Hegel, Heidegger, and the 'I'

Abstract

In scholarly community, there is general agreement that notion of self has become indispensable to contemporary social and political discourse and that specific models of self have specific implications for politics and society. In a superficial sense, everyone knows what it means to be an 'I,' in sense that everyone has a basic practical knowledge underlying use of this indexical utterance, as everyone must learn rules governing use of pronoun 'I' in order to become a speaker.1 However, immediate or common-sense understanding of this idea may imply an account of self that is not fully exhaustive and, more importantly, has practical consequences (for example, regarding one's relationships with others and one's integration into a community) that might or might not be desirable in social or political terms. One of tasks of philosophy is to put such immediate or common sense understandings under scrutiny, to provide a richer understanding of such a subject matter, and to possibly develop an alternative account.Throughout history of philosophy, development of concept of 'I' has been a constant concern. It was Descartes who developed Aristotelian notion of a self-sufficient underlying subject into idea of 'I' as a thinking subject, an idea that gave modern philosophy its peculiar subjectivistic twist. By 'subjectivism' here, I mean philosophical tenet that nature of reality, as related to a given consciousness, is dependent on that consciousness. This subjective account of 'I' is characteristic of modernity and, as observed by Malpas, indissolubly connected with the way in which modernity also seizes upon, and thematizes, objective. In other words, the attempt at a purely 'objective' understanding of world prioritization of physical science) is strictly related to subjectivism (the prioritization of 'cogito').2Even Kant was not immune from this subjective account. According to Kant, experiences must be held together in transcendental unity of apperception: I-think. We can trust our knowledge, provided we admit that we know things as they appear to us (phenomena) and not things in themselves (noumena), which can never be known. In other words, objectivity for Kant does not mean extra-subjectivity but universal and necessary subjectivity.The Kantian notion of thing-in-itself quickly became a subject of dispute. Fichte questioned its very existence-after all, if we cannot know things in themselves, they might also not exist. In his radicalisation of Kantian 'I-think,' however, Fichte built on Kantian idea that I-think is self-consciousness (not only 'I know,' but 'I become conscious that I know') to argue that 'I' must be self-positing and self-determining. Thus, Fichte put into jeopardy very distinction between subject and object on which entire Cartesian and post-Cartesian metaphysics is based.3Now, consider current debates regarding conception of self. Generally, such debates still polarize subjectivist and objectivist readings of 'I' into irreconcilably opposed camps. They both assume, however, a fundamental distinction between subject and object, a distinction on which very possibility of conceiving a 'subjectivist' or 'objectivist' position is grounded.I submit that it is possible to elaborate an alternative account of 'I' that overcomes Cartesian subjectivism and bypasses traditional oppositions between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of self. I also submit that intellectual resources needed to elaborate such an account can be found in philosophical views of Hegel and Heidegger. As this is clearly a very large project, this paper necessarily has a narrow focus and is limited to preliminary work and reflections.HEGEL'S IDEALISTIC OBJECTIVITYAccording to Beiser, German idealism was, from its inception, a reaction to subjectivism. …