Pre-reflective Consciousness

Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer, Clara Morando, Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer, Clara Morando, Clara Bravo Morando, Sofia Miguens, Gerhard Preyer, Clara Bravo Morando

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367873882
• eBook ISBN: 9781317399278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relationship between the current analytical debates on consciousness and the debates that took place within continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular around the time of Sartre and within his seminal works.

Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties, this volume includes twenty-two unique contributions from leading scholars in the field. Asking questions such as:

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• Why we should think that self-consciousness is non-reflective?
• Is subjectivity first-personal?
• Does consciousness necessitate self-awareness?
• Do we need pre-reflective self-consciousness?
• Are ego-disorders in psychosis a dysfunction of pre-reflective self-awareness?
• How does the Cartesian duality between body and mind fit into Sartre's conceptions of consciousness?

PART I

Foundation of the mental

1 Why should we think that self-consciousness is non-reflective?

Manfred Frank

It was Sartre who introduced the expression “pre-reflective” (Sartre 1936/7, in: Sartre 1978)—even though commentators have wrongly attributed it to other authors such as Fichte, Novalis, Brentano, and even to Dieter Henrich and the Heidelberg School. Meanwhile, the term has also come to be quite commonly used in contemporary analytic and phenomenological philosophy (by authors such as Peter Goldie, Shaun Gallagher, Dan Zahavi, Ken Williford, and Dorothée Legrand). Yet, for many of these authors, the term “pre-reflective” does not have the meaning that Sartre meant to introduce; the following is guided by this original meaning.

First of all, the term was coined with a negative intention in mind. What it says is that there is a type of self-consciousness that is not the result of reflection, as many representatives of mainstream philosophy of mind—especially higher-order theorists—would take all forms of self-consciousness to be. Some critics accuse the proponents of pre-reflective self-consciousness of being stuck with a negative position and of not coming forward with a positive theory of consciousness. I will discuss this objection at the end.

In what follows, I will first remind readers of which philosophers have insisted on the reality of pre-reflective self-consciousness, and why they felt motivated to do so. Then, in the section on the failure of higher-order theories of consciousness, I will look at the differences between higher-level and one-level models of self-representation and defend the merits of the latter. However, the so-called self-representationalists I address here largely reject pre-reflective consciousness, as I understand it. They do this because they think, wrongly, that “representation” is the basic term—“the core necessary condition” (Kriegel 2009, pp. 107, 154ff.)—for any reasonable theory of consciousness. I attack this position in the section on an analogous failure of same-order theories, by showing, amongst other things, that self-representation founders on the de se constraint, which invites radical consequences that require us to adopt an understanding of pre-reflective self-consciousness that differs from what they can offer in their framework. In the section on why inner differentiation of “pre-reflective consciousness” doesn’t prevent its transparency to the world, I seek to show, by way of a conclusion, that a common criticism of pre-reflectivity theory (as I shall refer to it) is ungrounded. According to this criticism, pre-reflectivity theories serve only as a negation of alternative models and, in particular, do not do justice to the internal differentiation that exists within the overall structure of subjective consciousness.

The discovery of ubiquitous pre-reflective self-awareness

In 1966, Dieter Henrich published an essay with the unassuming title “Fichte’s Original Insight” in the Festschrift for Wolfgang Cramer. Rarely has such a small seed sprouted into such rich food for thought—in this instance, concerning some special features of the structure of self- consciousness. The decisive point was presented negatively: self-consciousness cannot be understood to be the explicit turning-upon-itself of an (in itself and of itself) unconscious awareness. Since the times of Descartes and Leibniz, and in fact already with William of Ockham, the philosophical tradition had spoken of “reflection.” That which can be grasped in the act of reflection as itself is that, and only that, which possesses, prior to all reflection, a criterion for knowing (in a non-conceptual sense) its own being and its own self-sameness. Thus: “What reflection finds seems to already have been there,” as Novalis, in 1795—earlier than Fichte himself—had formulated the point (Novalis 1965, p. 112, Nr. 14).¹ Otherwise, reflection would not have discovered the phenomenon of consciousness, but rather created it: a case of something like brainwashing would have taken place.

