if the self lives the good life (a life according to God’s will), then the possibility of sharing eternity with the Divine is promised.

Think Like a Philosopher

Watch this discussion with Timothy Pawl on the question of eternal life, part of the PBS series Closer to the Truth , “ Imagining Eternal Life ”.

Is eternal life an appealing prospect? If change is not possible within heaven, then heaven (the final resting place for immortal souls) should be outside of time. What exactly would existence within an eternal now be like? In the video, Pawl claimed that time has to be present within eternity. He argued that there must be movement from potentiality to actuality. How can that happen in an eternity?

Hindu and Buddhist Views of Self

Within Hindu traditions, atman is the term associated with the self. The term, with its roots in ancient Sanskrit, is typically translated as the eternal self, spirit, essence, soul, and breath (Rudy, 2019). Western faith traditions speak of an individual soul and its movement toward the Divine. That is, a strong principle of individuation is applied to the soul. A soul is born, and from that time forward, the soul is eternal. Hinduism, on the other hand, frames atman as eternal; atman has always been. Although atman is eternal, atman is reincarnated. The spiritual goal is to “know atman” such that liberation from reincarnation ( moksha ) occurs.

Hindu traditions vary in the meaning of brahman . Some will speak of a force supporting all things, while other traditions might invoke specific deities as manifestations of brahman . Escaping the cycle of reincarnation requires the individual to realize that atman is brahman and to live well or in accordance with dharma , observing the code of conduct as prescribed by scripture, and karma , actions and deeds. Union of the atman with brahman can be reach though yoga, meditation, rituals, and other practices.

Buddha rejected the concept of brahman and proposed an alternate view of the world and the path to liberation. The next sections consider the interaction between the concepts of Atman (the self) and Brahman (reality).

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination

Buddhist philosophy rejects the concept of an eternal soul. The doctrine of dependent origination , a central tenet within Buddhism, is built on the claim that there is a causal link between events in the past, the present, and the future. What we did in the past is part of what happened previously and is part of what will be.

The doctrine of dependent origination (also known as interdependent arising) is the starting point for Buddhist cosmology. The doctrine here asserts that not only are all people joined, but all phenomena are joined with all other phenomena. All things are caused by all other things, and in turn, all things are dependent upon other things. Being is a nexus of interdependencies. There is no first cause or prime mover in this system. There is no self—at least in the Western sense of self—in this system (O’Brien 2019a).

The Buddhist Doctrine of No Self ( Anatman )

One of many distinct features of Buddhism is the notion of anatman as the denial of the self. What is being denied here is the sense of self expressed through metaphysical terms such as substance or universal being. Western traditions want to assert an autonomous being who is strongly individuated from other beings. Within Buddhism, the “me” is ephemeral.

Listen to the podcast “ Graham Priest on Buddhism and Philosophy ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Suffering and Liberation

Within Buddhism, there are four noble truths that are used to guide the self toward liberation. An often-quoted sentiment from Buddhism is the first of the four noble truths . The first noble truth states that “life is suffering” ( dukkha ).

But there are different types of suffering that need to be addressed in order to understand more fully how suffering is being used here. The first meaning ( dukkha-dukkha ) is commensurate with the ordinary use of suffering as pain. This sort of suffering can be experienced physically and/or emotionally. A metaphysical sense of dukkha is viparinama-dukkha . Suffering in this sense relates to the impermanence of all objects. It is our tendency to impose permanence upon that which by nature is not, or our craving for ontological persistence, that best captures this sense of dukkha. Finally, there is samkhara-dukkha , or suffering brought about through the interdependency of all things.

Building on an understanding of “suffering” informed only by the first sense, some characterize Buddhism as “life is suffering; suffering is caused by greed; suffering ends when we stop being greedy; the way to do that is to follow something called the Eightfold Path” (O’Brien 2019b). A more accurate understanding of dukkha within this context must include all three senses of suffering.

The second of the noble truths is that the cause of suffering is our thirst or craving ( tanha ) for things that lack the ability to satisfy our craving. We attach our self to material things, concepts, ideas, and so on. This attachment, although born of a desire to fulfill our internal cravings, only heightens the craving. The problem is that attachment separates the self from the other. Through our attachments, we lose sight of the impermanence not only of the self but of all things.

The third noble truth teaches that the way to awakening ( nirvana ) is through a letting go of the cravings. Letting go of the cravings entails the cessation of suffering ( dukkha ).

The fourth truth is founded in the realization that living a good life requires doing, not just thinking. By living in accordance with the Eightfold Path, a person may live such that “every action of body, mind, and speech” are geared toward the promotion of dharma.

Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Steven Fry and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Five Aggregates

How might the self ( atman ) experience the world and follow a path toward liberation? Buddhist philosophy posits five aggregates ( skandhas ), which are the thoughtful and iterative processes, through which the self interacts with the world.

• Form ( rupa ): the aggregate of matter, or the body.
• Sensation ( vedana ): emotional and physical feelings.
• Perception ( samjna ): thinking, the processing of sense data; “knowledge that puts together.”
• Mental formation ( samskara ): how thoughts are processed into habits, predispositions, moods, volitions, biases, interests, etc. The fourth skandhas is related to karma, as much of our actions flow from these elements.
• Consciousness ( vijnana ): awareness and sensitivity concerning a thing that does not include conceptualization.

Although the self uses the aggregates, the self is not thought of as a static and enduring substance underlying the processes. These aggregates are collections that are very much subject to change in an interdependent world.

Secular Notions of Self

In theology, continuity of the self is achieved through the soul. Secular scholars reject this idea, defining self in different ways, some of which are explored in the next sections.

Bundle Theory

One of the first and most influential scholars in the Western tradition to propose a secular concept of self was Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). Hume formed his thoughts in response to empiricist thinkers’ views on substance and knowledge. British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) offered a definition of substance in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Book XXIII, Locke described substance as “a something, I know not what.” He asserted that although we cannot know exactly what substance is, we can reason from experience that there must be a substance “standing under or upholding” the qualities that exist within a thing itself. The meaning of substance is taken from the Latin substantia , or “that which supports.”

If we return to the acorn and oak example, the reality of what it means to be an oak is rooted in the ultimate reality of what it means to be an oak tree. The ultimate reality, like the oak’s root system, stands beneath every particular instance of an oak tree. While not every tree is exactly the same, all oak trees do share a something, a shared whatness, that makes an oak an oak. Philosophers call this whatness that is shared among oaks a substance.

Arguments against a static and enduring substance ensued. David Hume’s answer to the related question of “What is the self?” illustrates how a singular thing may not require an equally singular substance. According to Hume, the self was not a Platonic form or an Aristotelian composite of matter and form. Hume articulated the self as a changing bundle of perceptions. In his Treatise of Human Nature (Book 1, Part IV), Hume described the self as “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”

Hume noted that what has been mistaken for a static and enduring self was nothing more than a constantly changing set of impressions that were tied together through their resemblance to one another, the order or predictable pattern (succession) of the impressions, and the appearance of causation lent through the resemblance and succession. The continuity we experience was not due to an enduring self but due to the mind’s ability to act as a sort of theater: “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 1739, 252).

Which theories of self—and substance—should we accept? The Greek theories of substance and the theological theories of a soul offer advantages. Substance allows us to explain what we observe. For example, an apple, through its substance, allows us to make sense of the qualities of color, taste, the nearness of the object, etc. Without a substance, it could be objected that the qualities are merely unintelligible and unrelated qualities without a reference frame. But bundle theory allows us to make sense of a thing without presupposing a mythical form, or “something I know not what!” Yet, without the mythical form of a soul, how do we explain our own identities?

Anthropological Views

Anthropological views of the self question the cultural and social constructs upon which views of the self are erected. For example, within Western thought, it is supposed that the self is distinct from the “other.” In fact, throughout this section, we have assumed the need for a separate and distinct self and have used a principle of continuity based on the assumption that a self must persist over time. Yet, non-Western cultures blur or negate this distinction. The African notion of ubuntu , for example, posits a humanity that cannot be divided. The Nguni proverb that best describes this concept is “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” sometimes translated as “a person is a person through other persons” (Gade 2011). The word ubuntu is from the Zulu language, but cultures from southern Africa to Tanzania, Kenya, and Democratic Republic of the Congo all have words for this concept. Anthropological approaches attempt to make clear how the self and the culture share in making meaning.

The Mind as Self

Many philosophers, Western and non-Western, have equated the self to the mind. But what is the mind? A monist response is the mind is the brain. Yet, if the mind is the brain, a purely biological entity, then how do we explain consciousness? Moreover, if we take the position that the mind is immaterial but the body is material, we are left with the question of how two very different types of things can causally affect the other. The question of “How do the two nonidentical and dissimilar entities experience a causal relationship?” is known as the mind-body problem. This section explores some alternative philosophical responses to these questions.

Physicalism

Reducing the mind to the brain seems intuitive given advances in neuroscience and other related sciences that deepen our understanding of cognition. As a doctrine, physicalism is committed to the assumption that everything is physical. Exactly how to define the physical is a matter of contention. Driving this view is the assertion that nothing that is nonphysical has physical effects.

Listen to the podcast “ David Papineau on Physicalism ” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Focus on the thought experiment concerning what Mary knows. Here is a summary of the thought experiment:

Mary is a scientist and specializes in the neurophysiology of color. Strangely, her world has black, white, and shades of gray but lacks color (weird, but go with it!). Due to her expertise, she knows every physical fact concerning colors. What if Mary found herself in a room in which color as we experience it is present? Would she learn anything? A physicalist must respond “no”! Do you agree? How would you respond?

John Locke and Identity

In place of the biological, Locke defined identity as the continuity lent through what we refer to as consciousness. His approach is often referred to as the psychological continuity approach, as our memories and our ability to reflect upon our memories constitute identity for Locke. In his Essay on Human Understanding , Locke (as cited by Gordon-Roth 2019) observed, “We must consider what Person stands for . . . which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.” He offered a thought experiment to illustrate his point. Imagine a prince and cobbler whose memories (we might say consciousness) were swapped. The notion is far-fetched, but if this were to happen, we would assert that the prince was now the cobbler and the cobbler was now the prince. Therefore, what individuates us cannot be the body (or the biological).

John Locke on Personal Identity

Part of the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Ideas , this clip is narrated by Gillian Anderson and scripted by Nigel Warburton.

The Problem of Consciousness

Christof Koch (2018) has said that “consciousness is everything you experience.” Koch offered examples, such as “a tune stuck in your head,” the “throbbing pain from a toothache,” and “a parent’s love for a child” to illustrate the experience of consciousness. Our first-person experiences are what we think of intuitively when we try to describe what consciousness is. If we were to focus on the throbbing pain of a toothache as listed above, we can see that there is the experiencing of the toothache. Curiously, there is also the experiencing of the experiencing of the toothache. Introspection and theorizing built upon first-person inspections affords vivid and moving accounts of the things experienced, referred to as qualia .

An optimal accounting of consciousness, however, should not only explain what consciousness is but should also offer an explanation concerning how consciousness came to be and why consciousness is present. What difference or differences does consciousness introduce?

Listen to the podcast “ Ted Honderich on What It Is to Be Conscious ,” in the series Philosophy Bites.

Rene Descartes and Dualism

Dualism , as the name suggests, attempts to account for the mind through the introduction of two entities. The dualist split was addressed earlier in the discussion of substance. Plato argued for the reality of immaterial forms but admitted another type of thing—the material. Aristotle disagreed with his teacher Plato and insisted on the location of the immaterial within the material realm. How might the mind and consciousness be explained through dualism?

Mind Body Dualism

A substance dualist, in reference to the mind problem, asserts that there are two fundamental and irreducible realities that are needed to fully explain the self. The mind is nonidentical to the body, and the body is nonidentical to the mind. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) offered a very influential version of substance dualism in his 1641 work Meditations on First Philosophy. In that work, Descartes referred to the mind as a thinking thing ( res cogitans ) and the body as an extended nonthinking thing ( res extensa ). Descartes associated identity with the thinking thing. He introduced a model in which the self and the mind were eternal.

Behaviorism

There is a response that rejects the idea of an independent mind. Within this approach, what is important is not mental states or the existence of a mind as a sort of central processor, but activity that can be translated into statements concerning observable behavior (Palmer 2016, 122). As within most philosophical perspectives, there are many different “takes” on the most correct understanding. Behaviorism is no exception. The “hard” behaviorist asserts that there are no mental states. You might consider this perspective the purist or “die-hard” perspective. The “soft” behaviorist, the moderate position, does not deny the possibility of minds and mental events but believes that theorizing concerning human activity should be based on behavior.

Before dismissing the view, pause and consider the plausibility of the position. Do we ever really know another’s mind? There is some validity to the notion that we ought to rely on behavior when trying to know or to make sense of the “other.” But if you have a toothache, and you experience myself being aware of the qualia associated with a toothache (e.g., pain, swelling, irritability, etc.), are these sensations more than activities? What of the experience that accompanies the experience?

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Self-consciousness.

Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness, peculiarities which distinguish it from consciousness of things other than oneself. After drawing certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for the very possibility of self-consciousness, this article discusses the nature of those epistemic and semantic peculiarities.

The relevant epistemic peculiarities are mainly those associated with the alleged infallibility and self-intimation of self-consciousness. It has sometimes been thought that our consciousness of ourselves may be, under certain conditions, infallible, in the sense that it cannot go wrong: when we believe that some fact about us obtains, it does. It has also sometimes been thought that some forms of consciousness are self-intimating: if a certain fact about us obtains, we are necessarily going to be conscious that it does. These claims have come under heavy attack in more recent philosophical work, but it remains unclear whether some restricted forms of infallibility and self-intimation survive the attack.

The relevant semantic peculiarities have emerged in recent work in philosophy of language and mind. Two of them stand out: the so-called immunity to error through misidentification of our consciousness of ourselves and the special character of self-regarding (or de se ) consciousness that cannot be assimilated to other kinds of consciousness. Some philosophers have argued that these are not genuine features of self-consciousness, while others have argued that, although genuine, they are not peculiar to self-consciousness. Other philosophers have defended the proposition that these features are genuine and peculiar to self-consciousness. We will consider the case for these claims in due course.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Self-Consciousness: Some Distinctions
• (How) Is Self-Consciousness Possible?
• Epistemic Peculiarities of Self-Consciousness
• Immunities to Error through Misidentification
• Essential Indexicals and De Se Thoughts
• Conclusion: A General Theory of Self-Consciousness?
• References and Further Reading

1. Introduction

Throughout our waking life, we are conscious of a variety of things. We are often conscious of other people, of cars, trees, beetles, and other objects around us. We are conscious of their features: their colors, their shapes, and the sound they make. We are conscious of events involving them: car accidents, tree blooming, and so forth.

Sometimes we are also conscious of ourselves, our features, and the events that take place within us. Thus, we may become conscious, in a certain situation, of the fact that we are nervous or uncomfortable. We may become conscious of a rising anxiety, or of a sudden cheerfulness. Sometimes we are conscious of simpler things: that we are seeing red, or that we are thinking of tomorrow’s errands.

In addition, we sometimes have the sense that we are continuously conscious of ourselves going about our business in the world. Thus William James, who was very influential in the early days of experimental, systematic psychology (in addition to being the brother of novelist Henry James and a gifted writer himself), remarked once that “whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence” (James 1961: 42).

These forms of self-consciousness—consciousness of ourselves and our personal existence, of our character traits and standing features, and of the thoughts that occur to us and the feelings that we experience—are philosophically fascinating, inasmuch as they are at once quite mysterious and closest to home. Our scientific theories of astrophysical objects that are incredibly distant from us in both space and time, or of the smallest particles that make up the sub-atomic layer of reality, are mature, sophisticated, and impressive. By contrast, we barely have anything worth the name “scientific theory” for self-consciousness and its various manifestations, in spite of self-consciousness’ being so much more familiar a phenomenon—indeed the most familiar phenomenon of all.

Here, as elsewhere, the immaturity of our scientific understanding of self-consciousness invites philosophical reflection on the topic, and is anyway partly due precisely to deep philosophical puzzles about the nature of self-consciousness. Many philosophers have thought that self-consciousness exhibits certain peculiarities not to be found in consciousness of things other than ourselves, and indeed possibly not to be found anywhere else in nature.

Philosophical work on self-consciousness has thus mostly focused on the identification and articulation of these peculiarities. More specifically, it has sought some epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness, that is, peculiarities as regards how we know, and more generally how we represent, ourselves and our internal lives. (In philosophical jargon, “epistemology” is the theory of knowledge and “semantics” is—more or less—the theory of representation.) This entry will accordingly focus on these peculiarities. After drawing certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for the very possibility of self-consciousness, we will discuss first the nature of the relevant epistemic peculiarities and then (more extensively) the semantic ones.

2. Self-Consciousness: Some Distinctions

Let us start by drawing some distinctions. (The distinctions I will draw are meant as conceptual distinctions. Whether they stand for real differences between the properties putatively picked out by the relevant concepts is a separate matter.) The first important distinction is between self-consciousness as a property of whole individuals and self-consciousness as a property of particular mental states. Thus, when we say “My thought that p is self-conscious” and “I am self-conscious,” the property we ascribe is in all likelihood different. My being self-conscious involves my being conscious of my self. But my thought’s being self-conscious does not involve my thought’s being conscious of its self, since (i) it does not have a self, and (ii) thoughts are not the kind of thing that can be conscious of anything. We may call the property that I have creature self-consciousness and the property that my thought has state self-consciousness .

