Constituting Selves: Psychology's Pragmatic Horizon
Author: Duus, Richard E.
Date: 2020-04-07T07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Psychology; personality; Psychotherapy; General; Psychedelic Library
Description: This book aims to provide a unique perspective and definition of the self in psychological literature, filling the gap between psychological science and practical implementation of interventions presented to psychotherapy clients. Combining insights from a broad range of interdisciplinary literature and multiple perspectives on the self and identity, the author seeks to determine whether an independent reality exists behind the term ‘self’ and what the nature of that reality might be. Among the topics Varieties of narrative self within a psychological frameFirst-personal experience and identit
Publisher: Springer

Richard E. Duus

Constituting Selves

Psychology’s Pragmatic Horizon

Richard E. Duus

Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-39016-7e-ISBN 978-3-030-39017-4
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4

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Dedicated to Anne

Preface

Opinions ofself are widely varied from extreme positions that there is “no such thing as a self” to its opposite extreme of a “universal self.” In between, there are opinions of a single true and authentic self of every person, multiple selves of which some might be healing selves and abusive selves. Other opinions include ageneralized other self that is an interiorization of cultural expectations, acritical self , and internal representations of principal others of one’s life. All this, it seems, is prior to or perhaps oblivious of the questions ofwhat a self is orwhat selves might be andwhat a self does .

Psychology as a discipline has a long history ofself-phobia accrued from the long effort to establish its scientific foundations. Encounters with Indian Hindu and Buddhist thinking are usually perceived as supporting both auniversal view of self and ano-self view and rarely the in-between conceptions of self of which there are many or of self’s ties to questions of naturalism. The real exemplary demonstration, perhaps miracle is an appropriate adjective, of the long Indian conversation of self and its relation to naturalism is the opening of the space of public reason that allows the focused conversation of self and its ties to naturalism during a historically turbulent context of repeated conquests.

The Western conversation directed to issues of self was initially less focused but becomes increasingly focused beginning with Augustine and gradually reached a peak intensity in the century beginning with René Descartes and followed by John Locke, David Hume, and Emmanuel Kant whom principally constructed the modern form ofself .

The project to determinewhat a self is andwhat it does began slowly and became directed to a monograph while still in an active full-time clinical psychology practice in the Duluth Psychological Clinic. Two colleagues, Dan D’Allaird, Psy.D., and Douglas Heck, Ph.D., followed this project with me and have read every sentence each from different perspectives. Dan D’Allaird has provided very detailed editing that has been helpful, and when his suggestions are not followed, the resulting writing has often been of poor quality. Doug Heck’s reading and feedback are from a larger overall perspective resulting in a general sense and feeling of a holistic text. We engaged many conversations sometimes over beer at a pub. This experience itself is memorable along with the experience of pursuing this project to something of an end.

Richard E. Duus

Duluth, MN, USA

Introduction

This series of investigations was motivated by a desire to determine what is intended by the termself in the psychological literature. My curiosity concerned whether there is an independent reality behind the term and what that reality is. The literature encountered by a clinical psychologist in a medical setting and private practice revealed a term as not so much vague as indefinite. The termself was, and currently is, frequently exchanged withego andego-states , and in a growing literature of dissociative identity disorders (multiple personality),selves were contrasted with a vague concept of atrue self which seemed to capture some intuitive truth but for which the reality was, and is, indeterminate.

As well, the broader interdisciplinary literature including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, communication, and especially political science does not conceive the termsself andselves in any clearer way. Political science is becoming more closely associated with psychology through a larger frame of human sciences. A self concept is used by such eminently creative psychologists as Carl Rogers, Erik Erikson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and others. It seems that the emphasis was too much onconsciousness in contrast toself and the terms were not clearly distinguished except, in retrospect, by those identified as pragmatists, especially William James. The concept ofself served psychology, following Rogers and others, as primarily an explanatory concept of personal integrity and mental health. Serious practical considerations of what a self might be and its significance intensified when I pursued an interest in Buddhist Zen-style meditation. The accepted term isZazen in Buddhist terminology as meditation did not distinguish from a contemplative Christian tradition which focused on phrases or objects of contemplation which is not the intention of Zazen. The Buddhist emphasis onno self was troublesome to a psychologist who had been trained in psychotherapy, such as Carl Rogers, Fritz (Frederick) Perls, and Sigmund Freud as well as others of similar orientation. Buddhist retreats could last one day, weekends, or weeks; sesshins, in Zen Buddhist vocabulary, were conducted with routine patterns of interacting with each other that are intended to heighten mindful awareness of oneself and other participants but which also strengthened one’s sense of integration, identity, and subsequently a sense of self. These were, in my thinking, the same or similar to the activities I would prescribe as a practicing clinical psychologist to strengthen one’s integrity and sense of self especially in the context of families. Realizing this convinced me to put my concerns to rest and continue to observe. I participated in Buddhist meditating activities including multi-day retreats that were useful in confronting and developing a relationship with my own selves and an awareness of my internal dialogues. Such experiences were subsequently important in my hospital and private practice.

Another salient experience was, and is, the incommensurability of scientific psychology with its practice. The interaction of theoretical and scientific principles of psychology and a first-person implementation of those principles requires skills that are usually framed asrelationship which is modeled and learned through supervising mentoring interactions. It is noted that the interaction between the scientific principles and clinical interventions presented to one’s patients is essential to practicing good psychology. The mentoring-teaching relationship encapsulate skills and processes that occur in the present moment and, for that reason, to which can only be pointed. The general skills of relating to a patient or client are acquired in practice through, mostly perhaps, the guidance of a series of mentors and in peer learning arrangements. It is often said that one becomes a psychotherapist, and is not simply trained to be one. It is noted that a very similar conversation occurs among physicians regarding training.

There is a gap between psychological science and the face-to-face implementation of interventions presented to the clients that requires small moment-to-moment adjustments that can be recognized as first-person and second-person perspectives in light of the studies of this monograph. This tension generates many papers and monographs seeking to grasp and fill in this gap in a necessary attempt to maintain the intellectual integrity such tension daily assaults when in a clinical practice.

It is in the context of these background experiences that the first study was initiated using Jerrold Seigel’s monumental intellectual history of the European thought of self,The Idea of the Self , and Charles Taylor’s very large corpus which focused primarily onSources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity but also other writings. The goal of the first study, Circumscribing the Self Aporetic, was to investigate the historical concept ofself in Western thought. In colloquial parlance, Western European thought has been credited with being less concerned with a concept of self in contrast to Eastern thought generally crediting India with a more mature development of self concepts beginning with the early Vedantic development of a universal self. While crediting Indian, principally Buddhist, thinking ofself as mature seems generally to be true, it is not correct to credit historical European thought with neglecting or not attending the concept of self. Seigel shows a long and continuous intellectual conversation concerning self that increases in intensity to the present when the concept and reality of a self and selves absorb significant attention. The purpose of this study is to grasp the outlines of the intellectual geography of Western European thinking of self.

The second study, Varieties of Narrative Self within a Psychological Frame, is directed to an inquiry of specifically psychological responses to a self concept. As expected, several creative approaches are described that address the problem of what a self is and how it functions for a person to facilitate day-to-day living. The purpose is no more creative than to identify the several psychological accounts of a self and to attempt some general assessment as to which might be followed to provide a greater insight into a concept and reality of selfhood. A central orientation is sought to understand the self concept that may have an organizing impact on the psychological literature.

This study prompted the third study, Identities of a Person, as it became clear that self and identity are the opposing sides of the same reality, sides of a coin, in which a self-side is a subjective side opening to an inward life and the identity-side opening to an external life. The external nature of identity makes it the easier psychological subject of empirical investigation and leads to such concepts as self-esteem and self-efficacy as has been noted by Ricoeur. It was in this study that the impact of William James’s thinking began to emerge. I have long felt that although many psychological investigators cited, and continue to cite, James in an almost obligatory fashion, few read him carefully, an observation made by Gordon Allport, previously in 1943. It grows clearer in this inquiry that a distinction would be helpful and perhaps required between first-person perspective and objective third-person perspective. It was also during this investigation that the author encountered Lynne Rudder Baker who, from an independent philosophical origin and with little evidence of having read James, presented an account of soft naturalism and first-person perspective that was congruent with James’s thinking and which added to his account of intrinsic psychology.

The fourth study, First-Person Experience and Identity, changes the direction of this project and begins to rely principally on philosophical resources beginning with Baker. Direction for this fourth study is provided by Baker’s proposed discrimination between a nonreductive soft and a reductive hard naturalism, and, in addition, to a clear presentation of what she called theconstitution view of first-person perspective and its essential role in establishing personhood. At least two issues emerge: one is the interdependence of first-person perspective and second-person engagement, and a second concerns the apparent incompatibility of a hard scientific reality with both first-person perspective and the related nonreductive soft naturalism.

The second issue is addressed in the next study, the fifth study, Quining the First-Person Perspective. The philosophy of science of those authors, which include Sellars, Quine, Dennett, and others, who most clearly resist first-person experience accounts as inappropriate data for science. Within psychological science, Peter Carruthers presents a vigorous case against first-person experiential data as appropriate to science which signifies that such resistance includes psychology. One of the issues that arises in this study is the interdependence of first-and second-person perspectives which is addressed in the later eighth study. What is examined in this study is the incommensurate relation of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives that higher-level perspectives cannot be reduced to previous levels. Each perspective contains information specific to that perspectival level that makes them incommensurate to other perspectives. The information unique to a perspective is lost when oriented to a different perspective. It turns out that the distinction Kant made between theoretical and practical reason applies to second-person perspective practical reasons that guide a person’s conduct and objective theoretical reason of third-person perspective concerning logical propositions of truth. The importance of this distinction receives emphasis in this study.

The sixth study, Dimensions of Mineness, is an investigation of the very long Indian conversation of self and its connection to a natural and real world using Jonardon Ganeri’s presentation of the concept of self as it emerged in India. The study contrasts the Indian conversation of self and nature, which is largely Buddhist, with the Western European intellectual history of self, explored in the first study, and to the first-person constitution of a person, fourth study. The purpose is to enrich the understanding of what a self is and how it functions in a person’s interaction with his world. Ganeri presents a useful taxonomy of the possible concepts of the self which includes both Western and Indian concepts. Ganeri’s contrast of both Western and Indian self concepts is useful and insightful. One of the issues to emerge in that study is the central aspect of precognitive subjectivity structure and processes that are entirelyblack box phenomena. Generally, those underlying unconscious processes are necessary to coordinate self functions and prepare experience for cognition.

The issue of subjectivity that surfaced in that study leads into the seventh study, Inquiry into Subjectivity. The goal of the seventh study is to confront theblack box appearance of subjectivity and enumerate the structure and processes that are the basis of intersubjectivity, experience, and cognition. More generally, little is known of the subjective processes that make possible experience and thinking, and a credible investigation would be useful. One unique and thorough study, the only one of its kind to my knowledge, is presented by a less known philosopher, Hector Neri Castañeda. Castañeda seems to be better known in Europe than in the United States although he worked at the University of Illinois his entire career. It is an empirical investigation built on the unique properties of linguisticindexicals and accounts for the relation of experience and thinking. Castañeda’s account will be or, perhaps, should be useful to psychological investigations because it constitutes a base for experience, thinking, and acting. There is a congruence between James’s notions of subjectivity and Castañeda’s that add some converging strength to both accounts. Following this study of subjectivity as a base for first-person perspective, an investigation of the other side of a first-person perspective is opened to second-person engagement.

The eighth study, Second-Person “We,” is of intersubjectivity which is, as noted, the other side of first-person perspective than subjectivity. The second-person engagement turns out to be the core of moral conduct and perhaps the core of psychological science. This investigation is centered on Stephen Darwall’sThe Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability . Darwall’s account of second-person engagement is philosophical, although he does attempt to tie it to experimental psychology. It is a complete and thoroughly investigated account of second-person perspective, which is perhaps the only one. Darwall’s inquiry draws substantially from Kant, especially the distinction between theoretical and practical reason which he attributes to be second-person reasons to direct one’s conduct. I do not remember how Darwall’s presentation captured my attention, possibly through Christine Korsgaard, but once encountered, everything was halted untilThe Second-Person Stand was thoroughly considered. In general, Darwall’s account of second-person engagement is sensitive and complete and deserves thorough consideration by psychological investigators.

The emphasis of a second-person engagement on ethical conduct suggests a direct relation to Emmanuel Levinas’s insistence of the “ethical nature” of a person’s encounter with an Other and sets up the ninth study, Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other. This study is a comparison of Levinas’s ethical intersubjectivity and James’s concept of plurality concerning the indefinite nature of living in the present. This study is guided by Megan Craig’s sensitive comparison of Levinas and James inLevinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology . I encountered Craig’s presentation in my early efforts to wrap my mind around Levinas’s thought and how it related to psychology. My impression was, and is, that in the theoretical and philosophical psychological literature, there are frequent cites to Levinas, which seemed to seldom rigorously represent his thought. It seems to be easy, because of the nature of his presentation, to interpret Levinas as what one wants to perceive, perhaps. The same is true of James. There is much gained in the contrast developed by Craig between these two thinkers. One of the surprising revelations of this study is that in spite of the poetic indefiniteness of Levinas’s presentation, he makes surprising specific recommendations for preserving one’s freedom and escaping from tyranny. Another insight is the implacable power of James’s insistence on the first-person immediate experience of moment-to-moment living that is felt rather than guided, compass-like, by an abstract principle no matter how admirable. For James, abstract general principles are changed and added to by each moment of lived experience.

There are several issues that continue to hang. One is an adequate understanding of the phenomenology of experience. Another is that the act of thinking seems incomplete. Third, semiotics as investigated and presented by Norbert Wiley inThe Semiotic Self and as presented by Louise Sundararajan in structuring emotion and in other investigations suggests that a complete account of self, experience, and thinking requires an understanding of semiosis. Any attempt, as these studies are, to grasp and circumscribe the self aporetic is incomplete without an examination of the relation of self and semiosis. This thinking led to the tenth study, Semiotics and Subjectivity, which reveals some important insights of the person’s relation to others and the importance of that relation to thinking that adds to Castañeda’s account of thinking and subjectivity. In this series of studies, perspective points to a pragmatic turn of psychology. My conclusion is that perspective is a necessary conceptual tool to apprehend the full richness of living intersubjectively. Psychology as a discipline, both a science and a practice, is facilitated by an increasing pragmatic orientation and a move to a pragmatic phenomenology that may be, at least initially, modeled by James’sThe Principles of Psychology . There is a maturity and completeness to Peirce’s thinking which affords many suggestions for empirical research and generally adds to psychology as a discipline.

The eleventh study, Assessing the Self-Aporetic: Framing a Pragmatic Psychology, is not a separate study as the previous studies. Rather the effort is to assess the progress toward understanding what has been described as theself aporetic and to trace some connections with current developments in psychological literature. This is to show that a pragmatic orientation has some natural connections to current concerns in psychology. One of these concerns is for the individual experiences of a local indigenous culture referred to asindigenous psychology that are not be apprehended by the general principles of an American-European or a global psychology. The question addressed is how a pragmatic orientation of psychology may contribute to apprehending an indigenous psychology. The principle is that the psychology constructed to understand experience be grounded in the culture a person is embedded. Another area of increasing concern is how psychology relates and contributes tosocial justice and topeace . In a global world, what is social justice becomes a complex issue to be represented in a theoretical third-person perspective. Although justice or injustice is experienced first-personally, the implementation of the practices of justice is impersonal and changeable. How that gap, between personal experience and impersonal adjudication, can be bridged is not straightforward for several reasons that are examined.

These studies beginning with Baker’s account of the constitutional view of first-person perspective in the fourth study rely to an increasing extent on philosophical resources to investigate the self aporetic. Why is this so? The materials to address the kinds of questions of concern are interdisciplinary and not limited to the psychological literature. A second reason is that the issues constituting the self-aporetic are not extensive or well developed in psychological literature. Hermans’ account of adialogical self fits with this pragmatic frame of psychology and especially Peirce’s idea of dialogical thinking and, although well thought out, does not directly contribute to the pragmatic framework. Kirchmair suggests the importance of intersubjectivity to develop moral behavior, but does not proceed further. The most innovative thinking concerning self is philosophical, although there are also some contributions in the communication literature. Peirce observed that psychological science in the last half of the nineteenth century lagged behind the other sciences. The psychological literature is large, complex, and varied and cannot, it seems, be characterized as undeveloped. Perhaps a preoccupation with emulating a natural science created some detours, but its literature and practice are robust. As noted in the fifth study, the vigorous resistance of first-person experience has delayed recognition of phenomenological experience and distanced psychology’s relation from other disciplines that could be considered human sciences such as political science, communication, aesthetics, and morality. What is illustrated is the relevance of James’s thinking to current psychological concerns.

The suggestion, which seems to emerge from these studies, of a pragmatic turn of psychology is a hypothesis which seems to fit current psychological science and practice as it provides a natural bridging between practice, empirical science, theoretical, and philosophical psychology. Such a turn is based on an openness to change and new entities because it, as a pragmatic frame of psychology, is based in a nonreductive naturalism that is open to newintention-dependent
[1] objects that make up, sometimes, swiftly changing realities of intersubjective persons. All hypotheses are fallible and subject to change or replacement.

About the Author

I have practiced Psychology in the Duluth area of Minnesota since 1987. My undergraduate work was done in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, at Augustana College after which I spent some time in military service in the officer corp. I then went to Eastern Washington University which was finished in 1975 with a Master of Science in Experimental and Clinical Psychology and went from there to Utah State University in Logan, Utah, where the Ph.D. with a Behavioral Psychology specialty was completed in 1982. I worked in Brainerd, Minnesota, at the Brainerd Regional Treatment Center and in Northland Mental Health Center in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, until1987 when I took a position in the Behavioral Health Unit of the Duluth Clinic, a large medical center in Duluth area. Practicing in that position for about 9 years, in 1996, I opened a group practice which was initially called the Duluth Psychological Services and by the next year became the Duluth Psychological Clinic, dedicated to using current psychological research and theory with the usual affiliations with area hospitals. Presently the professional practice of psychology is reduced while increasing the time dedicated to writing and research. I have a dedicated interest at this time in the theoretical conceptions and practical manifestations of theself as it affects the practice of psychotherapy, influences how research is done, and generally affects how we pursue the usual business of psychology. More general research interests include hermeneutical perspectives within psychology, phenomenological psychology, ecological perspectives of social constructivism, the practical implementation of fairness in establishing peace, spiritual and religious experience from a psychological perspective, and psychotherapy and change processes. I am increasingly interested in pursuing the ways in which philosophy, presented by people such as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Rorty, Dewey, James, Lynne Rudder Baker, Bernstein, and others, can benefit psychological investigation and science.

In 2013, an investigation of what came to be called theself-aporetic became a serious pursuit with a series of separate inquiries that became the book project in which the suggested nameConstituting Selves: Psychology’s Pragmatic Horizon evolved. During this time, shorter book reviews, journal articles, and as well reviewing some paper submissions to theJournal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology were helpful in keeping a focus on the undertaken self project. A pursuit of the wide variety of literature addressing theself-aporetic led to many surprises; one of the most significant was the intricate connection with pragmatic philosophical perspective beginning with William James and George Herbert Mead and leading to Charles Sanders Peirce. Another surprising realization during this series of inquiries was thatintersubjectivity has not been significantly addressed in the psychological literature with noteworthy exceptions, especially Mead. The reasons for this circumstance include a preoccupation with natural science but perhaps more importantly a liberal framework of European culture and its pursuit of democratic social infrastructures that privileges the individual. I continue to do clinical work with the utilization of hypnosis in therapy and medical problems at the Duluth Psychological Clinic. My time is primarily with the inquiries described and with writing. Philosophically and practically, the professional trajectory has been reasonably varied.

Richard Duus

October 29, 2019

Acknowledgments

No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to them (Carse, 1986, p. 37, 32).

I gratefully acknowledge Dan D’Allaird, Psy.D., and Douglas Heck, Ph.D., for reading every paragraph of this book, each contributing comments in their own way. Especially appreciated is the attentive editing of Dr. D’Allaird which has contributed to clearer presentation. I accept responsibility for those portions of the text presentations that are not as well presented as they could be. Appreciation is expressed, also, to those anonymous reviewer’s comments who contributed to a conceptually clearer text.

References

Carse, J. P. (1986).Finite and infinite games: A vision of life as play and possibility. New York: Free Press. (152 p)

Contents

1 First Study: Circumscribing the Self Aporetic
1

1.1 Charting a Course Through Self Territory
2

1.2 Topographic Mapping of Self Territory
3

1.3 Summary and Perspective
9

References
11

2 Second Study: Varieties of Narrative Self Within a Psychological Frame
13

2.1 A Narrative Self
14

2.2 Dialogical Self
16

2.3 Crises Identity of Post-Modernism
20

2.4 Psychological Narrative Thesis
24

2.5 A Narrative Therapy Alternative
26

2.6 Agency and Selfhood in Psychological Research
27

References
28

3 Third Study: Identities of a Person
31

3.1 Historicity of Identity
33

3.2 Naturalizing Personal Identity
36

3.2.1 The Naturalizing Wave
37

3.2.2 A First Extended Psychological Conversation
38

3.2.3 Intrinsic Psychological Inquiry
39

3.2.4 Anchoring Psychological Inquiry
40

3.3 Appraising Personal Identities
41

References
43

4 Fourth Study: First-Personal Experience and Identity
47

4.1 Persons and Selfhood
48

4.2 Reflection and First-Personal Orientation
50

4.3 Practical Realism and the Constitution View
51

4.4 Perspectival Maintenance
53

4.4.1 Psychological Kinds and an Emergent First-Person
53

4.4.2 Preliminary Look of Second-Person Perspective
55

4.4.3 Scientific Resistance to First-Person Perspective
56

References
56

5 Fifth Study: Quining the First-Personal Perspective
59

5.1 Philosophy of Science and the First-Person
59

5.2 Folk Psychology and Science
62

5.3 More Eliminative Accounts of Self-Concepts
63

5.3.1 Phenomenal Self Model and Self Illusion
63

5.3.2 Heterophenomenology and Third-Person Science
64

5.3.3 Reductionist Naturalism and Cognitive Psychology
65

References
68

6 Sixth Study: Dimensions of Mineness
71

6.1 Some Considerations of Hard Naturalism
73

6.2 Considering Varieties of Liberal Naturalism
74

6.3 A Proposed Taxonomy of Self Concepts
75

6.4 Occupying a First-Person Stance
80

6.5 What a Self Is: A Proposal
82

References
86

7 Seventh Study: Inquiry of Subjectivity
89

7.1 The I and Thinking
94

7.1.1 James’s Account of Subjectivity and Thinking
95

7.1.2 Castañeda and Dimensions of Reflexivity
97

7.1.3 Indexical Referencing and Thinking
100

7.2 Experience and the Doxastic System
103

7.3 Radical Doubt, a Noumenal I, and the WORLD
105

7.4 Self-Consciousness, Experience, and Thinking Hierarchies
106

7.5 Intersubjectivity, Otherness, Alterity
111

7.6 Review and Summary of Subjectivity and Its I
113

References
116

8 Eighth Study: Second-PersonWE
119

8.1 Empathy—Some Considerations
123

8.2 Engaging Second-Personally
125

8.3 Presupposing Felicity Conditions of Second-Personal Authority
126

8.4 Categorical Imperatives and the Second-Personal Stand
127

8.5 Social Behavioral Intersubjectivity
129

8.6 Second-Personal Reasons Considered
131

8.6.1 Contrasting Theoretical and Practical Reasons
133

8.6.2 Structure of Emotions in a Moral Context—Reactive Emotions
134

8.6.3 Summarizing Moral Emotions
136

8.7 Constraints to Second-Personal Engagement
137

8.8 Unconditional Accountability
138

8.8.1 Desires and Practical Reason
139

8.8.2 Freedom of Will
140

8.8.3 Caring and Relating
141

8.9 Group Intentionality and Group Action
143

8.10 Some Summarizing Observations
146

8.11 Concluding Comparisons
149

8.11.1 Relational Self
149

8.11.2 Dialogic Self
150

8.12 Summarizing the ‘WE’ Experience
152

References
155

9 Ninth Study: Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other
159

9.1 Face-to-Face Encounter
160

9.2 Third-Person and the Rational State
161

9.3 Consolidating Summary
163

9.4 Phenomenological and Pragmatic Ethics—Some Connections of Levinas and James
165

9.4.1 Provisional Ethics
166

9.4.2 Sense and Sensibility
167

9.4.3 Subjectivity and Plurality
169

9.4.3.1 The Subjectivity Nexus
170

9.4.3.2 Plurality
173

9.4.3.3 The Ethical Consequence
177

9.5 Summary and Integration
178

9.5.1 Ethical Intersubjectivity
179

9.5.2 Pluralistic Experience
180

9.5.3 Implications for Psychology
181

References
182

10 Tenth Study: Semiotics and Subjectivity
185

10.1 Semiosis
186

10.2 Selves and Semiosis
192

10.2.1 A Brief Recollection of Our Previous Studies
192

10.2.2 Semiotic Selves
194

10.2.2.1 First-Personal Perspective and Semiosis
195

10.2.2.2 Self and Sign
197

10.2.2.3 Inward-Outward Worlds—Self-Control and Reason
198

10.2.2.4 The ‘Ideal’ and Evolving Self-Control
199

10.2.2.5 Me-I-You—Semiotic Structure of Thinking
201

10.2.2.6 Semiotic Structuring of Emotion
212

10.3 Summarizing the Object; Forwarding the Future
214

10.3.1 Briefly Reorienting
215

10.3.2 Pointing to a Future
216

10.3.3 Some Consolidating Observations of Semiosis and Psychological Inquiry
218

References
223

11 Eleventh Study: Assessing the Self-Aporetic—Framing a Pragmatic Psychology
227

11.1 Thinking Structured Experience
228

11.2 Indigenous Psychology and Plurality
229

11.3 Justice in a We-Perspective
231

11.4 Some Concluding Observations
235

References
238

Index
239

Footnotes

1

. Intention-dependent objects refer to culturally invented things, such as credit cards and driver’s licenses, which did not exist earlier in history but has evolved to solve emergent problems such as decentralized rapid transfer of moneys or regulating automobiles and become indispensable in our lives. Facebook might be such an example. See the fourth study.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_1

1. First Study: Circumscribing the Self Aporetic

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

Radical reflexivityReflectionReflexivityEmbodiedRelationshipSelfhoodIntrospection

A coherent understanding of the concept of self accessible to practical and theoretical endeavors across the human sciences to include psychology would seem to be both useful and helpful. The inter-theoretic incoherence of what a self is or how one goes about addressing and arriving at a reasonable understanding of a self or, as it likely will turn out, selves makes it difficult to move that understanding forward in the context created by the extensive conversation of Western as well as the Eastern intellectual traditions of the self. The themes of these extended conversations has been pursued with some vigor by many interesting investigators. The purpose of this study is to identify some central conceptual themes of Western self conversations so as to circumscribe or locate the boundaries of the self-aporetic in order to move forward a psychological formulation that is coherent and useful to applied, empirical, and theoretical psychological, and more generally, human science investigations. This is attempted in what will seem a relatively brief review of principle aspects of this Western conversation.

To do so, in addition to self, there are several interlocking or interdependent terms that have emerged to form the vocabulary of an inquiry into self. To begin self, selfhood , person, and personhood have been used in the various presentations of investigators that are sometimes meant to be equivalent, and at other times merely overlapping. As has been often noted, the subject matter is notoriously difficult to circumscribe and fix so that these terms, even when meant to be equivalent are often not when more sensitively scrutinized. Conversations about self become even more convoluted because to do so addresses something about individual readers or participants of such a conversation. The vocabulary that has emerged to address the discriminations that need recognition to negotiate in such a conversation is itself complex, difficult, and can be confusing. These terms include, not only ‘self’, but consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, identity, interiority and exteriority, intersubjectivity, alterity, reflection , stream of consciousness, the link between morality and self, and embodiment which probably are the most central to identifying the gravity center of what can be usefully referred as the self aporetic.

A good working definition offered by Jerrold Seigel (2005, p. 3) is simply that a self is a person’s sense, sometimes elusive, of being who one is. Extending that minimal description, a self is whatever distinguishes one from another, can seem to pull together events of our life, persists through change, and which can open a way to build the self that one desires to be, to become. Already it becomes clear that what might be meant by self significantly overlaps with identity, an other important and ubiquitously pervading term in every day thinking and conversation. Although this will be the general central definition adhered to throughout this presentation, the concept of self is always ephemeral, subject to a vagueness, corresponding with the difficulty with fully containing it within specific limits and that will seem to be a moving and shifting thing. That is, there is a unique quality of vagueness about the entity or thing that is a self, selfhood , or an identity and their subsequent conceptual frames that separately requires inquiry (Baker, 2007, pp. 121–135; Sorensen, 2013). Accordingly it has been recently observed that “…although many philosophers are perfectly comfortable talking about “the self,” what they have to say about this concept usually turns out to be controversial. For example, that the self is socially constructed (Gergen, 2011) or a product of narrative (Schechtman, 2011), and nothing more; that the self is strictly minimal, on the order of 3 s[econds] in duration (Strawson, …), and nothing more; that the self as such doesn’t exist at all, plus a lot more about a replacement concept referred to as a “self model” (Gallagher, 2013, p. 1; Metzinger, 2011). Given this historically theoretical context, some progress in circumscribing and describing the metaphysical, the conditions by which selfhood exists, and conceptually framing selfhood could be a worthwhile achievement.

1.1 Charting a Course Through Self Territory

We begin with the powerful voice of Charles Taylor (1989) according to whom the modern characteristics of this conversation begin largely with Augustine who turns the discussion to an inward “radical reflexivity” and the adoption of the first person stance in pursuit of a morally satisfactory life. Descartes and then Locke further isolated, Taylor would say alienated, the individual to a self-responsible individualism, an emphasis on particularity and uniqueness, and of individual commitment to perfection (Taylor, pp. 185–186). These three dimensions according to Taylor further evolve to autonomy and freedom negotiated by an exercise of will, secondly by feelings and self-exploration, and thirdly commitment to a pursuit of authenticity and perfection (Taylor, 1989, p. 211; Taylor, 1991). A unifying theme is Taylor’s assertion that “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes” pursued and elaborated throughout his presentation (p. 3). Linking morality and self seems to be frequently seen as necessary in the pursuits to comprehensively understand what is meant and is to be a self.

Radical reflexivity is diagnosed by Taylor as an over intensification and unnatural magnifying of inwardness, and an over-emphasis on the first-person perspective (pp. 127–139). The task he sets himself is to liberate the person from the tendency of our modern culture to stifle the human spirit (pp. 520–521). Taylor’s study of what he refers to as the modern self is multi-faceted and rich with insight. He notes that “We are not selves in the way that we are organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we have hearts and livers” (p. 34). One’s selfhood occurs only in a language community and one can be a self only among others who are selves. He does not, however, distinguish between self and identity, and the portrayal of agency is limited to an exercise of will. One of the results of Taylor’s study, which is intended and nicely accomplished, is to show how individual’s thought and behavior change corresponding to the social environment they find themselves. The self has been constrained to be in the person by the circumstances of the modern era, and not only need it not be, it should not be. This goal, it might be noted, is similar, although not the same, to social psychologist Kenneth Gergen who seems to follow a similar soteriological goal in Relational Being (Gergen, 2009).

1.2 Topographic Mapping of Self Territory

“But what is the self whose understanding seems to promise so much?” (Seigel, 2005, p. 3). Jerrold Seigel presents a much different study to contrast Taylor that is an investigation of the concepts of self in Western Europe from the seventeenth century, but with a brief description of early Greek thought, to the present. Seigel uses three core dimensions of corporeality, relationality, and reflectivity in recognizing a multidimensional character of self; as the lens in examining the variety of self concepts that emerge and identifying the diverse themes that adhere to these concepts. Corporeality or embodiment refers to creatures that have desires, needs, temperaments with inclinations and who encounter the limits of a physical environment. The dimension of relationality places one in a specific culture and social environment with multiple social relationships. The reflectivity dimension is somewhat more involved and concerns a recurring thinking of past experience. That is, repeatedly reflecting on experience forms and gives order to our attitudes, beliefs, and the reasons one uses to choose their actions. In Seigel’s apt phrase, reflection is the means by which “…we are what our attention to ourselves makes us be” (p. 6). Seigel observes that it is not always clear whether a particular thinker accords with a single dimension or a multidimensional concept of selfhood as theories that are apparently single dimensional sometimes have folded into a privileged dimension some manner of the other dimensions of selfhood.

He is making less an attempt to describe what a self is, than to explore the extensive and nearly continuous Western conversation about it. Various concepts and images of self are examined on how they fold into the three dimensions described (p. 651). His is a task of mapping the topographical terrain of selfhood

, a term he prefers to being or having a self, and while he did not begin intending to describe what a self is, he admits he is unable to remain as professionally neutral as originally intended. Seigel’s admission, perhaps, reflects one difficulty in talking about self and selfhood which is that there is always a sense in which one is talking or reading about ourselves, about beliefs of who we are, our capabilities, and dispositions to future actions that inevitably pull at and influence such a conversation (Minsky, 1986, p. 39).

Beginning briefly with the Greeks it is noted that reflection is early emphasized by the Stoics and also by Aristotle who views intellect as the capacity to contemplate, that is, reflect on the forms that make material objects what they are and as separate from the material body. Aristotle’s position already reflects the Stoic roots of rationality and reflection which become the consistent and foundational thread that runs through the later Western conversation of self. One of the results of introducing rationality and reason into the world of objects, an accomplishment in Western thought credited to the Greeks, is to make reflection not only possible but even probable. One of the many threads of influence attributed to Descartes was that he made knowledge depend on the knower rather than the world (Seigel, p. 71). Seigel notes that in consideration of the social, political, and personal convictions, it is a position Descartes backed into rather than deliberately produced. It also deepens the already established tradition of interiority, of turning inward to engage self-examination, and of individuality, its cousin, to become ingredients in the mix that develops into selfhood and part of the conversation of self.

According to Seigel, it is with John Locke, Descartes’s contemporary, that the modern sense of self begins to coalesce. Locke is credited as the first theorist of the self by Ian Hacking, and asserts that Locke is the first to make the individual responsible for who they are and become (Hacking, 1995, pp. 146–147; Seigel, p. 108). Locke addresses several aspects or dimensions of self of which Seigel describes three: We are selves to others who have some knowledge of us, we are selves in an incomplete awareness of the present, and we are selves we imagine and intend to complete. These are relatively congruent with Seigel’s three dimensions of embodiment of physical presence, relationship , and reflectivity that he asserts characterizes the multidimensional selfhood explored and developed by Western thought. The idea of reflexivity as an automatic and spontaneous process emerges (Seigel credits Goethe, p. 353) to be distinguished from reflectivity that is an attention-directed process of thinking.

Reflection is an important process, indeed, the foundational process of a self and selfhood , and it might be profitable to spend some time exploring it. Smith (2007) notes that “It is indeed commonplace to assume that the capacity for self-reflection , the capacity to turn conscious awareness into an awareness of itself as an activity, is central to what defines a person as person” (p. 63). It could be described as the pathway to interiority that has been developing in Christian experience and theology, and which, as noted by Taylor, was initiated and shaped by Augustine at about 350 CE. Seigel attributes Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions to furthering Europe’s seeming obsession with an introspective effort to know oneself. Rousseau deliberately took up the title to contrast against Augustine’s autobiography of the same name, and in which he attempted an unexpurgated complete and honest self revelation of all aspects of his life. For Rousseau, society with its obligations, constraints and relationships antagonized and even prevented the development of a true and authentic self partly by interfering with the introspective drive to perfection. According to Seigel, the effect Rousseau had was to strengthen and perhaps permanently fix self-exploration and striving for self-perfection as a characteristic of Western selfhood . The reflection process requires a self-distancing and splitting; a self-splitting that does not simply repeat an experience, but transforms it, and is continuous. Self-splitting refers to the act of viewing oneself from an imagined distance. The reflection process is further grounded in a subjective center, the subjectivity of a person or self (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, pp. 63–64). Developing the vocabulary and further investigating what subjectivity is and how that subjectivity functions to either constitute or support selfhood, or both, has a slower history and continues presently.

Seigel notices that there is a discrimination to be made between reflection as active and passive processes. Etymologically, reflection is related to reflex such as motor actions and involved in habit formations that brings to focus its automatic nature. Reflection as used here, also, refers to a mirror reflecting an image, also automatic (Seigel, pp. 12–13). Additionally and importantly, reflection is a mental action that is intended and deliberately directed attention to an object, an experience, or problem in an act of thinking on a problem. To use James’s well chosen words “This stage of reflective condition is, more or less explicitly, our habitual adult state of mind” (1890, p. 263). As considered here, reflection is not automatic, but is actively directed with attention to problems confronted in daily living. Reflexivity , on the other hand, is an automatic preconscious process that senses and presents mental and real objects to the person engaged in an environment. These objects are then available to the directed reflective cognitive processes that constitute thinking. Reflection is active, and reflexivity as automatic is considered passive. Although reflectivity is actively directed and not thought to be automatic there is a sense in which thinking as an active cognitive process is always functioning in healthy cognitive processing and cannot easily be discontinued without training or special procedures.[1]

With a general outline of reflection and reflexivity, we continue with the survey of Seigel’s map of the Western self. Locke attributed to memory the function of grounding the relational self as did earlier French writers and as did Condillac and Diderot later, but which was not entirely satisfactory and provided a target for his critics. Embodiment , the importance of the physical body, and relations with others were themes initiated by Locke and followed up by later investigators. Concerns for morality seem a common impetus to investigations of selfhood

. Locke began distinguishing first-person and third-person positions and described direct second person interactions. Locke’s thinking included addressing relational and autonomous characteristics to a person that opened more daily living opportunities to the common people that were formerly attributed only to aristocracy. Important in these developments was Adam Smith who perceived that traditional social structures in England and France severely limited the life opportunities of common people who were not aristocracy, and resulted in the idea of a commerce market place as possibly enlarging the opportunities afforded to a person, providing opportunities to move up the ladder as well the opportunity to pursue individual moral responsibility. The everydayness of living took on a new importance, assisted by the new literary trend of the popular novel.

The themes of autonomy and individuality further strengthen the already strong theme of one’s responsibility for self-development was presented by Kant, who also recognizes the importance of index language terms such as “I” and the lurking notion of an agent, the center of action. It is the recognition of the “I” indexical which, perhaps, opens the door to investigating the subject and subjectivity, and suggests the importance of language and linguistic considerations to inquiries of selfhood . Attached to language considerations are considerations of the historicity of self and its temporality. That is, a self changes in time as the reflectivity process makes clear. Two observations of Kant and quoted by Seigel are of help. The first,

Unity this self afforded came from its awareness of itself as the site and the agent of all experience, a consciousness given form by the “I think” that explicitly or implicitly accompanies every perception. Without the “unity of apperception” (that is, of self-perception) that underlies all human encounters with the world there could be no experience, since the individual mind could not know its contents as its own. Because the very possibility of experience depends on the existence of such an identifiable ego, Hume was wrong to argue that we have no specific awareness of the self apart from the feelings and thoughts that we find in our minds (p. 305).

Here Kant acknowledges subjectivity, that is, “…awareness of itself…” and the entity behind the index “I” as the originator of action and the importance of this center, identified as ego by Seigel, for the very possibility of receiving experience. Kant’s second observation as quoted makes an equally important point,

We do not perceive this self through “inner sense” in the way we perceive sensory data that have passed into the mind (on this level Hume’s demotion of the self in Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature was right); in fact we do not and cannot perceive or “intuit” it at all. We know it only as an object of thought, the presupposition of all our experience, not as a component or manifestation of the world of things (p. 305).

In this observation, Kant was clear that there is no intuition or inner sense data of a self and we only arrive at knowledge of ourself as we would any other thought or object of thought. These two observations have emerged in modern thinking about selfhood that have more or less withstood various historical examinations and re-examinations almost unchanged.

Continuing the overview of Seigel’s map of the Western European explorations of self, German thought builds on the idea of the purposiveness of nature, argued by Kant, and the idea that one’s task is to find in the world a place that exactly fits one’s desires and talents. The German Idealists build on these ideas and evolve the perspective that a self functions to understand and act to build a stronger place for the I, or the ego, as a center for acting in the world. This tradition culminates with Hegel’s assertion that the self is the conceptual foundation for understanding the world, and that “grasping the true nature of the self” is what allows a true understanding of the world (Seigel, p. 391). These contributions of German thought to our ideas and practices of self were significant and lasting, but need not mire this overview in the complex arguments of their thought as they are generally irrelevant, or perhaps only peripherally relevant, to the psychological concerns of this study.

It is significant that there are extended attempts to eliminate reflection as a dimension or characteristic of self, one of those by Heidegger and earlier efforts by Bergson and Nietszche. The reason is that self-reflection once functioning as part of selfhood is seen as reducing the person to an object, distance is created between the community and the world, and the person enters a condition of alienation. This alienation is seen by Heidegger as the root disease of the Western world. The true self is then seen as authenticity or authentic Dasein whose dimension is temporality rather than self-reflection (pp. 586–587; p. 594–596). Reflection is to be overcome by the self, or Dasein in Heidegger’s terminology, and to achieve the authenticity that is seen as one with the community, two sides of one coin. Heidegger’s approach to authenticity has not endured for a variety of reasons, and one may be that it makes selfhood single dimensional similar to Nietszche’s and Bergson’s efforts and, secondly, it is overly dependent on domination and overcoming. This is not to say that the influence of these participants in the ongoing conversation concerning self and selfhood can be overestimated. The attempt to replace reflectivity has generally not held in today’s continuing conversation, but the suggested replacement, temporality or duration, has been recognized and included as an important property of selfhood.

Influential, but less famous than some of his contemporaries, was Janet’s ideas of self, that a person became aware of herself in their relation with others, but that this self-awareness centered and was grounded in the physical body. Reflectivity for Janet acted to give meaning to one’s relations with others. Janet is among the first to assert that a person could have several selves; an idea derived from clinical work with people, mostly women, diagnosed as hysterical, in the terminology of that day, and which could fit the diagnosis of a diffuse personality disorder in today’s terminology.[2] He credited ideas to have sufficient force to exercise an organizing influence on psychic life that is always incomplete and striving to completion, an idea that surfaces later in William James’s Principles of Psychology. In Seigel’s observation:

Contemporary psychology thus takes from us the illusion of a self that is “closed-in, impenetrable, and absolutely autonomous” showing our consciousness to be neither so curtained off from others nor so purely individual as we may imagine (p. 513).

That is, the idea that a deep or true self is necessary, an idea that continues with some contemporary currency, to provide for the unity and psychological health of a person who lives in a challenging changing world which is stable and relatively unchanging. A self, according to Janet, is constituted by an idea that organizes the events of everyday living that include genetics, our temperament, the accumulated habits that are the materials used in the work to build one’s life, and in which a person’s effort to achieve synthesis and perfection results in several selves.

To complete a view of Seigel’s conceptual map of the Idea of the Self, one conceptual region has yet to be explored. The region is what has been identified as the postmodern or post-structural projects which are represented, as selected by Seigel, by Foucault and Derrida. The concerns for well being and selfhood turn to the sociocultural context individuals find themselves that is dominated by the concern of how one subjects, how one submits, to authority and power, to use Foucault’s word play with the double meaning of the idea of subjectivity. The subjective inner self is not a source of freedom as much as it is a victim of domination by social sources of authority in which the dominant theme of the subjective self is the manner chosen to subject itself to socially pervasive authority. It is this result that is referred to as the dissolution of the self that is enabled by the enforced individualism resulting in the isolation required by modern living. The self then must transcend the subjective reflectivity in order to recapture or reassert itself. According to Foucault, with some similarity to Heidegger, the self is a combination of the way one chooses to subject to authority and one’s inner subjectivity that must overcome self-reflection to enter the relational aspects of sociocultural existence. Foucault’s thought is complex with a manifold of discriminations and terminology not immediately relevant to our current project, and in some ways it is a reassertion of Rousseau’s original view regarding social relations as antagonistic to selfhood .

In contrast to Foucault, Derrida redirects attention to the role of language and asserts that a principle condition of a self is a semiotic process of continuous iteration of signifier and signified that is never quite complete, which implies that the self can never be separated from language and can never quite achieve coherence. That is, selfhood can only be achieved in relationships with others, which, in turn, can only be accomplished through language. In this postmodern world, language structures result in a decontextualizing of a self that is problematic since this self is fully reliant on language to establish the relationships necessary to complete itself. It is then cut off from the possibility of achieving any satisfying relationships of which it is in need. Similar to Foucault, the person for Derrida is always striving to transcend the limiting conditions constraining or preventing it from achieving completion or authenticity. For Foucault, the limiting condition is social authority structures; for Derrida the limiting condition is postmodern language structures that dissolve the self and one’s identity. This postmodern region in Seigel’s mapping of the Western European conversation of the self consist of two sustained efforts to replace self-reflection, but seems no more successful than other such efforts, for example Heidegger’s “authentic Dasein.” Seigel observes that, “What can be said in conclusion here is that Foucault and Derrida together represent two versions of one possible outcome of the long Western meditation on the self” (p. 649).

1.3 Summary and Perspective

We have used Taylor’s and Seigel’s very different investigations of the Western European developing views of selfhood , beginning with classic Greek views to the present, to achieve a sense of the complex history surrounding the European experience of self and its conceptual frame. The goal was, and is, to achieve an overall view of the concepts of selfhood , and identify the vocabulary that has developed and is still developing that will help us achieve a sense of what selfhood is and how it continues to change. It is evident that whatever selfhood is, it is not static. Some sense of the complex history of the many different attempts, deliberate and accidental, to establish what a self is and what functions it performs is required to participate in the conversation and the investigation of which it is a part. Although the condensation of this study is too brief in some ways, that goal is largely achieved. Before moving on, it is interesting to note that there are parallels to William James’s view of the self literature in the discussion of pure self or pure ego with Seigel’s (James, 1890, pp. 332–379). Even then James observed that the literature on the self was large (p. 350).

How does this assist the endeavor to wrap our understanding around what a self is, the emerging concepts of selfhood , and to understand the problems that make it difficult to grasp its promise as well as its the problems? More specifically, how does an understanding of the Western European efforts to identify self phenomena and to formulate a conceptual framework assist in understanding of what can be referred to as the practices of the self? That is, the psychological concern is to reach some coherence in the conceptual framework of what a self is and what it does that is essential to living. A coherent concept of selfhood and its related phenomena is coupled to the practices of the self. What is gained in psychological knowledge and practices with a clearer and coherent understanding of what a self is and what functions it performs? Does a working understanding of the many different efforts to what a self is and does, described by Seigel, further the psychological task of achieving coherence in how to think about a self, how to use it in various investigations, and to direct its applications with more perspicacity?

While the conceptual understanding of self and selfhood is moving forward, it is clear that it will not be in the straight forward way that might initially have been hoped. What might be helpful is the inclusion of several other areas of experience and thought concerning selfhood that are likely to contribute significantly to a veridical and coherent concept of a person that may ground psychological knowledge generally and aid the directing of psychological inquiries and applications. One such area is the long and continuous conversation of Buddhist and Vedantic investigations of self of India. The naturalistic framework of philosophical conversations concerning ‘self’ was relatively well defined in Vedantic and Buddhist literatures, and for that reason may be sufficiently compatible to be directly compared to Western discussions. A second area to be investigated is a narrative approach, the person as a story telling being, inspired in part by Mikhail Bakhtin, that promises new perspectives of how a self develops, and examine the three dimensions of self: reflectivity, embodiment , and relationships Seigel proposes as well as the addition of other dimension, for example, temporality which Seigel considered but rejected (Seigel, p. 34). A third conceptual area that can play significantly in the developing understanding of self is what Sean Gallagher and Dan Zahavi refer to as the later Husserlian phenomenological tradition which potentially may be the principal player or contributor to a coherent understanding of self. That is, the phenomenological tradition directly addresses first-person experience while such philosophers as Lynne Rudder Baker show how first-person experience can remain in a materialistic context that is compatible with a scientific metaphysics. A fourth area needing examination is Emmanuel Levinas’s investigations of a self as encountered by another that he says is the beginning of ethical responsibility which may fit with a thorough and full consideration of all the probable aspects or dimensions of selfhood , and in particular addressing the moral and ethical issues that are always closely associated with selfhood. Note that, to add to the previously identified areas that impact the thinking of selfhood, the vocabulary and the conceptual region concerning self continues to grow. Importantly, semiotics that is credited to Saussure on the European side and to Charles Sanders Peirce on the American side is an expansive concept of the symbol that characterizes language, characterizes natural processes, and is asserted to be the core process of the self (Colapietro, 1989; Hoopes, 1991; Pickering, 1999; Wiley, 1994).

I want to shift the task now to an examination of self and personhood in the psychological literature more specific to the concerns of my inquiry. Such a shift will perhaps change and even quicken the pace of these investigations. This is not to ignore or deny that investigations of self are usually multidisciplinary especially when concerning neuroscientific contributions. Psychological interest in the self and related issues has been vigorous as reflected in the rapid growth in self related publications in the psychological and neuroscientific literature. This next study is concerned with man-as-a story-telling-being that looks at the developments of narrative as a self shaping process to include the proposal that narrative constitutes selfhood . In that discussion, identity gradually emerges as a related concern that warrants separate inquiry regarding its relation to personhood, and perhaps the need to investigate it separately. Ricoeur (1992) has demonstrated the inextricability of self and identity and has expended considerable energy in teasing apart the separate strands of identity and a subjective self. Indeed, what James described as the empirical “me-self” fits the description of the multiple identities which characterize a person’s varied involvements and activities. As might already be evident from the above overview of the Western conversation of the self and selfhood by means of the intellectual histories of Taylor and Seigel is the emergence of the large, varied, and growing vocabulary relating to self. It will prove necessary to attend to this varied vocabulary, and how it relates to the various inquiries of selfhood . These next study concerns the results of several psychological inquiries that introduce their own vocabulary of current psychological literature.

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Footnotes

1

It appears that recursion is a continual normal cognitive process that is iterative. To say this differently, recursion and its iteration subtly changes an experience with each reflective swing of thought to approach a greater accuracy in ‘reflecting’ an experience in a presently changing context, and, in the best case scenario, with increasing veridicality. As stated recently by Gallagher and Zahavi “Reflection does not merely copy or repeat the original experience; rather, it transforms it”(2008, p. 63; also Zahavi, 2004, pp. 146–150 Zahavi, 1999, pp. 186–189;). Any of us can impede, slow down, or interrupt reflective processes by attending to other external environmental events and tasks. That is, we can refuse, at least temporarily, or resist our first-personal experience by intellectualizing, attempting to live our lives only in third-person perspective, or to intensely engage an environmental external activity such as work-a-holism, or alcohol and drug addiction. In traumatic environmental circumstances, the recursive thought pattern can be distorted and clinically problematic, and referred to in various clinical terminology as regression (Doyle, 2003), flashbacks, intrusive experiences (van der Kolk, McFarlane, & Weisaeth, 1996), and other related terminology consistent with the presenting symptom patterns. These propositions regarding reflectivity and reflexivity are congruent with a proposed semiotic process suggested by Charles Sanders Peirce to be explored later (Hoopes, 1991; Sundararajan, Kim, Reynolds, & and Brewin, 2010).

2

It has been argued, especially by feminist oriented thinkers, that hysteria as diagnosed in time of Janet was a by-product of the culture of powerlessness of women driven by an unbalanced patriarchal society of Western culture which is in evidence by the lack of similar instances in these current modern times. A history of psychosomatic illness is in Shorter (1992) which shows how psychosomatic type disorders have changed. Diffuse Identity Disorder continues to be a complex pathological condition supported by a large clinical literature that emerges out of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_2

2. Second Study: Varieties of Narrative Self Within a Psychological Frame

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

NarrativeDialogicalI-positionsAlter-IGeneralized otherPsychological narrativeSelfIdentityI-selfMe-self

As has been acknowledged, in the words of P. M. S. Hacker, “the philosophical notion of self is incoherent” (Hacker, 2007, p. 261). Hacker’s acknowledgment equally applies to psychology, and human sciences generally. The attention is now on how self is being investigated in the current psychological literature. In general, the investigations of the themes of self in mainstream psychological literature appear to be more strategic in self-as-object is rather than directly confronting the phenomenal characteristics of what a self is, what subjectivity is, how agency is actuated, and what a self does to promote a person’s being. This may reflect a trend to investigate the characteristics of the empirical me-self rather than of agency and the subjective I-self because investigating ‘me-self’ as an object fits more easily into a methodologically defined cognitive science (Neisser, 1988; Neisser, 1993; Neisser & Fivush, 1994). There seems less investigatory activity of agency and subjectivity that might help define it in the psychological literature. An exception to this generalization is the early psychological conversations concerning Will which then served in the context of agency (Smith, 2007, pp. 60–65). This is, likely, not an accident as there are complexities concerning agency that includes a quality of indefiniteness that requires investigation in itself and is to be further discussed (Gallagher, 2012, pp. 28–29). The methodology by which inquiry of the subjective remains in question; although there are suggestions of appropriate ways to investigate subjectivity and other manifested phenomenological events (Barrell, 1990; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, pp. 13–43; Giorgi, 2009; Moustakas, 1994).

The psychological study of self themes in this chapter is by way of story telling, narrativity, dialogic selves, postmodern selves, and socially constructed selves. All these are closely related to identity leading to an extended question of whether the simpler concept of identity can do the work that self and selfhood are credited with doing. The principle enjoined is to conduct an inquiry flexibly so that if there are other concepts, terms, or vocabulary encountered that theoretically capture understanding the thing that is a self with processes that contribute to constituting a person more accurately, simply, and elegantly, that those theoretical affordances be recognized, put to use, and perhaps replace or add to the self grammar.

It is not necessary to vouchsafe the incoherence of the various conceptions of the term self in philosophy and psychology as well as in other human sciences. Simply put, to restate the above description, a self is the feeling of what it is to be oneself. This minimal self expanded in an extended form is: whatever distinguishes one from another, can seem to pull together events of our life, persists through change, and which can open a way to build the self that one desires to be or to become. Other overlapping terms that are sometimes managed interchangeably and at other times in different theoretical contexts with more finely nuanced discriminations with self are selfhood, person, personhood, ego, actor, participant, subject, subjectivity, and identity. Subject and subjectivity are those things or processes in which experience is centrally received and coordinated while the agent side of a subject is conceived as intended actions initiated toward the environment.

2.1 A Narrative Self

McAdams (1995; 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006) from the perspective of a personality psychologist proposes three different non-overlapping ways to view a person which he refers as a tripartite theory of personality. The first level view includes general dispositional traits that can be measured on dimensions such as extraversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness that are identified in the observations of social life. A second level is of more personal and individuated facts about the specific adaptations to environmental demands and are about oneself as vocation, achievements in relation to one’s aspirations, education, marriage, satisfaction, and other facts about us that are contextualized in time, social situation, and place. A third personality level is one’s identity that he proposes can only be developed narratively by the stories we tell ourselves and others. Identity addresses the integration and unity of a person and is achieved in a story fashioned to account for the experiences at level two that reveal the direction to achieving that kind of person intended. According to McAdams, identity is the quality of being integrated and unified to oneself and that is recognized by others. The varied and extensive project that has emerged around this core concept has posited self-reflective autobiographical reasoning to construct causal connections between biographical events and one’s self to formulate multiple life stories for different social roles, but always seeking to establish coherence (Pals, 2006, pp. 176, 182–185). Pals is representative of the supporting literature developing around McAdams tripartite theory that is providing the empirical content needed to demonstrate its viability.

All discussions of self and identity in psychological settings seem to, sooner or later, reflect William James’s thinking. McAdams asserts that James’s distinction between the “I-self” as subject or ego and a “Me-self” as the empirical identity are inconsistent for the idea of a narrative self as formulated in a three level personality structure. He states that the “I” is seen as a redundant and unnecessary homuncular entity, and need not be seriously addressed. He argues that whatever the “I” process of selfing is, it is separate from the narrative story telling process and does not seem to be compatible as the emphasis on the “I” process over the “Me” content obstructs the necessary story telling processes (1995, pp. 389–390). McAdams concludes that the James’s proposal is incompatible with the story telling process path to forming an identity and achieving integration.

A challenge, styled as postmodernist, to McAdams’ narrative and story telling formulations of identity is laid out by Gergen (1991) who argues that the person’s story has been converted to, or even enveloped by, a textualization of the person. The postmodern person’s life story, he argues, becomes part of an indeterminate text that is never completed, is continuously changing, resulting in an unstable identity so that “The center fails to hold…” McAdams says using Gergen’s phrase. The reality of a self is challenged by continuous radical reflexive inquiry, similar to Taylor’s thesis of ‘radical reflectivity’, which ironically probes for new identity. McAdams (2001), following Gergen, argues that the result of this process is that the “I” agential core can no longer coherently hold one’s experience together and the objective “Me” of the empirical self cannot remain intact because of the indeterminate nature of a text. Only personal narrative can achieve the meaningful integration required to maintain coherence. Because James’s “I”/“Me” formulation is both an incompetent story telling self, and because of the ready exposure and vulnerability to multiple promiscuous identities, the conclusion follows that William James’s formulation of an objective empirical self, “Me”, and an agential “I” which discovers one’s identity (1890, pp. 351–352) is no longer a useful formulation of self as it is or can be, and is replaced by a more effective narrative story telling process that maintains the coherence and unity of a person. McAdams, in summary, asserts that Gergen underestimates the integrative power of narrative storytelling to achieve coherence and integration of a person (p. 116).

There are some critical concerns of their theoretical formulation that should be acknowledged. One observation is the significant weight given to Erikson’s (1950) formulation of identity that could be broadened, at least in the presentations cited, to include the developments in attachment theory (one example would be Schore, 1994). Supporting work of McAdams’s personality and narrative formulation is significant, so perhaps this concern has been addressed of which the writer is not aware. The idea of causation between a story telling process and identity is examined by Pals (176–181). As described by her, causality is thinned to a single association so that the concept of causation is beyond real usefulness. This criticism is directed to the idea of creating a causal connection. One does not create, it would seem, causal connections as much as test them to, among other purposes, determine what might have actual causal properties. Also to be considered is that what seem to be left out is that one’s identity can be a reasoned choice. A person’s identity is often intentionally chosen and subsequently developed (Ganeri, 2012a, b).

Hacker (2007) argues for a broad conception of causation and its relation to agency, but the causation concept described by Pals, for example, does not seem satisfying or seem to fit what is usually intended by the idea of causation. A final concern is the limited role of ‘agency’ in creating the various stories of one’s life and in a unifying and integrating life story. Agency is attributed to any purposeful act of a person, and the story teller, an agent, of a story would seem essential to constructing a story; still constructing that story or stories do not exhaust the potential of agency. It seems likely that the agent which tells a story that is integrating of a person’s life or of portions of a person’s life to both oneself and to others, is also an agent that directs behavior in addition to telling the story about that behavior. The agent is itself a self, and one of many selves at least in the context of life stories in the conceptual frame described by McAdams and his colleagues.

2.2 Dialogical Self

An other narrative construction of selfhood adhering in part to the tradition of Mikhail Bakhtin (1973, 1994) of a multi-voiced presentation to one self and to others is the work of H. J. M. Hermans of the University of Nijmegan of the Netherlands. Departing from the narrative self theory of McAdams and others, Hermans and his colleagues question a self that is organized in a single core or center and attributed it to a Cartesian residual of the concept of a self (Hermans, Kempen, & Van Loon, 1992). They proposed, countering narrative self theory, a dialogical theory of a self with multiple “I” positions, each with a respective voice and a corresponding empirical self, a “Me”. “The empirical self,” as stated by James, “is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me.” “In its widest possible sense …a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children…”(James, 1890, p. 279). Continuing a few pages later James asserts that “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in the mind. To wound any of these images is to wound him. But as individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups” (pp. 281–282). This outline sketched by James is congruent to Hermans and colleagues more detailed account of an internalized intersubjectivity, of intrasubjectivity. This formulation overcomes the difficulty McAdams attributed to James’s concept of a Me-self and I-self for narrative identity theory noted above, and reemphasizes on the centrality of the physical body in which mental processes and, in particular, narrative processes take place. The fact of embodiment is central to mental processing and to narrative processes.

Dialogical self specifically refers to the intradialogues that make up a “minisociety” that is not so dissimilar from the interdialogues of a heterogeneous larger society the person is embedded in respect to dynamics of dominance and power relations (Hermans & Salgado, 2010). Each voiced I-position exchanges information regarding their respective Me’s in their dialogic exchanges, and internal dialogues are less organized, more impulsive than external dialogues. The “others” of engaged external dialogues are incorporated to internal dialogues so that “alien otherness” is experienced internally as well as externally. The body is seen as in the self as are spatial structures and is contrasted as an antidotal correction to the internal core self of Cartesian philosophy (Hermans, 2003; Hermans & Salgado, 2010 pp. 192–193). Hermans says, citing Bakhtin, that not only is otherness as an alter ego (alter-I) that is alien to and counters one’s own ego (I) incorporated into internal dialogue, but also a “collective voice” that is a ‘generalized and normative other’ is the engaged audience of any particular internal dialogue with a generalized other of society. A dialogue takes place in this triadic structure that includes an I-position that is the I that is addressing, the I-position of an alter-I that is listening, and the I-position of the collective audience of the community one is embedded (Hermans 2003, pp. 103–105; Hermans & Salgado, 2010 p. 190–191). One way dysfunction can occur in this minisociety style system when stress or trauma create a too strong desire to return to static older I-positions that are identified with safety and security so that the flexible dialogue addressing current environmental problems is impaired (Hermans, 2003, pp. 105–108; Hermans & Salgado, 2010, pp. 194–195). These proposals are consistent with Schore’s (1994) description of the development of affect regulation through attachment-rapprochement processes necessary for satisfactory neurological development that enables emotional control (Hermans, 2003 pp. 106–107; Schore, 1994 pp. 494–497).

It is clear that dialogical self theory is well developed with a conceptual depth, coherence, and attractiveness with a growing number of adherents in a variety of disciplines with significant empirical content (Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 1995; Hermans & Dimaggio, 2004). Hermans and Salgado (2010) see the advantage that the dialogical self perspective can bring together the scientist and practitioner; a split that is especially visible in psychotherapy even with the variety of different orientations of psychotherapy. The dialogical perspective is also credited with an ability to psychologically accommodate multicultural social environments resulting from globalization because of the natural openness of a dialogical stance which accommodates the current social reality that no one any longer can live within a single culture environment, or be confined to one. These different cultural situations become positions within a person, within a selfhood, and can facilitate the development of understanding leading to tolerance (Hermans & Kempen, 1998). Although some more radical social construction theories reject a substantial self internal to or associated with internal subjectivity, they do not see dialogical self theory as requiring that stance. Instead, aspects of dialogic interaction are “owned” by a self (Salgado & Hermans, 2005).

Subjectivity, then, becomes a relational and dialogical production of the tripartite dialogue of one’s self or I, an internalized Other or alter-I , and a generalized normative collective other. The “I” is the agent that establishes a relationship with an Other person in the world which, once encountered, becomes an internalized alter ego of the Other, an alter-I, which is mediated by the collective other or “potential audiences” that produce “different subjectivities.” It is acknowledged, by Hermans and colleagues, that a temporal dimension characterizes the narrativity process making it a single dimension activity. But further, a creative subjectivity process creates space for a second dimension, and a third dimension incorporates the additional interaction with society’s generalized other to structure at least a tripartite series of dialogues that are structured temporally. The result, it is argued, creates a more certain center of unity which Salgado and Hermans contend is equivalent to identity and which serves to simplify some of the present complexities of identity (Salgado & Hermans, 2005 p. 6, 10). The multiplicity of selves and unity are the simultaneous products of dialogical processes in which self-identity or unity derives from the somewhat complex subjective process

.

Dialogical self theory is contrasted to social construction self theories as an alternative that accesses an embodiment and centeredness that seems untenable in social constructive programs. The dialogic self theory as presented by Hermans and colleagues puts significant philosophical weight on countering of Cartesian subjective-objective dualism and the cognitive representational constructs credited as an expression of this dualism, and derives theoretical support importantly from Bakhtin (1973, 1994) as well as, already noted, from James. The possible weakness of dialogical self theory, acknowledged by Hermans and Salgado, is its breadth so that it becomes trivially acknowledged rather than providing the kinds of constraints necessary for good investigatory questions and promoting a coherent grasp of the problem of self (Hermans & Salgado, 2010 p. 201).

These observations taken into consideration, the distinctions between identity, unity, subjectivity and self overlap or are blurred, a difficulty, if in fact a difficulty, shared with narrative self theory especially in respect to self and identity. A reliance on the Me-self formulation of James makes the “selves” addressed by Hermans and colleagues fit those conditions usually placed in the concept of identity . Although not fluidly exchangeable there is enough fluidity between self and identity that obfuscates a clear discrimination although their discussion of unity as self-identity and the creative subjectivity processes goes far to clarify this complex conception of subjectivity (Salgado & Hermans, 2005 pp. 6, 10–11). Some question concerning the relation of self and subjectivity remains, but probably not seriously difficult as a quality of vagueness is the nature of the relation between them

. My anticipated projection, consistent with the current presentation, would be that while subjectivity refers specifically to internal dialogic processes, selves relate to the interdialogues in an external social environment that intradialogues reflect.

Arguing against the no-self position that is claimed by radical social constructionists and that is otherwise attributed to some social constructionist stands is important for the dialogical position. A person subjectively senses and centers on each I-position that can be thought of as the subjective I side of experience. This centering is the unity of selfhood amid the multiplicity of the “I’s” mutual dependence on the Other and the presence of the Collective Other (p. 10). That is to say that unity, which is identity, and multiple selves are simultaneous processes of the dialogic process. Such a position sets up two senses of identity , however, with a corresponding tension between them in that the internally achieved subjective identity in form of dynamic unity is in contrast to an identity exposed to the social environment. A plausible connection between these two senses of identity is characterized by vagueness and uncertainty that is a property of living in a social environment of one’s community

.

What is described as “subjectivity” is similar to James’s insistence that “…this central part of the Self is felt” while the successive centering of each I-position is similar to the sense of warmth to one’s own thought, and that ‘that thought is the thinker’ (James, 1890, pp. 286, 322–324, 378–379; 1912, pp. 54–56). The study of human beings is the study of purposeful behavior in the context of a social environment that results in an embodied pursuit of various life projects, which dialogical self theory seems to not address perhaps because of the preoccupation with unifying the multiplicity of dynamic narrative processes of identity. Burkitt suggests that Hermans follows James in depicting multiple I-positions of a self and is a too limiting a dialogical process

. He proposes that a closer reading of Bakhtin suggests a more open self, a microdialogue that accommodates the internalized Other and is an alter ego, that is, an other self, with the result that any one person, more accurately, has many ‘other selves’, and is what is intended by the term alterity (Burkitt, 2013, p. 277). In either case, the multiple I-positions of Hermans or the microdialogues of Burkitt are descriptions of thinking as internalized self talk, which is quite directly subscribed by many thinkers, for example Baker (1995, p. 190; 2013, p. 33), Korsgaard (2009, p. xiii), Mead (1934, p. 47), Peirce (Colapietro, 1989), and others.

However, this does not seem to be James’s view of thinking. Thinking in his view is an even more complex process in which “…some topic or subject about which all members of the thought revolve,” and “a gap we cannot yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase,” which “…influences us in an intensely active and determinate way” (1890, p. 250; and see Myers, 1986, pp. 242–271). Thinking is about a problem or subject of interest that provides a sense of direction or intention, and may consist of pictures, verbal content or dialogue, text, or simply behavior or action such as might be imagined of a professional dancer. James account of thinking does not fit with an internalized self talk account even if not simply internal talk. This contrast between the concept of thinking as internal dialogue and a reflective passive withdrawal from dialogue is addressed in a later studies, and is a source of tension that needs a plausible accounting. Presaging that anticipated study, Hannah Arendt argues forcibly and at length that an act of thinking is both a passive withdrawal from one’s presentation in the world and conversation that swings between internal and external dialogue (Arendt, 1971). Whether James view can be fit into the hermeneutic projects of those like Gadamer or Ricoeur requires some thought as for a pragmatist, as James, the principle issue always comes back to a person’s actual experience. It seems that it can be forgotten that thinking is about something intended, a problem, an object, or some other person and may only some times be about oneself. It is not clear that even complex internal dialogues of minisocieties can alone capture the possible richness of a disciplined sustained thinking concerning an inquiry into a complex problem

.