Fichte’s opinion was that his predecessors, even Kant, had misconstrued self-consciousness as reflection (Fichte 1798, p. 11; see Fichte 1797, pp. 18–19). With that they had involved themselves in a circle, the logic of which Henrich’s article on Fichte put under the magnifying glass, and the overcoming of which Fichte took all the credit for. By “circle” here we understand the tacit use of a premise that is then simply reiterated in the conclusion. Nothing is thus explicated; all that happens is that the same opinion gets repeated. Yet those who think that there really is such a thing as self-consciousness should look for independent explication.

By “regress,” we understand the infinite postponement of a justification. There can be non-harmful regresses. For instance, the repeated reiteration of the truth predicate (as in “The supposition that Gödel was right is true” and “It is true that the supposition that Gödel was right is true,” etc.) is harmless. But some regresses are indeed vicious. For instance:

Consciousness comes to be when an unconscious mental event becomes the object of a higher-order mental event. The higher-order mental event is itself unconscious and becomes conscious through the objectification by another mental event of yet higher order, which is itself unconscious. And so on.

Something similar is held nowadays by authors such as David Rosenthal, Peter Carruthers, and Rocco Gennaro. Yet Fichte had for the first time clearly shown (1) that those who take consciousness to exist cannot ground it by means of a regressive theory and (2) that consciousness must be unmediated, i.e., it must be awareness of itself from the start, so that no regress takes off. This was how Fichte justified his claim that consciousness presupposes immediate self-consciousness. This thesis is nowadays widely shared in self-representationalist circles, where one speaks of the ubiquity of self-awareness.

Fichte’s achievement would of course have remained unnoticed if Henrich hadn’t spelled it out in such a clear and impressive way and claimed that important things depend on it. Only thus could one call Henrich’s rediscovery a discovery. The underlying doctrine was spelled out in rapid sucession by Henrich and some of his students² and with time, they came to be known as the “Heidelberg School”—maybe for the first time in Tugendhat’s (1979) lectures on Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung (Self-awareness and Self-determination).

Although Henrich’s seminal idea was soon translated into English and although Henrich invited several leading proponents of analytic philosophy to Heidelberg or carried on discussions with them in the United States, his view had little influence in the then still young “Philosophy of Mind.” Hector-Neri Castañeda (1966) and Sydney Shoemaker (1968) had, independently of one another and almost simultaneously, arrived at very similar insights. They had shown that one’s self-consciousness does not reduce to the identification of an object, which then turns out to be “I, myself.” While Henrich immediately noticed this convergence, and included both authors in the reader he organized for his seminars on self-consciousness (Frank 1991a, 1994 are nothing but extended and published versions of this original anthology), one cannot really speak of a corresponding reception by the Anglo-Americans. Henrich’s difficult style, heavy with the influence of Kant and Idealism, was the first impediment; the second was the strong historical orientation of Henrich and his disciples, an orientation which in the anglophone world belongs not so much in philosophy but rather in the history of philosophy and in the literary disciplines. It is true that in 1987 Castañeda dedicated his contribution to the Henrich Festschrift to Henrich (“The Self and the I-Guises,” in Theorie der Subjektivität, edited by Konrad Cramer et al.) thus: “Here is a mere prolegomenon to a general theory of self-consciousness—dedicated to Dieter Henrich with gratitude and with admiration for his illuminating contributions to our understanding of the nature of consciousness, selfhood, and self-consciousness” (Castañeda 1999, p. 180).³ Nevertheless, one cannot really speak of the influence or of the dissemination of Henrich’s arguments. Only James Hart and Tomis Kapitan, the editors of Castañeda’s essays in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I (1999), brought to light, in their Introduction, what they had in common. Jim Hart, who had come across my views on such problems in a conference at Notre Dame, called my attention to the book Dan Zahavi had written in English on Husserl (Zahavi 1999), which is probably the most detailed and the most luminous representation of the basic idea of the Heidelberg School (and a defense of Husserl against their objections) and which has, as far as I can see, indeed had some influence on the anglophone scene and analytic circles.