Another distinction is between consciousness of oneself (one’s self) and consciousness of a particular event or state that occurs within oneself. Compare “I am self-conscious of myself thinking that p ” to “I am self-conscious of my thought that p .” The latter involves awareness of a particular thought of mine, but need not involve awareness of self or selfhood. It is a form of self-consciousness in the sense that it is directed inward, and takes as its object an internal state of mine. But it is not a form of self-consciousness in the stronger sense of involving consciousness of self. I will refer to the stronger variety as strong self-consciousness and the weaker as weak self-consciousness . State self-consciousness is consciousness of what happens within oneself, whereas creature self-consciousness is consciousness of oneself proper. (Note, however, that a mental state may be both creature- and state-self-conscious. Thus, if I am conscious of my thought that p as my thought, as a thought of mine, then I am conscious both of my thought and of myself.)

Another traditional distinction, which dates back to Kant , is between consciousness of oneself qua object and consciousness of oneself qua subject. Suppose I am conscious of Budapest (or of Budapest and its odors). I am the subject of the thought, its object is Budapest. But suppose now that I am conscious of myself (or of myself and my feelings). Now I am both the subject and the object of the thought. But although the subject and the object of the thought happen to be the same thing, there is still a conceptual distinction to be made between myself in my capacity as object of thought and myself in my capacity as subject of thought. That is to say, even though there is one entity here, there are two separate concepts for this entity, the self-as-subject concept and the self-as-object concept. To mark this difference, William James (1890) introduced a technical distinction between the I and the me . In its technical use, “I” (and its Mentalese correlate) refers to the self-as-subject, whereas “me” (and its Mentalese correlate) refers to the self-as-object. By “Mentalese correlate,” I mean the expression that would mean the same as “I” and “me” in something like the so-called language of thought (Fodor 1975) or Mentalese.)

Corresponding to these two concepts, or conceptions, of self, there would presumably be two distinct modes of presentation under which a person may be conscious of herself. She may be conscious of herself under the “I” description or under the “me” description. Thus, my state of self-consciousness may employ either the “I” mode of presentation or the “me” mode of presentation. (We could capture the difference, using James’ technical terminology, by distinguishing “I am self-conscious that I think that p ” and “I am self-conscious that methinks that p .”) In the latter case, there is a sort of “conceptual distance” between the thing that does the thinking and the thing being thought about. Although I am thinking of myself, I am not thinking of myself as the thing that does the thinking. By contrast, in the former case, I am thinking of myself precisely as the thing that is therewith doing the thinking.

Through Kant’s influence on Husserl , philosophers in the phenomenological tradition have long held that something like consciousness of self-as-subject is a distinct, irreducible, and central aspect of our mental life. Philosophers in the analytic tradition have been more suspicious of it (for exceptions to this rule, see for instance Van Gulick 1988 and Strawson 1997). But the distinction between consciousness of self-as-subject and consciousness of self-as-object might be captured using analytic tools, through a distinction between transitive and intransitive self-consciousness (Kriegel 2003, 2004a). Compare “I am self-conscious of thinking that p ” and “I am self-consciously thinking that p .” In the former, transitive form, self-consciousness is construed as a relation between me and my thinking. In the latter, intransitive form, it is construed as a modification of my thinking. That is, in the latter the self-consciousness term (if you will) does not denote a state of standing in a relation to my thought (or my thinking) that p . Rather, it designates the way I am having my thought (or doing my thinking). In transitive self-consciousness, the thought and the state of self-consciousness are treated as two numerically distinct mental states. By contrast, in intransitive self-consciousness, there is no numerical distinction between the thought and the state of self-consciousness: the thought is the state of self-consciousness. The adverb “self-consciously” denotes a way I am having my thought that p . No extra act of self-consciousness takes place after the thought that p occurs. Rather, self-consciously is how the thought that p occurs.

I have been speaking of the self-as-subject in terms of “the thing that does the thinking,” and correspondingly of consciousness of oneself as subject in terms of consciousness of oneself as the thing that does the thinking. But recent work in philosophical psychopathology counsels caution here. Schizophrenics suffering from “thought insertion” and “alien voices” delusions report that they are not in control of their thoughts. Indeed, they often envisage a particular individual who, they claim, is doing the thinking for them, or implants thoughts in their mind. Note that although they do not experience themselves as doing the thinking, they do experience the thinking as happening, in some sense, in them. To account for the experiential difference between doing the thinking and merely hosting the thinking, between authorship of one’s thoughts and mere ownership of them (respectively), some philosophers have drawn a distinction between consciousness of oneself as agent and consciousness of oneself as subject (Campbell 1999, Graham and Stephens 2000). The distinction between self-as-agent and self-as-subject is orthogonal, however, to the distinction between self-as-object and self-as-subject. To avoid confusion, let us suggest a different terminology, that of self-as-author versus self-as-owner, and correspondingly, of consciousness of oneself as author of one’s thoughts and consciousness of oneself as owner of one’s thoughts. To be sure, in the normal go of things, ownership and authorship are inseparable. But the pathological cases show that there is daylight between the two notions.

Another important distinction is between propositional self-consciousness and non-propositional self-consciousness . There is no doubt that there is such a thing as propositional self-consciousness: consciousness that some self-related proposition obtains. Presumably, such self-consciousness has conceptual content. But a strong case can be made that there is a form of self-consciousness that is sub-propositional, as it were, and has non-conceptual content (Bermúdez 1998). When a report of self-consciousness uses a “that” clause, as we just did, it necessarily denotes propositional self-consciousness. But when it does not, as is the case, for instance, with “I am self-conscious of thinking that p ,” it is left open whether it is propositional or non-propositional self-consciousness that is denoted. That is, “I am self-conscious of thinking that p ” is compatible with, but does not entail, “I am self-conscious that I am thinking that p .” In any case, the terminology leaves it open whether there is a non-propositional or non-conceptual form of self-consciousness.

Other distinctions can certainly be drawn. I have restricted myself to those that will play a role in the discussion to follow. They are five:

(a) State self-consciousness versus creature self-consciousness (b) Strong versus weak self-consciousness (c) Transitive versus intransitive self-consciousness (d) Consciousness of self-as-object versus consciousness of self-as-subject (e) Consciousness of self-as-author versus consciousness of self-as-owner

As I warned at the opening, these distinctions are meant as conceptual ones. This is doubly significant. First, the fact that there is a distinction between two concepts does not entail that there is a difference between the putative properties picked out by these concepts. Second, the existence of a concept does not entail the existence of the property putatively picked out by that concept. In fact, philosophers have questioned the very existence of self-consciousness.

3. (How) Is Self-Consciousness Possible?

Perhaps the best known philosophical threat to the very possibility of self-consciousness hails from Hume ’s remarks in the Treatise of Human Nature (I, IV, vi): “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

This passage makes two separate claims, of different degrees of skepticism. The modest claim is:

(MC) Upon “turning into” oneself, one cannot “catch” oneself without a particular mental state.

MC rules out the possibility of a mental state whose sole object is the self. But though it disallows catching oneself without a perception, it does not disallow catching oneself with a perception. Hume makes the latter, stronger, immodest claim next, however:

(IC) Upon “turning into” oneself, one cannot “catch” anything but particular mental states.

IC rules out the possibility of any consciousness of one’s self. That is, it rules out the possibility of creature self-consciousness, allowing only for state self-consciousness.

In assessing Hume’s claims, particularly the immodest one, we must ask, first, what did Hume expect to catch? And second, what sort of catching did he have in mind?

One way to deny the possibility of consciousness of oneself is to reject the existence of a self of which one might be conscious. But the inexistence of a self is not a sufficient condition for the impossibility of self-consciousness: there could still be thoroughly and systematically illusory experience of selfhood that gives rise to a form of (illusory) self-consciousness. Nor is such rejection a necessary condition for the impossibility of self-consciousness. Hume himself not only countenanced the self, he offered a theory of it, namely, the bundle theory. What Hume rejected was the existence of a substantival self, a self that is more than just a stream of consciousness and a sum of experiences. What he rejected is the reifying conception of the self according to which the self is an object among others in the world, a substrate that supports the internal goings-on unfolding therein but is distinct from, and somehow stands above, these proceedings. This rejection is shared today by several philosophers (see, for example, Dennett 1991).

This suggests an answer to our first question, concerning what Hume had expected to catch upon turning into himself. What he expected to catch is a self-substance (if you please). It is unclear, however, why Hume thought that consciousness of oneself, even non-illusory consciousness of oneself, required the existence of a substantival self. Consider how self-consciousness might play out within the framework of Hume’s own bundle theory. Upon turning into herself, a person might become conscious of a particular mental state, say an inexplicable cheerfulness, but become conscious of it as belonging to a larger bundle of mental states, perhaps a bundle that has a certain internal cohesion to it at and across time. In that case, we would be well justified to conceive of this person as conscious of her self.

As for the second question, concerning what sort of “catching” Hume had in mind, it appears that Hume envisioned a quasi-perceptual form of catching. He expected self-consciousness to involve some sort of direct encounter with the self. There is no question that one can believe (or otherwise think purely intellectually) that one is inexplicably cheerful. One can surely entertain purely intellectually the proposition “I am inexplicably cheerful.” But Hume wanted more than that. He wanted to be confronted with his self, by turning inward his mind’s eye, as he would with a chair upon directing his outward gaze in the right direction.

In other words, Hume was working with an introspective model of self-consciousness, according to which self-consciousness involves the employment of an inner sense: an internal mechanism whose operation is analogous in essential respects to the operation of the external senses. This inner sense conception was clearly articulated in Locke : “The other fountain [of] ideas, is the perception of the operations of our own minds within us… And though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with external objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called internal sense” ( Essay Concerning Human Understanding II, i, 4).

The plausibility of the introspective model is very much in contention. Thus, Rosenthal (1986) claims that for self-consciousness to be genuinely analogous with perceptual consciousness, the former would have to exhibit the sort of qualitative character the latter does; but since it does not, it is essentially non-perceptual. On this basis, Rosenthal (2004) proceeds to develop an account of self-consciousness in terms of purely intellectual thoughts about oneself (more specifically, thoughts that are entertained in the presence of their object or referent).

On the other hand, self-consciousness can sometimes have a quality of immediacy about it (and its way of putting us in contact with its objects) that seems to parallel perceptual consciousness. At the same time, philosophers have sometimes charged that self-consciousness is in fact too immediate, indeed unmediated, to be thought of as quasi-perceptual. Thus, Shoemaker (1996) argues that the quasi-perceptual model falters in construing self-consciousness along the lines of the act-object analysis that befits perceptual consciousness. When one is perceptually conscious of a butterfly’s meandering, a distinction is always called for between the act of perceptual consciousness and the meandering butterfly it takes as an object. But when one is conscious of one’s cheerfulness, a parallel distinction between the act of self-consciousness and one’s cheerfulness, supposedly thereby taken as object, is misleading, according to Shoemaker.

One way to interpret Shoemaker’s claim here is that while Hume’s argument may be effective against transitive self-consciousness, it is not against intransitive self-consciousness. Recall that transitive self-consciousness requires a duality of mental states, the state of self-consciousness and the state of (for example) cheerfulness. But in intransitive self-consciousness there is no such duality: there is not a distinction between an act of self-consciousness and a separate object taken by it. On this interpretation, Shoemaker’s claim is that being self-conscious of being cheerful may well be impossible, but it is nonetheless possible to be self-consciously cheerful. We might combine Rosenthal’s and Shoemaker’s perspectives and suggest the view that self-consciousness can come in two varieties: intellectual transitive self-consciousness and intransitive self-consciousness. Both varieties escape the clutches of Hume’s threat: one can catch oneself (with a particular mental state) if the catching is intellectual rather than quasi-perceptual, or if the catching is somehow fused into the particular mental state thereby caught. What Hume showed is that quasi-perceptual transitive self-consciousness is impossible; but this leaves untouched the possibility of intellectual transitive self-consciousness and of intransitive self-consciousness.

In summary, it is quite likely that self-consciousness is indeed possible. But reflecting on the conditions of its possibility puts non-trivial constraints on our conception of self-consciousness. In this respect, contending with Hume’s challenge still proves immensely fruitful. If anything, it wakes us from our dogmatic slumber about self-consciousness and brings up the question of the nature of self-consciousness.

One question regarding the nature of self-consciousness that arises immediately is what is to count as having self-consciousness. Many contemporary cognitive scientists have operationalized the notion of self-consciousness in terms of experiments on mirror self-recognition and the so-called “mark test.” In these experiments, a creature’s forehead is marked with a visible stain. When placed in front of a mirror, some creatures try to wipe off the stain, which suggests that they recognize themselves in the mirror, while others do not (see mainly Gallup 1970, 1977). Successes with the mark test are few and far between. Among primates, it is passed with any consistency only by humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans, but not by gorillas or gibbons (Suarez and Gallup 1981); and even humans do not typically pass it before the age of a year and a half (Amsterdam 1972) and chimpanzees not before three years of age nor after sixteen years of age (Povinelli et al. 1993). Outside the group of primates, it is passed only by bottlenose dolphins (Reiss and Marino 2001) and Asian elephants (Plotnik et al. 2006). However, this operational treatment of self-consciousness is problematic at a number of levels. Most importantly, it is not entirely clear what the true relationship between mirror self-recognition and self-consciousness is. One would need a principled account of the latter in order to clarify that matter. Mirror self-recognition experiments thus cannot take precedence over the search for an independent understanding of self-consciousness.

To that end, let us consider the ways in which self-consciousness has been claimed to be different, special, and sometimes privileged, relative to consciousness of things other than oneself. Early modern philosophers, from Descartes on, have often claimed certain epistemic privileges on behalf of self-consciousness. More recently, twentieth century analytic philosophers have attempted to identify certain semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness. We take those up in turns.

4. Epistemic Peculiarities of Self-Consciousness

In what follows, we will consider, somewhat hastily, about a dozen epistemic peculiarities sometimes attributed to self-consciousness. Traditionally, the most discussed special feature claimed on behalf of self-consciousness is infallibility. According to the doctrine of infallibility, one’s consciousness of oneself is always veridical and accurate. We may say that whenever I am self-conscious of thinking that p , I am indeed thinking that p . It is important to note, however, that to the extent that “self-conscious of” is a success verb, this claim would be trivially true, whereas the point of the doctrine under consideration is that it is true even if “self-conscious of” is not a success verb (or also for any non-success uses of the verb). To bypass this technicality, let us insert parenthetically the qualifier “seemingly” into our formulation of the claim. We may formulate the doctrine of infallibility as follows:

(DIF) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p , then I am thinking that p .

Thus, whenever I believe something about myself and my mental life, the belief is true: things are in fact the way I believe them to be.

The doctrine of infallibility ensures that my beliefs about my mental life are true. A parallel doctrine ensures that such beliefs are (epistemically) justified. We may, without too much injustice to traditional terminology, call this the doctrine of incorrigibility . The traditional notion of incorrigibility is the notion that the subject cannot possibly be corrected by anyone else, which suggests that the subject is in possession of (and makes correct use of) all the relevant evidence. We may thus formulate the doctrine of incorrigibility as follows:

(DIC) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p , then I am justifiably (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p .

Whereas according to DIF, whenever I believe something about my mental life, my belief is true, according to DIC, whenever I believe something about my mental life, my belief is justified.

Against the background of the tripartite analysis of knowledge, the conjunction of DIC and DIF would entail a doctrine about self-knowledge in general, namely:

(DIK) If I am (seemingly) self-conscious that I am thinking that p , then I know that I am thinking that p .

That is, if I am in a state of self-consciousness whose content is “I am thinking that p ”, then my state of self-consciousness will necessarily qualify as knowledge. Note, however, that the thesis is entailed by DIF and DIC only against the background of the tripartite analysis—though it may be independently true. (If the tripartite analysis is incorrect, as it probably is, then the thesis does not follow from the conjunction of DIC and DIF. But it can still be formulated.)

The three doctrines we have considered claim strong privileges on behalf of self-consciousness. But there are stronger ones. Consider the converse of the doctrine of infallibility. DIF ensures that when I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p , then I am in fact thinking that p . Its converse is a stronger thesis: whenever I think that p , I am self-conscious of doing so. That is, nothing can pass through the mind without the mind taking notice of it. Having a thought entails being self-conscious of having it. Thoughts are, in this sense, self-intimating. We may formulate the doctrine of self-intimation as follows:

(DSI) If I am thinking that p , then I am self-conscious of thinking that p .

Thus, whenever I think something, I inevitably come to believe (or be aware) that I am. Note that DSI entails DIF, because if I am indeed thinking that p , then my self-consciousness of thinking that p must be true or veridical.

A distinction is sometimes made between weak self-intimation and strong self-intimation (Shoemaker 1996). What we have just considered is the weak variety. The strong variety ensures not only that when I think something, I am aware that I think it, but also that when I do not think something, I am aware that I do not think it. Let us formulate the doctrine of strong self-intimation as follows:

(DSSI) If I am thinking that p , then I am self-conscious of thinking that p ; and if I am not thinking that p , then I am self-conscious of not thinking that p .

Strong self-intimation renders the mind in some traditional sense transparent to itself. But the term “transparency” has had such wide currency in recent philosophy of mind that it would be better not to use it in the present context.

Consider now the converse of the doctrine of incorrigibility. It is the thesis that if I think that p , then I am justifiably self-conscious of thinking that p . It also entails DIF, as well as DSI. Again, a strong version can be formulated: If I think that p , then I am justifiably self-conscious of thinking that p ; and if I do not think that p , then I am justifiably self-conscious of not thinking that p .

Finally, a parallel thesis could be formulated regarding knowledge: If I think that p , then I know that I think that p . The strong version would be:

(OSC) If I think that p , then I know that I think that p , and if I do not think that p , then I know that I do not think that p .

This last feature is probably the strongest epistemic privilege that could be claimed on behalf of self-consciousness. We may call the associated doctrine the Omniscience of Self-Consciousness . For it is the thesis that one knows everything that happens within one’s mind, and everything that does not.