2.3 Crises Identity of PostModernism

One presentation of the social constructionist conclusion that “The self has fallen on hard times” and is being rescued by what is described as postmodernist developments is Holstein and Gubrium (2000, p. 3), who extend Gergen’s concept of a saturated self that is fragmented or, in the worst case situation, overwhelmed and dissolved by multiple conflicting images and competing narratives to one’s own story. Following Foucault, the social environment determines one’s social self, one’s identity, by the power and influence of its social institutions and practices. Subjectively a person constitutes their “own moral agency” that is “…artfully agentic and culturally circumscribed,” that is caused in the environmental cultural setting in which the person is situated. Agency here is externally embodied in the cultural processes and is acknowledged but not explored or described as to how it comes about or functions in a causal capacity. Causal capacity is not limited to linguistic structures, as has been suggested by Minsky, but is placed in the social structures and institutions. The social self “must be skillfully fashioned” to fit meaningfully into the cultural context it must function (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000 pp. 12–14). To accomplish this task, the notion of an integrated self must be given up so as to be free to fully employ the multiple self-constructions necessary to navigate the post modernist cultural terrain. In their view the idea of an individualized integrated self which emerged gradually in the eighteenth through the twentieth century, as accorded in the picture provided by Seigel and Taylor, is simply superseded.

One of their goals is to uncover the vocabulary necessary to make the multiple selves visible in everyday life so as, it is presumed, to facilitate a more skillful building of the selves necessary to maneuver a complex cultural environment successfully. James is over-interpreted by Holstein and Gubrium to represent that a self “…doesn’t exist separate from, or over and above communication” (p. 23). Charles Horton Cooley, it is noted, emphasizes, similar to James, “self-feeling” in the formulation of the “looking-glass self” for which he is famously recognized. The embodied self implied by self feeling interacts with how others see oneself. Contrasting Mead, however, thinking is taken to be internalized conversation and self-feeling is rejected, initially and explicitly, by Mead (1934, p. 173) with an objection similar to that stated by McAdams that self-feeling reifies the self in a way which would interfere with its social construction .

What emerges in the Holstein and Gubrium account is that social institutions normatively ‘speak the selves’ required to function in a cultural environment. Selves, in this view, are the analogical equivalent to the sound that is produced when one speaks; as selves are performed when one acts, sometimes by speaking in combination with acting, in their social and cultural environment, and what might be thought of as a true self may be the personal capacity to resonate with one’s social surrounds in a way that adds a new resonance, a new wave or note, to let it be heard and act, much like a social wave. This kind of social presentation renders personal identity irrelevant. So that in a meeting of an Alcoholics Anonymous type of intensely structured interpersonal interactions, Holstein and Gubrium would say subjectively structured resources, of the AA institution and culture, the AA discourse “speaks” selves that are “interpretively constituted in the AA infrastructure, providing resources and directions for narrating persons lives” (p. 82).

Now it can be seen that the causal agency is not only linguistic, but is placed in the structures and institutions of power and influence, is not at all internal to the person, and is as well the structure of a persons behavior. This, of course, leads to other questions such as how a person participates meaningfully in constructing a life. One’s choice, it seems, is to enter a stream, a cultural cluster of resources, and then learn to “swim” in the circumscribed cultural situation chosen. That is, diving into a lake or a pool is a choice which necessitates swimming whether skilled or a beginner. Holstein and Gubrium argue that once the ideal of an integrated self is jettisoned, one can begin mastering the varied skills of “doing our selves.” The constraints of such a situation can, when first viewed, seem overbearing , but, as the authors point out, such a varied “discursive” environment “provides a moral space that can be exploited for other purposes, such as recovery and reproduction of another self” (p. 228).

The Holstein and Gubrium presentation closely relates to Kenneth Gergen’s sustained ambitious effort in Relational Being (2009) to refocus psychological inquiry from a view of a self-contained independent causal agent to relationship processes that focuses on the dynamic center of relating that blurs individualized boundaries. He describes these processes as a co-active “generative way of relating” that represents the multiple selves all persons are and which is referred to as multi-being (pp. xv, 3134–138, 227). That is, in any one specific interaction, a person is a “partial being,” one of many selves, and multi-being simply refers to this reality. A person is not so much an author of an action or of a meaning, as “co-actively” engaging an activity with other persons who jointly as an agent acts and creates meaning. No clearly demarcated boundary of a person emerges and the idea of a unified, coherent self or personality is a facade for a completely different real world that is characterized by many selves and many voices that is every person. Identity in Gergen’s view is a reliable sequential chain of relating, a reliable pattern of repeating relationships. Characteristic of some social constructivists programs, any centeredness in a physical biological body is repudiated or, if not repudiated, seen as unimportant .

Gergen’s is a model that is fully disembodied, instead the place of embodiment is shifted externally to social relationships institutionally structured by the culture in which a person is situated. This is a social reductionist program that, Gergen would say, moves beyond the postmodernist social context described by Holstein and Gubrium. Gergen asserts that the violence, or even hyper-violence, that infests our present world is a result of Eighteenth Century enlightenment inspired over emphasis on individuality and the resulting cultural institutions based on individual causality; what is required is a near reversal of Eighteenth Century Enlightenment founded culture. An avowed ambition to restructure or replace enlightenment created cultural values is a more radical proposal than the Holstein and Gubrium program, and is, it would seem, perhaps as radical a proposal as can be made by a psychologist, or any one in the human sciences . It is ‘radical’ in that it is hoped, or even expected, that the seeds or nuclei are in place that will result in that replacing Eighteenth Century Enlightenment based culture. Some uncertainty is generated as with all revolutions that may not at all be comforting when confronted by such overt soteriological aims.

An assessment of the proposals for socially constructed selves depends on whether an adequate account of how a self or selves come to be, what a self is or selves are, and what a self or selves do. Perhaps one can engage life in the manner described by Holstein and Gubrium, for example, but there is still a choice of not engaging one’s everyday living in a narrative-dialogical manner. There is a kind of high drama to living in such a manner that may be attractive to some people, describe some, but not all persons function in such a manner. Galen Strawson (2004, 2008, 2012) argues with vigor that not everyone coheres to the single narrative story of their life but rather are comfortable with an awareness limited to their present circumstances. That is, they orient to the life circumstances in what Strawson refers to as in an episodic manner . Others are more accurately recognized as “diachronic” and fit into a single coherent life story that characterizes their self or identity. The point is that not everyone can be naturally constrained into a single dimension narrative that reflects who they are at any particular moment. The diachronic and episodic temporal styles are proposed to be opposed to each other with a resulting disposal to misunderstand each other. The diachronic style sees their past as a single story and anticipate their future similarly while the episodic self style has a sense of their life as always just beginning. Nevertheless there is a sense in which the teleological quality of narrative is an empirical fact, and the narrative of history is not just a mode of experience but is an integral part of our experience, and that without a narrative indication of significance we cannot enter another’s world (Smith, 2007, pp. 176–181).

Holstein and Gubrium’s program exhibits some affinity with Minsky’s suggestion that causal agency may be linguistic , but as noted is not limited to a purely linguistic interpretation and further raises the question to what extent the computer metaphor applies to first-person phenomena (Burkitt, 2013; Minsky, 1986, p. 197). The dismissal of ‘self-feeling’, the ‘sense-of-me’, and the subsequently implied embodiment cannot, or at least should not, be so easily dismissed. The consequence is to abstract selfhood from the physical body and would seem to create a polar opposition to a Cartesian type solipsism inveighed, already by Holstein and Gubrium, as a not credible transcendent self so that now there are polar extremes based on two disembodied reductions. Although the choice, given these two extreme positions and given our place in the hermeneutical environment, might be easily given to the social construction option because the problems that have been revealed in the long Cartesian history of the several hundred years of its contentious presence are, for this reason, better known.

As noted , there are also difficulties with a pure social construction proposal. The dismissal of a self-feeling/sense-of-me seems to remove a centered subjectivity from identity, the empirical me, and to separate the narrative identity from a core subjectivity, that is considered by many necessary to constitute a person, unsatisfactorily leaves that person decentered and hollowed out which contrasts with the goal a holistic solid person. A core subjectivity, a for-me-ness, self-feeling, or mineness that accompanies all one’s experiences and allows one to own their experiences as their own, to discriminate their experience from the experience of a character of a movie, from a resonant subconsciously real character of an Alice Munro short story, or from the experience of a friend shared during a coffee break cannot occur without a first-person perspective or some access to those kind of processes.

Zahavi (2009) suggests that these two extremes, the self-sufficient substantial interior self and the external socially constructed self of relationships of social reductionism are more usefully thought of as qualities or facets of self. and that A minimal self is a middle point between these extreme positions which consists of a bare first-person awareness, a for-me-ness, that is quite compatible with a socially constructed self. This stands in contrast to Hermans and McAdams misgivings (2009, pp. 567–570). What emerges is a multidimensional self in which the “I”, the subjective core, is embodied and constitutes the socially constructed self. That is, the subjective core “I” is, to use a phenomenological phrase, ‘co-given’ with the world and is simultaneous with the experienced social environment. These points will require further elaboration. One of the things to take away from this argument is that the minimal first-person self awareness, a feeling of for-me-ness, does not commit to an interior self that displaces or is incompatible with a socially constructed dimension of a self or selves, dialogical selves, or narratively constituted selves.

Gergen’s presentation is a more radical and far sighted program which, for that reason, may be more easily criticized or even rejected. The weight of his proposal seems to be on a potential unlimited ability, at least with few structural biological or cultural constraints, to socially construct any society desired, and perhaps not trivially a utopian one. The assumptions or structure of assumptions, the metaphysics, of Gergen’s proposal may be probable, but is not at all obvious as presented. For example, a stream of consciousness as described by James and consistent with most interpretations of Buddhism would seem to provide a probable base for the well described co-active generative interactions that are, for Gergen, the center of a self and identity, but which is not considered by him (Ganeri, 2012a, b, pp. 42–43; James, 1890, pp. 378–379). That is, there would seem to be required some basic processes of a cognitive nature to make it possible for the interactions ascribed to a person participating in a social constructionist reality, and that an anchoring in a physical body is required for a person to act in such a constructionist reality. It would seem that if the dynamic interactive reality suggested by Gergen is, in fact, the kind of world we live and is somehow blocked or prevented from freely operating because of the overemphasis or misemphasis on individual agency that there would be, never-the-less, some normative pull towards that reality. Gergen may say that there is when considering recurring problems that appear to be intractable in this modern and postmodern world. It may be relevant to note that it was once fashionable to make this kind of contrast between East and West cultures, but which is now recognized as simplistic. Providing the empirical content to illustrate a social reality outlined by Gergen is perceived of pressing importance, and is unlikely to be neglected by Gergen and colleagues .

The most significant difficulty with Gergen’s proposed ‘relational being’ is what appears its radical disembodied nature, disembodied from the organism, the physical body, as a person does occupy one real physical body. The phenomenological criticism is that without a minimal self, a socially constructed self cannot develop that is not constrained by the material, social, and phenomenal realities of the world we live (Zahavi 2009, 2014). It is noted that the extensive cultural reorientation required by Gergen’s proposal requires an extended exposure in a social environment to begin to grasp and acknowledge the cultural institutions and general deep social infrastructure such a proposed reality would require; given that such a realized vision is possible. It is likely then, if one assumes a pull to that reality asserted by Gergen, that the conversations and social interactions will be continuing for an extended time, and that there is, indeed, much more to come .

2.4 Psychological Narrative Thesis

The basic form of the psychological narrative thesis (PNT) is that all normal people are narrative; that is, human beings as persons through narrative storytelling organize their experiences in a way that provides the direction for their anticipated future activities. Such an assertion is no more than an empirical hypothesis about how we guide our actions and experience life. The further idea that narrative story telling is essential for living a good life, to guide a morally satisfactory life adds a normative dimension to the narrative thesis that can be referred to as the ethical narrative thesis (ENT) . Two other positions include a narrative self constitution thesis (NSCT) which asserts that all normal people constitute their identity as a person through narrative, and it is this thesis coupled with PNT that is the strong form of the Narrativity hypothesis (Hutto, 2016). The corresponding ethical version is that ethical narrative self constitution (ENSC) thesis is that an identity is constituted by one’s narrative which further is a moral guide to one’s life. Strawson (2004, 2008, 2012) asserts that the dominant position currently is a combined PNT and ENT. That is, it is averred our nature organizes our experience through narrative and that additionally a pursuit of the eudaimonic ‘good life’ requires a narrated story to oneself and others. The strongest form of PNT is the assertion that narrative is required for the constitution of one’s identity or self. To say this differently, the strong form of PNT is that a self is not something that just exists and which is narratively described by oneself or others, but comes to exist when narratively described. “This ontological thesis,” Hutto says, “is the beating heart of Strong Narrativism” (Hutto, p. 11). The debate concerns whether PNT accounts for a person’s skillful social functioning and if weaker forms of the narrativity thesis are available if strong PNT is inadequate to that task.

Strawson, as discussed above, is skeptical of the sufficiency of all versions of narrativism to capture the experiences of a person meaningfully or that one’s experiences can be reduced to a narrative story. He is skeptical of the idea that human beings only comprehend ourselves verbally in narrative. The Socratic introspective injunction to know oneself reduces, or adduces, understanding of oneself to third person cognitive knowledge, and may, in despite of the antiquity of the wisdom attributed to Socrates’ injunction, impede one’s apprehension of one’s self. Hutto (2016) describes the fundamental challenge as simply demonstrating that there are “modes of temporal experience such that not everyone tends to experience or live or see his or her life in a storied way” (p. 14). Some people do experience their life through a Narrativizing framework, but not all. Strawson shows that an everyday act, the example used is making coffee, involves a narrative because one has to think ahead, and that a day’s activities require many such narratives

(Strawson, 2004, p. 7). Such narratives are ubiquitous and their significance is trivial as not to be explanatory of anything interesting or useful. Strawson presents himself as someone who does not experience life narratively, and also points to others such as Henry James, Marcel Proust, and more who experience life ‘episodically’, comfortable with an awareness of their life contained in the present circumstances and a sense that their life is just beginning. It is shown that at least one instance of an episodic experience of living is occurrent such that Strong Narrativism is untenable.

Advocates of Strong Narrativism introduce the idea of ‘implicit narrativity’ to escape this dilemma which in one account is described as an implicit sense of one’s life. The argument is also made that implicit Narrativizing is what we do in constituting the self or person that is automatic and natural without thinking about it (Hutto, 2016 pp. 22–23). Hutto’s conclusion is that Strong Narrativism cannot reply to Strawson’s challenge, and that a weaker form he calls Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis (NSSH) that assumes self-reflection and self-regulation capacities of adult humans in the context of biological constraints and history. The developmental path to achieve the abilities to understand ourselves and others through reasons is by engaging in sociocultural practices that include story telling practices that probably use special kinds of narratives (pp. 27–29).

The Narrative literature seems to be developing in a parallel fashion to the Self literature. While it is not independent, the Self conversation does not seem to be necessary to it. Narrative processes are presented as not just a means of unifying the varied experiences of a person, but is a means of constituting a person and even that experience itself must be “narrativized” to constitute experience. The narrative suggests a methodology that brings about the self and person when self is considered to be shorter events of one’s life while the person is the larger and contains or consists of many smaller defined experiences. What appears to emerge is an emphasis on what James refers as the empirical self. Causation or agency, I-self , is not as fully addressed or developed perhaps because of the difficulties associated with inquiries of subjectivity and agency. The suggestion then is that subjectivity, the I-self, is still uncertain for the reasons noted by Gallagher (2012) discussed earlier although the literature is growing rapidly in breadth and complexity.

2.5 A Narrative Therapy Alternative

A narrative therapy has been formulated by Michael White (1989; 1995; Epston & White, 1992) and colleagues which operates within the intellectual space suggested by the philosophical discussion of Strawson, Hutto, and Gallagher regarding narrativity. An examination of this form of narrative therapy is interestingly carried out by Hutto and Gallagher (Unpublished, 2014). They reveal several interesting therapeutic moves from a therapeutic perspective which are congruent to the idea of Self. One of the first, referred to as externalizing, is clearly placing a therapeutic problem in the environment side of the relationship of the person and her environment. A second move is described as modulating narrative distance, particularly increasing narrative distance, and consists of the explicit contrast of first-personal perspective with third-person perspective that is identity or narrative (pp. 22–25). As Hutto and Gallagher put it, there is a distance between the self that is narrating and the self that is being narrated. To extend this reasoning, it is noted that the relationship of a first personal perspective— more descriptively, a sense of mineness and a sense of acting both to attend to one’s third person identity, or narrative, and to create or modulate third person identity— requires second person participation. That is, the act of confronting one’s narrative identity is by a second-person participant self, to use Hutto and Gallagher’s vocabulary, and that one’s narrative, the narrated self, is interrogated at various times and subsequently modified. It is easy to lose these distinctions in the rich interplay of reflective narrating processes. In addition to perspectival distance just described, there is temporal distance and, what is referred to as, evaluative distance (p. 23). Linguistic constraints are present and narrative recounting as interpretation are also noted, and importantly recognized that we, persons, are not just narrative selves, a person is not just a narrating self and a narrated self (p. 24). Hutto and Gallagher’s (2014) interesting investigation not only suggests but also opens a naturalistic way of assessing therapeutic interactions with a relatively new vocabulary that promises new insights of selfhood, and perhaps extends to how second-person interactions can generally be viewed.

The psychological narrative thesis is continuing to develop with the promise of affording alternatives in our understanding of persons and in creating different or perhaps more explicit therapy approaches to facilitating or strengthening one’s mental health. The focus is more clearly on identity as what is described as the narrated self and identity are not obviously distinct. The next section of this study then will more specifically investigate identity. As noted, the developments that have evolved out of the psychological narrative hypothesis in many ways parallel a self conversation with all of its richness and which suggest affording an alternative to address those issues usually ceded to a self conversation with a vocabulary and with metaphysical assumptions that are less burdened with historically sedimented complexity. The empirical “me-self” as designated by James is basically one’s identity in all its complexities. Many of the investigations of self accomplished in the psychological literature are more about identity, than about a subjective I-self .

2.6 Agency and Selfhood in Psychological Research

Self and identity have been vigorously operationalized and investigated as a ‘self-concept’ and as ‘self-esteem’ , respectively, to derive useful psychological applications and tools in school settings, industrial and organizational settings, behavior medicine, psychotherapy, and other social areas. The casting of self and identity as self-esteem is set out by many psychological authors with an thorough summary in Jonathon Brown (1998) The Self in an attempt to rehabilitate self and related concepts in the wake Skinnerian operant behaviorism. Related concepts include ego-strengthening and self-efficacy in which all are methodologically accomplished in a respectable neutral context of the hard naturalism of science and in a normative third-person observational framework. Evidence-based treatment protocols required by scientific naturalism results in tensions that are most clearly reflected structurally and conceptually in experimental and humanistic psychology and their related literatures. An example of the research of ‘self’ and its related operational methodologies is reflected in the excellently conceived and executed research projects of Susan Harter (1999) and her similarly minded colleagues in The Construction of the Self: A Developmental Perspective in which the distinction between I-self and Me-self set out by James is recognized as conceptually important, and in which the relation of I-self (as agent) and Me-self (as objective experience) is operationalized as a person’s global self-worth in a precisely scientifically correct third-person objective conceptual framework (1999; pp. 182–194). The measures employed are indirect indicators of self events and are, perhaps, all that can be accomplished in impersonal third-person data format of personal experience. The result is several relatively specific interventions to help children develop some resistance to depression and improve their adaptive functioning (pp. 216–227). The question is whether the methodological and scientific skill exhibited by Harter and her colleagues address the phenomena of agency and selfhood correspond to their independent reality of a self and person in the social world. What is to be gained by more direct investigations of a first-person perspective? Indeed, what is a first-person perspective and what will it look like in a comparison of objective scientific data of third-person observation? Atoms and the various subparticles constituting an atom are, after all, only indirectly revealed in physics and chemistry so that the problems may not be, on the surface, so much different. It is easier to direct inquiries of the more objective Me-self in which the I-self agent is detected in the results of specific types of behavior reflected in a Me-self, in the residue found in the Me-self, which appears to be the basic scientific strategy in Harter’s research. Could it be accurate to state that a majority of the investigations in the psychological literature have more to do with the identity side of selfhood, a Me-self, because of a tendency to avoid agency related issues? Such is what Martin, Sugarman, and Thompson (2003) argue, and suggest that investigating issues relating to agency cannot be adequately accomplished within a strict scientific reality.

In general, it seems that much of the psychological research address issues relating to the Me-self , the historically established self, and seems to be relatively ambivalent concerning a central core self (for example Harter) as compared to multiple selves. For example, “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge” (Neisser, 1988), The Perceived Self (Neisser, 1993), and The Remembering Self (Neisser & Fivush, 1994) appear to address a Me-self and do not address agency issues, at least directly. This cannot be said, however, of more psychoanalytic studies of self found in The Book of the Self (Young-Eisendrath & Hall, 1987)and Self-Relations in the Psychotherapy Process (Muran, 2001) which are more concerned with psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic process that acknowledges an agent ego or a subjective self. The narrative and dialogical literature clearly favors multiple selves as does the more recent investigations of selfhood and persons. This recognition suggests a directed inquiry of identity is required to move forward the understanding of selfhood generally and as related to psychology. In the next study, we will investigate the various identities of a person, how the properties of those identities relate to selfhood, and how it is that ‘selfhood’ cannot be discussed in isolation of identity . Selfhood and identity give every indication of being aspects of the same entity.

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R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_3

3. Third Study: Identities of a Person

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

SamenessGeneralized otherFirst-person perspectiveInteriorizationNaturalizedIntrinsic psychologyFreedomAutonomyMoral perfection

The person, in a public sphere, is said to build their life by means of identity, locating a place in a social structure, beginning in a family, and that these interactions in a family result in a recognition of the various characteristics of that person as an oldest child, a middle child, the youngest child reflecting each finding their place in that family. From the family view, each person has an accepted and supported place of comfort which becomes their identity, the way they are recognized, and grow into their role in the family. From the child’s perspective a nurtured position of acceptance in the family is recognized as their’s, and a self and identity begins to be constructed which is characterized by a feeling of mineness. From the perspective of other members of a family, a child’s position will come to have the variou characteristics that come to be identified by the parents and relatives as an oldest child, a middle child, the youngest, and even the baby of the family, and recognized by the developing person as their self in the family context and by other family members as their identity. These characteristics often are designated with titles such as the baby of the family that persist, sometimes with some chagrin, throughout an entire life, and are not only recognized across families as persisting and identifying characteristics of an ordinary folk psychology, but are studied extensively by developmental psychologists. These processes are a model that is repeated many times in the course of building one’s life. This sketch is a reasonable picture that is probably limited to a contained biologically nuclear family in the Western European cultural setting. A feature of this description is that there is an uncertainty that emerges at different places of the description as to whether what is being referred to is more correctly an identity or a self. It is suggested that this uncertainty persists in the face of different kinds of attempts to definitively explain and describe the contrast between self and identity, and that the indefinite gap that appears between them suggests that they cannot be considered in separation.

One way to think of grasping this uncertainty and of discriminating whether one or the other of these concepts are the more appropriate is from direction of the perspective they might be viewed. The perspective that originates from the subjective “I” side of a person toward the experience of one’s participation and role in a social group is a self. That is, the subjective, first-person experience and perspective of participation in a particular group is connected with a feeling of me-ness, of mineness, that constitutes the self, and in James’s terminology the I-self. But it is also from that person’s third-person perspective of the generalized other, one’s identity in the social group, one’s dynamic interface with the social group; in James’s terminology, this is the me-self. In a confusing and uncertain fashion that nexus, that place of the interface between a person and the social group, is simultaneously self and identity. This first-person experience is characterized by a sense of mineness, a sense of a for-me-ness that, is not simply a quality of experience, but intrinsically inheres in experience and is what makes experience experience (Zahavi & Kriegel, 2015). When this same person’s characteristic participation with all the individualistic particularities that are habitual to her is viewed from the perspective of an other person of the social group, the sameness of the person’s identity is discerned. The identity discerned is not the same one as that perceived by the person herself, a fact that is not mistaken except, perhaps, in some forms of psychopathology, as it lacks the for-me-ness of a person’s self. As suggested by Ricoeur (1992, pp. 32–34), identity addresses the what of the signifying roles and particulars of an actor speaking or acting, while self addresses the who that is acting.

Identity is described as sameness and not selfhood. Having said this, I am not unaware of the advantage gained at the start by a problematic that prefers the question of the same over that of the self. It warns us, from the outset, against the possible drift toward private and nonpublic reference to which a premature recourse to self-designation might lead. By placing its main emphasis not on the who of the speaking but on the what of the particulars about which one speaks, including persons, the entire analysis of the person as a basic particular is placed on the public level of locating things in relation to the spatiotemporal schema that contains it (Ricoeur, p. 32).

Ricoeur builds on an earlier philosophical suggestion by P. F. Strawson of a person as a two sided entity that can not be further reduced referred to as a basic particular or primitive concept. What is important is Ricoeur’s recognition that identity and self constitute two sides of a person that needs to be considered conjointly when referring to the person. He states that it is easier to address one’s identity which has spatiotemporal characteristics and particular environmental associations, but which then results in tending to conceal selfhood. The term ‘sameness’ appears often in the self and identity literatures and is a standardized condensed way of designating the principal characteristic of glossing over particularities to emphasize similarity.

There is, then, as Kwame Appiah (2005) says, no reconciliation of one’s experience of self-directed activity embedded in one’s social environment, and using one’s knowledge and acquired skill to negotiate a social environment that further results in socially structured influences on those self-directed activities. There is no middle ground, no compromise, between first-personal experience and third person observation and conceptual knowledge of those originally self-directed activities. These are different planes of reality, they are different perspectives, different viewpoints, different modalities, and points to the significance of tracking first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives in psychological discourse. This difference was noticed and developed by Kant, as noted by Appiah, in the context of autonomy and freedom in an intelligible and rational world, and represents, as Appiah says, a noncoherence, a discontinuity that is the nature of conceptual terrain that characterizes the discourse of self-directed actions and those same actions as experienced. This is the same disjunction recognized by Ricoeur from the perspective of language when vocabulary is taken into account. There is agreement between Appiah and Ricoeur on the issue originally recognized by Kant that once one’s actions are reflected by a person, that is, are contemplated, the person is confronted by the consequences of those actions and the ethical character of one’s actions is entered (Appiah, 2005 pp. 51–61; Ricoeur, 1992 pp. 116–125). This is one of the ways that ethics and morality enter, whether bidden or not, into the practices as well as the conversation of selfhood, which, recall, includes identity. This observation does not yet recognize the central significance of intersubjectivity and second-personal engagement to ethical compelled conduct.

One learns when investigating the various facets of the literature on selfhood to be relatively cautious when an analysis appears to too neatly tie together, but an account in the context of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives is attractive as a naturalistic account of self and identity. For example, self-directed activity as phrased seems to avoid the issue of agency, that is, the second-personal immediate present of acting an act, which is a central question of self-direction, but recalling Gallagher (2012) the sense of agency is complex and a person’s capacity to cause events, to be an agent, is not as straight forward as could be hoped (See Second Study introducing comments). Nonetheless I think the analysis presented moves closer to finding a center of the self aporetic. With this background, we can continue with an overview of identity for which we principally will use Raymond Martin and John Barresi’s The Rise and Fall of the Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (2006), and their edited volume Personal Identity (2003).

3.1 Historicity of Identity

Martin and Barresi (2006) did not distinguish first-personal self-directed action from the conceptual nature of third-person observation, but rather directed their inquiry to identity generally and personal identity more specifically so that identity as referred to in their discussion often is not distinguishable from self, person, selfhood, or personhood. The above analysis, it is hoped, will make it easier to be somewhat clearer in our review of their discussion by keeping the diffusion of perspective in place although these author’s do not use that distinction. That is, we orient to the third-person reflective observation corresponding to identity, but remain aware of the inseparable nature of a first-person self and identity.

The Greeks began replacing myths with what would come to be science, originating from many streams of thought, in which ideas concerning self emerged usually not from direct concerns of selfhood. Socrates is credited by Plato as holding that “life’s most important project is care of one’s own soul” (Martin & Barresi, p. 13). It is also in Plato’s dialogues that an early challenge to the immortality of the soul is given. The soul and self as terms are not at this time distinguishable, and were not through much of Western intellectual history. Three important threads are introduced into the Western conversations of the self and identity. One of these is the introduction of a two world view of an soul that is fully independent of the body, is wholly rational, and an immaterial substance not susceptible to change, and which is contrasted to an imperfect physical body and its passions that are still capable of joining with reason. A second important tradition introduced by Heraclitus who was somewhat earlier than Plato, is the concern with ‘impermanence’ and the persistence conditions under which identity and sameness maintain that allow recognition of objects and persons. A third theme is a concern for the psychological construction of a person or self that leads to: how a person comes to say “I am this self” (p. 25). Martin and Barresi interestingly suggest that this idea is an extension of ownership and of private property, and of a person’s relation to herself since all human beings were believed to be equal no matter race, class, or gender, and, in their view, “it was only a short step to the view that each person owns him-or herself” (p. 26). That is, each person owns their self, their own body in contrast to the Greek cultural tradition of slavery of the time. In summary, all the intellectual constituents, and to some limited extent cultural constituents, were generally put in place in the Fifth Century B. C. E. by the Greek Axial age contribution to the Western intellectual tradition regarding self and identity

(Armstrong, 2006).

The threads of these and several other themes integral to identity at first tentatively enter and gradually gather authority in the continuous Western conversation over the several hundred years that precede the emergence of its modern formulation. The theme of interiorization is among the earliest having already been articulated by Plato using Socrates and becomes further elaborated in Christian theology especially by Augustine and the subsequent scholars who follow Augustinian thought and theology.[1] Interiorization is given voice by Augustine and refers to the increasing attention to self-directed reflection and contemplation of one’s actions, the consequences of those actions on one’s relation with God, on one’s moral status. The important issue of the time was not the subject of identity, self, or related concepts, but that of the immortality of the soul and the nature of its resurrection in which Christianity adopted the Neo-Platonic duality in which the idea of the soul as an immaterial substance creating a dual world view, and that has demonstrated a remarkable persistence through modern times. Much of the thinking during the early development of Christianity was absorbed with how the soul and the body were related and, as well, how an immortal soul persisted after bodily death

.

Aristotelian thought was introduced through Arabic scholars who had preserved and translated all or nearly all of his writings. Scholastic thinkers were exhilarated by Aristotle’s approach to nature and placed him in greater importance than ancient Greeks, and Aristotelian thought came to contrast Neoplatonic Christian dogma as it was integrated into Christian doctrine by Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s emphasis and tone were to integrate, in Martin and Barresi’s words, “…Platonic elements [that] were embedded in a predominantly Aristotelian, scientific framework” (p. 97). This had the important effect, among many other significant influences, of emphasizing the authority of rationality and reason which is an important and necessary theme in what will emerge as a modern concept of identity and give rise to what would become modern science and a mechanization of nature. It may be of some interest that Western intellectual tradition was somewhat behind Indian Buddhist emphasis on public reason and rationality (Ganeri, 2012). It was in 1513 that personal immortality of the soul became the doctrine of the Christian Church. In these activities, it was repeatedly acknowledged that while the body changes in life, its identity is retained maintaining and subsequently strengthening the theme, as we have seen, introduced by Heraclitus

. The notion of individuality reemerges in Western thought through Abelard whose writings were influential in further shifting the concern of moral behavior to internal motivation in contrast to external behavior. While this idea is very similar, or even the same, as those of Augustine, it is not new but is introduced into a cultural context of increasing affluence with emerging humanistic concerns, and for that reason gains increasing authority. The idea of inner motivation is strengthened by the growing ideas of friendship which was initially understood as the development of a common mind, and as participation in the love of Christ (Martin & Barresi, pp. 88–92).

The dualism of a physical body and an immaterial substance persisted as it was difficult to say how human immortality was possible otherwise. In general, the physical world was seen as the individuated imperfection of the simple perfected sameness of immaterial substance (p. 96). Inspired paradoxically by Augustine’s Confessions, the following century witnessed the development of humanistic ideals that initially centered on “the care of the soul” in the context of continuing prosperity and increasing secularism. Ideas that people are the author of their own identity, human dignity, and freedom are articulated and deepened. Thinkers recognized that the self was the center of one’s own “circling thought” with a concern for the individual psychology of how one presents oneself to others. Individual self-knowledge continues to grow in importance joining with ideas of sincerity and authenticity that are given impetus by Montaigne who takes up a study of the individual and creates the concept of sincerity to include inventing the word and is subsequently recognized as the “ambassador of sincerity” (pp. 121–122). An ethic of authenticity, that is taken up by Charles Taylor (1989), is rooted and becomes part of the idea of individual knowledge

.

The seventeenth century is given over to the transitioning to a new science originating in a theory of a corpuscular mechanics, and occupied much of the cultural energies of the century in midst of the colonization of the Americas, the Christian Thirty Years’ Wars of intolerance, and on. The most important issues of the century were not self or identity although a transition resulted in a shift of perspective that had significant consequences when the conversation concerning self and identity were to reemerge

. A split results between objective empirically verifiable data and subjective, private unverifiable information, that comes to characterize science that persists in these present times. Descartes substitutes mind for soul and fixed the independence of the nonmaterial mind/soul and the physical world that, while moving toward solving the immediate problem of freeing science from religious doctrine, becomes the source of significant difficulties that continue in the present. A human being is promoted as primarily a thinker and knower of a mechanical world of cause and effect. In this new view, the religion is decentered with the result that the world loses its claim of a special status as God’s creation and becomes a mechanism of infinite causes by sometimes unnamed inanimate objects maintained by inertial momentum that itself becomes an object of awe. Subjectivity and a subjective world loses a connection with the physical world, and resists many ingenious attempts to specify or fix it as a thing or specify its functions. As concerning self, two ideas of Descartes have significant consequences: he added strength to the idea of an immaterial Platonic soul which would eventually be given up by science, and the idea that thinking is reflective which is a theme that would continue to grow in strength and eventually be recognized as essential to defining the human being

.

3.2 Naturalizing Personal Identity

Binding together of the varied themes that had an affinity to identity had as a model Isaac Newton’s successful formulation of the laws of motion that set the structure of the scientific transition of the preceding century for the next three centuries. The Principia (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) was published in 1687, perhaps, as suggested by Martin and Barresi (2006), the greatest single scientific book written. It added force to an exuberant confidence in human reason with the result that the goal Locke, following Hobbes, pursued was the scientific study of human nature. Four decades later Hume’s goal was that the empirical study of human nature be established as the foundation of human knowledge is a measure of Locke’s success. The shaping of modern identity from the themes that evolved from the Greeks onward was taken up and achieved by Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Kant. Hobbes made the first contribution to move away from the substance view of the soul on which Locke continued to build. The most significant and controversial assertion made by Locke was that matter could think; that is, there was nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses. With this assertion, the soul substance, which was formerly the seat of thinking, becomes unnecessary which, among other implications, threatened one of the ways of explaining human immortality .

An implication was that the persistence of persons, that is, identity, could not depend on or be parasitic to the idea of an underlying substance supposed to constitute a person. What accounted for identity, persistence over time, was consciousness, by which Locke meant memory. He distinguished between self as sensing perceptive inputs, pain and pleasant nervous input, capable of feeling happiness and sadness, self-concern, and that of a relatively short duration; with a person capable of thinking, judging, reflection, and general “transtemporal self-reference” that is of a long duration, and accountable for actions as a “forensic term” (R. Martin & J. Barresi, 2003, p. 36). Person, as a forensic term, was specifically set equivalent or was seen as indistinguishable from personal identity. A self is constituted by an appropriation process that is the relation with its present and its past. However, this was not clear in Locke’s presentation and persons (or selves) are perceived by his contemporaries as fictions that lack substantial existence and which only addressed polemic intent. Locke’s view however was that “…selves are created implicitly by human mentality via processes of appropriation and the application of self-concepts that are ingredients of reflexive consciousness” as stated by Martin and Barresi (2006, p. 145). The central feature of reflexivity relative to consciousness is taken by Locke directly from Descartes (pp. 143, 151–152). Locke is described by Martin and Barresi as riding a crest of naturalization that had been developing the previous century and given impetus by Newton’s successes .

3.2.1 The Naturalizing Wave

The subsequent conversation that developed out of the critical reaction to Locke’s presentation was vigorous with the purpose of unequivocally reinstalling the soul as the central foundational unifying substance of human beings. There were weaknesses with Locke’s memory account of personal identity and interpretations of such concepts as the ‘fictitious self’ that were seen as plain wrong and were fair targets to vigorous critical conversation. The perception of a ‘fictitious self’ was an outcome of relational accounts of self and identity which did not seem to promote a substantive thing that justified ontological status of being (pp. 149–151). This conversation was intense and extended involving Joseph Butler, the Clarke-Collins debate, Thomas Reid, Alexander Pope, and significant others that did much to deepen understanding and, in the end, more firmly secure the grip of the naturalizing movement, to the chagrin of some of the principle participants.

David Hume was prominent in this conversation, famously asserting a no-self doctrine that a persisting self is an illusion. He addressed how it is that people are so susceptible to the illusion of self. He was led to formulate an “…alternative “bundle” conception of the self and also to compare the mind to a kind of theatre” (p. 153). Recent scholarship interestingly suggests that Hume had occasion to be exposed to Buddhist thought regarding no-self through the Jesuits while vacationing in France when a young man (Gopnik, 2009, 2015). He asserted that selves are fictional mental constructions, and what counts as ‘self’ is no more than successive perceptions. Hume’s view is a refining of the earlier critical reaction to the initial proposals of selves as relational and that selves, and subsequently identity, were fictitious if they were only relational and not substantive. One of Hume’s principal concerns was how objects, including the “materials out of which we ourselves are constructed, nevertheless seem to persist” (p. 153). He sought to explain how it is that things that change—to include ourselves—are seen to persist through time. Secondly, how it is that belief in ourselves as persisting over time functions in representing ourselves to ourselves and to others. That is, he attempted to explain personal identity through our thought and imagination and formulated the idea that one’s perception of a persisting object resulted because of the resemblance between the objects. The account provided by Hume was entirely a psychological achievement. The problem of identity, then to Hume, was not just verbal disputation, but significant and real (p. 153). Prior to Locke, the growing concept of identity was concerned primarily with resurrection and maintaining one’s identity after death, and Locke’s introduction of the “forensic person” shifted identity to a central position enabling responsibility, accountability, and general moral behavior where it remains to face challenges such as Gergen’s (2009) notion of relational being, Taylor’s (1989, 1991, 2004), communitarian emphasis as a corrective for too great an importance placed in autonomy and individualism characterized in the person’s actions, Sugarman and Martin (2010) sociocultural development of hermeneutic agency and public personal existence, and other noteworthy programs.

3.2.2 A First Extended Psychological Conversation

The conversation in England initiated by Locke and Hume was varied and rich, and could be said to have ended with William Hazlitt after some 100 years of continuous psychological discourse. Hazlitt developed some ideas congruent with modern psychology concerning the acquisition of self-concepts and separating the problem of personal identity from those of the requirements for survival. At this time the conversation shifted, bringing to an end a relatively continuous conversational tradition of “the nature of self and personal identity that began with Locke and took place in Britain throughout the eighteenth century” (Martin & Barresi, 2006, p. 169). The relatively progressive ideas of Hazlitt anticipating modern psychology fell fallow with the emergence of Kant followed by the German Idealists which began a new series of investigations of self. Immanuel Kant, characterized by Martin and Barresi (p. 171) as “…the culmination of Enlightenment thought,” is accountable for many varied and centrally important intellectual conversations to include the basic conceptual structure for the modern liberal tradition. As previously noted (see Sect. 1.2), these developments in the formulations of self captures all the important present day features of selfhood in the current dynamically fluid conversations regarding the self and personal identity. An empirical personal identity, according to Kant, required more than a psychological criteria of conscious memory of sameness , but must be “…at least partly physical” (p. 173). Both Locke and Kant promoted relational views of identity over time which Kant sometimes referred to as an empirical self, a term later famously used by James although probably not borrowed from Kant. To use only a psychological criteria left the sameness of identity subject to uncertainty to too great a degree, and a physical embodiment provided the objectivity to correct that result (2006, pp. 171–177; 2003; pp. 59–62).

3.2.3 Intrinsic Psychological Inquiry

William James’s approach to personal identity is entirely intrinsic and psychological. That is, his concern is how one ‘senses’, or identifies, their own selfhood and their own identity. He describes thoughts that are one’s own as discriminated by “a warmth and intimacy about them” that are absent from those thoughts that are not one’s own (1890, pp. 314–319; 1892, pp. 201–205). These thoughts, he says, “…belongs to the great class of judgments of sameness ; and there is nothing remarkable in making a judgment of sameness in the first person than in the second person or the third” (1892, p. 201). James’s goes on to ask “Is the sameness predicated really there?” He distinguishes an I that is broadly understood and a narrower understanding of I when the former broadly conceived I is the “concrete Me” (p. 202); the latter narrower conception of I is the thinker. “It is the sense of sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things thought-about. These things are a present self and a self of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but thinks that they are identical.” James goes on to emphasize that even if it were to be demonstrated that the sameness of identity was, in fact, not to be the case, “…it would exist as a feeling all the same; the consciousness of it by the thought would be there, and the psychologist would still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness lay” (1890, p. 316).

Generic sameness and generic differences of the empirical self must be acknowledged but extended no further. Changes are gradual and never affect the entire self at the same time so that there is a continuity that maintains a unity of the self, and that continuity of similarity and resemblance unite “what discontinuity might hold apart” (1890, p. 317; 1892, pp. 201–203). The sense of personal identity perceived by thought or ‘passing states of consciousness’ consists in a series of thoughts that emerges as a new thought by an owner of the previous thought and ends owned by the next thought James describes as a stream of consciousness. The thought is the agent that first owns followed by being owned by the following thought (1890, p.323). To state this differently, a thought appropriates the previous thought that is the preceding Me-thought by the present Me-thought; the Me-self is an object of thought like other objects that may be thought. To use James’s words, “The heavy warm mass of my body is there, and the nucleus of the ‘spiritual me’ [which is] the sense of intimate activity” (1892, p. 203). “These [thoughts] are the real nucleus of our personal identity,” James says, “and it is their actual existence, realized as a solid present fact, which makes us say ‘as sure as I exist, those past facts were part of myself.’ They are the kernel to which the represented parts of the Self are assimilated, accreted, and knit on; and even were Thought entirely unconscious of itself in the act of thinking, these ‘warm’ parts of its present object would be a firm basis on which the consciousness of personal identity would rest” (p. 323, italics in original). That I which we conceive as “thinker” is only a vehicle. Past and present states of consciousness proceed unflinchingly and no substantial identity of the thinker is necessary; they, past and present selves, that are thought only have a functional identity as both are aware of the same things.

As the procession of the passing states of consciousness are surveyed “The identity which we recognize … can only be the relative identity of a slow shifting in which there is always some common ingredient retained.” And a few lines further, “Thus the identity found by the I in its Me is only a loosely construed thing, an identity ‘on the whole’, just like that which any outside observer might find in the same assemblage of facts” (1890, pp. 351–352; 1892, p. 205). As Martin and Barresi observe, “…individual thoughts are in effect the agent” (2003, p. 67). The core of selfhood for James is “…the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought, and recognized as continuing in time” (1890, p. 350). Alternatively stated, the core of selfhood is a physical body and passing thought that is aware of that body.

3.2.4 Anchoring Psychological Inquiry

A concise and accurate summary of William James’s complex, detailed, and precise thinking is not easily accomplished. Sometime ago Zahavi (2002) cited Bernard Baars’s In the Theater of the Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind (1997) stating that “By wide consent the foremost work on human mental processes is William James’ Principles of Psychology” which contains detailed analysis of such things as the nature of the stream of consciousness, self-awareness, self, habits, selective attention, and perception. Continuing by quoting from Baars, “On many of these topics James’ thinking is fully up to date, and it is embarrassing but true that much of the time he is still ahead of the scientific curve” (p. 8). Zahavi continues by noting that although these developments are encouraging, there is also something disconcerting that much of the work of Kant and James has not yet been fully integrated into psychological inquiry; and “…why does contemporary cognitive science and analytic philosophy of mind return all the way to Kant and James?” and seem to ignore the phenomenological traditions of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger (p. 8). We will return to address the question of the neglect of the phenomenological tradition and its resources later. Right now the most interesting observation concerns how relevant James thinking continues to be to psychological science, and that many of the results of his investigations have not yet been integrated into modern psychology. As psychological inquiry becomes increasingly interested in subjectivity, personhood, and intersubjectivity, a fuller evaluation of James’s thinking and its integration into a broader mainstream psychological tradition may be even more important .

If one agrees with Baars’s and Zahavi’s assessment of William James’s disciplined psychological thinking, an earlier and relatively thorough exposure to James earlier in one’s career would positively impact the thinking, research, and professional practice of psychology. Graduate training of clinical psychology at the time I was a graduate student in the 1970s and 1980s significantly included Carl Rogers, Erik Erikson, and Fritz Perls with the simplistic explanatory concept of psychological healing as re-unifying and elimination of the self-conflicts and self-alienation incurred from various developmental and interpersonal conflicts that damaged or impaired the adaptive functioning of a person’s self or self-concept (Erikson, 1950; Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951; Rogers, 1951). That there is some truth in the tone of this general position is not so much questioned as is the congruence with the phenomenological actual facts of the situation, and the resulting delay of realistic inquiry of core psychological entities of subjectivity, identity, and self. The concept of self used in this way by these authors is not more than an explanatory concept of an integrated and whole psychologically healthy person .

Psychoanalysis provided, in some ways, a richer approach to psychological therapeutic treatment, but was confronted with its own contradictions as it forged what it considered to be a unique and more thorough approach to assisting, and even healing, a person. Yet the idea that there is “something fixed” that makes us human beings or that there is a real and authentic self was already largely antiquated despite the large, especially psychotherapeutic, literature continuing to use the explanatory concept of healing the self (Smith, 2013, pp. 265–279). Roger Smith notes that “Whatever the reasons …psychological society both glorifies and dissolves the self,” and that some psychotherapies continue to use the explanatory concept of self (p. 265). The sustained efforts to naturalize self, personal identity, and agency that were initiated by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume suffered from serious problems which were largely presaged by Kant who seems to have anticipated and pointed to the difficulties encumbering that effort. The apparent success resulted in establishing the scientific arbitration of what was to be seen as reality. The next section describes some of the significant efforts in psychology to grapple and challenge the apparent reductive naturalization of the aporetics of primarily personal identity, but also directed to the other aspects such as subjectivity, selfhood, and agency .

3.3 Appraising Personal Identities

Martin and Barresi (2003) observe that the analytic philosophical tradition of personal identity divides “neatly” into three divisions: from Plato until John Locke, from Locke to about the 1960s, and the contemporary time continuing on from the 1960s. The Platonic period viewed the self and identity as persisting after death and an either material or immaterial simple substance that accounted for the unity of a person. Locke promoted a relational account of identity that was intrinsic and entirely psychological, was dynamically in constant change, and was meant as a replacement of simple substance views. More extrinsic relational accounts of identity would not make an appearance until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century most notably by George Herbert Mead (1934), although Martin and Barresi seems to have largely overlooked Mead’s probable impact on psychological and analytic philosophical accounts of personal identity and self . An extrinsic relational account acknowledges the importance of other persons than oneself in establishing and recognizing personal identity and to otherwise contribute to personhood. The third period, the 1960s to present, addresses not only intrinsic but also, in addition to Mead, more intensely extrinsic accounts of identity through a proliferation of fission scenarios as the prince and cobbler scenario of Locke (e.g., Martin and Barresi, 2003; pp. 3–4; 31–32). What emerges, or reemerges, is whether personal identity is at all important in consideration of overall survival. That is, what emerges as important in the examination of different fission scenarios is survival rather than persisting personal identity. Four-dimensional temporal accounts of identity make an appearance as a useful way of assessing identity. A traditional three-dimensional account includes a past, present, and future while a four-dimensional account consists of a series of momentary slices of a person’s life beginning with birth and including a series of temporarily short person-slices until one’s death. The assertion is that such an account is the only noncircular way of truly recognizing the particularities of the intimate changes experienced through one’s life period. This sketched outline points to the increasing intricacies that surround identity attesting to its importance in our social interactions in a complex society .

The complexity that has evolved around the concept of identity directly ties to the plurality of the ways identity functions, both for a social system and for the person in that society. Our task is not to explore these practically and conceptually intricate relationships, and those who are interested are referred to Gallois (2015), Identity Over Time; Korfmacher (2015), Personal Identity; Noonan and Curtis (2014), Identity; and Shoemaker (2014), Personal Identity and Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Korfmacher in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy all well presented and representative of the rich issues concerning identity. In a larger context of human sciences, selves and selfhood are psychological phenomena while identities are not only psychological but also social and a political science phenomena; such a view is required to capture and to circumscribe the aporetic of selfhood (see Robinson, 2002).

In the context of political science, Kwame Appiah says “that identity is at the heart of human life: liberalism, [as he explored it], takes this picture seriously, and tries to construct a state and society that take account of the ethics of identity without losing sight of the values of personal autonomy ” (2005, pp. 267–268). There is no identity without autonomy and a capacity to choose in the context of aleatory environmental circumstance. That is, identity presumes autonomy and the act of choosing in an aleatory world illustrates identity as a core ingredient to constructing one’s life. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and others evolved the vocabulary necessary to articulate identity and self and their related concepts. Identity, in the enlightenment tradition of these thinkers, presupposes an embodied person and becomes an empty concept without the autonomous ability to choose in an uncertain environment. Those projects that have identified enlightenment and related liberal concepts as a source of intractable social problems seek to replace individual agency with collective and communitarian identities; to replace the person with an identity formulated by sociocultural constructive processes . These include Charles Taylor (1989, 2004), Holstein and Gubrium (2000), Kenneth Gergen (2009, 2010), and more recently Goodman and Collins (2019) as well as others. Taylor is vigorous in pursuing his conviction of the wrong headed nature of an autonomous individuality, referred to as a punctual disengaged self. It is not clear that such projects such as presented by Gergen are at all probable or possible, but the scope of Gergen’s project and the import of the conversation he is participating becomes clearer. Gergen’s account, it might be noted, introduces a different social constructivist reductionism to particular social patterns of interaction that contrasts with the hard naturalistic reductionism to the atoms and related particles constituting the material world. The result is two reductionist extremes of the hard naturalism of science and the sociocultural reductionism of Gergen’s social constructivism.

Our discussion has reviewed the central importance of identity as well as exploring those views extending to the insistence that the enlightenment developed autonomous identity is a mistake that has led to some very intractable problems of the modern global world. The conclusion that enlightenment thinking is basically “wrong” and requires replacement by something like a shared mutual co-action and co-identity (Gergen’s terms) contrasts sharply with Appiah’s suggestion that the enlightenment ‘philosophes’ error, if there was an error, was that they were not enlightened enough and that they were too imaginatively limited in their understanding of the range of shared human nature (Appiah, 2005, pp. 250–258). Not that enlightenment , so to speak, is the wrong project. Gergen’s formulation leaves out intention and, subsequently, agentic property essential to what is a person (Martin, Sugarman, & Thompson, 2003, pp. 41–43). What Gergen recognizes is that each person is the center of multiple identities, and selves, with corresponding voices. That is, each person is multi-voiced and is what Gergen refers to as a multi-being.

There are many who agree with the general direction of these assertions as noted above (Hermans, 2003; Hermans & Salgado, 2010; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000; McAdams, 2001). McAdams (2001, p. 116) suggests that Gergen underestimates the power of stories to integrate the person, and instead the stability and continuity of a person is provided by recurrent features of her interacting in the social environment. There are other possible, even probable, sources of integration as well (Baker, 2000, 2013, p. 121; James, 1890, pp. 378–380; 1902, p. 165; Zahavi, 2009, pp. 567–570). Returning to the opening discussion of the relation of identity and self, the suggestion was that it is only through, what can be termed, a diffusion of perspectives that the individual aspects and qualities of experience are understood and appropriately valued. A comparison of identity and self leads to an emergence of perspective as useful, if not necessary, to capture the different aspects of a person’s experience; and perhaps, different modes of experience. The rich range of one’s experience of living may be only captured and accounted by a full range of the levels of perspective.

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Footnotes

1

See the First Study for parallel conversations concerning Augustine in Jerrold Seigel (2005) and Charles Taylor (1989).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_4

4. Fourth Study: First-Personal Experience and Identity

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

MinenessOwnershipHard naturalismSoft naturalismReductionismIntention dependent objectsFirst-person perspectiveSecond-person perspectiveObjectiveThird-person perspectiveWe-perspective

One difficulty with the idea of a first-person experiencing and its perspective, is the challenge to a naturalistic reality. A reality that is congruent with science avoids appealing to magical supernatural entities or relations. Science is the standard lens through which reality is seen, and there is not a straightforward step to an account of subjectivity, first-person perspective, self, person, or personhood, or even an account for those social objects each person encounters in day-to-day interactions like parking meters, overtime, contracts, car keys, and the myriad other everyday things that require little and get little thought. What are the ontological beginnings of those things scientifically recognized to exist? In contrast, what are the ontological beginnings of those things not included in a scientific reality, but which arise out of social interactions and necessary to daily activities? A naturalistic science breaks down to the basic elements of reality. Reality can be reduced to atoms, electrons, and so on in the natural sciences that include generally physics, chemistry, and biology. It seems intuitively obvious that basic elements are lawfully related to constitute the external reality in which we exist. Yet the hard naturalistic scientific reality excludes much that make up our daily social lives and do not reduce to a scientific reality. The set of everything that is in course of living is not scientifically recognized. One of the issues addressed in this study is a metaphysics that describes how those real things fit together, how they are related, and how the ontological set of social entities and scientific material reality are posited together.

This tension is expressed in psychology between humanistic and scientific views of psychological events, between a holistic nonreductionistic view of an individual, social events and interactions, and the standard mainstream reductionistic view required by psychological science and more generally by science. Gordon Allport (1955) observes “…that for two generations psychologists have tried every conceivable way of accounting for the integration, organization, and striving of the human person without having recourse to the postulate of the self,” for the purpose of building a psychological science ‘self’ was perceived as too close to a ‘soul’ (pp. 36–37). He recognized then that “…the tide has turned.” A similar observation applies to the first-person perspective, the necessary part of a constituted self, in these current times with an increasing number of experimental psychological inquiries of first-and third-person perspectives (Bach, Fenton-Adams, & Tipper, 2014; Legrand & Ruby, 2009; Mattan, Quinn, Apperly, Sui, & Rotshtein, 2015; Rennie, Harris, & Webb, 2014). It is my assertion, following Lynne Rudder Baker, that a person can not exist unless a capacity for a first-person perspective is present. Stated alternatively, a person is a person because she exercises a first-person perspective. A person emerges when an organism with sufficient neural capacity engages a first-person perspective using language. This is asserted with a firm confidence that reality is materialistic, that it is naturalistic and without superstitious, magical, or independent unconnected substances as, for example, required by a Cartesian style dualism. More explicitly, there is no independent mental substance needed to account for a naturalistic reality, Cartesian or otherwise.

The assertion of first-person experiencing and the perspective of that experience raises a number of questions concerning what it is, and whether it can be fit into a scientific frame of reality. In a context of carefully constructed arguments asserting the central importance of a liberal nonreductive naturalism and first-person perspective, an argument by Baker, is that the criteria for inclusion in naturalistic ontology can be softened to include, what she terms, “intention dependent objects or phenomena,” (Baker, 2007, pp. 11–13). An intention dependent phenomenon is “…any object that could not exist in a world lacking beings with beliefs, desires, and intentions” (p. 11). Such phenomena, or objects, include promises, credit card, community expectations, kitchen utensils, garages, and on. Martin, Sugarman, and Hickinbottom (2010) use another strategy for ontologically including everyday objects by employing a global emergence account and recognizing differing general levels of reality that emerge. The core idea of emergence is that as the organization of a system becomes increasingly complex it begins to exhibit properties that are entirely novel to the original system introducing a ‘higher level’ of reality with properties that transcend the original constituent systems and are generally not predicted from them (Baker, 2007, pp. 237–239). An emergence of higher levels of reality avoids the requirement for hard naturalistic reduction and results in a nonreductive naturalism. Martin et al. argue that including a ‘sociocultural level of reality’ accommodates everyday objects that are identified as ‘intentionally dependent’ by Baker (Martin et al., p. 82). It should also be noted that achieving a nonreductive naturalism avoids deterministic constraints on human activities with the result that free action of choosing among affordant alternatives is more easily recognized as a property of a person.

4.1 Persons and Selfhood

Persons for Martin and colleagues emerge in human infants who have developed the complex neurology that make possible the cognitive processes and skills that make a reflective first-person perspective possible. In their view, personhood requires conceptual self-understanding (an empirical ‘me’), reflective agency, and personal identity that emerge “…from the ongoing participation in the world of human sociocultural practices—practices that are not only linguistic” (Martin et al., 2003, p. 113). While emergence succeeds in accounting for a nonreductive naturalism and explains the appearance of first-person perspective and self-understanding, there remains a fuzziness in the explanation. The relation of an organism to first-person perspective seems to leave some of the relationships involved, even required, out. The broadly consential definition of a psychological self, that includes Hermans, James, McAdams, Vygotsky, and others, Martin et al. refer to as a perspectival self. Such a self is understood as “…an embodied first-person perspective (an “I”), the worldly experiences of which enable a constantly evolving self-understanding (a “me”) with sufficient stability and coherence to permit generally effective personal functioning in the biophysical and sociocultural world in which it develops” (Martin et al., 2010, p. 110).

This definition attempts to occupy the middle between a hard scientific naturalism that requires determinism, and is a radical constructionism intending to follow Mead at a sociocultural level of reality (Martin et al., 2010, pp. 110–116). This careful attempt to capture what-a-self-is, nevertheless, is controversial. For one, there is a circularity in the dependence on social interaction for installing first-person perspective in a self. While circularity is not necessarily bad as it can be explanatorily useful, an empirical causal connection is weakened which is required in a ‘near natural’ reality, to use Baker’s phrase, and with the ‘psychological kinds’ postulated by Martin, et al. (Baker, 2013, p. 207; Martin et al., 2003, pp. 103–113). Other than a general context of sociocultural emergence, the relation is relatively indefinite between self, self-interpretation, and embodied social participation. In a second respect, subjectivity may require the recognition of a minimal self which the mere recognition of a subjective I does not fully account (Siderits, Thompson, & Zahavi, 2011; Zahavi, 2009). For-the-more, there is a passiveness to agency as well as intentional activity with the result that an exact specification of what is meant by agency is uncertain (Gallagher, 2012; Rovane, 2004). To establish a self-entity in this way creates an other problem: the appearance of an homuncular entity, which the concept of self is, perhaps, always in danger of evoking without specific recognition of the kinds of connecting relations, that is, causal relations, involved.

We will examine Lynne Rudder Baker’s detailed account of what a person is and how that person comes to be in the context of Martin and colleagues’ account and the respective criticisms noted. The goal is to show that the material constitution account of a first-person stance is more successful than the psychological kinds formulation of Martin et al. It is more successful because the constitution view is causally more direct and simpler, that is, it is explanatorily simpler and lighter.

4.2 Reflection and First-Personal Orientation

As Baker says “…first-person perspective - however it came about, by natural selection, by accident, or otherwise - makes such a difference that there is a difference in kind between beings that have it and beings that do not” (2000, p. 21). Three assumptions are specified in Baker’s inquiry: The first-person perspective occurs in a thoroughly material world and human persons are material beings; secondly, this world is a temporal world that endures through time and is not merely the sum of temporal parts; and third, identity is a strict identity; to use Baker’s illustration, if x differs from y in any way then x is not equal to y. These assumptions are viewed by Baker as a good way to investigate how far they can take an inquiry of understanding of what a person is and how large a range of questions regarding the properties of human persons can be answered and rebutted when called out (pp. 21–23). In the context of practical realism
(Baker, 2007), intentionally dependent objects, things that emerge from social interaction, have an ontological significance and require, more than simply deserve, reflection and consideration in our inquiries and deliberations. In addition, the human person is to be considered as a whole; is not reducible to parts that may be contrived to be its constituents. Our first-person experience requires a participant first-person perspective that is unique to the person who experiences, and who has properties that are not reducible to apparent constituents. It should be noted that such holistic properties have been recognized by others, and are not unique to Baker, and is what Martin and colleagues refer as psychological kinds
(Hacking, 1995, 1999, 2007).

What is it about first-person perspective that gives it the property of creating persons? To begin, it is the ability to see oneself from the inside. The capacity to sense myself and those thoughts, objects, and experiences that identify with that ‘sense of warmth’ unmistakably as my “I” (to use a phrase from James). This sense of warmth is similar to what Marya Schechtman refers as “…empathic warmth…” that maintains a connection with one’s past for maintaining those persistent conditions of personal identity (Schechtman, 2003, pp. 245–246). Following James, it is necessary to maintain the distinction between “I” and “Me” in which “Me” is the object one becomes to oneself, a self, or more accurately the selves of oneself. It is this “I” that centers those intentional activities engaged by an embodied human person that is embedded in a sociocultural world, to use Martin and colleagues’s terminology, and medium sized intentional objects, to use Baker’s terminology. These centered experiences are reflected by standard cognitive processes and become the content of the selves that make up a life, and continues a ‘loopy’[1] (a term borrowed from Hacking) ongoing reflective recursive cognitive process that becomes one’s inner life. It is this first-person experiencing, self-reflectivity of that experiencing, and its subsequent perspective that makes possible an inner life. It is the “Me” that coheres those constituents as a particular self.

Two processes are to be discriminated. The first is what might best be referred to as reflexivity and is automatic and preconscious, which is also to say preconceptual. It is not subject to the coarse examination of introspection, as introspective sensitivities are conscious and conceptual while reflexivity is not. It may be said to be habitual as automatic, but is not supposed as a reaction of a neuron or any particular neuronal system as affecting muscle groups or behavior. Reflexivity is a holistic process of a stream of thought, or mind, such as described by James. Reflectivity is a deliberate and intended action of viewing oneself in an experience that you have just had, or experiences had in the past. That is, seeing oneself as a concept that is Me, from the outside in a third-person perspective as any other person in the social community would see oneself. This splitting of subjectivity of oneself from the outside world, that is, splitting the first-person “I” from the concept of oneself in the outside world creates third-person perspective, a concept of oneself.

This splitting becomes embedded in language and in one’s use of language, and is what Baker refers to as ‘the datum’ (Baker, 2000; pp. 60–69; 2013; pp. 64–65). The statement “I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill” is such an example illustrating the speaker of this sentence experiences herself in two different ways. One is to think of oneself as oneself, designated I∗, which reflects back and represents the speaker of the sentence, and the other is the speaker or thinker of the thought who happens to be oneself, designated I, about who the sentence refers. There is illustrated, then, two different beliefs of oneself. The asterisk of I∗ (I star) is a practice initiated by Hector-Neri Casteñada[2] and followed by Baker to indicate the reference of oneself∗ as oneself without assisted identification from an impersonal third-person perspective or referential device. The “I” is a marker of perception and is a weak or rudimentary first-person perspective that is exhibited or shared by any problem solving animal such as a dog, lion, gorilla, and an infant prior to acquiring a competent use of language and an ability to employ an “I∗”, self-reference. A rudimentary first-person perspective is a property of all problem solving organisms that encounter daily circumstantial difficulties such acquiring food, remaining undetected, and on. An infant or young child also exhibits rudimentary first-person perspective until developing sufficiently to acquire the ability to perceive herself∗ as herself in relationship to reflectively conceiving of herself thereby exhibiting robust first-person perspective (Castañeda, 1999).

4.3 Practical Realism and the Constitution View

In Baker’s psychological philosophy anything that has robust first-person perspective, human or not, is a person (2000, p. 91). The requirement for the emergence of a person is an organism, or entity, with sufficient neurological like structures to support the complex cognitive processes necessary for self-consciousness and a first-person perspective. The relation between the organism and person is one of material constitution that establishes a union between a body and the entity that is self-conscious, a person that is embodied, but which has a different identity. A human person is in union with the organism that constitutes it, but is not identical to it. The person exhibits a difference from an organism in primary kind that has ontological significance by virtue of the property of self-consciousness. To refer back to Martin and colleagues vocabulary, a new level of reality, as sociocultural reality, emerges which they refer as psychological kinds
. For Baker, ontological significant properties create the persistent conditions that set the requirements for survival (2007, pp. 218–226).

We now come to the issue of personal identity across time. Our discussion has been concerned with how a ‘person’ that is self-conscious emerges as a result of acquiring a first-person perspective. This is a synchronic question in a context of being present in a net of relations as a perspectival point of view which cannot arise in the absence of the relations. The diachronic issue is how a person at one time is the same person at another time and extends the discussion to what is ascribed as personal identity. Baker asserts that what is essential in one’s personal identity is a first-personal perspective because describing one’s personal identity by using nonpersonal facts, from a third-person perspective, cannot address what personal identity is or of what it consists. In Baker’s words:

We can use sameness of body, sameness of living organism, sameness of brain, and psychological continuity as evidence of personal identity, but none of these proposed criteria show what personal identity consists in. Again, this is no surprise: Why would anyone assume (as almost everyone does) that personal identity consists in any other, nonpersonal facts anyway? (2000, p. 131)

In sum, according to the Constitution View, personal identity over time is unanalyzable in any more basic terms than sameness of first-person perspective. Although the Constitution View has no noncircular (i.e., reductive) account of personal identity over time, it does better than its rivals, and it allows for robust realism about persons and determinacy about questions of personal identity. (p. 138)

‍Personal identity is unanalyzable from a third-person view ‘from nowhere’ not because a person is a nonmaterial spiritual substance, but, as Appiah noted, there is no middle ground between first-personal experience and third-personal normative observation (2005, pp. 58–61). There is an incommensurability of first-and third-person perspective that can be ignored only in the face of conflation that is similar to that of conflating logical categories, and in this case ontological categories. Conflating or overlapping psychological categories (or levels of psychological kinds) is a similar error as overlapping logical categories. There is also the fact that what is immediately present cannot be described, that the ‘present’ only can be pointed to; which adds a kind of vagueness, an uncertainty, around the boundaries of first-personal experiences and perspectives described by Baker (2007, pp. 121–141). Baker’s view, the Constitution View, is fully compatible to a practical realism that can be termed a liberal naturalism
, and is fully resolvable to a materialistic metaphysic.

A relaxed hard naturalism, it may be noticed, in a context of near naturalism constructs metaphysical relations in which a ‘scientific’ materialism, or naturalism, that is not exhausted within definite unchallenged boundaries containing it, beyond which nothing ontologically is present, and, instead, is embedded in the metaphysical relations that forms it own contextual environment. This environment is the cultural institutional supports for activities society knows as science. This near naturalism
, would seem to be a situation that could be seen as more coherent and harmonious and which more faithfully reflects the circumstances we find ourselves than a scientific materialism, that is a hard naturalism, taken to exhaust reality. Science as an activity, and a social entity, occurs in a cultural and social context that empowers its institutional presence. The near, soft, or liberal naturalism seeks to capture this state of affairs and reflect that persons act within the space of reasons (Ganeri, 2012, pp. 19–21).

4.4 Perspectival Maintenance

This section has been about how first-person perspective relates to identity. It reveals that relation to be one of dependency. As Baker says, there is circularity to a first-personal identification of personal identity , but that this way of explaining is superior to third-person impersonal attempts to accomplish that purpose, which in fact it cannot, at least with any satisfaction to closure. This section introduces Baker’s thorough psychological philosophy which accomplishes some closure of the near naturalism issue though not without controversy. There are several areas of rather intense controversy, including the rejection of the hard naturalism that is arbitrated by natural science and the reductionism that it requires, and subsequently the rejection of the methodological and epistemologically normative third-person description of a monistic reality. There are other philosophers who have similar approaches to person, agency, relationships, and attitudes, such as John Macmurray, that are not inconsequential; however my choice in this discussion is Lynne Rudder Baker’s corpus for clarity and specificity (Macmurray, 1957, 1961). For this reason, the Constitution View is not presented as the only correct solution to an untenable, in my view, reductionistic mainstream psychological science, rather a probable affordance for resolving the largely unspoken tension between first-person owned experience and impersonal third-person attempted descriptions of that experience.