Above all, it was cited in the circle of the young philosophers of consciousness who call themselves self-representationalists—and through Zahavi I too had the honour of being, at least indirectly, cited. And through Zahavi’s mediation some knowledge of the Heidelberg School has percolated (for example, Kriegel and Williford 2006, p. 7 fn. 8; Williford 2006, p. 111f.).

The failure of higher-order theories of consciousness

We know two varieties of subjective consciousness: impersonal and preconceptual self-consciousness and conceptual self-knowledge, with an I as owner or agent at the center.

“Separatists,” such as Block in the 1990s, and Chalmers, hold that the first, only, is non-reducible from a functionalist viewpoint. “Anti-separatists” such as Horgan and Kriegel see in the for-me component, which is also present in phenomenal consciousness, the turning point from pre-conceptual into conceptual self-consciousness, i.e., into self-knowledge (Kriegel 2009, Ch. 4). This rather recent school in the “Philosophy of Mind” calls itself “self-representationalism.” It sees phenomenal states as involving qualitative consciousness together with a for-me component, which they call “subjective consciousness.” Consciousness, they think, is a case of “representation” (which can also naturally happen in the absence of awareness). At least, “representation” is the fundamental concept of the theory, which insists on dealing exclusively with conscious, i.e., with self-conscious states (for example, Kriegel 2009, pp. 101ff., esp. p. 105). This has a point: it commits the theory to dealing with self-consciousness at the same level as all other cases of representation.

With regard to qualitative consciousness, most self-representationalists are at first sight inclined to endorse hard representationalism’s thesis that it is environment which determines the content of consciousness (Kriegel 2009, pp. 12f.; Ch. 3). They differ over the “for-itself aspect” of each consciousness (Kriegel 2009, pp. 71ff., Ch. 4), which the hard externalist would deny. Thus Kriegel matches purportedly mind-independent properties of objects against the disposition they have to cause in our minds, or rather, in our nervous systems, certain states, which he calls “response-dependent properties of the object.” This is already an internalist maneuver that invokes a “subjective” aspect of experience; this aspect will be cashed out in terms of self-representing consciousness. This is in frank contrast to hard externalism. In order not to fall into the trap of the reflection model, it must be guaranteed that higher-order consciousness is not directed upon the representational (the outer) content, but on first-level consciousness as its sole content (Levine 2010, pp. 7 and 10).

(Authors like Harman, Dretske, and Tye do not take this subjective factor into account. According to them, consciousness is totally transparent or revelatory of the surfaces and properties of physical objects and does not in itself have access to any further intrinsic properties of consciousness which could appear in reflection. The inference which Dretske and Tye eventually recommend—that of a consciousness-of to a consciousness-that—seems to me clearly to involve a petitio principii. That which did not lie at all in the scope of consciousness before cannot suddenly come to be there through “displaced perception or ‘secondary’ seeing-that (seeing that P by seeing something not involved in the truth-conditions for the proposition that P)” (Tye 2002, p. 145). How could reflection make truth conditions accessible which are not, as it were, authenticated by the findings of primary consciousness?)

Also, unlike hard representationalists, self-representationalists defend the claim that each consciousness not only represents its environment but also represents itself, hence its for-me-ness character: “Thus, whatever else a conscious state represents, it always also represents itself, and it is in virtue of representing itself that it is a conscious state” (Kriegel 2009, pp. 13–14). So, whenever consciousness occurs, there are two things that the awareness is awareness of : something typically different from consciousness itself, and the consciousness itself. Kriegel calls this last aspect “subjective consciousness”—hence the title of his 2009 book.

The question that I have just hinted at is the following: Is self-representation a representation of the same kind as object representation? Or, to ask it again, more radically: Is self-consciousness a special case of object-consciousness? Clearly hetero-consciousness and self-consciousness differ in content. If the higher-order state not only renders the first-orde...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Back to pre-reflectivity
• Part I Foundation of the mental
• Part II I-knowledge, perception, and introspection
• Part III Pre-reflectivity disputed
• Part IV Body as a whole, the other, and disorder of the mental
• Part V Historical philosophical background
• Index