Freud ’s work on the unconscious has all but refuted the above doctrines (see especially Freud 1915). Thus few if any philosophers would defend them today. But many may consider restricted versions of them. The above doctrines are formulated in terms of thoughts, understood as mental states in general. But some theses can be formulated that would restrict the epistemic privileges to a special subset of mental states, such as sensations and feelings, or phenomenally conscious states, or some such. A thus restricted self-intimation thesis might read: if I have a sensation S , then I am self-conscious of having S ; or, if I have a phenomenally conscious state S , then I am self-conscious of having S .

Counter-examples to even such appropriately restricted theses have been offered in the literature. Staying with self-intimation, it has been suggested that there are sensations and conscious states that occur without their subject’s awareness. Arguably, I may have a sensation—indeed, a phenomenally conscious sensation—of the refrigerator’s hum without becoming self-conscious of it, let alone of myself hearing it.

Consider now a restricted version of the infallibility doctrine: If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of having sensation S , then I do have sensation S . An alleged counter-example is the fraternity initiation story. Suppose that, blindfolded, I am told that a particular spot on my neck is about to be cut with a razor (this is part of my fraternity initiation); then an ice cube is placed on that spot. At the very first instant, I am likely to be under the impression that I am having a pain sensation, while in reality I am having a coldness sensation. That is, at that instant, I am (seemingly) self-conscious of having a pain sensation but do not in fact have a pain sensation, or so the argument goes (see Horgan and Kriegel 2007).

Another way to restrict the above doctrines is by making their claims weaker. Consider the following variation on self-intimation: If I am thinking that p , then I am self-conscious of thinking. Whereas DSI claims that when I have the thought that p , I am self-conscious not just of having a thought, but of having specifically the thought that p , this variation claims only that I am self-conscious of having a thought—some thought.

We can apply strictures of this type to any of the above doctrines, and some of the resulting theses may be quite plausible. Thus, consider the following thesis:

If I am (seemingly) self-conscious of being in a phenomenally conscious state S , then I am in some phenomenally conscious state.

It is difficult to conceive of a situation in which one is aware of oneself as being in some conscious state when in fact one is in no conscious state (and hence is unconscious). In particular, the fraternity initiation tale does not tell against this thesis: although in the story I am not in fact in a pain state, I am nonetheless in some conscious state.

Such nuanced theses may thus survive modern critiques of the traditional doctrines of epistemic privilege. Their exploration in the literature is, in any case, far from complete. But let us move on to the semantic privileges sometimes imputed on self-consciousness.

5. Semantic Peculiarities of Self-Consciousness

A. immunities to error through misidentification.

On the two extremes, the first-person pronoun “I” has been claimed by some to be entirely non-referential (Anscombe 1975) and by others to be the only true form of reference (Chisholm 1976 Ch. 3, and in a more nuanced way, Lewis 1979). Presumably, analogous statements could be made about the concept we use in thought in order to think about ourselves in the first person. For convenience, I will call the relevant concept the Mentalese first-person pronoun , or just the Mentalese “I” . Plausibly, the special features of linguistic self-reference (the way “I” refers) derive from, or at least parallel, corresponding features of self-consciousness, and more specifically mental self-reference (the way the Mentalese “I” refers). In the present context, it is the latter that interest us. Our discussion will focus on two main features. In the next section, we will consider the alleged essential indexicality of self-consciousness (Perry 1979) and irreducibility of de se thoughts (Castañeda 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969). (These terms will be explicated in due course.) The present section considers a semantic peculiarity pointed out by Sydney Shoemaker (1968) under the name “immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun” and related peculiarities discussed by Anscombe (1975), Evans (1982), and others.

When I think about things other than myself, there are two ways in which my thoughts may turn out to be false. Suppose I think that my next-door neighbor is a nice person. I may be wrong about either (i) whether he is a nice person or (ii) who my next-door neighbor is. The first error is one of mispredication , if you will, whereas the second is one of misidentification . Thus, if I mistake my neighbor’s tendency to smile for kindness, when in fact it serves a cynical ploy to lure me into signing an unjust petition against the superintendent, then I make a mistake of the first kind. By contrast, if I mistake the mailman for my next-door neighbor, and think that it is my next-door neighbor who is a nice person, when in fact it is the mailman who is, then I make a mistake of the second kind.

In this sense, my thought that my next-door neighbor is a nice person displays a composite structure, involving identification and predication. We may represent this by saying that my thought has the internal structure “my next-door neighbor is the person smiling at me every morning & the person smiling at me every morning is a nice person”, or more generally “my next-door neighbor is the φ & the φ is a nice person”. This is not to say that when I think that my next-door neighbor is a nice person I am thinking this as a conjunction, or that my thought takes a conjunctive proposition as its object. The above conjunctive representation of my thought is meant just as a device to bring out the fact that my thought has a composite structure. The point is just that my thought has two separable components, an identificational component and a predicational component.

Correspondingly, we can envisage three sorts of semantic peculiarity or privilege. (1) There could be a kind of thought K 1, such that if a thought T is of that kind, then T can only be false due to mispredication; thoughts of kind K 1 are thus immune to error through misidentification. (2) There could be a kind of thought K 2, such that if T is of that kind, then T can only be false due to misidentification; thoughts of kind K 2 are thus immune to error through mispredication. (3) There could be a kind of thought K 3, such that if T is of that kind, then T can be false due to neither mispredication nor misidentification; thoughts of kind K 3 are thus immune to error tout court . The above are just definitions of privileges. It remains to be seen whether any of these definitions is actually satisfied. Shoemaker’s claim is that the first definition is indeed satisfied by a certain subset of thoughts about oneself.

Note that the third peculiarity, immunity to error tout court , is basically infallibility. This way of conceiving of immunity to error through misidentification brings out its relation to the more traditional doctrine of infallibility. Unlike the latter, the doctrine of immunity to error through misidentification does not claim blanket immunity. But it does restrict in a principled manner the ways in which the relevant thoughts may turn out to be false. If I think that I feel angry, then I can be wrong about whether that is a feeling I really have, but I cannot be wrong about whom it is that is allegedly angry.

We said that according to Shoemaker, a certain subset of thoughts about oneself is immune to error through misidentification. What subset? One can think about oneself under any number of descriptions. And some descriptions one may not be aware of as applying to one. Thus, I may think that my mother’s nieceless brother’s only nephew is brown-eyed, without being aware that I am my mother’s nieceless brother’s only nephew. In that case, I think about myself, but not as myself. We might say that I have a thought about myself, but not a self-aware thought about myself. Let us call self-aware thoughts about oneself I-thoughts . According to Shoemaker, some I-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification, namely, those I-thoughts that are directed to one’s mind and mental life, as opposed to one’s body and corporeal life. (To take an example from Wittgenstein , suppose I see in the mirror a tangle of arms and I mistakenly take the nicest one to be mine. I may think to myself “I have a nice arm.” In that case, I may not only be wrong about whether my arm is nice, but also about whom it is that has a nice arm. Such an I-thought, being about my body, is not immune to error through misidentification. But my thoughts about my mind are so immune, claims Shoemaker.) More accurately, as we will see later on, Shoemaker holds that absolute, as opposed to circumstantial, immunity to error through misidentification applies only to mental I-thoughts.

We should distinguish two versions of the doctrine of immunity. According to the first, the relevant I-thoughts cannot be false through misidentification because the identifications they involve are always and necessarily correct; call this the infallible identification (II) version of the doctrine of immunity. According to the second version, the relevant I-thoughts cannot be false through misidentification because they do not involve identification in the first place; call this the identificationless reference (IR) version of the doctrine of immunity. (Brook [2001] speaks of ascriptionless reference , which may also be a good label for the specific feature under consideration.) Both versions claim a certain distinction on behalf of the relevant I-thoughts, but the distinction is very different. The first version claims the distinction of infallible identification, whereas the second one claims the distinction of dispensable identification.

Shoemaker appears to hold the IR version (see, for example, Shoemaker 1968: 558). In some respects this is the more radical version. On the II version, I-thoughts have the same composite structure as other thoughts. When I think that I am amused, the content of my thought has the structure “I am the φ & the φ is amused”. It is just that there is something special about the identificational component in the relevant I-thoughts that makes it impervious to error. Whenever I think that I am the φ, I am. The IR version is more radical. It claims that the relevant I-thoughts do not have the same composite structure as other thoughts—that they are structurally different. More specifically, they lack any identificational component. My thought that I am amused hooks onto me in some direct, identification-free way.

The distinction between these two versions is important, because the burden of argument is very different in each case. To make the case for II, one would have to argue that the relevant self-identifications are infallible. To make the case for IR, by contrast, one would have to argue that the relevant I-thoughts are identification-free. There is also a corresponding difference in explanatory burden. II must explain how is it that certain acts of identification are impervious to error, whereas IR must explain how is it that some acts of reference can dispense with identification altogether (How do they hook onto the right referent without identifying it?).

Shoemaker’s (1968) argument for IR, in its barest outlines, proceeds as follows. Suppose (for reductio) that every self-reference required self-identification. Then every thought with a content “I am F ” would have the internal structure “I am the φ & the φ is F ”. That is, ascertaining that one is F would require that one identify oneself as the φ and then establish that the φ is F . But this would entail that the same would apply to “I am the φ”: it would have to have the internal structure “I am the ψ & the ψ is the φ”. That is, in order to ascertain that one is the φ, one would have to first identify oneself as the ψ and then establish that the ψ is the φ. And so on ad infinitum . To avert infinite regress, at least some self-reference must be identification-free.

To claim that immunity to error through misidentification is a peculiarity of self-consciousness is to claim that it is a feature peculiar to self-consciousness. One can deny this claim in two ways: (i) by arguing that it is not a feature of self-consciousness, and (ii) by arguing that it is not peculiar to self-consciousness (that is, although it is a feature of self-consciousness, it is also a feature of other forms of consciousness).

Several philosophers have pursued (i). Perhaps the most widely discussed argument is the following, due to Gareth Evans (1982: 108). On the basis of seeing in a mirror a large number of hands, one of which is touching a piece of cloth, and a certain feeling I have in my hand, as of touching a piece of cloth, I come to think that I am feeling a piece of cloth. But this is false, and false due to misidentification: I am not the one who is feeling the piece of cloth. Therefore, there are states of self-consciousness that are not immune to error through misidentification; so such immunity is not a feature of self-consciousness as such.

Arguably, however, this is not a pure case of self-consciousness. The thought in question involves self-consciousness, but it is also partly consciousness of something external, and it is the latter part of it that leads to the error. Consider the difference between the thought “I am feeling a piece of cloth” and the thought “I am having a feeling as of a piece of cloth,” or even more perspicuously, “I am having a cloth-ish feeling.” It is clear that if it turns out to be erroneous that I am having a cloth-ish feeling, it is not because I have misidentified myself in the mirror. Indeed, what I see in the mirror is entirely irrelevant to the truth of my thought that I am having a cloth-ish feeling.

More often, philosophers have pursued (ii), arguing that immunity to error through misidentification is not peculiar to self-consciousness. Evans (1982) himself, for instance, argued that thoughts about one’s body, and even certain perceptions and perception-based judgments, can be equally immune to error through misidentification, indeed be identification-free. When I think that my legs are crossed, my thought seems to be immune to error through misidentification: it cannot turn out that someone’s legs are indeed crossed, but not mine.

One response would be to claim that thoughts about one’s own body are a genuine form of self-consciousness, albeit bodily self-consciousness. But another would be to draw finer distinctions between kinds of immunity and attach a specific sort of immunity to self-consciousness. Shoemaker (1968) distinguished between absolute and circumstantial immunity to error through misidentification, claiming that only the relevant I-thoughts exhibit the absolute variety. In the same vein, McGinn (1983) distinguishes between derivative and non-derivative immunity to error through misidentification, and Pryor (1999) between de re misidentification and which-object misidentification, both claiming that only the relevant I-thoughts exhibit the latter. However, Stanley (1998) erects a considerable challenge to all these attempts. The issue of whether some kind of immunity to error through misidentification is a peculiarity of self-consciousness is still very much debated.

Let us end this section with a few general points. First, immunity to error through misidentification is at bottom a semantic, not an epistemic, peculiarity. It concerns the special way the Mentalese “I” hooks onto its referent. Thus, immunity to error through misidentification is not to be confused with immunity to error through unjustified identification, immunity to unjustifiedness through misidentification, or immunity to unjustifiedness through unjustified identification—all of which would be epistemic peculiarities.

Second, immunity to error through misidentification is a semantic peculiarity of strong self-consciousness, not weak self-consciousness, since it involves essentially consciousness of oneself, not just consciousness of a particular thought of one. So, if I am (seemingly) self-conscious of thinking that p , it may be that I am not thinking that p , but only because it is not thinking that p that I am doing—not because it is not I who is doing the thinking.

Third, Shoemaker’s “discovery” of immunity preceded the Kripkean revolution in philosophy of languag e and more generally the theory of reference. A question therefore arises concerning the relation between his claim that self-reference is identification-free and Kripke’s claim that many kinds of reference are direct or rigid. Direct reference—which is commonly thought to characterize proper names, natural kind terms, and indexicals—is reference that is sense-free , if you will: it does not employ a sense, or mode of presentation, in hooking onto the referent. What is the relation, then, between sense-free reference and identification-free reference?

A natural thought is that some (perhaps all) senses are identifications, and so identification-freedom is simply one special case of sense-freedom. If so, Shoemaker’s “discovery” may be just a foreshadowing of the Kripkean revolution: it is the discovery of the possibility of sense-free reference, but with an overly restrictive assessment of its scope (where Kripke claimed that all sorts of representational devices are sense-free, Shoemaker thought that only “I” is).

But there is also another view of the matter. Kripke’s directly referential terms do not employ senses, but they do employ reference-fixers . When I think that Tom is generous, there is something that fixes the reference of my Mentalese concept for Tom—for example, the fact that Tom is the salient person called “Tom.” This reference-fixing fact is not necessarily something I am aware of, which is why it does not qualify as a sense. But it is nonetheless operative in the reference-fixing. When thinking that Tom is generous, I am performing an identification of Tom, albeit an implicit identification, one of which I am not explicitly aware. One way to interpret Shoemaker’s claim is that self-reference does not even employ a reference-fixer. It is not only sense-free, but also reference-fixer-free. It is not only that the relevant I-thoughts hook onto oneself without the subject performing an explicit identification, but they hook onto oneself without the subject performing any identification, explicit or implicit. If so, Shoemaker’s claim is more radical than Kripkean direct reference: identification-free reference is not just direct, it is entirely unmediated.

A similar point can be made with respect to Elizabeth Anscombe’s claim that, unlike all other expressions, “I” cannot fail to refer. So I-thoughts are “secure from reference-failure” (Anscombe 1975: 149). That is, such I-thoughts as “I am feeling hungry” are, in effect, immune to error through reference-failure. What is the relation between immunity to error through misidentification and immunity to error through reference-failure? One view would be that there is no difference—the two are the same. But this would make Shoemaker’s ultimate claim that the relevant I-thoughts enjoy identification-freedom the same as Anscombe’s ultimate claim that they enjoy reference-freedom. Shoemaker states explicitly that “I” does refer, though in some identification-free manner. One way to make sense of this is by appeal, again, to freedom from reference-fixing. Here identification-free reference is construed as reference-fixer-free reference. On this view, the Mentalese “I” is referential, but it has the peculiarity that its reference is unmediated by any reference-fixing mechanism.

A crucial issue that remains unaddressed is how reference-fixer-free reference is possible. How can a representational item “find” its referent without any mechanism ensuring a connection between them? Any general theory of self-consciousness that embraces Shoemaker’s IR version of the doctrine of immunity must explain the possibility of reference unfixed. To my knowledge, this challenge remains to be broached in the literature.

b. Essential Indexicals and De Se Thoughts

In the last section we saw that, when one employs the Mentalese “I” in thought, one’s thought probably acquires certain unusual features. In this section, we will see that in certain thoughts one cannot avoid employing the Mentalese “I.” This, too, is a semantic peculiarity, albeit of a different order.

In a well-known story, John Perry tells of his experience following a trail of sugar in a supermarket and thinking to himself “The shopper with the torn bag of sugar is making a mess.” Upon realizing that he is the person with the torn bag, he forms a new thought, “I am making a mess.” This thought is new: its functional role is different from the one of the original thought. Perry’s subsequent actions can be explained by ascribing to him this I-thought in a way they cannot by ascribing to him the “I”-free thought. Perry calls beliefs such as “I am making a mess” locating beliefs , and argues that such beliefs cannot avoid employing Mentalese indexicals. There is no way to think the same thought without employing the Mentalese “I.” Such a thought thus contains an essential indexical , or more accurately, essentially contains an indexical reference. In this sense, these thoughts are irreducible to any other, non-indexical kind of thought.

It should be emphasized that the point here is not that such I-thoughts cannot be reported by anyone other than the subject, or that such first-person reports cannot be matched by third-person reports. In direct speech ( oratio recta ), one might report Perry’s I-thought as follows:

(1) Perry thinks “I am making a mess”.

The same report could be made more naturally in indirect speech ( oratio obliqua ). In order to do so, however, one would need to employ what linguists call an indirect reflexive . Some languages apparently contain unique words for the indirect reflexives. English does not. But fortunately, the English indirect reflexives were discerned in the late 1960s by Hector-Neri Castañeda (curiously perhaps, not himself a native speaker). Castañeda showed that (1) is equivalent to:

(2) Perry thinks that he himself is making a mess.

At least this is so for paradigmatic uses of “he himself.” (There are also uses of “he” that function in this way, but these are more rare. And there are probably—somewhat unusual—uses of “he himself” that do not function this way. Castañeda introduced the term “he*” as a term that behaves as an indirect reflexive in all its uses.) Castañeda called reports of this sort de se (that is, of oneself) and claimed that de se reports cannot be paraphrased into any de dicto or de re reports, and are thus semantically unique and irreducible. Correlatively, the mental states reported in de se reports, to which we may refer as de se thoughts , are irreducible to mental states reported in de dicto and de re reports. In a “material mode of speech,” this means that states of self-consciousness form an irreducible class of mental states.