4.4.1 Psychological Kinds and an Emergent First-Person

A closer comparison of Martin, Sugarman, and colleagues with Baker may be revealing as their account of psychological kinds has similar aspects to Baker’s constitution view. There is agreement concerning the incompleteness of hard naturalism to accommodate adequately those objects actually encountered in everyday living, objects that are encountered daily with little thought, and a necessity of an organism with sufficient neurological structures that support reflective cognitive processes. Significant differences emerge in Martin and colleagues’s two presentations describing the embodied intersubjectivity embedded in their cultural structures. They perceive this conjoint interaction to project personhood into an organism with the essential characteristics of conceptual self-understanding and reflective agency which makes possible self-determined action and personal identity. That is, sociocultural patterns of practices have an integrity and momentum of their own that projects the properties of personhood into a sufficiently equipped organism. Similar to Mead, the social interactive processes take on a momentum of their own that constitutes the person that is contained by the reflective cognitive processes of self-understanding and reflects first-person perspective.

This socially emergent account of a person contrasts with the constitution view as laid out by Baker in which an organism with adequate neurological like structures constitutes a person when a first-person perspective developmentally emerges. Baker’s constitution view posits the constitution of personhood as the developmental emergence of a robust first-person sense of appropriating experience in a social and cultural context. Martin and colleagues exert significant effort to keep the “conceptual self-understanding” that they see as the necessary constituent of a person in a third-personal framework of knowledge and a view of first-person perspective that is closer to what might otherwise be seen as an aspect of identity. Specifically, perspective, first-personal and otherwise, is constrained to “…perceptual and conceptual orientations to a situation with a view to acting within that situation” (Martin et al., 2010; p. 117), and a few pages later citing Mead “Reality is a field of perspectives “characterized by the relation of an organic individual to his environment of world. The world, things, and the individual are what they are because of this relation.”” (p. 120).

In sum, perspective as described in Martin and colleagues account is constrained to third-person normative perspective and it is unlikely to satisfactorily account for persons or for an adequate account of their inner lives despite their highly attractive presentation of psychological kinds encompassing agency and persons. In addition, while the ontological concerns were attended to and may be well accounted for with a liberal naturalism resulting from the emergent sociocultural level of reality of psychological kinds that includes everyday objects encountered in living, the metaphysical relations between recognized ontological entities seem stark, are perhaps undeveloped, and presents a confused picture of causal relations. The constitution view promises a more direct approach that can win some success in circumscribing the self-aporetic and developing coherence with some consensus in how self, persons, identity, and agency relate to each other and how they may be constructively used to advantage in human sciences.

It is recognized that there is something significant and, perhaps, essential captured by each of the several accounts of selfhood , persons and personhood, identity, subjectivity, and agency that have been described above that can be appreciated and even admired. Where they fall short is in an incomplete recognition of the full range of perspectivity, that is first-, second-, and a third-person perspectives that, it is asserted, is required to engage and apprehend the full richness of a person’s life activities embedded in the sociocultural institution one finds oneself. It is anticipated that when the full horizon of a self-aporetic is apprehended a thorough psychological space results that includes sociocultural macro-levels of moral-legal, social-political, aesthetic, and spiritual institutional infrastructures. If on that same horizon, the perspective is reversed in the direction of a person-side of phenomena to one’s inner life, the micro-levels of subjectivity, agency, personhood, and identity that are dependent on preconscious reflexivity and directed reflectivity can be noted and investigated. This all within a single thorough full horizon of the self-aporetic. Second-person perspective fully accounts for intersubjectivity as so richly described by Mead, and is not neglected as described by Martin, Sugarman, and colleagues. First-person perspective, as described by Baker, sets-up and provides the participants of intersubjective processes which are described in subsequent studies. To anticipate, it is proposed thinking to be perceived as an intersubjective core of a person rather than, as proposed by Martin, Sugarman, and colleagues, self-knowledge. It is generally asserted that a full spectrum of perspectival orientations are required to capture the entire richness of the life world.

4.4.2 Preliminary Look of Second-Person Perspective

Second-person perspective refers to, as the terminology suggests, a two person engagement concerning a common project or intimate relation directed to meeting each others needs in the present. An immediate present act that subsequently is lost in a resulting historical object and is, thereby, visible only in the third-person perspective. As Emmanuel Levinas would say “the saying is lost in the said” as the present moment can only be pointed to and cannot be captured for examination (Levinas, 1981; Levinas, 1987, pp. 126, 170). The link between a person with an other is occupying a second-person perspective: a direct face-to-face confrontation. It is that confrontation which founds intersubjective ethics as asserted by Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1981) and Stephen Darwall (2006) in two entirely different accounts emanating from very different origins.

A second-person perspective is instantiated when two persons engage in a shared project which may be no more than a conversation or other shared activity. Such an engagement may be entirely second-personal singular or achieve a limited first-personal plural relation. Such a relation has a graduated dimensional property and is not a binary either-or commitment. This dimension is explored later, but is related to sharing a unified perspective of the task engaged or whether individually engaging the task with limited awareness each of the other. First-person commitment initiates the relation irrespective of it properties. Second-person engagement generates a you-me experience in which a reciprocating triadic structured interaction that each is aware of the other concurrently attending to the project and, at the same time, each is aware that the other is aware of oneself. This face-to-face second-person experience establishes the intersubjectivity “through which the world acquires the character of a truly social world” and is foundation of complex social relations and institutions of culture (Zahavi, 2014, p. 248). Once the significance of we-experience and we-intentionality is recognized, it becomes apparent that third-person objective only theory of mind formulations are not necessary and, indeed, an empty concept (Goldman, 2006; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992, 2012; Zahavi, 2014).

There are other forms of we intentionality that broaden the transitory face-to-face we experience. For example, a “we won” when a college football team wins a homecoming game, or a “we will win” are derived we intentions that are extensions of a fundamental second-person we-experience. The question invited is whether a collective we-intentionality that transcends a second-person perspective? The answer of many thinkers is yes. It turns out to be a growing literature asserting collective intentionality to include J. R. Searle, Alfred Schutz, H. B. Schmid, and L. Schilback (Brinck, Reddy, & Zahavi, 2017; Szanto & Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2014, 2015). There are, then, not only first-, second-, and third-person perspectives, but also a we-perspective by which the full richness of a person’s experience at all levels of sociocultural reality need to be viewed in order to be apprehended. In the light of this consideration, it is perhaps not too much of stretch to assert a type of perspectival diffusion is necessary to apprehend how a person fits in a life world, to use a term from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

4.4.3 Scientific Resistance to First-Person Perspective

Before a more complete examination of robust first-person perspectively constituted personhood, it is necessary to examine those arguments marshalled to defend what might seem to be a degradation of the scientific pursuit of knowledge and its third-person perspectival methodology. The cumulative technological successes of the last century are credited to be a powerful argument for continuing unchanged current scientific conceptual framework and practices. Indeed, this scientific success is unquestioned although it may be questioned that an expanded metaphysical framework need not, and even should not, degrade this methodological success. Rather, the goal is to expand this success to what may be recognized as the human sciences, and perhaps a phenomenological psychology as a part of this expanded success. This conjecture is, of course, controversial. Some reasons for this controversy is examined in the next study.

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Footnotes

1

This is a term introduced by Ian Hacking (1995) as the “…looping or feedback effect involving the introduction of classifications of people.”

2

This is presented in a collection of essays in The PhenomenoLogic of the I: Essays on Self-consciousness by Hector-Neri Casteñada and edited by James G. Hart and Tomis Kapitan. Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Others have also used the convention of I∗ to indicate subjective first-person experience and action, for example, Matthews, Gareth B (1977). “Surviving As.” Analysis 37(2): 53–58.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_5

5. Fifth Study: Quining the First-Personal Perspective

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

Philosophy of scienceOntologyHard naturalismSoft naturalismIntention dependent objectsHeterophenomenologyPhenomenal self modelQualiaIndexicalReflexive

There are strong, and for some compelling, reasons raised resisting what is seen as a degradation of objective scientific reality by the intrusion of incompatible nonreductive first-person events into a scientific reality. There is no tolerance for an irreducible first-person perspectives or irreducible first-person facts. The resulting attempts to naturalize first-person perspective consist of either eliminative or reductionist strategies that are skillfully threaded by Baker’s discussion and in which, it is asserted, the ineliminable nature of first-person perspective is convincingly established (Baker, 2000, 2007, 2013). Denying ontological existence to an entity is to attack at the level of its foundation. However, as pointed out by Flanagan (1992, p. 21), denying the existence of something that everybody thinks exists occurs with enough frequency in philosophy that it is recognized by being named. Quining is a gerund of the verb ‘to quine’ in honor of W.V.O. Quine, and means to deny resolutely the existence or the importance of something that is usually taken as real or significant (Dennett, 1988; Flanagan, 1992). Dennett is concerned with ‘qualia ’ while Flanagan with ‘consciousness’. Evident from the discussion in the preceding chapter, our concern is the notion of perspective, and at present in particularly first-person perspective and the facts relating to it.

5.1 Philosophy of Science and the First-Person

The purpose of this study is not to present this conversation in all its complexity and sometimes its indefiniteness, but acknowledge the distrust and outright opposition to first-person perspective and phenomenological description that appears grounded on the intuition that naturalistic integrity requires third-person perspective. How is it that the first-person perspective challenges or compromises scientific naturalism? The guiding intuition seems to be that the ontological inclusion of first-personal facts obscure, or is seen to obscure the epistemological process required by science by including relationships inimical to a scientific naturalism that allows appropriate causal closure. First-person facts include I’s and related subjective processes which are outside a naturalistic ontology . In general, a unified science and reductionism are two sides of the same coin. That is, a unified science requires reductionism which is threatened by the spectre of a nonreductive first-person perspective. The alternative extreme is that a unified science in a liberal naturalism is not achievable. The result is that in the context of scientific naturalism varied attempts to naturalize first-person events. We explore the general strategies employed to this purpose, and, following Baker, show how these fail to overcome the nonreductive and ineliminable nature of the first-person perspective for apprehending the full richness of living in a world that requires experience and intentional objects. The mutual goal, however, is to describe reality as accurately as achievable given the metaphysical constraints, that is, given the underlying assumptions of a specific descriptive effort. A question is how to test the different and incompatible descriptions, the different theoretical formulations to determine which is true or most congruent with the world. Is it conceivable that two incompatible conceptions of reality hold equal truth in the space of propositional reason? Unless there are other considerations, this would seem the situation we are presented; with all the tension of a paradox. It can be argued that the current tension between psychological science and the professional practice of psychology, even when the latter is informed by psychological science, fits to that description. This is a situation of some drama.

This may be the case, and it is interesting that no less significant a person than Quine defends that such a drama may be justified when more than one empirically equivalent world theory holds. Quine is cited by Nelson and Nelson (2000, p. 84) as asserting:

[When the two theories are equally simple and natural] we can no longer excuse unequal treatment of [them] on the ground that our own is more elegant, but still we plead that we have no higher access to truth than our evolving theory, however fallible (Quine, 2000; p. 99 as cited).

However, it will become evident, if it is not already, that it is unlikely that the concept of first-person perspective and hard scientific naturalism whose purpose is maintaining a unified science are equivalent.

An important consideration that challenges a scientific hard naturalism that is taken to exhaust, that is, to include all, the things that causally exist and are subject to reduction: that consideration is that it is self-contained and thereby vacuously circular. This consideration is expressed by Quine as follows:

When questions regarding the ontology of a theory are meaningless absolutely, and become meaningful relative to a background theory, this is not in general because the background theory has a wider universe. One is tempted to, a little while back, to suppose that it is; but one is then wrong.

What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely is not universality but circularity. A question of the form “What is an F?” can be answered only by recourse to a further term: “An F is a G.” The answer makes only relative sense: sense relative the uncritical acceptance of “G” (Quine, 1969, p. 53).

Quine’s statement describes a scientific hard naturalism situated as to create not only indefinite and diffuse edges at its boundaries, but also with less coherence, a vagueness of coherence to the naturalistic program referred to by Quine as ‘indeterminacy’ (Quine, 1990; pp. 101–102 as cited in Nelson & Nelson, 2000, p. 81). As it became clear that truth or reality could not be expressed mathematically and analytically, Quine advocated a turn to psychology as a natural science. Said differently, epistemology now has to rely on psychology, on psychological process, as having an access to experiential sensory input to provide the connection between observational evidence and theory that Quine considers the central concern of epistemology which “…falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence natural science” (1969, p.82). This is an interesting position that defines an essential role for psychology in hard naturalistic science whether or not such a position is sought. It provides validity to Hume’s dream, or perhaps insight, that psychology is, or should be, the foundation of scientific knowledge (see Sect. 3.2, Naturalizing Personal Identity).

The significance as well as the boldness of Quine’s move, endorsing psychological science, as necessary to the practice of science as a required replacement of epistemological functions should not be overlooked. Such a position picks the psychologism side of a deep divide between allowing or fiercely rejecting psychological explanations of empirical and logical issues. What is included as a psychologism is widely varied with little agreement of what it was, and currently is, as shown by Martin Kusch (1995, pp. 95–121), and originally referred to the attempts to base philosophical concepts on psychological explanatory accounts. This concern intensified and perhaps reached its harshest expression when Gottlob Frege criticized Edmund Husserl’s 1891 publication of Philosophy of Arithmetic for the attempt to explain mathematical and logical relations by an appeal to psychology. Frege’s antipsychologism accusation embarrassed a young Husserl and triggered a defense that, as a result, sought to further strengthen the antipsychologism arguments. The principle was to defend the analytic self-sufficient integrity of logic and mathematical reasoning from the uncertainty of psychological events such as observations of behavior (Kusch, 1995). Quine showed that the attempt to establish unquestioned analytic integrity and maintain a certainty of truth failed (Quine, 1969; pp. 28–29, pp. 71–72). It turned out that logic and mathematical reasoning were unexpectedly not equal to the analytic task set for it so that the uncertainty introduced by psychologism is required according to Quine. This should not be interpreted as a friendliness to first-person perspective as set out by Baker. While creating a space for scientific psychology, it is a naturalistic psychology that is occupied by naturalistic cognitive psychology and neuroscience. There is no ontological space for, or recognition of, perspective and especially of first-person perspective as there is scarcely a recognition of intention and agency

. Quine’s naturalistic metaphysics firmly and fiercely excludes perspective as well as intention, first-person perspective is eliminated from the ontology acknowledged by the naturalism described by Quine. What is interesting is Quine’s direct appeal to psychology as, not so much, a replacement, but to conjoin with epistemology and language to establish pragmatic theories of science that can be strengthened or falsified in their turn (Hylton, 2014, pp. 31–32).

5.2 Folk Psychology and Science

Wilfrid Sellars approaches psychological concepts differently by regarding them as any other theoretical concept which are then acceptable as science. Meaning in this theoretical frame is then functionally defined by the terms and definitions of each theory so that referential issues of normative language need not be addressed. Sellars is firmly on the antipsychologistic side of that divide, opposite Quine. He avers that first-person authority belong to “…concepts pertaining to such inner episodes as thought and essentially [are] intersubjective, as intersubjective as the concept of a positron and that the reporting role of these concepts—the fact that each of us has privileged access to his thoughts—constitutes a dimension …[of] …this intersubjective status” (deVries, 2015, pp. 24–26; Sellars, 1963, p. 172). For Sellars, thinking is preceded by language and the creation of an intersubjective world. Folk psychology, Sellars’ manifest view

, is separate or superseded by the scientific view because folk psychology, like any theory, will be replaced so that folk psychology that is concerned with daily living does not address understanding the realistic world that science confronts and evolves as a view independent of a scientific view. With this basic reasoning he declares:

… I am quite prepared to say that the common sense world of physical objects in Space and Time is unreal—that is, that there are no such things. Or, to put it less paradoxically, that in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what it is not that it is not (Sellars, 1963, p.158).

In summary, the general strategy followed by Sellars is to eliminate first-person perspective by including it as a normative event of language which situates first-person data in a communitarian frame that is implicitly a normative third-person context. This is the move that Sellars finds necessary in the reconstruction of empiricism (deVries, 2015, pp. 6–8, 42–44; Sellars, 1963, pp. 153–155). The relevant question is whether the varied and strong, to some compelling, scientific naturalism described by Quine and Sellars obviates first-person perspective of participation and of experience? Their influence is significant. In particular, deVries (2015) credits the Churchlands, Paul Churchland, a former student of Sellars, rigorous elimination of first-person perspective and the development of a theory of the theory of mind counter to first-person experience to the influence of Sellars (Churchland, 2002, 2011; Churchland, 1995; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992, 2012).

Scientific naturalism acknowledges as real only non-first-person entities and properties, only objective third-person observed entities and properties. This is framed large by these two arch-naturalists, Quine and Sellars, with no space for addressing a more liberal naturalism that might find an accommodation for first-person entities as primary kinds. The question is: What is good psychology? Which is to say: What is good scientific psychology? In the view of this presentation, these are equivalent questions, and affirms that the first-person perspective is accommodated without non-caused supernatural entities or relations in what is a liberal naturalism that includes self-concepts and intention dependent objects . This assertion, of course, follows Baker (2013), in that ‘good psychology’ must ontologically include all the entities that enable personal daily living in its full richness to be recognized and described. Only that way of describing living in the world that recognizes a self-concept

, an I∗-concept, of the form ‘I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill’ which can discriminate the distinction of thinking of oneself (an I) as oneself∗ (an I∗) can adequately describe a person and their relations in a complex social environment that may also include an extended cognition such as described by George Herbert Mead (see also Castañeda, 1999).

5.3 More Eliminative Accounts of Self-Concepts

Additional accounts of thinkers employing eliminative theories of first-person perspective are addressed in this section. The goal is to show that such accounts are often ingenious and significantly attractive although generally unsuccessful; with the result that a first-person perspective is ineliminable to a full and rich psychological understanding of a person. That is, stated more simply: good psychology requires adequately accommodating perspectives. It is argued that it is in this way that subjectivity and agency can be harmoniously appropriated and structured in a psychological space of understanding.

5.3.1 Phenomenal Self Model and Self Illusion

Our discussion begins with Thomas Metzinger (2000, 2003) who proposes a neuroscientific transparent self model that functions to apprehend the qualitative contents of conscious experience such as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, as ‘mine’ or ‘not mine’, as ‘my arm’ and ‘my action’, a ‘centered presence’ in an environmental context, and a ‘nowness’ or ‘presence’ (Metzinger, 2000, pp. 288–289; 2003, pp. 116–211). While he provides a detailed account of perspective, that there is a subject experiencing her participating in a social world is emphatically denied, such experiencing is only illusion. Metzinger avers subjectless subjective experience. A person, a subject that receives experience, is an artifact of a computational information-processing system that transiently appears, but is not real and which has no ontological status, that is, a person as a person and self do not exist. Metzinger attempts to provide a parallel and equally viable and coherent, in his view more viable, account of a phenomenal self without recourse to an I∗ index. There are problems that emerge that make that account untenable (Baker, 2013, pp. 95–99). Baker points out that an intentional thought engaging an environmental goal cannot only be accounted as the firing of specific neural correlates, but also as an indexical reflexivity that is required when tracking on one’s own activity, when communicating to another, and as well one’s internal dialogue of those communications. In this context, a strictly phenomenal content supervenient upon a neural correlational pattern fails to fully capture intentional behavior. An overlay of some arguments militating against Metzinger’s Phenomenal Self Model , as he designates it, can be more thoroughly examined in Baker (2013, pp. 80-100).

5.3.2 Heterophenomenology and Third-Person Science

First-person perspective is confronted entirely differently by Daniel Dennett. He, simply, denies that such a thing exists by generally attributing it to a myth of folk psychology, similar to Sellars, which is the everyday, non-scientific, account of intentional actions and thinking and is entirely unrelated to science (Huebner & Dennett 2009; Dennett, 1991, 2001, 2003). First-person accounts are no more than a special kind of third-person account of an action or interaction that “… exploits an experimental subject’s capacity for verbal communication” (Dennett, 2003, p. 6). It might be noticed that Dennett did, perhaps compelled to, use the term ‘subject’ despite his stated eschewal of such an entity as a ‘subject’ (p. 3). Examine, “…like another dimension: the private, subjective,‘first-person’ dimension” that is a “…quite radical or revolutionary alternative science?” or rather.

…a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that handsomely.

covers the ground — all the ground — of human consciousness, doing justice to all.

the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the experimental.

method that have worked so well in the rest of science. This third-person methodology, dubbed heterophenomenology (phenomenology of another not oneself), is, I have.

claimed, the sound way to take the first person point of view as seriously as it can.

be taken [that is, not taken seriously] (p. 1).

The resulting implication , contra the above quote, is that ‘subject’ and ‘first-person perspective’ are difficult to be, and perhaps simply cannot be, ignored by one’s choice despite the determined imperative pursued by Dennett (Dennett, 2001). Why that may be is interesting and poses a difficulty that Dennett is determined not to perceive, but arises none-the-less. Dennett avers that it is only the contents of mental thought that is to be determined as existing and that then can enter into a propositional framework to be evaluated as true or not true.

The only access to one’s behavior and experience, according to Dennett, is by questioning a person about her first-person experience, and, then secondly, to submit the result to an intentional and propositional evaluation. Using Gallagher and Zahavi’s description, heterophenomenology proposes a black box psychology that is a third-person version of phenomenology (2008, pp. 13–19). The point asserted by Dennett is that there is no such thing as phenomenology which is supposed to be a systematic examination of first-person experience. There are many difficulties with this extreme position and one of the more salient is overlooking the significance of linguistic indexicals

. If, for example, an experimental participant says that ‘I see a moving dot’, the scientist’s report of that datum is ‘She says the she∗ sees a moving dot’ or the equivalent statement ‘She sees a continuously moving dot’. This example, is used by Baker (2013, pp. 74-80) to illustrate that the linguistic index of who is reporting is inescapable if the scientist is to accurately track the data he is collecting. That is, if he is to accurately distinguish his reporting from her reporting, from the reporting of his experimental participant. It is not so certain that such situational markers are successfully translated into a supposed third-personal equivalent as claimed by Dennett. Baker observes that there is a significant difference between ‘she’ and ‘she∗’ that performs an important and even crucial function in daily adaptive living and cannot be eliminated in scientific and philosophical communications, although they can be ignored as Dennett demonstrates .

5.3.3 Reductionist Naturalism and Cognitive Psychology

The interdisciplinary relation of cognitive science and neuroscience reflects on the firm ‘co-dependence’ of these scientific endeavors. This dependence reflects a firm adherence to hard naturalism ’s reductionist commitment. The inherent third-person perspective results in an emphasis on epistemology and a vigilant search for an ‘epistemic warrant’ with little concern for the metaphysical and ontological entities that result. This unbalanced methodological stance excludes intention dependent artifacts that are necessary to full and rich living in, what has been called, a lifeworld.

A representative example and cognitive theoretical scientist of some achievement is Peter Carruthers who explicitly and vigorously denies first-person perspective. In a review of two defining presentations of phenomenal consciousness, What is it like to be a bat? and A view from nowhere, Carruthers clearly and explicitly denies a sense of ‘mineness’, a first-person perspective (Carruthers, 2000, pp. 31–32; Nagel, 1974, 1986). Thomas Nagel presents the phenomenal problem as: “How I can be a particular person?”, a two part question that is (1) “…how can I be a particular person?” and (2) “…how can I be merely a particular person?” These can be restated as ‘How can ‘me/TN’ be an I?’ and ‘How can I be a ‘me/TN’?’ when TN designates Thomas Nagel standing in for any living person. That is, the same question is asked in two different directions: from the direction of a social context to a subject, and from the direction of a subject to a social context. The subject is spoken of in the first-person while the me constituted in the social context as a social object is referenced in the third-person. The fact to wrap our understanding around is that we are located in an immense spatiotemporal world alone with other entities to include other ‘me’s’ that is without a center, “…should have produced [‘a’] me, of all people—and produced me by producing TN” (1986, pp. 54–57). These distinctions are those made by James and that have been and are now the center of our discussion (for example James, 1890, pp. 314–317, 323; 1892, pp. 201–203,).

Carruthers, as do mainstream cognitive scientists generally, objects, that while the first-person statement “I am TN” is a special kind of statement, it does not contain any information, any truth that cannot be stated from a third-person perspective which designates the special context it occurs and that is acceptable to science. He finds Nagel’s argument, as well as Wittgenstein’s similar observation, “…unconvincing…” that there is a sense of mineness of one’s experience that identifies it as one’s own and not of some one else. Carruthers asserts that, first, introspection is sufficient to account for any information relevant to describing a ‘first-personal’ situation, and that, secondly, self-understanding is achieved by observing our own behavior in the same way we observe and come to understand any other person (Carruthers, 2009, 2011; Wittgenstein, 1922, 5.64, 5.641).

An examination of the his argument supporting the insufficiency of Nagel’s reveals a thin assertion that “This argument is, too, unconvincing.” Carruthers does not accept or examine the semantic indexical

, the I, datum. The I am x statement depends on who makes it as well as when and where the statement is made. That is, it depends on the positional, or the perspectival, context it is stated which can be noted in a third-person statement, but cannot be duplicated. In Nagel’s words, “This cannot be used to manufacture a metaphysical mystery” (Nagel, 1986, p.59, pp. 57–60). TN or x does not need to know objectively who he/she is in order to make I statements. The term indexicals include such pronouns as I, she, it, and that; adverbs as here, now, and today; adjectives as my, her, and actual that are necessary for first-person communication (Braun, 2015; Prosser, 2015).

It is not clear, other than the assertion of preference, what the reasons for rejecting Nagel’s description of first-person statement of identity might be. Nagel argues that there is something left out, a gap between a first-person statement and its third-personal translation while Carruthers, and mainstream cognitive science, denies a gap or the significance of a gap. Baker’s ‘datum’ would seem to illustrate more clearly such a gap. Recall that the statement “I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill” illustrates two different beliefs of oneself without assistance from a third-person reference, that is, a person speaks of oneself∗ as oneself, a person refers to oneself. This act, it asserted and which Carruthers denies, does not translate to a third-person equivalent statement. The reluctance of cognitive science generally to admit a more liberal naturalism that would accommodate a nonreductionist first-person perspective is driven by the intuition to move beyond the particulars of first-personal experience and pursue a universal good and truth, to pursue methodological epistemic altruistic goal of universal good. Or, might it be that a reluctance of science, particularly cognitive science, to step from, not necessarily abandon, a delimited methodological third-personal perspective to include first-personal perspective reflects an anxiety of losing the identity of a science, an identity of a naturalistic science. That is, “These … at the outset apparently innocent [first-personal perspectives as presented by Nagel and Wittgenstein] are supposed to be inaccessible from the objective [third-person perspective] standpoint of science” (Carruthers, 2000, p. 31).

This narrow methodological limitation need not be the case if a more liberal naturalism allowed for an ontological presence of ‘intentionally dependent objects’ as proposed by Baker (1995, 2000, 2007, 2013) and others with similar proposals (Martin et al., 2003; Martin et al., 2010). First-person perspective is not a magical, mythological, or theological process just as a person is not magical or mythical entity, but is a natural process resulting in a person that is constituted and emergent: emergent upon a biological base and constituted by a robust first-person perspective. It is asserted that a full richness of a personal life cannot be experienced, conceptually grasped, and understood in the full richness of a lived life without a full perspectival range that includes first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives. One strategy for accomplishing such a goal is that proposed by Baker.

It may be instructive to recollect William James’s observations when introducing the Stream of Thought chapter in The Principles of Psychology

. In the Principles, he refers to the stream of thought, in the Briefer Course: Psychology he refers to stream of consciousness, and elsewhere he refers to stream of thinking and stream of pure experience all essentially equivalent phrases but with subtly different emphasis (1890, pp. 219–220; 1892; 1912, pp. 18, 23, 44). Most books on psychology begins, James observes, with sensations as the simplest mental facts and then build synthetically the “…higher stage from those below it.” He objects that “No one ever had a simple sensation by itself.” Such a procedure, a chosen methodological procedure, commits what seems “…at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. Bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable…” Elaborating in the Briefer Course, he says that while sensations are sequentially first, “Psychologically they might better have come last.” He asserts that “We begin our study of the mind from within,” and that “our study must be analytic.” In James’s view “The only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is the act of thinking itself…, and that The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on.”

The conclusion suggested is that the raging debate dominating mainstream scientific psychology, but which nevertheless is ignored by some and is intolerable to others, appears to have been anticipated by James, and is a consequence of what he described as a synthetic methodology of building the more complex psychological process and entities from atomistic sensations. To paraphrase Gallagher and Zahavi (2008), people are being accused of being introspectionists, heterophenomenologists, neurophenomenologists, and, even worse, phenomenologists (pp. 13–17). Using an objective third-person restricted methodology requires that the particularities of the first-person perspective are averaged out, and cannot, thereby, be evaluated by reductionist naturalistic science despite the inventiveness of such thinkers as Metzinger, Dennett, and Carruthers. The sense is that this is not a debate, raging or otherwise, that can proceed in a hermeneutic fashion to a reasonably consensual resolution. Rather there appears to be a general stasis of extremes, the result of which two independent nonparallel directions will be pursued and one, possibly, both will either fade from prehension, new alternatives will emerge, or one will substantially remain and provide the future theoretical theme for psychological investigation. To say this differently, there is no intuition, no evidence in view of an apodictic proof that will resolve the confrontation in favor of one or the other if the evidence of semantic indexicals are not acknowledged; to be investigated in a later study. It is asserted that a person’s lived life can only be apprehended in a full perspectival range that includes at least first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives. Baker describes first-person perspective and acquiring personhood that is one part of approaching that goal.

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_6

6. Sixth Study: Dimensions of Mineness

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

OwnershipFirst-person perspectivePersonParticipantImmersionIndividuationSelf—No-self

It is clear that the notions of naturalism, personhood, identity, and selfhood are complexly intertwined. To briefly recapitulate, the initial goal for investigating the aporetic of self was to explore its rather indefinite boundaries, and begins with Jerrold Seigel’s thorough survey of the idea self in the western intellectual tradition, The Idea of the Self (Seigel, 2005). He showed an intellectual conversation centering on self to be relatively continuous with growing intensity and complexity, and that the structure of the self aporetic, both the conversation and what-a-self-is and -does, was set by Kant, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume. This framework has been challenged by Foucault and generally by, what is referred to as, post-modern thought as the enlightenment formulation of self, but which has not been shown to be basically wrong although Gergen (2009, 2010, 2011), Taylor (1989), as well as others would disagree. Seigel found three dimensions of the self concept necessary to trace its western conceptual history: its embodied physicality, its social relatedness, and the processes of reflexivity and reflectivity resulting, roughly, in self-consciousness. Although these dimensions were not always consistently present or emphasized equally in all the various historical conversations of self concepts, they were persistently encountered. What is impressed upon one is its continuity and growing intensity that might not be evident except in a historical investigation as Seigel’s. What is also revealed is that as one investigates and studies selfhood, additional layers of what a self is and what it does comes into awareness. These layers, nevertheless, are not unending and can be breached or at least perceived with some specificity. Thoroughly circumscribing the self-aporetic is a goal of these psychological and, as it turns out, phenomenological investigations. An indefiniteness accompanies the boundary circumscribing the set of issues and problems designated as the self-aporetic since the hypostatic base of personhood is no less than Being, to follow Emmanuel Levinas. This set of issues is addressed later.

Baker’s constitutional view is that personhood is established by the acquisition of a robust first-personal perspective in a physiological body and establishes a foundation for further inquiries concerning the structures of its processes, and, further, of sub-cognitive processes underlying self-consciousness. The structured processes that are pre-cognitive are understood to be subjective and are the subject that receives the experience presented to a person. Some questions of concern include: Is there more to mineness, owning the experience one is having, that is necessary to grasp what subjectivity is? Are there dimensions of mineness? What is the place of subjectivity for a person? Does mineness as revealed in the competent use of linguistic indexicals have other constituting properties? How does mineness structure or contribute to subjectivity? How does mineness or, alternatively, a sense of sameness arise in subjectivity? A related question is whether liberal naturalism as proposed by Baker is the only form of liberal naturalism and is it the most efficient or effective way to accommodate personhood and its subjectivity? These questions may find illumination in comparison to the very long and rich Vedantic and Buddhist inspired conversation of a self and its nature, that is, the materialistic or naturalistic properties of a self. What is interesting about the Indian conversation centering on self is that it is just as continuous and as intense, perhaps longer in some aspects its history, as the Western counterpart to that conversation.

Jonardon Ganeri presents a series of investigations of the Indian extended 2500 year conversation of a self and the related forms of naturalism which he then relates to current modern philosophical investigations. Ganeri reveals that in many ways the two independent conversations, the Vedantic-Buddhist and the Western European, concerning self, share significant points of contact and whose similarities are sometimes not only parallel but also congruent and seemingly intertwined overlays of the other (Ganeri, 2001; 2007; 2012). The Indian conversation supports and adds breadth and depth to the first-person perspective described by Baker (2013) and is to show how the first-person constitution view is related and strengthened. It also contributes several new aspects to the concept of self which generally succeed in developing multiple ways of approaching the concept and reality of selfhood.

One goal in this study is to examine the Indian long conversation concerning the nature of what is a self, how it is conceptualized, and how a self relates to a naturalistic account of the real. Said differently, a goal of this study is to explore hard and liberal naturalism as set forth by Indian thinkers and where the concept of self fits in this naturalistic context. This endeavor will at times be difficult, but hopefully helpful in enlarging the possibilities of how the self and subjectivity is perceived to promise some benefit in improved verity and usefulness.

Ganeri does not exhibit the same caution as Baker in using the term self rather than person since the self-term is what is directly addressed in the Vedantic and Buddhist inspired largely uninterrupted Indian conversation. Baker’s caution in referencing self is the risk of invoking an homuncular entity in an already metaphysically and ontologically complex subject. In the Indian conversation, self provides a center around which other naturalistic and logical investigations are undertaken. Ganeri argues that the self is the processional negotiation between the appropriation of experience that is mine and the context of the appropriated experience in the mental states that are the space of one’s emotions, preferences, and beliefs that are grounded in unconscious monitoring. Three dimensions jointly constitute mineness or self, or to use Baker’s terminology person that constitute “…the first-person stance at once lived, engaged, and underwritten” that “…is in harmony with the idea of the natural” (Ganeri, 2012, p. 15). These three dimensions constitute the first-person stance and include (1) immersion , a subject that is fully wrapped and surrounded by one’s experience as if breathing it; (2) as participant , an embodied agent that fully occupies a first-person stance engaging in a changing experience according to the normative appeals of emotions, preferences, and beliefs; and (3) as an underself, a subconscious monitoring and coordination of the subjectivity processes (pp. 14–15).

6.1 Some Considerations of Hard Naturalism

According to Ganeri (2012) the naturalism themes in India evolve in direct response to Vedic ritual law. Ritual law described “…resemblance-mediated connections between small-scale and large-scale phenomena…” that are judged effective because the small-scale processes are set up “…in proper isomorphism with an intended large-scale effect, will benefit in a law-like fashion accordingly, that some good will come of their performance” (p. 25). Ritual law was understood as a parallel causal law outside of and independent of natural law. Ganeri argues that this distinction between ritual law and hard naturalism is not so different than Sellars distinction between what he designates as the manifest view indicating all ordinary beliefs that are relatively unpredictable, and what he designates as scientific naturalism, a scientifically constructed theory (Ganeri, 2012, p. 29; Sellars, 1963, pp. 156–159). Early Indian efforts were to develop a naturalistic understanding of human lives independent of the supernatural influences of ritual law and other divine agencies, and that would reflect and be based in the natural world. Two varieties of naturalism emerged in this context. One was to develop a naturalism based on individual nature or the particularities of differences in persons, between the same kinds of animals, and so on. The result was to establish the existence of individual natures as an alternative explanation for variations of things and their individual characteristics that is based on material reality of the world. A coexisting second variety of hard naturalism was one based on the causal closure of physical world. In such a system mental events become epiphenomenal, but more specifically the main interest in this theory was to show that moral properties are epiphenomenal and that there are no laws of karma, laws governing the regularities between good and bad behavior and the distribution of happiness and suffering. In this way argues Ganeri, early Indian thinkers enter the area of theorizing about human nature that includes a concept of self that is already deeply embedded in Vedic culture. The general principle that appears is that everything, including especially mental and moral events, supervene on the total physical world. There are no alterations in human well-being without some accompanying changes in the physical world. Such a causally closed physical world then is fully determined. What is also be of interest are the methodological procedures that arrive at the hard naturalism described that is not so different from a Western form of naturalism.

6.2 Considering Varieties of Liberal Naturalism

Ganeri points to two general types of naturalism : One derived from the a realm of laws ideally illustrated by physics and a second based on moral normative reasoning (a space of reasons) that requires justification. Neither needs to account for what it is to be human or for mental events as these are seen to be irreal or epiphenomenal. However, “What is needed,… is a conception of the natural in which properly to locate a description of our humanity” (Ganeri, 2012, p. 21). This conceptual space, a space of reasons, cannot be created in the context of hard determinism of a causally closed naturalism. One of the first responses of Indian thinkers in rejecting ritual law was to accept a hard determinism of a causally closed system. This thinking was countered by a tradition beginning in about the Second Century with the intention of saving naturalism from an epiphenomenalism, that mental events and resulting mental objects are artifacts of corresponding physical events with no further significance. This group of naturalist thinkers proposed that as the complexity of physical events increased mental events supervened or emerged that were then not reducible to those physical events. A full accounting of reality then must not only include the physical base from which mental events are supervenient, but additionally mental events that are irreducible to the base.

The man who became known as Buddha introduced a variety of liberal naturalism by constructing a space of reasons, that is, of a system of rational reasoning directed to understanding reality. Accordingly, a correct understanding of reality is tied to a soteriological goal of ending one’s craving and suffering that is caused by wrong belief, an incorrect understanding of reality. Said differently, self understanding was tied to correctly understanding the material world “…as an antidote to the poison that is the will to structure the world according to one’s own concepts and categories” (Ganeri, 2007, p. 116). It is one’s choice to pursue an arduous path of gaining the understanding of how misconception comes about inevitably in the course of normally living, even in a well lived life. A person in the course of living is “Presented with reasons, [with the result that] one forms a conception of oneself as possibly benefited by something: this is a fundamental transition into a value-laden first-person perspective (Ganeri, 2012, pp. 31–32). This frame is presented as causal and associated with reason-giving and justification. Within this framework, Buddhism denies a real self but disagrees with Hume by asserting that one is aware of a phenomenological self, that it is a mere appearance, and that that appearance is not genuine, a view with similarities to Metzinger’s account of a Phenomenal Self Model which appears to have been inspired by the Buddhist conception. What is denied is that the perception of what appears to be a self is real and, further, one’s normal perception is misled to a false understanding of the world that then further ensnares the person in ignorance. To achieve a correct understanding of one’s experience in the world, it is necessary to resist accepting one’s self as real. This is a liberal naturalism, Ganeri asserts that the system of rational thinking, the space of reasons constructed was intended to replace the ritual law doctrine. The achievement of the Buddhist formulation was to simultaneously reject the Vedic universal self and to reject the hard naturalism of the day; occupying a conceptual middle space between them. Ganeri argues that the denial of a real self results in rejecting the idea of a participant self with the result that the skill to be achieved by a Buddhist practitioner is of actively observing the particular uniqueness of one’s lived life (pp. 31–32).

There is another version of liberal naturalism that is thoroughly materialistic that holds that the mind, the capacity to think and generate reasons, “…is not transparent to itself; there are both affective and cognitive processes below the level of consciousness; [that is,] the self is essentially embodied; [and] content is external [in the world]” (p. 33). Two points Ganeri considers significant needs to be noted about this conception of self: this self is not conscious cognition and, second, it is what makes mental life possible. For the reason that a self is not conscious, mental life is not Cartesian and is, in fact, thoroughly non-Cartesian. This conception of self is not a hard naturalism and at the same time not a phenomenal conception, but presents the conceptual middle area. Ganeri suggests that this formulation is one of the first examples of participant ownership of thought, emotion, and intentions, and, further, that phenomenal and intentional structures are explained by subpersonal processes consisting of attention, comparison, and coordination (pp. 33–34).

These are three examples of liberal naturalism to emerge from Vedic and Buddhist thought, some of which will be used by Ganeri to construct a plausible working concept of a self. It provides some context for Baker’s constitution view and adds some structural richness to the notion of a robust first-person perspective. Ganeri’s review of Indian thought suggests several directions to follow concerning what a self is and how a first-person perspective is occupied. The question then emerges, not only of what a plausible and useful concept of a person or self might be but also, of how many different self-concepts may be possible. If there are several reasonable concepts of a self that fit in the physical world through a liberal naturalism, how is the discrimination made as to which is most congruent with reality? The next section addresses a taxonomy of different conceptions of a self and addresses the methodological issue of discriminating between various self concepts .

6.3 A Proposed Taxonomy of Self Concepts

The question What am I? is superseded by the more important Who am I? which confronts a concept and reality of a self. These questions are addressed by illuminating the relation between me and my thoughts, between a person and how the first-person stance is occupied, between an person and an inner life, and between a person and a body. Further and intersubjectively essential, a self concept must account for the relation of a person to the physical environment and social melieu as there is no individual self that is not related to others. A self exists only so long as it related to others; a person is a person in relation to other persons. There appear three possible regions a self can be centered: in a physical body, in the intersubjective relations one engages, and in the stream of experience-thinking. The first-person constitutional account enumerates the dependent nature of the physical organism and reflexive indexical for a person; that a self emerges when in a relation to another in a social milieu, and, as James points to, the always present stream of experience as a basic psychological fact of a person.

There are two properties to be distinguished by which experience, subjectivity, agency, a physical embodiment of these processes, and in which inheres a self: these two properties are individuating and ownership relations. A base for individuating processes is required by the supervenient relation of mental events to a physical body and provides for the ontological presence of a self prior to epistemological and linguistic processes. The individuating basal relation is distinctly separate and independent of ownership. Individuation processes establish a continuing identity of the self in the context of other things, relations, and events of a setting in a particular environment. On the other hand, ownership is the relation that describes the I’s appropriation of an experience as one’s own, and allows for one to say that an experience is mine, that they are not events simply happening to me, and that in some sense are me. Ownership then needs a place upon which it is dependent to take possession of an experience, individuation fixes an identity requires a base to establish an identity. These dimensions result is distinctive models of self.

Ganeri notes that these discriminations, individuation and ownership , can easily be allowed to intertwine and be conflated, but that these processes need to be carefully held separate. A common experience for many is visiting a sandy beach on a sunny day to swim, enjoy the fresh breeze, and warm sun. Feeling the warm sand beneath one’s feet and between the toes is a personal and particular experience that is one’s continuing identity in that pleasant environment; a self-awareness of having that experience as mine and mine alone is ownership. It may be helpful to notice that one’s identity is continuing and diachronic while ownership

, mineness is in the immediate present and synchronic. Following Baker, consider the following sentence “I am [oneself∗, a person that is] having an experience” which shows that one experiences oneself in two different ways. When considering this statement, note that it is shown in our next study that thinking and experience are interdependently entwined (Seventh Study, Chap. 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity).

In Indian theory

, this separation is aided by the two different technical terms referring to each: āśraya refers to the support or base of the particularity of identity and ādhāra points to the place or location an experience is experienced. Put simply, in an ownership view of self, experience is owned by selves and is individuated dependently on bodies (pp. 35–39). There are three different versions of these relationships: (1) a reductionist version, (2) an emergent version, and (3) a constitutional version. The reductionist version has been eliminated in earlier recognition that it is incompatible with required nonreductionist quality of mental events and especially first-person stance. An example of (2), an emergentist version has been developed by Martin et al. (2003, 2010) in recent psychological literature with some positive results. A constitutive view, (3), developed by Baker as discussed above. What is important to note is that the constitutive view is not reductionist nor is it emergentist because it is a broad rather than a narrow relation (Ganeri, 2012, p. 36). Ganeri’s view “…is that ownership is rooted in the deep psyche of the individual and in their propensities to endorsement, and individuation is determined by the essentially embodied character of a capacity for normative emotional response” (p. 39). With these considerations, Ganeri reconstructs a taxonomy of self concepts that emerged in Vedic, Buddhist, and, as well, Western theory. A helpful framework is a systematic, perhaps panoramic, variety of views of how a self is constituted and how it functions that assists considerations for psychological investigations of self, person, and subjectivity.

Ganeri first discusses those views that make no distinction between ownership and individuating identity

; that are then one dimensional. These include the Cartesian, Materialist, and Reductionist views. The basic Cartesian view features no differentiation between possession and individuating identity, between a place of owning and a base of identity so that a self, in Ganeri’s words, is a substratum or simple particular. Ganeri argues that it is this characteristic rather than dualism that “…is the defining characteristic of Cartesianism as a theory in the philosophy of mind” (p. 40). In the materialist view, mental and physical events are events or entities that are the same kinds of events and not to be differentiated; this is a hard naturalism. In this view, the ownership of experience is the body which also provides for the identifying particularity of itself. The reductionist perspective is that one’s stream of experience exhibits the mental states that account for experience and one’s identity, and are derived from and reducible to basic physical events. In this view, the stream of experience is said to be both the place of ownership and the base of identity or individuation . These one dimensional views are generally perceived as too attenuated or impoverished to provide a realistic or useful concept of a person, and are not considered further. The result has been that the numerous conversations of single dimension views have not produced a useful understanding of the self or, said differently, what it means to be a human being.

A second category is what Ganeri refers to as real self views which recognizes the person as the owner of its experience and denies personhood a double role of also providing one’s identity. The person is the place of ownership and the body is the place of one’s identity. The constitution view, according to Ganeri and Baker, locates ownership in the constituted person that is situated in a physical body which is then, subsequently, the embodied individuated identity. There are a variety of ownership views that vary with the emphasis of the importance of either the place of ownership or embodied base of identity (p. 41). A second type of real self view is termed a phenomenal view and consists of a person appropriating possession of an experience and the stream of experience as the identifying base of diachronic continuity. That is the self, or to vary terminology, James’s thinker, is imminent in but not identical or reducible to the stream of experience, which is the identity base. Ganeri suggests that this second view closely characterizes William James’s view of a self in the Principles (James 1890, 1892). Characteristic of James view is that there is no enduring self but rather a succession of momentary selves. I am not convinced this is correct as my reading of James is that the body is the base of identity. That is, the self is imminent in the stream of experience which is embodied in the physical organism from which originate the sensing and sensations a person experiences. Mainstream psychology usually overlooks the imminent and intrinsic aspect of James’s psychology in favor of his distinction of a historical and third-person me. Others find the idea of multiple third-person me’s unacceptable such as Flanagan (1992, pp. 179–182) and those who assert that the whole idea of a self is an illusion created by a narrative center of gravity as Dennett (1991, pp. 227–252). A third view of the second category, referred to as pure consciousness, prioritizes a place of possession, ownership, but denies a requirement for an identity or a base of identity. Subsequently a self is pure consciousness that owns itself with no dependent relationship on anything. Varieties of this conception of self can be found in historical Indian theory (Ganeri, 2012, p. 42).

The Buddhist no-self views make up a third category of the kinds of self that emerge along the dimensions of ownership and individuation . No-self kinds result when the idea of ownership is given up and mental events are not owned by a person. Individuation is sometimes placed in the physical body subject to transcience, stream of experience, or to deny such a place is necessary. There is some suggestion that only one’s immediate actions are possessed. The result is to replace the notion of general properties of a logical propositional frame with particular pieces of attributes or relations that shifts to a metaphysics of tropes, an entirely different framework of assumptions that do not require propositional logical justification (Bacon, 2008; Ganeri, 2001, Chap. 4; Ganeri, 2012, Chap. 7). Trope theory can be confusing if only because it is a much different way of looking at the world and persons than a traditional propositional framework. A trope is a particular instance or small bit of a property or attribute that is outside and independent of a propositional requirement for a causal justification. A primary difference between a propositional logical framework and trope theory is that trope theory does not require causal relations. That is, they can be thought of as associating in ways similar to the particles of an electron nucleus rather than being related logically or causally. The trope system seems to have evolved because it allowed Indian thinkers concerned with naturalism and self issues to escape from universal categories of a propositional framework in developing various theories of naturalism and a self. It allowed thinkers to approach the problems addressed from the direction of particular characteristics or properties rather than from the opposite direction of the universal and general that is required by a propositional framework. As such, it was, and is now, a potentially useful methodological tool of inquiry. Those readers who find this brief characterization of trope theory unsatisfying and wish to pursue an interest further are invited to the above references.

There are, according to Ganeri, three varieties of views in the no-self types of entities, the third category, that are eliminative of the notion of owning one’s experience; that the ownership of one’s stream of experience may be claimed by a person, but that such a claim is the result of ignorance and a failure to achieve the wisdom or enlightenment to let go of this false and delusional perception. This false perception that is, nevertheless, natural and an inevitable belief in a self is a cause of human suffering. This suffering is eliminated when a person lets go of this ordinary way of understanding and of living in the world. To accomplish this is to achieve an enlightened understanding and the true wisdom of a correct understanding of the world that includes letting go of one’s ordinary conception of a self. This is the basic core of the Buddhist soteriological goal of ending suffering which Buddha tied to a correct understanding of the world and the psychological processes required to live in the world. Those with a greater curiosity in Buddhism as philosophy are referred to Siderits (2007) as one place to begin, but there are many such resources available.

Related is a no-place view is that the body provides the base of identity corresponding to the varieties of ownership relations, the possession of experience as discussed in the above paragraph. The basic no-self view that ownership is unnecessary and is only a delusion in natural unenlightened life circumstances. When, in ignorance, one takes a sense of self to be real and claims ownership of one’s experience, he acts as if his self really exists. This is a mistake that needs to be overcome or, perhaps more accurately, transcended. The second no-place view asserts that one’s stream of experience provides the base for identity or individuation , but there is no place for possessing one’s experience. The third no-place view asserts that there is no need for a base to establish identity or for a place of ownership of experience. Ganeri says that the Abhidharma Buddhism is an example of the first, the Yogacara known as the Mind-Only or the Cognition View is a version of the second no place view, and that Madhyamaka Buddhism is an example of the third no place view. There are apparently no Western philosophers who hold such views, Ganeri states, so that he refers to this variety of views as Buddhist (pp. 42–43).

There are two remaining conceptions of self, a fourth category, that result if the place that discharges the role of ownership is the stream of experience, rather than a self, and the body remains the base establishing identity. Ganeri characterizes this as a tornado view that he describes as a dynamical system of some sufficient complexity that can, for that reason, give rise to new and emergent properties (pp. 43–49). For the tornado view, the experiential stream provides a place for ownership while the physical body is the base for instantiation of identification. The second dynamic system view is referred to as a flame view

, and in which the stream of experience is where ownership is effected while there is no particular base to provide instantiation of an identity. “The idea now is that the micro-elements are in a process of fusion and mutation which we want to identify as corresponding with mind. An analogy better than that of the tornado, therefore, is the flame, pictured as something emergent from a process in which the constituent material is continuously in flux” (p. 46). There are instances of each in both Indian and Western philosophical discussions of a self (pp. 45–47).

These are eleven different models of the concepts of self that occur in Indian and Western discussions of a self excluding the rejected single dimension proposals. These four ways of conceptualizing a self; single dimension, real self, no-self no-place, and dynamical views; and this outline can be said to correspond to different research programs. Ganeri points out that, even when an instance of these views do not specifically mention a self, “In every case, however, it is open to stipulate that what the term self really means, in any of these views, is whatever it is that the view takes to be the place [that discharges the role of ownership]: the body or the stream” (p. 47). It is clear from Ganeri’s discussion that Buddhist views are not simply a no-self view associated either with the body or the stream of experience, but “…that there is no ownership of experience at all” (p. 47). In order to fully grasp the Buddhist no ownership view it appears necessary to shift from a standard propositional metaphysics (system of assumptions) to a trope metaphysics. The intrinsic phenomenal view appears generally congruent with James’s (1890, 1892) view and also with aspects of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenological systems, and is generally an embodied view, that is, a view that requires a base in a physical body. Although Ganeri generally compares the phenomenal view to be most consistent with James, I apprehend some similarity with the tornado model characterized by Ganeri that might pursue comparison with James’s intrinsic psychology when he attributes “The passing Thought [of the stream of consciousness] then seems to be the Thinker” and identification is dependent on the bodily sensing and sensations (1890, 324–328). My view, a working hypothesis, is that psychological investigation is constrained to embodiment conceptions required to attain a capacity for autonomous action. The fact of embodiment leaves open questions of subjectivity and how autonomy might be achieved in the context of social embeddedness or to Gergen’s hypothesis of relational being (2009; 2010; 2011).

6.4 Occupying a First-Person Stance

The experience of ownership

(of the mineness of one’s thoughts, of one’s emotions, of one’s body, of the artifacts of one’s day-to-day living such as clothing, and of the events that have nourished and damaged a person) occupies the first-person perspective. Even the Buddhist who is convinced of the delusional nature of any sense of connection and ownership, the ability to identify what is enacted by oneself and what is associated with a person in day-to-day living, is required to live in an orderly manner with other people in varying environments of varying complexities. Everyone must occupy a first-person stance of committing to and of acknowledging actions emitted in their life space. This experience is the core of a person and constitutes an origin of conduct and thought that is a minimal self. It is necessary when following a coherent understanding of the different possible conceptions of a self to hold separate the distinction between (1) a place for appropriating experience, (2) possessing one’s experience, (3) a base of individuating oneself in a social environment, and (4) establishing one’s identity by and individuating process. These four properties result in the instantiation of a capacity to act in the complex relations of a social environment because they establish a perspective from which to direct action. As is apparent in the possible models of a self outlined by Ganeri, the possible arrangements for ownership

, place of ownership, individuation , and the base of identity: each individually or jointly combined can be located in the physical body, in a self, or in the stream of experience and each separately can be simply eliminated or denied significance.

With a recognition of a place of ownership and a supervenient base for instantiating identity, there is a reaching deeper into intrinsic psychology and a confronting the sub-cognitive structures of subjectivity. These sub-cognitive relationships do not replace or supersede the significance of the three dimensions of selfhood identified by Seigel (2005) at the beginning of these investigations: those of physical embodiment, social relatedness, and reflexivity-reflectivity that have been persistent in this discussion of selfhood. The important realization is that a thorough discussion of selfhood, or alternatively personhood, is not to be achieved without an acknowledgment of pre-conscious and pre-cognitive processes that set up the conditions that make possible cognitive processes. It is the conclusion of these investigations that self cannot be constrained or reduced to a third-person description and a historical self, designated by James as an empirical self. Baker avoids using the term self because of concerns that such a term suggests a homunculus issue, and instead prefers person as the term most fitting for indicating an organism with a robust first-person perspective. I use self and person terminology as equivalent and interchangeable in the context of Ganeri’s investigation of Vedic and Buddhist thinking.

Baker makes visible a path concerning how, in the context of liberal naturalism

, a robust first-person perspective constitutes a person. The distinction between ownership and individuation adds textural features that allows for a systematic recognition of varying models of selfhood. Baker’s constitution view adheres to an ownership model: the physical body constitutes the base of identity for a person, and the person as the place mineness registers ownership. Ganeri suggests that the phenomenal model is congruent with James’s intrinsic psychology in which ownership registers in the person, an “I”, and the base of individuation, the capacity to act, is the stream of experience. A contrasting view is that Ganeri’s tornado model more closely fits James’s description of an intrinsic psychology in which the physical body is a base individuating the capacity for acting and that ownership takes place in the stream of experience. This model is more congruent with James’s description of the importance of physical embodiment and of the stream of consciousness or experience and is to be investigated further later.

The three self models most congruent with psychological investigation are the ownership, the phenomenal, and tornado models although much of the mainstream psychological discussion concerning self avoids the issue of a thinker and actor. My view is that the self model alternatives that will prove most useful to psychological investigations and to a professional practice of psychology are those alternatives including physical embodiment whether the person or the stream of experience is paired as the place of ownership all in a intersubjective and sociocultural context. Baker’s constitutional view requires a physical supervenient base which appears to be the most promising and most solidly demonstrated for psychological investigation and practice.

With that conclusion, there is much that remains to be investigated to accomplish a working understanding of subjectivity, agency as the capacity to initiate an act, and the accommodation and assimilation of other persons in a social milieu. Agency implies causal efficacy: the capacity to initiate changes in one’s inner life and in the surrounding social and physical environment causal relationships and patterns. We have already discussed the difficulties of establishing with definiteness specific properties of agency (Gallagher, 2012; Rovane, 2004). Single dimension concepts of a self such as the Cartesian, materialist, and reductionist formulations in which ownership and individuation are collapsed are inadequate to allow a full and rich investigation of the human or the person in the full spectrum of the social milieu (Ganeri, 2012, pp. 39–40). In this context, the reductionist view has been extensively discussed and subsequently rejected.

6.5 What a Self Is: A Proposal

The sum of the emergent argument concerning embodiment and first-person perspective constitution of a self is its plausibility, and that the constitution view is the most useful and veritable for psychological conceptions of sub-cognitive processes that ground cognition. A pressing question introduced as a result is: How does a person, a self, occupy the first-person stance? How does a self become an entity with a capacity to have states and properties, and is not a state or property itself? That is, how does a self become an ontological kind with causal significance? This self being addressed, it will be recalled, is a real entity in the context of a liberal naturalism. If a first-person stance is to be occupied, does a person have the option of not taking ownership of what would be one’s experience? Charles Larmore would say that such an option is open to all persons as does Ganeri in a more limited way (Ganeri, 2012, pp. 323–328; Larmore, 2010, pp. 132–169).

Three possibilities for how a first-person perspective is occupied are explored by Ganeri. One account is what can be called a causal model of ownership . That is, thinking can be viewed intentionally as similar to the lifting an arm, one intends or plans lifting an arm to perform a particular act. Such a concept is viewed with suspicion by a naturalistic science as well as liberal naturalists because an immaterial antecedent is causing an immaterial causal relation resulting in a material effect. Ganeri asserts that the Buddhist rejection of a self is based on such an ownership causal model and is justified. One does not so much intend to think about an object or problem as focus one’s attention in a particular way that results in the tendency to fill in a hole in a network of relations that arise, as James would say and others as well (James, 1890, pp. 240–251; Savransky, 2018; Treisman & Gelade, 1980). The intentional causal model of first-person occupancy is widely rejected and especially rejected by Ganeri as a suitable account of first-person occupancy (Ganeri, 2012, pp. 319–323).

A second account extensively investigated by Indian thinkers, but not so much by Western thinkers, is a reflexivity ownership of experience (Siderits et al., 2011, pp. 1–14). Reflexivism is the idea that self-consciousness consists of mental occurrences being aware of themselves as a thought. The general conclusion is that there is a role for reflexivist representations in a full account of self-consciousness, but experiential ownership using reflexivist principles results in conceptual solipsism (Ganeri, pp. 214–217). It implies the distinction between recalling a representation of an event from the past and remembering experiencing that event. Ganeri argues that a reflexivist representation of self-awareness interferes with an ability to take a first-person perspective by undermining the ability to identify an experience as one’s own and to distinguish it from a representation of an other person’s self-conscious experience. According to Ganeri, “Reflexivist representational theories seem to lack any means by which to answer the question ‘Which one am I?’ Each experience seems to come, as it were, with a little mirror in which it can regard itself and its reflections of itself; but within these halls of mirrors there is nothing to reflect apart from nested images of the mirrors themselves” (p. 213). A robust first-person presence is one way, perhaps is required, to apprehend other persons which Ganeri credits Baker (1998) for pointing out. That is, thinking of an experience as one’s own implies an other person as a concept of an excluded other, who also has their own experiences (Ganeri, p. 214). Ganeri’s conclusion is that constructing a person with reflective representational principles so severely limits necessary sub-cognitive processes of subjectivity that they are untenable, that is, unable to account for owning one’s experience in occupying a first-person stance.

A more successful account is a non-phenomenal direct endorsement of an idea, a mental occurrence as one’s own within a socially constructed space of reasons. The intuition that using reason determines endorsing, that is, owning a thought as one’s own is founded on reasons. A thought can be disowned; disowning a thought is breaking one’s commitment with the result that the thought is no longer available for justifying beliefs, actions, and desires. Such an action results in fewer resources, in an intellectual poverty, for confronting future problems and for advancing in the social environment one inhabits. Similar ideas are advanced by Charles Larmore in the ideas of commitment and authenticity and by Christine Korsgaard’s notion of self-constitution as an intended action in the world (Korsgaard, 2009; Larmore, 2010). Endorsing and committing to an idea is to take on a belief that it is true and refer to the facts supporting its truth. Further embedded in the act of commitment is a kernel of the idea running through Indian thinking, particularly Buddhist thought, that self-knowledge leads to a knowledge of the external world.

Two other areas illustrate the importance of the idea of commitment: emotion and unity of consciousness. Emotion can be thought as a metacognitive indication of congruence and conflict. To take ownership of an emotion, by this account, is to endorse it by inhabiting it, being immersed in it. In this way, a person becomes a participant and not a mere observer of mental occurrences. Unity of consciousness , a second area impacted by the act of commitment, refers to the basic unity of perceptions, beliefs, and physical actions that occur at any present moment that are bound together by being embodied in a particular physical body and that are effected by the act of commitment, that is, by inhabiting a thought and intentionally acting. Ganeri describes it this way:

A being capable of a first-person stance is entitled to assertions that trade on the truth of cross-temporal and cross-modal identities with respect to its own self-ascribed experience. The argument that thoughts of this type ‘This object I am touching is the same as the object I am seeing’ require unity establishes that ownership is what creates a single normative space [of reasons] in which the contents of one’s attitudes, emotions, and intentions bear rationally upon each other. Having a first-person stance implies the ability to conceive of oneself as oneself and so the ability to conceive of one’s thoughts as one’s own. I have argued that this requires that one must conceive of oneself as an embodied individual. The self is a necessarily embodied place for endorsements, what the individual pulls and demands implicit in each and every ‘mine’ lay claim to and because of which they pull together or pull apart (2012, p. 326).

In this statement, it is clear that endorsement requires physical embodiment and that acting to endorse an emotion, a thought, belief, or physical act does not require reflexivity principles, representation, or phenomenological description. It is the core of what a person/self is, what such an entity does, and importantly how it is accomplished and is placed securely in a socially created space of reasons. Larmore suggests that reasons are a third ontological plane following the physical and psychological planes

(2010, pp. 61–76); a proposal similar to Martin et al. (2003, pp. 103-131). Both of these proposals do not consider the idea of a liberal naturalism which would include intention dependent objects and include a space of reasons as proposed and defended by Baker, and which has been revealed in the long history of Indian thinkers who developed various versions of liberal naturalism some of which include reasons as chronicled by Ganeri.

A question remains as to whether a person can fail to or deliberately choose not to occupy an available first-person stance? If so, how does a person not occupy that first-person stance? Asked differently, how does a person distance themselves from such things as ideas, evaluations, emotions, and even actions? To use Ganeri’s words for this process “We achieve this by making them into objects of consciousness

, and thereby ‘not self’, opening them to the deliberative question ‘Shall I make them mine?’” (Ganeri, p. 326). That is, a commitment is made and an endorsement which inhabits the mental object so that by that commitment a participation is engaged in that concept, emotion, project, or action. What this makes clear is that there is “…no room for a no-ownership theory of self…” (Ganeri, p. 327). The choice to ‘…not make them mine’ results in a lack of spontaneity and, in Larmore’s words to an inauthenticity in a person’s presentation in the social environment one finds oneself (Larmore, 2010 pp. 61–68, 142–150). There is a certain paradox in the stance of choosing not to own a thought or action. To again use Ganeri’s words:

One might indeed argue that it would be better to adopt the stance of merely witnessing one’s anger or betrayal rather than inhabiting it; but my point is that one can assume a spectatorial stance with regard to some of one’s states only if one is occupying a stance of endorsement with respect to others [that is, other first-person perspectives of the conceptual objects one is witnessing] (p. 327).

This implies that mental events, that is mental states, are rooted in a self that is a tangle of reasons and justifications that are “…underpinned by the procedural holism of a single comparing, monitoring and selecting unconscious mind” (p. 327). This all occurs in the context of a liberal naturalistic frame that makes clear the apprehension of a self that occupies a first-person stance.

The self

, then, proposed by Ganeri is constituted by three, a unity of three simultaneous and balanced, processes of participation, immersion , and a monitoring underself that is a transparent unconscious processes of coordination. Participation is the act of commitment and endorsement of particular aspects of our thinking and acting that is the first-person stance of owning our thinking and actions. Immersion refers to the inhabitation of our emotions, desires, and beliefs that might be a committed caring of love, a directed attention of anger or rage, or to a total absorption in a project such as writing, reading, or fighting injustice. The underself is reference to complex coordination that functions unseen in pre-aware processes that is subjectivity, that is, sub-cognitive processes, and which sets up the cognitive processes some of which we are aware. A unity of participation and immersion would be unlikely without the coordination of comparing, monitoring, and feedback at the subterranean roots of the stream of consciousness all which are a unitary process and an entity (p. 332). These are, then, three dimensions of mineness. A good way of closing this study is with Ganeri’s words:

…the reason there is a correlation between felt affect and neural states on which my desires and preferences supervene is that they are me: supervenience is just a constraint on the dynamic system that is my neural base.

The self is a unity of immersion , participation, and coordination; the first-person stance is at once lived, engaged, and underwritten. The interplay between immersion and participation, mediated by and grounded in the underself, is constitutive of self. And all is in harmony with the idea of the natural (p. 332).

We have investigated one probable account of how a robust first-person stance can be enacted: Baker’s constitutional model. We see in this account that autonomy begins with the decision to occupy a first-person stand presented in a context of reasons and of justification. We have also seen that, while it is possible to choose not to occupy a presented first-person perspective, there are constraints to that choice in that to choose not to occupy a particular first-person perspective requires that other first-person perspectives a person has to other conceptual objects, already be endorsed and committed. We have also investigated a variety of ways to conceptualize a self, or if preferred, a person using Ganeri’s detailed and thorough discussion of Indian philosophical discussions of self concepts and of different forms of naturalism that concepts of self entities are embedded. One of the parting implications derived from the Indian discussions is that a self is always embedded in a naturalistic formulation of a real world. It is suggested that for psychology the most useful accounts of what a self is, what it does, and how that is done are those accounts that incorporate some aspect of embodiment as has been well established by James (1890) and is embedded in the natural world. It is acknowledged that what has been discussed is intended only as a outline of Jonardon Ganeri’s presentation of the long and rich discussion of Indian thinking regarding self and nature. In Ganeri’s summary of the Indian philosophical context, self-knowledge relies on observation and inference rather than on direct intuitions; the significance of such a methodological observation is important and suggests its own further inquiry.

This result has a counterpart described as James’s sciousness hypothesis by Thomas Natsoulas (2013, pp. 49–76). The goal has been to employ Ganeri (2012) to propose some ways to enlarge the range of self concepts available to psychology with the promise to accommodate a full rich range of human activities, especially in consideration of those activities that are excluded in a causally determined scientific naturalism. The conclusion suggested is that only in the context of a full range of a person’s perspectives that includes first-, second-, and third-person can the richness of human activities be apprehended. An investigation of this kind may open to what is phenomenological psychology and how it fits with scientific empirical psychology.

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_7

7. Seventh Study: Inquiry of Subjectivity

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

SubjectivityExperienceThinkingI-strandsIndexicalsDoxastic matrixRadical doubtNoumenalPhenomenological

Subjectivity is and has been a difficult and slippery problem for psychology

. The task undertaken in this study is to investigate subjectivity: what it is, how such an entity might be structured, and how it functions to make possible experience that then is cognitively accessible so as to produce, or make possible, one’s first-person presence in a complex cultural environment. In this inquiry, subjectivity refers to those processes that provide, or better, introduce unified experiences into the appropriate cognitive processes that are then transduced to language symbols and other various activities of living for negotiating a complex cultural environment of other persons and institutions that begins with a first-person stand. As presaged earlier one’s existence and life activities are negotiated intersubjectively and is structured second-personally which is a subject of a later study (Study 8, Chap. 8, Second-Person ‘We’). Such an inquiry is qualified by recognizing that first-person intersubjective engagement constitutes a second-person We experience and the creative abstract generalization of knowledge about which is third-person perspective, and extends the breadth of such an inquiry.

