Two modes of givenness of pre-reflective self-consciousness

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I shall first attempt to criticize Zahavi's notion of the “experiential self” as the latter is presented and developed in his book Self and Other (2014). I will argue that Zahavi's “experiential self” is so thin that its connection with the pre-reflective dimension of selfhood at the distinctively human, conceptual, “space of reasons” level becomes problematic. Second, I shall suggest that an alternative account of self-consciousness first developed by Kant and refined by Sellars, which I shall call the “Kant-Sellars” thesis about self-consciousness, which stresses the distinction between sentient and sapient self-consciousness, can help us do justice to the insights contained in Zahavi's account of experiential self, while at the same time avoiding its more problematic features. Finally, I shall offer a brief response to the objection that by dropping the phenomenological “bridge” between the normative and empirical-material dimensions of the pre-reflective self, the above “Kant-Sellars” account of self-consciousness leaves us with an essentially bifurcated conception of pre-reflective self-consciousness. I will suggest that what unites those two dimensions of the pre-reflective self can be best described not as a phenomenological unity but rather as a “dialectical” normative-functional unity, whose ultimate raison d’être is practical in nature.