Note, in any case, that Castañeda’s thesis is a generalization from Perry’s thesis about reports of one’s own self-conscious states (that is, first-person reports) to all reports of self-conscious states, including reports of others’ self-conscious states (third-person reports). According to Castañeda’s thesis, self-reference is irreducible to either de dicto or de re reference to what is in fact oneself. Castañeda argues for this by showing that the indirect reflexives “he himself,” “she herself,” and so forth, have special logical features. Thus (2) cannot be paraphrased into any (indirect-speech) report that does not employ “he himself.” Consider the following de dicto report:

(3) Perry thinks that the author of “The Essential Indexical” is making a mess.

The truth conditions of (3) and (2) are different, since the latter does not entail the former: Perry may be unaware that it is he who is the author of “The Essential Indexical” (that is, that he himself is the author of “The Essential Indexical”). So (3) and (2) are not equivalent. Presumably, the same goes for any other description “the φ” that picks out Perry uniquely—it could always be that Perry is unaware that he himself is the φ.

Consider next a de dicto report with a proper name instead of a definite description:

(4) Perry thinks that Perry is making a mess.

Again, Perry may be unaware that it is he who is Perry. Therefore, the truth conditions of (2) and (4) are different, and the two are not equivalent. What about the de re versions of (3) and (4)? These can be obtained, in fact, by reading “the author of ‘The Essential Indexical’” and “Perry” in (3) and (4) as used, in Donnellan’s (1966) terms, referentially rather than attributively . But the de re versions are more perspicuously put as follows:

(5) Perry thinks, of the author of “The Essential Indexical,” that he is making a mess. (6) Perry thinks, of Perry, that he is making a mess.

Boër and Lycan (1980), for instance, claim that (2) is equivalent to (6). But Castañeda argued that it is not. The argument proceeded as follows. The conjunction of (4) and “Perry exists” entails (6), and likewise, the conjunction of (3) and “The author of ‘The Essential Indexical’ exists” entails (5). But neither the conjunction of (4) and “Perry exists,” nor the conjunction of (3) and “The author of ‘The Essential Indexical’ exists,” entails (2). Thus, “Perry thinks that Perry is making a mess” and “Perry exists” do not entail “Perry thinks that he himself is making a mess.” Therefore, (2) has a different logical force from, and is thus not equivalent to, either (6) or (5). There is perhaps only one approach that may plausibly succeed in reducing de se reports to de dicto ones. It is the approach Eddy Zemach (1985) refers to as neo-Cartesian , and according to which the thought “I am making a mess” is equivalent to:

(7) The thinker of this very thought is making a mess.

On this approach, (2) is equivalent to:

(8) Perry thinks that the thinker of that very thought is making a mess.

In terms of the distinction drawn in §1, the idea here is that self-consciousness is essentially indexical and irreducibly de se inasmuch as it is consciousness of self-as-subject. On this approach, one’s self-conscious thought refers to oneself by referring to itself. In other words, one’s self-reference is mediated by the self-reference of one’s thought.

The emerging view is quite natural. Just as an utterance of the word “I” refers to whoever betokened that very utterance, so a deployment of the Mentalese “I” refers to whoever betokened that very deployment, that is, the thinker of that very I-thought. It may be that “I” is not synonymous with “the utterer of this very word,” but surely the latter functions as the reference-fixer of the former. Likewise, even if the Mentalese “I” is not synonymous with a Mentalese “the thinker of this very thought,” the latter still functions as the reference-fixer of the former.

One problem with the neo-Cartesian approach, however, is that it replaces one sort of indexical self-reference with another. It replaces the thinker’s self-reference with the self-reference of his or her thought. We are thus left with an unexplained essential and irreducible indexical self-reference.

Castañeda actually discussed the neo-Cartesian approach before it was expounded by Zemach, and found a different fault in it. According to Castañeda, what dooms the approach is “the fact, which philosophers (especially Hume and Kant) have known all along, that there is no object of experience that one could perceive as the self that is doing the perceiving” (Castañeda 1966: 64). Whether or not it reflects Hume’s or Kant’s thinking on self-consciousness, the idea is that the subject of thought cannot be thought about as such. Castañeda is effectively denying here the possibility of consciousness of oneself-as-subject. When I think about myself and my mental life, what I am thinking of thereby becomes the object of my thought. I cannot think of myself qua the subject of thought, that is, the thing that does the thinking. The self-as-subject is in this way elusive. As Ryle (1949) put it, trying to think of the self-as-subject is like trying to hop on one’s own shadow: every time you take a step back in order to observe your self-as-subject, your self-as-subject takes a step back with you, as it were.

This objection may apply with more force to what we called in §1 transitive self-consciousness than to what we called intransitive self-consciousness. Even if I cannot become self-conscious of thinking that the thinker of this very thought is cheerful, it does not follow that I cannot self-consciously think that the thinker of this very thought is cheerful. This is because, as pointed out in §1, self-consciously thinking that p , unlike being self-conscious of thinking that p , does not involve two separate states, such that the second one takes the first one as its object. That is, intransitive self-consciousness does not involve “taking a step back,” which is required for Ryle’s regress to get going.

We cannot pursue this issue here with any seriousness. It seems clear, however, that if de se thoughts are not irreducible to de dicto thoughts, it would probably be because the Mentalese “I” can be somehow understood in terms of reference to the subject of the very act of referring. Either way, there is almost certainly some semantic peculiarity to be reckoned with here. The question is merely how best to characterize that peculiarity.

6. Conclusion: A General Theory of Self-Consciousness?

Discussions of the peculiarities of self-consciousness, both epistemic and semantic, mostly focus on whether a given alleged peculiarity in fact obtains or is merely alleged. But as Brook (2001) stresses, these peculiarities must also be explained, or accounted for, in the context of a general theory of self-consciousness. With a handful of exceptions (for example, Bermúdez 1998) current work on self-consciousness does not appear to address the need for a general theory thereof. Instead, it rests content with a piecemeal treatment of each alleged peculiarity in separation from the rest. Sooner or later, however, this will have to be rectified by a reorientation or reorganization of research in this area.

The alleged peculiarities of self-consciousness will then come in handy. For they are useful in providing explananda for any putative theory of self-consciousness, or data against which to “test” such a theory (this is indeed how Bermúdez 1998 proceeds). This is not to say that they must be the only explananda. Such empirical data as are gleaned from mirror self-recognition experiments and other studies of animal metacognition should also be accommodated by a philosophical theory of self-consciousness.

My suggestion is that a general theory of self-consciousness could be configured in two steps. The first would be to determine which of the alleged epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness in fact obtain. The second would be to devise an account of the metaphysical structure, as well as of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the formation, of states of self-consciousness, such that the relevant account would explain, by predicting or “retrodicting” (as C. S. Peirce puts it), the obtaining of just those peculiarities.

The peculiarities discerned in the second half of the last century are so subtle that we should be open to the idea that there may be further peculiarities which have yet to be “discovered.” There may also be familiar peculiarities that have not been recognized as such. Thus, some recent authors have drawn a new connection between self-consciousness and Moore ’s paradox, which presents the challenge of understanding the logical impropriety of beliefs or thoughts of the form “ p & I do not believe that p ” (see Moran 2001, Kriegel 2004b, and Fernández 2006). Thus it may well be that Moore’s Paradox is at bottom another peculiarity of self-consciousness.

All this suggests that, as far as philosophical research on self-consciousness is concerned, the hardest, but in a way the most interesting, challenges are yet to be faced. At present, the philosophical literature on self-consciousness is quite disparate in the respects mentioned above. But it invites unification under a systematic framework for a general theory of self-consciousness. The most philosophically rewarding work on self-consciousness is still ahead of us.

7. References and Further Reading

• Alston, W. 1971. “Varieties of Privileged Access.” American Philosophical Quarterly 8: 223-241.
• Amsterdam, B. 1972. “Mirror self-image reactions before age two.” Development Psychobiology 5: 297–305.
• Anscombe, G. E. M. 1975. “The First Person.” In S. Guttenplan (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in Cassam 1994.
• Bayne, T. 2004. “Self-Consciousness and the Unity of Consciousness.” The Monist 87: 219-236.
• Bealer, G. 1996. “Functionalism and Self-Consciousness.” Philosophical Review 106: 69-117.
• Bermúdez, J. L. 1998. The Paradox of Self-Consciousness . Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• Boër, S. and W. G. Lycan. 1980. “Who, Me?” Philosophical Review 89: 427-466.
• Boër, S. and W. G. Lycan. 1986. Knowing Who . Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
• BonJour, L. 1999. “The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism.” In J. Greco and E. Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology . Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
• BonJour, L. 2001. “Towards a Defense of Foundationalism.” In M. DePaul (ed.), Resurrecting Old-Fashioned Foundationalism . Lanham, MD: Roiwman and Littlefield.
• Brook, A. 2001. “Kant, Self-Awareness and Self-Reference.” In Brook and DeVidi 2001.
• Brook, A. and R. DeVidi (eds.) 2001. Self-Reference and Self-Awareness . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
• Burge, T. 1988. “Individualism and Self-Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 85: 649-663.
• Campbell, J. 1999. “Schizophrenia, the Space of Reasons and Thinking as a Motor Process.” The Monist 82: 609-625.
• Cassam, Q. (ed.) 1994. Self-Knowledge . Oxford: Oxford UP.
• Cassam, Q. 1997. Self and World . Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Castañeda, H.-N. 1966. “‘He’: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness.” Ratio 8: 130-157. Reprinted in Brook and DeVidi 2001.
• Castañeda, H.-N. 1967. “The Logic of Self-Knowledge.” Noûs 1: 9-21.
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A Brief Overview of Philosophy of Self-Consciousness

• First Online: 12 November 2019

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• Gerhard Kreuch 29  

Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 107))

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The main goal of the first part of this book is to present some important challenges in contemporary philosophy of self-consciousness. These challenges will motivate a deeper look into philosophy of human affectivity in Part II and a proposal for a solution in Part III. This chapter introduces the debate over self-consciousness and proposes an attempt to categorize four different types of theories. First, a distinction can be made between egological and non-egological theories of self-consciousness. Classical egological approaches understand self-consciousness as consciousness of a distinct entity that is the underlying subject of mental states, a core “ego”. In contrast, non-egological approaches understand self-consciousness as a property of mental states. A second important distinction deals with the question of how self-consciousness is actually established. Higher-order (or reflective) models see self-consciousness as reflective process where a higher instance makes a lower instance self-conscious. Alternatively, there are same-order (or pre-reflective) models of self-consciousness. They argue that the bearer of self-consciousness is itself self-conscious, without the need for an additional level. Given these distinctions, we may distinguish four types of theories of self-consciousness, each facing significant challenges: Reflective egological, reflective non-egological, pre-reflective egological, and pre-reflective non-egological.

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Some of these thinkers may be influenced by Lichtenberg’s famous objection to Descartes (Lichtenberg 2000 [1764], p. 190). He denied the existence of an “I” in favour of the immediacy of experiences just being there. Consequently he may be seen as ancestor of non-egological theories of self-consciousness, which are prominent today (see below in Sect. 1 ).

Even before that, Peter Geach ( 1957 /58) published a short essay exploring similar intuitions.

See e.g. Rosenthal ( 1986 ) and Kriegel ( 2009 ).

The terms “higher-order” and “reflective” will be used synonymously throughout this book. Please note that there are two historically prominent understandings of the term “reflective” that should not be mixed in the context of this book. First, the term reflection can be used in the sense of representing something. For instance, my image in the mirror reflects (i.e. represents) my actual body. Second, the term reflection can be used to describe the process of reasoning and building concepts. For example, one can reflect (i.e. reason) about a certain problem and perhaps reach a conceptual conclusion. See Frank ( 2007 ) for a historical analysis of the different usages of this term. This book will stick with the first meaning when talking about reflective theories of self-consciousness. The term “reflective” here refers to the fact that self-consciousness is understood to be a higher-order reflection (or representation).

A related distinction is made in the more general debate over consciousness. “Transitive” consciousness is consciousness of something (e.g. being conscious of the dog), while “intransitive” consciousness is not referring to anything else (e.g. after the accident Julie was unconscious, but now she is conscious again) (Kriegel 2009 , pp. 23–32; Rosenthal 1986 ).

Rosenthal built his own higher-order thought approach by refining Armstrong’s traditional higher-order perception account (Armstrong 1968 , 1978 , 1984 ). Lycan ( 1987 , 1996 , 2004 ) is a current defender of a perception-like higher-order approach.

Note that these versions vary in their specific nuances and have been labelled for instance “higher-order perception”, “actualist higher-order thought” or “dispositionalist higher-order thought” (see Carruthers 2011a , for an overview). These slight variations within higher-order theories are not overly relevant in the context of this book.

For this reason this book does not include a detailed review on Damasio’s theory of self-consciousness. The critique on higher-order monitoring theories put forward here applies for him as well. Compare Lenzen ( 2004 ) for a substantial review of Damasio’s work.

The terms “same-order” and “pre-reflective” will be used synonymously throughout this book.

Note that in classic Indian philosophy there was a similar controversy between other-illumination (paraprakāśa) and self-illumination (svaprakāśa) theories (MacKenzie 2007 , 2008 ).

You might also regard some work on phenomenal consciousness like Burge ( 1997 , 2007 ), Block ( 1995 , 2007 , 2011a ), Byrne ( 2004 ), and Levine ( 2001 , 2006 ) as support for same-order theories. However, this cannot be explored in greater detail in this book, since it would lead us too far away from the core question.

We will see in chapter “ Self-Feeling and Unity ”. that the account of self-feeling developed here follows a similar path.

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Kreuch, G. (2019). A Brief Overview of Philosophy of Self-Consciousness. In: Self-Feeling. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 107. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30789-9_1

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Table Of Contents

• About the author
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• Acknowledgements

Introduction

• Part I. Metaphysics and Personal Identity
• Animalism and the Remnant-Person Problem
• Will I ever be a Cyborg?
• Part II. Epistemology and Phenomenology
• How Consciousness explains the Self
• Self-Knowledge, Introspection and Memory
• Imagination as a Bodily Pattern: thinking about Sartrean´s account of Consciousness
• Feelings and the Self
• Part III. Cognition, Psychology, Neuroscience
• De Se Attitudes and Semiotic Aspects of Cognition
• The Division of the Mind: Paradoxes and Puzzles
• Empirical and conceptual clarifications regarding the notion of ‘Core-Self’ from Gallagher’s and Merker’s Behavioural-Neuroscientific Proposals
• Part IV. Ontology and Taxonomy
• Core Self and the Illusion of the Self
• The Reality of the Virtual Self as Interface to the Social World
• Conceptual Personae of the “attentional self”
• Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank, first and foremost the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology for their support in funding the Research project The Cognitive Foundations of The Self (PTDC/FIL-FCI/110978/2009).

We also would like to thank Peter Lang for all the help during the process and the Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem for all the support and facilities.

Finally, we wish to thank the following people: António Marques, Nuno Venturinha, Inês Hipólito, Daniel Ramalho and all the collaborators in this volume, among whom Peter Olson for his patience and sheer professionalism.

Lisbon, November 2013 João Fonseca and Jorge Gonçalves

I. The Background

The quest for the nature and scope of the human Self has been one of the most important intellectual tasks in western thought. Nevertheless, It was not until Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy, that the cluster of problems we now associate to the notion of ‘Self’ were identified as such (eg.: self-identity, the nature of self-reflection, the epistemological status of self-evidence, the unity of conscious experience, among others). What was more, this set of problems were taken to be among the most crucial philosophical tasks to be addressed in the upcoming centuries. The work of such diverse authors as Hume, Lock, Kant, Nietzsche, William James, Husserl, Wittgenstein, or Sartre, to name just a few, testifies this importance.

In the last 10 to 15 years the topic of the Self has strongly re-emerged. This renewed interest is illustrated by the number of recent collections of essays and anthologies (Gallagher, 1998; Kircher, 2003; Gallagher, 2010). One of the main factors holding behind such interest has to do with the recent burst of different methodologies and approaches adopted to face the set of problems related to the Self. These methodologies include but go beyond the more traditional philosophical approaches (like phenomenology or linguistic analysis) (Dan Zahavi, 2005; Perry, 2002), into empirical researches in the areas of cognitive psychology (Gallagher, 2005, 2008; Hofstadter 2007) several branches of the neurosciences (Damasio, 1999; LeDoux, 2002; Kircher, 2003), analysis of psychiatric pathologies (such as schizophrenia) (Parnas, 2010) and other disciplines and methodologies related to the interdisciplinary field of current cognitive sciences and even social theorists and cultural analysis (Elliot, 2007).

These are, thus, exciting times in what the studies regarding the notion the ‘Self’ are concerned: neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are accessing this notion by providing empirical methods and scientific tools (redefining and revolutionizing the way the western ← 9 | 10 → tradition approaches the problem) philosophers and cognitive scientists from various traditions are rediscovering old methodologies like phenomenology and psychoanalysis and, psychiatric approaches to cases like schizophrenia are establishing links with philosophical proposals concerning the nature of the self and its ontological status. Succinctly, the last decade has seen the reemergence of the interest on the notion of ‘Self’ under a new interdisciplinary umbrella.

As a drawback the adoption of such different approaches and methodologies seems to result in a proliferation of unarticulated and, most of the time, incommensurable concepts and results. Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, pp. 197–198) identify this problem:

[T]his disparity, which is both problematic and productive, is directly related to the variety of methodological approaches taken within philosophy and in related interdisciplinary studies of the self. They include introspection, phenomenological analysis, the use of thought experiments, empirical research in cognitive and brain sciences, and studies of exceptional and pathological behaviour. One problem to be posed in this light is whether different characterizations of self signify diverse aspects of a unitary concept of selfhood, or whether they pick out different and unrelated concepts.