In context of the three dimensions of mineness described by Ganeri, the present inquiry is directed (a) to an underself which monitors and enables coordinated feedback between the subjective functions in engaging and experiencing an act or belief, (b) an immersion of the self in an emotional experience of the first-person stance, and (c) a participant self of a first-person action and committing to a belief. An inquiry of the structure of subjectivity will probably encounter these constituting processes. What is sought is how the structural processes fit together and what entities enable these processes. Subjectivity is the core of first-person perspective that functions in a unified manner with second-person engagement. Second-person perspective has been relatively neglected in psychological literature or at least as what might be conceptualized as second-personal perspective. First, prior to proceeding, a brief outline of the perspectival structures will be helpful to outline a general concept of how subjectivity as the core of first-personal commitment to an action relates with a person’s other perspectives of the world.

The world appears to a person in perspectives that include first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. Any experience is at least three-dimensional and a single perspective contains unique information that when taken together fuse into a person’s reality. This reality may be supplemented by a we-perspective that is a sense of us, or said differently, is a sense of community. A we-perspective refers to an aggregate of persons with a capacity directing a collective group-intention and initiating group-intentioned action (Brinck, Reddy, & Zahavi, 2017; Schmid, 2017; Szanto & Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2015). The group we-perspective remains primarily as a phenomenological and philosophical inquiry with, to my knowledge, limited recognition in psychological literature. The question addressed in this present investigation is whether a subjective structural frame of experience can be discerned, to identify and describe the properties of subjectivity, and how it is located as the core of a first-personal stand. The second-personal and the group we-perspective are significant areas of inquiry with far reaching consequences whose nature and content are investigated later (Szanto & Moran, 2016).

What is subjectivity and how is it structured if it is structured? Generally described subjectivity is a frame in which an experience occurs out of which the materials of that experience pass into cognition from which thinking and action emerges. A frame of subjectivity, it is asserted, consists of the several dynamic processes that centrally include the joint processes of reflexivity and self-awareness in an embodied person, (b) a sense of tensed time moving from a future, becoming present, and passing into an objective past that can be termed temporality, (c) unifying the varied contents of an experiential episode, (d) provide for the ownership of an experience and first-person commitment to action, (e) an intersubjective embeddedness with other persons and cultural institutions, and (f) agency, a committing to and acting from a first-person stance

. This is a large and complex conceptual region and an ambitious undertaking around which to wrap our understanding.

How does one’s I relate to directing one’s attention which result in experience and thinking? How does experience result in thinking that then makes possible an agent taking a first-person stand? These questions are post-perceptual, after a worldly environment has been sensed and apprehended, but before a person agentially acts. It is tentatively suggested that the first component requiring investigation is to recognize that reflexivity as self-awareness (noted above and introduced by Baker in the statement “I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill”) indicates a concept of oneself when I∗ refers, is reflexive, to a speaker. As Baker makes clear, this reflexivity requires a physical body with appropriately sophisticated neurological structures that materially reflects a concept of oneself that is tied to language; that is, that makes possible the functioning of self-awareness as a concept of oneself. Self-awareness is mapped in the statement, “I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill” by the relation of I and I∗. This fact a special function of the pronoun I suggests that the occurrence of referents, indicators, and indexicals in ordinary conversation provides some data with which to investigate self-awareness. This is the backbone of first-person perspective and its subsequent commitment to a stand. One’s interface with one’s lifeworld is a flow of experience which requires a sense of and mechanisms for processing the objects and events occurring in tensed time and form the constituents of an experience episode. At the same time, there is a unitary property of one’s experience that is somehow presented and apprehended in that experiential flow. Finally, there is ownership, a mineness

, of an experiential episode that it is happening to oneself and none other. Said differently, a sameness property of the experience episode crosses and adheres to an agent’s set of thoughts, actions, and relationships which is one’s commitment and participation in a first-person stance. These are the properties of subjectivity that are being investigated.

First, a look at how experience and subjectivity relate. Subjectivity addresses the structures and functions of experience. It overlaps with phenomenology, which is exclusively concerned with experience. Phenomenology is characterized by an often cited maxim of Husserl’s: “Back to the things themselves!” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008, p. 6). Phenomenology is concerned with the way things are experienced in a first-personal perspective. An extensive discussion of the vigorous resistance to first-person perspective is in the Fifth Study, Chap. 5, Quining the First-Personal Perspective by natural and includes cognitive science. First-person perspective is perceived as a replacement, rather than an extension, of the third-person methodology of cognitive science. That discussion suggests that all the dimensions of perspective are required to apprehend the reality of a person. This is heuristically referred to as perspectival diffusion

. Said differently, a person comprehends her experience through all the perspectives that experience is received. Those perspectives includes first-person commitment, second-person intersubjective engagement, and third-person knowing one’s community. When first-person perspective personal statements are reduced to third-person objective and impersonal propositions, such a reduction loses the individual information that is unique to the first-personal perspective.

It is, indeed, the inherent lack of equivalence of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives that sets up what can be described as a psychological diffusion in that all perspectives are required to capture a the full rich spectrum of living. To eliminate any perspective, impoverishes one’s understanding and ability to negotiate a complex social and cultural environment. It may be realized later that a second-person engagement is more central to daily adaptive activities than the first-or third-person perspective. Although that may seem intuitively obvious, it is not reflected in psychological literature.

Central to second-person engagements are intersubjecive interactions with other persons: engaging an other is unique and more complex than engaging worldly objects such as cars, trees, and even animals. Our immediate concern is: how is an intersubjective space created for an other person? One way that opportunity is presented may be when a speaker indirectly states what another person believes about an object. For example, a speaker, John, believes that Pete is an engineer. A hearer then intersubjectively understands that John-the-speaker intersubjectively attributes that ‘Pete may be an engineer’. A joint and mutual intersubjective relation is created between the speaker and the hearer with simultaneous attendance to a conceptual object. In this relation, the hearer and listener are mutually aware that each is aware that the other is simultaneously attending to whether ‘Pete is an engineer’. It is asserted by many (for example, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler) that this experience of intersubjectivity is essential to the emergence of reflexivity and an I. Restated, first-person functioning is constituted in an intersubjective second-person encounter with an other (Szanto & Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2011). This is not a complete description of intersubjectivity and second-person encounters which is left to the later Eighth Study, Chap. 8.

Our the focus is on experience and the subjective structures which allow experience to unfold. The emphasis on experience, however, preceded Husserl. The development of ‘pragmatism’, by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey and later by George Herbert Mead, emphasized the immediacy of experience and action. The pragmatic emphasis on immediacy is described by James as “Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.” When, however, the “… reflective intellect gets to work… incomprehensibilities in the flowing process” are discovered (James, 1912, p. 43). This “…experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions. Its purity is only a relative term, meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies.” Similarly, in a criticism of Kant, Dewey asserts that “…with a purely logical method, one can end only with the must be or the ought: the is vanishes, because it has been abstracted from. The psychological method starts from the is, and thereby also gives the basis and the ideal for the ought and must be” (McDermott, 1981, p. 125). It is of interest to note that Dewey published a psychology textbook entitled, simply, Psychology, in 1886. He described psychology as the Science of the Facts or Phenomena of Self. Among these facts of self is “the power of recognizing itself as I or self-awareness. An other fact is the recognition of subjectivity “…that the self lies under and holds together all feelings, purposes, and ideas…” and is what differentiates the self from an object (Dewey, 1891, p. 1). Elsewhere he says that “…man’s nature undoubtedly… is itself a product of experience…” and that “…the conscious experience, whose science is psychology, is self-conscious , and that therefore self-consciousness as the unity of subject and object, not as “purely objective,” as the totality,… must be included in the science of psychology” (McDermott, 1981, p. 125). James’s definition of psychology contrasts and extends Dewey view: “Psychology is the Science of Mental Life of the ‘phenomena’ and the contextual ‘conditions’ that these phenomena occur and make them possible” (James, 1890, p. 15). Further on he asserts that the starting point for psychology is the act of thinking; that “…thinking of some sort goes on” (pp. 219–220). The emphasis of both Dewey and James is phenomenological experience which they assert is psychology.

James describes an intrinsic psychology that turns out to be phenomenological according to his definition of psychology’s subject matter, and is an account of subjective processes which he attributes “… as a sort if inner-most centre within the circle, of sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole” (1890, p. 285). His intrinsic description of psychology is what is now recognized as subjectivity (compare Zahavi, 2014; Zahavi, 2008). As noted, subjectivity refers to the inquiry of those structural processes that sets up an experience and the interface between experience and taking a first-person perspective, taking a stand in one’s world. To say this differently, initiating an action is taking a first-person stance as an agent. In this inquiry, what is intended as subjectivity not only overlaps with phenomenology but also engages the structural processes that present and open an experience which, then, a person feels and of which she becomes self-aware that it is she who is having this experience. This sequence of events is a first-person perspective. Caution is to be taken when comparing subjectivity and phenomenology, however, as the phenomenological tradition initiated by Husserl and others is larger than what is intended here by subjectivity and the stream of experience which is the target of our inquiry. Some assert that Husserl’s anti-psychologism leads him to be not directly concerned with the stream of experience (Cerbone, 2012, pp. 10–11; Zahavi, 2012). Those such as Zahavi and Gallagher who are interested in selfhood do pursue an analysis of subjectivity with some vigor (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008; Zahavi, 2014; 2008; 1999). Zahavi (2003) and in Husserl’s Phenomenology shows that later developments in Husserl’s thinking subsequent to Heidegger relax the initial anti-psychologism and is more intensely concerned with phenomena such as James’s stream of consciousness or alternatively stream of experience that is the concern of subjectivity and as well intersubjectivity.

There is a difference between those processes that occur prior to one’s presented experience (that is pre-reflexive and out of awareness) and those processes that emerge as a result of an experience one is self-aware, that is, an experience that is reflexive. Reflexivity and self-awareness , as they are used here, are equivalent terms for the same event: recognizing oneself as the I of an experience occurring or an action taken. It is surmised that post-experiential events engage an intentional agency that leads to additional perceptions, judgments, and valuations which result from the appropriate cognitive processes. Alternatively stated, experience provides the material for continuing thinking episodes in which cognition enriches articulated perceptions, judgments, and valuations. These episodes provide that provide continuous support for a person’s first-person stand. The structure of experience is developed later. We will discover that experience is constituted triadically with self-awareness, an encounter with objects and subjects in the world, and thinking.

With this proposed outline and with a general context of the concept of subjectivity

, we can proceed with its inquiry. But before proceeding, it will be helpful to briefly examine the terms subjectivity, subjective, and subject to more clearly circumscribe and center the concept in a more general linguistic context. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) lists four uses for subjectivity. The first listed use applies directly to our inquiry: “Consciousness of one’s perceived states.” This use is illustrated by a Samuel Coleridge quote “In the object we infer our own existence and subjectivity,” and can be understood to correspond to an intrinsic function of subjectivity at the level of the experiential stream as described by James. A further usage example, attributed to Sayce, states “The idea of life, and therefore subjectivity, is put out of sight.” A second related usage listed is simply “A conscious being,” supported again by a Coleridge quote, “The identity. The absolute subjectivity, whose only attribute is the Good,” and with a usage illustration of W. H. Mill, “Individuals stand as ‘subjectivities that realize the substantial’ of an idea.” Mill’s quote in particular recognizes a function that moves from experience to an idea. Said differently, subjectivity is the process that translates raw experiential presence to the cognitive processes out of which emerge an idea or action. Simultaneously, subjectivity concerns how a person is self-aware that she is the intentional initiator and possessor of that idea or action. That is, how a person is aware of the first-person stand she occupies. There is a recognition of an intrinsic process that is in some way contained in a stream of experience that connects with cognition productive of thinking and acting.

Each term in this discussion refers to those processes or entities that reflexively mediate, between experiential presence and thinking that emerge from congruent cognitions. To restate, thinking or reflective intelligence refers implicitly to an I (compare Mead, 1934, pp. 165, 164–173; Natsoulas, 2013, pp. 8–14). In a description both cogent and precise, Mead describes the relation of an I and a self as “… that an object involves a subject. Stated in other words, that a me [an objective empirical self] is inconceivable without an I. And to this reply must be made that such an I is a presupposition, but never a presentation of conscious experience, for the moment it is presented it has passed into an objective case, presuming, if you like, an I that observes—but an I that can disclose himself only by ceasing to be the subject for whom the object me exists” (Mead, 1934, pp. 142–143).

The use of subjectivity, subjective, and subject then

, as may already be clear, refers to processes that are so structured as to arrive at self-awareness as reflexive and embodied. They constitute conditions in which a person emerges who exhibits a sense of tensed time (temporality), can support a unity of experience, owns one’s experience and first-person actions, sets up inter-relations with others (intersubjectivity), and participates in agential action resulting in one’s first-person commitment to a set of actions.

We now examine Hector-Neri Castañeda’s extended investigations of the properties and structures of subjectivity

. Castañeda uses linguistic references and indexicals of routine conversation to map self-awareness, thinking, and one’s commitment to a first-person act. His philosophical investigations of subjectivity are guided by the intuition that “…questions concerning self are rooted in the use of first-person pronouns…” and is an extended investigation of self-consciousness (Kapitan, 1999, p. 3).

7.1 The I and Thinking

In their separate inquiries, William James and Hector-Neri Castañeda each begin with thinking

. James consolidated psychology into a coherent and defining scientific discipline. He carefully summarized the literatures of the subjects centrally contributing to the general concept of psychology. The result was an encyclopedic summary of psychology of the time that is still credited as scientifically relevant and consulted (Baars, 1997; Natsoulas, 2013). James asserts that the “…universal conscious fact is not ‘feelings and thoughts exist’, but ‘I think’ and ‘I feel’. No psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of personal selves.” He proceeds by saying “…the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves” (James, 1890, pp. 221–222). He acknowledges “…a reflective process” which “is the result of abandoning the outward-looking point of view, and of our having become able to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers” (pp. 284). James presents an intrinsic phenomenological account of psychological science which attributes self-awareness, or reflexivity, as a property of a person. This assertion converges with Baker’s (2013) later assertion of reflexivity as the constituting property of a person (see also Castañeda, 1999).

7.1.1 James’s Account of Subjectivity and Thinking

This section will explore James’s account of subjectivity and draw attention to those aspects which are consistent with Castañeda’s account of experience and the associated thinking. A good place to begin that investigation is with a quote: “If the stream,” James says,

as a whole is identified with the self far more than any outward thing, a certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all men as a sort of inner most centre of the circle, of sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole. Compared with this element of the stream, the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned, whilst that which disowns them remains. Now, what is this self of all the other selves?” James continues by saying “…whatever qualities a man’s feelings may possess, or whatever content his thought may include, there is a spiritual something in him [read an I] which seems to go out to meet these qualities and contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it. It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the perception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its assent… It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from which appear to emanate the fiats of the will (1890, pp. 284-285).

This excerpt from Principles describes subjectivity

, a subjective life in James’s phrase, and is congruent, as far as it goes, with the subjectivity processes that Castañeda extensively develops. James describes what Castañeda terms as an I-strand “which seems to go out to meet these qualities and contents.” Two additional excerpts further illustrates James’s idea of self-awareness: “…it would follow that all that is experienced is, strictly considered, objective; that this Objective falls assunder in to two contrasted parts, one realized as ‘Self’, the other as ‘not-self’; and that over and above these parts there is nothing save the fact that they are known, the fact of the stream of thought being there as the indispensable subjective condition of their being experience at all.” James’s assertion here is that it is those processes designated as subjectivity that presents experience to a person. “Instead,” James continues, “of the stream of thought being one of con-sciousness, “thinking its own existence along with whatever else it thinks,” …it might be better called a stream of Sciousness pure and simple… The sciousness in question would be the Thinker, and the existence of this thinker would be given to us rather as a logical postulate than as that direct inner perception of spiritual activity…” (James, pp. 290–291). Sciousness is reflexive self-awareness of an I, and this excerpt describes what Castañeda designates as an I-strand, an I— not-I, and its properties. Note that James attributes two types pulses of the experiential thought stream: a knowledge about constituents of the stream that, as James says, is objective and reflexive self-aware pulses (Natsoulas, 2013, pp. 52–53).

Finally, we come to James’s description of the unity of an experiential episode: “The unity into which the Thought, the present mental state—binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there… . The thought does not capture them [the past facts], but as soon as it comes into existence it finds them already its own. How is this possible unless the Thought have a substantial identity with a former owner [that is, a former thought], —not a mere continuity or a resemblance, as in our account, but a real unity?” (p. 321). James concludes that “The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker, and though there may be another non-phenomenal Thinker behind that [an I], so far we do not seem to need him to express the facts” (p. 324). “Psychology,” James says later, “is a natural science, an account of particular finite streams of thought, coexisting and succeeding in time” (p. 347). James has already described what Castañeda identifies as I-strands

: pulses of thought or mentality that accounts for the unity of experience in a very similar manner which is reflexive to the I and constitutes a person. It turns out that James’s description of subjective processes is surprisingly similar to that of Castañeda, as far as they extend. Castañeda’s work shows that the non-phenomenal Thinker behind that…, as postulated by James, to be an I, and identical to the, noumenal, unworldly I of Kant. Castañeda incorporates this noumenal I directly into his account of thinking and the formulation of I-strands.

Castañeda’s investigation of the logic of self-consciousness extends the similar descriptions of James. Castañeda shows that questions of personhood and self are based in the use of first-person pronouns which can be used to map self-consciousness and, subsequently, thinking. The psychologically oriented concern of subjectivity addresses how the sensed environment is shaped into experience that then is cognitively processed to shape a first-person engagement of the world. This issue does not arise directly in an objective third-person context as such an orientation requires a representational token framework such as a theory of the theory of mind or simulation theories (P. M. Churchland, 1995; P. S. Churchland, 2002, 2011; Goldman, 2006; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992, 2012), and as well an emphasis on states of mind as the token originators of environmental adaptive behaviors.

As previously discussed, the gap between first-and third-person accounts is intractable. The embodied sub-cognitive processes that prepare the perceived environment for cognition are referred to as subjectivity, a term that further refers to a framework that receives the stream of presented experiences that are translated to an agental first-person engagement of a lifeworld. Subject refers to the person or self that engages non-objective processes of self, an I, that as an I receives an experience and initiates the thinking an experience requires. The questions are: how does a person engage in thinking, how is the thinker distinct from what is being thought, how does the thinker relate to it’s thinking, and how is an episode of thinking organized or structured relative to a corresponding experience? It is not certain that James makes these distinctions. The next section investigates these questions.

7.1.2 Castañeda and Dimensions of Reflexivity

We start with the self-aware nature of a person

. This fact, Baker shows, is illustrated in the statement “I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill” in which the I∗, it is recalled, is a concept and a reference to the I that thinks, the thinker that thinks and acts. This fact emerges in a physical body with sufficient neurological capacity to support an ability to have a self concept that developmentally emerges and is ontologically novel for that person (Baker, 2013). The self-aware nature is variously referred to as self-consciousness or self-awareness. It is the dimension of reflexivity. Castañeda states that “Self-consciousness is the highest form of consciousness” with a peculiar property of iterative reflexivity (Castañeda, 1999, p. 278). That is, reflexivity is a continuous iterative process that swings between the thinker, an I, and an object of the world or thinking that is being thought (p. 222). To illustrate this, we will put Baker’s statement:

1. a.

I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill, into the form of

2. b.

ONE thinks of [that] ONEself∗ as [is] oneSELF.

The logic of self-awareness requires a twofold reflexivity that is illustrated in (b). There is what Castañeda describes as, “an external, pedestrian one, and an internal, exciting reflexivity, which rests on the former”. The pedestrian external reflexivity that is ‘ONE thinking of ONEself’ refers to a world of objects and events of one’s thinking. The internal thinking is of ONE thinking of something, whatever that may be, as oneSELF. This “internal reflexivity [thinking] hinges on I’s” and is the core of self-awareness (p. 252). Here self-awareness and self-consciousness are equivalent terms. External thinking is acknowledged to characterize the consciousness of animals, or organisms without a first-person self concept, and to include very young children until they acquire a self-conceptual ability at about two years (Kagan, 1981; Rochat, 2009; D. N. Stern, 1985). A self concept

, that is self-consciousness, is the summit of mental ability (Castañeda, p. 254). These are the same discriminations made by Baker, though she does not extend them to the subjective level of thinking.

In Castañeda’s words, self-consciousness occurs with episodes of thinking of ONEself as oneSELF. To quote Castañeda:

Here we consider occurrent consciousness only. More precisely, we focus on episodes of self-consciousness. These are episodes in which ONE is conscious of ONEself qua oneself. Our topic is the reflexivity of self-consciousness. The reflexivity in ONE referring to ONEself as oneself is twofold. There is the external reflexivity of ONE referring to ONEself, and the internal reflexivity of ONE referring to something, whatever it may be, as oneself. We must take both reflexivities into account. The internal reflexivity is the peculiar core of self-consciousness (p. 253).

‍The internal self is that to which an I refers. The point here is to accentuate the importance of the two forms of reflexivity for self-consciousness and for thinking to occur. Note the transition of ONEself , the external self, to oneSELF, the internal self to which I refers, is the relation constituting internal reflexivity to which Castañeda and Baker refer. Castañeda asserts that an external self does not exist, but the internal self to which I refers does exist (p. 257). Both levels of reflexivity are required for thinking to occur which, further, begins in a first-person stand (cf., Natsoulas, 2013, pp. 66–71; 396–397). The levels of reflexivity take place in three-position reflexive statements of the form x refers to x as x. That is, ONE (I) thinks (think) that ONEself (I∗) will win (as oneSELF). ONE is in the position of I and ONEself is in the second position of I∗ which refers back to the originating thinker and completes the external episode of reflexivity that contains the objects of the world that one is thinking. The oneSELF, the third position, is the internal reflexivity of oneSELF referring to I, which as Castañeda says ‘whatever that may be’, the internal self. This core of self-consciousness is also the core of a thinking episode.

What, then, are the general features of self-awareness

? It turns out that there are many important characteristics that can be derived from what has already been discussed. Castañeda outlines several characteristics of self-awareness (self-consciousness) that are distinctive and essential to understanding how a first-person perspective is related to the thinking of an experience.

- First, there is both consciousness and self-consciousness . This assertion acknowledges those who argue that there is only self-consciousness; here Castañeda probably refers specifically to Johann Gottlieb Fichte (Breazeale, 2014).

- Second, self-awareness consists of at least four levels in which each level suffuses or incorporates the more primitive levels. Those levels consist of:

1. 1.

Conceptually undifferentiated sensory data,

2. 2.

I-less (self-less) unowned differentiated sensed objects,

3. 3.

I-less (self-less) unowned differentiated objects in an immediate mental episode, and

4. 4.

I (self) owned mental episode.

This structure constitutes self-aware reflexive internal content that sets up an experience. These levels are described by Castañeda as suffused so that the reflexive content is a cumulative subsumptive hierarchy. The adjective suffused refers to each higher subsequent level incorporating or containing the content of the previous levels and to the entire structure as a cumulative subsumptive hierarchy. In summary, and to use Castañeda’s description, “…self-consciousness is built up on layers of self-less [I-less] consciousness which remain as an internal basis for reference to oneself as I” (p. 255).

Third, the unity of an experience one is self-aware is a property of an experience, and not because of an underlying self or, more specifically, an I. The unity of an experience, according to Castañeda, is accounted for in its own terms. Unity is a property of being an experience. If, says Castañeda, an experience is internally owned by an I, the unity of that experience is then a characteristic of an I, a characteristic that constitutes ownership by that I, and can be considered a presupposition of the I. The unity of an experience is a property of a whole person.

Fourth, the contents of self-awareness occur in a hierarchy of a network of conceptual contrasts. On the one hand, a network of negativities is contrasted by a corresponding network of positivities. Castañeda goes on to say that these contrasting networks identify who one is through the property of sameness. This statement introduces an uncertainty that raises some questions. How is the property of sameness introduced and maintained into an experiential episode to ascribe a person’s identity? The idea of contrasts that maintain sameness lead to the concept of I-strands that is explored and developed in the coming discussion.

Fifth, a self-awareness episode organizes and monitors the experience with which it is associated, and is then exhausted by that experience. Said differently, self-awareness is a property of an experience which organizes and monitors the experience, and which disappears when that particular experience ends.

Sixth, the first-person

I reference functions to organize an episode of experience and functions similarly to all other indexical references. Indexical reference is discussed and explored later. In general, the I reference with the other related indexical references functions uniquely, autonomously, and importantly organize one’s present experience.

Seventh, indexical references constitute the structure of subjectivity. One’s act of referring to particular transient features of an experience in a thinking episode is accomplished through the mechanism of indexical reference. A person singles out particular objects and characteristics of the world that are components of an evanescent experience, which are in turn episodes of a thinking episode. Castañeda uses the descriptive term of a harpoon, to describe a person’s, an I, adherence to a worldly object. To harpoon (that is, reference) the features of world is to constitute an experience and corresponding thinking episode. How thinking episodes evolve and are structured is further investigated later. The question that is intended is: how does thinking come about?

Eighth, what can be referred to as indexical particulars are transient, lasting only as long as an experience episode, and have a two-sided epistemological function. They possess first-person incorrigibility, that is, they exist only because they are experienced by a person, an I, whose experience it is. On the other side, they function to attach an I to physical objects in the external world that are the contents of an experience. That is, they harpoon the external world objects referred which are the contents of an immediate experience. The ontological significance of the indexicals employed is transient and ends when the experience ends, that is to say, when the epistemological function of the indexical references is completed.

Ninth, the first-person reference

, the Is, are transient indexical particulars. The Is in episodes of self-aware thinking function to harpoon in reflexive thinking (that is, attach to) the person who is experiencing an experience and engaging a thinking episode, however indefinite or whatever that subject, that I, might be. To say this differently, an I identifies the experiencer or thinker; the experiencer is harpooned by the I (to use this graphic term), as receiving that experience and thinking those thoughts.

Tenth, a peculiar feature of Is is to appropriate ownership of the realities experienced to the experiencer.

Eleventh, all Is last only for the duration of an experience.

This is a rather complete, although preliminary outline of the features of self-consciousness

. It shows some of its structures and points to essential components such as indexical referents, I-strands

, ownership or mineness, agency, and temporality. As noted above, several questions are introduced that require inquiry, such as thinking, the role of indexical referents in self-consciousness, maintaining the unity of an experience, and identity (Castañeda, 1999, pp. 245–248, 254–256). In general, Castañeda proposes a relatively thorough structure of subjective processes based on indexical referents used in ordinary conversation that are indispensable to any conversation or communication that maps subjective structures. These empirical facts, indexical references

, offer a methodology for inquiring into self-awareness, which is the core of subjectivity out of which Castañeda constructs a map of subjective structures. This is an achievement that is more acknowledged on the European Continent than in the United States although not yet incorporated into Continental mainstream phenomenology (Zahavi, 2012).

7.1.3 Indexical Referencing and Thinking

Reflexivity, or self-awareness could not be explored in the preceding section without indexical references! This fact might suggest that a discussion of indexical references could well have preceded it. While sympathetic, my sense is that reflexivity is the context that encapsulates linguistic reference and to logically precede this inquiry of the relation of referencing and thinking. A thinking reference directs attention to a specific object and excludes others. The specified object becomes a subject for the psychological processes of a thinking episode, a target for an action, or the subject of a communication. These processes are accomplished in communication by using linguistic mechanisms of reference which are indexicals or indicators that have three unique characteristics essential to this function. These are tools of one’s intention that play a causal role in communicating referred, or fastened objects, of one’s experience thereby opening a window to others to view a chosen portion of one’s own experience. I owe this outline of thinking references to Tomis Kapitan in his introduction to Castañeda in The PhenomenoLogic of the I which he with James G. Hart edited and who were former students of Castañeda (Kapitan, 1999, pp. 3–16).

What are the essential characteristics of indexical indicators that enable them to function in this unique way? There seems at least three such characteristics. First, like the first-person perspective out of which a thinking reference emerges, they are nonreducible; that is, they cannot be equated to non-indexical terms or mechanisms in a manner similar to which first-person perspective is not reducible, to non-personal objective third-person descriptions. Thinking requires some way of presenting an intended object that can tie it to the relevant conceptual structures. A reference is satisfied when a thought item that matches and is paired to the reference is distinguished in an experience episode, . This property is a result of the internal reflexivity context of ‘oneSELF’ referring back to the thinker, the I which is always an essential part of the referent (Kapitan, 1999, pp. 5–6). That is to say, a thinking referent is always tied to the thinker for the duration of the thinking episode (see the ninth I-strand feature).

A second unique and essential characteristic of thinking referents is its autonomous property. That is, thinking referents as an indexical indicator do not depend on any other means of referring to the same item. The thinker who uses an indexical requires no secondary means or mechanisms for referring to those indicated items. In a spoken communication such as “I will now hit the ball there on that green” the tokens I, now, there, and that are the indexical indicators that indicate the time and place you are hitting the ball in the context of your speech. These are interpreted autonomously by a hearer who has her own separate, independent access to the place you intend to hit the golf ball. There is no need for rules of interpretation as then the indexical indicators would not be autonomous (pp. 6–7). The independent ability of the indexicals in the spoken utterance direct the hearer’s attention to that which is referred, but they can only direct the hearer’s attention in the context of that which is said and co-located in an environmental setting. This point refers to the sixth and seventh I-strand features that speak to structuring an immediate experience and the subsequent thinking episode. One’s thinking coheres and is congruent to what can then be communicated to an other. Such a characteristic is an entry into second-person perspective and suggests some unique properties that constitute a second-person standpoint (Darwall, 2006).

Contextual sensitivity and dependence is the essential third property of indexical indicators. Here the executing and implementing of indexical indicators are to be kept distinct from interpreting the thinking referents, the indexical indicators, by a hearer of the communication. Interpretation is not simply a ‘reverse engineering’ of the implementation of a thinker’s formulated thought or utterance. A speaker who communicates about her thinking of an experience of an object does so from a particular point of view, a first-person reference. The uniquely particular first-personal point of view cannot be derived interpretively as there is no access to first-person experience by an other person, and an interpretive process would destroy the autonomy of the indexicals of what is spoken. A reference is indexical because it originates in the thinker’s experience and reflects her experience from her perspective. An indexical referent that is perspectivally presented is “a relational attribute that the referent has in virtue of being experienced by the user” (Kapitan, 1999, p. 7).

Indexicals are not, then, just labels, but each uniquely informs the audience of an immediate experience, or indirectly shares an experience such as when pointing to a picture of a loon on Seagull Lake in Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Northern Minnesota saying something like “This is a loon of Northern Minnesota.” The indexical this designates something present here-now-in-this-place that is in one’s awareness. Indexicals such as now and then indicate intervals of time that are related to an immediately present experience.

Differing indexical types are associated with different forms of encounter to which the thinker/speaker is related in an experience. The hearer needs no further interpretation to indirectly apprehend the speaker’s unique first-personal experience which the hearer then incorporates to his particular point of view, his first-personal perspective, perhaps having learned about Northern Minnesota loons. I owe the term form of encounter to Kapitan (p. 8) which nicely addresses the unique manner different indexicals present a speaker’s experience and adequately indicates the structures or forms created by indexical referents.

These forms of encounter are related to, in fact, can be said to emerge out of a person’s use of I, the first-personal indexical pronoun that refers to the speaker in which the forms occur. Further, Castañeda asserts that an I refers not just to oneself but to oneself as oneself, that is, to a self-concept. Still, Kapitan says, something continues to be missing for indexical referents to identify items of an experience. One’s perspective by itself does not adequately identify experiential items. What is required to complete an identifying task is the position within a perspective. Indexical referents have properties of orientations or positions within a perspective. A good example, used by Kapitan, is “You, you, and you go to work now, but you stay here” which nicely illustrates the different positions of an indexical referent within a single perspective. An I tokens the point of origin of a perspective while the referents of what is said are particular to an object. Three features, according to Kapitan, constitute how indexical referents identify the contents of an experience: (a) a generic encounter that is structured by a particular kind of referent such as an I, a you, a then, etc.; (b) an originating perspective that begins with an I; and (c) a position or ordering of positions within a perspective. It is important to keep in mind that these subjective structures are transient and ephemeral notwithstanding the complexity of indexical referents and their core function in thinking episodes.

Briefly reviewing, an indexical referent is created in a formed encounter

, following Kapitan, that has a position within a perspective. The contents of an experience are structurally fixed in one’s attention through indexical referencing mechanisms on the side of a thinker when spoken, and on the side of an audience when what is spoke is then heard. The contents of an experience are extracted from the subjectivity of a person, the thinker, through the window created by the indexical referents that are as conspicuous as the experiential contents themselves. The first-personal confrontation of an experience and the resulting thinking is structured indexically and is available only to the I who receives the experience. It is opaque to all others. This opacity is the subjectivity of a person. What is then said by a thinker about an experience opens a window into that subjective experience-thinking episode to an audience, that is otherwise alien, using indexical referential mechanisms to provide a form or structure of what is said of the thinking. The audience enters the window of the speaker’s subjective experience by interpreting the indexical referents in what is said and which reveals the features (a), (b), and (c) noted above. Said differently, the indexical referents in what is said reveals: (a) a generic encounter with the world that is subsequently structured with various appropriate indexicals such as I, then, here, that, etc.; (b) a perspective that begins with an I; and (c) a series of ordered positions within that perspective of what the window opens to the scrutiny of an alien other person. The adjective alien refers to the subjective and agential properties of an other person that points to an opposition, an irradicable boundary, between two persons that is different than relating to an inanimate world object or even those beings without a self-concept (Levinas, 1969, 1978, 1981). The significance of the term alien is explored later, but it can be noted uniquely relates to Levinas’s account of intersubjectivity addressed in a later study.

7.2 Experience and the Doxastic System

What can now be said about the nature of experience? In light of the transience of I-strands and indexical referents which only endure in a thinking episode, how is experience to be described? How does it propel a person’s activity in the life world? Happiness or disappointment, the reactive attitude reflecting one’s engagement with the social world, seems to lie somewhere between an immediate structured experience and the reservoir of one’s memories, beliefs, the generic information about situations, knowledge of normative social requirements, reactive attitudes, and what we posit, induce, or anticipate of the world. This complex of beliefs, information of objects, understanding of social normative expectations, fitting in social relationships, reactive attitudes, affective coloring, and other myriad mental objects and events has been designated as a doxastic system by Castañeda (1999; pp. 143–144, 223–224, 225, 243–244, 277). What is meant by one’s doxastic system is what is usually intended by the term mind

, but which is less burdened by historical accretions. One’s doxastic system includes a tendency to rehearse beliefs and can be characterized as functioning on a large iceberg-like system of out-of-awareness beliefs, generic knowledge, propensities, desires, intentions, etc. on which it causally relates and pivots. An experience that occurs here and now is embedded in the doxastic network of connections with the particular contents and intentions of that experience. A newly emergent experience recruits elements of a person’s doxastic network through similarity and sameness properties that were once tagged by an I. Such a supposed recruitment process is open to empirical investigation. Self-consciousness is executed in episodes of thinking; thinking is the backbone of an experience which derives its qualitative character from the particular objects and intentions contained by it. A particular experience endures only for the length of a thinking episode as do the corresponding I-strands and indexical referents which structure that experience (pp. 182, 277).

Does an I, the first-person presence here and now, of an experience apperceive a past empirical I, or does a past empirical I, a mental object, connect with the first-person presence of an I-here-and-now once it appears in a thinking episode of an experience? The importance of the question is whether the movement of an apperceptive act of identification moves from the present first-person I to a mental object that may be an empirical I, or whether a mental object connects with the first-person presence

, an I-here-now, with which it is already identified. Such an act of identification establishes an operative I-strand consisting of an I-here-now and a mental object that may be an empirical I (or to use James’s terminology, an empirical me). Is it necessary to discriminate whether apperceptive actions move from present to past or whether from past to present? In some sense, the inertial force would seem to move from present to past and that the identities of empirical contents such as selves, empirical I’s, as has already been established, has already been tagged, in an originary immediate here-now experience. On the other hand, we live our lives forward into an anticipated future so that the inertial movement is from past forward into a future that is determined by past choices. James describes a present pulse of thought that appropriates the immediately preceding thought and is felt as an intimately felt warmth of identity and sameness which creates a stream of thought pulses in James’s vocabulary and, in Castañeda’s vocabulary, a sequence of I-strands

(Castañeda, 1999, 278; James, 1890, pp. 321–323). James uses a vocabulary that includes sense, feeling, familiarity, intimacy, and warmth that Castañeda does not use but does acknowledge (Castañeda, 1999, p. 275–276; James, pp. 311–317). For James, as previously noted, I feel and I think are the basic facts of psychology. The two vocabularies enrich and complement each other. While James did not identify indexical referents, he acknowledged language to be embedded in experience (1890, p. 284; 1912. p. 43), and did not explore or elaborate the structures of subjectivity revealed by indexicals: the structures of self-consciousness, thinking, and immediate experience.

This section introduces new terms and concepts to further explore the nature of experience

. We will summarize and consolidate some of the concepts central to thinking which is, indeed, the backbone of an experience. There is no evidence in Castañeda’s corpus that he had encountered or read James so the similar and, it seems, convergent accounts are all the more significant in light of their independent origins. James’s account describes a larger molar view of the subjective psychological processes that is more panoramic in its scope. Castañeda provides a fine-grained examination of thinking episodes and experience that adds a grounding and perhaps a hypostasis to James’s independent account. An experience according to Castañeda is an immediate here-now perceptual confrontation with the world that is embedded in a doxastic network whose unity is recruited and tied to an I which establishes one’s perspective. Central to an experience is a self-aware thinking episode that is structured by the indexical referents internal to thinking all which endures only for the duration of the thinking episode. Each particular immediate experience entwines with, enriches, and deepens one’s doxastic system. The recruitment processes of varying doxastic contents are based on sameness qualities established in the I-strands

, which, according to James, are original self-feelings of warmth, intimacy, and familiarity of pulses of thought (Castañeda, 1999, pp. 200–201, 210–211; James, 1890, pp. 252, 311, 316, 321).

How does an immediate here-now experience relate to remembered past experience? Although the source of a past experience is different than that of an immediate experience, both are tied to a person’s doxastic network that is relevantly identified by the thinking I with appropriately tagged sameness qualities of similarity and familiarity. In this way a new I-strand, or thought pulse, is sustained, which further entwines with and adds to one’s doxastic network. The unity of an experience with its internal thinking episode is attributed to being owned by an I or self. It acquires a tag of familiarity and sameness of the transient event of that ownership, and is then added to one’s doxastic network. This kind of unity is synchronic in that the occurrence is in the immediate present. A succession of I-initiated ownership tags each succeeding thinking episode. These tags constitute a succession of I-strands

, following Castañeda, or a stream of thought, following James.

To contrast synchronic unity, a historical diachronic unity is one’s identity and is anchored in a body, and an I, a self, provides for that identity internal to a first-person presence. A temporal categorizing of experience into simple past and immediately present is necessary and heuristically self-explanatory, but which does not address other kinds of experience that is a large portion of experience in this modern world. For example, it is not clear that those experiences resulting from reading a novel, watching a movie, listening to a concert, engaging a virtual-world device, and so on fall easily into a temporal categorizing of past and present. These experiences are aesthetic in that the thinking structures are created outside a person by an artist or writer and one chooses to enter into the constructed thought structure to immediately experience the results of someone else’s thought structures. While the basic structures of such experiences remain the same, aesthetic experience requires a different analysis such as suggested by Vittorio Gallese (2017) and, while important to a complete psychological account of a person, is not pursued in these investigations.

7.3 Radical Doubt, a Noumenal I, and the WORLD

This section is an inquiry into one’s relation to the world inhabited by oneself. One of the ideas inherited from Descartes is a radical skepticism that the world exists. What we sensorially perceive of the world is in inexorable doubt. He argues that an evil demon may manipulate to its purposes one’s sensory perceptions, and we cannot know whether what we perceive is actually the world. Castañeda asserts that Descartes shows that an evil demon “can make me doubt” the World in its entirety. Descartes says the I think-I exist is the terminal certainty that is not derived by deductive logic, but rather from a first-personal present reflexiveness of ONEself to oneSELF. Castañeda concludes that the evil demon may have created a wholesale illusion of experience. The circumstance is that:

I think > > {The WORLD of objects, other persons, beliefs, empirical I’s, intentions, desires, and other sensory perceptions and concepts}

As noted by James, the thinker is outside the world she thinks (James, pp. 291, 324). Descartes’ error, according to Castañeda, is that he placed the I, the thinker, in the WORLD so that he was compelled to posit a separate non-material mental substance which creates the Cartesian dual substance formulation that has created difficulties for Western thinking to the present. Kant, says Castañeda , understood this error and placed the thinking I in a noumenal sphere outside the phenomenal world. It is this fact that Kant originally referred to as transcendental and which sets up the transcendental argument that if A is necessary for B then showing B is sufficient to conclude the existence of A, an argument that he frequently used. The transcendental argument is not discussed or further investigated here, but those curious readers who would like to are referred to Stern (2017).

Radical doubt persists and there is no argument, system of logic, or methodology that can eliminate it. According to Castañeda, it must then be accepted that there is no way of being certain of the existence or the accuracy of our understanding of the world that we posit exists. We must, then, accept that the WORLD may be wholly illusory. Castañeda elaborates two directions of the dimension of transcendence. In one direction is the presence of a transcendent source of the thinker, the I, that thinks the WORLD and which is also the source of thinking the contents of the WORLD. The other direction is an internal pointing to a transcendent reality “within the experiences inside” the WORLD (p. 217). Castañeda asserts that:

The fundamental attitude we must take toward the world is that of transcendent realism. We must live our ordinary experiences as if normally what we experience is real beyond them.

The possibility of error, he suggests, does not affect our experiences or the sequences of those experiences. Castañeda states that:

We simply take—and must take—it for granted in our basic daily experiences that we are not toys of an Evil Demon or the thinking gadgets of a clever scientist, or the accidental connivance of we do not know what that causes us to have wholly illusory experiences (p. 217).

Castañeda argues that it is not profitable to spend time attempting to overcome the skepticism of a possibly nonexisting world as such endeavors are unlikely to be satisfactorily successful. Rather, we must accept the deepest skeptical doubts and, further, accept that we are compelled to understand the world from within. Restated, the only alternative remaining is to investigate the world from within experience. What we are left with is a pointing-to framework that Castañeda says is transcendental because “…we must vicariously and holistically connect our experiences to a reality…” to which is pointed (p. 213). This situation has psychological consequences that dramatically impact the way we are present in and deal with our lifeworld. One of those consequences is that the intrinsic psychology as presented by James is fully congruent with such an internal transcendental assertion. A second consequence is, perhaps, to suggest that psychological investigations must take account of first-personal participation in experience. Castañeda’s account indicates that we can only understand our world through experience as was asserted by earlier pragmatists. Husserl’s maxim, discussed above, “Back to the things themselves!” is an insistence that the WORLD can be understood only by an inquiry of one’s experience. Understanding the world of which the person is a content among myriad other constituents is constrained to the experiences of that WORLD which we think (pp. 212–227). The turn to experience is not optional.

7.4 Self-Consciousness, Experience, and Thinking Hierarchies

The questions addressed in this section concern the organization of self-conscious experience around a core thinking episode. How do the elements of a self-conscious episode, an experience, arrive at the level of organization that makes possible an agential thought or an action? The hierarchical levels of increasing organization can be described at the self-conscious, experiential, and thinking frames, but all converge on a hypostatic individual I that thinks “by means of an indexical internal representation” and that is expressed in the first-person pronoun (Castañeda, 1999, p. 273). In Castañeda’s words “That [I] …is a device for successfully thinking of oneself. As such,… it has no objective properties” (p. 273). However, since this I token only reflexively references the thinker, only reflexively represents the thinker, how are I-strands created so as to reflect the structural thought of a thinker? How do the I-strands then go on to create organized structures that potentiates first-person action and thought?

There are subtle distinctions internal to I structures such as those illustrated by me, mine, my, we, and our that create contrasts important to first-person spheres of action. These distinctions create a range of possible properties and relations open to all I’s when a network of I-strand structures are created. These internal I-structures are formed by I-strands that are between an I and what Castañeda describes as a “…polar negation of something intrinsically non-I …Because of the polarity, the negation is dichotomous. Thus, an I-schemata [structure] is a complex of negativities” (p. 275). When a person orients to an environmental setting, she acts to pick out instances of non-self, polar negations to oneself. The instances of negations identified confront the I, thinking of ONEself as oneSelf, and forms a new I-strand in the present. Restated simply, a new I-strand is gained when a person self-consciously notices an other object (that is not ONEself) in the world. An I-strand hinges “…on contrasts between what one is qua oneself and something one is not” (p. 275). This is the fundamental constituent of the reflexivity of self-consciousness.

The question now becomes: how do new I-strands become a lasting part of a person’s reserve of experience, one’s doxastic network, that adds to one’s learning? Castañeda’s response is, similar to James’s, that thinking of ‘ONEself as oneSELF’ about something intimates it to feel the opposition of the negative instantiation to oneSELF, one’s I (p. 275). That is, Castañeda recognizes that feeling, sensing, familiarity, warmth are primitive forms of apprehension of a subject, an I, that is autonomous and not dependent, mediated, or enabled by a separate identification procedure. This apprehension is preconceptual and sets out a network of I structures for the duration of a self-conscious thinking episode. He further asserts that “such an act of apprehension sets in readiness a hierarchical manifold of propensities to think, especially think believingly, appropriate ranges of propositions.” It is important, is the assertion, to keep in mind that “These ranges are demarcated by the felt negativities.” What determines the elements and qualities of these ranges is the personality of the person thinking (pp. 275–276).

What is to be noted is the emergence of a hierarchy of propensities to think and act in a set of possible affordances in one’s lifeworld. This hierarchy is a doxastic system that is the repository of beliefs, values, social relations, and generic knowledge that includes a propensity to rehearse those wants, beliefs, and so on. Self-conscious reflexivity sits at the top of this doxastic hierarchic pedestal. Reflexivity is not reflection as an intentional and deliberate cognitive act. Rather again, reflexivity is an automatic occurrent consciousness of oneSELF that swings between one’s I and a negative non-I object of thought that is an I-strand. “The empirical contents of episodes of self-consciousness fall,” according to Castañeda, “within one or more of the negativities composing the I-strands” (p. 276). A sampling of often used I-strand forms are:

1. 1.

The contrast I—this, that (referencing immediately present objects)

2. 2.

The contrast I—it,those (referencing external objects)

3. 3.

The contrast I—he/she (referencing an other agent and thinker in an impersonal context)

4. 4.

The contrast I—they (referencing other agents and thinkers in an impersonal context)

5. 5.

The contrast I (believer/knower)—I (agent) (referencing one’s own empirical I or self)

6. 6.

The contrast I—he/she (referencing directly a specific other thinking and acting person)

7. 7.

The contrast I—you (referencing an other person with whom one is engaged in a shared activity or communication)

8. 8.

The contrast I—we (referencing an other person or persons one is engaged with in a relationship)

9. 9.

The contrast I—they/we (referencing the members of one’s community)

Some clarifying observations concerning the I-strand examples are, perhaps, required. The nomenclature just used follows Martin Buber’s I-thou, I-it nomenclature indicating an I and non-I relation (Buber, 1958). The non-I pole of the bi-polar relation references an indexical designation, that is by this, that, they, you, he, she, we, etc. These indexicals complete I-strands that then function to structure experiences and set up thinking episodes. These I-strands divide a complete concept of I, thinking of ONEself as oneSELF, from different I-strands, each of which can be thought of as an axis with an integrity that maintains its separation from other I-strands. They are formulated from the “perspective of the experience of thinking” (Castañeda, 1999, p. 277). The end points of each strand are (a) what is experienced in contrast to things that are not immediately experienced but which belong to or are associated with the larger world; (b) what is internal to the doxastic system in contrast to what is external in one’s environment; (c) being-a-person in contrast to not-being-a-person that is reflexively self-conscious; (d) believing in contrast to acting; (e) being a person that thinks and acts in contrast to a we as a member of a community. Thus thinking occurs in a network of negativities (p. 273). As Castañeda acknowledges other lines of contrast can be made. The purpose is to distinguish (1) the I of a thinker from the negativity of a non-I thing, and (2) the empirical I’s (or empirical selves, per James) of one’s biography from the contrasting non-I things of one’s environment.

The general concept is that these sample I-strands , and those not enumerated, entwine in a spiralic process that comprises the maturing of a person or knowledge gained during an inquiry. This entwining includes our behavioral and biological natures existing in a world that is physical, social, and personal. Some of these doxastic elements may be deep in a thinker’s psychological make-up. They are reflected in a person’s orientation to the world, are entirely out of awareness, and form the “foundation of the thinker’s doxastic pedestal” (p. 277). The network of negativities are built on that foundation and are filled with contents such as beliefs and generic knowledge of the world.

The immediate contents of a thinking episode, says Castañeda

, enter conscious cognitive processes as networks of I-strands. The appearance of particular contents mobilizes past contents of the doxastic hierarchical system that become part of the immediate experience. This hierarchical system is organized suffusively and subsumptively, adjectives chosen by Castañeda to describe the organization of self-consciousness, which is the “highest form of consciousness” and which sits at the top of conscious and subconscious elements of a doxastic system (p. 278). The suffusiveness of the hierarchical organization refers to the mobilization of past events and contents that are situated in lower levels of the hierarchical structures on the basis of sameness properties such as similarity, familiarity, and warmth that mark ownership. The subsumptiveness of the hierarchy is the presence of the lower levels of organization in its higher levels in a nested manner. To state that differently, the physiological and neurological processes support a hierarchical structure that moves up to higher levels of organization and mobilizes lower level contents according to a particular current experience.

A subsumptive reflexive organization of the doxastic system is suggested by Castañeda to include at least seven levels:

1. 1.

Body and environmental sensory input is conceptually unarticulated;

2. 2.

I-less (unowned) articulated sensory data of objects, the body, and occurring mental events;

3. 3.

I-less focused consciousness of which the core is a complex of perceptual judgments;

4. 4.

I-owned content articulating the contrast between the I (self) and non-I objects;

5. 5.

I-owned content articulating intentional agency;

6. 6.

I-owned content articulating the contrast between I (self) and non-I other persons;

7. 7.

I-owned content articulating interactions between I (self) and a non-I you as well as absent persons (pp. 277–278).

These seven hierarchical levels constitute the doxastic pedestal in which reflexive self-awareness emerges. It begins with early levels of I-owned content and reaches an apex in self-conscious intention. Subsumption refers to, again, the content of each lower hierarchical level suffusing into the higher levels of the hierarchy. These levels of consciousness have at their highest level the self-consciousness of an I that focuses a first-person perspective and anchors a person in their environment. Lower levels of consciousness do not involve an I identification. They represent an increasing organization of the objects of the world, and results in complex perceptual judgments at the hypothesized level 3. An I emerges at level 4 when a person establishes contrasts between oneself and other non-I objects. Then intentional agency comes into play followed by increasingly complex social discriminations that culminate in an awareness of ONEself as oneSELF at levels 5, 6, and 7. In the context of the contrasts between oneSELF, one’s I, and the objects of one’s environment that experience and experience’s structural thinking episodes emerge in the full doxastic content recruited. Castañeda had hoped to identify various forms of psychopathology by discerning the level of reality disturbed corresponding to the level of co-conscious integration that could fail; a relatively direct determination of disorders of consciousness. For example, if focal consciousness at level 3 failed to develop adequately, such a person would not orient well to their environment. Ganeri (2012) observes that Dharmakīrti in seventh century Buddhist thinking in India discerned another level between 3 and 4 involving imagined or quasi-subjects (p. 215). Castañeda’s analysis of self-consciousness, according to Ganeri, is in the spirit of early Buddhist thinking with the “. . emphasis on contrastive exclusion and on levels of preconceptual and conceptual articulation” (p. 216).

A brief recapitulation of the discussion of the relation of self-consciousness

, experience, and thinking episodes is in order. The doxastic system is hierarchically structured levels of consciousness that are all contained within self-consciousness according to two principles: suffusion and subsumption. Self-consciousness, experience, and thinking episodes are three interdependent dimensions of the same event. Each dimension exists for the duration of the experience so that their existence is delimited by the duration of an experience in the specious present, and each experience is followed by a succeeding experience that congruently emerges with a changing environment that already owns the previous experience. These processes are congruent between Castañeda and James. Self-consciousness is the reflexivity of a person thinking of ONEself as oneSELF. Castañeda argues that the fundamental constituent of reflexivity is the contrast between what one is and what one is not. These contrasts between one’s I and the non-I, are the contents of cognition that comprise a doxastic system that relates to the contents of a self-conscious-experiential-thinking episode. I-strands enter neurophysiological supported cognition as networks. They intermingle in a variety of ways that deepen the experience of a maturing person so that successive experiences are confronted with a growing reservoir of accumulated experience recognized as, perhaps, wisdom. Castañeda suggests a hierarchy of at least nine forms of I-strands that range from an undifferentiated recognition of the contrast this-and-that and culminates as a participating we as a member of a community. These nine forms of I-strands fill in and complete an I.

The intermingling of I-strands can lead to different presentations of a person in their world. For example, a solipsistic manner of presentation confronts the world as accessible only to oneself, one’s I. Charles Taylor refers to this presentation as a punctual self. He says it is characteristic of the Western cultural tradition initiated by Descartes’s disembodied self and radicalized by Locke, Hume, and Kant (Taylor, 1989; pp. 159–176). Deists may see the world as the content of an all embracing I (Taylor, pp. 248–265). Mysticism exhibits a variety of forms, but generally mystics present themselves as a partial I within one all-encompassing I (Castañeda, 1999, p. 277). The moment-to-moment intermingling of I-strands accumulates in the doxastic system of a maturing person and adds to the resources that person brings to future interactions with their world. These intermingling I-strands are hierarchically organized according to the principles of suffusion and subsumption.

To again briefly review, suffusion refers to a thought that contains particular contents that activate or mobilize related contents of the doxastic system in the lower levels of its hierarchical structure. The relationship of immediately thought contents to doxastic contents is established by drawing on the sameness properties of similarity, familiarity, and association to recruit related contents. Secondly, the subsumptive relation holds that the highest level of self-consciousness contains within it all contents of the lower levels of consciousness. That is, unowned content, I-less content of undifferentiated sensory properties is contained in each of the seven levels of consciousness and is a part of a person’s directed self-conscious interactions with others in their community at the highest I-strand level.

7.5 Intersubjectivity, Otherness, Alterity

All of the constituents necessary to account for first-personal perspective and commitment are assembled in Baker’s constitutional view of personhood. Still, at least one important issue is not fully addressed: intersubjectivity . Intersubjectivity is a person’s capacity to apprehend the subjectivity of an other person and thereby to interact with that other person. Subjectivity, to review quickly, is a capacity to act first-personally from the interdependent processes of experiencing, of thinking as the core of experience, and of the inner reflexivity of self-awareness. An interaction with a person is not the same as relating to other objects of the world which are not self-conscious with their own capacity to act first-personally. Although an animal is conscious and aware of its physical body, it is not internally reflexive and so does not have a robust first-person presence. To apprehend an other person is to acknowledge their subjectivity; that relation is intersubjective.

The term intersubjectivity is used generally in a wide variety of ways. In the psychological literature, the term refers to a reciprocating interaction between two or more persons. The phenomenological literature uses the term more narrowly to refer to an alien otherness of a person who has their own subjectivity and agential capability that cannot be grasped or possessed by another person. In this context, an authentic encounter with an alien Other always increases one’s insecurity and creates fundamental alienness that is unbridgeable (Levinas, 1969). (Capitalizing Other follows a standard established by Levinas when referencing an external other person; a noncapitalized other is used by Levinas to refer to an internalized other. All this is thoroughly examined later.) According to Levinas, the Other always transcends one’s effort to grasp and understand that other, which underscores their alienness to which we are compelled to respond (Levinas, 1999). More simply, the Other is irreducible to a total conceptual representation. Related terms include alterity and otherness to capture different aspects of reciprocating interpersonal interactions. Alterity refers to the quality of an other person that is not reducible to one’s interiority, one’s perceived characteristics of the other person that becomes an inner, that is, an internalized concept of the other person that always fails to completely grasp the Other (Levinas, 1969, 1978, 1999; Ricoeur, 1992; Zahavi, 1999, 2003). The importance of these terms is in their polar contrasts— subjectivity-intersubjectivity, self-otherness, and interiority-alterity (or interiority-exteriority)—which indicate the dimensional quality of each pair of opposites (Levinas, 1969).

With this background sketch we can address how Castañeda accounts for the potential of intersubjective relations within a person’s own subjective processes. The experience of those intersubjective relations is referred to as intersubjectivity: a person’s capacity to structure an experience that results from engaging in a relationship self-consciously and hierarchically in an act of thinking. According to Castañeda, the potential to intersubjectively apprehend a foreign other begins with a speaker’s act of indirectly referring to what one believes about another. In this reference, the speaker opens a window into her subjective structures that are otherwise inaccessible to another. In a statement “Albert says (that) Alice believes (that) Bush is a scientist,” the speaker refers to the doxastic content, believes that, of another person, Alice, of her knowledge of a third person, Bush. A thinker, Albert, indirectly references Alice’s knowledge of Bush as a scientist, illustrated by a general formula ‘V indirectly refers to X referring to Y as Z’, with the result that the knowledge emerges that Bush is a scientist. A thinker’s access to another’s thought content connects those contents to an external shared world and constitutes an intersubjective connection. As that connection is elaborated through accumulated experiences, an intersubjective environment develops that is internally represented in each thinker’s doxastic hierarchy. More schematically:

1. c.

A speaker verbally asserts Albert,V, says (that) Alice, X, believes (that) Bush, Y, is a scientist, Z which is generally represented schematically as.

2. d.

V (X [Y {Z}])

Both (c) and (d) illustrate the hierarchical nested property of the intersubjective windows of a thinker’s thought content. This property opens the potential to second-person reciprocating interactions, which in turn opens a new dimension of a we-experience, which in turn opens a larger range of possibilities of intersubjectivity.

This is an account of the subjective origins of intersubjectivity derived from the indexical references of language used in communication (Castañeda, 1999, pp. 258–264, 286–288). As such, it is a relatively detailed account of an experience that is self-consciously structured in thinking episodes that provide for further cognitive processing. The properties that emerge from continuing reciprocating social experience in the dimensions of subjectivity-intersubjectivity, interior-alterity, and self-other are captured in a large and complex literature of sociality (Szanto and Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2012). Sociality and related issues can be investigated directly through a second-person participant perspective, which seems to have been largely ignored in the extended conversation of first-person perspective, in contrast to a normative objective third-person perspective that has dominated Western thought (de Quincey, 1999). That study follows this one.

What Castañeda shows in his investigations is that self is inseparable from self-consciousness, which includes lower levels of consciousness at a basic subjective level. Not only are self, an I, and self-consciousness inseparable, but self-consciousness, experience, and thinking episodes are in an important way the same event, either viewed from differing perspectives or as entwined inseparably in a way that none can be distinguished individually. There is no self, no I, without self-consciousness, without self-awareness. “This,” as Castañeda says, “is another dimension of the characteristic and peculiar internal reflexivity of self-consciousness” (Castañeda, 1999, p. 278). I-here-now, the self of the specious present, identifies the past empirical I’s, the past selves, and is co-terminal with them (p. 210). For Castañeda, “a self refers to itself in a first person way,” and “a self so referred is called an I” (p. 89, italics added).

The next section reviews and summarizes our larger discussion of I and Thinking to identify and emphasize some of the more important elements of this inquiry of subjectivity.

7.6 Review and Summary of Subjectivity and Its I

Ganeri (2012) argues that early Sanskrit concepts of the self held that self and a naturalistic understanding of the world are tied interdependently. Buddhism especially tied self-understanding and one’s place in the world, referred to as enlightenment, to a naturalistic understanding of the world that is a form of naturalism congruent with the scientific naturalism of Quine and Sellars. That is not to say that the conceptual range of naturalism is not wide and, indeed, includes a variety of forms of soft and of hard naturalism

. Ganeri’s investigation discovers converging themes with first-person perspective which are congruent with the investigations of Castañeda into the structure of experience through the methodological device of indexical references and indicators of ordinary communication. Ganeri concludes that there are three self functions derived from Sanskirt philosophical literature: to monitor and coordinate cognitive processing, participation in a first-person perspective in thinking and acting, and an immersion in the situation encountered. Monitoring and coordinating between the subjective elements of cognition and precognition processes are tied to the immediate experience at the various hierarchical levels of awareness. Agential participation refers to that process that commits one to a first-person stance and action. Finally, a full immersion in an experience that includes the emotional salience and the reactive emotional responses to one’s situation. One is not just an observer of the events of one’s life, but is fully immersed in the experience of living those events. Ganeri’s proposal fills in nicely Baker’s account of first-person perspective which she refers to as the constitution view and which asserts that a person is constituted when a concept of oneself emerges. The datum for this conclusion is ‘I think/hope/wish that I∗ win/go/am not ill’ where I∗ reflexively refers back to oneSELF, back to one’s I.

Ganeri’s account fills in and converges nicely with those self-based reflexivity processes that structure a person and her/his first-person commitment. The monitoring and coordination, immersion in an experience, and participant dimensions of a self proposed by Ganeri are larger molar formulations of Castañeda’s fine grained analysis of experience consisting of self-consciousness, encounters of objects in the world, and thinking as three entwined constituents of a person. These can be said to be the phenomenological reality of a person. The monitoring and coordination as described by Ganeri compares to the self-consciousness of external and internal reflexivity as tied to indexical referents and indicators (see 7.1.2). The account constructed by Castañeda provides the structured processes of monitoring and coordination. Ganeri’s immersion corresponds to the stream of experience as described by Castañeda as a confronting of the world that includes affective reactions and, in fact, an immersion in that world. In spite of the inescapable skepticism of the external world, one’s experience is inescapable and cannot be questioned or denied. Finally, a self, or person

, as a first-person participant is exhibited in Castañeda’s account of thinking as providing a structural backbone for experience which results is an agential first-person stand and action. The comparison of Ganeri and Castañeda argues for a convergence of their thinking regarding personhood and its relation to the world of two very different independent thinkers from very different backgrounds. Add to this the convergence of the independent descriptions of the structure of self-consciousness by Castañeda and the account of the stream of consciousness of James’s intrinsic psychology, and a forceful argument emerges for the convergence of these thinker’s accounts of subjectivity.

Baker’s constitution view is hypothesized as setting the outer structural boundary for James’s intrinsic psychology and Castañeda’s account of subjectivity. Castañeda’s proposal of I-strands contrasts an I tied to worldly and mental objects that is harpooned by a set of specialized referents designated as indexicals

. Direct and indirect indexicals are tools of thinking that are required to communicate within the frame of a self-concept, as in Baker’s constitution view. According to Castañeda, a self-concept is an iterative reflexivity between an I∗ referring to oneSELF and a non-worldly I that originates a particular perspective and is outside the world that it thinks. One of Castañeda’s original and important contributions is an analysis of reflexivity which demonstrates that there are two kinds of reflexivity: external and internal. The internal reflexivity depends upon the external one as ‘ONE thinks of ONEself∗…’, but the core of self-awareness is internal reflexivity: thinking of ONEself∗ as oneSELF, a non-worldly I, according to Castañeda and James. The internal reflexivity is what Baker refers to as the datum of a self-concept and which constitutes a person with a robust first-person perspective (Baker, 2013, pp. 30–71; 127–143). Subjectivity processes structure the first-person perspective by means of indexical referents that are the tools of the thinking episodes of experience. Every experience is triadically constituted by self-awareness, an encountered world of objects and subjects, and thinking.

According to Castañeda, these constituents are connected by intermingling I-strands of contrasting I and non-I contents of the world about which we are thinking and acting. These I-strands are integrated in a doxastic system that is composed of the general knowledge relevant to the experience, social normative expectations, and personality characteristics of a person who can make or not make a first-person commitment. This integration is the everyday cognitive processing of the neurological structures of the brain. Particular I-strands and other contents of an experience-thinking episode are integrated according to characteristics of similarity, familiarity, sense of warmth, and other properties of sameness. This integration makes possible the contents to be recruited when related experience episodes occur that support a person’s first-person stand, commitment, and action. Two important properties of subjectivity are the non-worldly nature of the I that thinks the world and the radical skepticism regarding the independent existence of the world. The uncertainty about whether sensory input is the manipulations of an evil demon or clever scientist cannot be epistemologically overcome. This radical doubt persists and no argument, system of logic, or methodology can eliminate it. What cannot be denied is our flow of experience. It is only from experience that a person can think and build one’s world. There is no real issue of returning to experience, to paraphrase Husserl; it is the only thing we can do; the only thing of which we have a real awareness.

The central goal of this paper is to propose a framework of subjectivity that will further investigations of the preconscious and precognitive processes that found cognition. It consolidates Castañeda’s thinking to what is most psychologically relevant to present his account of the structures of subjectivity, experience, thinking, and their relations to the world. The goal has been to enrich psychological notions of subjectivity and give an account of the functions and structure that are internal to subjectivity. At the same time, it has been shown that it fills in and converges with Baker’s constitutional view, James’s intrinsic psychology, and Ganeri’s reconstruction of early Sanskrit thinking of what is a self and its relation to a naturalistic world. Castañeda’s account of subjectivity is the most complete so far available, and is unknown in the psychological literature. Its significance should not be under estimated. It’s congruence to James’s presentation of intrinsic psychology is recognized and provides significant convergent strength to both accounts. Castañeda bases his formulation of subjectivity on an analysis of indexical referents, and so is empirically derived. It can reasonably be argued that the subjective processes described can be the foundation of cognition for psychology, comparable to quantum physical processes foundational role in physics. Such a development moves psychology further toward a uniquely psychological subject matter that some have argued is lacking (for example, Sugarman and Martin 2010). Such inquiries of subjectivity are inevitable, sooner or later, as they are the hypostasis of cognitive mental processes.

While I can feel somewhat remorseful for suggesting the introduction what might seem like too many different, if not new, concepts, I do not apologize, as the concepts are seen as necessary to wrapping understanding around one account of subjectivity and its constituent processes. These are uniquely psychological concerns. In fact, it may be that Castañeda’s indexical formulation of subjectivity provides a basic structure to subjectivity that theoretical formulations such as the dialogical self can build (Hermans & Salgado, 2010). We are, again, moved closer to recognizing a perspectival view of psychological phenomena, and acknowledging the ontological significance of first-and second-person perspectives and an objective third-person perspective as necessary for a complete understanding of experience, thinking, and acting.

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_8

8. Eighth Study: Second-Person WE

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

IntersubjectivityWe-experienceMoralitySecond-person standPractical reasonsAutonomyReactive attitudesInterdefinable circleCategorical imperative

In the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the philosophy of science, a tension between first-person experience of and objective third-person knowledge about reflects that these terms are incommensurate. A rigorous naturalistic science is a closed reductionist system that requires objective third-person facts and description (See Studies, Chaps. 4 & 5, Duus, 2017). This tension establishes a gap that is filled by what is referred to as second-person perspective. It is an intersubjective gap between first-personal experience particular to an individual and are exclusively accessible to the individual actor contrasted to third-personal knowledge about the world that is general, shared, and collaborated by a community of others. This study is within the context of perspective first elaborated by Mead (1934, 1938) and further developed by Darwall (2006) and Baker (2013). Specifically, this study is limited to second-person engagement proposed to structure the intersubjective space, the gap, between first-person perspective contrasted to a third-person perspective. The intersubjective space has been unattended, perhaps, because of the philosophically extended conversation of first-person perspective verse objective scientific third-person descriptions of the philosophy of science. It is proposed that this intersubjective space is filled by the structures of second-person engagement which has not been equally unattended in philosophy (Darwall, 2004, 2006; Korsgaard, 1993, 2007).

