The Personal Self: A First-Personal Approach

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AbstractIn that we have now offered an account of animate empathy, our thematic concern can begin to fix upon the second mode of empathy delineated in the third chapter, namely interpersonal empathy. But rather than directly considering the manner of givenness of other people, I will now turn to a detailed treatment of personal self-consciousness. This may raise suspicions that the account of interpersonal empathy which I ultimately offer will simply transpose the personal self as given first-personally onto others, a move which would be inadequate to the task of explicating the manner in which other people are given. The reader will have to determine for themselves whether I commit this error in the seventh chapter, but I would like to emphasise that it is not my aim in beginning with an exclusively first-personal analysis. As we will later see, the personal self is not something which can be simply transposed from self to other, because its full sense is one that only emerges in and through intersubjective relations, and to this degree a phenomenology of personal selfhood must incorporate a second-personal analysis too. Nevertheless, I take it that in pursuing such a phenomenology scant progress will be made until one considers what it is to be a person, to live a personal life. This is because the distinctive character of the personal self is partially a matter of specific contours within the life of subjectivity, contours which can be most richly disclosed through reflection upon one’s own case. In this chapter, I will attempt to bring into view some of these contours on the basis of Husserl’s analyses of the personal self. I will first consider the sense in which voluntary movement and practical inclinations can be appropriated and transformed into chosen actions, thereby manifesting a subject who is not merely a locus of instinctive tendencies but a person who decides (Sect. 1). This will then bring into view a conception of the personal self as a living nexus of decisions and stances who has a distinctive kind of motivational dependence upon its surrounding world as well as a certain personal freedom and enduring character (Sect. 2). Finally, I will turn to the form of self-awareness and habituality that is implicated in the distinctive experiential unities that Husserl terms persistent opinions (bleibende Meinungen), thereby excavating one of the most significant pre-reflective bases for personal self-understanding (Sect. 3). In so doing, I will try to show that Husserl’s thinking on these issues is remarkably contemporary, cohering with and arguably improving upon some of the recent decades’ most powerful philosophical thoughts regarding agency and selfhood. This will then leave us with a specific pair of tasks in the remaining chapter: first, that of determining the degree to which personal selfhood depends upon empathetic relations to other persons, and second, that of discerning the recognition and understanding of other persons in interpersonal empathy, in its differences and similarities with the personal self-consciousness considered here.