Therefore, this new transdisplinary approach comes with a cost: a taxonomical confusion and fragmentation inherent to the proliferation of so distinct methodological approaches. In itself, this consequence constitutes an unfortunate obstacle to the very progress in the field of the studies about the nature of the ‘Self’. Where it should be expected conceptual unity there is, instead, incommensurability and lack of communication.

We believe that Philosophy, given its general, far reaching, synoptic and conceptual approach is specially suited to overcome this unfortunate scenario by providing conceptual clarification that facilitates the establishment of links between disciplines. The present volume is an attempt to a first approximation to different sub-topics and methodologies about the Self from a Philosophical standpoint.

It should be stressed that, and as stated in the quote above, philosophical approaches to the problems of the self are, by themselves, everything but unified and monolithic. This diversification can be understood at two different levels: the level of the different methodological tools used, and the level concerning the diversity of topics and problems . Within the first level; the methodological one, a further division is useful: the distinction ← 10 | 11 → between, on one hand philosophical methodologies proper (Phenomenology, Conceptual/Linguistic analysis, third-person accounts) and, on the other, the relation established between Philosophy and other scientific approaches (Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, psychiatry).

At the level of the different philosophical topics related to the Self they include: the problem of personal identity, discussions regarding the ontological status of the Self, the topic of self-knowledge and Immunity to Error trough Misidentification, modern assessments to the Mind-Body Problem and the nature of the relations between Self and consciousness and emotions.

This collection of essays aims to provide a non-exhaustive map of this diversity within contemporary philosophy on the Self at both identified levels. It reflects the pluralism of philosophical perspectives associated with the problem (or set of problems) of the Self. Besides providing a general view on such diversity, we aim, at the end of the day and more implicitly, to suggest possible bridges unifying and relating apparent protracted and unrelated data and methodologies.

II. The Essays

Part I. Metaphysics and Personal Identity

E RIC T. O LSON explores his original proposal according to which persons are animals, i.e., complete organisms. In ‘Animalism and the Remnant-Person Problem’, Olson discusses a reading of the transplanted brains thought experiment. Animalism clashes with the conviction that we should go with our transplanted brains. A good reply is that if animalism were true, we could explain easily enough both why the conviction is false and why it seems compelling. But another objection cannot be answered so easily. Animalism seems to imply that the detached brain would be a person who comes into being when the brain is removed and ceases to exist when the brain gets into a new head. And this seems absurd. The article argues that, although ← 11 | 12 → this is equally problematic for many views besides animalism, it has no obvious solution.

In ‘Will I ever be a Cyborg’ R UI V IEIRA DA C UNHA criticises Olson’s views. Vieira da Cunha states that although very attractive, in no doubt because of its appeal to a scientific worldview, animalism is not without its problems. In Olson’s own brand of animalism, the Organism View, one of those problems is the answer to be given to situations of inorganic replacement, which this paper explores in a very specific thought experiment. If indeed Olson is right in saying that animal or human animal or organism is what best serves as a substance concept in the case of beings like you and I, then it seems a hard task for the animalist to account for the intuitions arising from the thought experiment in this paper, at least without changing substantially the concept of organism.

Part II. Epistemology and Phenomenology

In ‘How Consciousness explains the Self’, K LAUS G ÄRTNER asks for an epistemological access to the Self in order to answer some ontological questions regarding its own existence. When we talk about the metaphysics of the ‘Self’ we want to know something about the ‘Self’s’ nature. Since in Philosophy of Mind it is less than clear if the ‘Self’ exists or not, it seems that we need a way to analyze it. A natural suggestion is that Consciousness might give us the access we are looking for. The article suggests a way of how a concept of the ‘Self’ can be tight to a concept of Consciousness. The key to establish such a conceptual connection is Self-Consciousness . Such a relation has the advantage that the ‘Self’ is not isolated, it is rather connected to a phenomenon that is interdisciplinary studied. After testing this idea in a case where the ‘Self’ is compromised (schizophrenia), the article suggests that a concept of the ‘Self’ depends necessarily (but not sufficiently) on a concept of Consciousness.

In ‘Self-Knowledge, Introspection and Memory’ A NTÓNIO M ARQUES claims that self-knowledge by introspection (s-ki) leads to the question of the status of the content of retrodictions, wich are memory dependent statements. These are in specie different of retrodictions that are ← 12 | 13 → not memory dependent and therefore s-ki expresses itself in statements that have not truth value. Furthermore the fact that s-ki has a dual time structure (the representation at time 2 of an event or experience of a past time 1) doesn’t mean that any s-ki retrodiction is a kind a of a meta-representation (a representation of representations). Finally, Marques states three other claims, namely: 1. s-ki contains a dual time structure based on memory, 2. it must be direct (non mediated by any exterior observer) and 3. it must have first-person authority.

C LARA M ORANDO ’s article aims to identify and analyze the phenomenon of imagination in Sartre’s philosophy, intending at the same time to clarify some possible connections between imaging skills as a specific activity of consciousness and the way physical bodies essentially incorporate those kinds of data. A synthetic explanation about how Sartre sees his theory of imagination is outlined. The article questions in what way this theory can contribute to a more accurate idea of psychophysical relations, contending that it makes no sense to employ the expression ‘psychophysical relations’ simply because the mind is the body and the body is the mind. Metaphysically, “imaginative consciousness”, seems to be the very core of the “transcendental consciousness”, since it can be compared to a simple intentional movement towards ‘objects’, also characterized by an essential “nothingness” and a great proximity to the “phenomenon of quasi-observation”, which is not genuine observation.

In ‘Feelings and the Self’ D INA M ENDONÇA starts by noticing that philosophers of emotion agree that emotions always implicate a self. However, it is not at all clear within the literature what kind of self, nor what kind of implication, philosophers have in mind. The article argues for a situational approach to the nature of emotions by, first, showing how a situational approach brings to the surface the interesting connections between the self and emotions, and second, by showing how this approach allows us to understand how emotions contribute to the constitution of the self. While the first part lays down the situational approach to emotion and the many ways in which the implicated self can be understood, the second part looks at some emotions (fear, love, pride and jealousy) in order to illustrate and elaborate on the conceptual map constructed in the first part. The article concludes indicating the open-ended character of both emotions and self. ← 13 | 14 →

Part III. Cognition, Psychology, Neuroscience

In ‘De Se Attitudes and Semiotic Aspects of Cognition’ E RICH R AST explores the connection between so-called de se puzzles that are well-known in the Philosophy of Language to Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. De se puzzles attempt to show that references of an agent to herself formulated in a 3rd-person perspective do not necessarily have the same explanatory power for the agent’s behavior than corresponding 1st-person self-ascriptions, while the Knowledge Argument attempts to refute physicalism by showing that the way a certain color feels, its phenomenal character, cannot be explained or emulated by mere physical knowledge no matter how exhaustive it may be. According to Rast, both puzzles need to be addressed from the perspective of the semiotics of cognition. Drawing from a computational metaphor he suggests a trivializing interpretation of the puzzles according to which actual thought tokens of one sort cannot be replaced by tokens of another sort because these play different roles in cognition. From this perspective the irreducibility asserted by both kinds of puzzles is ultimately the result of the (trivial) difference between actually cognating and explaining cognition.

In ‘The Division of the Mind: Paradoxes and Puzzles’ V ASCO C ORREIA , starts by the claim according to which divisionist models of the mind argue that irrational phenomena such as akrasia and self-deception can only be understood if one assumes that the mind is somewhat differentiated in relatively autonomous sub-systems. Yet, the divisionist postulate seems to be intrinsically paradoxical in many regards. The article reviews some of the most influential divisionist models and argues that each of them leads to specific inconsistencies. It is not to suggest, however that the mind cannot possibly suffer any sort of partitioning, and even acknowledges this possibility in pathological cases of mental dissociation. Instead, Correia claims that the divisionist hypothesis is not necessary to account for ordinary cases of irrationality. This analysis relies on a unitary account of the mind which maintains that irrational attitudes typically derive from conflicts that take place between individual mental states (e.g., a desire and a belief), and not between differentiated parts of the mind.

In ‘Empirical and conceptual clarifications regarding the notion of ‘Core-Self’ from Gallagher’s and Merker’s Behavioural-Neuroscientific ← 14 | 15 → Proposals’ J OÃO F ONSECA addresses the problem of conceptual fragmentation brought about by the methodological and disciplinary diversity concerning current scientific studies on the Self. Fonseca focuses specifically on two different proposals regarding the nature of Core (or Minimal)-Self: Merker’s evolutionary perspective and Gallagher’s phenomenological one. Each one corresponding to very different proposals for the neural implementation of Core-Self: Merker’s brainstem/sub-cortical and Gallagher’s pre-motor cortex suggestion. At a first approximation these two proposals seem mutually incompatible. By deploying a model-theoretic framework for theoretical concepts of behavioral neuroscience, Fonseca tries to uncover some of the underlying principles sustaining both proposals. Using the instrumental and fundamental notion of ‘Nested Concept’ within such framework, he shows how the two proposals can relate to each other. Fundamentally he shows that Merker’s and Gallagher’s suggestions of Core-Self (including their different proposals for its neuronal implementation) are related in a common nested conceptual relation formally defined. Such nested relation provides conceptual clarity and empirical unification into a hitherto fragmented and confused scenario. By bringing both proposals under the same formal conceptual framework Fonseca shows how to gain conceptual and taxonomic clarification, explanatory richness and bridges, both conceptual and empirical, between different disciplines and practices regarding current scientific studies on the Self.

Part IV. Ontology and Taxonomy

The concepts of consciousness and self have been central in contemporary philosophy of the mind. Inevitably, this lead to the recuperation of a few conceptions from classical Phenomenology, starting with Husserl. It is the case of the concept of “pre-reflective self-consciousness”. The approach of these philosophers is not existential, but what could be called “biological” in the sense that they considered consciousness and self as natural phenomena, explained scientifically. One of the problems that these philosophers intended to resolve is the renowned problem of the self that was initially formulated by David Hume and more recently by Metzinger, among others. In his article J ORGE G ONÇALVES , departing ← 15 | 16 → from scientific data regarding the developmental origins of the self, argues that the concept of pre-reflective self-consciousness does not solve the problem. In spite of the facts not being conclusive, Gonçalves states that there are good reasons to reject the idea that the entire form of phenomenal consciousness assumes a feeling, no matter how small, of self.

In ‘The Reality of the Virtual Self as Interface to the Social World’ R OBERT C LOWES explores the idea and implications of the virtual self . This idea has so, up until now, been most associated with the philosopher Thomas Metzinger phenomenal self model hypothesis (Metzinger, 2004, 2009). Metzinger takes the idea to imply a “no self” thesis (Metzinger, 2011). Clowes’ paper puts the idea against a background of virtualist representation (Clowes & Chrisley, 2012) and from here questions the metaphysical implications which are often drawn from the idea of the virtual self.

Clowes’ paper starts with a review of the perplexing place of virtuality more generally in theorizing about mind. His paper then focuses in on the arguments Metzinger employs to argue for a virtual self, asking whether Metzinger’s approach can be cast into a broader virtualist framework. Arguing that indeed it can, Clowes then attempts to show that while Metzinger gives us an interesting way to think about the self that the conclusion he draws from them about the non existence of self are unwarranted.

In this context, the final part of the paper attempts to show that the virtual self may in fact be a useful way of making the self theoretically tractable for further scientific investigation including in the context of psychopathology. The paper concludes that the concept of the virtual self may not only be a useful theoretical tool but it may be real enough to supply the conceptual roles required in much theorizing around the self. Concluding that the virtual self does not need imply a “no self”, Clowes concludes it may in fact be a useful way of unifying several current ideas about self. The virtualist view of self may be best thought of as a fruitful scientific reduction rather than an elimination as Metzinger argues.

Biographical notes

Joao Fonseca (Volume editor) Jorge Goncalves (Volume editor)

João Fonseca is a Post-Doc researcher at New University of Lisbon. His main research interest is philosophy of neuroscience. His area of competence is philosophy of neuroscience with particular interests in topics such as: the critical assessment to the mainstream neuro-behavior explanation of instrumental fear-conditioning, the quest for the evolutionary origins of self and consciousness and the links between phenomenology and neuroscience. Jorge de Almeida Gonçalves was born in Lisbon. He graduated in Psychology (1988) and in Philosophy (1997), both in Lisbon. He has a Master’s degree in Philosophy (2002) and a PhD (2007) also in Philosophy. Between 1988 and 1999 he worked in Clinical Psychology. He currently works at the Institute of Philosophy of Language (New University of Lisbon) and his current research interests are consciousness and self studies, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of psychiatry, and philosophy of film.

Key Subject Areas

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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

The true self. critique, nature, and method.

• 1 Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
• 2 Department of Psychology, Integrated Curriculum for Anthroposophic Psychology (ICURAP), University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
• 3 Department of Medicine, Integrated Curriculum for Anthroposophic Medicine (ICURAM), Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany
• 4 Department of Medicine, Institute of Integrative Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany

The history of philosophy gives us many different accounts of a true self, connecting it to the essence of what a person is, the notion of conscience, and the ideal human being. Some proponents of the true self can also be found within psychology, but its existence is mostly rejected. Many psychological studies, however, have shown that people commonly believe in the existence of a true self. Although folk psychology often includes a belief in a true self, its existence is disputed by psychological science. Here, we consider the critique raised by Strohminger et al., stating that the true self is (1) radically subjective and (2) not observable, hence cannot be studied scientifically ( Strohminger et al., 2017 ). Upon closer investigation, the argument that the self is radically subjective is not convincing. Furthermore, rather than accepting that the true self cannot be studied scientifically, we ask: What would a science have to look like to be able to study the true self? In order to answer this question, we outline the conceptual nature of the true self, which involves phenomenological and narrative aspects in addition to psychological dimensions. These aspects together suggest a method through which this concept can be investigated from the first-person perspective. On a whole, we propose an integrative approach to understanding and investigating the true self.

Introduction

Let us start with a quote: “Many people like to think they have an inner “true” self. Most social scientists are skeptical of such notions. If the inner self is different from the way the person acts all the time, why is the inner one the “true” self?” ( Baumeister and Bushman, 2013 , p. 75). This is how the notion of a true self is introduced in a recent textbook on social science. It is suggested that there is a conflict between folk psychology and science, where the true self is a notion that does not hold up to closer scrutiny. This view has recently been reinforced by a number of studies conducted by Strohminger and Nichols (2014) and Strohminger et al. (2017) , showing that belief in a true self is indeed common while questioning its actual existence. Is the view we have of our “true self” merely a reflection of the socio-cultural environment in which we exist? And can someone have a “true self” that is good, even if they continually act in ways that are harmful?

Positing a chimera of an inherently good “true self,” existing so deeply within the structure of someone’s psyche that it may never make an appearance in reality may seem completely unwarranted. Not only does this put the true self beyond scientific observation, it also makes it seem like a hopelessly optimistic dream. Hence, although it is empirically clear that people make use of the concept of a true self – in the sense of that which cannot change without someone becoming less of what they really are – there are weighty reasons to doubt whether the true self exists beyond the widespread belief in it. Since this belief is so common, could it be that it is in fact grounded in reality?

This is the question that we will explore in the following, outlining not only a suggestion for what the structure of the true self might be but also sketching out a method for investigating it. In doing this, we will also provide counter-arguments to the critique of the aforementioned true self. In our view, the true self can be viewed as having a kind of spiritual existence. It can appear in time but also exists beyond time. It may even be absent at different moments in time without ceasing to exist. Complete absence of the true self would, however, make it impossible to investigate. We take it that we are dealing with an essence of the Hegelian kind, i.e. an essence, the essence of which is to appear (and indeed, can there be an essence that never appears?). In other words, the true self cannot be so chimeric as to never enter the stage of actual life. However, such an object of study cannot be investigated adequately using conventional philosophical or psychological methods alone. We propose that the true self may be approached through a first-person method combining both philosophical reflection and introspective observation, as we will outline in section “Outline of a Comprehensive First-Person Method for Studying the True Self.” Before introducing this method, we will look into the history and nature of the self and the true self in philosophy and psychology (section “Introduction”). This will follow with a response to critiques of the true self (section “The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self”).

A Short Historical Account of the Self and the True Self

The self, one of the most central as well as critically discussed concepts in philosophy and psychology, has a long history. The idea that one has an underlying self in addition to a surface personality can be traced back to the notion that one has a soul that is potentially immortal. In the Egyptian culture, only the Pharaoh possessed an immortal, divine soul (akh) while alive. Only at the moment of death could other Egyptians gain such a soul ( Waage, 2008 ). In Ancient Greek culture, Socrates was known for having heard an inner voice that indicated to him what he should ( Memorabilia 1.1.4, 4.3.12, 4.8.1, Apology 12) and should not do ( Apology 31c-d, 40a-b, Euthydemus 272e-273a). This was part of what lead to his demise, as he was accused of following other gods. The inner voice was a daimonion , a divine being (particular) to Socrates and not one of the gods condoned by the Athenian city-state. Such a private divine being is now commonly understood to refer to conscience in the Christian tradition ( Schinkel, 2007 , p. 97), which is connected to the moral essence – the true self – of an individual. The idea of a person’s moral essence was developed further in Greek thought. For example, it was connected to the performance of specific virtues by Aristotle. Aristotle also suggested that “the true self of each” is the divine intellect or nous (NE, 1178, a2).