The controversy is that scientific descriptions of knowledge about averages out individual and the particular information of the person and is incommensurate to first-person experience of those particular characteristics of an individual. Such third-personal public descriptions have dominated the Western intellectual tradition and, perhaps, results in ignoring first-personal perspective (Dennett, 2001; 2003; Duus, 2017; de Quincey, 1999). When addressing the we or us as a shared world there emerges some differences between a second-personal singular perspective and a first-personal plural perspective which blurs how these concepts can be distinguished. What emerges is that the second-personal standpoint is far from a pellucid concept. This inquiry is interested in the second-person engagement as an interaction between two persons engaging a shared activity. Stated more directly, this inquiry enters an investigation of a second-personal singular perspective which pursues the goal of setting out the necessary constituents of second-personal engagement. In principle a second-person engagement may involve more than simply two persons; this inquiry will address the paradigmatic two person encounter.

The intuition is that the properties arising from a second-person engagement exhibit a unitary quality that can properly be referred to as second-personal singular. A first-personal plural perspective concerns two individuals engaged in a common activity that is not shared but only concurrently engaged without direct interaction with and, perhaps, knowledge of the other individual. No unitary characteristic unique to a second-person engagement is present. It is proposed by some that there are no unique properties of a We relation (Szanto & Moran, 2016, pp. 93–140). The dimensions of self-other, subjectivity-intersubjectivity, and interiority-alterity are encountered through the whole of the discussion of the second-person we as all are entwined. The interiority-alterity dimension parallels the previous two in that alterity refers to encountering an other person that cannot be grasped, possessed, or understood; that is infinitely different from oneself (Levinas, 1999). We also encounter the notion of the agency of a plural subject that refers to groups of people exhibiting agential capacities, the agency of a plural subject (Szanto & Moran, 2016).

The basic structure of the second-person perspective is that of one person engaging an other in a conversation or shared activity

. The link between one person and an engaged other is a second-personal perspective: a direct person-to-person exchange. A second-personal perspective is initiated when one person engages an other person in a conversation that exchanges their respective view points about a shared concern or, alternatively, engages a project or object that produces a shared intentional act. The shared activity may be that of simply engaging in an activity such as building a house in which, because of the skill of two workmen, require minimal verbal discussion. This is a WE experience involving a YOU-ME relation that is reciprocating and triadic in which ME is aware of the other, YOU, and a shared project; and YOU is aware of ME thinking of the shared project; each concurrently are aware that each of the other is similarly aware of ME thinking of the project who is aware of YOU thinking of the project who is aware of ME and so on. What is important is that each is aware of oneself and of their awarenesses of the other relating to a common project. A first-person plural perspective occurs when each is aware of the same project but the project is not concurrently shared. That is, each person is not aware or not attentive to the other engaged in the same project. This discrimination of second-person singular and first-person plural perspectives is used in this discussion, but is not the same across all investigators (Szanto & Moran, 2016). A first-personal commitment precedes all second-personal engagements of a singular kind; a person must be first-personally competent to engage second-personally.

With this general outline, the second-person standpoint is understood as the second-person perspective you and me (I) take when we engage a particular interaction in which we hold each other responsible and accountable. Said differently, when WE, you and me (I), engage a second-personal interaction, I make demands on your behavior and your future related actions, and fully anticipate you make similar demands of me. Therefore, as soon as a person in a first-personal stand commits to a second-personal perspective and engages another, a relation of reciprocating accountability emerges that characterizes morality (Darwall, 2006; Ricoeur, 1992; and others). In a paper concerned with the origin of morality , Lando Kirchmair (2017) defended the idea of intersubjectivity as the source of norm-based-morality that begins in early childhood development. It is one of the few examples of intersubjectivity, the interaction between persons, as the source of morality in the psychological literature. This is significant; as mainstream psychological literature to this time has ignored similar proposals of a large phenomenological literature (Szanto & Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2012). It is anticipated that the psychological literature will continue to broaden to include important areas of intersubjectivity, otherness, self, alterity, first-person perspective, second-person perspective, and related inquiries (Ataria, 2016; Bergner, 2018; Duus, 2017; Freeman, 2017). A second-personal stand fills the gap, although probably partially, between first-person and third-person perspectives, and is an origin of morality that is inherent in the interaction of persons; which has not been a significant subject of inquiry in American psychological literature. This assertion is congruent to the ethical intersubjectivity of Levinas. Second-personal events fit entirely within a soft naturalistic reality that is compatible with psychological science; without supernatural substances or beings. The phrase soft naturalism refers to an open scientific ontology that admits new intention dependent objects as they inevitably emerge in a continuing social culture (Baker, 2007, 2013; Duus, 2017; Ganeri, 2012).

Our goal in this part of the inquiry is to explore the second-personal standpoint and the resulting inherent moral properties. What, though, is meant by moral or moral properties? How do morality or moral properties emerge to become a central feature of one’s regard and behavior with another? Further, what are the consequences of morality that originates in an intersubjective relation with an other? Kirchmair’s (2017) proposal of an intersubjective origin of morality derives noteworthy consequences that he does not recognize (Kirchmair, 2017). He specifically limits intersubjectivity as a ‘core concept’ to the “…innate features or capacities of the brain/mind” that is supported by the environment, and that “Moral phenomena can only be explained “in terms of diverse cognitive components that are not specific to morality”…” if morality is “…a product of reason” (p. 248). Intersubjectivism , however, requires that the origin of morality is one’s relations to others; morality supervenes from second-personal engagement in a community. Similar to first-person actions, an organic body with the necessary complex neurological like structures adequate to support second-person engagement is necessary but not sufficient to support ‘moral behavior’. Moral conduct arises out of a first-person commitment to a second-personal engagement (Darwall, 2006; Dewey, 1960; Habermas, 1992; Korsgaard, 1993; Mead, 1934, 1938; Ricoeur, 1992; Zahavi, 2012; and others). To state this point more completely, a first-personally constituted person engaging a second-person interaction is required to conduct oneself morally. Our task is to follow how this is accomplished.

To paraphrase John Dewey, all morality can be reduced to the utility to men in getting along and resolving problems. The minimum requirements for moral engagement are: the ability to generate reasons, freedom to choose among affordant alternatives, an autonomy uncontaminated by influences other than one’s own reason, and the power to act according to one’s subjective reason (Dewey, 1960, p. 262). Reasons are always initially subjective and personal. More specifically the reasons for acting are second-personal and cannot be reduced to first-personal status which will be more carefully discussed later, and are generally opaque to third-personal description. Once a reason is acted on in a second-person engagement, it may be abstracted and generalized by the moral community one lives and become an objective agent-neutral value. A subjective reason becomes enculturated by society and becomes an objective value that is added to the community’s moral infrastructure. Objective values can be shared by others while agent relative or subjective reasons are inaccessible to an other. A reason can be said to become a value when that reason is used iteratively. Reasons, and the values that follow, have a normative force because they are a person’s reasons to commit to an action, and that person expects the other to do so as well. Values then are intersubjective and supervene on the “structure of personal relations” (Korsgaard, 1993). Normative refers to a pull to perform an act a person is responsible to perform that matches the expectations of the community one is a member.

To summarize, the purpose of this section has been to describe the interdependent connection between second-person engagement and the kind of behavior we call moral. In this view they are the sides of a coin, and one in isolation of the other is simply incomplete. In spite of the appearance of coherence, every point of the argument is controversial with a discussion contained in a large literature spanning, in most cases, at least 2500 years. The presented description is the structure of presuppositions underlying viable second-personal engagements that follow Stephen Darwall’s rather complete presentation in The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality Respect and Accountability (2006), and as well other related presentations (Darwall, 2004, 2007, 2011). It is recognized that Darwall’s development of the second-person standpoint is in a philosophical context and that part of the task of this investigation is to show that it is of psychological import and suggest how second-person engagement can be conceptually and empirically included in psychological science as set out in these investigations. Kirchmair (2017), Duus (2017), and Freeman (2017) are some beginning examples of psychological import of second-personal engagement in a frame of soft naturalism and psychological science. There are significant others who have contributed to the inquiry of second-personal perspective that include Thomas Nagel, Christine Korsgaard, George Herbert Mead, and, perhaps more interestingly, Adam Smith.

Adam Smith is credited by Darwall as the first inquiry into second-person phenomena (Darwall, 2006, pp. 43–47; 2011). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Smith gives a relatively broad and sensitive account of the role of empathy human relationships in thought and in practice although he does not use that term (Smith, 1759). Rather he describes the imagination as functioning to “place ourselves” in another’s situation so that “we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments” he is suffering and “we enter into his body, and become in some measure the person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. Smith provides a useful functional description of empathy quite accurately although “our own senses will never inform us of what he suffers” (pp. 1–2). Darwall further notices that The Wealth of Nations begins with a discussion of engaging in an exchange with another to gain something needed for one’s well being. Such an exchange is based on self-interest but with respect and a sense of accountability and responsibility to the other. “…man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, by Smith’s account, “and it is vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only” (Smith, 1776/1976, p. 25). Darwall asserts that Smith’s description of exchange corresponds precisely with second-personal engagement, and presupposes established patterns of practices to which both parties are committed. That is, there is an established second personal infrastructure of a reciprocating acknowledgement that presupposes both parties are mutually accountable, that each have equal authority to complain and be free of coercion. What is interesting is that the gap between first-person particulars and objective third-person description has a long history of inquiry that stretches back to at least Adam Smith.

8.1 Empathy—Some Considerations

The concept of empathy has been the target of many different extensive inquiries and varying discussions with the result that empathy as a term has many different meanings. In addition to phenomenological investigations that have proceeded since Husserl, recently there also has been active neuroscientific investigations that have been both empirical and theoretical (J. Decety & J. M. Cowell, 2014; 2015; Gallese, 2003; Lamm, Batson, & Decety, 2007; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2006; Zahavi, 2014). Decety and Cowell (2014) argue that the term empathy no longer has significant meaning because too much has been attributed to it and is little more than a useful explanatory concept in a wide variety of situations. The functions usually attributed to empathy, they argue, consists of three constituent separate processes that at the same time entwine. First is affective sharing which is the detection of affective motivational and emotional states that can trigger caring and nurturance, but not necessarily an automatic response or convergence of emotion. Secondly, empathic concern which is the motivation to care for another and to be concerned for their welfare. The third component is perspective taking referring to the capacity to put oneself into an other person’s circumstances and imagine that person’s thinking and feelings (p. 4). Gallese (2003) and Rizzolatti, Fogassi and Gallese (2006) argue that empathy may function directly by means of a dedicated neurological network that may be similar to motor mirror neurons by directly apprehending the behavior and situation of another person, and as well indirectly processing the input of the motor mirror neuron network. Other related work addresses social neuroscience of second-person interactions and identifying the neural networks involved in social behavior (Schilbach et al., 2013). At this time, what Schilbach and colleagues mean by second-person refers to a methodology of involving two interacting persons that are monitored as they engage the task established for them. Simultaneously monitoring two interacting persons is a relatively new methodology for neuroscience that has not yet contributed to the complex series of interactions that exhibit the awareness of each other and reflexive self-awareness.

In the context of these vigorous empirical and theoretical activities, how is empathy to be understood that is necessary and central to second-person engagement? The suggestion is that empathy refers, simply, to the experience of engaging with another person in a second-person manner. The received experience is one’s connection with the other who is also at the same time experiencing his engagement with you and the simultaneous experience of both can be referred to as a we experience. Centrally important is that each is aware of the other’s self-awareness of their awareness of the other’s self-awareness. Sympathy is used to refer to a third-personal descriptive appreciation of another’s situation from a reflective distance. Darwall ascribes to a two stage simulation concept of empathy in which a person observes the circumstances and behavior of another person from which she infers likely hypotheses of the experience of that person in the context of that situation and what she already knows of that person (Darwall, 2006, pp. 43–48, 178–180). That is, a hypothesis is cognitively developed from an objective third-person perspective and our interactions with the other person are based on inferential simulations (Goldman, 2006; Gopnik & Wellman, 2012). This view provides a scenario that our interactions are based on intellectualized inferential simulation of the other person’s mental states. Nothing in this model is spontaneous and intuitive.

Opposed to this account is the assertion that our experience of the other person is direct and intuitive by, for example, Zahavi following what he refers to as the later Husserl (Zahavi, 2003, 2011a, 2011b), Moran’s account of an intersubjectively of a shared ‘We-World’ of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (Moran, 2016), a social neuroscience account following the logic of mirror neurons (Decety & Cowell, 2015; Lamm et al. 2007; Gallese, 2003; Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2006), and the neuroscientific polyvagal investigations of empathy and compassion (S. W. Porges, 2017). There is also, as noted, a neuroscience effort to investigate the neurological mediation of second-person engagement that focuses attention to related methodological issues, but has not yet revealed insight into the complex simultaneous interactions of a second-person standpoint (Schilbach et al., 2009; Schilbach et al., 2013). Rather than a simulation account as suggested by Darwall, a direct perceptual apprehension of an other’s circumstances and related experience is advocated as supported by both phenomenology and neuroscience (Decety & Cowell, 2015; Gallese, 2003; Moran, 2016; Zahavi, 2011a). In fairness, Darwall has continued to refine his ideas of empathy and suggests the concept of projective empathy that seems more spontaneous and less dependent on cognitively generated hypotheses (Darwall, 2011).

8.2 Engaging Second-Personally

How is an engagement with an other person concerning shared activities to be understood? Further, how are two people present with one another when their only intent is to meet the needs of each other to be understood? To understand what happens in deceptively simple interactions of two persons who are simply being with or who are engaging in an agreed common task, we must return to their experience. Empathy

, the first-person experience of an other person sets up a second-person engagement that directly orients to the other person’s circumstances that include behavior, facial expressions, and a conversation or shared overt task. A second-person relation is marked by what Darwall calls an interdefinable circle

. A person engaged in a second-person relation does so from a first-personal position, although a second-personal relation cannot be reduced to a first-personal position. Similar to a first-personal position, the second-personal relation is not commensurate to an objective third-person perspective. Stated differently, a second-personal relation cannot be converted to objective third-person description nor reduced to first-person commitment for the reason that information specific to each perspectival modality is lost in an other perspective. It is also recognized that first-person thought does not concern a second-person relation and is not second-personal (Darwall, 2006, pp. 8–10). A first-person commitment to engage in a second-personal exchange and the experience of that engagement is first-personal in that it is owned by a participating person, and is the empathic link that sets up the WE experience of second-personal engagement.

How is a relation uniquely constituted and structured as second-personal? Darwall proposes that such relations are constructed by an interdefinable circle of four properties of authority, valid claim, reason, and, a responsibility to perform a respective action, and that each of these suppositions implies the others. That is, second-person authority, a second-personal claim or demand, a second-personal reason, and the responsibility or accountability of the person addressed to perform the action for which a reason has been provided (Darwall, pp., 10–15). These properties derive from the relations of the two persons engaging each other as members of a well established community, indeed, an established infrastructure of a moral community. The practical authority or the standing to make a claim derives from being members of the same moral community and from the interdefining circle of interlocking second-person components. Once a second-personal relation is established the authority of the person addressing a claim is cemented by the right to make a claim or demand through a practical reason that is defined by the circumstances of the engagement to which the person addressed is responsible to perform. Both the addresser and the addressed are mutually and equally accountable to the other according to Darwall. Korsgaard (2007) refers to the circle of interlocking properties as felicity conditions of a second-personal stand (pp. 8–9). Authority derives solely from the felicity conditions of second-personal engagement to which a third-personal or objective epistemological view is unrelated. When a person makes a demand from a position of authority, that person commits to the presupposition that there is a shared normative principle which both will view the demand or claim made as a reason for the action addressed. Each is seen then as equals even in such a situation of a military officer commanding a person under her command; both in that moral capacity are equals. What equality here points to is the value of dignity (Darwall asserts ‘an inviolable value’) that is grounded in a second-person relation, and to which Darwall asserts is “an irreducible second-personal element” (Darwall, p. 13).

Dignity is the authority to claim respect for one to make a claim of an other and expect compliance by each holding other to account. That is, each is held equally accountable by the other; a central derived property of second-personal engagement. Closely related to the ethical concept of dignity within the second-personal circle is the idea of a right, a right to make a claim. A claim right is more than a mandatory norm to which one complies or not, but a moral claim that is addressed to another who can recognize the ‘right that is claimed’ as something which one must comply. The standing to assert that claim right originates is a second-personal relation. The addresser asserts the right to resist, remonstrate, complain, and challenge the violation of her/his right; even to use coercive measures to redress the violated right, and further, perhaps, gain other compensation for the violated right. Rights are associated with second-personal reasons since a right would not exist unless invoked second-personally. Second-person reasons have particular second-person properties that are unrelated to logical propositional reasons; second-personal reasons are practical reasons and is distinguished from third-personal theoretical reasons. This distinction is explored later. The idea of a right implies a justification for limiting the freedom of a society in a certain manner, for example a right to safety and to pursue one’s life and happiness; the use of force to secure fairness, justice, or one’s right. On the other side of a right is society’s role in securing what a person is obligated perform. To restate, there are two sides to being a member of a moral community: that which a person expects and can lay valid claim and that which one owes the moral community to which one belongs, their obligations to the community. To secure one’s rights, a person is obligated to perform certain actions, for example, obtain a driver’s license if one wishes to drive. The moral community can demand certain kinds of conduct from its members which no one has the right not to do. Both ideas, that of rights and obligations, derive from the notion of a second-personal claim or demand according to Darwall (pp. 18–20). Dignity and rights are concepts closely related that are contained within the interdefinable second-person circle of authority, claims, reasons, and responsibility.

8.3 Presupposing Felicity Conditions of Second-Personal Authority

What difficulties result from a second-person perspective if a person to which a claim is addressed fails to recognize the claim or simply does not comply? From the other side, what difficulties arise when a person fails to perform the obligations demanded by the moral community? These concerns address what Darwall designates as presuppositions of second-person engagement. Any claim made by a person from a position of second-person authority is a sufficient reason (a second-person reason) when grounded in a normative infrastructure of one’s moral community. That is, the addresser expects the person addressed, the addressee, to follow through on the (second-personal) reason given by committing to, or willing, the appropriate action. The addressee as a free agent has the power to act appropriately to the given reason, and can seem as the addresser directs the addressee actions. It is necessary that the addressee be acknowledged as a free agent that can respond to a reason out of, at the same time, a respect and dignity of second-personal competence. Any resort to nonrational means of securing compliance moves outside second-personal relations and destroys the dignity and respect that acknowledges a free person. To acknowledge the respect and dignity of an other is to recognize her right claim and acknowledges that one’s freedom is limited.

Second-person competence consists of an ability to address a second-person reason and the mutual expectation of an addressee to acknowledge that reason and commit to the appropriate action. It emerges that practical reasons are second-personal and fundamentally different than theoretical reasons of a logical nature used to objectively describe. Moral actions are rationally directed by a person addressing a claim to an addressee, a free and second-personally competent person. All second-person engagements are based on these presuppositions, but these are seen in a pure second-person relation and as ideal may not always obtain as expected. It is certain that there is immoral behavior sometimes due either to not being fully aware of the moral infrastructure of the community ; or to not being fully second-personally skilled or competent. Deliberate choices by a free person to commit to acts clearly outside what the moral community would consider acceptable are acts of immorality. Second-personal engagement as presented by Darwall is grounded on the presuppositions of (a) an established normative community infrastructure, and (b) second-personal competence that includes dignity and reciprocating respect, rationality, authority to makes claims of an other member of a moral community, skilled discrimination of practical from theoretical reasons, equal accountability and mutual responsibility, and an agential power to act for a given reason. A second-personal claim presupposes second-person competence, authority, and mutual responsibility. These assumptions presuppose a pure second-personal engagement of mutual self-originating agents to make claims

(Darwall, pp. 20–25).

8.4 Categorical Imperatives and the Second-Personal Stand

One’s moral obligations springs from the normative expectation contained in a community’s second-personal in frastructure that is recognized as moral. It is expected that such moral infrastructures are not static, but evolve with the circumstances confronted by individual persons of the community

. How might this continuous transforming change come about? Korsgaard (1993) asserts that when a person addresses an other with a claim reason, it is entirely personal and subjective in that it is outside public awareness. Such an initially subjective reason may be absorbed by a community as it becomes known to the community with the significance that this formerly subjective reason is adopted as part of its second-personal normative infrastructure. As a now intersubjective reason, it may come to be viewed as a value and gains a general universal normative force.

Darwall asserts that such a normative force is categorical in that its rational character is unavoidable and, in some ways, rationally coercive in that it is what is owed to other persons or what one must do to take care of other persons that may include oneself. Darwall argues that the most well known categorical approach is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative

(Darwall, p. 26). The notion of a categorical nature of one’s first-person commitment to the normative and second-personal infrastructure of one’s community captures what is special about moral obligations. But, Darwall suggests that there is an important distinction between theoretical and practical reasons. As stated earlier, moral requirements follow their own distinctive form of accountability of practical reasons. Alternatively, propositional logic of theoretical reasoning connects reasons analytically that create for the rational person a desire, or perhaps even a compulsion, to correctly connect those reasons to their propositional forms. Importantly, the distinction between these alternatives are of different kinds. Moral actions are directed by reasons that are practical, that are related to behavioral accountability, not logical relations, and are judged whether to fit the normative infrastructure of the community governing accountability. To restate, practical (moral) reasons are a qualitative different kind of relation than a theoretical (analytic logical) relation; Darwall points out that this is what Kant means by distinguishing theoretical and practical reasons (pp. 26–28; 213–299).

The question that emerges then is how do moral principles such as a golden rule and a categorical imperative

, or other equally imperious moral principles, fit in a second-personal relation? Where in the second-person interdefinable circle are such universal or unconditional principles required? Is there a second-personal version of, something like, a categorical imperative

? Following Kant, Darwall argues that each person exhibits the autonomy to generate the practical reasons directing an action. Here there is some disagreement to the extent to which first-personal perspective interacts with second-personal engaged activities, not with Kant as he did not explicitly use the concept of perspective. Darwall, it seems, holds that once engaged in a second-personal interaction, one does not escape from its grip and that there is no interaction between one’s first-personal stand and a second-person interaction (pp. 20, 26–38). This is the disagreement. Korsgaard (2007) asserts that there must be a first-person stand in which a person acknowledges and judges a reason to commit to an unconditional obligation to the moral community (pp. 10, 12, 20). This act, I agree with Korsgaard, is required; also required is that a person must first-personally acknowledge one’s own experience as well as to committing to the unconditional second-personal obligation, a demand of one’s moral community (Duus, 2017). For these reasons, Korsgaard’s observation is correct and serves to underline that first-person psychological processes are not in abeyance once second-personal processes are initiated.

Where do moral obligations get their authority? More correctly, where do moral obligations gain the normative force, the desire to complete the action warranted? Normative force evolves from the second-personal infrastructure of a community. The authority of an addresser placing a demand or making a claim of an other person, an addressee originates, not from the properties of the individual person expressing the claim, but from her stand in a moral community of which both, addresser and addressee, are equally accountable, and which results in blame that is warranted by the community. Obligation viewed from the side of the community arrives at its coercive force of its members. What is an obligation that one is responsible and accountable to perform? How is the extent of the unconditional properties of an obligation determined? An unconditional obligation , an imperative, is not judged by its content, but in the legislative form inherent in a claimed obligation set by the community. Content is discerned third-personally as knowledge and is not what gives an obligation its seeming coercive authority as it is not part of the second-person interdefinable circle . From the community side, a claim is pressed by a person, the addresser, equally accountable as the addressee to the moral community and subsequently to each other. But, it is the addressee that has earned the blame by not adhering to an expectation of the moral community that is ‘called’, that is ‘claimed’, by the addresser.

What is important in this discussion is not to lose sight of the central nature of freedom and autonomy to the ability of a person to act morally. Darwall asserts, following Kant, that freedom and autonomy, the capacity to act freely, are necessary and sufficient for a person to act morally (Darwall, p. 213). A person can be held accountable only if he acts in freedom, and it is the ability to act freely from which a standing of respect and dignity is achieved in a moral community; from which originates one’s authority to make a claim on an other; that, further establishes the second-personal interdefinable circle (pp. 82–90). Recall that the interdefinable circle consists of an (a) authority to make a (b) moral claim for a (c) second-person (moral) reason, and of which that other person addressed is (d) responsible to perform.

The goal of this section has been to make clear the connection between accountability and what Darwall, following Kant, regards as an unconditional obligation or, more familiarly, a categorical imperative , and that such a categorical imperative is not an intellectual exercise of propositional reasoning by which one directs one’s action, but an embodied obligation that is practiced in intersubjective relations with others of one’s moral community. Second-person engagement structures intersubjective relations out of which moral behavior is possible as suggested by Kirchmair (2017).

8.5 Social Behavioral Intersubjectivity

An interesting contrast to Darwall’s account of second-personal engagement is George Herbert Mead’s presentation of a social behavioral intersubjectivity

(Mead, 1913, 1934, 1938) Jürgen Habermas (1992) perceives Mead’s account as directly confronting the issue of a particular individual and the abstracted general universal. Mead addresses the irreducible gap between first-and third-personal perspectives which, as demonstrated previously, is a second-personal standpoint although Mead does not use that terminology (pp. 151–153). Mead’s account is an intersubjective analysis of the person. The problem Mead addresses is how a person that develops in, and continues to be immersed in, intersubjective second-personal engagements is capable of autonomous action, free agency. Mead asserts that a maturing person attaches to reference other persons and by acting on their expectations of her, internalizes those expectations that then become an abstracted and internalized generalized other. This general internalized other results in a capability of independent autonomous action but remains accountable to the continuous community expectations, that is, accountable for the moral responsibilities to the community. Habermas asserts, I think correctly, that “G. H. Mead was the first to have the thought through this intersubjective model of the socially produced [self] ego. The result is a reflective-model of self-consciousness according to which the knowing subject relates to itself as an object of an other person in order to lay hold of and thereby become conscious of itself” (p. 170). The account of self-consciousness and of subjectivity that Mead developed is fully congruent to William James and Hector-Neri Castañeda (James, 1890; Castañeda, 1999; see the previous Study, Chap. 7).

When engaging with an other person, the engaged person is recognized as autonomous as is oneself, an observing I that sees oneself in the third-person is experienced as contrasting with a performative I that is speaking and hearing. Such a contrast sees one’s performance similarly to the performance of the other with the result that an inner dialogue is established that is an alternate self (Habermas, pp. 171–177). Self-consciousness is a basic self-relation in which I, Me, You, and We are intertwined second-personally; self-consciousness in this view is formed from outside-to-inside, from external to internal, which illustrates an often referred contrast of an alterity (externality) and interiority dimension. Central to this relation is the mediation of language as these intertwined relations are possible in a communications framework that is intimated to be unlimited by the range of intersubjective relations that is strengthened by language. Mead’s intersubjective account contrasts epistemic self-relations, as a subject knowing herself, and a practical self-relation of an acting person. This contrast is analogous to the distinction between theoretical reasons and practical reasons emphasized by Darwall. Mead’s presentation elucidates this distinction in a context of pervasive intersubjective relations from a viewpoint other than within a second-personal interdefinable circle.

In Mead’s account , language provides for a symbolically mediated interaction that makes it possible for a person to monitor and control one’s behavior. One’s moral behavior is propelled by the ‘normative behavioral expectations’ owed to one’s moral community (Habermas, pp. 178–179). The autonomy of oneself, an acting I, generates or receives reasons for those actions to complete one’s obligations to the community as they are called out and claimed by an other person or one’s internalized abstracted other. The other by which a person can be addressed with a claim to a moral obligation may be entirely internalized, an internal generalized other. The generalized other, according to Mead, is Me. The generalized other is developed intersubjectively during one’s maturing in the interactions with others that begin with significant referenced adults to which one is attached. The resulting Me is a generalized other that in maturity achieves a capacity to stand alone independent of the community it originated. This is the capacity of autonomous actions with the freedom to choose among affordant alternatives encountered (Habermas, 171–172, 190; Mead, 1913, 145–147). It is of interest that William James’s thinking is convergent with Mead when he says that “Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (James, 1890, pp. 281–283). He goes on to say that a man’s social selves, his Me’s, are reflective of the different groups of individuals he associates which suggests generalized others, but does not explicitly, as far as I am aware, discuss a thoroughly generalized other associated with the larger moral community.

Mead’s social behavioral account of intersubjectivity is thorough, and although he does not systematically use second-person terminology, it fits quite well in the first-, second-, and third-person perspectival context as shown by Habermas. In the next section, we return to a more direct examination of Darwall’s formulation of the second-personal interdefinable circle that explores second-personal reasons and the related contrast between theoretical and practical reasons .

8.6 Second-Personal Reasons Considered

Darwall’s account of a second-personal engagement requires significant conceptual weight be born by reason, claims, demands, authority, and dignity to address what is meant by a second-person reason. All interactions between two people are not second-personal. As for example, paying for or receiving change for a purchase and giving or receiving directions or advice; these are purely instrumental exchanges with no intention or effort to understand one another’s points of view. What are referred to as professional relationships are contained in a disciplined third-personal exchange of a specific kind of information with specifically recognized boundaries. Transgressing a professional boundary occurs when a professional consultant allows those boundaries to be slurred with first-personal issues. There are, of course, different kinds of personal and professional relationships with varying mixes of first-personal and second-personal investment with third-person epistemic or public objective concerns. Psychotherapeutic relationships are specialized and directed reparative relations of a particular mixture of perspectival investments that require a transfer of epistemic third-personal knowledge to a client or patient second-personally but with nondirective value claims respectful of a patient’s first-person stand, and with a limited contractual responsibility to facilitate improving the client’s well-being and adaptive functioning. While psychotherapeutic relations may be nondirective regarding value, the essence of a therapeutic relation is disciplined nurturing. More generally, all second-personal relations are inherently moral.

The uniqueness of the psychotherapeutic relation is to facilitate the improvement of second-personal interactive skills by means of first-person directed second-personal interaction with a client. There is an unique authority in the form of an agreement, or contract, between a therapist and a client to attend and to facilitate the client’s second-personal patterns of interaction and the effects of overwhelming experience of painful aspects of unfortunate events of living that include personality, attachment history, trauma history, health, neurology, and on; all with an established infrastructure that varies according to the psychotherapeutic tradition to which one is first-personally committed. The complexity of the psychotherapeutic relation is attested by the very large literature addressing its subtle complexities (for example, Schore, 2012; Weiss & Sampson, 1986). It is my view that the second-personal aspect of this psychotherapeutic relation is a large part of its puzzle. Such relations as described may fit a pattern that is first-person plural since they are defined by a disciplined use of boundaries that limit a We relation. This inquiry addresses those properties unique to a second-personal relation singular.

How are second-personal engagements constituted? What are the properties of an engagement between two people that make that engagement second-personal; that fits in the space between first-person commitment and public objective knowledge, that is, third-personal description? Second-personal exchange seems to make certain demands upon those engaged whether or not they are recognized as moral and simply social; there is a ‘pull’ to engage and to share a We relation. Levinas describes that when a person encounters an other person, the Other, one is overwhelmed by that which cannot be understood or absorbed, and he is pulled toward the other by the uncertainty and unpredictability of an other’s equally autonomous person that leaves an internalized alter self of the Other in oneself (Levinas, 1969, pp. 69–71, 194–219). That is, the residue of an encounter with an other leaves an internalized representation of itself with which one engages in an internal dialogue. Using Martin Buber’s (1958) language: “Every It [Thing] is bounded by others [other things]; But when Thou [You] is spoken, there is no thing, Thou [You] has no bounds. When Thou [You] is spoken, the speaker has no thing [no It]; he has indeed nothing. But he takes his stand in relation” (p.4).[1] In more prosaic everyday parlance, the relation between an I and a You is something one can not wrap the mind around. To paraphrase, she/he takes a second-personal stand. The question is then simplified: when an I engages You, what makes this engagement second-personal?

The first requirement, already stated earlier, is a mutual awareness between one person and another that involves a reciprocal recognition of each of the other in giving and receiving a reason or claim to an action. Each person is aware of the second-personal relation between them and that each is competent to fulfill their second-personal obligation. A second essential process is an effort to understand the other’s perspective of the circumstances of an exchange. This is the ability to project oneself into the other’s perspective of the circumstances addressed, and enter into a mutually empathic relation with the each of the other. A difference is distinguished relative to sympathy and empathy. Empathy is a direct first-person grasp of the other person’s view while sympathy is an objective knowledge of another’s situation that elicits supportive affective reaction. Although the operative motive of an exchange may be entirely self-interest, both mutually recognize a common infrastructure or set of norms that has been established by a moral community and previous practices. Each recognize the equal obligation expected by the social community and by their own previous interactions. The purpose of a second-personal interaction is to guide or lead the other person through their own free choice by the reasons given to them, and by so doing the actions taken by an other are rational and not coerced.

In the context of second-person reasons, how are rational and nonrational practices distinguished? When one’s actions are forced through physical intimidation or by other means such as forcefully reducing the alternatives available to one, a forced action that is so compelled is nonrational. The terms nonrational or irrational are applied to those situations in which an established infrastructure is not recognized or of which an actor is ignorant, that is, not a member of the moral community. There is a sense that one is coerced or compelled by authoritative well placed second-person reasons. Second-person engagement, itself, can be seen as coercive. This is not the case because in the context of alternative courses of action of which one is otherwise free to choose, a person’s action remains rational (Darwall, pp. 49–51). What is important is that a free and autonomous person’s actions are self-guided by the practical reasons encountered in a second-person engagement.

8.6.1 Contrasting Theoretical and Practical Reasons

With this background of practical reasons, we are now interested in the presuppositions of theoretical reasons in contrast to practical reasons, reasons that are uniquely second-personal and that lead to a performative act. Theoretical reasons are built on independent facts in the world that are related propositionally, that is, through a system of logical propositional statements about their truthfulness. The propositions, if perceived true, formulate one’s beliefs concerning the actual state of the world that allows a successful negotiation of the world. Darwall suggests that sometimes exceptional knowledge and wisdom are sufficient to grant a person second-personal authority; a standing that allows her to address a second-personal reason, a claim, to another for which he is accountable to perform.

Practical reasons to act are second-personal reasons to responsibly perform an obligation to the person making the claim, it could be said, on behalf of the community which grants the standing or authority to make a claim, but also with the same action to the whole of the moral community each are members. To state this somewhat differently, a practical reason derives from the relationship and, to use Darwall’s phrase, “…are relational all the way down” (p. 60). A practical reason guiding an action is embedded in an interdefinable second-person circle of (a) authority, (b) a claim/demand, that is a (c) a second-personal reason, and with (d) the performative responsibility to complete. Practical reasons in this view, asserts Darwall, are inseparable from respect for the originator of a claim to direct one’s behavior; that also claims the respect and recognizes the dignity of a member of one’s moral community. The fundamental characteristic of practical second-person reasons is their derivation from a relation embedded in an established social infrastructure. This relational origin of practical reason makes it incommensurate with theoretical reasons which derive from independent facts of the world and are outside an intersubjective relation.

What makes the presentation of a second-person reason rational and not merely coercive? This is a question of central importance that captures the core of second-person exchange. What makes a second-personal interaction rational is the addresser’s expectation of the addressee’s calling up and resonating with the practical reason addressed to himself. One is not only confronted by another but also by oneself. Forthemore, there are times a practical reason guiding one’s action is autonomously generated by oneself; from one’s own capacity to act freely. This is what Darwall refers to second-person competence and which maintains the rational character of second-personal interactions that recognizes the equal accountability of both addresser and addressee (Darwall, pp. 74–80).

8.6.2 Structure of Emotions in a Moral Context—Reactive Emotions

Making a claim on an other generates a reactive attitude of respect that recognizes the dignity of the originator, and which expresses a recognition of an error and of the resulting obligation for corrective compensation. Darwall argues such reactive emotions and attitudes are important to moral behavior (pp. 60–90). Returning to experience

, an experience one has of a relation one is participating relates the entwined constituents such as thought, memories, beliefs, facts of the world, and includes an emotional registry of the quality and intensity of one’s participation relation. Cohesive adaptive behavior, moral and otherwise, is only possible with intact emotional experience supported by appropriate neurological structures and a social community (Damasio, 1999; Nussbaum, 2013, 2016; Porges, 2011). Reactive attitudes are comprised of an emotional apprehension of the quality and intensity of one’s first-and second-personal participation in an interpersonal interaction combined with relevant beliefs, knowledge, and memories (or alternatively, combined with the contents of the doxastic pedestal associated with that experience, to use Castañeda’s vocabulary).

In Darwall’s account, reactive attitudes are a concurrent constituent of one’s participation in second-personal interaction, and are responsive to conduct, not only one’s own but also an other’s, rather than to character or identity. Examples of personal, or participant, reactive attitudes include gratitude, forgiveness, hurt feelings, love, approbation, and others. Darwall proposes that there are also impersonal reactive attitudes that come from an impartial perspective that result from observations of other’s conduct or the conduct of oneself. Some examples of impersonal reactive attitudes are indignation and disapprobation, and when self-referenced guilt, remorse, contrition, and compunction. Reactive attitudes, it should be kept in mind, address one’s own conduct as well as others. “Reactive attitudes,” Darwall asserts, “presuppose the capacity to take moral demands as conclusive reasons for acting. And this involves the capacity to hold oneself responsible and… determine oneself by a second-personal reason… whose validity is grounded in presupposed normative relations between persons and that is, therefore, independent of any value or any outcome or state” (p. 78). Note that a second-personal reason arises from the relationship; it is relation dependent on the relationship and therefore independent of an outcome of an action or of any value connected to the relation or outcome. Second-person reasons are derived within a second-person interdefinable circle

. An objective attitude, by contrast, is an evaluation from a third-person observation and description of a publically accessible event or situation.

Reactive attitudes are the structure of the affective and emotional constituents of moral behavior, and particularly of the second-personal engagement from which a person implements moral action. To define concisely, reactive attitudes are emotionally directed attendance to one’s own or another’s conduct that approbate or censure, approve or disapprove, of that conduct and are affective reactions that originate in a person’s own remembered experience, beliefs, and knowledge of the communities expectations. Reactive attitudes occur in the context of the responsibility and subsequent accountability of a person in an interdefinable circle of a second-personal engagement. There are at least four aspects, then, to reactive attitudes to be enumerated.

1. 1.

The experience of a reactive attitude is the address to oneself or another for a behavior that conflicts with or that outright flouts the community’s norms. A reactive attitude is a claim to oneself or another that is sufficient to require an action, indeed to demand an action.

2. 2.

A reactive attitude assumes and recognizes another’s second-person competence and addresses that person as free. Having second-person competence implies that a person will recognize any warranted blame and his culpability and equally hold himself to accountability. The claim, that in this case, results from the reactive attitude that is addressing “…as conclusive reasons for acting” (p. 78). Darwall suggests that to act immorally is to give-up one’s freedom by transforming oneself to an object in that relation (p. 71).

3. 3.

The apprehension of one’s own or another’s conduct that conflicts with the community’s moral infrastructure, but which is not a reference to one’s character, personality, or identity. That is, one’s reactive attitude one addresses the conduct of a person and not his character.

4. 4.

A reactive attitude acknowledges respect for the addressee. The status of both the addresser and the addressee is of central importance in all claims and subsequent reasons. The addresser and addressee acts from the authority accorded them in the respect and dignity of recognized moral members of the community, both equally accountable.

In Darwall’s words, “What is central is simply reciprocal recognition of the standing to make certain demands of one another, that is, in the moral case, mutual respect of the equal dignity of free and rational persons” (pp. 83–84).

It would seem consistent, Darwall points out, for reactive attitudes to censure with disrespect one who violates our dignity. After all, he says, they are ‘reactive attitudes’. But this cannot be correct, he asserts. If reactive attitudes were retaliatory with the goal to give to their targets as good as one got, the goal would be to return disrespect with disrespect. Second-personal moral reactive attitudes, however, are a form of respect that recognize the standing and dignity of a person who is a member of the moral community, and which pursue an ideal of equal respect. Darwall asserts the implicit aim of reactive attitudes is to compel the “other to feel our dignity,” and in that act to acknowledge their own (pp. 84–85). Reactive attitudes seek respect, and seeks to reverse what retaliation is after rather than to return disrespect for disrespect. That is, they seek, or demand, respect for disrespect. The object of reactive attitudes is always some form of disrespect, their purpose is to secure respect, and the mode by which this might be accomplished is to respect the person who exhibited the conduct that formed the disrespect (pp. 65–86).

8.6.3 Summarizing Moral Emotions

The concept of moral reactive attitudes builds a structure for emotions into Darwall’s account of second-personal engagement and shows how emotions can function in moral behavior. The importance of emotions to moral behavior is not appreciated or accepted by some (Crowell, 2016), Darwall provides a structure for emotions experienced in a moral context. This is important as emotions function to cohere one’s actions. These concepts are best reviewed by Damasio (1999), Porges (2011), and Nussbaum (2013, 2016). What is true of action generally is also true of moral conduct. It is unlikely, in my view, that genuinely moral actions occur in which emotions are not a central constituent. Far from thinking that there is an over reliance on reactive attitudes, I think it is necessary and central to moral conduct as arising out of second-person engagement (Crowell, p. 75, 2016). Darwall’s descriptions of various samples of reactive attitudes such as shame, gratitude, and guilt may be legitimately contested and may be the subject of empirical investigations by psychology generally, such discussions and investigations enrich the understanding of reactive attitudes and their constituents. Such discussions or investigations are important and do not affect the overall account of second-person engagement. Challenging Darwall’s proposed account is good science and moves his second-personal account from philosophy to science. For example, according to Crowell the ‘equal accountability’ nature of the second-personal engagement, considered of central importance by Darwall, is challenged by Levinas and Lyotard (Crowell, 2016, pp. 78–88).

One final remark concerning reactive attitudes : not all second-personal claims of practical reasons to bring one to accountability result from reactive attitudes. A person may engage in more careful principled moral reasoning. An example might be the determination by a practicing psychologist to write the best psychological evaluation of the available psychological data because of its importance to the patient’s situation. It can easily be imagined how that same report may be subject to a reactive attitude of the person or of another. Such a report may be subject to a supervisor’s approval that will result in a reactive attitude of the supervisor or the person himself, disapprobation for example, if such a report is incomplete or poorly constructed. What we call a professional commitment to serve a patient well and to a commitment to their well-being suggests a well-thought out infrastructure of principles and background originating from training and conjoint thinking. Darwall’s exploration and development of reactive attitudes provides a good structure for emotions as tied to other cognitive properties of beliefs, and general knowledge as a constituent of moral conduct.

8.7 Constraints to Second-Personal Engagement

The problem that arises is that Darwall’s rather complete account of second-personal engagement addresses an ideal social environment in which everyone is fully second-personally competent. This is, obviously, an unreasonable practical expectation. In this account, the constraints encountered are the limits of the second-personal competence of the members of the community. Not everyone is a mature adult second-personally, if that phrase is admissible. Not everyone exhibits a full and equal capacity to engage autonomous moral freedom and, subsequently, an equal competence to engage second-personally. A person may not have matured sufficiently to achieve autonomy when choosing the various alternatives encountered in which they invest their actions. There are those we objectively view rather than second-personally view, because they are children or cognitively impaired persons that lack the moral freedom to engage second-personally. Such people are recognized by legally regulated standards of care because of the public consensus of their vulnerability and are engaged with consideration of their limited second-person competence (pp. 65–119).

Could second-personal engagement of contrasting belief and social normative structures be a subject matter for political science? Viewed in this way, the distance between the disciplines of psychology and political science is relatively small. It is to be noted that the gap between the objective theoretical view of the world, a third-personal stand, and second-and first-personal stands seems to play out in this country’s social political environment as well as intellectually. An extension to this observation That is to observe that an under developed or wrongly conceptualized psychology influentially shapes a misunderstanding of ourselves that further influences institutional patterns that are inefficient or destructive (Bergner, 2018; Gergen, 2009). Perhaps, political science can be usefully conceptualized as addressing the differences between different forms of second-personal engagement. Such an issue is what Dilthey (1988) was addressing in his emphasis on human sciences and the study of experience as occurring in history in contrast to natural sciences (Makkreel, 2008). In his view, human sciences are the study of human interactions both from the aspect of the individual and from a social infrastructure and cultural aspect; such a view would encompass second-person account of interpersonal interaction that includes a first-person I perspective and a second-person We perspective whether the We included one other or many others (Caminada, 2016; Moran, 2016; Szanto, 2016). The suggestion is that a perspectival conception of psychology

(first-, second-, and third-person perspectives) will result in the distinctions between political science, social science, economics, jurisprudence, aesthetics, and religion that have a common foundation and are commensurate; similar to what Dilthey and similar thinkers are suggesting. Dilthey holds that psychology can only be a ‘foundational human science’ if it is primarily descriptive (Makkreel, 2008, p. 5). This is not to say that Dilthey and others conceptualized or thought in the context of personal perspectives. In other places, I have used the term perspectival diffusion to refer to the distinctly identified perspectives that are addressed by the specific methodologies relevant to the perspective of a problem investigated may be located.

8.8 Unconditional Accountability

It is not an intellectually formed universal principle that successfully captures the events of unavoidable accountability to one’s community

. To so attempt is to proceed in reverse of the actual direction of events, to proceed as if moral accountability is a third-personal objective matter, and which fails to capture the unavoidable character of accountability. Darwall argues that Kant did not make this mistake and that theoretical reasons, objective third-personal prescriptions, are incommensurate with practical reasons that guide a person’s actions. How does one become unconditionally accountable to another person, who is at the moment an agent of the community, and subsequently an agent in one’s community? The foundation is, simply, the normative infrastructure of one’s community

. It is the expectation that one sits with one’s dying mother, is present for one’s sister’s wedding, somewhat more distantly that you visit an uncle or cousin when in town, and more mundanely that one pays the parking ticket when careless. Darwall argues that the formulation of a categorical imperative is intended to capture the normative force of what is an unavoidable obligation, and that there are good reasons to explore Kant’s thinking that is relevant to acting with freedom (Darwall, pp. 119–144). Following Darwall, I suggest that psychological inquiry generally will benefit from an awareness of Kant’s reasoning concerning what is required for a person to act freely when choosing between affordant choices. When psychological inquiry confronts what is required to act for reasons, the questions that are encountered will likely be similar to those originally asked by Kant in 1788 in The Critique of Practical Reason (compare Bergner, 2018, pp. 133–134).

The center of a categorical imperative via Kant or a golden rule via Hobbes is the empirical presence of an unconditional or unavoidable obligation grounded in the moral infrastructure of one’s community. The categorical imperative or golden rule are the principles or maxims by which reasons are derived to guide one’s various actions in accordance with a social harmony or a moral infrastructure. Principles, or to use Kant’s term, maxims are the lens for identifying the practical reasons to negotiate one’s social environment in a way that promotes harmonious relations in the community. How do reasons that are derived from a person’s central principles function to contribute to one’s freely initiated moral conduct? How is the freedom to choose among the alternatives confronted in one’s social environment achieved so that a person is assured that what one does is freely performed and is not in some way coerced? These are the concerns addressed in the next two sections.

8.8.1 Desires and Practical Reason

Desires motivate one’s actions. All actions are based on desires that are expressions of belief, values, habits, and knowledge of the world. One’s desires target a state of the world as an outcome such as pleasing an other person or some other preferred condition of the world. Such a desire then is object-dependent, a particular wished for situation of one’s world, and one’s conduct is not autonomous, but under the control of something in the world outside oneself. Alternatively, a desire can result from a principle that pursues harmonious relations with one’s community generally and, more specifically, with an other person engaged, which Darwall, following Kant, designates a categorical imperative

. Such desires, according to Darwall, are principle-dependent and leads to self-initiated conduct free of outside influence and leaves a person’s autonomy is intact. This distinction is the discriminating difference, the fundamental difference, between theoretical and practical reasoning. Rational action requires, asserts Darwall, that a person freely accepts a normative expectation of her community and makes that normative expectation her own; makes it a reason generating principle, a categorical principle.

Practical reasons that guide one’s conduct are generated from a person’s deliberations of her adopted normative principle, one’s categorical imperative, that originated with the desires, beliefs, values, and knowledge of her community when confronting a social problem. Practical reasons arrived at by the deliberations of a problem situation are initiated by one’s desires, and correspond to the world-dependent (and principle-dependent) desires that initiated the initial volition. Alternatively, rather than derived from an originary deliberation, practical reasons maybe attentionally recruited from earlier experience or from observed behavior of other member of one’s community, and applied to a currently confronted problem. Desires may not always precede reasons as they are interdependently related in an experienced socially integrated person. When actions are guided by reasons that target environmental objects or outcomes to satisfy various desires, Darwall argues following Kant, that such a person is controlled by something other than her own autonomous reason and is not acting freely. A practical reason and the related principle-dependent desire is free based on a principle that has the nature of a general categorical imperative to conduct oneself sensitively in a social and moral community, and is independent of outside influence. A person guiding their conduct by one’s own autonomously derived reason is acting freely. For Darwall, what is classified as a categorical imperative is closely related to autonomy

, and perhaps should be considered as different sides of the same phenomena (Darwall, pp. 295–296; 304–309).

8.8.2 Freedom of Will

Practical reasons are already well integrated into the beliefs, norms, knowledge, and values commensurate of a thoroughly socially integrated person of a community . It is then, according to Darwall (again following Kant), the will that initiates an action that is socially congruent, or harmonious, with one’s community. The will is to an actor what the I is to the thinker. This observation emphasizes the interdependent relation of will and freedom which figures prominently in Darwall’s account of practical reason as distinguished from theoretical assertion, but which is congruent to James’s original observation, and the further suggestion that “…there may be another non-phenomenal thinker behind that, but so far we don’t seem to need him to express the facts.” Such congruence further argues for the intrinsic psychological character of second-personal engagement, if any is additionally needed. The will is similarly another non-phenomenal actor behind the actor whose functions can only be described rather reason. It may follow, to extend James’s assertion that the passing thought is the thinker, to assert that the fleeting action is the actor (James, p. 324).[2] Darwall does not make such an assertion, but which is congruent to James’s original observation, and the further suggestion that “…there may be another non-phenomenal thinker behind that, but so far we don’t seem to need him to express the facts.” Such congruence further argues for the intrinsic psychological character of second-personal engagement, if any is additionally needed. The will is similarly another non-phenomenal actor behind the actor whose functions can only be described rather than grasped, but which is not required to ‘express the facts’ concerning an acting person. The will is present in a noumenal mode, but is not required to describe the acting person.

The lens through which practical reasons are discerned is a general principle which we designate as a categorical imperative

. The practical reasons guiding moral conduct are derived by principle, but with a consideration of the role of reactive attitudes that structure the role of emotions in moral conduct. It is important that it is not the third-personal knowledge of content or of subject matter that forms the categorical imperative principle. The general imperative principle is formed relationally in a second-personal context in a legislative form that is embedded in the normative infrastructure of the moral community. Such an imperative principle is the lens through which one’s own and other’s conduct is viewed resulting in a judgement as to the quality of one’s or another’s conduct (Darwall, pp. 218–219). A categorical imperative is a term that refers to the practical reasoning of an autonomous person who is acting morally. Such a person has the standing and authority to bring claims that are in the form of practical reasons by which another, who implicitly acknowledges the authority and dignity of a member of one’s community, is responsible to perform. Both the claimant who addresses the infraction and the addressee receiving the claim, insists Darwall, are equally accountable to each other. As well it should be acknowledged that a person can simply address herself in acknowledging a claim and accounting for her own conduct in particular self-reviewed situations. In fact, this self critical center of oneself is an important concomitant of a mature socially integrated person.

An important property of reason, of being rational is the capacity to freely choose the reason by which one directs her conduct. Coerced behavior is not free nor, for that reason, rational. How, then, is the freedom to choose among the alternatives confronted in one’s social environment accomplished so that a person’s conduct is free, and is not in some way coerced? In the account described in the previous section, a truly free action is one that is guided solely by reasons originating in a principle embedded in desires, the beliefs, knowledge, values, and expectations of a fully socially integrated person, and is independent of any outside influences of environmental objects, self-advancement, another person’s influence, or physically contrived constraint on one’s conduct. What is sufficient to test this proposed account? Kant replies, according to Darwall, that there is no way of being certain that one is acting in complete freedom. A person can only pursue what is rational; follow the reasons that are presented to her as thoroughly as one can (Darwall, pp. 222–229). A related issue, perhaps, concerns the uncertainty one confronts in sensory data received relative to the reality of the world when, in fact, we cannot certify the accuracy of our sensory reproduction of the world. According to Castañeda, what we can be certain of is our experience of the world we live (Castañeda, 1999, pp. 212–227; see earlier Study 7.3). In summary, a person can only proceed with confidence but not certainty that what one chooses is chosen on one’s own initiative, with one’s own autonomous free will.

8.8.3 Caring and Relating

Darwall argues that it is important to consider how moral conduct is perceived. If moral conduct is considered as fundamentally care of the other or the care of one’s community more generally, morality is then bound in the concerns of the welfare of human beings

, or the welfare of all sentient beings. Moral evaluations of actions and social practices thus perceived are instrumental to achieving an end, to achieving good. A person, then, is a subject of respectful appraisal, but respect that is derived by appraisal is not intrinsic to a person. Such an appraisal respect is a third-personal description and constitutes knowledge that is public and taken to be objective, and is not, and even excises, second-personal characteristics of an engagement. Such a position re-instates the unintelligible gap between first-personal conduct and third-personal description. The second-person stand is excised and no longer open to inquiry or discussion. Concern for the welfare of human beings feels intuitively correct and a true value of the world, but leads to a way of perceiving the world that excludes a class of particular kinds of events in the world: second-person engagements. Such a class of events, second-personal engagements, occurring in a real world do not go away, of course, and will always be present, perhaps, to add mystery to our attempts to understand the world without direct accounting or apprehending second-person engagements. Without an understanding of second-personal engagement, it is asserted that their will always be something that is lacking, a lack of cohesion in our attempts to conceptually understanding our behavior.

What is, then, an alternative to a virtue ethic which is guided by a value or mental state of caring for each other that would lead to a more inclusive conceptual frame for moral conduct? A contrasting inclusive account concerns how we relate to each other. The primary concern of a person who commits to moral conduct, to building harmonious relations in her community, is how she relates to others in relation to whatever other projects she pursues. Such a commitment to attending to ‘how’ one relates to another is based on equal respect and equal accountability and brings moral concerns within a second-personal relation, that is, the interdefinable second-personal circle is engaged. The corresponding reactive attitude fits with what Darwall calls recognition respect that acknowledges the standing and authority, the dignity, of an other member of one’s moral community in contrast to appraisal respect

(Darwall, pp. 120–138). Recognition respect recognizes the intrinsic dignity of an other person one is engaged; that recognition guides one’s conduct with the other person. More generally such recognition between persons of a moral community acknowledges how our conduct with the community is governed and regulated (p. 123).

Briefly summarizing, the distinction between caring and relating as related to moral conduct seem initially to be relatively minor, but as the discussion shows the consequences are quite significant. Such a distinction is methodological since beginning with a primary concern caring begins with a mental attitude that fits with a virtue ethic. That is, cultivating a good compassionate mental orientation cannot, it seems, be bad or lead to difficulties. Alternatively, moral conduct may also be viewed as solely concerned with the consequences or outcomes of one’s conduct, a methodological utilitarian approach to morality that is different than the two approaches discussed, but which has a long and distinctive literature that is not addressed here (Mill, 1859). Virtue ethic is referred to as methodological because the emphasis is placed on cultivating the mind, the emphasis is on internally cultivating oneself and in a certain kind of self-sufficient conduct. An emphasis on the act of relating to other persons is equally a methodological commitment, and more specifically puts it in a pragmatic region. To the degree that the experience of a second-personal interaction is attended, a phenomenological conceptual region is engaged. Experience is a fact of a person’s thinking and acting, and will necessarily always be a target of inquiry. A primary concern with how one conducts oneself with an other person places morality, ethical conduct in the second-personal interdefinable circle and makes clear that morality is an agent relative second-personal occurrence. To refer to moral action as agent relative emphasizes the intrinsic dignity and authority of the person addressed. In contrast, an agent neutral action addresses, not a person, but the welfare of a person. In Darwall’s words, “But whereas respecting someone entails relating to her as a being with a dignity, caring for someone involves viewing her as a being with a welfare” (p. 126). The person, in effect, may not matter as significantly as executing a principle, perhaps, for one’s own advancement. A separation of caring and relating is not always to be distinguished of a person who attends to how she is relating to an other or others as behind recognition respect is also first-personal commitment to caring. The reverse consideration is more ambiguous as one may act to improve the welfare of an other or others objectively and impersonally. In a second-personal context, caring may take the form of a reactive attitude to address a claim. No first-personal caring needs to be presupposed in a relationship for it to be, nevertheless, moral caring in form. The point, in sum, is that concern with one’s relationship with others is interdependently second-personal and ties one to a community’s expectations and its form of a categorical imperative adapted by individual community members.

8.9 Group Intentionality and Group Action

Can collective intentionality be attributed to certain kinds of groups or aggregates of persons gathered under conditions that create a collective unity which then imparts an identity that can be experienced and collectively act as an extended we-perspective? How might the plurality of a group affect the intersubjective nature of second-personal engagement? Is membership in a group intersubjective in the same way second-person engagement is intersubjective? These questions suggest the possibility of an emergent level of behavior that may have properties and characteristics that supervene on first-person perspective and second-person engagement. The issue of group identity and the possibility of group agency is an emergent area of study identifying as phenomenological sociology or as a phenomenological study of sociality.

Psychology is primarily concerned with persons and their functioning in a collective environment. One question is to what extent a person is immersed in a collaborative group context and how practical reason giving and thinking lead to rationally guiding one’s conduct in that group setting? How are emotions shared and how are different types of group intentional acts related to a person when recognizing a group as three or more persons? According to Szanto, Max Scheler has proposed that a collective with specific characteristics can form a community personhood or a group personhood that is congruent with what Husserl refers to as personalities of a higher order that are expressions of intentional cohesive group relations (Caminada, 2016; Szanto, 2016). Similar ideas have been proposed by Hannah Arendt (1958) in The Human Condition. Recalling that the defining property of a person is reflexive self-awareness, does a group with cohesive and unitary relations exhibit such reflexive self-awareness, the ability to conceptualize itself as itself? If so, what might be the processes that account for such a property? Such emergent properties of certain kinds of groups result in a psychological human science extending its investigations of personhood generally and include the study of group personhood

. Such emergent properties as group personhood and group agency are more relevant to political science and make the relation of political science to psychological science more clearly commensurate. The idea is that group personhood does not override individual first-person and second-person stands, and that multiple persons constitute a plurality with a group identity and capable of group action (Szanto, 2016, pp. 297). This is in contrast to Gergen’s (2009) proposal that in true relational being first-and second-person perspectives are unnecessary.

Caminada asserts that Husserl views objectivity as the goal of unified cognitive processes of plural subjects and that these unified cognitive processes provide a foundation for action, that is, provide for group agency (Caminada, 2016, pp. 286–287). The assertion that all cognition seeks closure in objectivity is striking. It seems equivalent to Habernas’s assertion that a person’s cognitions concerning the objects of the world, in the general context of beliefs, past experiences, and community expectations, inherently intends closure by confirming a congruence with an internal generalized other or by transparently communicating with other members of a community for publically legitimating objective knowledge (Habermas, 1975). Higher order personal being, as proposed by Husserl, addresses the interests usually ascribed to political science , which may be experienced as a meaningful part of something larger than oneself, and is a social background all persons live. Such a view describes a relation between what are psychological concerns and what are political concerns as related in a larger frame of human sciences.

Described from a second-person standpoint, an action performed by a group member may be the result of a claim or demand by an other member or an internal generalized representation of the group, a generalized other, and is a practical reason that person is responsible to perform an action. if the action is performed because of one’s own freely committed reasons, then the action is fully autonomous. A less well socially integrated person of the same group performing the same act is acting non-autonomously because the performance is for immediate gain or to avoid punishment or stigma, and there is no first-personal commitment to a second-person engagement and subsequently he does not act on his own freely chosen and committed reasons. Reason giving likely contributes to one’s first-personal commitment to a group with a particular intention. For example, participating in a march for gun control relevant particularly in March 2018; or a march for science in 2017 following anti-science rhetoric of the government; more relevant in the 1960’s-1970’s, an anti-Veitnam war demonstration.

To what extent is a group member, especially of a limited participation with intense shared emotion, such as a demonstration protesting injustice, vulnerable to an emotional contagion that overwhelms one’s second-personal reasoning that guides one’s conduct? The general question is how an engagement in larger groups affect second-person engagement, that may include group-persons or community-persons, that is, a higher order personal being? The proposal, according to Szanto, is that group-persons and community-persons build upon, rather than interfering with or overwhelming, first-and second-personal perspectives. These are empirical questions for investigation by psychological and neurological science.

These few remarks reveal a range of possibilities regarding personhood rather than engage in substantive discussion of group-or community-personhood. Psychological science concerns are more centered on first-person commitment and second-person engagement with a goal of arriving at an objective description that is an objective third-person perspective. Inquiries of we-perspectives of group-or community-personhood , such as citizenship and public action are of political science. An interesting speculative hypothesis is whether the gap between the perspectives of first-person and third-person is not only connected with a single second-person perspective, but also with a range of we-perspectives that includes higher order personhood and degrees of group-person and community-person perspectives. That is to ask whether, what is now referred to as a third-person perspective, is objective publicly legitimated knowledge that is always the teleological end point of cognition, once cognition is interactively engaged. Cognition itself is not, in this view, an internalized isolated process of a single person who then contributes a product to benefit an outside social world, but the result of second-personal engagements with a community of other persons (Clark, 2016; Mead, 1934).

An interesting question concerns how many perspectives may fill the gap between the end points of a first-person perspective and a public legitimated perspective, an objective perspective formerly referred to as a third-person perspective. Perhaps, first-person perspective, a second-person, group-person, and a community-person perspectives that end with a publicly legitimated perspective

, that is, knowledge, the whole of which constitutes a perspectival diffusion through which persons, their behavior, and especially their complex relations are viewed. To restate this conjecture, the gap between a first-person perspective and an objective publically legitimated perspective is filled with a range of we-perspectives beginning with second-person engagement and with various group-and community-person perspectives. Group-personhood may be enumerated by the kinds of group intentional actions engaged by collectives of corresponding kinds. Such speculative hypotheses are constrained by the empirical verification of such entities as a community-person that establishes the properties and processes of such entities. The most important and difficult issue, perhaps, is to describe and demonstrate a group’s capacity to reflexively conceptualize itself as itself; the criterion for personhood (Baker, 2013). These speculations whether interesting or overwhelming for psychology follow the recognition of the central importance of the first-person perspective necessary to constitute a person and whom is only completed in second-person engagement. In my psychological view, these fundamental facts are recognized by James as well by other pragmatically oriented thinkers such as Pierce, Dewey, and Mead, but that has not yet penetrated the practice of psychological science and consultation.

8.10 Some Summarizing Observations

A we-experience involves a You-Me relation which is reciprocating while mutually attending a shared project. In a second-personal context

, each is aware of oneself, the other, and a shared project while simultaneously aware of the other’s awareness of the one’s awareness of the other’s awareness. Each person commits first-personally to engage an other second-personally. With this commitment to open to the we experience and to engage the other, we make reciprocating demands of each other’s conduct. This characterizes morality . In opening to the experience of engaging the other, we open to the internal representation of the other and engage an internal dialogue that is not just helpful, but necessary to attain second-personal competence with the accumulation of experiences, beliefs, memories, and knowledge that makes what Castañeda terms a doxastic pedestal

(see Study 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity). The recognition of systematic internalized dialogue is congruent with Hermans and colleagues account of a dialogical self in which there are many continuous internal dialogues that constitute a minisociety (Hermans, 2003; Hermans & Salgado, 2010). This second-person description opens an intersubjective account of social behavior as a second-personal standpoint in which moral conduct is an emergent property of intersubjectivity. Morality is supervenient on relationship. This account asserts that intersubjectivity and morality are sides of a coin nearly equivalent expressions.

A we-experience, it turns out, is not exhausted in second-personal engagement when higher order personal being, to use Husserl’s term, is attributed to collective group-personhood

. What is proposed is that the constitution of personhood of collective aggregates of persons is commensurate with the constitution of individual personhood. The criterion of a person is the first-personal capacity to conceptualize oneself as oneself, and the group-personal criterion of a person is the capacity to conceptualize itself as itself. In the context of intersubjectivity such as developed by Mead, the constituents for higher order personal being have been identified as they have by Husserl, Arendt, and others (Arendt, 1958; Szanto & Moran, 2016). In this inquiry, we acknowledge the possibilities that are largely empirical matters of investigation generally, and psychological science more specifically. Perspectival indices are not limited to first-, second-, and third-person. Rather, the perspectival end points of first-person and objective publically legitimated knowledge (third-person perspective) create a gap that is filled with varying degrees of intersubjectivity that include second-person engagement, group-personhood, and citizen-personhood. Additionally, there may be other we-perspectives created by new ideals and intentional goals that arise in response to new social endeavors. These hypotheses are meant to be speculative only, and waits on further empirical methodology and inquiry.

It is important when discussing intersubjectivity as structured in second-personal engagement to recognize that social events fit into a liberal naturalism, an ontology that is permeable to intention-dependent objects and projects. These events may lead to new we-perspectives that are created by newly formulated intentional principles in response to encountered problems by ongoing cultural adaptivity. New social infrastructures may become necessary for such things as accounting for cars when they became a common cultural tool that was not present earlier when there were only horses and carriages. That is to say that an institution organized around the principle of intending to account for and to regulate the infrastructure for self-powered wheeled vehicles maybe viewed as a we-perspective, a group of people and practices organized around a function that was not previously required. Other such intention dependent objects are driver’s licenses, contracts, and on. The term intention dependent objects refer to the creation of such objects as results of continuous cultural elaboration and growth. Liberal naturalism is nonreductive in that there are cultural artifacts that cannot be reduced to electron and atomic constituents, for example driver’s licenses are not constituted by atoms as they are intentionally created to track on a right to drive a car and the expense required by the infrastructure supporting cars and other multiwheeled vehicles. There is nothing magical or supernatural about new cultural objects that are introduced by evolving cultural institutions as needed and simply become part of existing cultural institutions and processes.

The purpose of this study is to explore the second-personal standpoint and the resulting emergent moral properties that inheres in relationship. Kirchmair makes a more limited case for the intersubjective origins of moral conduct. The second-person perspective extends Kirchmair’s limited account by structuring intersubjective engagement in a way that accounts for moral conduct. Darwall provides a thorough account of the second-personal stand and the emergent moral properties inherent in second-personal engagement and its relation to community normative expectations. Competent second-personal interactions are based on several presuppositions that he states form an interdefinable circle . These presuppositions, to restate them once again, consists in the (a) authority or standing as a member of a community (b) to address a claim or complaint of an infraction or misconduct of a person who is addressed that (c) becomes a reason that the person addressed is (d) responsible to perform an action to correct or compensate the addresser. The reason to act is important because if the person addressed as the transgressor, if he is to act morally, acts in freedom only if he rationally acts on reasons he has autonomously freely chosen. It is this portion of a second-person interaction that is central. If the person addressed acts because he is intimidated, coerced physically, or because he fails to choose between the affordant alternatives available to him for any reason, the action is not a moral act. The addresser and the addressee are equally accountable to each other as members of the same moral community and each possesses the dignity of a member of the community. They are each equally accountable to each other and to the community; each has autonomous dignity in the community. The desired end of calling a demand or complaint of an addressee is not punishment, but to re-establish harmonious community relations and mutual respect. To the extent that shame or punishment is experienced, the a second-personal engagement is less than ideal, or even fails.

The minimum required to act morally include: the capacity to sort reasons and desires to arrive at the practical reasons to guide one’s conduct, freedom to sort through and choose among alternatives, autonomy to act on one’s reasons uncontaminated by outside influences, and the power (or will) to act according to one’s own reasons. Although necessary, these individual capacities are not sufficient. What is required to secure sufficiency is to recognize that these capacities function only in a context of public reason. Public reason that is constituted by community expectations and norms established by one’s community. The experience of second-personally engaging a transaction is empathy. Empathy is a direct apprehension of other person’s actions, expressions, and situation. The unique second-person property of an engagement is constituted by the presuppositions of the interdefinable circle in the context of an established infrastructure of expectations and benefits of one’s community.

One of the central constituents of the interdefinable circle of second-personal standpoint is a person’s responsibility to perform an act. The particularity of the action is addressed to the one who addresses the complaint, which may result from an internal dialogue or an other member of one’s community. The action is accountable to one’s moral community; incontestably and unconditionally. The call to accountability takes the form of a general principle that balances desires and practical reasons that a person sorts through to direct one’s principle dependent moral conduct. Such principle dependent conduct is derived autonomously and freely. Our conduct is moral only if it is undertaken with freedom and autonomously, without outside influences. Those actions conducted to achieve an end (such as profiting, gaining an advantage, or otherwise achieving a desired state of the world) is described as object dependent and belongs to a different category of behavior, such as economic or political. Darwall argues that only those actions that are founded on principle are moral. Following Kant, Darwall designates such principles as categorical imperatives , an internalized and universal desire that is a propensity to maintain and establish harmonious interpersonal relations and community institutional processes. A categorical imperative importantly advances the harmony of one’s internal dialogue as well as the harmony of community functioning. Darwall asserts a categorical imperative is not a theoretical proposition, but an embodied formulation of the practical reasons to guide one’s conduct. The practical reasons guiding conduct stem from the rational capacity that sometimes addresses practical reasons and sometimes reflects on theoretical reasons following a first-personal commitment.

All cohesive behavior, moral and otherwise, require intact emotional backgrounding that moves to the foreground when cued by environmental circumstances. The structure of emotion in the moral conduct of second-personal engagement Darwall refers to as reactive attitudes

. Reactive attitudes are specific to second-personal relations. Specifically, reactive attitudes are directed attendance to one’s own or an other’s conduct that can approve or disapprove of that conduct and are affective reactions that originate in a person’s remembered experience, beliefs, and knowledge of community norms in a context of the responsibility of a person in second-person engagement. What is important is that a reactive attitude is not a call for punishment or retaliation. They are, rather, a call to mutual respect, an ideal of equal respect. Reactive attitudes “seek an ideal of equal respect.” Not all claims that result in a practical reason for accountability result from a reactive attitude. That accountability may be an outcome of a more systematic and deliberative process that precludes an affective foregrounding. Finally, moral conduct is not the result of a general universalized principle of “caring for human beings” or of “caring for all sentient beings,” as attractive as that mental orientation may be, because such a move makes moral behavior an intellectual and theoretical issue of knowledge. Rather, morality is relational and relational attention is on “how we conduct ourselves with each other.” The attention is on the particular character of each of the participants behavior and not on intellectual knowledge or ideals.

8.11 Concluding Comparisons

The second-person We-perspective is an intentionally interwoven shared world; an intersubjective world. Similar inquiries have been implemented as the sociocultural turn in psychology that forward many of the propositions and problems presented in our discussion of second-personal engagement; some of which has been central to the second-personal perspective with similar contrasting results (Kirschner and Martin 2010).

8.11.1 Relational Self

Kenneth Gergen’s account is perhaps the most radical. Gergen is convinced that the Eighteenth Century enlightenment conception of a bounded person as an isolated being is an intellectual and cultural mistake. The result, in Gergen’s view, is that “relationships are secondary in their importance to us,” and autonomy of the individual is over emphasized (Gergen, 2009, p.17). An over emphasis on autonomy devalues interpersonal relationships, and sets up a society that is prone to violence and ‘breaks down moral deliberation’ related to conduct. The result is that individual prosperity and achievement are prized over the common good. Gergen denies significance to biological embodiment and places self in the nexus of relationships. This is a radical constructionist view that emphasizes that a mind is created and exists in a reality that is created rather than discovered by a relationally created and evolving mind. The instrumentality of autonomous personal action gives rise to “a calculus of self-gratification as control to all human action” (2009, p. 21). He attributes postmodern traumatic problems such as chronic violence and psychopathology as derived from a culture of the bounded self. The solution he asserts is to transform culture to a primary emphasis on relation and the creation of a tradition of a relational self

. “In the beginning is the relationship” (p. 27), and that identity, emotions, self, and meaning are derived from these intersubjective relations. Gergen describes continuous coactive processes that result in a cocreation of cultural relations, objects, and institutional infrastructure. One’s self, or more correctly for Gergen, one’s selves are continuous evolving entities that is never, in hermeneutical fashion, complete (Duus, 2010; Gergen, 2009, 2010).

The perspectival account and particularly the second-person engagement described in this study respond to Gergen’s concerns. The second-person perspective requires a biologically embodied person that is constituted in a first-person perspective. It has the advantage of not denying the significance of the human animal’s biological origins and embodiment. One characteristic proposed by Gergen is attractive and is not exclusive of a second-personal standpoint; that is the idea of multiple selves and multiple voicing of a person. It is compatible with a second-person perspective but as constituents of an embodied person, and will be further discussed subsequently. As a criticism of a long legacy of utilitarianism, behaviorism, and a consumer dominated culture, Gergen proposals are cogent and trenchant. As pointed out, however, in Duus (2010) the individual nature of a biologically constituted person cannot be ignored by choice, but can only be acknowledged. Does the reality of a biologically embodied person preclude the central nature of one’s relation to an other person or persons? My assertion is that it does not. It should be self evident that the second-person perspective accounts both for the relation of individual persons to a central intersubjective nature of persons. In fact, a first-personally constituted person is required by the second-personal perspectival engagement presented. As discussed in, ‘Dimensions of Mineness’, Study, Chap. 6, the taxonomy of the multiself-multivoiced self proposed by Gergen would fit a no-self view. Using Ganeri’s scheme of taxonomy derived from the Buddhist literature, what Gergen proposes is a no-place view of self in which there is neither a base necessary for identity nor a place to own experience. Gergen’s proposal is the first such proposal in Western thinking (Ganeri, 2012).

8.11.2 Dialogic Self

More compatible with the second-personal perspective is the dialogical self account of H. J. M. Hermans and colleagues. In the dialogical self account is that the intrapersonal structure of each person consists of multiple I-positions that ‘voices’ their perspectives with other I-positions that are the Me’s resulting from different or earlier experiences or a representation with an Other person of the social environment that are in the context of generalized normative representation, a generalized other, of one’s social and, therefore, moral community. Breaking that down, there is both one who voices communication and one, an I-position, listening to the communication, and an audience constituted by a generalized representation of the social and moral community of the person (Salgado & Hermans, 2005). The various intrapersonal I-positions, or perspectives, resemble a minisociety that reflects experiences of various biographical social events as well as the current social circumstances. An I-position may be a past or present internalized I of a person or a past or present alter-I that is the representation of an Other person encountered in the social environment. Important here is the ubiquitous presence of the generalized normative audience of the social and moral community. The account presented by Hermans and colleagues fits with James’s outline of internalized social selves

. It has been found compatible with attachment theory (Schore, 1994), with the neurological structures of attention, emotions, and actions (Lewis, 2002), and with the general qualities of a dialogue that have been identified by Buber (Cooper, 2003).

How does the dialogic self presented by Hermans and colleagues relate to the second-personal perspective? One of the most obvious ways is the direct address of Otherness or the Other. The dialogic view provides an account of the processes of an encounter of one person with an equal Other. This direct confrontation of alterity, an encountering of and recognition of an Other person as an agent equal to oneself and which, as a result of that encounter, realizes a limit on one’s freedom, is similar if not the same as the second-person perspective. Levinas elaborates both the interiority and exteriority (or alterity) phenomenology of intersubjectivity; the encounter with an Other. The term Other, beginning with a capital, refers to the recognition of an agent equal to oneself, realizing a resulting limitation of one’s freedom, and the experience of a call or summons to unavoidable unconditional accountability that result from such an encounter. The call to unavoidable responsibility is an intrinsic property of rationality (Bergo, 2011; Levinas, 1969, 1981). What is interesting and not coincidental is that this unconditional accountability to the Other is also a property of the second-personal interdefinable circle . Levinas elaborates the phenomenology of a person internalizing the Other to become an alter-I, or more familiarly an alter ego.

The dialogical self account provides a description of the dialogue that results from the process of interiorization with other I-Me positions, not all of which result from an encounter with an exterior other but of otherwise indexed biographical experiences. The I-Me positions are voiced, using Hermans terminology, and communicate with each other carrying on a dialogue that is thinking. The I-Me position terminology indicates that an I is one pole contrasted to an object, a Me established by earlier experience; the I initiates and carries on a dialogue with an other I-Me position (Castañeda, 1999; Hermans et al., 1992). In sum, the dialogical self-concept supplements the second-person perspective with a more detailed description of the cognitive apprehension of an encounter with an Other and enriches it with first-personally incorporated significant experiences from one’s biography.

A second way the dialogical self concepts are congruent with second-person perspective is the nearly identical triadic structures of intrapersonal dialogue and second-personal engagement. According to the dialogical self account, an I-Me position speaks to an other I-position, the listener, in the foreground of a generalized normative audience. This contrasts with the external triadic structure of second-personal engagement in which a person addresses an addressee with a reason to which the addressee is responsible to act in the context of the normative infrastructure of one’s moral community. This very similar triadic structure of action is striking: one is internal while the other second-personal engagement is external. The dialogical address of one internal I-position to another is an internalized action of thinking while the second-personal external act is a performance of a responsibility. In summary, they are structurally similar in their contrasted internal and external environments. There is good reason then to conclude the complementary characteristics of the dialogic self concepts with second-personal perspective.

8.12 Summarizing the ‘WE’ Experience

The basic structure of the second-personal perspective is the link between two people engaged in a joint shared activity. The experience a person, each of them, of such a shared activity is a WE experience involving a ME-YOU reciprocating relation engaging a shared project or simply being present with another person. Each is aware of the other’s awareness of oneself and the engaged activity, and a first-personal commitment initiates a second-person exchange. Once a second-person relation is entered a moral dimension of sociality is opened from which there is no withdrawal. A person makes a demand on an other’s conduct in view of the moral community which dignifies each equally by recognizing them as members of the community. In this triadic social structure a relatively intricate moral environment is opened to be negotiated by the participants.

The first thorough presentation of second-person perspective is by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and later continued in the Wealth of Nations

. Smith describes the imaginative awareness of mutually engaged persons in a common project have of each other that is later tagged as empathy and is necessary to engage second-person encounters. The empathic experience is of the link between the persons participating in a second-person exchange that is structured by a set of presuppositions Darwall named an interdefinable circle

. The properties of the interdefinable circle are (a) authority, (b) a valid claim, (c) a practical reason, and (d) a responsibility to act. Taking these in order, an authority refers to a person who recognized the infraction requiring redress or correction; the authority to address a wrong derives from the dignity acknowledged by the recognition of the moral community she, as well the addressee, are both a member. In this authority, she addresses a claim, a wrong requiring to be set right. When the claim is received by the addressee, it becomes a reason, a practical reason, for directing a performative action which the addressee is responsible to perform. The nature of the claim is that the addressee has no question what is required. There is no need for quibbling as to the merits of a valid claim, or it would not be a valid as it is intrinsic to the moral infrastructure of the community. A claim is connected to the rights of an individual and so is a claim right. The entire interaction is in the context of and witnessed by the moral community of which both are equal members as a generalized internal representation to oneself and, to the extent that an exchange is public, by the community. The interdefinable circle of presuppositions are specific to second-personal engagement and cannot be reduced to the first-personal perspective, nor can it be derived from the propositional logic of a third-person description.

There is a shared normative principle to which each, addresser and addressee, are equally accountable from which there is no escape. This unconditional obligation derives from the force of the normative infrastructure of the community and takes the form of what Darwall terms a categorical imperative he adopts from Kant. Darwall draws extensively from Kant’s discussion of practical reasons, as contrasted to theoretical reasons, and the development of maxims that as a categorical imperative frames the reasons by which a free agent guides her conduct. The link between a categorical imperative and acting with freedom is interdependently connected and can be said to be the sides of a coin. The point that is emphasized is that moral conduct can only occur when a person acts in freedom, when an agent acts free of outside influence, in autonomy , and her conduct is directed fully from the reasons she herself attends. It is not the content of a particular categorical imperative that determines its normative force, a potential to impel harmonious moral conduct. Restated, content does not determine normative power as content relies on knowledge of the reasons directing one’s conduct from a descriptive third-person perspective and is simply not possible to relate to and influence practical reasons that guide conduct. Rather the infrastructure of the community forms an imperative structure that is more legislative in form, and is a structural form that is filled in with specific particular details of each new event, and it is the formative structure that gives normative moral force to a categorical imperative; the content varies from event to event but the legislative form endures. What preserves the autonomous freedom of a person confronted by a rights claim, despite the seeming coercive force of an imperative, is a person’s autonomous freedom always to act or not act for her reasons uninfluenced by outside reasons to derive advantage or gain. An action undertaken for gain or advantage does not meet the requirements of a moral action, but rather is an instrumental action and is a different kind of action.

Emotions are an important constituent in a experience of performing an action. Moral conduct cannot be described completely and convincingly in the absence of emotion. Cohesive behavior requires an intact affective constituent that is entwined with relevant beliefs, knowledge, and memory (what Castañeda describes as one’s doxastic pedestal). A performed action is accompanied by its experience that includes emotion. Darwall describes the emotions associated with moral conduct reactive attitudes which occur in a context of second-personal relations. Reactive attitudes are the emotional attendance to one’s own or another’s conduct that notes approval or disapproval of that conduct which originates in the remembered experience, beliefs, and knowledge of the community. Reactive attitudes are the emotional structure of moral conduct and is by itself a claim of a wrong that needs to be confronted and corrected. A reactive attitude is a call to respect rather than a stand to indite or retaliate against a perpetrator. Rather it is a call by equally accountable members of a community to reset harmonious relations between the individuals involved and the community.

Finally in this quick summary, what it is that makes one’s conduct moral? It seems appropriate to consider all behavior that is motivated by a cultivated desire of care and to provide for the welfare of other human beings as moral. The actions emitted by a person motivated by a cultivated virtuous mental attitude are instrumentally providing care and promoting the welfare of fellow human beings. The instrumentality of these actions derive to a difficulty. Such motivated actions are implemented from a third-person perspective of a presumed knowledge of humanity that determines what is good for others independent of their wishes. Such a conceptual position re-institutes a gap between first-and third-person perspectives. Morality , if that is what it is, from such a position is an intellectual discipline with solipsistic characteristics and with a potential of being implemented whether or not the other person, or persons, receiving such care desire it or considers it good for them. Such a position excludes an important class of events in the understanding of the world. What is excluded are second-personal relations. Such second-personal events do not go away or disappear. They are simply unapprehended and, as not perceived, results in a gap in our understanding of ourselves, others, and the community with the corresponding relations. Such blindness adds mystery to a psychological, economical, and political attempt to understand our world that will require other explanations that, probably, will be largely irrelevant but also possibly damaging and counters the intended outcome of the welfare and thriving of one’s community. What is an alternative to an ethic guided by a cultivated value of caring for each other? If, rather, one’s actions are guided by considerations of how we relate to each other, the primary concern is to build harmonious relations with an other person and the larger community. To paraphrase Gergen, Levinas, and Darwall all with very different conceptual accounts of intersubjective relations, in the beginning is the relationship. Actions that rise to the level of moral conduct is supervenient on intersubjective relations: those relations are described by a second-personal account of engagement.

The purpose of this summary is to review the necessary components of second-personal perspective

. Those necessary components are five: (1) an interdefinable circle, (2) the normative expectations of a community captured and represented by the person as a categorical imperative

, (3) acting autonomously on the reasons sorted through one’s categorical imperative free of outside influence, (4) reactive attitudes that structures the form of emotional constituents accompanying moral conduct, and (5) the import of intersubjective relations in founding moral constraints in a community. The last component, (5), addresses the importance of resisting the seductive call to cultivate, superseding the centrality of our relations with others, a disciplined mental focus on such powerful concepts as caring, universal love, compassion, and so on. The cultivation of such mental discipline is useful, helpful, and to be admired which will undoubtedly be of benefit to those persons engaged in such discipline. Moral conduct is founded on how we treat each other. To once again restate John Dewey, ‘all morality can be reduced to the utility to men of getting along and resolving problems’. All moral conduct occurs in a context of ‘getting things done’; of working toward our various projects.

What is significant is that a person’s conduct in no longer centered on a first-personal perspective, but one’s conduct now centers around the other person of a We relation. A person’s conduct, and indeed their life, rotates around the multiple relationships of their living experiences. It is the unseating of a personal self, the first-personal self, replaced by the other person that is described as a We experience. The motivations for conducting one’s life are the practical reasons derived from a relation with an other person in the context of the social infrastructure one lives. Perhaps, however, not all that radical as many have already made various alternative presentations to a centralized I (Gergen, 2009; Kirschner & Martin, 2010).

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Footnotes

1

There are various translations of Martin Buber’s I and Thou of which some translate Thou as You. To read this passage as You is not to be unfaithful to the author.

2

This remark occurs in James’s Principles in ‘The Consciousness of Self’ chapter: “The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker; and though there may be another non-phenomenal Thinker behind that, so far we do not seem to need him to express the facts. But we cannot definitely make up our mind about him until we have heard the reasons that have historically been used to prove his reality” (p. 324).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_9

9. Ninth Study: Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

FaceOtherThere is
SubjectivityIntersubjectivitySense and sensibilityPluralityEthics

What is the significance of decentralizing I? Craig (2010) credits its significance to the Copernican revolution of 1514 which challenged a geocentric universe. She made that assertion relative to Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological account of one’s relation with the Other. That assertion fits equally well to second-personal engagement. Levinas’s description of the phenomenology of one’s relation with an Other seems to parallel the second-person engagement presented at the level of subjectivity and below. One of this study’s goals is to illuminate the parallel similarities and differences between second-personal engagement and the phenomenological ethics of Levinas. The similarities are parallel because Levinas’s investigations are directed to a region of experience prior to subjectivity and does not reach the level of cognition to support second-person engagement. This study’s central goal is to investigate the connections between Levinas’s ethics and James’s pragmatism with the intention of generally demonstrating that Levinas is not simply a phenomenological outlier and is relevant to deepening psychological understanding of persons living in their society.

Levinas investigates that region of experience at the interface of subjectivity and Being. Being is investigated as behavior. This slice of reality interfaces with subjectivity and existence which is an experience, to the extent that experience can be used in this context, of the there is, that space of being beneath one’s subjectivity. Such a sensing, a term for experience used by Levinas, is described as a discomfiting sensation of something that is too tight for the skin and of a twisting restlessness (Levinas, 1981, pp. 104,108). The smallness of that slice of reality belies its significance. We will be contending with the studied indefiniteness of Levinas’s poetic descriptive language as we try to avoid becoming mired in the many philosophic and poetic detours Levinas creates to enhance the impressionistic accuracy of his descriptions. The technical term there is is the interpretation for the French preposition il y a (Davis, 1996). A caution is required perhaps: if this inquiry presents a clear and organized account of Levinas’s presentation, it is probably not fully accurate. Nevertheless the goal is to present an account of Levinas’s phenomenological ethics which can be relatively clearly comprehended and those readers whose curiosity is piqued can further investigate Levinas as they wish.

9.1 Face-to-Face Encounter

A general outline of the intersubjective process begins with a subject, a person’s subjectivity, that is grounded in a sensibility of the ‘there is’. The ‘there is’ is, approximately, a feeling of life that persists anonymously and impersonally without light, in the dark, whether sleeping or no, according to Levinas. This is a person’s actual originary experience which is generally unnameable and perhaps generally unrecognized. In the midst of the biological pulse of existing, of being overcome by an unnameable ‘there is’, a person is interrupted and startled to encounter the face of an Other. It is difficult at this point to fully wrap one’s understanding around the extraordinary indefinite significance Levinas gives this event. Levinas’s term for this encounter is the ‘face’ in the face-to-face of the encounter. Several properties emerge from the “dazzling interruption” of an encounter with the face of an Other. (a) There is the sudden awareness of the resulting limitation of one’s freedom. (b) There is an experience of being transcended, or being surpassed since the Other cannot be incorporated or known by one (using Levinas’s terminology, reduced to one’s ‘sameness’). (c) The gaze upon the face in this interruption is to confront infinity, according to Levinas, and he at times refers to it as the absolute by which he means God. (d) In the confrontation with the face of the Other

, the presence of second face is apprehended, a third person, and with that apprehension the realization that oneself is a third person. (e) The expression of the face calls one to a responsibility for the Other; for the Other’s well being; in that call one’s freedom is replaced with responsibility. This encounter Levinas calls Ethics.

It is an unseating of a personal self . The first-personal self is supplemented by an other, an alter-I, a process described as a ‘We’ experience of second-person engagement. A ‘We’ experience is not Levinas’s terminology, and reflects some similarity to the Second-Person We concepts discussed above. The result is that a person’s actions center around the other, and as well around the others of all the relationships one engages. Levinas attributes the self to “living human corporeality” rather than either a soul or a brain. Self is a sensibility of plasticity and unity; it is a site of a “susceptibility to being hurt, a self uncovered, exposed and suffering in its skin” (Craig, 2010, pp. 25–26; Levinas, 1981, p. 51). A self is fully formed when a person accepts and takes on the responsibility for the care of Others, one at a time, when one is fully open and vulnerable (Levinas, 1996, p. 94). A similar idea concerning plasticity of an embodied self is expressed by James (1890, p. 110; Craig, 2010, p. 25). Responsibility is thrust into the subjective functioning of a person prior to cognition. Levinas states that “Freedom then is inhibited, not as countered by a resistance, but as arbitrary, guilty, and timid; but in its guilt it rises to responsibility” (Levinas, 1969, p. 203). Subjectivity, a precognitive processing, functions without direct authorship as an organ functions, as a lung breathes, a heart pumps blood, a brain apprehends the environment, a mind thinks. Responsibility in Levinas’s phenomenological account is not a matter of arbitrary commitment. Nevertheless, it appears to be easily subverted. Freedom is still operative and the tyrant can avoid gazing on the face, avoid the expression of the face as history clearly reveals (Levinas, 1987, pp. 15–24). The face is only seen askew by the tyrant as hostility or submission.

9.2 Third-Person and the Rational State

Levinas describes “The absolute nakedness of a face, the absolutely defenseless face, without covering, clothing or mask, is what opposes my power over it, my violence, and opposes it in an absolute way, with an opposition which is opposition in itself…, says no to me by his very expression…, but it is not the no of a hostile force or a threat;… The face is the fact that a being affects us not in the indicative, but in the imperative,…” (Levinas, 1987, pp. 20–22). It is a no expressed in passivity. The tyrant escapes the gaze upon the face and catches it in an angle of hostility or submission. With the appearance of a third person external to one’s encounter with an Other, a society can emerge with a rational order of institutions of a just state. The significance of a third person is, in Levinas’s words, “The relationship with a third party, responsibility that extends beyond the scope of intention, characterize essentially subjective existence which is capable of discourse” (p. 33). Restating, the precognitive conditions are established that are necessary to cognitively engage in discourse. It is only in discourse that a path to create a society of reason and rational institutions of a just state is possible.

Resisting the tyrant who has an unlimited access to resources is not simple. A strong rational person can resist violation with the forfeiture of her life which is honorable and soon passed over. A rational person who understands that he has been violated can remain free, and in freedom “preserves an unlimited power of refusal” (p. 15). But tyranny and its threat, is not just understood through reason: reason is put in distress and a despotism of the senses continues and “makes a mockery of autonomy” (p. 16). In that struggle, tyranny, true heteronomy, true autocracy overwhelms when one’s obedient consciousness “becomes an inclination” (p. 16). One tries to stay ahead of the bullying tyrant; we come to accept the bully’s order as if “it came from ourselves.” The question that is posed is: How does a person, a group, an institution preserve freedom?

That a servile soul, one who accepts the bully’s orders as their own, can be created is the most painful experience of modern man and refutes human freedom. It seems remarkable that modern man blessed, perhaps obsessed, with technology and consumerism can so easily seem to give away their freedom to a autocratic bullying President in these United States 2016–2020, for example, which was thought to be the bastion of democracy. Recourse to one’s categorical imperative is powerless against the bullying tyrant, just as loving one’s neighbor or friend, despite the significance of the essence of love, is inadequate to invert the bullying tyrant. To relate to the tyrant/bully is as if there are no other relationships in the world. “To love is to exist as though the lover and the beloved were alone in the world” (Levinas, 1987, p. 31). The presence of the loved other exhausts society, and the universality of love can only be built through time by “successive infidelities” or by exchanging friends (p. 31). A morality of respect founded on love is blind to the third person, according to Levinas, “and is only the pious intention oblivious of the real evil” (p. 31). A recourse to inner virtue or one’s inner categorical imperative does not address or contain the violation or injustice experienced in a society. Creating or achieving a virtue morality that absorbs injustice is the dream of religions, philosophy, and perhaps psychology. The evil of injustice is not corrected by one’s conscience because it is outside, exterior to the person. A relation with the third person opens the possibility of discourse: it is the only path to nonviolent interaction; it provides a means of establishing the institutions of justice and a government.

To use Levinas words: “The being that presents itself in expression already engages us in society, commits us to enter into society with him. The formal structure of the presence of one to another cannot be put as a simple multiplicity; it is subordination, an appeal from one to another. …This subordination constitutes the first occurrence of a transitive relation between freedoms and, in this very formal sense, of command” (p. 21). The expression “in the face” opens the possibility of nonviolent discourse necessary to build the institutions of a just state. Levinas asserts that when two freedoms, or two entities with a capacity for freedom, are arranged next to each other conflict and violence results. Each limits or defines the other and can only affirm themselves in negating each other: war is the inevitable result. That is, they exercise violence and tyranny and there is no freedom. What remains free, according to Levinas, is the capacity to foresee, to predict the resulting degradation of oneself, of themselves, and to arm against it. The freedom of a person or a collection of persons can only be constructed outside the sphere of contesting identities with a group of third-persons by instituting an order of reason outside oneself and outside the association of the several third-persons that entrusts rationality of law to an impersonal text: resorting to institutions. The entities of autonomous freedom are induced to participate by a relation with a community that has a normative expectation in the form of a categorical imperative that is internal to the autonomous will. That is, there is an interiorization of the external relations of the state, and, Levinas suggests, it is reason, wisdom, “dwelling within us, that makes us immune to tyranny” (Levinas, 1987, p. 23). This interiorization is necessary to be otherwise than an exterior tyranny and the violence of contesting freedoms (Levinas, 1987, pp. 109–118). Without an interiorizing process of pursuing reason which alone resists the violence of authoritarianism, only external coercion compels compliance which is not less than violence.

What is given up is the individuality of oneself, one’s identity, to the impersonal context of reason, what is personal is let go so that universal reason, the written law, has priority over love and over individual desires and programs. The state does not recognize particularity and individuality; to the state individuals are exchangeable and interchangeable. The normative process of interiorization is common to the account of second-person engagement and shows that Levinas ethical phenomenology is a parallel account to the second-person perspective in this respect (compare Eighth Study, Chap. 8). The subordination of one’s will to impersonal reason, to a discourse in an encounter of a person and a person, is a relation that is not tyrannical, but transitive, in which one is subordinate to the Other. Levinas suggests that this situation, can be called, religion, one speaks to an other. He asserts that speech is essentially commanding (1987; pp. 15–45).

9.3 Consolidating Summary

This is a sketched outline of Levinas’s general ethical program. Again, a too tidy account of Levinas’s ethical phenomenology is likely to be incomplete. The goal is to gain a sense of the of Levinas’s ethics to assess whether it can benefit psychology’s effort to understand ethical and, subsequently, moral actions. There is an ambiguity even in Levinas’s choice of terminology that contrasts behavior and actions. Behavior is the result of environmental selection. Novel behavior is radically interpreted as chance variations that are more effective in negotiating one’s environment. This, from one point of view, is a very passive view of the human organism with undue negative attribution of agency. Such a concept of behavior is a simple extension of natural evolutionary processes. This statement would probably be vigorously contested by behaviorally oriented psychologists.

Intention is the desire to thrive and act to pursue life’s projects that transcend survival concerns. Actions, in contrast to behavior, attribute a vital intentionality to person who first-personally commits to and, in that sense, owns the action committed. The intention directs the pursuit of one’s various projects in their life space. While much of a person’s conduct may consist of a matrix of habit, the habit structure, in contrast to conditioned reaction, is intentionally set in place, and can intentionally be modified according to the various projects one may be pursuing as asserted by James (1890, p. 110). Both views, behavioral and intentional actions, depend on neurological cognitive processes of sufficient complexity.

Levinas asserts that the ethical structure of a person is established precognitively in the core of a person’s subjective structures. Some of these processes are necessarily pre-subjective and work at the interface of existing and subjectivity. This indicates that inquiries of conduct in the exclusive context of cognitive processes are not likely to uncover the principles and the properties of ethical action or the moral principles that contextualize conduct. The ethical structure, or more accurately, intersubjective structure is established precognitively in the core of a person’s subjectivity, subjectivity refers to those processes necessary for cognitive functioning. That is, cognition is supervenient on subjectivity, on the intersubjective interactions with the Other. One’s ethical structure is established from outside to inside; the ethical structure comes from an encounter with the Other to the subject; to one’s subjective processes that are set in motion by a sensed relation with there is, a sensitivity to being. Sensitivity to being would seem to be an experience of being, but the phrase experience of being seems to be the wrong term or phrase as experience is the interface of subjectivity and cognitive processes of perceived environmental data in the account provided in this investigation (Refer to Seventh Study, Sect. 7.1, The I and Thinking).

The term there is is a complex and central concept introduced in Existence and Existents in 1947 and continuously developed through out Levinas’s life. The there is can be thought of as a field (of existence) with which a being, in Levinas vocabulary, an existent, relates and in that relation is a subject by which consciousness originates. Such a relation takes place in the dark, as Levinas describes it, and is sensed and felt; it is a prickly uncomfortable sensation that creates a vigilant insomnia like condition, and, Levinas emphasizes, from which there is no escape (Levinas, 1978). A second concept necessary to grasp Levinas thought is the face that seeks to capture the significance of an encounter of an I with the Other. It, the face, is perceived by Levinas as being “incomprehensible but not unreal” and refers to a shock resulting from the recognition of one’s limitation, of one’s obligation to the Other, the infinity of the Other that “reveals itself as a command,” and reveals that one is the servant of the Other (1996, p. xi). The term infinity is a contrast to the sameness that is oneself. Recall that the capitalization of Other is a convention used by Levinas to refer to an Other in the exterior world, and an uncapitalized other for the interiorized alter-I, or alter-ego that results from the substitution process which occurs when one encounters the Other. The interiorization process of substitution is discussed later.

What seems to be often missed in the passive intensity of a founding situation of the person’s encounter with the face, is the central importance of ‘catching a view’ of a third person and subsequently realizing that oneself is also a third person along with many other third persons. This is the beginning of a society. It is the expression of the face that calls up one’s responsibility and creates the possibility of a discourse through language, a nonviolent interaction that circumvents the contest of two or more freedoms. Levinas asserts that the only real freedom that a person has is to prepare for the preservation of their freedom through the creation of a just and impersonal state. That is, the creation of the institutions of reason designed to protect freedom. To arrange and allow free entities along side each other results in inevitable war with all the characteristics of tyranny, injustice, and violence. What is compromised in the creation of the institutions of a governing structure is one’s individuality. One’s individuality is irrelevant and not recognized by the impersonal reason of a written law and is an agreement to limit one’s freedom. Levinas makes clear that individual freedom can be secured only by institutions designed to maintain limited freedom. Further, the participation of a free autonomous person in those institutions is accomplished without coercive violence only by the interiorization of the normative infrastructure of society: an interiorization of a categorical imperative

. Although Levinas has more in common with Kant than some other significant thinkers, substitution is his version of the categorical imperative that is freed from Kant’s system (Levinas, 1996; p. 10, pp. 79–95). The point is that the violence of coercion is prevented only by the internalization of a categorical imperative like principle derived from society’s moral infrastructure; its written law that Levinas is careful to describe. Substitution describes the interiorization of Other as an other, an alter-I along side one’s own I.

This section is intended to provide an outline of Levinas ethical philosophy that was consistently elaborated over a long life time with regular publications from 1947 to 1995 when he died. The goal is to provide a general outline of his thought that will assist in a comparison of Levinas and James. Such an outline is necessarily simplistic and incomplete, and probably unsatisfying. In the next section, William James and Levinas are compared to uncover some similarities that will point to and, it is hoped, anticipate some usefulness for theoretical and practical psychology.

9.4 Phenomenological and Pragmatic Ethics—Some Connections of Levinas and James

Levinas and James compare on the provisional nature of ethical relations in the plurality of human relations and on the indefiniteness of a person’s intersubjective relation to an Other. That is, there is agreement that there are no system of rules or general principles that applies to any single ethical situation. One purpose of this inquiry is to examine the similarities of these two thinkers to show the relevance of Levinas’s examination of the small slice of reality between the sense of being, there is, and subjectivity as relevant and useful to psychology. Credit is given to Megan Craig’s (2010) Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology which, as the title suggests, is an examination of the connections between these two thinkers. Craig provides the guide for our exploration, and this inquiry seeks to take advantage of her astute insights into their relation.

Craig observes that James first appears in Existence and Existents in an anecdote in which he describes a reluctance to rise in the morning, unwilling to leave the warmth of one’s bed on a cold morning (Levinas, 1978). James uses this example to illustrate initiating a physical movement, volition of movement. Levinas began this book while in a labor camp during World War II and from memory cited this example; what he is interested in is the gap between the initial intention to act and the actual action. He designates that gap as indolence; the experience of being stuck in the moment, unable to yet act. Levinas describes what it feels like to be unable to get going, to be stuck as of a writer’s block. James provides the illustration (1890, pp. 1132–1133) which Craig observes dominates Levinas’s entire book (2010, pp. 81–83). James uses the illustration to describe ideo-motor movement

, movement that occurs without much thought or sometimes even awareness and which is described as automatic-like (James refers to them as quasi-automatic). Levinas finds the interval between intending and the action to be significant and worthy of exploration, that moment when one has not yet commenced an intended action (1978, p. 13). Levinas opens his long investigation of ethics and intersubjectivity with this perspective.

9.4.1 Provisional Ethics

We begin by determining similarities and differences in James’s and Levinas’s views of ethical conduct . James asserts that the “. . highest ethical life consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case,” and “that real ethical relations exist(ed) in a purely human [immediate] world” (McDermott, 1977, pp. 625–626). What this means, suggests Craig, is that Levinas agrees with James’s statement when he asserts that every ethical situation must be navigated in the dark, without the benefit of light and of seeing one’s way. The truth of ethics will not derive until the last man ‘has had his experience and had his say’ (McDermott, 1977, p. 611). Levinas is perhaps more exasperating in that he does not directly tell his readers that there are no rules as he simply does not provide such direct descriptions, nor does he even provide an account or definition of who or what it means to be human or to belong to humanity (Craig, 2010, p. 46).

The most noticeable difference in their account of ethics is Levinas’s insistence on the importance of the third, fourth, fifth (and on) other persons; others that together constitutes a society with the impetus of the expression of a face which enables a peaceful engagement with exteriority, in alterity, through communication with language. It is this move that makes possible establishing an institution of reason and corresponding institutions of the state. An appeal to a virtue ethic such as universal love or respect misses the problem and is only pious good intention characteristic of established religions. Levinas insists that it is only the exterior institution of the state that can preserve one’s freedom and that can avoid the tyranny and violence of freedoms arranged together. Men communicating with language can work out plans to preserve their freedom by setting up the means of preserving those freedoms at the cost of sacrificing their particularity and individuality; that is, each person most submit to impersonality. A final step is necessary to avoid the violence of coercion and intimidation: each person’s interiorization of the Other, the society’s laws, and general social infrastructure (Levinas, 1987, pp. 15–45). James does not develop or even address a similar idea, and, in fact, that is left to his pragmatic colleague George Herbert Mead as discussed in the preceding study.

Where James does connect with Levinas is the insistence on intercourse, on communication between individuals with varied different practices and beliefs which are guided by the dedicated pluralism of James’s guiding philosophy. This stance is congruent with Levinas’s insistence on the particularity, the individuality of one’s encounter with the Other that is accomplished only through a willing openness to be vulnerable, to be ethical, and in taking up a responsibility for the Other. That is, to be both open and vulnerable when confronting the face of the Other is to be ethical. A central theme running through Levinas’s philosophy is a criticism of the privileging by the Western intellectual tradition of reason and the universal, to which he frequently applies terms of sameness and totality. James similarly uses the term idealistic monism to refer to reason’s pull to the general and universal. For James, radical empiricism is the insistence that the world is a pluralism in contrast to the pull toward monism and idealism, the idea that the world is a whole constituted by naturalistic rigorous materials identified by physics and is continuous with biology. Pluralism for James ascribes that experience is a messy discontinuous, unfinished, and disorganized world of particularities and individual characteristics that lacks an elegantly reasoned underlying account for which science continually searches. This aspect of pluralism challenges traditional scientific credibility; it suggests, in the context of a Western intellectual tradition, an unacceptable irrationality and inauthenticity.

What is to be resisted, according to James, is a tendency to dogmatize one’s own beliefs and practices which, in contrast to the openness of plurality, would result in further blindness to other peoples visions and values. The call is to communicate with others who have their own particular and individual vision of the world and, subsequently, their own path to flourishing. The first thing to learn, James says, is not to interrupt or to interfere with another’s particular way of being happy. To both Levinas and James, a nonviolent dialogue is the essential starting point for building a just society; a society that protects individual freedom (Bernstein, 2010, pp. 55–66; McDermott, 1977, pp. 645, 629–651). Levinas and James are in agreement that the world is always incomplete; the world is always in the making. One’s future conduct may follow a regular routine and be predictable, but it, one’s conduct, is always open to the possibility of novelty, of a free act.

9.4.2 Sense and Sensibility

It did not long escape the author that the title of this section is an infringement, fully unintentional, of a well known and justifiably famous novel of Jane Austen. I initially, upon that realization, considered an alternative, but finally considered the title to remain. No one is likely to judge what is written here to plagiarize so precise and articulate a personage whose art, as art, is not objective nor does it reveal inwardness, rather it is a “covering for inwardness (Levinas, 1978, p. 49).

Sensibility , for Levinas, is adapted to describe that slice of reality at the interface of existing, there is, and subjectivity. This reality is conceived as prior to phenomena, or perhaps as suggested by Craig, the first tier of phenomena, while experience at the level of perception constitutes the second tier of phenomena (Craig, 2010, pp. 53–54). The first tier is prior to experience and Levinas describes sense as a sensitivity operative at the pre-experiential level, as “a level of the psyche deeper than consciousness” (as cited from Craig, 2010, p. 53). Levinas describes that sense can show details by stopping the action in a manner similar to video camera that can open up perspectives that might otherwise be obscured or covered by the normal play of proportion against a horizon (Levinas, 1978, p. 49). Sensibility is the direct contact between pre-conscious elemental, necessarily indefinite , entities that structure a person’s subjectivity; an impact, Levinas might say, of awareness that is not awareness. Stated differently, the sense of things, sensibility, is a nonintentional receptivity that precedes intentionality, and thereby consciousness.

What is meant by sense is also relevant to what Levinas describes as the trace of a face. A trace is a signifying of a beyond against a large, perhaps infinite, horizon that leaves no sense of a past, that does not become part of history. It is rather, according to Levinas, an interruption of a subject’s relation with being, of which it becomes a part, and is a call to responsibility. Rather a trace “signifies beyond being” and beyond the face; by beyond Levinas means “a Third Person which is not definable by the Self” (1996, p. 61). The beyond indicated by the trace of a face, “from which the face comes is in the third person” (p. 61). Here the third person enters into a social relationship with a person who has realized by an encounter with the face (presence) of the Other that she too is a third person along with many third persons, a third party. The society of the third party opens peaceful exchange mediated by the reason of language that is the foundation of peaceful engagement. Language is required to cross the separation of exteriority of a society of third persons to establish those institutions based on the reason which preserve one’s freedom and the freedom of the society of all third persons. The society of third persons is external to one’s relation of responsibility with an Other.

By the idea of infinity

, Levinas refers to a surplus that cannot be contained in an idea. The idea of infinity is the other overflowing one’s self, and the social overflowing of one’s encounter with a face (1987, pp. 54–57). It refers to the similar inability to fully capture experience conceptually in language. Levinas states that “then the other is not simply another freedom; to give me knowledge of injustice, his gaze must come to me from the dimension of the ideal. The other must be closer to [the ideal] God than I. This is certainly not a philosopher’s invention, but the first given of moral consciousness, which could be defined as the consciousness of the privilege the other has relative to me. Justice well ordered begins with the other” (1987, p. 56). It should also be recognized that the ethical relationship described by Levinas is not part of cognition nor does it form a cognitive scaffolding for ethical behavior, rather Levinas emphasizes that it is a foundation upon which a cognitive understanding of morality rises (p. 56).

The similarity of Levinas’s use of sensitivity with James is demonstrated in James’s description of sensation relative to cognition in Chapter 17 of that name which opens the second volume of The Principles of Psychology

. James asserts two ways of knowing: by acquaintance which is a an awareness of the nature of things, and knowledge about a thing. He states that “I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavor of a pear when I taste it; …; but about the inner nature of these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say nothing at all… At most, I can say to my friends, Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these object will probably come” (1890, pp. 217). When we are only acquainted with an object, we have it, or the idea of it, James says. James points out that the words feelings and thought become contrasted here. It is through a feeling that we become acquainted with an object as a simple idea, and when we operate on that fact or the simple idea of that fact, elaborate its relations and properties a person moves beyond acquaintance and knows about the object. “Feelings are the germ and starting point of cognition, thoughts develop the tree.” Feelings however are not to be confused with states of minds that are emotions (pp. 216–218).

The function of sensation is to acquaint one with a fact, with the “bare immediate natures” that distinguish an object. The function of perception is to acquire “knowledge about” a fact. It is at this stage that sensations are desensed, a term used by Hannah Arendt (1971), and are converted to signs that are used by thought. This is a three step process of a fact: a sensed acquaintance of a fact, a desensed sign of the fact, and an inclusion in thinking, that is a semiotic triad of an object, its sign, and interpretant of which an interpretant itself becomes an object in a moving logical structure of continuous pulses of thought (Colapietro, 1989; Peirce, 1998; Wiley, 1994). An interpretant refers to the continued utilization of a sign in thinking which then becomes itself an object of further thinking. James notes that the desensed cognitive transformation is a completely different form of the original fact that has been reduced to nerve impulses physiologically and becomes the symbols of writing with the further development of the knowledge about a fact (James, 1890, pp. 651–689). In sum then for James, sensations acquaint a person with the facts of things which are then replaced by thoughts of the same facts, but in ‘altogether’ different ways (p. 655).

James addresses a level of reality above, or beyond sensitivity as employed by Levinas who is only peripherally interested in cognition. If Levinas is interested in a tier one level of reality as delineated by Craig, James is addressing tier two at the level experience as it enters consciousness. Sensation , according to James, is the core of experience. How to understand this experience is important. He asserts that experience is unitary that is supplied by the sensation of a fact of which we can become aware depending on the focus of attention, and then which, in turn, with reflection becomes thinking. This is in contrast to the alternative empirical view of experience as consciousness and the content, a fact or object, of consciousness. In a short essay ‘Does Consciousness Exist’, James puts it this way: “Experience, I believe, has not such inner duplicity [as consciousness plus content]; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not by way of subtraction, but by way of addition…” of awareness and other sets of experiences that are added [or recruited] to the original unitary experience (James, 1912, pp. 11–15). The stream of experience is continuous and is the flux, the material by which we live our lives. But the stream of experience consists of both joints of connectedness and continuity of which both properties need to be recognized. The limits or boundaries of an experience is indefinite and vague, perhaps, in the same way the peripheral view of one’s environment shifts and is relatively indefinite. Like Levinas, James considers experience always overflows the capacity of language to describe it.

9.4.3 Subjectivity and Plurality

The goal in this section is to explore what is meant by subjectivity for both Levinas and James. The difference is quite distinct but with similarities. Levinas descriptively addresses the subject and almost never uses the terms person or individual, and further neither defines or designates what a person, human being, or humanity might be, either through qualities or characteristics (Craig, 2010, p. 46). His concern, as noted, is with that slice of reality in the gap between existence and existing. That space created by a subject sensing the field of being, there is, exudes an uncomfortable too tight for one’s skin feeling. There is a pulse to this existence and a tension to subjectivity that is not due to an effort to purge emotions or of self-control, but rather a tension of being in the grip of the exterior world without one’s consent. James addresses the hither side of subjectivity that is concerned with experience and the processes which experience enters cognitive processes of acting, thinking, and judging. For both, Levinas and James the “I”, the “knower” is tied to subjectivity (McDermott, 1977, p. 178; Levinas, 1987, p. 51).

9.4.3.1 The Subjectivity Nexus

An existent’s sensibility to the act of existing is its relation to what Levinas names the there is, a too tight for the skin feeling that he sometimes describes as the horror of there is. The act of existing, however, is not voluntary; as an existent existing is a sense of imposition. Existing is tied to an existent by the present, by the now which is a position provided in hypostasis. “A subject does not exist before the event of its position” Levinas says (1978, p. 81). Levinas asserts that “the present [now] is the event of hypostasis” (1987, p. 52). This substantial existing of hypostasis designates the momentary stability of a position which is necessary to give an “I” the ethical authority or strength to rise to the level of the face of the Other. He quickly cautions that he does not know why or how a hypostasis emerges and that he “can simply show what the significance of hypostasis is” (p. 51). This is perhaps not much different than the speculative reaches of physics or astrophysics. That is, its reality is required by the context of surrounding relations. The beginning to which hypostasis originates is in a vagueness of a dialectic of an “I” tied to subjectivity. The “I” is a mode of existing that begins in the initial freedom of a beginning at hypostasis; the “I”, then in turn, becomes an “existent” in the form of a past and a self, an ego (p. 53). According to Levinas, it is only an “I” that can respond to the injunction of a face the Other (1969, p. 305). The beginning referred to is the beginning of the event of time at hypostasis. Time, according to Levinas, is another relation between an existent and existence which appears and is characteristic of one’s relation with the Other.

Stepping back, Levinas recognizes a relation, preceding the relation of time, between an existent and existing that he names solitude. Solitude is described as the unity of an existent and existing, or perhaps better described as simply an existent existing, an existing that started with hypostasis, the present now and the existent that is, in turn, the freedom of beginning. Solitude describes that subjectivity, a nexus of an existent existing being alone that is characterized by a sense of abandonment and despair at the same time as there is a sense of virility, pride, and a sovereignty of beginning freedom (p. 54–55). Levinas again acknowledges the investigation is at a level that is prior to experience, “at a level of investigation that can no longer be qualified as experience,” and “we find ourselves beyond [below] phenomenology” (p. 54).

Important is recognizing that a single subjective entity, a single subjectivity, can never exist solipsistically in itself, similar to Castañeda. Levinas asserts that once desire, in contrast to need, is recognized as a central motivating impetus of a person, that which is exterior to the person is a governing aspect of a person’s life. The ineluctable appearance of a face calls out the response of the “I”, that encounter introduces a third person, and with that introduction the one realizes that oneself is a member of the party of third persons. In the instant of an “I” encountering a face, an incorporation of the Other into oneself as an other alter-I. The process of incorporating an other into oneself Levinas terms substitution (Levinas, 1981, pp. 99–129). Levinas says that solitude, the unity of an existent and existing, is better described as a dual solitude because once an Other is encountered through the face “this other than me accompanies the ego [the I] like a shadow” (1978, p. 90). Subjectivity does not, then, exist as an isolated entity; the subjectivity of a person exists, or rather, functions only intersubjectively (1969, pp. 304–306).

The intersubjective ethical relation with an Other is shared or ethically compelled by the substitution processes that nonvoluntarily result in an encounter of an Other, and is a fully shared we-perspective, to use second-personal vocabulary, although Levinas would probably prefer compelled in contrast to shared. The concomitant relation with an always present third-party is distant, is an exteriority that can only be breached with language. Said alternatively, the separation, Levinas would say exteriority, of a person and a third party is bridged by communication through language. Briefly reviewing, language opens the possibility of preserving one’s freedom by intersubjectively building the institutions necessary for a just State. This is inescapable as it is the only way to escape the tyranny that results when two or more agents with freedom find themselves next to each other. The person finding oneself in the context of the third party can choose to avert tyranny and preserve their individual freedom by communicating to build a just State (review 9.2, Third Person and the Rational State).

It is the nonvoluntary tie to the Other that opens a relation with the third party. It is, in Levinas’s words, the metaphysical relation with the other that makes possible an opening for a more general we-relation that can lead to an aspiration to construct a state, institutions, laws that establish abstract universal principles, create a space for reason, and open new paths to intersubjective creativity; all of which preserves individual freedom. More simply, an impersonal third-person perspective is opened in the form of a political sphere (1969, p. 300). There is uncertainty concerning how an I and its field of subjectivity (1969, p. 299) is maintained in a context of impersonal reason of a just State. Levinas cautions: “But politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who have given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus as in absentia” (p. 300). Asserting the irreducibility of personal particularity that must confront the multiplicity and impersonal universality of the State, Levinas asks how is the particularity of the person sustained in the confrontation with an impersonal institution which is no longer concerned with a particular individual whose freedom it, the institution, was originally created to preserve? Stated differently, how is the particular identity of a person preserved in an environment of an impersonal State?

Levinas proposes that it is in an opening of interiority which occurs in response to encountering exteriority in the face of an Other in which one’s identity, the identity of the I perdures. Stated alternatively, an opening of one’s interior which is the structure of one’s field of subjectivity that allows an I to rise to the encounter with the face and the exteriority of a third party and not be overwhelmed. This proposal of an opening of interiority converges with Peirce’s account of inward and outward worlds, and that one’s capacity for autonomous action derives from an inward power of self-control as is discussed later (see 10.2.2.3, Inward-Outward Worlds: Self-Control). An ineluctable violence results when different freedoms are arranged next to each other. This tension to violence is countered by substitution that is an interiorization of an Other that is not oneself and that has the force of an alter-I, an alter-ego that is inescapable and is a fixed structure of one’s subjective field. It is the interiorization of an Other that allows one to escape the violence of being coerced by a State, and that participation in a we environment of a State can be voluntary and an act of freedom that is not compelled by the State. One’s freedom to participate in the institutions of the State comes at a cost of voluntarily limiting one’s freedom. It is the interior environment, one’s subjective field, which enables the possibility of pursuing peace and of preserving one’s freedom. The exterior multiplicity is a plurality that remains disjointed, unorganized, and messy. It is described as plurality because of a resistance to being organized when in the context of ethical conduct which always remains embedded in individuality and particularity; Levinas’s specific term is pluralism (Levinas, 1969, pp. 289–307). It is the character of plurality which connects Levinas and James according to Craig.

In contrast to Levinas, James is principally concerned with the relation between experience and thinking which, as noted earlier, is at the opposed side of subjectivity and complements Levinas’s description. Subjectivity at this level is the interface with cognition. Although not primarily concerned with cognition, Levinas does state that “Cognition is the operation in which the idea which a word substitutes for the image of an entity “enlarges the horizon” of the appearing, and reabsorbs the shadow [the word] whose opacity the consistency of the given projects on to the transparency of intuition” (1981, p. 63). By intuition Levinas refers to the idea or cognitive object reflected back to the subjective field. James states that “ ‘Pure experience’ is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories” (McDermott, 1977, p. 215). One’s continuous actions in the world results in a continuous flow of experience that is accompanied by thinking and which recruits related and similar experiences and related ideas recollected from memory. The world consists at all times of a subjective part and an objective part of which the objective part is “incalculably more extensive than the” subjective, and yet the subjective is necessary. He goes on to say that “The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we are thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass” (1902, pp. 386–387).

James thinks of subjectivity as where thinking originates in experience and enters the cognitive processes where consciousness begins (compare Seventh Study, Chap. 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity). Further he says “A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude towards the object plus the sense of self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts…,” and followed by the next bit of experience continuously (1902, p. 387). An object being thought about, or as an attitude, or as an idea are only abstract elements. James asserts that “It is a full fact, even though it be an insignificant fact; it is of the kind to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the motor current of the world run through the like of it; it is on a line connecting real events to real events” (p. 387). As long as “we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (p. 386). Individuality and the particularities of an individual are founded on feeling and the only place “we can catch real fact in the making” is in the deeper “recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character,” (p. 389). These last several remarks occur at the conclusion of The Varieties of Religious Experience that nevertheless are a concise summary of James’s thinking of the interface of subjectivity and cognition.

The contrast between Levinas and James, I think, is relatively clear along with their similarities. Levinas writings are more extensive in distinguishing and elaborating the prephenomenological dimensions of subjectivity while James attends to a much broader psychological horizon that is, in contrast, phenomenological dimensions. Levinas maintains an intense focus on subjectivity as it originates in our very basic sense of being itself and its development into an intersubjective nexus of conduct. The subjective field is the intersecting site of one’s basic sensitivity to living, to being, and one’s relation to an other person, indeed, other persons; it is an intersubjective nexus. It is that focus on intersubjectivity which makes Levinas’s program ethical. James does not attend minutely to the prephenomenological foundations of the interactions between two individuals, but rather addresses the ethical actions that cannot be predetermined but are responsive to the immediate social situational demands that call for that action which produces the most good.

9.4.3.2 Plurality

What is plurality ? Does the concept of plurality, as revealed by Levinas and conceptually developed by James, have a significance for psychology? How does the concept of plurality affect psychological science and the practice of psychology?

Plurality is an openness to new perspectives of any given experience or fact, and an acceptance of an incompleteness of any one particular experience of a person. This is similar to the hermeneutic understanding of an interpretation of a text that is never quite finished or complete. For Levinas, it is a sense of an ambiguity of a subjectivity that is never quite complete, never quite achieves stability, and is an uncomfortable tension since there is always an incompleteness of any present experience without the next moment’s experience, a changing perspective, and another possibility. Despite, or perhaps because of, this uncomfortable tension, there is also a positive hopefulness that Craig sensitively describes: “Plurality gives the subject unique chances for being otherwise, for emerging in a new way and for not having any single experience or identity become definitive for the whole of one’s life” (2010; p. 114). There is no closure, no completeness to any particular lived duration. By taking a stand, which Levinas names hypostasis, a person lays claim to being a unique person; individuating from impersonal being or being just one among many. Using Craig’s descriptive turn “Taking a stand, a person refuses to be counted as simply one among many” (p. 114). Craig summarizes Levinas: “On one side there is the stability of gathering oneself up and pulling oneself together. On another side there is the instability of being overwhelmed or shaken. In standing the subject finds a place, a here, and becomes a subject,” to the extent that Levinas can be summarized (p.116).

One encounters the usual frustration when attempting to describe Levinas as he provides no conceptual account of what he means by the determined incompleteness of his poetically styled language which requires both patience and a tolerance of ambiguity. One of Levinas goals is to demonstrate the inadequacy of any methodological approach to understanding or capturing a person or what is human whether phenomenological or psychological. Craig asserts that he works to create a feeling and sensitivity for what cannot be thematically captured. That is, the subjective reality that is the target of poetic description exceeds the capacity of language and reason. Levinas’s poetic-style descriptions and entire philosophy is a demonstration that the particularities of an individual is not to be transposed to a third-person impersonal perspective, an objective impersonal reason he says is privileged by Western philosophy and that he characterizes as a totality that seeks to erase individual subjectivity.

Craig suggests that purchase is gained comparing Levinas’s thought with James’s radical empiricism to gain a more appreciative understanding of the ethical implications of the core notion of pluralism. Pluralism is a term employed by James 43 years earlier in an attempt to capture the idea that the individual, the one particular fact, cannot be described in a general principle of relation. To restate, James anticipated Levinas by some 43 years that the individual, the single particular fact, is lost in the averaging process of objectivity that strives to capture general relations of similar facts. The effort to track and not lose the individual characteristics and facts of a person is expressed by the term pluralism. The term is used in the Principles of Psychology

, but was developed in 1897 in The Will to Believe in its present meaning and further developed in The Pluralistic Universe and Essays in Radical Empiricism.

In the preface of The Will to Believe, James asserts that “the difference between monism and pluralism is the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. ‘Prima facie’ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form. …But absolute unity… still remains undiscovered.” (1897, p. viii). Empiricism

, as used by James, holds that all conclusions regarding observed facts about the world are hypotheses subject to future modification, no matter how assured we might be, by new experience. Facts are only held together by our experience; the world is not experienced as a unity. Radical, according to James, in Radical Empiricism designates that the doctrine of monism is a hypothesis and subject to falsification. Monism refers to that family of ideas that proposes the world, and ultimately the universe, is a unitary whole constituted by its constituent parts held together by the general principles of physics and biology, otherwise acknowledged as the laws of nature. James restates the central nature of the difference between monistic and pluralistic thinking in later writings of the pregnant contrast between monistic and pluralistic style thinking (1911, pp. 114, 135) When any particular phenomenon is investigated, the phenomenon is reduced to its parts, its constituents. The mereological direction moves in toward the center, toward the whole. The whole is a tight cause and effect like sequence of relations that is acknowledged as a bounded scientific naturalism; that is only those objects are real which meet scientific criteria (Dennett, 2003; Quine, 1969; Sellars, 1963). The goal, of course, is to exclude extra naturalistic processes of magic and superstition although soft naturalist alternatives have been proposed that do allow for novelty and at the same time reject magical relations (Baker, 2013; Ganeri, 2012; Duus, 2017). The alternative to scientific naturalism, for example, for monistic thinkers is understood as a non-rational universe which is unacceptable or absurd given their position.

Pluralism refers to a reality that is additive and distributive rather than whole and subtractive, as characterized by James, and in the immediacy of individual facts of an experience are not neatly and reasonably tied together. A collective is a result of adding together the parts that are experienced; what is not experienced not part of a particular collective. The parts of a collective are only held together by a pulse or bout of experience. Plurality addresses individual and particular facts of an experience and a first-personal experience. A totality is developed by reason based on the general relations between objects and events, and are based on similarities and differences. The creative generalizations that emerge are how we learn about our social and physical world and are necessary. These generalizations are objective third-person descriptions of investigations of our world are important, but the plurality of a person’s experience is lost. The individual meaningfulness of experience is lost. A person then alternately attends to these two modes of being, but can only inhabit a first-person stand. Actually, when the second-person we is included, a person moves between at least three modes of being, and occupies the first-and second-person stands (see Eighth Study, Chap. 8).

Individual experience and particular facts, according to James’s account, are passed over by the panoramic horizons of the hypothetical concepts of general objective models of the world that are only hypotheses; not reality. Generally, as James says of a pluralistic view, “each part of the world is in some ways connected, in other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and the difference are obvious to view” (1909, p. 34). There is no good reason “for even suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strung along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in” (p. 82). Important is one’s personal vision that creates the experiential connectedness of a person which James has referred to as a spiritual center that gives meaning to one’s life. In the final consideration, the idealistic monistic formulations, as James refers to such views, of the world or universe are hypotheses, and no one such hypothesis has been justified or proven.

James develops several lines of argument asserting pluralism that leaves a world that is relatively unfinished and in which the central concern is not a neat rational and well reasoned model of the world (1911, pp. 140–142). He points out the difficulty with the idealistic monistic attitude generally and scientific naturalism specifically has with recognizing free will (McKenna & Coates, 2016; O’Connor & Franklin, 2016). Pluralism puts no constraints on free will, or as James describes it, the capacity to act novelly. Although the impersonality and expansive horizon of scientific naturalism is intellectually attractive to many of a certain attitude, James believes such views to be shallow. He argues that a general and large panoramic view only deals with symbols and representations of reality. It is only “as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (1902, p. 386). That is, we live our lives in the flux of continuous experience of which each pulsed duration does not lend itself to the partition of individual atomistic facts and things, and which is then tied to and owned by the next duration of experience, that is, by their “conjunctive relations” (1912, pp. 25–32). It becomes increasingly apparent that there are two incommensurate ways to view the world; each of which have their specific uses. We encounter again the incommensurate difference of theoretical and practical reason noticed by Immanuel Kant and discussed in the Eighth Study, Chap. 8, Second-Person We.

All the arguments marshalled by James bear on the fact that reality is first-personally experienced by a particular person, and that person’s mineness or ownership of an experience determines her reality. Any first-person single experience is not final but joined in a conjunctive relation with subsequent and preceding experiences. James said it this way: “Our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields view. Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and continuously supersedes them as life progresses” (1912, p. 36). Craig’s suggests that the “overflowing field” and the “superseding more” presages Levinas’s “transcendent” and “infinite” sense of the face (Craig, 2010, p. 74). When an experience is thematized (conceptualized) and shared through effective language communication, what was experience is impersonally represented third-personally, objectively, and subject to epistemological concerns. Third-person perspective essentially is a generalized observer with a wider view than a single first-person agent and adds a reservoir of represented similar experiences which supplement social and cultural infrastructure ; it becomes knowledge. Lastly, it is important to hold in context that every experience is tied to an action. A person is not a passive recipient of experience, but rather an active participant in an experience (1912, pp. 71–76).

As noted, Craig suggests that radical empiricism and its central idea of plurality precedes and connects with Levinas’s later development of sensing the transcendent and infinite face that creates the same openness and resistance to closure as does James’s pluralism , and is indeed recognized as pluralism (Levinas, 1969). Levinas’s proposed subjective structure escapes reason’s effort to generalize the particular sensing and feeling of an I, a subjectivity, and its substitutions of the Other as other. To restate this rather complex thought, the individuality of a subject’s sensing and feeling of the face of the Other results in Other’s incorporation as other, an alternate I or self of an I; a process that is always unfinished, in that sense messy, that cannot fit into a reasoned orderliness or a reasoned generalization. The sensing and feeling, described by Levinas, opens subjectivity and operates primarily as an aesthetic process as described by Levinas. Similarly for James, sensing and feeling operate in connecting the unitary nature of an experiential episode in an aesthetic like process. These aesthetic processes are necessary to operate in those environs characterized by entities that cannot be clearly seen or discerned, whose outlines are vague, hazy, and indefinite. Levinas can be thought of as an apostle of intersubjectivity whose consistently focused philosophy is not so much an ethics as a constructing of the prerequisites for experiencing and cognitive processing. He provides the non-optional mechanics of the link between persons, between an I and an Other, an intersubjective interval, to use a phrase from Craig. A future is impossible to a solitary individual, an other is required (Craig, 2010, p. 81; Levinas, 1978, pp. 17, 88–90). James provides a phenomenological account of experience as structured by cognition that builds on Levinas’s subjectivity foundation. To paraphrase Craig, the plurality of the social world is captured by the plurality of subjectivity (p. 3).

9.4.3.3 The Ethical Consequence

This section further develops the earlier discussion concerning the provisional nature of ethical conduct (see 9.4.1). The consequence of pluralism as developed by James and Levinas is the provisional nature of ethical conduct: the ethical nature of any particular act can only be determined when it is enacted. Any moral act is tailored to a present circumstantial context encountered to fit the larger context of the social infrastructure , one’s accumulated experience, one’s ethical responsibility for the well being of the Other, and a general concern to preserve social harmony. There are many, if not innumerable, sources of influence of any particular act in the social environment. Some of those sources are unique to the circumstance encountered and could not have been considered by any earlier formulation of rules; except, as suggested by James, “one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and to act as to bring about the very largest universe of good which we can see” (McDermott, 1977, pp. 625–626). James can be interpreted to say that a moral obligation proceeds from the claim of a concrete other person in the context of a social infrastructure and is not simply a compliance to an abstract principle applied to the particular situation encountered except that inclination directing attention to an other person’s claim. This apt interpretation fits as examined in the earlier Second-Person We, Eighth Study, Chap. 8. Recall that that study asserts that moral obligation develops in a two person intersubjective relation that is designated a We relation in the context of the social infrastructure in which they are embedded and which is similar to James’s description of moral conduct (McDermott, 1977, p. 617).

The goal of this discussion is to examine how plurality and intersubjective ethics are related and to note their similarities and differences. The shift from perceiving reality as a whole made up of constituent parts that are to be investigated and described in relation to a whole— the current dominant scientific view of reality—to perceiving reality as a collection of particular and individual facts with no inherent reasoned relation until a set of facts are experienced is significant. James names these views as idealistic monism and pluralism. One of purposes of this study is to consider the implication of radical empiricism and plurality for psychology. One of those implications may be to direct psychology to a human science rather than a pretense to a natural science. What is to be gained is a clearer more direct percipience of what it is to be an acting person in an intersubjective social environment, and subsequently more useful investigations of all aspects of the person. Psychological phenomena are not generally investigated from an explicit pluralistic perspective, and such investigations may lead to a human science as has been suggested, and even recommended. These kind of speculations are not pleasing to those psychologists who prefer a natural science stance. They are more in tune with social constructionist views and the corresponding movement toward a qualitative methodology. In a pluralistic reality whatever the circumstances, there is always an openness to new possibilities; to new opportunities for novel acts, that is, for freely willed behavior. However routine and regular a person’s conduct, or how ever often expected social circumstances repeat, there is always the expectation that things can be different, and that nothing is determined and final. There is always possibility of a novel action, of a free will, that is disputed in a naturalist scientific psychology.

9.5 Summary and Integration

The purpose of this study is to compare James and Levinas, and then to assess their significance to psychology. What is noticed is that they describe similar processes at different levels of psychological reality . Levinas describes the processes structuring intersubjectivity prior to and upon which experience and cognition supervenes. James describes the other side of subjectivity where having an experience begins cognitive processing when percepts are desensed and become words and other applicable symbols. Craig suggests that a clearer understanding is obtained when reading James and Levinas together as each enhances and makes clearer the other’s thinking. On the surface, she says, even together it can seem that their theoretical resources are thin when compared to all-embracing panoramic theories of psychological reality. This is because the pluralistic reality they describe as experienced is not tidy and elegantly tied together, but is rough, unfinished, and open to new experience and subsequently new possibilities. One’s experience in the present is not elegant and neat until it becomes history, an empirical self, and is encapsulated in a narrative; in Levinas’s vocabulary, thematized.

9.5.1 Ethical Intersubjectivity

This study begins with a discussion of some important concepts needed to understand Levinas’s ethical and intersubjective thinking. These concepts include there is, sense and sensitivity, his unique use of the word infinity, the use of Other for a person exterior to oneself and other for the interiorized alter-I of that Other, and as well the concept of subjectivity as a structured intersubjective interface between existence and a person, an existent. With these basic concepts, a cautious outline of Levinas’s thinking characterizing the flow of subjectivity through the intersubjective interaction with an Other (person) that then moves to the recognition that not only is there an Other but also a third person outside, exterior to, the We-relation of oneself and an Other, and further recognizes that oneself is a third person. Society is made up of this collection of unconnected independent third persons that constitute a society. The separation of these individuals Levinas describes as exteriority which is bridged only by a language used to communicate and negotiate the establishment of a state and a justice that preserves one’s freedom.

Although I am reluctant to criticize Craig, she does not seem to consider the entry of the third person and the society constituted by the collection of third persons (Craig, 2010, pp. 94–95). It is the society of third persons and language used to communicate among the collective that creates a third-person perspective that makes up reason, objectivity, and justice (although neither James nor Levinas uses perspectival terminology). Levinas recognizes the third person as previously encountered Others, those individuals not encountered, and oneself as a society or at least the beginning of a society (1987, 15–45). He asserts, to restate earlier remarks, that the only way to preserve one’s own freedom is with language and peaceful engagement with a society of Others to breach the exteriority separating persons, and negotiate establishing justice and the governmental structures of the state. He asserts that two or more freedoms next to each other inevitably results in violence and tyranny, and is incompatible to continuing freedom. The only way to secure one’s freedom is to agree to limit one’s freedom; to subject oneself to impersonal justice administered by an indifferent state. The general outline of Levinas’s ethics is a structuring of intersubjectivity, a structure of intersubjective processes, that sets up and is the foundation for cognition, according to Levinas. Intersubjectivity would seem more appropriate than ethics since there is no choice concerning how one engages an Other, as Levinas often asserts, if a person commits to and fully engages the Other. What is chosen is whether one will open to an Other and allow oneself to be vulnerable. To so do according to Levinas is ethical. When one approaches obliquely and is closed to the face of an Other, the conditions are set for intersubjective failure and for a resumption of violence, tyranny, and (Levinas adds) cemeteries.