However, when answering the question “who are you?”, it was for a long time customary to name one’s ancestors. In ancient Rome, the firstborn son was the property of the pater familias until the death of the father. During the funeral procession, the son wore the father’s death mask ( Salemonsen, 2005 ). It may be noted that the word “mask” ( lat. persona) is related to the word “person,” suggesting that we can take on different identities but also that there is an underlying essence. Augustus is known for writing the first autobiography, inaugurating a genre defined by the idea that certain events and thoughts are more important than others when seeking to understand who someone is. Arguably, the Judeo-Christian religions also contributed to the view that all human beings have a divine core, regardless of background: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola emphasized the notion of agency in his “Oration on human dignity”, making God exclaim that it is a matter of will whether the human being shall become animal or divine, mortal or immortal:

I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine ( della Mirandola, 1996 , p. 7).

For Kant, the self is that which provides transcendental unity to our thoughts and perceptions, in short, to all our experiences ( Kant, 1904 ). Although the self cannot be known as it is in itself, in Kantian ethics, the individual is fully autonomous, free, when it acts according to rational principles ( Kant, 1968 ). The individual manifests the kingdom of heaven on earth to the extent that ethical principles are adhered to as if they were natural laws. As a reaction to this, some philosophers, such as Sartre, point out that this view disregards the communal and social aspects of the self as well as its individuality and authenticity ( Sartre, 2014 ). Rejecting Sartre’s notion of authenticity, Foucault denied that there is any self that is given to us; claiming that we should rather view the self as a work of art:

I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity – and not that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art ( Focault, 1997 , p. 262).

Foucault points out that Sartre’s notion of authenticity reintroduces a given measure for someone’s true self. Foucault thinks we should be more radical in our rejection of any given content or measure of what constitutes the true self. Any such content or measure we must create ourselves. One may remark that even creative acts contain an element of or at least relate to something given, for example an inspiration or a framework of understanding. The idea of creating a self does not need to be thought of as a pure/arbitrary invention of something incomprehensible. Creative acts may be understood instead as the encounter between something given and subjective energy. In part, the subject identifies with the given, subjects itself to it, and in part, the subject recognizes the given as itself.

If we pause and summarize here, we can see that there is a whole host of ideas connected to the self in the Western canon (for a discussion of self, no-self and true self accounts in Asian traditions, see Siderits et al., 2010 ):

1. The self is a kind of essence, substance, or a soul that may or may not survive death

2. The self is the voice of conscience, the source of moral or authentic action

3. The self is divine, possibly created by God

4. The self is related to the past, to ancestry, and outward identity such as one’s work

5. The self has a story connected to it that can be represented in a biography

6. The self provides unity to cognition and experience

7. The self is a free, autonomous agent

8. The self is essentially connected to other human beings and culture

9. The self has to be created

As we can see from this short and non-exhaustive list, the self is complex and may be conceived in conflicting ways. For example: Is the self-created by God or the individual? Is the self completely autonomous or is it thoroughly culturally determined? Is the self an essence or is it a story? None of these are necessarily contradictory, but much work is required to flesh out a comprehensive conception of the self. Do all these characteristics have something in common? This question is not easy to answer. If we cannot find a common characteristic in all the different definitions, we may have to concede that the self is simply a name for a host of unrelated ideas or aspects of human existence. On a closer look, each item on the list can potentially be said to be the true self. Even one’s outward identity could arguably be seen to constitute a true self. Imagine a puer aeternus , a Peter Pan-like existence: someone who is reluctant about identifying with anything at all, preferring to stay adolescent indefinitely. For such a person, actually identifying with something could be said to be a realization of their true self (their true self would not necessarily be the specific outward identity but could be manifested by taking on a concrete and not fantastical identity). There is one way of conceiving what the nature of the true self is, which we will elaborate in the following, that does not imply that we have to make a choice about which specific self represents the true one. This is the conception of the true self as a whole that unifies the different selves. Moreover, the true self can not only be viewed as a whole but also as the manifestation of a specific moral self that has grown out of the past. The true self, on this conception, has both distanced itself from the past and integrated it, moving toward an ideal that is in one sense given, internally and from the past, but in another sense must also be created, or is only just coming into existence from the future.

The True Self in Philosophy and Psychology

Although the existence of the self is controversial in philosophy ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Siderits et al., 2010 ; Ganeri, 2012 ), there are a number of influential philosophers who claim that there at least a minimal or core self exists. Such a view can be found both among traditional thinkers, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, etc., and contemporary ones ( MacIntyre, 1981 ; Taylor, 2012 ; Zahavi, 2017 ). Charles Taylor has specifically addressed the notion of a true self in the context of a discussion of negative and positive freedom ( Taylor, 1985 ; Sparby, 2014 ). Negative freedom is the idea that one can realize one’s true self insofar as there are no external restrictions on the self (and perhaps no internal restrictions such as fear). But where does the understanding of what actually counts as being the true self come from? If it comes, for instance, from a totalitarian state, then the “true self” may indeed be a false self since someone other than the self determines it. Hence it would follow that actualizing a true self is typically seen to include self-determination. It could of course be that content of a state prescribed true self accords by coincidence with the true self recognized by a person. This would not stop the person from actualizing the true self as long as the recognition is internally constituted through reflection and moral deliberation. However, if someone can determine themselves radically, does this not mean that the content of the true self is arbitrary? We believe that such problems can be solved with ideas as such “being-with-oneself in otherness” ( Sparby, 2016 ). For example, acting according to one’s true self does not exclude acting according to principles as long as these principles are recognized as stemming from the true self. Finding one’s true self may involve finding oneself in another person, community, culture, etc. This does not mean that the true self is simply something given. Even creative processes can involve something approaching the self “from the outside”, such as an inspiration. Again, the true self can be viewed as a whole, as something transcending the subject-object dichotomy, allowing for such events where something comes to the self seemingly from an external source (e.g. the voice of conscience), a source which is, however, more adequately conceived of as belonging to the self in a deeper, higher or more inclusive sense. It is of course possible that the voice of conscience might be an expression of an internalized dogmatic morality. However, this does not make it unreliable in principle. It means that what it dictates has to be viewed in light of an investigation of what its source might be, considering cultural factors specifically.

Is a person always acting in accordance with their true self if they act according to their self? The problem here is that the self is not only multifaceted but also contradictory given that different aspects are in conflict with each other. For example, the human being can act out of principle or according to their desires. Both may be viewed or at least experienced as essential parts of one’s identity, although these parts do not always harmonize. If one acts according to one’s desire, another desire may not be fulfilled. If one acts morally, desires may fail to be satisfied at all. If one acts in a case where there is a moral dilemma, the true self seems to be constituted by that act. But what if I act based on wrong information, inherited cultural views, or delusion? Indeed, as we shall see, one of the main critiques of the true self is its radical subjectivity. The beliefs and actions that we ascribe to the true self depend on our worldview that is ultimately a reflection of the culture we belong to.

The field of psychology has contributed to our understanding of the self by gathering empirical support for the view that we are indeed ruled by external forces, such as unconscious desires, bias, and social conditioning. It has been shown that the experience of living a meaningful life is associated with having cognitive access to one’s true self, and yet psychological research remains either skeptical or agnostic about the existence of it ( Schlegel et al., 2013 ) despite the belief in a true self seems to be independent of personality type and culture ( De Freitas et al., 2018 ). However, one can indeed find representatives of notions of a true self also in psychology. The true self is sometimes referred to as the I-self or self-as-process as opposed to the me-self or self-as-object ( Ryan and Rigby, 2015 ). The former “concerns the conceptions, images, roles, statuses, and attributes associated with an identity,” while the latter “concerns the inherent integrative tendencies of people to understand, grow, and create coherence in their experiences” ( Ryan and Rigby, 2015 , p. 246). The psychoanalyst Winnicott made explicit use of the concept of a true self, contrasting it with the false self ( Winnicott, 1965 ). His view of the true self can be summarized as the self that is spontaneous, alive, and creative – the false self would then be a persona that lacks those characteristics ( Rubin, 1998 , p. 102). Numerous other terms are used for the true self such as the real self, the ideal self, the authentic self, the intrinsic self, the essential self, and the deep self [see overview of sources in Strohminger et al. (2017) ]. Strohminger et al. have shown that people on average understand moral traits to be most fundamental to a person in addition to personality, memories, and desires, while characteristics related to perceptual abilities (e.g. near-sightedness) and psychical traits are perceived as having the least impact on who someone essentially is ( Strohminger and Nichols, 2014 ). The essential differences between the self and the true self according to Strohminger et al. are that the self (1) encompasses the entire range of personal features, (2) is valence independent (it is inherently neither good nor bad) but (3) is perspective (first- or third-person) dependent, and (4) is cross-culturally variable, while the true self has an emphasis on (1) moral features, is (2) valence-dependent or positive by default, (3) perspective independent, and (4) cross-culturally stable ( Strohminger et al., 2017 , p. 3).

Strohminger et al. have also provided a particularly powerful formulation of the argument against the true self, which is quoted in full since it is the critique used as the background to our suggestion of what the nature of the true self is and how it can be studied:

Is the true self also a scientific concept, one that can be used to describe how the mind actually works? Is there, in other words, a true self? The evidence reviewed here points to two properties relevant to this question. One: the true self depends on the values of the observer. If someone thinks homosexual urges are wrong, she will say the desire to resist such urges represents the true self ( Newman et al., 2014 ). And if she scores high in psychopathy, she will assign less weight to moral features in her conceptualization of personal identity ( Strohminger and Nichols, 2014 ). What counts as part of the true self is subjective, and strongly tied to what each individual person herself most prizes.

Two: The true self is, shall we say, evidence-insensitive. Resplendent as the true self is, it is also a bashful thing. Yet people have little trouble imbuing it with a host of hidden properties. Indeed, claims made on its behalf may completely contradict all available data, as when the hopelessly miserable and knavish are nonetheless deemed good “deep down”. The true self is posited rather than observed. It is a hopeful phantasm.

These two features—radical subjectivity and unverifiability—prevent the true self from being a scientific concept. The notion that there are especially authentic parts of the self, and that these parts can remain cloaked from view indefinitely, borders on the superstitious. This is not to say that lay belief in a true self is dysfunctional. Perhaps it is a useful fiction, akin to certain phenomena in religious cognition and decision-making ( Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999 ; Boyer, 2001 ). But, in our view, it is a fiction nonetheless ( Strohminger et al., 2017 , p. 7).

To reiterate, the problem facing the true self-view is that it is a conception tied to the values of a person, which are determined subjectively according to the structure of their personality, and by the culture and social environment in which that person exists. What the authors mean by “radical subjectivity” is, however, not clear. Does it mean that the values that a person uses to measure whether they live up to their true self are arbitrary, that the true self is based on a radical existential choice not grounded in anything, or that it is determined by biological, cultural, or social factors that happen to affect the person? These are issues that need to be untangled and answered. Furthermore, a good response is needed when arguing that the true self is not observable and therefore fictional. In particular, does it make sense to speak of a true self if that self never manifests? Can a person be called inherently good if they commit heinous crimes and consistently act in ways that are harmful to others, taking pleasure in their suffering?

In order to argue in favor of the existence of the true self, one must address the critique that it is a radically subjective notion and that it is unverifiable. Since we take the view that the self is not a thing with clearly defined borders but rather an organizing principle of a continual process, speaking of “the existence” of a true self can be misleading. Nevertheless, one may claim that there is such an organizing principle and that the true self is neither radically subjective nor unverifiable. Before turning to that, we will provide a preliminary delineation of the true self that we will flesh out as we address the critique above.

A Thin and Thick Conception of the True Self and Their Unity

Two conceptions of the true self are implicit in what has been said above, which we will refer to as the thin and thick conception of the true self. One way to characterize them is to say that the thin conception is static: unchangeable, timeless, always the same. The thick conception is dynamic: developing, spread out over long changes of time, and continually emerging. The current objective in the following is to unite these two conceptions (in fact, to show how they are interdependent) and to investigate how such an account may be able to respond to the critique raised against the true self that we will focus on in section “The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self”.

The thin conception of the true self is the idea that the self has a deeper and more essential nature; the true self is identical to this essential part of the self. Some of the properties attached to the self are accidental while others are essential. Someone can change their job and although they may have identified with their job, they do not really cease to be who they truly are when they change jobs. The true self as the essential self can consist of either one essential property or a set of properties. Sometimes, this is also referred to as the minimal self, which can be defined as the simple quality of subjective experience; the most fundamental experience of what it is like to be this or that subject ( Zahavi, 2017 ). However, as pointed out by Fasching, the essential self’s nature may be exactly a bare existence ; not recognizable by any property. It simply is and we know it as something that can identify itself with potentially anything but can never be reduced to any specific property ( Fasching, 2016 ). A similar view is presented by Ramm, who, using first-person experiments, argues that the self in itself both lacks sensory qualities and is single ( Ramm, 2017 ).

If we conceive of the true self along these lines, the result would be rather indeterminate. There would be nothing more to it than what is common to all other selves: a simple and unique existence potentially aware of itself as such. Any identification of the self with a particular property, such as being a human, acting morally, or having been born in a certain place, would be fully irrelevant to the true self. But this seems wrong – or at least too indeterminate. Not only would it be at odds with typical conceptions of the true self, it would also conceptualize the true self in the form of a ghost with no bearing on its environment. This leads us to the thick conception of the true self [compare Galen Strawson’s conception of the self, which differentiates between the self as a distinct mental entity and a subject of experience and the self as an agent, personality and diachronic continuity ( Strawson, 1997 )]. The thick conception of the true self connects it to certain substantial and moral properties such as being able to form memories or making an existential choice. Hence the thick conception where the true self consists of more determinate characteristics than bare existence is in accordance with how the true self is typically conceived in folk psychology. Is there a specific property or set of properties the self can identify with to become a true self or at least a “truer” self? Can one make a choice or live in a way that does not represent the ideal version of that individual? This certainly seems to be the case. But what is the measure according to which an act or a way of life can be judged as being in accordance with one’s true self? Who or what decides what counts as a proper measure? What is it based on? Where does the true self come from? It will later be discussed how the true self is essentially related to both the past and the future. It will also be suggested that a certain conception of the true self can unite both the thin and thick version of it. Before turning to that, however, we turn to some discussions surrounding the true self in philosophy and psychology.

The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self

Here we will consider the two problems connected to the idea of the true self as identified by Nichols et al. above.

Radical Subjectivity

As we have seen, the problem of radical subjectivity relates to the notion that how someone conceives of their true self is dependent on what values they have. As we have stated earlier, there are more ways of interpreting what the claim that the true self is “radically subjective” means. It can mean that the true self is based on: (1) something completely arbitrary, (2) an ungrounded existential choice or (3) external factors, such as culture and biology. Although Strohminger et al. do not state explicitly which interpretation they have in mind, we think, based on the examples they give (sexual preference and psychopathy), that the third option is more likely. A person’s sexual preference is rarely considered to be a choice but is rather understood to be based on biology and culture; psychopathy is hardly conceivable as a choice, but, again, is widely believed to be contingent upon biological, cultural or other environmental factors.

This, however, may seem surprising: Does not “radical subjectivity” mean something that involves arbitrariness or some form of creative or spontaneous choice? Since Strohminger et al. speak of the “radical subjectivity” of the true self as tied to what someone prizes or values, there might be some merit to the interpretation of it as being indeterminate in some way (not based on factors external to the self). But then again, the examples they mention point in another direction. So is the critique of the “true self” as radically subjective based on (1) the idea that it is radically arbitrary, random or contingent (what someone happens to value) or (2) the idea that the external factors that a person has happened to be exposed to due to the geographical location of their life and their inheritance has determined what they value?

It is highly unlikely that someone would hold the view that what someone values is completely arbitrary, based on something akin to the random result of throwing dice. For example, we value food because of biological needs, friendship because of social needs, and certain ideas because we find them enlightening. However, when we are presented with a moral choice or dilemma or when we are challenged with coming up with a plan for our next steps in life, our choice might seem subjective in the sense that it is creative or ultimately relies on a decision. But if it is creative, this does not mean that it is arbitrary – as we argued above in relation to Foucault. And if it is ultimately based on a decision, this does not mean that we do not have good reasons for acting the way we do, although we might have reasons to act in other ways as well. So the choice itself might be spontaneous, but that does not mean that it is arbitrary in the sense of not being grounded in reasons. And insofar as it is not clear to us what reasons are the best when considering a moral dilemma or committing to a life path, we could regard the choice as creative – but again, such creativity does not have to be arbitrary. What we are left with is the notion that someone’s idea of their true self is radically subjective because it is based on what they happen to value, which in turn is based on the features of their personality. We will consider this in more depth.

Depending on one’s sexual preference or whether one has a personality disorder such as psychopathy, one may conceive of the core of one’s personality differently. This boils down to a claim there are a variety of different conceptions of the self and that therefore how someone defines their true self is subjective. Such a view, however, fails to consider the possibility that one may be right or wrong about their true self. If there were a true self, it would indeed be possible to make such mistakes. We cannot take it for granted that there is no true self based simply on the fact that people value things differently and conceive of their true nature accordingly. Even if I value money and claim that I am affluent, I would be mistaken about this claim if I have no money. Even though people value things differently, and the specific values someone has influence how they conceive of their essential nature, it does not follow that one’s true self is merely an extension of what one happens to value.

However, it is still a significant point that one’s conception of oneself tends to co-vary with one’s cultural background. Could it not be the case that someone’s true self harmonizes with what a specific culture dictates, while someone else in that culture could have a completely different true self; one that runs counter to the common views and values? How would someone know if they were mistaken, i.e. simply influenced by their culture, when it comes to viewing what their true identity is? The true self may indeed be fully individual. How does one uncover it? Perhaps, this is possible exactly by making mistakes or taking on or trying out identities that are not in accordance with one’s true nature.

It seems strange or even wrong to say that by changing one’s identity or taking on a different role, one suddenly lives according to one’s true self. This indeed identifies the true self with the me-self – the true self would be a specific role, identity, job, etc. – which seems counterintuitive; should the true self not be a deep self, the self-as-process? If I change my identity and consider the new identity my true self, it implies that the former identity was a false self. But was it not the case that one aspect of the true self is exactly an underlying identity, one that cannot change simply by changing from one’s surface identity to another? Without such an underlying identity it would not make sense to say that the former identity was a false self, because there is nothing to connect the two identities.

Indeed, the true self may be conceived of as that which unifies different conceptions of the more concrete selves (the me-selves) through a narrative ( Polkinghorne, 1991 ; Gallagher, 2000 ; Schechtman, 2011 ), where the variations and mistakes are not necessarily plain errors, but rather essential parts of the process. By manifesting a unity within the different conceptions of the me-self, the true self is also manifested. This manifestation is not necessarily tied to a specific identify, a me-self, being right or wrong, true or false. The measure of the degree of manifestation is the degree of unity created by the processual self-conception. Since the self is also influenced and potentially challenged by different cultures, ethical norms, and worldviews, the unity increases to the extent the different cultures are encompassed, i.e. to the extent that difference is recognized and integrated in the true self.

This capacity of unity may manifest in different ways for different aspects of the true self. Take for example the ethical self, which as pointed out previously, is considered by many to be the true self. Even if one considers the true self to be the ethical self, it does not follow that the true self is radically subjective. What I value may be dependent on a whole range of factors, but that does not mean that the values cannot be judged objectively. There is a long tradition of discussion surrounding the question of whether ethics is objective. However, since there is no consensus on this issue, one cannot say with confidence that values are subjective. Does this mean that the true self is identical to a specific moral set of beliefs? Here, it is helpful to differentiate between different potential layers of the true (ethical) self: (1) the capacity of moral deliberation and action, (2) specific moral views, (3) individual moral or existential choices. At the most fundamental level, a moral self does not consist of a specific set of moral principles and beliefs, but rather of the capacity of ethics, i.e. the capacity of ethical deliberation. Even if one is mistaken about a specific ethical act, the capacity to deliberate offers continuity to the true self. Recognizing that a previous act is wrong is inherently a deepening of the capacity of morality. However, certain acts do not necessarily involve a universal ethical requirement; ethical individualism allows for certain acts being ethical measured only according to the individual ( Hegge, 1988 ). Depending on talent and interest for example might be right for one person to pursue a life as an artist, while wrong for someone else. Furthermore, there may be both general and individual patterns of ethical development that needs to be taken into account. The unity of such patterns, the connection between good and bad actions, failure and success – like the inner coherence of a drama – would be what the true self is.

Evidence-Insensitivity

Let us look at the argument against observability again:

The true self is, shall we say, evidence-insensitive. Resplendent as the true self is, it is also a bashful thing. Yet people have little trouble imbuing it with a host of hidden properties. Indeed, claims made on its behalf may completely contradict all available data, as when the hopelessly miserable and knavish are nonetheless deemed good ‘deep down’. The true self is posited rather than observed. It is a hopeful phantasm. […] The notion that there are especially authentic parts of the self, and that these parts can remain cloaked from view indefinitely, borders on the superstitious ( Strohminger et al., 2017 ).

There are two related but not identical claims that seem to be inherent in this argument: One is that the true self is in principle unobservable and hence it is an unscientific (superstitious) concept. The other is that what the true self cannot be revised based on evidence, removing it from the domain of science. Both claims will be addressed in the following.

The fact that some properties may be hidden does not in and of itself make the object connected to those properties in principle unavailable to science. Indeed, scientific activity consists of making what is hidden visible, for instance through inventions such as the microscope. However, basing the argument on a contrast hidden/visible implicitly limits the range of inquiry to what we can and cannot see , which is unwarranted. Some phenomena, specifically those that unfold in time, are indeed constitutively dependent on some related properties being unavailable (“hidden”) as the phenomenon manifests . When a phenomenon manifests, something in the previous stage must be removed for a new stage to replace it. In other words, for something to manifest, something that once was, now has to be “hidden.” For someone to say “the true self is not observable,” for example, requires the word “the” to not appear (sound) when “true” is said. In fact, all other words must be “hidden” as well. What is consistent throughout the sentence is the invoked meaning. The meaning is partially invoked by each word and only fully invoked by the whole sentence (which cannot be present as a single instance in time, though perhaps as the retained meaning, something that includes the words and their sequence in a kind of concrete universal, i.e., a concept that is a whole containing its parts in it). Studying time-phenomena such as the self hence requires different methods than those that try to find and measure it at a specific moment in time. The latter approach may find it but only parts of it. Only a narrative that takes the whole into account can be an adequate method for studying the diachronic aspects of the self.

The claim that someone is “good deep down” despite all the evidence to the contrary is harder to counter. A “good” friend who never supports their friends is not a true friend. But is there any point at which someone loses the capacity for acting morally or being a good friend? Losing this capacity would also imply a loss of agency and the eligibility to be blamed. The self would be gone or at least not manifest in a basic sense. How could someone therefore provide evidence that the capacity really is absent? If someone always acted in a morally blameworthy way, what we could say, scientifically, i.e. based on observation, is that this person’s true self is evil. However, a single good action would disprove that we have identified an essence. And a case of a person who consistently acts in a morally reprehensible way is hard to conceive. Is it someone who always acts so as to inflict the most pain possible? Is it someone not capable of any form of co-operation? Such a person would seem more like a machine than a human being. Even if we could conceive of such a person, we see no reason to reject the metaphysical possibility that such a person may change their ways. Maybe it would be possible to argue for the existence of evil true selves. Such an argument could very well be interesting but we suggest that for most persons it is possible to discover at least small acts of kindness, which would go to show the presence of a capacity for good. People who have indeed acted in reprehensible or in problematic ways and have changed provide a special area of study in relation to the true self. We take it for granted that such individuals exist. People who go through fundamental change toward good show that simple forms of observation and measurements at specific points in time are not adequate for studying the true self. An approach rather is required that takes long stretches of time into account. Given that there is a capacity for good or at least basic agency, a view that does not take this into account would be less truthful, i.e., less scientific, than a view that does take this into account.

It is still problematic that just as one can always correctly posit the capacity for good, one can also posit the capacity for evil. What is actually representative of one’s true self then would seem to depend on what tendency manifests the most. For this reason, it seems appropriate to have a more abstract conception of the true self, i.e., as something that provides unity to life, and considers the relationship between good and bad acts. Actual human beings will probably never be so bad as to exclusively manifest evil actions and probably never be so good as to never do anything blameworthy. Considering what is good and bad, in the long run, requires historical perspectives. The scientific view is therefore also a view that is continually evolving with time.

One further objection to Strohminger et al. is that reliable methods already exist that objectively measure issues relating to the true self. For example, the ease with which people describe their true self is correlated with life meaning ( Schlegel et al., 2009 ). However, such studies only assess the belief people have about the true self – not its existence. Strohminger et al.’s point is that the belief in the true self is evidence-insensitive in the sense that people are in principle unwilling to revise their view about what they believe their own or someone else’s true self to be. The belief can only be confirmed, not rejected; hence, the true self is a non-scientific concept.

Another response to Strohimger et al.’s skepticism would follow a similar line of argument as Zahavi’s response to Metzinger’s claim that the self is an illusion or a model created by the brain. Zahavi’s response is that the sense of self can be understood to constitute the self, or, in other words, the existence of the self is nothing above and beyond the phenomenal experience of the self ( Zahavi, 2005a ). We would argue similarly in relation to the true self when faced with reductive arguments. The sense that people have of the existence of a true self can indeed be taken as constitutive of the true self. However, we wish to extend the concept of the true self to include specific life moments or developmental trajectories that manifest the true self, i.e., situations or ways of acting where the true self is not just a sense, but rather something that comes into existence. One could formulate this as an actualization of the potential true self. As we will outline in the next section, the sense of the true self extends not only into the past but also into the future. The existence of the true self in this way transcends time, although it can also appear or manifest for instance during significant life events – such as during Socrates’ trial – where one’s moral character is put to the test.

Outline of a Comprehensive First-Person Method for Studying the True Self

Understanding the true self as an activity in evolution and a process in metamorphosis involves conceptualizing it in a format that is most likely difficult to be nailed down with conventional, outwardly observable research methods. It is per se a first-person phenomenon and hence also requires a first-person mode of enquiry, although it also potentially involves behavioral aspects. It may manifest in a specific behavioral and even biological instantiation. This is however only the outer signature or correlate of the qualia of the phenomenon. This signature can be studied with conventional (e.g., behavioral or even physiological) research methods; the true self in actu as a first-person phenomenon, however, cannot be studied in this way. It can only indirectly be inferred from this signature mode of appearance. The approach outlined below can be seen as an extension of first-person approaches to the self that focus on its minimal, synchronous experience as presented by Ramm ( 2017 ), who involves for example directing attention to the point from which one looks at the world and investigating this point phenomenologically. The investigation reveals that this point has no visual features, but rather is transparent, single, etc. Through further experiments, one is lead to an experience of a minimal synchronic subject. The focus here is on diachronic aspects of the self, which are essential to study in order to develop a thick account of the self.

One can suspect that the true self can be grasped more by what it can become (causa finalis) rather than by what it has become (causa efficiens). This has further implications for the way it is studied. As an analogy, take the example of climate change. A small minority of people (mostly climatologists) made the earliest indications while researching subtle and even ambiguous symptoms of complex weather phenomena. For them to persist in their claim and stick to their account, they needed a good sense of trust in their reading and interpretation of the data and early indications. Moreover, they needed a vision of a future that might unfold if things continue in the manner they have developed so far. This was highly unusual and anachronistic at a time where climate change was still outside the conventional thinking style.

In a sense, the challenge that we see in this admittedly far-fetched example is somewhat related to the case of researching the true self. We need to investigate subtle and elusive symptoms to begin with and envision how this true self might unfold if given a chance to manifest and materialize within the constellation of potentials and situational factors with which the individual is endowed. Firmness is needed in envisioning the potentiality of this true self and a sense of trust that it can metamorphose from potential to reality. The moment it manifests as a reality in which to be studied in one way or another will have already crystallized into a given form to be considered a product rather than a process in actu . This would be an indication of a sub-component of the true self, not the true self proper.

The method we outline below is an extension of first-person approaches we have developed elsewhere, consisting of small groups of researchers investigating their experience through a series of meetings, note taking, comparison of results and repeated refinement of the experimental tasks that are carried out by the researchers themselves ( Weger and Wagemann, 2015 ; Hackert et al., 2019 ). For more depth and precision of experiences involved in the descriptions of the events and tasks described below, micro-phenomenological interviews ( Petitmengin, 2006 ) or self-inquiry can be employed.

We propose that a first-person method for studying the true self would include five steps:

1. The first step is developing a conceptual understanding of different possible accounts of what the true self might be. This involves envisioning possible worlds and future realities. Can a sense of one’s true self be evoked through considering scenarios closer or further away from one’s current life and identity? The sphere of the true self is not necessarily only that which is already instantiated but that which is still to come into existence. Without such conceptual guides, we are likely to miss the more subtle traces of the true self as mere background noise.

2. The second step is to consider significant life events (e.g., decisions, moral choices, challenging situations, illnesses, accidents, etc.) where one has the sense of either living up to or failing to live up to one’s true self. Are there common markers of managing and failing to act in accordance with one’s true self? What does the exploration of the sense of living in accordance with the true self reveal about the possible nature of one’s own true self?

3. The third step is to consider the experience of the true self in the present moment. Which of my current properties and identities (gender, job, hair color, nationality, interests, philosophical outlook, etc.) relate to my true self? By employing a version of eidetic variation ( Giorgi, 2009 ), one can change any or all of these identities to see what can possibly be changed before the sense of who one is changes fundamentally. Furthermore, experiments such as described by Ramm ( 2017 ) can be employed to access the basic aspects of the synchronic subject. Is the sense of this subject similar to the sense of the true self one has developed to the present day? Additionally, different meditative techniques can be employed in order to heighten the awareness of the minimal self, for example by directing attention away from the awareness of specific thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, the sense of self, and channeling them toward an awareness of awareness itself. To what extent is the true self connected to the minimal self and pure awareness and to what is it connected to specific properties of the actual/personal self? Can the true self be understood as integrating the minimal and personal self?

4. The fourth step is observing instances during the course of several weeks where one feels more vs. less at one with oneself. How do the instances where one feels more at one with oneself differ from those in which one feels less like oneself? How do such moments relate to the significant life events connected to the true self that were explored in step two?

5. The fifth step is “trusting” the true self into becoming – or one could also say: acting it out. This acting out has both a productive and a receptive side. The unfolding of the activity and getting to know it from inside inherently involve participating in its activity as well as cultivating a sense of receptivity for the inner echo that this activity produces. This fifth step is perhaps the most unusual form of scientific enquiry. This is a reminder that any form of research ultimately strives toward insight and the capacity for action (e.g., in the form of reproducing an effect that nature has created in a scientific physicochemical experiment).

Each step also involves checking one’s understanding of the true self that was developed in the first step. Do any of the further steps lead to a deepening or change of one’s initial conception of the true self? As such, this method involves both philosophical aspects as well as first-person experiments and first-person data gathered from memory. One could refer to such a method as “comprehensive” in that it involves investigating large developmental trajectories, present moment experiences, as well as how they relate to each other. It draws on different first-person methodologies that seem to be adequate for investigating the true self in the way we have presented in the previous sections. It may be noted that the method itself not necessarily presupposes any specific conception of the true self. It is therefore part of the method to reflect continually on what the true self means conceptually. Though the nature of the true self that we have suggested served as a guideline for developing the steps of the method outlined above, it may be that the actual first-person investigations of the true self following this method outlined here will lead to refinements both of the method as well as the account of the true self that we have argued for.

The basic function of the self is unity. It connects events in time and space into a single continuum of experience. To the extent that this unity is manifested, the true self is manifested. This can happen on different levels: (1) the core self – extending the continuity of the subjective sense of being – linking together orientation in space, time, and situation, and (2) the narrative self – creating unity throughout live events. Though we can say that there cannot be a narrative self without a core self, the converse is also true: The core self cannot actually exist – be aware of itself as a unity – without different moments in time being united within a time-structure. Hence, Zahavi is wrong, in part, in stating that:

[…]…it takes a self to experience one’s life as a story. In order to begin a self-narrative, the narrator must be able to differentiate between self and non-self, must be able to self-attribute actions and experience agency, and must be able to refer to him- or herself by means of the first-person pronoun. All of this presupposes that the narrator is in possession of a first-person perspective ( Zahavi, 2005b , p. 114).

Though this is half right, one can also say the opposite: There is no self without a minimal story, a beginning, middle, and end unfolding in time and united across time. However, it is also true that there needs to be an underlying self (unity) to the story. If no time has passed, it cannot be decided whether the self is indeed a self and hence the story/narrative and the minimal, phenomenological self are co-constitutive. In other words, the narrative and core self are co-constitutive and therefore inseparable. Although the latter may become ever more specified and deepened, this cannot happen without the core self. However, as the narrative self becomes more concrete in its various differentiations, the core self expands while not losing any of its being: It is that which is capable of being manifested as all the different concrete identities while not being fully identified with any single one of them. This self, a true self, can potentially be investigated following the methodical approach outlined above.

Author Contributions

TS has written most of the manuscript. FE has taken part in conceptual development of the manuscript and commented on it. UW has taken part in the conceptual development of the manuscript, commented on it, and written parts of it.

This study received funding from the Software AG Stiftung. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: the true self, the self, first-person methods, consciousness, phenomenology

Citation: Sparby T, Edelhäuser F and Weger UW (2019) The True Self. Critique, Nature, and Method. Front. Psychol . 10:2250. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02250

Received: 13 May 2019; Accepted: 19 September 2019; Published: 22 October 2019.

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Copyright © 2019 Sparby, Edelhäuser and Weger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Terje Sparby, [email protected]

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The Self and Self-Knowledge

Richard baron inspects different ideas of the self..

What counts as a person? We think we know our own beliefs, desires and sensations, but what kind of knowledge is that? And how secure is that knowledge?

These are big philosophical questions, and this collection of essays by eleven leading philosophers shows just how much our thinking about them has advanced in recent years. Unfortunately, I only have space to mention some of the contributors here.

If there is a theme through this book, it is that to understand the self we need to interweave several strands in our thinking: for instance, that the concept of the self has an ethical dimension, or that concepts of rationality have special roles to play, or that you only have beliefs and feelings if you are disposed to state them.

The first of these strands is visible in Carol Rovane’s essay, in which she makes use of her ethical criterion of personhood. For her, a person is not necessarily a biological organism: a person is an entity that pursues its own coherent projects as a single entity, with one set of thoughts. A group of people who all think individually, and who might disagree, does not count as a person on this criterion. But a tightly-knit team of people who thought and acted as one, could count as a person. One aspect of the ethical dimension is that we should respect peoples’ projects.

It is pretty radical for Rovane not to start with the biological body as the basic criterion of personhood. One reason why it is so radical is that thoughts are in the heads of individual bodies. Moreover, we naturally think of persons as individual bodies. But does that prove anything, or could we just be making a mistake in our natural intuitions?

Christopher Peacocke says that our thoughts really ought to prove something. He makes the point that how we think of ourselves as ourselves ought to give us a good general guide to what it is to be a self. He reflects on how we file and integrate our experiences, then goes on to rescue the self from David Hume’s famous challenge to the whole concept. Hume claimed in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that when he looked within himself, he could find only perceptions, not a self. Peacocke argues that the self can exist as the subject of conscious states without itself being an object of perception.