9.5.2 Pluralistic Experience

With this general outline, those concepts needed to understand Levinas’s presentation of ethics is compared with James’s presentation of radical empiricism and its central concept of plurality. In some respects, the concept of plurality, as used by James and Levinas, revisits an earlier distinction by Kant concerning the incommensurate nature of theoretical and practical reason. Plurality addresses the facts of first-personal experience in the context of intersubjectivity, that is to say, the intersubjective engagement of an other person. For both James and Levinas, a life is lived intersubjectively, which is to say ethically. At this juncture, intersubjective and ethical are interchangeable except that ethical implies the responsibility a person involuntarily takes on for the Other with whom one is engaged. The intersubjective processes structured in subjectivity require the interiorization of the Other at a level that is below the cognitive representation of objects and events. The result of that encounter with the face of an Other is to incorporate an interiorized shadow of an alter-I, which Levinas designates other, to one’s own I. The encounter leaves a sense of incompleteness that a subjectivity reactively strives to correct by the interiorization process. This process of interiorization is required, according to Levinas, to provide an intersubjective process against the involuntary compulsion to an Other, and provide for one’s capacity to freely commit to opening to the Other. Given the pluralistic context of the social world, a person’s ethically guided conduct at any single time emerges aesthetically as felt in the moment and cannot be determined by a previously cultivated state of mind or selected principle. According to James, only a sense of direction or intention, a sense of harmony perhaps, leads to selecting an action judged to produce the greatest social well being for the other, the most good. Without the direct contrasting of James and Levinas conducted by Craig, the intersubjective quality of James’s psychology can be missed or not sufficiently recognized.

The pluralism of James precedes Levinas by approximately 43 years and is shown to influence Levinas’s first major monograph , Existence and Existents, which he began while a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp. Their similarities center on an emphasis of the particular events of a person’s life in the present moments before closure is achieved, if achieved. As previously noted, each attends to different and opposite edges of subjectivity. That is, they complement but cannot be said to overlap. Levinas investigated the interface of existing and the internal structures of subjectivity that are by their nature indefinite and vague, but nevertheless real. James was interested in experience on the hither side of subjectivity structures to include the indefinite trailing fringes at the edges of experience, the pluralistic reality of experience. Pluralism is the lack of closure in the world as asserted by both James and Levinas. Closure can be achieved artificially or as contrived by general objective theories that may be a useful hypothesis or tool directed to specific tasks, but reality is only encountered in the particular, individualistic events and things of an experience. Unlike Levinas, James recognized a political side to radical empiricism that is “democratic” and allows room for multiple perspectives that perceives daily world events from the ground up rather than top down. This “ground up” apprehension of reality promotes public reason and discussion, and promotes one’s freedom.

9.5.3 Implications for Psychology

We now come to address the issues concerning how James’s pluralism and Levinas’s intersubjective ethicism impact psychology as a science and practice. If experienced reality is as presented by James and Levinas, how is psychology as a discipline affected? Would it be significantly reshaped at all? It was suggested earlier that a transformation is required to what might be considered a human science that requires appropriate perspectival views to include first-, second-, and third-perspectives in contrast to what seems to be a preferred natural science, but is such restructuring required? Levinas’s and James’s emphasis on particular individual facts and the pluralistic nature of experience points to a greater attention to experience and intrinsic psychology. The significant move in the American Psychological Association to address qualitative data is movement in that direction. A distinguishing feature of natural science is the insistence on an exclusive third-person perspective. Such a science has been extraordinarily successful, and that a first-person perspective is not only unnecessary but inappropriate (Dennett, 2001). Present psychological science has gathered an array of facts, concepts, and theories addressing many different facets of psychological functioning by dedicated and gifted scientists and consultants within a framework of natural science. In fact, psychological testing and assessment stands as a science within psychological science that is exclusively concerned with relating objective third-person knowledge to particular events of one’s experienced life. Psychological assessment becomes increasingly difficult as the general population diversifies and requires increasingly specific normalization standards to address non-homogenous, indigenous, and diversified target populations. It is apparent that the use of perspective is useful in addressing these different levels of experience and corresponding knowledge in assessment science. An exclusively objective third-person view of the reality inherently overlooks and is indifferent to individual perspectives, as it averages out the personal, individual experience and the fact of first-personal ownership, the mineness of one’s experience (Duus, 2017). The propostion is to employ perspective to accomplish assessment in a natural and systematic manner that supports scientific inquiry and clinical and consulting personal engagement.

Dilthey (1988/1923) proposes a human sciences to more seamlessly and authentically relate first-and third-person data. This was asserted as far back as Kant to be incompatible as practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning (Kant, 1878/2004). In the present context, practical reason is equivalent or analogous to first-personal commitment and second-person engagement in contrast to theoretical reason as equivalent or analogous to a third-person perspective. This issue has led to the phenomenological proposals of a return to “facts themselves” by thinkers as Husserl (1913) and Merleau-Ponty (1964) as an alternative to naturalistic science. In psychology, one of the developments is, what has been called, the sociocultural turn to a more constructivist approach to investigating human experience as constituted by actions engaging an external environment (Kirschner & Martin, 2010). The relevance of James and Levinas in this context can be, I submit, significant, and an introduction to their thinking may be timely. It is an increasingly important task to reassess, as James (1911) says, the very “obscure, abstract, and universal questions which the sciences and life in general suggest but do not solve; questions left over as it were.” One of the most pressing concerns, he asserts concerns, “Is unity or diversity more fundamental?” and “Which is the most real kind of reality?” (pp. 29–30). That is, is a pluralistic way of viewing and acting in the world pragmatically effective when acting on one’s experience, or is it more truthful and effective to cognitively translate one’s experience and actions through a objectively derived principle? James asserts that the facts of experience and action side with the former, a pluralistic experience of living. Immediate experience is not closed or finished, there is no ending; it becomes closed and organized when we cognitively process experience into symbols, words, and concepts which then are structured in the social infrastructure. That is, a person is seldom certain that an action to which she commits is unqualifiedly the correct action.

Levinas spent a long and productive life focused on intersubjectivity. He investigated the internal structures of subjectivity that are real, but by their nature, indefinite and vague and resist exact apperception. He found those subjective structures to be the very mechanism of intersubjectivity . He did not find an isolated I or ego, but the structures of an ethical intersubjectivity. The interval between first-and third-person standing is filled with second-person intersubjectivity. Encountering another person requires one to imaginatively reconstruct the other’s field of experience of her first-and second-person experiences while simultaneously engaging her second-personally, and while assessing third-person objective knowledge of her respective place in a shared community. An encounter with another viewed in this way reveals what might be called a perspectival diffusion that accentuates the decentered nature of a person.

In closing this study, I express my appreciation of Megan Craig’s investigation of the relation of James and Levinas thinking and her insights concerning their similarities and differences. Without her perspective, I may not have fully evaluated the significance and force of the concept of plurality in the experiences of daily living as well the depth of intersubjectivity in James’s and Levinas’s thinking. It becomes clear, for example, that it is more correct to emphasize Levinas’s focus on intersubjectivity than on the ethical nature of his thinking. It is because of the intersubjective force of one’s relation to another that it is ethical and appears to be primarily ethical.

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_10

10. Tenth Study: Semiotics and Subjectivity

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

SemiosisInterpretantObjectSignIconIndexSymbolDialogueThinkingPhenomenologyQualityRelation and reactionMediationFirstnessSecondnessThirdnessIdealHabitActionLogical interpretant

Perspective has been shown to be useful in this inquiry of self with frequent use of first-, second-, and third-person perspectives to distinguish the perspectival modality of a person’s experience. A person occupies a position that yields a perspective from which she then acts with the intention to achieve particular effects which, given the plural nature of the world, may not achieve one’s original intentions. That is, a person acts in the face of uncertainty as she feels her way through circumstances of varying challenges concerning the ethical nature of an action, according to James and Levinas, and, as will be seen, Peirce. As Kirschner and Martin (2010) demonstrate a sociocultural turn in psychology, Richard Bernstein asserts a pragmatic turn in philosophy demonstrated by Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and others (Bernstein, 2010). Characterizing a pragmatic turn in psychology may not fit current circumstances, but the modality of one’s perspective is not just useful but necessary for revealing the context and fullness of one’s experience and derives from the pragmatic emphasis on the effects of one’s actions.

Perspective is spatial, but need not be visual as auditory, gustatory, and kinesthesia all provide directional perspective that is less directionally specific for a human organism. Pragmatism places meaning in the action and the effects that action exerts in particular circumstances from a position in an environment that sets the perspective from which that action derives. A person makes a first-person commitment to engage an other person second-personally which sets a unitary we-relation to mutually address a shared problem, engage a discussion, or be present with the other. At the same time, a person is assessing third-personally (a) one’s knowledge of the social community, (b) the other’s place in the community infrastructure that influences the ability to affect the problem addressed, and assesses the circumstances of their unitary we-relation (or we-perspective). Pragmatism explicates a uniquely democratic stance to society, and perhaps could have only evolved in a democratic social environment that contrasts with authoritarian approaches to information. For example, the authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica contrasted to a democratic Wikipedia, an endeavor that is maintained without direct charge and that steadily improves in accuracy and depth. This is not to question the significant contribution or authority of Encyclopedia Britannica, it only suggests the non-authoritarian approach allows for many different perspectives, and which may be at times just plain wrong, self serving, and biased political or commercial interests. The point to make is that perspective provides unique and crucial information regarding the quantitative, qualitative, relational, and modal richness of life that is not available or is skipped over otherwise in the limited perspective of authoritarian information management rather than produced knowledge. Pragmatically, the meaning that is captured in a person’s lived experiences, then, is transferred from antecedent narrative to the consequent results of acting. The meaning of a person’s action is carried in a semiosis process as uncovered by Charles Sanders Peirce who considered the self itself to be a sign (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 37, 84–85).

The purpose of this study is to explore the semiosis process that is uncovered and explicated by Peirce and to assess its relevance and usefulness for psychological science. The resulting suggestion is that a potential pragmatic turn of psychology not only concerns the use of perspective in describing different modalities, or levels, of experience relevant to their contexts, but also suggests decentralized subjective structures, the intersubjective processes in the context of a social environment, and the transmission of the signification in those intersubjective processes. Our goal is to explore and assess how this might occur.

10.1 Semiosis

Vincent Colapietro notices that John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the last chapter of that book recognized the necessity of signs. Locke states that because “.. ideas that makes one man’s thought cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another…” and that “.. therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary..” (1690, Book IV, Chap. 21). This recognition Locke named a doctrine of signs and designated it with the Greek word semiotika which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in that form refers to diagnosing symptoms of a disease (OED, 1989, semiotic, 1 & 3B). Peirce independently, to my knowledge, incorporated a similar Greek terminology semiosis (Peirce’s preferred spelling is semeiosis) to refer to a triadic structure of a sign which he asserted is the same as logic in its very general sense (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 27–29; Peirce, 1998, pp. 387, 411).

Colapietro observes that it is unlikely that Locke understood the full import of the sign in contrast to the concept of the idea of which he had just completed a lengthy study. If he had, the new examination of human understanding based on an idea was already obsolete and would require revision. Locke’s exploration of an idea resulted in an individually contained and isolated subjectivity that followed and extended Descartes, and which Charles Taylor (1989) designates as a punctual self which implies a disengaged and detached consciousness with an emphasis on remaking itself (pp. 170–175). That is, a radical objectivity that is made possible only in an isolated self-contained subjectivity. According to Colapietro and Locke, meaning of an idea emerges and is contained in the private subjective processes of a person. In contrast, a sign develops and is used in an intersubjective process of consensus among several individuals. Meaning is discovered socially and intersubjectively and results in a decentering of the person in a relational context with others. The difference between an idea and a sign could not be more profound.

Semiotics as a central concern of logic, a science of signs

, is a tool of inquiry for Peirce in a long life dedicated to an indefatigable investigation of nearly every subject of significance, to include logic, mathematics, ethics, psychology and on, and not so significant subjects such as whist and wine. In his own words: “…it has never been in my power to study anything,—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, astronomy, psychology, phonetics, economics, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semiotic” (As cited Atkin, 2013, p. 1). The difficulty for a systematic study of semiotics, according to Colapietro, is that the descriptions are scattered throughout Peirce’s extensive writings and have not been collected so that it is only the dedicated scholar can search out and integrate the writings relevant to semiotics. This is improving as a relatively large secondary literature is developing that makes it more accessible (Atkin, 2005; Atkin, 2013; Colapietro, 1989; Hoopes, 1991; and others). Peirce’s initial formulation of semiotics was relatively concrete and directed to cognition and thinking. Subsequently it became increasingly abstract and general as it was realized that it also applies to natural processes of the world. The basic triadic form of semiotics remains constant and what changes, or more correctly matures are the recognition of the general applications of the semiotic processes (Atkin, 2013; Colapietro, 1989).

The unique aspect of semiosis is the addition of a third part to the usually two-part recognition of a sign as a representation of an object

. The additional third part is the interpretant and generally designates the way the representative sign is used or interpreted. The triadic parts then are the object, sign, and interpretant that function interdependently. That is, each are cooperative elements of a semiotic process and a sign is more accurately thought of as an element with the object and interpretant that are elements, too. It is important to recognize, according to Peirce, that there is no cause and effect compulsion in the relation of these semiotic elements. An explanation by Peirce makes this clear:

It is important to understand what I mean by semiosis. All dynamical action, or action of brute force, physical or psychical, either takes place between two subjects,—whether they react equally upon each other, or one is agent and the other patient, entirely or partially,—or at any rate is a resultant of such actions between pairs. But by “semiosis” I mean, on the contrary, an action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant

, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs (Peirce, 1998, p. 411).

‍

What is to be noted of this statement is that the third element, the interpretant , is a unique addition by Peirce to a two-pole relation of a object and sign. He conceives all three semiotic elements to act, not just cooperatively, but in a unitary process that cannot be reduced to a two-pole object and sign. An event is necessary to initiate a sign since not all objects are designated with a sign, and, likewise, not all signs have interpretants. He designates the occasion of initiating a sign an utterance and an initiating of an interpretant an interpreter and interpretation. This views the triad of the semiosis process as embedded in both a cognitive, social, and a more general material context of the natural world (Atkin, 2013; Colapietro, 1989, pp. 19–20). For example, this statement by Peirce indicates the breadth of the semiosis process:

Thought [i.e., the development of signs] is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can not more deny that it is really there, than that colors, the shapes, etc. of objects are really there (as cited Colapietro, p. 20).

‍

An utterance event opens a trace from the object to sign to an interpretant , that is, a view from an object side of the semiotic process, and the interpretation of an interpreter traverses a trace or path from the direction of the interpretant.

A sign is constituted in three aspects: First, it is an icon such as a portrait which closely resembles the object of which it is a representation, a sign; second, an index which directly exhibits a qualitative physical character that is the sign itself of which a pure form without iconic or symbolic properties might be music; and third, it has a symbolic aspect that invites an interpreter to several possible interpretations as probable interpretants as, for example, poetry. The iconic, indexical, and symbolic aspects are always present in a sign in varying ratios. The semiotic process is continuous such that an interpretant brings about an action of a person that, in turn, modifies and transforms the interpretant to another sign^2 which reflexively refers back to the original object (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 34–35).

A person’s action importantly contributes to a habit that is either incorporated in a habit pattern the person already has, or contributes to a changing or new habit. The concept of a habit as developed by Peirce broadly refers, not to automatic neuronal reactions but to beliefs, behavior patterns, routines, and patterns of thinking. Generally a belief is a mental habit that feels comfortable to the person who holds that belief. The concept of a habit or a habit pattern is equivalent to the more usual psychological term learning. Peirce does not perceive a significant difference between thinking, speech, or behavior patterns, and views habits and beliefs as equivalent. Doubt is a disrupted belief and is uncomfortable and unsettling to the person holding that doubt that presages a belief being modified, replaced, or simply given up. Doubt is significant as it spurs subsequent thinking and the will to learn. What constitutes a person is an evolving pattern of habits of increasing complexity. In this large and general view of a semiotic process, a person herself is a sign that is a process of continuously evolving meaning that is an outcome of semiosis and is coupled with an evolving habit pattern.

It may be helpful to illustrate the semiotic processes in notation format to illustrate some of the relationships: A: Semiotic Procession.

1. (1)

[Utterance/Setting context] O_1 > > S_1(Ic,In,Sym) > > Int_1 [Interpreter/Utilized]

(2)

O_2 < < Int_1 = S_2(Ic,In,Sym) > > Int_2

(3)

O_3 < < Int_2 = S_3(Ic,In,Sym) > > Int_3

(4)

Oi < < Inti-1 = Si (Ic,In,Sym) > > Inti

‍The above shows one schematic of the described semiotic process

. (1) shows a bracketed process by an Utterance or Setting context on the Object, O_1, side and an Interpreter or Utilizer from the side of the interpretant

, Int_1. S_1 is first level sign in which Ic indicates icon, In the index , and Sym indicates a symbol all which are a partialization ratio of the sign. Line (2) shows the second level iterative deepening of the semiosis process and with an aspect of the original object, O_2 The left pointing arrow points show the reflexivity of S_2 to the original object, O_2, and shows its dyadic relation; at the same time this dyad is held together or is given meaning by the interpretant, Int_2. Important is the transformation of Int_1 into the transformed sign, S_2. Line (3) shows the third recursive iteration, while (4) shows an iterative process that continues until it ideally reaches a limit. The object’s, O, changing subscripts indicate that a person’s experience of an object changes with each iteration of a semiotic process that is driven by the a future seeking interpretant, Int_1.

In general, a semiotic process consists of two infinite series, one back towards the object, and one forward to the future in a iterative creation of successive interpretants. The first series establishes stability and is a kind of corrective that meaningfully anchors the process. The second series, object through a sign, develops a future variety of alternative meanings or possibilities consistent with the object. To restate, the sign relation characterizes interlocking vectors in which one, a vector of representation, points from the sign through an interpretant toward an object, and a second, a vector of determination, points from the object through a sign to an interpretant (Sundararajan et al., 2010, pp. 67–69). A semiotic recursion can continue without adequate termination, and an ideal termination of a particular semiotic process is to end in an action or a logical interpretant (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 29–37; 108–110). An action interpretant , as suggested, occurs when the semiotic process results in a person’s action while a logical interpretant results in a concept or a habit. Both processes can contribute to a formation of a habit, habit pattern, or changing a habit.

The habit pattern is an important feature of the semiotic process in the structural functions of a person as it is vital to the development of self-control and to create an inner environment. Also, a particular semiotic process can be fallible and inefficient by failing to achieve an interpretant, or it can languish and disappear from disuse, perhaps because of a shift in attention resulting from environmental changes or trauma. There is a self correcting capacity by the reflexive undertow of an iterative sign to the original object, the vector of representation which stabilizes the semiotic process. This is indicated in the O_1 < < Int_1 = S_2(Ic,In,Sym) portion of line (2). The corresponding Int_1 = S_2(Ic,In,Sym) > > Int_2 in the opposing direction is a vector of determination that traces to a future and generates the variety and possibilities associated with the particular object, sign, interpretant triad among which a person chooses. An interpretant ideally balances stability, the reflexive undertow, and a reaching to new future possibilities. This balance sometimes fails with troublesome consequences. The purpose of this notation schematic is to make clear the differentiations necessary to understand the richness of the semiosis process. Peirce places considerable weight on the concept of semiosis not only in the investigation of a self, but as the foundation in the conduct of any inquiry.

Viewed in this way, a semiotic process is teleological and a person is a medium in which semiotic functions are particularly teleological and moves directionally toward an indeterminable mark while stabilized by its reflexive undertow to the object that is represented. As noted, a semiotic path can be fallible and unpredictable. That is, a sign may be inept and fail to capture a designated object or to attain an interpretant. It is unpredictable because although a semiotic process has direction, it functions in a fully aleatoric world that allows for free will that is directed or not by one depending on the degree of achieved self-control and rationality related to a core pattern of accumulated habits

. Considering the importance given to chance and personal autonomy, it is, perhaps, surprising that Peirce and James are directly opposed concerning monistic and pluralistic views of the world. Peirce is dedicated to the idea that nature is systematic and wholistic and that a thorough investigation of truth by science would result in a systematic monistic concept of the world, indeed the universe. Truth for Peirce is fallible and is an opinion that is agreed on by all who investigate a particular concept or hypothesis and which is not final until the final opinion has been expressed, that is, the last person is dead. The emphasis is on the public collective nature of inquiry. Truth is a process and not a fact, and is pointed toward the future (Legg, 2014).

James, as previously discussed, advocated a pluralism experienced as incomplete and disorganized in which a person feels through a veil of darkness rather than perceiving an path to a defined destination. Peirce in a letter to James reveals an ambivalence concerning his commitment to a systemic and monist concept (Colapietro, 1989, p. xvi). James addresses this difference by noting that Peirce combines chance with continuity so that “the world’s rational continuity” is repeatedly shattered which he calls synechistic pluralism

, or a continuity of pluralism. That is, in the Peirce’s monistic vision, the pervasive novelty inscribed by chance results in a probabilistic distribution of affordant alternatives for action that shatter any pretense of a rationality in a person’s immediately present environment. The result is that one’s experience of the world is pluralistic and probabilistic in the same sense as described by James as unorganized and unfinished, and that a person needs to feel their way through a situation as there are no discernible paths or destinations. The novel, what is not anticipated, leaks in imperceptively and is perceived only in retrospective reflection with the result that an infiltration of otherness is detected as old ruts or habits are replaced. James’s conclusion, then, is that the phenomenal experience of their apparently different views in reality are phenomenologically the same (James, 1909, pp. 154–155).

A pursuit of a grand vision of reality

, a hypothesis of a total reality of which its parts are derived and related, a theory that is general and detailed enough to include all of reality, is viewed in this postmodern time with suspicion following the shock of Auschwitz of Nazi Germany and the Gulag Archipelago of Stalin’s Russia. As described by Levinas, the Western European intellectual tradition pulls to the absolute, unity, and sameness and pulls away from crediting the individuality and particularity of a person and her views. The privileging of the general and sameness is thought to contribute to the development of authoritarian and tyrannical regimes. Colapietro notes that Peirce is unfashionable as it is considered that he presents one such view which for that reason should be approached cautiously (Colapietro, 1989, p. xvi). The aleatory property of the apparent monistic nature of Peirce’s view of the universe insures a pluralistic property of living one’s life that obviates reliance on principles of unity and absolute principles. What is not appreciated in such absolute and unitary systems and which is overlooked is the incompatibility of theoretical reason, a third-person general perspective of reason, and practical reasons addressing a person’s actions in a second-person engagement; in the practical reasons employed in guiding one’s actions.

As cited by Colapietro, Lyotard describes the postmodern view in which the will to present an overall system as a lack of integrity and worse as a will to dominate which will lead to more terror. Lyotard describes that Kant knew that the theoretical reason of the language games, Lyotard’s vocabulary, is separated from the practical reasons guiding one’s conduct by a chasm. Going on:

But Kant also knew that the price to pay for such an illusion is terror. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name (Lyotard, 1984, pp. 81–82).

‍

In this short quote are some large themes. The first is that it is illusory and self-defeating to ignore or exclude considerations of an individual person’s otherness in the differences that emerge in the service of enforced, and therefore violent, homogeneity. Such efforts have resulted and continue to result in terrorism, Lyotard’s term, and that people’s memories are, unfortunately, short so that the fantasy of totality and unity already re-emerges and voices the desire for a return to the practices that promote violence and subsequent terror. There appears to always be those who prefer violence to the hard inward work of self-control, reason, and openness to otherness; there appears to be a ubiquitously present group of people that coalesces as priests of violence

. He proposes that, instead, we wage war on totality, the illusion of homogeneity, and open to diversity, to individual differences (Colapietro, 1989, p. xvi; Lyotard, 1984, 81–82). These themes, perhaps, were not yet as evident during Peirce’s and his Pragmatists colleague’s lives as two world wars, Auschwitz, and the Gulag have intervened since and has made this postmodern age.

In the next section we investigate the relation of a self, or selves, to semiosis. We have already indicated that there is a relation between a self and semiosis, and with a working outline of semiosis we can now address personhood and self.

10.2 Selves and Semiosis

The concern addressed in this section is to further develop the internalized structure of a self to reveal its functioning and its relation to other properties of personhood. Peirce hypothesizes that a semiosis process provides an essential internal structure to the functioning of a self. As well, semiosis provides a structure for selves to participate in general cognition and in a larger mind; that is, he views selves as constituents of a larger mind that is not contained in an individual subjectivity. The goal of this study is to explore the structure of a semiotic self. The question is not only the relation of self and semiotic processes, but also how this relation enriches the understanding of selves and personhood.

10.2.1 A Brief Recollection of Our Previous Studies

In this series of nine studies, we began with a general exploration of the self aporetic with Jerrold Seigel’s perceptive intellectual history of the concept of self in Western Europe (Seigel, 2005). The Western conversation regarding self was, interestingly, discovered to be relatively continuous and exhibiting a gathering intensity that continues to the present. Seigel refers to “the long Western meditation of the self” that is nowise less than the Indian and Eastern conversation of selfhood in length or intensity (Seigel, 2005, p. 649). This meditation revealed varied concepts of a self, and interestingly that the current ideas of self have their beginnings with the concept of an inner life which originated with St. Augustine (see also Taylor, 1989). There is some argument that the seeds of an inner self were set by Paul in the letter to the Romans (Arendt, 1978, pp. 64–74). Seigel guided his investigation of the Western conversation of self with three principles: physical embodiment, social relatedness, and reflectivity-reflexivity. It was noted in the early conversations regarding a self that reflection was viewed as problematic by creating a distance between a person and the community. The thinking was that self-reflection functioned to create, essentially, a third-person perspectival distance and a radically disengaged objectivity that created and isolated the individual person whose task, then, was to achieve authenticity through self-creation. According to Charles Taylor, this radical objectivity created an isolated and conceptually disembodied subjectivity that framed and shaped the way a person cared for herself and how she encountered the world. First-personal commitment and second-person engagement were overlooked, at best, or perhaps ignored (Taylor, 1989, pp. 159–176).

There were exceptions. One was Adam Smith (1759) who provides a relatively accurate account of second-person perspective and engagement in The Theory of Moral Sentiments although he of course does not use that terminology. A couple of decades later Immanuel Kant distinguished the difference, referred to as a chasm by Lyotard, between theoretical, or pure reason and practical reason which is arguably similar, if not the same, as a third-person perspective as objectivity and first-person perspective as commitment. Kant recognized that theoretical and practical reason, as he termed them, are of different logical categories and incommensurate; propositional (theoretical) reasoning contrasting the practical reasons for acting are independent of the other (Kant, 1788/2004). It is not until the pragmatic movement, especially the contributions of George Herbert Mead, that perspective terminology began to emerge to be useful for distinguishing the modes of acting and thinking.

Some of the current, perhaps mainstream, psychological literature investigated narrative as a central aspect of a person recognizing him as a story teller. Narrative is conceptualized as a unifying core of one’s varied life and of one’s personality structures (McAdams, 1995, 2001). Hermans and colleagues develop a concept of a dialogical self that has its origins in psychotherapy that proposes the presence of multiple I positions that are an internal minisociety in relatively continuous dialogue which reflects one’s outer social community. Of all the current psychological explorations of a self and self-concept, Hermans and colleagues are one of the most congruent with James’s and Peirce’s pragmatic formulation of a self (Hermans, 2002, 2004; Hermans & Salgado, 2010).

Our explorations of self were further enriched by Jonardon Ganeri’s review of the long history of Vedantic and Buddhist conversations of a self in the context of a connection to a naturalistic understanding of the world. He compared this 2500 year series of Sanskrit investigations of a self with the Western European conversation and notes some interesting similarities. His review is guided by different dimensions, or properties, than Seigel of a (1) participant in received experience, (2) immersion in the experience, and a (3) coordinating preconscious monitoring underself that focus on experience. The difference between Seigel’s and Ganeri’s properties is in their perspective. Seigel’s three properties of embodiment, relatedness

, and reflectivity serve a third-person perspective that provides the objectivity required by a historical investigation. The properties that guided Ganeri are of a first-person perspective necessary to investigate experience and is phenomenological. Ganeri’s properties do not add or extend those that guided Seigel as provide dimensions of a different perspectival modality (or level) which serves to emphasize the importance of perspective.

In the context of these three properties

, Ganeri develops a taxonomy of self-concepts based on the dimensions of individuation and ownership. These fall into four categories of (1) One dimensional views that do not distinguish between identity and ownership, (2) Real self views that consider a self to be existent, (3) a No-self view that a self is illusory or the result of ignorance and immaturity attributed primarily to Buddhism, and (4) the Dynamic views which places ownership in the stream of consciousness and identity in the body. Ganeri arrives at eleven viable models of self-concepts in Sanskrit and Western European literature. His presentation broadens the horizon for understanding selves, and shows there to be significant concurrence of Indian and Western European intellectual traditions that contrasts with an often asserted incongruence or even incommensurability of Western and Eastern cultures and their intellectual traditions (Sixth Study, Chap. 6).

Baker shows in the constitution view that a person achieves a reflexive perspective that adds an important first-person aspect to Seigel’s third dimension of reflectivity (Fourth Study, Chap. 4). A first-personal perspective requires language competence to be reflexively constructed which Castañeda recognizes as an indexical function of I∗ (Seventh Study, Chap. 7). Baker’s constitution view emphasizes the importance of an automatic reflexive first-personal perspective, I∗, in conjunction with an affective sense of ownership and identity. This adds to Ganeri’s three first-personal properties of the self. In turn, Ganeri adds the importance of clearly distinguishing individuation-identity and ownership.

It appears that some forward movement can be claimed in pushing back the intransigence of the self aporetic. I suggest that the issues regarding self and selves will have shadowy boundaries and a property of vagueness that is inherent in an understanding of self, selves, I, me, we, and Other as is eloquently demonstrated by Levinas and by this monograph.

This relatively quick summary of some of the important themes resulting from this series of studies of the self aporetic brings us to the inherent relation of selves and semiosis as initially suggested by Locke and developed by Peirce. What can semiosis add to our attempt to wrap our understanding fully around the self aporetic? As the term suggests, discussed earlier, such a problem always transcends understanding if it simultaneously occupies different perspectival modalities. That is, they include first-, second-, we-, and third-person perspectives that are inherently ethical in an intersubjective second-person engagement as suggested by the plurality of James and Levinas, which cannot be clearly seen or determined in a present moment of an act. In any event, how does semiosis function for a self and make the concept of self clearer? More correctly, perhaps, how does semiosis contribute to how a self functions?

10.2.2 Semiotic Selves

A normal expectation following a series of nine studies of a designated entity termed self is that its structure and functions would be made clear and coherently sensible. My suspicion is that this expectation may be disappointed, but as can be said, this is an empirical question to be revealed in the continuing investigation. None-the-less, there may be an inherent quality of vagueness to the reality of a person or self that cannot be dispelled by ever more thorough inquiries. This may be similar to Levinas’s demonstration that the properties of subjectivity cannot be captured and always escape the grasp of the concept. A self functioning in the present in principle cannot be grasped, but only as it passes to history and memory. Similarly, following James, the boundaries circumscribing the periphery of a person or self may be diffuse and can only be sensed and not clearly delineated. Be as it may, one of the goals of this study is to come to a decision, and we shall see.

The constitution view of Baker is that a person emerges when embodied in an organism with adequate neurological like capacity to support language and a reflexive first-person perspective combined with the affective capacity to sense the warmth of participating in and owning one’s experience. A semiotic view of a person is congruent with the constitution view in that an organism is a reaction machine tied to a semiotic potential (a potential referred to as mind by Peirce) to evolve into an autonomous person and is not limited to an individual. Recall that person and self are equivalent terms as used in these studies although at times some distinctions may emerge and are noted then. Peirce moves beyond Baker’s first-person perspective and sense of ownership and mineness which she asserts necessary to be a person, and which he in various places endorses (Colapietro, 1989). Three capacities are necessary, according to Peirce, for a potential capable of evolving an autonomous person capable of free agential action: (a) a capacity to feel, sense, and experience emotion; (b) a capacity to act; (c) a capacity to take on and combine habits, or equivalently, to learn. In light of the constitutional view

(Fourth Study, Chap. 4) a capacity to form a first-person perspective must be added to these three capacities, following Baker, and which I have not discovered to be explicitly described by Peirce. The first-personal perspective according to Baker is central to being a person, a self, that combines feelings of warmth registering ownership of an experience and that registers one’s identity. Both Baker and Ganeri agree that individuation, identity, cannot be separated from ownership.

10.2.2.1 First-Personal Perspective and Semiosis

A semiotic process of first-personal awareness is something like: A person has an experience which may be sensations of her body or an other experience of the external world which she warmly senses as mine. That is, ownership of the experience registers as a sense best described as warmth

, following James, and, secondly, that it is she that is having the experience. That is, a person thinks of herself in two different ways: as experiencing the immediately encountered world events and as one who is aware that it is she having that particular experience. This dyad of events evolves to a first-person participant in an experience, a perspective, and is a precognitive subjective event which enables cognition. The immediate undergoing of the experience is an object and the sign is an awareness that it is I that is experiencing, and this dyad is tied together by the interpretant

, Peirce would say a logical interpretant , which, following Baker, is a precognitive reflexive first-person perspective that is registered in language as I* to distinguish the two different events. The I is an index of an entity, the actor, that is experiencing, and I* is an index of one’s reflexive recognition of first-personal participation in an experience by that entity the linguistic I indexes. I∗ is a concept of I participating in or having a particular experience. Further, according to Peirce, the actor sets the occasion of the semiotic process that sets the object-sign dyad, and is the utterer that provides the utterance. The actor

, designated by the index I, is also the interpreter that is reflexively self-aware and makes a first-personal interpretation designated with I*. These events are occurring in the present and can only occur with adequate linguistic indexing. It is these events occurring in a neurologically adequate body that enables language skills that constitutes being a person. How does self-awareness more precisely fit a semiotic process? This will be more closely examined in the following schematic.

Indexing is a language function so that a reflexivity to one’s I is only possible through language and therefore dependent on language skills (see the Seventh Study, Chap. 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity; Atkin, 2005). Extending the notational schematic of A to illustrate self-awareness, or equivalently first-person reflexivity, will be helpful to make clear the discriminations and relations described. A notational presentation could look something like this: B: Semiosis of First-Person Perspective and Self-Awareness.

1. (1)

O_1 (I-experience/act) > > S_1 (I∗ aware I-experience/act) > > Int_1 (first-person owner-identity)

(2)

O_2 (I-experience/act) < < Int_1 = S_2 (I∗∗ aware I-experience/act) > > Int_2 (first-person owner-identity)

(3)

Oi (I-experience/act) < < Inti-1 = Si (Ii aware I-experience/act) > > Inti (first-person owner-identity))

‍This schematic follows the previous notation pattern of A. The O is a semiotic object which in this situation is the experience or act indexed by I and is designated as (I-experience/act). In line (1), S_1 is a sign representing sensing the warmth associated with an experience or act that indicates owning a particular experience or act. I∗ represents a linguistic indexing of sensing the warmth of mineness of O_1, which is I’s experience of the external world or performed action that is registering a reflexive self-awareness of that experience designated S_1(I∗ aware I-experience/act). The Int_1 is the interpretant designating first-personal ownership and individuation of the experience, and is indexed with I* which is designated Int_1(first-person owner-identity). Line (2) reflexively identifies O_1 which becomes O_2, the original experience that is now wrapped in a first-personal ownership of the I-experience and reflexive self-awareness by Int_1 = S_2 that is tied to O_2 with Int_2, a first-person interpretation of ownership and identity. The subscripts and superscripts indicate the iterations of the semiotic process which are unlimited in principle. Each iteration, line (3), potentially results in some modification that can result in a changing experience and that contributes to acquiring a new habit or learning. Left pointing arrows indicate that each new sign is affected by a reflexive undertow to the main aspects of the original experience, the object (O_1, O_2, Oi), that stabilizes the semiotic process and modifies with successive iterations. The right pointing arrows indicate a forward movement to future possibilities. The B semiosis schematic is a conceptual tool to illustrate that first-person reflexivity or equivalently self-awareness is a semiotic process.

The schematic illustration in B is only possible in communication and thinking with a language that employs indexicals. Once linguistic indexicals become part of the process, the relations can initially seem complex, but the basic principle is straight forward: Language indexicals point to a region or object of the inward or outward environment to which a person directs their attention. Examples of linguistic indexicals are I, you, me, now, then, this, that, and others, and are specifically identifiable only as used in expressed verbal speech or written text (Atkin, 2005; Castañeda, 1999; see Seventh Study, Chap. 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity). A person exercises an ability to commit to an action as oneself and owns that experience as oneself. For a human organism, the ability to take a first-personal perspective emerges around 3 to 4 years of age. The B notational schematic relates also to later efforts to understand semiotic relations regarding thinking.

10.2.2.2 Self and Sign

We now have a framework in which to explore the specific characteristics proposed by Peirce concerning the structures of selves and how semiotic processes contribute to those structures. Selves terminology is used to indicate the person is, not so much a self, as an inner environment that provides the subjective space that centers several selves. Peirce observes two considerations to be important in considering the person. The first is that no one is actually an individual. One’s thoughts are what a person is telling himself, what he is saying to an other self that is coming to life in the flow of time. When a person reasons, she is trying to persuade a critical self. All thought is a sign that is mostly in the form of language. A second consideration is that a person’s circle of society is a sort of “loosely compacted person.” These facts allow a person to determine truth and what one does not doubt according to Peirce (1998, p. 338). Thinking occurs in dialogues that are both internal and external. A self is a sign in the process of developing which is essentially a dialogue with itself; these intrapersonal dialogues are potentially part of larger interpersonal engagements. Colapietro concludes from this that “Such interpersonal dialogues are capable of generating such intimate unions among distinct selves as to be comparable to personal beings themselves” (p. 91). Generally, Peirce begins with a dialogical conception of thought that evolves to a personalist conception of a community.

The semiotic processes of self develop a coordinated system of habits that is a personality. The unity of the person, especially in consideration of intrapersonal dialogue

, is maintained by the unity of the core habit pattern, by the emotional experience, and being embodied in a single organism. There are important considerations that are consistent throughout the three lengthy periods of time Peirce developed his ideas of self, according to Colapietro. The first is an orientation to a future as meaning evolves in a person’s act. Secondly, a person pursues purposes in which novel affordances emerge and the whole of which is a developmental teleology. Third, when intersected at any point in her life, a person is a process in which some kind of meaning is evolving (pp. 91–92). The embodied person is considered by Peirce to be a perfect sign

. The organism is the object which activates the sign person resulting in an interpretant in the form of an action that affects its environment or results in a logical interpretant : a habit. Peirce wrote “it is difficult for man to understand this, because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute force (pp. 58, 66). Now the organism is only an instrument of thought” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, p. 58). The signs a person uses are the sum total of the person, we are the totality of the language we use and possess. An organism is an instrument of thought, and if all thought is semiosis then the organism is a medium through which a person expresses herself to the world and, reciprocally, the medium through which the world is expressed to a person

.

10.2.2.3 Inward-Outward Worlds—Self-Control and Reason

Next to be addressed, is the balance of one’s inward environment with the external environment

. In concert with Peirce’s driving concern with the scientific method and investigating the external environment, he also asserts the importance of one’s inward environment. The external environment is given and concrete and requires a deference to objects external to human opinion and imagination. This deference naturally leads to increased information of an object or event. That is not to say that there may be some shallowness in one’s perceptual awareness of that environment which may be limited by technology or experience in a way that cannot access the full truth about it; truth only emerges at the end of an inquiry. The inward environment of a person, in contrast, is developed and not given or concrete. The development of one’s internal environment begins with the inhibition of an externally attracted reaction. It is the ability to inhibit behavior that distinguishes a human organism from an animal organism, according to Peirce. It is inhibition that creates or enriches the inward environment and a potential for inner action. The ethical goal of a person is self-control which, asserts Peirce, is the ground for rationality. That is, self-control is the basis of reason and rationality, and the function of consciousness is to make it possible to develop self-control and to make it efficient (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 113–114). Self-control develops when a person pursues an ideal of reason and develops individual habits that then combine into an ultimate habit of efficient self-control.

Self-control and reason are, it appears, sides of a coin. What love is for affect as a powerful emotion, reason is for cognition, Peirce asserts. The ideal of reason requires a radical openness to an other person and novel thinking (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 92–93). An achievement of self-control opens to personal power as contrasted to force. Force comes about with the drive of one’s will, but personal power opens with self-control and to a gentle attractiveness of ideals as opposed to brute compulsion. The capacity to act, agency, is enabled by rationality (p. 97). It opens to effective agential action which, it must be recognized, is not an individual absolute source of action, but binds with a set of internal and external conditions to yield an efficient cause to effect a change in one’s ecological environment (see also Gallagher, 2012). Inwardness, attending to one’s inner environment, is a capacity to withdraw from the world and refrain from outward action, which further develops one’s interior environment and personal power (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 115–116; Peirce, 1955, pp. 87–90). “Every sane person,” according to Peirce, “lives in a double world, the outer and inner world, the world of percepts and the world of fancies [dialogues and habits of the inner world]” (p. 115). Further Peirce elaborates:

These [two worlds] are directly distinguishable by their different appearances. But the greatest difference between them, by far, is that one of these two worlds, the Inner World, exerts a comparatively slight compulsion on us… while the other world, the Outer World, is full of irresistible compulsions for us, and we cannot modify it in the least, except by one peculiar kind of effort, muscular effort [inhibition], and but very slightly even in that way. (as cited, p. 115)

‍

A person’s life is a series of transitions between the inner and outer worlds. One’s encounter with the facts of the outer world is shaped by the dialogues and habits of the inner world, and, of course, our inner characteristics, the proclivities of our inner world, are influenced by our encounters with the outer world. Experience is the interface of the inner and outer worlds.

According to Peirce, the breadth of power and wealth of the inner world is not fixed but changes, perhaps in response to encountered circumstances, as one borrows signs, that is, employs semiotic processes from others, and those a person marshals herself; recalling one’s power to influence and act is generated by achieved efficient self-control. Peirce describes that one is unable to catch or become aware of one’s present thought; a description very similar to James (1890, pp. 250–262). What one becomes aware of is a sense of stretching one’s attention, in Peirce’s words, we become aware that “our attention was actively on the stretch” and that we seem to be evolving or transforming new thoughts or concepts some which contribute to specific actions. What we call introspection may be more accurately recognized as retrospection of what we have just thought. This retrospection or internal reflection engages an inner dialogue and an assessment of that inner dialogue. Peirce asserts the intersubjective structure of subjectivity, similar to Emmanuel Levinas. Internal reflection is not to review what we have already thought, rather it is to engage an inner dialogue and in assessing the results of that dialogue. For Peirce, all accurate knowledge derives from vigorous debate to derive the most comprehensive opinion. Truth, we should recall, according to Peirce is that opinion fated to be agreed to by all who investigate a particular issue. Such a standard for what can be considered truth requires community involvement, is a continuing inquiry process, and is directed to the future (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 99–118; Legg, 2014). Although Peirce asserts a connection with others of a direct sensibility that is independent of language, this sensibility of connectedness does not eliminate the requirement for an outward communication with language between human organisms (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 62–63; 117–118). This assertion is congruent with Levinas.

10.2.2.4 The ‘Ideal’ and Evolving Self-Control

The constituting core of a person is conceived by Peirce as a “multilayered network of interpenetrating habits,” and “it is that part of our nature which takes general determinations of conduct” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, p. 95). Restated, it is this core of oneself through which the intentions and plans of one’s conduct are filtered and which results in either inhibiting a behavior or not. One’s inner life, as noted above, is created and deepened by the inner act of inhibition; to inhibit one’s action is an inner action

. Necessary to building the structures of a self-disciplinary core is an ideal, and an admirable ideal is a more general inclusive form than such discursive principles as acting to achieve the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people, or to act in such a way as one’s principle can become a universal law of conduct. The nature of one’s core is to absorb the lessons or results of one’s inner dialogues coupled with one’s experience of the external world and to move in the direction of self-control and thereby achieve increasing reasonableness of thinking and conduct. The penultimate result is an increasing capacity for autonomy.

The general description of an admirable ideal

, sometimes referred to by Peirce as an eternal form, is “the continuous growth of concrete reasonableness.” A commitment to an ideal is central to the unity achieved by a person in a context of the dual aspects of self-control and rationality of an autonomous person. Autonomy appears to be proportional to one’s achieved rationality, although thinking of autonomy as proportionate seems contradictory. Colapietro asserts that it is Peirce’s insight of a person’s relation to the ideal that enables an integration of his account of self; that is, his account of a person. A person only realizes himself by developing some capacity for autonomous action that is achieved exercising self-control and a basis of rationality. Self-control , in turn, is achieved only by committing to an ideal and the actions to adhere to that ideal. Autonomy is achieved by one’s actions toward an ideal and are independent of external influence of secondary gain, such as, being paid or gaining social notoriety. In a quote, cited once again from Colapietro, “self-control depends upon comparison of what is done with an ideal admirable per se without any ulterior reason” (pp. 95–96). One’s commitment to an ideal is, suggests Colapietro, more like acts of surrender than acts of acquisition. “The higher ideals take possession of us rather than we of them” (p. 96).

Moral conduct breaks down to what are the ends of our actions. A frequent error, according to Peirce, is confounding motivation with the ideal ends of conduct. This criticism can be applied to a virtue style ethics that focuses on cultivation of a mental state such as compassion or love which, while admirable and even worthwhile, is misplaced concerning ethical conduct. The practical reasons for conduct are screened through future oriented ideals (Bernstein, 1960, 2010; Darwall, 2006; Levinas, 1969; also see Eighth Study, Chap. 8). Peirce goes on to say that a self-centered person is an anarchical force which will lead to self-destruction, and as well injurious to that which the person influences. There is a self-transcendence in achieving autonomy and personal power; such a person completely surrenders self-centeredness in the direction of self-governance and rationality. By surrendering to increasingly higher ideals, a person’s life trajectory moves in a direction that sustains a continuous growth of concrete reasonableness and simultaneously contributes to the public reason of one’s community which is the only “truly admirable ideal.” Reason’s context is a community and operates only intersubjectively in a community. Persons are agents performing the essential function of a sign, to render inefficient relations efficient according to Peirce (Colapietro, 1989, 99–118).

Peirce asserts that the quest for reason, of rationality, requires openness to others and overcoming the tendency to defend against what is foreign and strange. For Peirce there is a connection between concrete reasonableness and creative love, and states “The higher developments of human reason can only be agap[e]istic” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, p. 93). Agape is a Greek word that is variously translated as spiritual, brotherly, or Christian love; Peirce’s proposed hypothesis is that the world and the universe, because it proceeds in the direction of concrete reasonableness, is immanently agapeistic, that is, as constituting ambience of support and nurturance, of spiritual love (pp. 65–68, 79–80, 93). Stated more simply, the world and universe are not indifferent to the human organism specifically and sentient beings more generally.

In later stages of his thinking argued that the universe was organized around the cosmological principles of synechism

, the idea that universe is organized according to an immanent goal of concrete reasonableness; tychism, that reasoning regarding the world and the universe must take into account the probabilistic nature of one’s life trajectory and of the universe; and that the development of a concrete reasonableness is agapeistic. Peirce insists on the probabilistic nature of each person’s encountered circumstances and the effect of their actions responding to those circumstances in the trajectory of their life which results in ruling out deterministic interpretations of the trajectory and meaning of one’s life. Peirce and James are congruent on the aleatory principle of one’s living present although from different directions.

10.2.2.5 Me-I-You—Semiotic Structure of Thinking

Norbert Wylie in a prescient presentation proposed an integration of Peirce’s and George Herbert Mead’s ideas centering on self and the nature of thinking (1994). This integration was, according to Wylie, suggested by Colapietro in private communication that concerned a Me-I-You temporal semiotic structure of a pragmatic concept of self. The center for this integration is the internal conversations that constitute thinking for both Peirce and Mead. Briefly reviewing, the four most significant pragmatic thinkers were contemporaries, but although John Dewey and George Herbert Mead were colleagues at the University of Chicago and James and Peirce were friends who communicated with some regularity, Peirce and Mead were not acquainted and there is little evidence to suggest they had read each other’s writings. They could not have been more different, Mead was a conventional respected academic and Peirce unconventional and, in his times, was academically unemployable.

10.2.2.5.1 Structure of Thinking

The center for Wylie’s proposed integration was their conception of the internal conversation which is the nature of thinking for both Mead and Peirce. As stated, both Mead and Peirce conceptualized thinking as dialogical internal conversations. According to Wylie, for Mead thinking is from present to past, from I to Me, while Peirce emphasizes the future and thinking occurs from present to future, from I to You. Wylie subsequently proposes a triadic self model

: Me-I-You as a basic structure of thinking and of a self. Said differently, Me-I-You is the basic structure of the internal conversations of thinking. Thinking is experienced as a tightening, an intensifying, of one’s attention (Wiley, 1994, pp. 40–73). Peirce describes it as “All that we know of the ‘thinking’ [internal] is that we afterwards remember that our attention was actively on the stretch, and that we seemed to be creating Objects or transformations of Objects while noting their analogy to something supposed to be real” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, pp. 116–117). A person is unable to catch one’s present thinking, but only a past thought in retrospection. James argues similarly in the Principles.

Wylie proposes a semiotic structure of thinking as a six place process. A speaker (an utterer in Peirce’s terminology) who verbally communicates, which becomes an object. From this object, a sign emerges and results in an interpretant, an interpretation by a listener (Wiley, 1994, pp. 27–29). The interpretant feeds forward to point to future possibilities. At the same time the interpretant iteratively feeds backward to become a second transformed sign pointing to the original object. This process is outlined in A and B above. Wylie posits another semiotic level to the semiotic series described in A, and which occurs at the speaker-communication level in which, he argues, that the speaker is reflexively self-aware of her just emitted communication. This is the sixth place in a semiotic thinking process. This is a self to self recursive loop in which thinking is a self talking to itself (Sundararajan & Kim, 2011; Wiley, 1994). What Wylie suggests is first-person reflexivity (self-awareness) of one’s act of thinking that is illustrated in B above. A person is self-aware of her thinking as she is of any emitted action. Wylie posits that a person hears herself and reflects, evaluates, and re-evaluates what she has said in judging whether her communication has its intended effect. Thinking then, it is proposed, consists of a semiotic process nested in a larger semiotic processes of self-awareness and continuing reflection. Thinking is structured in a complex of semiotic processes. These semiotic processes are not products of a mind or a brain; they do not occur in a brain or mind; what can be referred to as mind occurs within a complex of semiotic processes distributed between the internal and external worlds; between private and public space of reason. This proposed structure of thinking is convergent with James’s statement that the “thought is the thinker.”

Summarizing, the Me-I-You structures of self are semiotic processes that include internal and external conversations

: these conversations are thinking. While agreeing with the general structure of a self proposed, I demur regarding Wylie’s somewhat rigid description that thinking is only intrapersonal conversations that are initiated from a single I position addressed to Me, and a You. He suggests, in addition, there may be included internalized temporary quests that are incorporated others of a community. As indicated, this description

, is too rigid and not reflective of a full variety of dialogic conversational exchange necessary for effective thinking. Peirce asserted that the “mind stands to the self as a genus stands to a species” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 87), and that “When one reasons, it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society (however widely or narrowly this phrase may be understood), is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, pp. 92–93).

10.2.2.5.2 Dialogic Form of Thinking

Peirce understood thinking to be internal and external dialogue

. My suggestion is that a more thorough account of thinking incorporates something like Hermans and Salgado’s (2010) notion of multiple internalized I positions consistent with their notion of an internalized minisociety that reflects one’s social context. The primary intrapersonal conversations are with one’s empirical selves, to employ James’s vocabulary, one’s Me’s, and with future oriented You’s that grasp and are constrained by the differing affordant opportunities for future action in accord with one’s habits, desires, and intentions. These are filtered through the abstracted generalized other in deference to one’s community as formulated by Mead (1934) and others, and to one’s critical self as asserted by Peirce depending on the development and sophistication of a person. Contrary to Wylie, the assertion, consistent with James and Levinas, is that several empirical selves develop in the course of living and are available to the internal conversations that constitute thinking. These processes are convergent to Levinas’s description of the Other’s internalization that becomes an alter-I that further enriches dialogic thinking. Peirce’s critical self may be conceptualized as an aspect of a single generalized self in consideration of the varieties of developmental paths for different persons (compare Sundararajan & Kim, 2011).

Following the previous discussion, thinking occurs in a dialogic exchange which alternate between internal and external conversations. Internal conversations are with internalized members of one’s community and with generalized others representing community expectations and constraints. According to the previous discussion, these internalized others may be distinguished as Me’s, You’s, generalized other, or critical other depending of the developmental history of a person. There is a judgmental aspect in which what is said is evaluated by the speaker concerning whether what was said is an effective communication. Added to the interpretant’s reverting to a re-representation of the original object (the normal semiosis undertow) is a folding back of what was said by the speaker to the speaker himself that is attributed to normal self-awareness. He evaluates the effectiveness of his communication. The folding back process adds to the normal dual semiotic processes of (a) the moving trace forward to an opening of future possibilities, and the undertow of the interpretant to revert to re-referencing the original object and becoming a new transformed sign.

A schematic construction of thinking presented can take the following form: C: Semiotic Me-I-You structure of thinking.

1. (1)

Speaker-Utterance > <{< Diction-Object_1 > Sign_1 > Interpretant_1} Listener-Interpreter

(2)

SP< < < ><< < {< D-O_1 > > S_1 > > Int_1} > ListIntr

(3)

SP< < < > < < <{D-O_2 < < Int_1 = S_2 > > Int_2} ListIntr

(4)

SP< < < > < < < {D-Oi < < Inti-1 = Si > > Inti} ListIntr

‍Line (1) is a general structure of thinking that is consistent with the notation used in A and B, and with a triadic structure that is initiated with an utterance and is interpreted by a listener. Line (2) shows the iterative series in which SP, indicating a speaker, speaks to an Other person, designated >, a ListIntr who is the Listener-Interpreter. Contained in braces is the semiotic structure of the semantic content of a thinking episode in which D-O is the Diction of the communication (the saying) and is the Object represented by a Sign, S, which is the meaning content of the communique (the said) from which emerges an Interpretant , Int, to the joint object-sign. The Int is the reaction of an Other person to the said (or spoken) communique that now has an objective history. The directional arrows, > >, is toward a forward future direction out of which arises a Sign (S), and subsequently an Interpretant (Int), and indicate the beginning of the first iterative series of semiosis. The < < <, superscript left pointing arrows, represents a second triad of the self reflexive loop in which a speaker is aware of her communique (Diction) and is suggestive of a self talking and listening to itself. The semiotic structure, SP <<<><<< {…}, of the speaker’s self talking to itself fits Self-Other-Self triad. Line (3) shows the next and deeper vertical iteration, designated with the subscript_2, D-O_2. The beginning Interpretant , Int_1 becomes Sign_2, S_2 designated Int_1 = S_2. Importantly the < <, reverse arrows, indicate a second iterative series of a semiotic undertow process that refers back to the object. As discussed earlier, this reversed series pointing back to an object, in this case the original communique, stabilizes the semiotic process while the forward future loop of the first iterative semiotic series points a variety of possible meanings or interpretations of a communication. Line (4) indicates that recursion theoretically can continue without end, or until it is terminated in a habit, habit change, an action, or a logical interpretant , or simply disappears because of non-use as suggested in an earlier portion of our discussion that not all recursive semiotic traces are adequately terminated for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that any one semiotic strand may be fallible. The intent of this schematic is to indicate the details of our investigation of thinking as dialogue that might otherwise not be noted.

Wylie’s seminal presentation of Me-I-You self structure is important for an understanding of the probable importance of semiosis to psychology. My suggested limitations, which lead to departures from his suggested conceptual framework, are not meant as a denigration. It is simply that more is known and the applications of semiotic processes are somewhat different and more straight forwardly psychological in nature. The uniqueness of this semiotic account of thinking is the addition, proposed by Wylie, of a speaker’s reflexive apprehension of her own communication as a second semiotic series in support of the primary semiotic series of a object-sign feeding forward to an interpretant. This feeding forward process is balanced by a deepening vertical process of an interpretant referencing the original object and creating an renewed sign. These processes have been referred to as a centrifugal moving away from itself, and a centripetal returning to itself (Sundararajan & Kim, 2011). While I have some reservation about this description, there is a descriptive emphasis on the central importance of these core semiotic dual processes of object reflexiveness and future projected alternatives that addresses the fact that a self is a developing sign, as asserted by Peirce (Colapietro, 1989, p. 91).

10.2.2.5.3 Self-Other-Self Contra Me-I-You Triads

Sundararajan and Kim attempt to enrich the concept of a self by proposing that the Me-I-You triad be replaced with Self-Other-Self triad. This seems to be a collapse of first-, second-, and third-person perspectival levels

. They propose that the pronouns, as I, you, me, her,and they, to capture different experiential levels. A pragmatic understanding of the world and human actions can only be accurately described with a corresponding perspective of a person’s actions and the effects on one’s environment. I also suggest that Mead’s use of Me is not assessed by Sundararajan and Kim in the full richness attended to that concept by him (1934; 1938). Their project is to develop the conceptual framework for a semiotic structure of the self in relation to an Other person, and the empirical data derived by the Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count language analysis program to empirically support that goal. Their empirical data does appear to indicate different qualitative experiences related to a detached, reflexive, focal, and affected self associated with different sets of pronouns. These are related to detached or immersed properties of the core dual semiotic processes of a forward projected openness and a reflexive undertow, that is, centripetal and centrifugal movement of a self. They do not address the indexical function of pronouns recognized by Peirce or Castañeda in a semantic context. Pronouns provide an important indexical function without which thinking and communication is not possible and are more usefully considered in their functions as indexicals which at some point become too salient to ignore (Atkin, 2005, 2013; Babb, 2016; Braun, 2015; Castañeda, 1999; Legg, 2015).

A second observation is that Peirce connects openness to reason, which seems correct, and that reasonableness operates only in the intersubjective social environment, that is, originates and develops in second-person engagement. This is congruent with Sundararajan and Kim’s emphasis on an Other person. Practical reason as originally enacted by an individual evolves to a generalized practice when that reason becomes abstracted, embedded in a community culture, and becomes impersonal as a third-personal property. Second-person practical reason which guides one’s conduct evolves to third-personal propositional reasoning and logic (Korsgaard, 1993; review Sect. 8.4). In this context, reason becomes a cultural ideal that is pursued by members of the community (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 95–97).

Although the Self-Other-Self triad cannot be a replacement for the Me-I-You, as suggested by Sundararajan and Kim, in the conceptual context of thinking, the Self-Other-Self triad does depict a person’s reflexive self-awareness of one’s own spoken communication addressed to an Other person. Sundararajan and Kim (2011) make an important point: there is no self without an other and there is no I without a not I (Colapietro, 1989; Castañeda, 1999; Darwall, 2006; Levinas, 1969, 1978). A self becomes existent only second-personally or intersubjectively. An actor-speaker, an I, speaks a message directed to an Other that once spoken and is heard by an Other becomes the Other’s object, the said communique emerges to the Other as a sign with semantic content that has meaning, and which evolves to an interpretant in the form of the Other’s reaction or response. All this is in accordance with A, B, and C. The communique that is heard by the speaker herself is the interpretant of a semiotic process that is her evaluation of the effectiveness of her intended meaning and its reception by the other person. In addition to the dual core iterating processes of semiosis, the semiotic processes of thinking also consists of a third Self-Other-Self triad represented in C as, SP<<<><<< {<D-Oi . .}, the initial portion indicating the semiotic process SP of speaking to an other person. Within the {…} braces is the semiotic process of the other’s hearing of a communique that functions as described in A, B, and C.

In the present moment of speaking to an other person, the speaker hears her own communique. An internal relation between the self, one’s I, listening with a critical internal self assessing whether the communique says what was intended, and whether the other received the communique. This internal relation reflects the structure of an external conversation. The other person addressed, in turn, is also evaluating the received communique. This shared relation is a second-person engagement, a We relation (see Eighth Study, Chap. 8). A shared engagement evolves between two I’s, the speaker and the Other, hearing the communique, and a second-person perspective emerges to establish a We relation. Peirce’s assertion of thinking as a conversation is more complex than an exchange of information.

It will be helpful to examine a schematic of the semiotic relation described. Such a schematic of a Self-Other-Self triad that fills in the initial SP<<<><<< {<D-Oi ..} of C may look like this: D: Self-Other-Self internal semiotic triad of thinking.

1. (1)

An I speaks > I-Other hears the said > I apprehends her said.

(2)

SPgO_1 > SaidS_1 > SelfInt_1

(3)

SPgO_2 < SelfInt_1 = SaidS_2 > SelfInt_2

(4)

SPgOi < SelfInti-1 = SaidS i > SelfInti

‍SPgO, the object

, indicates a person addressing an other person, SaidS is the speaker (the I) hearing her communique to the Other and is the sign representing what was said, and SelfInt indicates the speaker accessing and reacting to her own communique and is the interpretant

. The evaluation of lines (2), (3), and (4) follow A, B, and C. The result is that thinking always accesses an internal other, and follows the structure of a shared external conversation. When a person hears her own spoken communication, she evaluates whether her intended meaning was successful, and assesses how the other hears her communique. She then reacts, SelfInt_1, to her assessment, perhaps, by repeating her communique. She can only accomplish that through an internalized critical other that is an alternate I (Hermans & Salgado, 2010; Levinas, 1969, 1978). The other person hearing the speaker engages the similar process of assessing the communique and evaluating the speaker’s efficacy. Each is aware the other is aware of her awareness. These shared and mutual communication processes constitute a second-personal engagement that is a We relation that shares a common project and intention. The thinking episode consists of both the external dialogue with an Other and the internal dialogue of the speaker. One implication that thinking is not only internal suggests a congruence with an aspect of the Rorschach literature that has a long history of identifying internal and external problem solving, introversive and extratensive, respectively. This observation suggests an interesting relation of internal and external thinking which is relevant here (Exner, 1993, pp. 405–411). The conclusion of whether a person’s thinking is primarily internal or external influences his adaptive functioning.

Something of this may be what Peirce had in mind when he wrote: “. . man’s circle of society …, is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of an individual organism” (as cited in Colapietro, 1989, pp. 90–91). Colapietro further describes Peirce as asserting that: “The self as a sign in the process of developing is in essence, the self as a being in dialogue with itself; this intrapersonal dialogue is potentially part of a larger context, an interpersonal dialogue. Such interpersonal dialogues are capable of generating such intimate unions among distinct selves as to be comparable to personal beings themselves” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 91). As pointed out numerous times by Levinas, what one says is quite different than what is historically said as it then has an objective continuing history. This second triadic pattern is an iterative series of the semiotic structure of thinking, C, and is a semiotic process nested within a larger semiotic process containing semiotic processional content of the internal conversation which is the core of a thinking episode. The conclusion is that thinking is characterized by at least the two nested triadic semiotic processes described.

10.2.2.5.4 Thinking as Conversation

Is it realistic to attribute the characteristics of external second-person engagements to internally structured conversations? Asked differently, what is the justification for attributing the characteristics of an external conversations to internal conversations? Wylie was modest in his descriptions of the internal conversations attributing a podium only to the I position of the Me-I-You triad. The I then addressed either Me or You and some mostly temporary quests. Levinas attributed an alien internalized other full occupation that dominated a person’s intersubjective activities. He would not object to an internalized other’s I conceptualized as participating in internal conversations. Hermans and colleagues attribute multiple I positions to an internal minisociety that reflects one’s community; a conception that anticipates internal conversations but probably not limited to thinking (Hermans & Salgado, 2010). The psychological literature has not generally explored internal conversations, or conversations generally, as thinking. Secondly, thinking does not seem to only occur internally but in alternating rhythm with external conversations. It may be, for example, that one’s internal conversation is a preparation for engaging an external conversation. These thinking episodes as structured in conversation take place in a public space of reasonableness, an ideal of public reason, that has evolved in the community’s culture (Ganeri, 2012a, b). Peirce does say that “Scientific conceptions [semiosis is a science of signs] have always first become clear in debates. And this is an important truth” (as cited Colapietro, 1989, p. 2). Colapietro goes on to paraphrase that “. . whenever competent inquirers disagree, genuine doubt is present” (p. 2). Third and finally, any reasoning activity occurs intersubjectively, and addresses an Other second-personally.

Peirce’s account of thinking, first, is that it occurs, or better, begins in internal conversation with oneself in preparation to engage another person in external conversation; a process that probably swings back and forth until what is being considered has settled. Secondly, as shown in C and D, thoughts are structured and transmitted signs that function triadically in semiosis. These two specific proposals are well argued by Peirce and they importantly forward an understanding of, Peirce would say hypothesis, of thinking. A simple form of a dialogical form of thinking is between a critical Me anchored in an experience of community culture and an innovative You directed to the future that conforms to a semiotic structure (Colapietro, 1989, p. 93). The critical Me takes form in a generalized other that has been distilled or abstracted from the experiences with one’s community as described by Mead (1934). The innovative you is directed to the affordant opportunities. This exchange between Me or critical self with the innovative self or You is framed by an I. The I can be thought of as initiating a semiotic process in which Me is confronted with choice, a sign, and an interpretant in the form of You pulling forward to an action. The Me as object of a reflexive undertow provides stability while the You is the pull to the future and the new. All this is in accordance with C and D.

The semiotic object , Me, could contain, it is suggested, different aspects: a generalized other that, previously discussed, consists of community expectations and norms that are one’s obligations to the community second-personally and can be apprehended as an internalized categorical imperative, an ideal pursued by an innovative you (Eighth Study, Chap. 8). A second critical aspect, or part, constituting the internalized general other is based on one’s own habits, to use Peirce’s vocabulary, accrued and constructed from experience. There may be other aspects to the internalized other such as an influential mentor, and significant others, generally. Peirce often refers to the self as a sign in process, and the above tentative description seems to fit the basic processes of a triadic semiotic process. The You that provides the place for an interpretant seems somewhat simpler than the Me object described, but that might not be necessarily so, depending on the sophistication and level of development of a person.

While Peirce’s account describes a probable structure of thinking that fits experience, the idea was original with Plato which Peirce observed and elaborated. There is, however, a quieter and passively receptive side of thinking interpolated in the more raucous debate. How does the conversational side, which can be combative, fit with James’s observation that the “thought seems to be the thinker”? Recall that Peirce has observed that “we are unable to catch our own thought in flight; we cannot know what we are presently thinking, only what we have just now thought” (Colapietro, 1989, p. 116). Further he says: “All that we know of the ‘thinking’ [going on within us] is that we afterwards remember that our attention was actively on the stretch, and that we seemed to be creating Objects or transformations of Objects while noting their analogy to something supposed to be real” (As cited, Colapietro, 1989, pp. 116–117). Creating novel objects of thought, then, seems to be a different category of activity, a receptive passivity, than the dialogue of conversation. How do these two different, and it seems, necessary activities to thinking fit together? Are they different aspects of a single act of thinking?

10.2.2.5.5 Thinking and Receptive Passivity

Some light on this more passive receptive side of thinking is presented by Judith Schlanger, a not well known French philosopher, discovered and discussed by Martin Savransky (2018). In a paper tantalizingly titled How It Feels to Think: Experiencing Intellectual Invention, Savransky investigates the context and issues of James’s it thinks. James considered whether it thinks is as direct as it rains or it blows, and concluded that all that could be said was “thought goes on” (1890, p. 220). Later he extends this conclusion by stating that “the passing Thought seems to be the thinker” (p. 324), and further that “the phenomena are enough, the passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker” (italics original, p. 328). Following James, Savransky proposes that not only do we think intentionally, but also “thinking happens to us” spontaneously, and cannot said to be controlled. In a certain sense, thoughts take control and “make us think” (Savransky, 2018, p. 610). Thoughts, then, have a force of their own, and letting them play out and participating in composing with them can result in a “feeling of finding oneself inventing in thought” (p. 611). A novel thought breaks with the established conceptual relations. It is fragile and lacks connections to a conceptual structure of its own in which to belong. Such a fragile thought cultivating and nourishing to become an element in the possibilities of new relations and a part of its own new conceptual relations.