Self-Knowledge

Moving on to our knowledge of ourselves, there are several possibilities. One is that we work out our beliefs, desires and sensations by observing ourselves. Another is that our beliefs, desires and sensations are automatically presented to us, so that we know we have them without our needing to deliberately observe or work anything out. So if you believe that Sacramento is the capital of California, or if you desire chocolate, or if you have a headache, you just know that you have that belief, or that desire, or that headache, without having to make any observations of yourself. A third possibility is that if you sincerely express a belief or desire, that means you have a belief or desire. If I ask you about the shape of the Earth, and you sincerely say “I believe that the Earth is round,” then you have that belief. All of these possibilities, and more, are considered in this book, although the idea that we look at ourselves and then work out what we believe, desire or feel, gets short shrift. The range of options reflects the need to accommodate several points. We seem to have rock-solid knowledge of our own states of mind: you may not know the right answer to some factual question, or what you ought to want, but you must know what you think is the right answer, or what you do want. And it would be very odd to ask someone how she knew that she was in pain; so that kind of knowledge seems to be immediate and incontrovertible. On the other hand, we can sincerely say we think one thing, but act as if we think something else. Someone can sincerely say they believe that a volcano will never erupt again, but always avoid going within twenty miles of it.

Jane Heal opens the discussion of self-knowledge by setting out some underlying structures that might explain its special features. We might reveal ourselves to ourselves through how we perceive the world. Alternatively, our expressions of our internal states might be aspects of those states. Annalisa Coliva and Akeel Bilgrami develop the bold line that when someone expresses her beliefs as things to which she is committed, those expressions have to be correct. That is, they make an inviolable connection between sincerely expressing a belief and commitment to it. This connection reflects norms of rationality, and does not leave the expression secondary to the belief.

Lucy O’Brien considers our knowledge of our actions. She shows how problems arise for the ideas that each action is preceded by trying to act and that this trying grounds our knowledge of our action. She generalises from this to discuss how a mechanism that we construct to solve a philosophical problem may bring more problems in its wake – a lesson worth heeding. Another valuable lesson is taught by Paul Snowdon’s discussion of claims like “I am in pain” or “This image (presented by an optician) seems to me to be more blurred than that one.” Discussions of self-knowledge often assume that the speaker must know the truth of such claims. Snowdon challenges this assumption. The general lesson is that widespread assumptions are worth challenging.

The views expressed in this book are wide-ranging, and some authors disagree with others. Overall, the book gives a good idea of what analytic philosophy is like these days. There are lots of carefully-defined views, and disagreements keep on emerging; sometimes in ways, and for reasons, that one would not expect, for example, when Christopher Peacocke argues that fear is not made up of an awareness of danger plus some attitude, like anxiety about danger. The reader who is already immersed in the topic will recognize many of the views, and will spot new moves in the debate. The reader who is new to the field will have to work hard to map out the different views and the common themes, but that itself will be a most rewarding mental exercise.

© Richard Baron 2013

Richard Baron is a philosopher in London. His website is www.rbphilo.com .

• The Self and Self-Knowledge , edited by Annalisa Coliva, Oxford University Press, 2012, 304 pages, £45 hb, ISBN 978-0-19-959065-0.

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Supplement to Self-Knowledge

Knowledge of the self.

The main entry focused on knowledge of one’s own mental states. Yet “self-knowledge” can also be used to refer to knowledge of the self and its nature. Issues about knowledge of the self include: (1) how it is that one distinguishes oneself from others, as the object of a self-attribution; (2) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of the material or non-material nature of the self; (3) whether self-awareness yields a grasp of one’s personal identity over time; and (4) what sort of self-understanding is required for rational or free agency. These issues are closely connected with referential semantics, the mind-body problem, the metaphysics of personal identity, and moral psychology, respectively. This section briefly sketches some prominent views about knowledge of the self arising from debates in these areas.

Self-Identification

In self-attributing a mental state, I recognize the state as mine in some sense, and my self-attribution partially consists in a reference to myself. This reference is reflexive, in that I think of myself as myself and not, e.g., as BG, or as the shortest person in the room. Nozick (1981) underscores the significance of being able to thus refer to oneself: “To be an I, a self, is to have the capacity for reflexive self-reference”. This raises the question: how is it that I identify myself, and distinguish myself from others?

Consider: seeing a flushed red face on film, I might wonder whether the face I see is mine or my identical twin’s, and therefore I may say, “someone is embarrassed, but is it me?” Evans (1982) argues that for some kinds of self-attributions, such a question will not arise. Adopting a term from Shoemaker (1968), he describes self-attributions of the relevant type as “immune to error through misidentification”.

None of the following utterances appears to make sense when the first component expresses knowledge gained in the appropriate way: “Someone’s legs are crossed, but is it my legs that are crossed?”; “Someone is hot and sticky, but is it I who am hot and sticky?”; “Someone is being pushed, but is it I who am being pushed?” (Evans 1982: 220–1)

Evans believes that my immunity to error through misidentification, in such cases, shows that I identify myself directly in these cases. If in identifying myself as the one who is hot and sticky, I used some information beyond the information involved in determining that someone is hot and sticky, then I could possibly be justified in believing that someone was hot and sticky but mistaken in thinking that it was me. Because that scenario doesn’t “make sense”, he thinks, I must recognize myself directly, without any identifying information.

Others deny that self-identification is direct, claiming instead that it occurs by way of some sort of description. For instance, Rovane argues that, in self-reference, the way one thinks of oneself can be analyzed as “the series of psychologically related intentional episodes to which this one [the current intentional episode] belongs” (Rovane 1993: 86). While Rovane sees intentional states as the anchor to self-reference, Howell (2006) provides an alternative descriptive picture, in which the self is identified through awareness of an occurrent sensation.

Proponents of descriptive accounts claim that such accounts can accommodate the fact that we don’t actually err about who it is that is hot and sticky. For instance, Rovane claims that it is unsurprising that we are reliable self-identifiers, given that understanding ourselves and our place in the world is required for genuine agency. (We return to the issue of agency below.) Still, there is an important epistemic disagreement between those, like Evans, who claim that self-reference is “identification-free”, and those who claim that we refer to ourselves via a description. The former maintain that there is, in a real sense, no room for error about who is hot and sticky, whereas the latter will say that while such errors are possible, we simply avoid them.

Notably, both “direct reference” and descriptive accounts capture the reflexivity of first-person reference. (For descriptive accounts, this reflexivity lies in the fact that “this one” refers to the very thought of which it is a part.) They thereby fit with the widely accepted belief that self-reference in the distinctively first-person mode is essentially indexical. (See Castañeda 1966; Perry 1979; Lewis 1979.) The dispute between Evans and Rovane is then, in part, a disagreement as to whether the indexical term “I” refers to the self directly, as Evans believes, or instead refers via an implicit indexical of another sort, e.g., “this” or “here”. In general, one’s epistemology of self-identification will depend on what sort of indexical one considers most fundamental, in self-reference.

A final issue concerns the relation between self-awareness and awareness of other persons. On the leading traditional view of this relation, one first grasps that one bears psychological properties, and reasons by analogy to the conclusion that other creatures do as well. (This is the “argument from analogy” to the existence of other minds, articulated by J.S. Mill (1865).) Some recent philosophers have challenged this traditional view, contending that self-awareness is logically dependent on at least a conceptual grasp of other persons. For instance, here is Bermúdez:

[A] subject’s recognition that he is distinct from the environment in virtue of being a psychological subject depends on his ability to identify himself as a psychological subject within a contrast space of other psychological subjects. (Bermúdez 1998: 274)

Materialism and Dualism

In a much-criticized piece of reasoning, Descartes (1641/1984) contrasts the certainty afforded by introspection with the dubitability of knowledge of the physical, to show that introspective objects (thoughts) are ontologically distinct from physical things. This strategy for supporting dualism has few current proponents. Commentators still adhere to the basic criticism lodged by Arnauld (1641/1984): that a purely epistemic premise cannot support an ontological conclusion. It is clearly possible to be (relatively) certain that there is water in the tub, while doubting that there is H 2 O in the tub; yet water is identical to H 2 O. Many contemporary materialists are similarly concerned to restrict the deliverances of introspection, arguing that while mental states appear, to introspection, to be non-physical, the grasp which introspection affords is partial at best, and systematically misleading at worst.

However, there are materialists who take the opposite tack: rather than rejecting self-reflection as a guide to ontology, they claim that some mental states appear physical. These arguments employ three types of self-reflection: introspective awareness of sensations, introspective awareness of perceptual states, and proprioceptive awareness of bodily states. Proprioception is the putatively direct, non-perceptual awareness of one’s bodily state; it is what allows you to know that your arm is raised “from the inside”, that is, without looking at your arm.

The argument for materialism from proprioceptive awareness, due to Brewer (1995), is as follows. Proprioception is epistemically on a par with introspective knowledge, in that (i) it is a species of direct, non-inferential awareness, and (ii) it is “immune to error through misidentification of the first-person pronoun” in Shoemaker’s sense.

Presumably, introspective awareness of mental states justifies the claim that we are mental beings, by virtue of its epistemic character. But proprioceptive awareness of physical states shares this epistemic character; so we are equally justified in the claim that we are physical beings. This argument falls short of disproving dualism, for it leaves open the question how our mental nature is related to our physical nature.

Brewer (1995) also builds an alternative argument along these lines, which seeks to rule out dualism by focusing on introspective awareness of sensations. This argument takes introspective awareness of sensations as intrinsically mental and, at the same time, intrinsically physical. Like the previous argument, it claims that awareness of physical properties is epistemologically equivalent to awareness of mental properties. But it goes further, contending that introspection provides an awareness of physical and mental properties, in sensations, as inextricable. It thus tries to block the possibility of distinctness between the mental subject and the physical subject.

A final argument to show that self-knowledge supports materialism, advanced by Cassam (1997), uses a somewhat different approach. Rather than relying on the spatial quality of bodily sensations or proprioception, this argument exploits one’s awareness of one’s own perceptual states. It says that in becoming aware of our own perceptual states and taking these states to represent a physical world, we are driven to conceive of ourselves as physical objects.

Broadly Cartesian objections to introspection-based arguments for materialism illuminate possible ways that the ontological conclusion can be flawed, consistent with the introspective evidence. For instance, the apparent proprioceptive awareness of the position of one’s limbs could be nonveridical: an amputee might have a similar sense that her legs are crossed, even if she doesn’t, in fact, have any legs. (This does not violate Evans’ claim that such judgments are immune to error through misidentification: the error here is not one of misidentifying the subject, but instead of falsely ascribing a property to the self.) A similar argument could be made against the claim that sensations are intrinsically spatial, and that perceptual states represent a physical world. Even if one’s sensations portray oneself as spatially extended, the idea that one is non-extended (immaterial) is logically consistent with the presence of those sensations or (apparent) perceptual states. Proponents of these arguments for materialism could respond by claiming either that knowledge of oneself as a mental thing is less certain than this alleged contrast implies, or that knowledge of oneself as a physical thing is more certain than it implies.

Personal Identity

The ontological views described in the previous subsection have no immediate consequences for personal identity. For it may be that the criteria of persistence through time, for persons, differ from the criteria of persistence for (other) material objects even if, as materialists contend, a person at a time is necessarily constituted by some matter or other. (See the entry on personal identity .) Knowledge of mental states is not usually thought to provide any special insight into one’s persistence through time, since it is typically assumed that one enjoys privileged access only to one’s current states. In particular, the individual has no special insight into whether her current apparent memories are veridical, and so has no special way to determine whether a particular prior experience was hers. Since views about first-person access played a greater part in shaping theories of personal identity during the modern period than they do today, my brief remarks here will focus on that period.

As mentioned above, Descartes’ meditator uses the proposition that there is thinking occurring, to which she purportedly has immediate (indubitable) introspective access, to establish her own existence with certainty. But this does not allow the meditator to grasp a persisting self. For Descartes, the self, like every other substance, is not directly apprehended; it is understood only through its properties.

Hume also claims that we never directly apprehend the self. Unlike Descartes, he concludes from this that there is no substantial self. In a famous passage, Hume uses introspective awareness to show that the self is a non-substantial “bundle” of perceptions.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself , I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself , and may truly be said not to exist. (Hume 1739–40/1978: 252)

Locke agrees that self-reflection is important to the nature of the self. But while Descartes takes self-reflection to reveal that nature, Locke seems to suggest that one’s self-conception constitutes the self.

[A person is] a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and considers itself as itself , the same thinking thing in different times and places. (Locke 1689/1975: II.27.ix, my emphasis).

On some interpretations, what it is for an experience or action to belong to me (a Lockean person) is for me to appropriate it, or to impute it to myself (Winkler 1991). This interpretation underscores the importance of Locke’s claim that “person” is a forensic term.

“Person”…is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents, capable of a law, and happiness, and misery. This personality extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness,- whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present. (Locke 1689/1975: II.27.xxvi)

Locke’s view of the self is usually considered less deflationary than Hume’s view. But these philosophers agree that, in a very real sense, the nature of the self is bound up with one’s reflections on one’s states. For Hume, this means that the self is nothing over and above a constantly varying bundle of experiences. For Locke, it means that the self is defined by what we do—or, perhaps, can —self-attribute, through recollection and/or appropriation.

Kant repudiates the basic strategy shared by Locke and Hume, for he denies that self-awareness reveals objective facts about personal identity. He concurs with Descartes and Hume that we never directly apprehend the self (this fact is what he calls “the systematic elusiveness of the ‘I’”). And while he holds that we cannot avoid thinking of ourselves as persisting, unitary beings, he attributes this self-conception to necessary requirements for thought which do not directly support substantive ontological conclusions about the nature of the self.

A couple of contemporary views about personal identity are noteworthy in this context. Galen Strawson’s (1997) view does not explicitly draw on introspective reflection, but it implies that the limits of a subject correspond to the limits of what could be introspectively grasped, at a moment. A subject is defined by (indeed, identified with) a period of experience which is “experientially unitary”. Since in humans an appropriately unified experience lasts no more than about three seconds, subjects are in fact very short-lived. Dainton and Bayne (2005) present a related view, which tries to avoid the result that subjects are very short-lived. On this view, personal identity is tied to (the capacity for) experiential continuity rather than experiential unity. But unlike Strawson’s view, the continuity view is vulnerable to familiar objections concerning the possibility of branching streams of consciousness or “fission”.

The role of self-understanding in agency is a complex topic, and we can only briefly examine some leading positions on the issue here. Knowledge of one’s relatively stable traits and dispositions—one’s character—is believed, by some, to be crucial for the exercise of free agency. For instance, Taylor claims that self-reflection is imperative for being human (where this means, in part, being capable of agency),

[T]he human animal not only finds himself impelled from time to time to interpret himself and his goals, but … he is always already in some interpretation, constituted as human by this fact. (Taylor 1985: 75)

In a somewhat different vein, Frankfurt maintains that the capacity to rationally evaluate one’s desires is required for freedom of the will. This rational evaluation issues in second-order desires, that is, desires concerning which desires to have or to act upon.

[N]o animal other than man … appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (Frankfurt 1971: 7) It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. (1971: 14)

These claims by Taylor and Frankfurt go beyond the merely pragmatic observation that a reasonable degree of self-understanding is required for effective action. Instead, they assert that what is distinctive about the exercise of a free will, in determining one’s course of action, is that this exercise involves the capacity to critically reflect on one’s basic goals and desires. (For a related recent view, see Bilgrami 2006.)

While Taylor, Frankfurt, and Bilgrami stress that a broad self-understanding is crucial for responsible agency, others claim that particular actions require some awareness of one’s intentions in performing that action. For instance, Searle (1983) argues that intentions are always self-referential, in that when one performs an action X intentionally, the relevant intention to act includes an intention to X so as to fulfill that intention itself. Anscombe (1981) similarly emphasizes the significance of one’s awareness of intentions in acting. In fact, on her view thoughts about actions, intentions, postures, etc. have a special status: it is only thoughts about such aspects of the self that are

unmediated, non-observational, and also are descriptions (e.g., “standing”) which are directly verifiable or falsifiable about the person. (Anscombe 1981: 35)

And she also believes that action requires some awareness of these features of oneself. For criticism of the idea that action requires awareness of intention, see Cunning (1999).

One contemporary theory of practical reasoning, offered by Velleman (1989), casts knowledge of the self in a particularly important role. Velleman notes that we strongly desire to understand ourselves and, in particular, to understand our reasons for acting. On his view, this desire leads us to try to discern our action-motivating desires and beliefs. (He calls this attempt to gain self-awareness “reflective theoretical reasoning”.) But strikingly, Velleman thinks that the desire for self-understanding also leads us to model our actions on our predictions about how we will act. In this way, our expectations as to how we will act are themselves intentions to act. “Intentions to act … are the expectations of acting that issue from reflective theoretical reasoning” (Velleman 1989: 98). Thus, Velleman can say that our desire to understand what we are doing, at the moment we are doing it, is usually satisfied, since our predictions about how we will act are themselves intentions to act, and hence our beliefs about what we will do are “self-fulfilling expectations”.

Finally, there is an emerging literature which examine the effect of societal influences on subjects’ self-understanding and, thereby, on agency. See, e.g., Neisser and Jopling 1997 and Meyers 2002.

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1 (page 6) p. 6 C1 ‘Who am I?’ Identity in philosophy

• Published: February 2019
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The question of how consciousness and self-awareness connect with personal identity has accompanied philosophy since antiquity. Sages of diverse orientations have put forth various elaborate answers, showing among other things that self-awareness is more than just being conscious. The ensouled matter of the self-conscious brain still poses deeply puzzling questions about individual identity, and nowadays the new reality of anthropo-technology once again poses the question how we can know about ourselves. ‘ “Who am I?” Identity in philosophy’ considers the concept of identity in philosophy through time and the mind–body problem. It also discusses empiricist reductionism, mentalist essentialism, ordinary language analysis, and interactionism.

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