Such emergence of a new thought element demands new relations and meanings introduces vagueness, confusion, and partial comprehension with a concomitant tendency to marginalize and dismiss it. If not immediately cultivated with disciplined attention, it can disappear, much as a dream with which one awakes. If not a disciplined attending to an otherwise briefly remembered dream, such a dream usually quickly disappears. This is a likely outcome for new emerging thoughts of an intellectual invention

. A novel thought is neither discontinuous nor continuous with the previous conceptual frame from which it emerged, but as a novelty it has no preceding conceptual frame (p. 612). Savransky argues that the skill to be developed is to nourish and cultivate the outcomes of intellectual invention. The phrase invented thought seems appropriate to describe how internal conversational dialogue leads into external dialogue of explicit thinking. Schlanger says that: “neither a continuity nor a discontinuity, the new is a difference that emerges within a multiplicity of problematic relations” (as quoted, p. 612). The current culture of sociological, and I suggest psychological, methodological rigor tends to approach such episodes of vagueness or confusion as failed or incomplete knowledge that require diligent repair. The result is a tendency to over look potentially important beginnings of new thinking. The goal of cultivation is to establish new relations attuned to the new thought so that it can stand on its own. Recognizing the force inherent in thoughts and ideas emphasizes their heuristic context.

The question of whether an intellectual invention , a new thought, is true is premature and, perhaps, irrelevant. A new kind of conversation is required relating to how it feels to think. The result would be to introduce a vagueness property to mental activities, in particular to thinking. Savransky cites James once more as to “…. the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to press on the attention” (1890, p. 245). He suggests, quoting Schlanger, that “the risk of (temporary) vagueness seems preferable to the risk of [methodological] reduction” (p. 614). Cultivating the “vague and dramatic experience of thinking” requires entering into a play of ideas that resists control and learns “how to compose with ideas” (p. 615) so that something new, interesting, and potentially important comes to be present. At an appropriate place in this cultivating process, an introduction to the rough and tumble of conversational dialogue occurs as new thinking moves toward maturity. I want to state my appreciation of Savransky’s insightful and significant account of the mental activity of thinking, using his phrase, intellectual invention

. His account of thinking is convergent with Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on withdrawing from public engagement to open to a passive receptivity required for thinking in a book of that title, Thinking (Arendt, 1971). Arendt presents an account of thinking from a context of political science and a general concern with moral conduct. She asserts, that to pursue moral and ethical conduct, thinking, rather than correct belief, is required to avoid the unique modern form of evil: totalitarianism. The element of receptivity and openness is common to both.

10.2.2.5.6 Thinking—Some Concluding Observations

The goal of this section (10.2.2) is to fully investigate thinking. This investigation included an examination of semiotic structure and presented the nested semiotic structures that constitute thinking, which are roughly characterized as a self-other-self triad nested in a me-I-you triad as shown in C and D. Thinking occurs in internal and external conversational dialogue as thinking episodes move both toward its future you and in a backward undertow toward its past me. The former is pulled to an innovative future, challenge, and toward a maturing of a stream of thought. The latter undertow provides a base of stability and is one’s critical self

. The result is a constructive tension between stability and the promise of a future. But this is not a complete account of thinking. A second constituent is episodes of withdrawal and engaging a passive receptivity which occurs, as Peirce observed, when one’s “attention is on the stretch” and a thought could be observed to emerge retrospectively. Such episodes of passive receptivity were explored using Savransky’s account of what it feels like to think and intellectually invent novel thoughts. The cultivation of new thinking, it turns out, requires a developed sensitivity that is open and attuned to the vagueness and uncertainty of a newly invented thought.

I propose that Savransky’s account is nicely congruent with Peirce’s observations of the stretch of one’s attention and of “creating Objects or transformation of Objects,” and provides one account of the passive receptivity aspect of thinking activity, which fits nicely with the conversational constituent of thinking activities. It may initially seem that these two constituent processes constitute thinking. That initial impression, however, may be only apparent, as the initial constituent may be an implicit and non-visible reasoning that is only noted in the stretch of one’s attention. Conversational dialogue employs episodes of visible explicit reasoning that alternately take place in internal and external conversation which develops new relations tuned to the new invented idea. Together a probable complete account of thinking takes shape.

Much of mainstream cognitive psychology recognizes thinking by its contents, such as problem solving and verbal learning

. James and other pragmatists, were interpreted as establishing a functionalist tradition in American psychology. Although well quoted in psychological literature, he was not read to reveal the intrinsic psychology he so clearly described and advocated (Bourne, Ekstrand, & Dominowski, 1971). This section does not address the contents of thinking nor the functionalist methodology

. The goal of this study is to explore how semiotics contributes to subjectivity and selves from first-and second-personal perspectives, and how semiosis and signs function to account for an I and its thinking and feelings. The concern is with the stream of thought and how thinking activity is structured, how thought advances, and then contributes to everyday living in the context of emotional solidarity. A semiotic structure of emotional experience and expression is addressed in the next sect. (10.2.2.6).

In a pragmatic context, a semiotic triadic structure combined with dialogical conversation following Peirce, James, and Mead provides a workable frame for thinking in first-and second-personal planes of experience, which in turn becomes historical and enter an objective third-personal social plane of experience. Emotional solidarity is addressed subsequently, but it must be emphasized that thinking functions with affect and emotional unity. Much significant research and advance was and is being accomplished behaviorally and cognitively that, nevertheless, is not directly applicable to the first-personal experience of thinking as represented by Bourne et al. For this, a pragmatic turn of psychology is, perhaps, necessary.

A study more sympathetic to Peirce, James, Savransky, and others is Hannah Arendt’s monograph, Thinking. She assesses the withdrawal from the world of appearances to engage a passive receptivity required for a person to engage thinking. Following Kant, she identifies an I, the thinking ego, and the importance of reason in the face of radical doubt introduced by Descartes. Descartes adverted a human being to be primarily a thinker. He placed thinking in an unextended mental sphere or mode of existence in contrast to a mechanical physical mode of existence. Arendt concludes that the paradigmatic thinker is represented by the internal dialogue of Socrates. Her recognition of the inner dialogue as the structure of thinking converges with Peirce and Mead, and the preceding account of thinking.

A question not articulated by Arendt is: How does thinking function in a context of feelings and emotions? The unity of a person is accounted for largely by one’s emotional experience and expression. To what extent does thinking take place along side emotional experience and to what extent is one’s thinking immersed in one’s emotional experience? The next section will explore Sundararajan and colleagues’s formulation of a semiotic application to the experience and expression of emotion in a psychological context.

10.2.2.6 Semiotic Structuring of Emotion

Peirce has received irregular but consistent attention in psychological and related literature (Bodie & Crick, 2014; Crick & Bodie, 2016; Raggatt, 2010; Raggatt, 2012; L. Sundararajan, 2011). Louise Sundararajan (2008, 2012) and colleagues (Sundararajan, Kim, Reynolds, & Brewin, 2010; Sundararajan & Kim, 2011) have advocated the usefulness of Peirce’s semiosis to address unresolved psychological issues

. In a well reasoned paper titled It’s turtles all the way down: A semiotic perspective on the basic emotions debate, Sundararajan describes how semiosis can resolve the issues, perhaps impasse is better, between basic emotion theory and categorical affect theory. An emotion is not a building block or an entity with identifiable boundaries or invariable properties. Rather, an emotion as experienced by a person combines felt body changes with one or several relations embedded in a social environment of a community. Emotions may vary across cultures, but feelings are general. A person’s particular emotional experience, such as shame or disappointment, emerges from one’s particular biography while pursuing a specific endeavor, engaged in specific relations, and embedded in the particular institutions of a community. There is nothing general or universal in such an experience. It is particular and individual. The emotion experienced will fit into various categories such as shame, disappointment, fear, sadness, or happiness, but only in retrospect (James, 1909, 1912). If someone is running from James’s famous bear, fear contributes to speed and finding a tree to climb. A seasoned person in the ways of the woods, a skilled woodsman, will know that she is unlikely to outrun a bear. The point is that all fear is not the same as all shame is not the same, but particular and unique to each situation; an encounter with a bear is an infrequent event and is not a paradigmatic example of the emotional experience of fear for most people (Lambie & Marcel, 2002; Russell, 2003; L. Sundararajan, 2008; Sundararajan et al., 2010; Sundararajan & Kim, 2011; Zacher, 2006).

Sundararajan points out that one lives in the context of meanings, not truths, and that feelings are signs that carry meaning. This is a parallel distinction of second-person engagement and third-personal perspective: meaning derives from the practical reasons of a second-person engagement and truth is a propositional characteristic of objective third-person perspective. These psychological events are structured in a semiotic triad. Sundararajan argues that psychology’s study of emotions would benefit significantly by shifting the investigative paradigm to semiosis (Sundararajan, 2008). The semiotic triad consists of an object, a sign that emerges in a diadic relation to the object as its representamen, and an interpretant that is the meaning of this of this relation. This is a first iteration of a triadic semiotic process of a potentially infinite iterative series. Implied in the description of any one emotional category is that any one emotion will consist of several semiotic traces some of which, if not most, a person is unaware (Colapietro, 1989, pp. 39–41). Each interpretant becomes, in turn, another sign that points back to the object and simultaneously points forward to the future. This process is continuous until a particular semiotic process terminates in an action, a thought (in Peirce’s vocabulary a logical interpretant

), or disappears because of non-use or other fallibility.

What is important when the semiotic process carries an emotion , as described by Sundararajan, is that the two processes balance or fail to balance each other. The reflexive undertow to the object stabilizes the semiotic process (emotional experience) while the forward pull develops variety or energy (and perhaps instability in an emotional experience) appropriate to the content of the semiotic process moving into a future. In regard to emotion, a too energetic undertow too deeply immerses a person in an emotional experience so that one is overwhelmed and emotional self-control fails. A too energetic forward pull to a future will create too much distance from the emotion so that it is, perhaps, intellectualized or too tightly bound in language concepts or future intentions and not meaningfully experienced in a way that can guide one’s actions (Sundararajan, 2008, 2012; Sundararajan et al. 2010; Sundararajan & Kim, 2011).

What is to be achieved by a person is emotional self-control via flexible and balanced undertow toward the object with the forward pull of the semiotic process toward the future and new possibilities, both of which can be potentially infinitely iterated. What is important, Sundararajan emphasizes, is the bipolar feedback of semiosis in opposing directions. That is, in the context of information, a semiotic series can be described as a tension between accuracy and variety. In Peirce’s words, the semiotic process consists of “two infinite series, one back toward the object, the other forward toward the interpretant ” (as cited in Sundararajan, 2008, p. 68). In an emotional context, the tension is similar, but along two dimensions of (a) self-focus and an outward world focus concurrent with (b) primary first-order and a second-order awareness of one’s emotion. Lambie and Marcel (2002) thoroughly and sensitively analyze the experience of emotion as felt or sensed of the various physical bodily changes corresponding to a particular emotion such as fear, satisfaction, or shame. Feeling and sensing the body are the grist of experience.

What emerges are two primary bipolar dimensions of the experience of emotions that consist of (a) mode of attention and (b) the quality in which one is aware of one’s emotional experience. Mode of attention refers to self focus contrasted with world focus. Examples of an attentional mode might be an awareness of oneself’s felt happiness, and an outward directed attention to the world might be when angered or irritated by something or someone in one’s environment. The quality of one’s awareness of one’s emotional experience may be first-order in which a person is reflexively self-aware as a first-personally participant, or reflectively and retrospectively aware of a particular emotional experience. Attending to oneself or to the external world is further nuanced in an analytic or synthetic manner, as immersed or detached, and as an evaluative attitude contrasted to an action attitude. That is, an experience may result from a focus on important aspects of the experience or wholistically as attending primarily to the whole of one’s emotional experience. Secondly, one may be immersed and overwhelmed or distantly detached.

Finally, Lambie and Marcel identify a tendency to reflect descriptively on an emotional experience leading to thoughtful and more cognitive understanding, or in contrast, be motivated to take an action concerning the situation that gave rise to the emotional experience. These dimensions are uniquely well structured in the bipolar iterating processes of a triadic semiotic series in a way in which a person learns from their experience. As discussed in the preceding section, the goal of a person is to achieve increasingly effective self-control which moves that person toward a rational and increasing reasonableness, and with an increasing capacity for reasonableness attain a larger capacity for autonomy. Autonomy, according to Peirce, is not a quality of humanity and of being a person; autonomy is achieved and reflects one’s growing capacity for reasonableness. Emotional self control is an important, perhaps crucial, part of such an achievement.

A semiotic investigation of emotion seems to advocate for a paradigm shift in psychological investigations of emotion that harmonizes with the general pragmatic turn that seems to emerge from the previous investigations. The goal for Sundararajan and colleagues in these series of investigations is to arrive at even more effective and efficient psychological descriptions that are increasingly rich in capturing the whole of living.

10.3 Summarizing the Object; Forwarding the Future

Semiosis is embedded in an extensive body of thinking by Peirce, an immensely capable thinker and perceptive observer, as fits his dedication to scientific inquiry. A sterile semiosis abstracted from that body of thought probably is not possible and certainly is not desirable. Peirce has been more significantly recognized internationally than in the United States, although that seems to be changing, judging by the increasing number of papers and investigations appearing in American journals. In psychology, that can not be claimed, despite the relatively recent work of Sundararajan and colleagues. There has been some interesting developments in other disciplines, to be noted in communications (Bodie & Crick, 2014; Crick & Bodie, 2016), and is to be examined later.

10.3.1 Briefly Reorienting

Now we will assess what has been achieved and what remains to be done. In general, the goal of these series of studies has been to trace the relation of the concept with the reality of self. We began with a large view of what a self is and its related concepts. We discovered that the modern concept of self is entangled and, in the Western European intellectual tradition, originated in early Christian conversations. A parallel cultural conversation was underway in Hindu and Buddhist India which gave rise to some remarkably similar considerations, although the Buddhist intellectual tradition pursued questions of the reality or illusionary nature of self more directly and by tying it to a naturalistic understanding of the world. An examination of current psychological literature revealed a series of ideas of the self connected to the idea of narrative which was sometimes connected to the idea of personality as functioning to unify a person engaged in an otherwise dissembling living experience. One of the most prescient ideas was of multiple selves constituting a minisociety that reflected the external engagements of a person. It seemed difficult to keep the reality of what a self might be from disappearing into a visage of an empty explanatory concept. For much of the psychological literature, the concept of self is little more than an explanatory concept of unity and cohesion. Much of the effort in the series of studies in this book consists in an effort to move beyond such broadly vacuous ideas of self. Indeed, there were publications in the psychological literature to that thesis (Hood, 2012; Wegner, 2002). Beyond the concept, the reality of a self is phenomenological

. When investigated only from a third-person perspective a self is only conceptual and as conceptual cannot be perceived as more than an explanatory mechanism. Investigating self requires that perspectival levels, similar to diffusion grates of experience, be taken into account. This was first acknowledged by James who did not use that vocabulary but described self phenomenologically. It was Lynn Rudder Baker who formulated the first-personal perspective of a person. However, she rejected self terminology for its perceived suggestibility to conflate a homunculus type entity with the person (see Fourth Study, Chap. 4).

The limitation of first-person constitution of self is that a person lives his life intersubjectively, in relation to others, and not individually and first-personally. Peirce recognized this early in a series of criticisms of the Principles of Psychology. James describes the phenomenological experience of a flow of thought and a person’s ownership of that thinking experience; he describes first-personal participation which requires a phenomenological description. He describes what Peirce refers to as firstness which is, in Peirce’s view, an incomplete recognition of reality (Bernstein, 2010, pp. 136–144). It should be noted, again, that in the Consciousness of Self chapter of the Principles James states that the “thought is the thinker” which is more commensurate with a semiosis formulation. Peirce thought that much of James’s presentation was in error. James never seemed to understand the categorical frame of firstness, secondness , and thirdness nor understand the point of semiosis (ibid.).

Peirce thought that James’s preoccupation with phenomenological description and first-person participation emphasized individualism and ignored or, at least, did not attend to the essential intersubjective constitution of a person. He, in fact, had some rather harsh language for the concept of individuality and personal identity describing them as negativity. He continued by asserting that the individual person is a cell of a social organism. In this, he is consistent with Kenneth Gergen’s thesis of multibeing and coaction as properties of relational being which criticizes an individual bounded self as a source of modern chaotic living and as well Charles Taylor (Gergen, 2009; Taylor, 1989). This may seem an unexpectedly radical stand by a person whose primary interest is scientific investigation. Nevertheless, Bernstein asserts that Peirce offers many solutions to problems that have bedeviled science, such as that which has been called the myth of the given. The difference between Peirce and Gergen is that Peirce is a thoroughly committed naturalist; that is, he is committed to the idea of an independent world reality that is open to investigation. It is also recognized that Peirce’s assertion is fully congruent with the Eighth Study, Chap. 8, Second-Person ‘We’ which describes the intersubjective structure of shared projects and goals, and with the Ninth Study, Chap. 9, Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other concerning the intersubjective ethical embeddedness and plurality.

10.3.2 Pointing to a Future

An insightful analysis of Peirce’s notion of dialogical thinking is conducted by Crick and Bodie (2016). Interpersonal conversation, dialogue

, is not always purposeful and is directed more to building an attuned relation than information or thinking. Thinking is a process of learning, of moving from ignorance to knowledge, and of discovering that certain events are governed by rules. Reasoning or sustained thinking is an examination of the knowledge and beliefs we already have that can evolve to a habit: a ground on which one may act. The function of thinking is to arrive at a belief or modify an old belief. Dialogue , as Peirce considers it, is a narrower and focused inquiry that begins in doubt that is viscerally felt and uncomfortable to varying degrees. Crick and Bodie suggest that an internal conversation that seeks to resolve painful doubting is often a preparation for engaging an external dialogue. It swings back to an internal dialogue with an internalized other that may be a generalized critical me, and continues such internal-to-external swings until the painful doubt is resolved. All of this serves to convince one’s critical self and is accomplished with language and a triadic semiotic structure of signs as discussed in the previous section.

The dialogic conversation functions in four processes, as explicated by Crick and Bodie. These processes— colligation, iteration, erasure, and observation— to collect and provide the material for the thinking that needs to occur. Reasoning proceeds with three operations of abduction, induction, and deduction. According to Peirce, as cited by Crick and Bodie, colligation is the most important process and involves gathering and comparing related but new materials that bear on the inquiry engaged. Iteration and erasure involve experimental testing or trying different materials under attentive observation for the best path to resolving the painfulness of doubt. The reasoning operations maps connections between the various elements of the materials. Deduction demonstrates that certain things or elements are required, that is, whether any particular element is necessary or sufficient to a phenomena. Abduction operations generate possibilities or hypothetical explanations, while induction connects the various hypotheses to real phenomenal events (Peirce, 1998, pp. 4–26).

A second proposal in the context of communication theory concerns the application of Peirce’s categorial phenomenology —firstness , secondness , and thirdness —to listening (Bodie & Crick, 2014). Bodie and Crick point out that listening is an acquired skill within a larger set of communication skills that is quite different from hearing. While hearing in context of a conversation with an other person involves combined sensory and cognition processes to translate an aural communication, the goal of listening is to apprehend the underlying attitude, affect, and contextual character of what is being communicated. Bodie and Crick propose three experiences in the act of aurally interpreting symbolic communication: listening, hearing, and sensing. These three distinguishable experiences correspond to the phenomenological properties of mediation

, reaction and relation , and quality that is described by Peirce to correspond to phenomenological properties of thirdness , secondness , and firstness , respectively. Phenomenology is the study of all the elements present in experience that are captured in the three modes of experience—firstness, secondness , and thirdness —which include the quality of, the reaction and relation of, and mediational property of an experience (Peirce, 1955, pp. 61–63).

These are the “three fundamental ways in which we encounter people, objects, or events,” in Bodie and Crick’s phrase, that fully captures that experience. Peirce says: “My view is that there are three modes of being

. I hold that we can directly observe them in elements of whatever [experience] is at any time before the mind in any way. They are the being of positive qualitative possibility, the being of actual fact [reaction and relation

], and the being of law [mediation ] that will govern facts in the future” (Peirce, 1955, p. 75). These three phenomenological modes of being fully contain an experience. Pragmaticism, the authors observe, is understood as a means of “discerning and constituting the meanings of those various encounters in relationship to future practices and expectations” (Bodie & Crick, 2014, p. 108). Briefly summarizing, listening, hearing, and sensing are quite neatly congruent with, or better, “derived from” mediation (thirdness ), reaction and relation

(secondness ), and quality (firstness ) which describes the sensing of an experience of aurally understanding and reacting to another’s communication. The authors further assert that these three modes of phenomenological being are present in every encounter with a person, object, or event in varying proportions governed by the setting and purpose of an interaction.

Hearing

, according to the authors, is an instrumental act of a person when encountering an other person; it is secondness . Hearing establishes facts in a relation and, perhaps, a shared goal in a conversation or other shared project. The emphasis is on the relationship which may be contentious or involve a shared project in second-person perspectival fashion (see Eighth Study, Chap. 8). The authors do not consider the possibility of a shared goal, but rather characterize a contentious encounter as a contest of wills. Hearing involves a relation of secondness that Peirce describes as dual consciousness (Peirce, 1955, p. 95) constituted by an awareness of oneself and the other. That is, according to Peirce, and congruent with Levinas and James, recognizing an other person is like acknowledging one’s own I (Peirce, 1998, pp. 351–352). Dual consciousness of hearing involves instrumental actions to achieve specific goals; when consciousness becomes plural, learning is taking place and mediated consciousness, thirdness , can be said to be an emerging form of being, of consciousness. Learning points to the future, and to moving more skillfully in one’s environment. When hearing is the dominant activity, the other two modes of being, of consciousness, listening and sensing are less significant. Learning of the environmental relations—mediation , and a qualitative presence—sensing the presence of an other person are not, or minimally present during the relational pursuit of purpose.

When sensing is one’s dominant mode of being

, an intrusive awareness of an aesthetic presence of wholeness and timelessness holds one’s attention to a qualitative aspect of an object. One’s wholehearted awareness of presence is difficult to sustain as it requires an intense open focused attention that can quickly escape one’s grasp. This kind of whole hearted open and attentive awareness may possibly be what is described as emptiness in the advanced stages of Buddhist meditation or something of the phenomenology of spiritual experience (Brown, 2006; Ganeri, 2012a, b; 2017).

Bodie and Crick (2014) presents a wonderfully creative application of Peirce’s phenomenology . It demonstrates a practical usefulness that resolves tensions between listening, hearing, and sensing that appears to intuitively describe complex relationships required to aurally understand and react to a verbal communication

. As pointed out by the authors, Peirce’s phenomenology is an alternative to European-style phenomenology such as presented by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. This is a visionary article that is well-thought, nuanced, and constructed and which is likely exert influence beyond the communications discipline to include psychology.

10.3.3 Some Consolidating Observations of Semiosis and Psychological Inquiry

The relevant questions now are: What has been learned that is useful to psychological investigation and practice? Are there emerging significant perspectives or even insights that may impact subsequent psychological inquiry? It is, of course, too soon to attempt to answer such a questions. The goal is to move these tensions forward.

For the first time in this series of studies, the suggestion of a pragmatic turn in psychology becomes extant. This realization has been slow to emerge, but begins in the Fourth Study, Chap. 4, First-Personal Experience and Identity and is continued in the Fifth Study, Chap. 5 with an examination of first-person perspective in the context scientific naturalism as explicated, for example, by Quine, Metzinger, Carruthers, and Dennett. Dennett, in particular, has been outspoken in outright opposition to first-person perspective and its relation to phenomenology . He introduces the concept of heterophenomenology

, which eliminates first-person perspective and even a recognition of a place for first-person perspective. It is interesting that only Dennett seems to have perceived the threat first-person perspective presents to an objective, third-person conception of scientific naturalism. One of the final suggestions in the Fourth Study, Chap. 4 is that first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives are required to capture a full and rich understanding of living. Perhaps this is something like the perspectival diffusion required to separate the rich hues of experience to apperception. In an examination of current psychological literature concerning self and self-concepts, the narrative emerged as a cohesive integrating process of a person. Hermans and colleague’s suggestion of an internal minisociety with multiple I positions that mirror an external society emerges as the most congruent view. It complements Peirce’s suggestion that thinking and reasoning are constituted by intrasubjective and intersubjective conversations.

The emergence of perspective as an important conceptual tool for distinguishing modes of experience begins with a comparison of identity and self, and with Ricoeur’s observation that identity tends to obscure a self entity because of the salience of its immediacy. Identity points outward toward social interrelations while self points inward toward one’s subjectivity, one’s inward world. A person is like a coin and neither side, identity and self, can be reduced to the other. While self is a first-personal phenomenon, identity is an object that can be contemplated and manipulated from a third-personal perspective. The study of first-personal experience, Fourth Study, Chap. 4, strengthens this recognition with an exploration of a nonreductive soft naturalism proposed by Baker. What comes into light in this study is that personhood, becoming a person, is not accrued as a property of a human being, but rather is achieved rather routinely, and outside awareness in normal development. The properties of identity and mineness inhere in personhood.

Baker’s formulation of a constitution view of the first-person standpoint is compared with the detailed investigations of the relation of naturalism and self in Vedantic and Buddhist literatures illuminated by (Ganeri, 2012a, b). These investigations were primarily initiated by the Buddhist break with Vedantic ritualistic law, a break that initially took the form of a causally connected naturalism that had no room for mental events that were not reducible to the causal laws of nature. The philosophic moves to allow for mental events that were not epiphenomena of a causally enclosed naturalism occurred, according to Ganeri, in the recognition of a supervenience of mental events that were perceived as no longer reducible to a naturalistic base. Secondly, the man who became the Buddha created a space for reasons to allow for correctly understanding the relation between self and the reality of the naturalistic world. It is this space that initiates and sustains the long Indian conversation about self and its relation to causal reality. What is noticed in Ganeri’s sensitive and detailed presentation of various aspects of this conversation is the absence of the communitarian and intersubjective priorities sometimes attributed to a more mature Indian philosophy. Ganeri arrives at eleven models of self for Western and Indian traditions derived from two core properties of self: individuating and ownership relations. These are based in the body or in the stream of experience (see the Sixth Study, Chap. 6). Ganeri greatly broadens the horizon for inquiries of self in new directions and with different possibilities.

What begins to niggle, while exploring Ganeri’s account of the self literature in light of the Indian long, detailed, and rich conversation of a self and its relation to a naturalistic world, are the sub-cognitive aspects of self and self-related issues. A first-person stand seems to capture much of what-a-self-is and does, but the core processes of individuation and ownership further point to sub-cognitive processes that base cognition. Additionally, an idea floating around since James observed that: ‘there seems to an I, but that it, an I, did not seem to be needed to describe the facts of experience’ is of a non-phenomenal I. He notes that:

The passing Thought then seems to be the Thinker; and though there maybe another non-phenomenal Thinker behind that [an I], so far we do not seem to need him to express the facts. But we cannot definitively make up our mind about him until we have heard the reasons that have historically been used to prove his reality (1890, p. 324).

‍Two things stand out in this short statement. One concerns the recognition of the passing Thought as the apparent thinker. This creates some similarity to semiotic processes. The second is a recognition of an I, although James avoids naming it. What is pointed to is a more thorough examination of processes that are the core of being a person referred to as subjectivity

. Restated, the subjectivity we are interested is those processes connected to what the index I points to. One such investigation was maintained over a lifetime by Castañeda and is explored in the Seventh Study, Sect. 7.1, The I and Thinking. In that account, an I is present when connected to a not-I; an I is present, that is, exists only in I-strands. Similar to James, Castañeda asserts that the I is not needed “to express the facts” because the I is outside the world that it thinks (refer to 7.3). Similar proposals are developed later, by Darwall and Levinas, regarding a person: a person is present only in relation with another person or, said differently, when confronting an Other (see Studies 8, Chap. 8, Second-Person We, and 9, Chap.9, Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other). Important is noticing that self-awareness, experience, and thinking are different aspects of the same event that are the result of the unique property of internal reflexivity of self-awareness, according to Castañeda.

Following this discussion of James’s and Castañeda’s accounts of subjectivity

, an inquiry of second-person engagement is initiated using Stephen Darwall’s presentation in The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability (2006). Darwall’s account of second-person engagement is reasonably thorough and is directly relevant to psychology whose literature to my knowledge has not yet attended to second-person perspective in any significant way. Although a philosophical account, my suggestion is that, if not the whole of the framed second-person model, there are several aspects that are usable in psychological investigation and practice, and which may prod psychological interest in intersubjectivity and, in particular, to a second-person perspective. The core of the second-person stand is the interdefinable circle by which is meant a coalescence of four events: (a) a person’s authority as a member of the community (b) to make a claim or a demand of another member of that community (c) which establishes a practical reason (d) that the person addressed is responsible to perform or correct.

A free flow of this interdefinable circle assumes full and equal second-person competence of both participants in an engagement, which, of course, may not be the case. Full maturity or integration into a community might not have been achieved by all the second-person participants. In that case, autonomy and one’s capacity for freedom are constrained. Given basic second-person competence, to act counter to the requirements of the interdefinable circle is to abrogate responsibility and to act immorally, with the consequence of constraining or even giving up one’s freedom (Darwall, 2006, p. 162). This aspect of Darwall’s account is explicitly congruent with Peirce as well as to Levinas, although less explicitly. Peirce asserts that freedom is achieved in a person’s striving for self-control and pursuing an ideal of reasonableness. Peirce states that the function of a person is “to work out his own nature and impulses, to aid others, and contribute to the fulfillment of the destiny of his generation” (as cited, Colapietro, 1989, p. 41). Levinas’s whole philosophical program is a demonstration of an inseparable coupling of intersubjectivity and ethical behavior which in that way is similar to and convergent with the second-personal standpoint. The similarities of the account laid out in the Eighth Study, Chap.8, Second-Person We, to Levinas’s account of the relation of subjectivity and intersubjectivity opens a new question concerning how a person, or a self, and cognition emerge from subjective processes.

This inquiry is nicely opened by Megan Craig’s insight concerning the congruence of Levinas’s and James’s thought (2010). But they are not only congruent, they are importantly complementary as shown in the Ninth Study, Chap. 9, Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other. That is, they address the opposite sides of subjectivity, Levinas at what might be referred as the bottom of subjectivity which interfaces with existence, while James describes that side of subjectivity which interfaces with cognition. Levinas begins with the relation between existing and an existent in which an I emerges in a brief but real present moment. This relation he terms il y a, or there is, and is experienced as uncomfortableness that he describes as a feeling of being too tight for the skin. The I is tied to one’s subjectivity by which it, the I, gains an ethical authority to confront the face of an Other. In that confrontation, that the dynamics of intersubjectivity emerge, and the confrontation is perceived as ethical. This is similar to Darwall’s account of the second-person stand.

James describes the opposite side of subjectivity where experience is framed and founds cognition. Levinas distinguishes between the intersubjectivity of two engaged persons from a third party. The intersubjective dynamics are ethical as responsibility to the Other, but the intersubjective engagement creates an awareness of a third party, those others outside the immediate intersubjective engagement (or a second-personal engagement, to use Darwall’s vocabulary). The others of the third-party open a distance, which Levinas calls exteriority, that can only be bridged with language. That is, the third party opens a space to build a state, institutions, and laws. This can only be achieved with language communication. To restate again, an impersonal, third-person perspective, a political sphere, is created. Levinas states that when two or more freedoms are next to each other, war and tyranny are the inevitable result. A person’s only alternative to escape tyranny and war and preserve one’s freedom is to communicate within the third-party to arrange a just State. Said differently, language allows one’s freedom to be preserved by establishing the institutions and laws of a just State. The cost is an agreement to limit one’s own freedom in some form of a social contract.

This arrangement, however, creates a new problem: how to preserve the particularity of individuality in a context of an indifferent institutional setting that was originally established to preserve freedom. What makes it possible for a person to join a State, even a just State, free from coercion by an impersonal and tyrannical State? The response, according to Levinas, is individual interiority, from which emerges the freedom to engage the state’s institutions in exchange for limiting one’s freedom. Interiority is created when a person confronts the face of an Other. This becomes a shared intersubjectivity the dynamics of which open a choice to each person to escape the tyranny of war by entering the arrangements for a State. This is achieved triadically: an individual with potential confronts an Other; this establishes a relation that results in reaching beyond the intersubjective relation to a third party. Interestingly, this converges with Peirce’s account of an inward and an external world of a person, the role of achieving self control in one’s relation to others (see 10.2.2.3), and a triadic semiotic structure of intersubjectivity and relation with a community (10.1).

Finding convergence between Levinas’s and Peirce’s body of thought is unexpected and important considering their thoroughly different backgrounds and with no evidence that Levinas was familiar with Peirce’s writings. Such convergence may emerge only because the reality that is being investigated constrains it. Might there be a convergence toward a pragmatic horizon for psychology and human-related sciences generally? That is, do psychology, sociology, political science, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics all seem to be moving in the direction of pragmatism, the direction of describing the modes and qualities of experience, first-, second-, and third-personally? Peircean categorial phenomenology , following Bodie and Crick, captures experience in all its modes. All instances of experience break into three ways in which a person encounters other persons, events, or objects: sensing or qualitative percipience, relating to a person or object, and a reaction. A reaction refers to interpretively extending what is learned to guide our actions in the larger environment. I am arguing that there is a pattern of convergence among the thinkers discussed: James, Hermans and colleagues, Castañeda, Darwall, Levinas, and Peirce. This convergence points psychology toward a pragmatic horizon.

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R. E. DuusConstituting Selveshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39017-4_11

11. Eleventh Study: Assessing the Self-Aporetic—Framing a Pragmatic Psychology

Richard E. Duus[1]

(1) Duluth Psychological Clinic, Duluth, MN, USA

Richard E. Duus

Keywords

PerspectivesThinkingExperienceDialogueIntersubjectivityWe-perspectiveSocial justiceReflexive justiceAll-subjectedAll-affectedIndigenous psychology

What conclusions can we draw about the self-aporetic in light of these ten studies? Perhaps not much should be added to the results that emerged in each of the studies. In an effort to achieve status as a science, and perhaps a misdirected attempt to achieve parity as a natural science, early American psychology excluded references to self. As Gordon Allport observed, the effort to avoid using self concepts when attempting to account for such properties as integration, individual organization, and striving was extensive. The term began to appear with Carl Rogers as an explanatory concept for integration and individual unity to describe a healthy person. Erik Erikson employed the related concept of identity in a similar way. Self terminology then began to be used reflexively as self-control, self-management, self-presentation, self-esteem and others to refer to behavioral principles and routines to negotiate one’s environment successfully. Around the 1990s thinkers such as John Shotter, Kenneth Gergen, Hubert Hermans, Jerome Brunner, Daniel Hutto, and others began to open such concepts as subjectivity, intersubjectivity, inner selves, relational being, and dialogical relations within what became defined as constructionist psychology, or the sociocultural turn of psychology.

The interest in European phenomenology through Husserl and his interpreters such as Daniel Zahavi became attractive to some, as did increasingly serious investigations of philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jurgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur. An unnoticed philosopher, Hector-Neri Castañeda, carried out a series of incisive investigations of linguistic indexicals and developed a creditable structure of subjectivity (Seventh Study, Chap. 7, Inquiry of Subjectivity). This series of studies crystallized to a firmer form in Lynn Rudder Baker’s constitution view of first-person perspective and the person in the context of her presentation of a soft naturalism. Baker’s account was extended with Jonardon Ganeri’s investigation of Indian and, in particular, Buddhist thought concerning self and its relation to the natural world. Each of the these studies builds on the previous studies, which is perhaps not surprising. This was not designed as much as spontaneously growing out of the questions raised in the preceding study. A surprise to this author was the emergence of the fundamental importance of the second-person perspective as engagement and the compelling ethical nature of intersubjectivity , although such had been adverted by Levinas since 1947. Another surprise, among many through out these series of studies, occurred when closely reading Levinas and finding in midst of the studied indefiniteness of his poetic descriptive presentation some very definite and practical suggestions, perhaps imperatives, concerning maintaining one’s freedom and avoiding tyranny. It becomes intuitively obvious that the rich reality of a lived life cannot be captured and understood in any single dimensional perspective whether third-personal or other; that at least a three-perspective diffusion is necessary. It is suggested that there are other levels of experience which can only be accounted as we-perspectives related to varied levels of group solidarity and identity as suggested principally in the sociological literature.

11.1 Thinking Structured Experience

In the study of subjectivity, Seventh Study, Chap. 7, thinking and its relation with experience emerged as the center of pre-cognitive structure of subjectivity. Thinking in all the subsequent studies was, thereafter, either an implicit or explicit subject. This result may derive from the fundamental fact for psychology that: I think or that thinking of some sort goes on is demonstrated to be correct, as asserted by James. Further, it suggests that Descartes captured some truth when he proposed that man is primarily a thinking being; except that thinking was identified with the knower of third-person objective knowledge that and is part of that world. Kant shows that the thinker is outside the world that is thought, as elaborated by Castañeda.

Preceding experience, cognition, and thinking are the subjective structures that require intersubjective encounter. According to Levinas, a narrow slice of the subjective structures at and between being and cognition constitute the beginning existence of a person which requires an intersubjective encounter with an Other to continue existing. The event of encountering an Other propels experience, cognition, and thinking forward. Levinas insists that the compulsion to intersubjectively engage an Other makes possible and is the core of the existence of a person embodied in a physical body and who then can engage experience and thinking. Intersubjective engagement is thereby impelled, cannot be avoided, and which, for that reason, Levinas terms ethical. It is noticed that it is easy to misplace the emphasis on the ethical when the actual processual emphasis is on intersubjective engagement
(Ninth Study, Chap. 9). Levinas’s emphasis on intersubjectivity converges with Peirce’s similar emphasis on the intersubjective nature of human beings, and a denial of an individuality of a person. Peirce criticized James’s account of psychology in the Principles because it places too much emphasis on individual experience to an exclusion of intersubjective experience. This is not a fair appraisal of James; his concern was first-personal experience prior to second-person engagement not that he failed to appreciate the significance of a relation with an other. In this way he was similar to Levinas.

The self-aporetic has much to do with the inadequate or underdeveloped conceptual tools for apprehending what a self is and how it functions as an important part of being a person. That is, approaching the self solely through the lens of a third-person perspective excludes conceptual tools that allow us to fully apprehend the different aspects of self. There will always be a property of vagueness concerning the different aspects of self or selves, which are to be addressed in the perspective level that corresponds to the experience investigated. These few remarks at the conclusion of this series of studies are not meant as a review which is, at least meant to be, accomplished in each study’s integration with the preceding studies. It is suggested that these studies do point to a pragmatic turn for psychology.

11.2 Indigenous Psychology and Plurality

It is relatively easy, and also a mistake, to pass over too quickly the plurality principle presented by James (see 9.4.3.2). A question arising from the principle of plurality, an insistence on the significance of individual particularity, concerns the impersonality and generality of theoretical reason. The paradoxical question concerning a plurality principle is how general is it? As a contrasting principle to monism, James’s term for universally inclusive scientific views of the world, the plurality principle exhibits monistic characteristics. It is to be applied generally to grasp the richness of one’s living as it is lived. The gerund, living, is used to highlight the synchronic vertical richness of a life in the immediate present first-personal commitment.A recent movement at the beginning of this twenty-first century could be a direct extension of the idea of plurality, or in the minimum, a parallel concept, is Indigenous Psychology
(Sundararajan, 2019). This idea depends on one’s understanding of IP (indigenous psychology) as the concept is still fluid and developing. Indigenous psychology is an effort to recognize and acknowledge that the practical individual psychology of a particular culture is particular to that culture. It is the recognition that psychology in practice is specific to its local cultural practices and is decentered from the Euro-American or Global psychology. When Euro-American psychology is exported to indigenous or particular cultures the effort to understand a culture is constrained to norms and suppositions not natural properties of that culture, and in this constraining tension risks averaging out the unique characteristics of a local culture.

All generalization loses what is particular and individually unique to the richness of living in a particular indigenous culture in a similar manner James attributed to plurality and monism. The intention is to develop a meta-psychological science that can connect and acknowledge the legitimacy of a way of life, an indigenous psychology. I aver that James’s concept of plurality and radical empiricism anticipates the need to recognize the individual particularity of one person’s life in a local particular indigenous culture which one happens to be embedded. It is also noted that a first-person stand, terminology not used by James to recognize what he clearly describes, is a self-awareness, commitment to, and ownership of one’s experience which overlaps with the concept of indigenous psychology that extends the plurality principle. However, anticipates as used previously and suggesting that James anticipated the problem identified by the IP project may be misleading as his presentation of an intrinsic psychology (a pragmatic phenomenological psychology) inherently recognizes first-person participation to result in particular and unique experiences within an IP.

Plurality implies that living is messy with no clear pre-established mapping available when engaging a problem. Alternatively stated, any objective third-person understanding of a situational problem one engages becomes immediately obsolete as the immediacy of a new problem unfolds uniquely. Rather, he asserts a person feels their way through life aesthetically, as by taste. Abstract moral principles may emerge later on reflection as one seeks to learn from an experience. One’s immediately present experience always exhibits an uncertainty and messiness that may resolve as an experience slides into the past and becomes an object about which one can think. Plurality resists inclusion into larger more generalized views of reality in that the particular and unique information of a person’s experience when described objectively is averaged out and lost.

If IP is an attempt to retain the particular experiences characteristic of a person in a unique culture, it fits well within a plurality principle. The question then is how such an IP connects meta-psychologically with a more general global psychology? The conclusion suggested by the studies in this monograph is that the experience of a person of any particular indigenous psychology, can be fully apprehended only when diffused through relevant first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. For example, notice that in earlier discussions of IP, second-personal engagement did not emerge as a concern as it also did not emerge in the special issue of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology addressing IP (Sundararajan, 2019). Yet the proposition that emerged from the study of the Second-Person ‘We’ is that central to any community, no matter the culture, is second-person engagement: the basic structure of second-person engagement is universal.

This is an empirical question of significance. This proposition converges with the central theme running through Levinas’s corpus of the compelling intersubjectivity of all existing persons: the ethical constraint of all persons. How does second-person engagement reflect the indigenous culture in which it occurs? What is the nature of the second-person engagement in a particular culture and the resulting IP? Alternatively, is second-person engagement different in unique culturally suffused psychologies (different IPs), and if there is a difference, how do those differences vary? A recognition of the central nature of second-person engagement opens what might be an empirical test of an intact culture and its corresponding IP. It is suggested that indigenous psychologies may more productively be contrasted with characteristic second-person engagement patterns rather than contrasted with solidarity of emotional experience and expression. Second-person engagement generates the practical reasons directing a participants conduct. These practical reasons are likely to vary across different IPs in characteristic ways and provides for an empirical assessment. Reactive emotional experiences associated with the practical reasons governing conduct are likely to be characteristic of a particular locally unique culture.

One hypothesis, and an ideal, is that all particular IPs can interface harmoniously with a global meta-psychological science. The idea that all identifiable culturally unique local psychologies fit within a general global science. An open inclusive meta-psychological science is careful to acknowledge the idiosyncratic properties of local psychologies. This is possible only when it is recognized that particular and individualistic information is not captured by general principles which are intended to contain new learned information about the distant larger interrelations between indigenous psychologies. Information of this larger panoramic view, in turn, cannot be represented at a personal level of experience. A perspectival diffusion is the conceptual tool needed to discriminate between indigenous psychology and meta-psychological global psychology. Each of the basic perspectives are not commensurate with each other.

Second-person perspective requires a first-person commitment, but the information in the first-person perspective is not the same and cannot be contained at second-person perspective level. The processes corresponding to each perspective function separately and interdependently with the processes characteristic of other perspective phenomena and must be recognized uniquely and jointly. The same is true of third-person contrasted to second-and first-person perspectives; the information contained in each is unique to that perspective and the tension between them cannot be eliminated as the difference between any properly established category cannot be eliminated. One of the goals of the IP project, it seems, is to acknowledge the plurality characteristics of individual experience unique to a local culture. Said differently, a persons’s first-person participant unique experience of their culture is acknowledged. Uniqueness is not transmissable to other categories of perspective, other levels of perspective. The function of second-person engagement is to participate intersubjectively with others; the function of third-person objective perspective is to enlarge one’s understanding of the world, to learn so as to become aware of other IPs, for example, and to enable creative potential. It may be noticed by the reader that this description corresponds to a pragmatic phenomenology described by Peirce in a preceding discussion (10.3.2, Pointing to a Future).

11.3 Justice in a We-Perspective

Central to a second-personal engagement, a we-experience, is the interdefinable circle. Darwall describes the interdependent four properties he terms an interdefinable circle as authority, a valid claim, reason, and responsibility; each implies the others in a structured process that is a we-experience, a second-person engagement (Eighth Study, Chap. 8, Second-Person ‘We’). Second-person authority accrues in a dignity and respect of members of a community that are equal. A claim is the right of a member of a community who has been wronged to address the guilty person. The claim received by a guilty addressee becomes a reason, a practical second-person reason, to direct her conduct. The addressee, then, is obligated to perform the actions to correct and repair the infraction. These interrelated properties derive from the we-relation, a second-person engagement, of participants embedded in the normative infrastructure of their community from which they derive the original authority and responsibility to make claims regarding a moral transgression. The claim is made not to get even, tit for tat, or to punish, but with respect for the other person, oneself, and the community. The ethical question is how to treat others rather than following a supposed standard of behavior; ethical conduct is not following a predetermined map based on a principle, but a sensitive response to how one treats another person based on respect. This is similar to James’s description of plurality. To paraphrase an earlier statement, a community demands certain kinds of conduct from its members which no one has the right not to do. This brief description of the interdefinable circle assumes second-person competence. A person may not have achieved complete second-person competence which introduces other issues not addressed here (see 8.3).

An interesting comparison is with the account of social justice described by Nancy Fraser (2008) and cited by Thrift and Sugarman (2019). Is there a relation between second-person engagement as described and a phenomenon of social justice? If there is a relation, how is a second-person stand related to a third-person objective formulation of social justice? Recall that second-and third-person perspectival information differ and, thereby, are incommensurate. What is acknowledged to be incommensurate? Could social justice events occur in a context of a group identity that is a we-perspective with agential properties? The implication then is that a we-perspective supervenes on second-person phenomena which results in a group with agential properties and which belongs to a larger group community created by national or globalizing governing entities. In the context of experience, injustice or justice is a second-personal phenomena that is the first-personal experience of an individual. Individual experience of first-and second-person perspectives are mediated to be third-personal learning that recognizes similar experiences of others and which guides one’s future conduct. Further, one’s experience of injustice may not be recognized by the governing entity of one’s community, but, if it is, the injustice is formulated by impersonal principles of reason that only approximately matches one’s experience.

The distinction to attend to that which is propositionally true is not the same as correct conduct; truth is not the same as correct. Said differently, theoretical reason relating cause and effect relations are removed and distant from the immediate practical reason that directs one’s conduct affecting another person. Learning from an experience of injustice may result in the conclusion that a social institutional authority is required to enforce redress and which can be claimed of community governance. In contrast, the conclusion may be that one can only accept victimization and conduct their disenfranchised lives accordingly. According to Peirce, while an event, injustice in this instance, is experienced in first-personal privacy it is thought about in intra- and intersubjective dialogue in a space of public reason. This observation points to the entwining and interdependent relations of different perspectival levels.

Social justice phenomena occur in, or alternatively, supervenes on, a context of a group we-perspective that transcends second-person conduct from which the group we-perspective begins, or alternatively, supervenes. To state again, one’s experience of an injust, or just, events occurs in an immediate face-to-face second-person engagement and is a first-personal experience of a particular person and no other. What is learned from that experience is a third-person perspective that is objectively shared and thought about with other persons who as a group make the social arrangements required to obtain an acknowledgment and redress of the injust event. The claim of the injust event takes the form of a plurality of people of an identified group adequately significant to bring attention to the claim of injustice. Plurality as used here refers a number similarly motivated people to communicate and influence an adequate response to an injust event. The social institutions created to address and correct injustice, as emphasized by Levinas, are impersonal and constructed according to propositional logical reason of politics which lead to their own kind of imperious problems. In many respects, these are the kinds of problems addressed by Nancy Fraser in the Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (2008).

Competing representations for what social justice is, or even whether it is an appropriate consideration for the concerns of governance creates a chaotic environment with a spectre of incommensurability militating against an adequate conceptualization of social justice and especially against its practical implementation. One of the more glaring problems identified by Fraser is that justice issues are obscured by the fluid boundaries of the communities affected by justice-injustice issues that are secondary to globalization. Not only by the painful issues of forced migration of peoples by various forms of violence, but also by the transnational communities created by global organizations and corporations that become governing entities who indulge the ambiguity created by this situation by exploiting it to their advantage. Once aggregates people, that is, once communities are large enough neither self-interest nor universal benevolent principles of caring attend to situational outcomes that are just (see 8.8.3). It is proposed that a second-person stand in the context of a community becomes a we-perspective with group agent like properties in which social justice is continuous with the interdefinable circle that is the core of second-person engagement (Darwall, 2006, pp. 187–188; Rovane, 2004). Fraser recognizes the difference between theoretical and normative reason similar to, although apparently independent of, Kant (Fraser, 2008, l. 1060).[1]

In light of the interdefinable circle, what is required to secure justice is an authority to make a claim of injustice, an established claim is a normative reason to change or secure responsible organizational and institutional practices to address reparation. A normative reason is parallel to a second-person practical reason, but in a we-perspective setting of an identified community. One practical difficulty to be overcome is to identify the community of persons that are all-affected , using Fraser’s vocabulary. It is as a member of a larger community that authority to make a claim of injustice is conferred to a smaller constituent community. A plurality of community is created with communication among those with similar experiences. Fraser confronts this problem with three moves to identify a community or its equivalent. Fraser succinctly specifies three basic questions concerning justice: specifying what justice is in fluid ambiguous social environments, identifying who is experiencing injustice that needs correction, and how to implement practices of justice in a community. Fraser proposes identifying three principle social processes necessary to establish the members of a community, and thus establish the authority to make claims of injustice. The first is what she calls parity of participation that can address resource distribution inequalities that limits one’s ability to participate effectively, recognition as addressing identity prejudices such as racism, and representation or recognition so as to participate in decisions and policies of the community they live and which affects them. The second is an all-affected principle that moves toward establishing a community of those affected by general forms of injustices such as distribution, recognition, and representation. A third principle moves toward identifying the governing body, an international corporation or organization, referred to as an all-subjected principle that identifies those persons that constitute an identified group affected by the governing practices of the corporations-organizations which significantly constrains their lives.

Fraser’s assessment of the globalizing world is that the issues of the what, who, and how of justice practices is not going to be settled soon. The result is that issues of justice requires a continuous readjustment which she suggests could be termed reflexive justice
. In this move, justice becomes similar to Peirce’s definition of truth as what lies at the limit of an inquiry process and is always in the future. Truth is not closed as unchangeable until the last person is dead and no more inquiries are possible. Similarly, for Fraser reflexive justice is never a closed or permanently established practice as there will always be changes in the social environment that will require resetting the practices of justice. Fraser’s thinking provides a way to conceptualize social justice issues in this globalizing beginning of the twenty-first century. Her vision, even in the face of controversy, holds the promise of correctness that seems to fit intuitively. The social practices required to acknowledge and perform the responsibility of correcting injustice are less easy to discern. She suggests moving in the direction of cosmopolitan democracy that will need to resist proto-totalitarian seduction that all democracies seem susceptible. It can be well argued that a good example of the seduction of proto-totalitarianism is the United States in 2016–2020. Democracy is a space of public reason maintained by an established governance whose task is to maintain a balance between individual flourishing and stabilizing structure. Proto-totalitarianism refers to the fact that that balance is never static and will tend to authoritarian states.

The purpose of this section is to trace a connection between second-person engagement and social justice. All injustice is experienced first-personally and, in a we-perspective context of a group of persons, second-person intersubjectivity is translated to social justice through language and communication in a frame of the interdefinable circle. Social justice is a political issue which to say it is both theoretical and practical. The goal here is to trace psychological experience to an objective third-person description from which we can learn. The timeliness of an encounter with social justice issues is owed to the Thrift and Sugarman (2019) journal article from which derived an idea of comparing second-person engagement with Fraser’s description of social justice in a globalizing world is appreciated. I assert that the second-person intersubjectivity process, circumscribed as an interdefinable circle, is a counter part to the structure of the processes which secure social justice. That is, an authority to make a claim of injustice is derived as a member of the same community, a claim once made becomes a normative reason to guide social practices required to secure justice, which then establishes a responsibility to be performed by an institution or established normative practices of a community to secure justice. The intersubjective processes of a second-person stand are not identical to the political processes addressing justice because the perspectival levels hold different information: second-person and we-perspective are separate perspectival categories with the result that the information of each is different and not interchangeable to the other.

What we have traced here is the psychological movement beginning with first-personal experience, to second-person intersubjectivity , and to an increased intersubjective complexity of social justice practices of a we-perspective , a perspective of an identified group. This account is a useful conceptual context for continued psychological investigation and makes explicit psychology’s close connection with political science.

11.4 Some Concluding Observations

Reflecting on the self-aporetic suggests what appears to be a pragmatic horizon for psychology: a pragmatic turn for psychology. The usefulness of the perspective terminology implies that each identified perspective is an origin for the action emitted in the context of a perspective and a view of those actions effect on the external world. The first-person perspective has as its origin an I, the origin of a second-person engaging stand is a We-relation, the origin of a third-person perspective is a generalized other of the community one is embedded, the origin of a unified plural we-perspective is an identified group with the cohesive capacity to generate a view of a generalized other. Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase when describing objectivity as a “view from nowhere,” while making a point of the distinction between first-person experience and objectivity, is not correct. The view is from the perspective of a community-of-reason a person is embedded; the view of the generalized other of the community of reason. The origin of the objective view is, perhaps, more easily discerned in the context of perspective as a conceptual tool.

A dynamic contrast to the intersubjectivity in an external world is subjectivity of an inner world which receives and structures experience and thinking. The window of experience, if I may use this metaphor, is the first-person perspective that is continuously constituting the person. The point of perspective as a conceptual tool is to distinguish the properties of different experiences characteristic of a perspectival context. The different experiences of the lower categories suffuse to the ascending perspectives which function only in the context of the experiences of the lower perspectival categories. More explicitly, a second-person stand is only possible with an already structured first-person experience on which the second-person perspective then supervenes to a new context with different kinds of information. The back and forth movement between a person’s internal and external worlds is essential to what and who is a person who participates in the intersubjective processes of sociality that include reasoning. If the above outline seems tidy or presents closure on the self aporetic, such an impression is probably illusory. It is a property of reason, according to Levinas, to bring together facts that appears to bring a general closure that obscures important distinctions, James might say the pluralistic distinctions of the present experience. There does seem to be a clearer connection between psychological phenomena and what are human sciences generally. A current pragmatic frame shows clearer relations between psychology, sociology, aesthetics, ethics, political science, anthropology, communication, and logic that moves toward identifying them as human sciences. Peirce, however, considered psychology as a special descriptive science separate from what he classified as normative sciences of aesthetics, ethics, and logic. James, in contrast, insisted that psychology begins with a primary fact of “thinking of some sort goes on” or “I think.” What is important is that the perspectival origins, an I, a person, a community of reason, an identifiable cohesive group of influence are outside the world that is thought or that is influenced. To miss this fact, is wrong and leads back to a Cartesian impasse; although such an assertion perhaps carries with it some arrogance that is not intended.

Peirce asserts, as related by Colapietro, the main endeavor of psychology is to investigate the signs by which experience, thinking, and cognition generally proceeds; that is, investigate the related semiotic processes. For Peirce, the prime fact of a person is that she is joined to others through constant communication and continuous intra-and interpersonal dialogue. In agreement, Levinas’s entire corpus is an emphasis of this belief. Peirce agrees that a person can keep a modest number of facts about herself to herself, and that selfishness is a fact of a person’s life, but such separateness is a negation of personhood that reduces one’s resources to live life well (Colapietro, pp. 62–74; Tenth Study, Chap. 10). This is not to deny the importance of an inner world of a person that is elaborated by acts of inhibiting one’s conduct, and that a person moves between his inner and external worlds continuously. The inner world is like a private space that is bounded with the external world, and is important in developing self-control that is proportional to achieving autonomy. That is, Peirce held that one’s inner world is developed by acts of inhibiting actions and which moves one incrementally toward achieving self-control and corresponding autonomy. The difference between an animal and a person with first-person competence is the ability to inhibit actions that enriches one’s inner world and that results in a continuous incremental development of self-control. A self-centered acting alone produces chaos outside the space of public reason. With self-control is a proportional growing capacity for autonomous action.

There is a pervasiveness of semiotic processes that structures not only experience and thinking, but, also, that inheres in natural processes of nature. The basic phenomenological structuring of an object, the object’s sign to a person or other natural entity that establishes relations with other objects or entities, and the utilization of that relationship to effect a person’s experience or other natural process, or more simply, an object, sign, and interpretant. The utilization/interpretation that is an interpretant becomes a sign that refers back to the initiating object which stabilizes the semiotic process while the feeding the interpretation forward which opens to a future of opportunity, risk, and instability. The tension of the feed forward to a future marked with uncertainty and an undertow returning back to the original initiating object is the core of semiosis. There is a basic sensing which might best be described as quality
, a sensitivity to the existence of a real or mental object; the sense of quality gives way to an apprehension of a relation with oneself and with other real or mental objects; and which then gives way to a mediating experience of learning which is a relating and fitting of the object to the world and becomes knowledge. The semiotic process is a phenomenological structure of experience and is, then, pervasive and ubiquitous as phenomenology. Semiosis is a pragmatic phenomenology, it is a formulation of phenomenology in a pragmatic perspective, and as phenomenology is ubiquitous.

When a person, for example, hiking in the mountains encounters a clear rushing stream, it is perceived as pleasantly noisy clear water rushing between its rocky banks. Initially one may be impressed by the natural beauty of all the sensations coming together and seek to extend the appreciation of beauty: the refreshing sound of rushing clear water seen against a field of alpine flowers with the scent of fresh pure air, water, and flowers and the feeling of the ground and rushing water. All which are apperceived in its entirety of the present (sensing the qualitative beauty), and then one begins to notice the rocky banks, the shape of individual rocks, trees, the flowers, the grass as the relate to each other and the relation of stream to the left of the trail one is walking (the emergence of the signs respective to the objects perceived). The person may then relate the rock formation to geology and the aridness of alpine meadows that can be summarized as what she is learning from the experience (the interpretation and emerging interpretant). This relatively straight forward example illustrates the phenomenology of an experience consisting of a wholistic quality, the apperceived relations within that qualitative experience, and what is learned from experience and added to already achieved knowledge of the world.

These three properties (sensing, relating, and mediating) captures an experience in its wholeness, there is nothing left over; nothing that is not included in this experience. These phenomenological properties pervade reality, the real world. The semiotic properties of an experience proportionally vary depending on the kind of activity one is engaging. In a museum or a concert hall a person spends more time in a qualitative sense of an experience with an emphasis on the aesthetic experience of beauty, a musician participating in the concert will be spending more experiential time performing and analyzing musical mechanics of the relations of melody, key, tempo, the modulations, the kinds of harmony that is required to produce the music she is performing that is relational and creating signs that will move forward to an interpretant, an interpretation and utilization. Finally, as a historian and perhaps teacher, she relates these relations to the intricate relations of the history of the music to students that accentuates and extends an interpretant property of experience. This short description is meant to show how pragmatic phenomenology is semiosis, and the central importance of semiosis in continuing experience; therefore psychology.

This then is the frame of a pragmatic psychology. Such a framework will provide a direction for psychological inquiry and is a clearer description of different categories, or levels, of experience that occur in different perspectival contexts. Perhaps, one of the most important features is the account of intersubjectivity and individuality. The role of an individual is not only de-emphasized, the limited role of an individual is constrained to a first-personal commitment to intersubjective engagement. The person becomes a person intersubjectively, embedded in relationships with others. It is not likely that this presentation of a pragmatic psychology will be satisfactory to, for example, Kenneth Gergen who pursues a no-self/no-ownership kind of sociality. Charles Taylor may be somewhat more accepting of the emphasis on intersubjectivity as congruent with the his presentation of a communitarian society. It probably need not be said that pursuing a pragmatic horizon in psychology will not be without resistance. The general questions in the spirit of these inquiries concern the impact on psychology as a science and as a discipline.

References

1. Darwall, S. (2006). The second-person standpoint: Morality, respect, and accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2. Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Reimaging political space in a globalizing world (p. 240). Malden, MA: Polity Press. (EPub).

3. Rovane, C. (2004). What is an agent? Synthese, 140, 181–198.Crossref

4. Sundararajan, L. (Ed.). (2019, May). Special issue: Indigenous psychology: What’s the next step? Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39(2), 65–132. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

5. Thrift, E., & Sugarman, J. (2019). What is social justice? Implications for psychology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 39(1), 1–17.Crossref

Footnotes

1

Nancy Fraser (2008) reference is an epublication without page numbers. The cite includes l. 1060 to indicate l., the location, and 1060 the number of that location in the epublication.

Index

A

Action interpretant

Actor

ādhāra

Admirable ideal

Aesthetic processes

Agency

Agent neutral

alien

Alter-I

Alterity

American Psychological Association

Antipsychologism

Appraisal respect

āśraya

Autonomy

B

Behavior

C

Cartesianism

Categorical imperative

Caution

Claim

Claim right

Clinical psychology

Coerced behavior

Cognitive processes

Cognitive science

Cognitive transformation

Communication theory

Community personhood

Consciousness

Constitution view

Contextual sensitivity and dependence

D

Datum

Democracy

Dialogical self

Dialogical self theory

Dialogue

Dignity

Doxastic pedestal

Doxastic system first-person mind
nature of experience pulse of thought recruitment processes self-consciousness synchronic unity tagged sameness

E

Embodiment

Emotional self-control

Emotions

Empathy

Empiricism

Encyclopedia Britannica

Enlightenment

Epistemic warrant

Ethical conduct

Ethical intersubjectivity

Ethical narrative self-constitution (ENSC)

Ethical narrative thesis (ENT)

Existence and Existents

External thinking

F

Face-to-face encounter of other
responsibility

Fictitious self

Firstness

First-person perspective agency
assertion of constituted self constitution view emotion, consciousness experience of ownership higher level of reality intention dependent objects liberal naturalism objects of consciousness orientation
ownership causal model persons and selfhood perspectival maintenance emergent first-person natural science personal identity psychological kinds reductionism
scientific resistance second-person perspective physical embodiment practical realism reality
reflexivism
reflexivity
sciousness hypothesis self
self models
self-concepts SeeSelf-concepts self-constitution socio-cultural level of reality tension
underself
unity of consciousness

Folding back process

Folk psychology and science first-person perspective intention dependent objects liberal naturalism manifest view meaning
scientific naturalism self-concept

Forensic person

Formerly subjective

Freedom

G

Group personhood

H

Hard naturalism

Hearing

Heterophenomenology

Human person

Human sciences

Hypostasis

I

Idea of infinity

Idealistic monism

Identity
historicity
importance

Identityvs. self

Ideo-motor movement

Imagination

Immersion

Impersonal reactive attitudes

Indeterminacy

Index

Indexical reflexivity

Indexicals
alien
characteristics communication contextual sensitivity and dependence formed encounter language
linguistic
mechanisms
orientations/positions semantic
types

Indexing

Indigenous psychology

Individuation

Inner dialogue

Inner sense

Inner world

Intellectual invention

Intention dependent objects

Intentional causal model

Interdefinable circle

Interdefining circle

Interiority

Interiority-alterity

Interiorization

Interiorization process

Internal conversation

Interpretant

Intersubjective engagement

Intersubjective process

Intersubjectivism

Intersubjectivity

Intrinsic psychology

Introspection

I-positions

I-self

L

Levinas ethical philosophy

Liberal naturalism

Logical interpretant

M

Manifest view

Mead addresses

Mead asserts

Mead’s account

Mediation

Me-self

Mineness
constitutional view first-person first-person perspective SeeFirst-person perspective hard naturalism immersion
indexicals
liberal naturalism naturalism
participant
self-concepts See alsoSelf-concepts

Minisociety

Monism

Monistic reality

Moral actions

Moral conduct

Moral obligations

Moral perfection

Morality

N

Narrative Self Shaping Hypothesis (NSSH)

Narrative therapy

Naturalistic science

Near naturalism

Neo-Platonic duality

Nonrational/irrational

Noumenal

O

Object

Objective third-person

ONEself

Ontology

Opening of interiority

Organism

Ownership

Ownership causal model

P

Participant

Personal identity

Perspectival diffusion

Perspective

Phenomenal self model

Phenomenology

Philosophy of Arithmetic

Philosophy of science description
hard naturalism ontology
practice of science psychologism reality
recognition, intention and agency unified science

Pluralism

Pluralistic experience

Plurality

Political science

Post-modernist

Practical realism

Practical reasons

Pragmatic turn

Pragmatism

Primary kind

Principles of Psychology

Projective empathy

Psychoanalysis

Psychological conversation

Psychological health

Psychological inquiry

Psychological kinds

Psychological narrative

Psychological narrative thesis (PNT)

Psychological reality

Psychological science

Psychological self

Psychological testing and assessment

Psychologism

Publicly legitimated perspective

Pulse of thought

Q

Qualia

Quality

Quining

R

Radical doubt

Radical empiricism

Radical reflexivity

Rational institutions

Rationalityvs. reflection

Reactive attitudes

Reactive emotions attitudes
descriptions interdefinable circle

Real self views

Reality

Reasons

Reductionism

Reflection

Reflexive justice

Reflexivism

Reflexivity
consciousness external thinking feature ofIs
first-person reference holistic process indexical references indexicals
internal self internal thinking Is
levels
ONEself
self-aware nature self-awareness self-concept self-consciousness unity

Relational self

Relationship

S

Sameness

Science

Sciousness

Sciousness hypothesis

Secondness

Second-person perspective authority
autonomy
categorical imperatives characteristics conversation/shared activity dignity
empathy
exchange
first-personal plural perspective group action group intentionality human sciences ideal social environment imagination
interdefinable circle intersubjective gap intersubjective space intersubjectivism intersubjectivity knowledge about morality
morality/moral properties objective values political science presupposing felicity conditions psychology
reasons

SeeSecond-personal reasons rights
social behavioral intersubjectivity soft naturalism standpoint
unavoidable accountability SeeUnavoidable accountability we-experience SeeWe-experience you-me experience

Second-person standpoint

Second-personal reasons empathy
nonrational/irrational practical reasons professional relationships psychotherapeutic relationships reactive emotions theoretical reasons

Self
concepts and images dialogical
narrative

Self-alienation

Self-aporetic
indigenous psychology integration and individual unity intersubjectivity plurality
thinkingstructured experience
we-perspective

Self-aware nature

Self-awareness

Self-concepts

Cartesianism cognitive psychology emergentist version flame view
goal
good psychology heterophenomenology Indian theory individuating identityvs. ownership
individuation no-place view no-self kinds ownership
phenomenal self model physical environment psychological investigation real self views reductionist naturalism reductionist version role of ownership self exclusion self illusion social environment third-person science Trope theory

Self-conflicts

Self-consciousness

Self-constitution

Self-control

Selfhood
investigations literature
observations topographical terrain

Selfhoodvs. self

Self-Other-Self

Self-reflection

Self-reflectivity

Self-term

Selves
chasm
constitution view dialogue
goal
properties
radical objectivity reflection
self aporetic semiotic
SeeSemiotic selves Western conversation

Semiosis
abduction
action interpretant communication theory cultural conversation deduction
description
dialogical thinking doubt
first-person habit
hearing
heterophenomenology icon
idea
identity
index
interdefinable circle interiority
interpretant meaning
mediation
modes of being naturalism
object
otherness
phenomenological pluralism
priests of violence quality
reality
relation and reaction selves
SeeSelves sign
stability
subjectivity symbol
symbolic
teleological unfashionable verbal communication

Semiotic internal reflection

Semiotic object

Semiotic processes

Semiotic selves constitutional view emotion
external environment first-personal perspective ideal
mineness
reaction machine self and sign self functioning self-control synechism
thinking

SeeSemiotic structure of thinking

Semiotic structure of thinking characterization conversations description
dialogic form dialogical conversation integration
interpretant problem solving receptive passivity self
self model
self-awareness Self-Other-Self
verbal learning

Sensation

Sense and sensibility

Sense of warmth

Sensibility

Sign

Simulation

Social and cultural infrastructure

Social behavioral intersubjectivity

Social infrastructure

Social justice all-affected principle all-subjected principle chaotic environment claim
communities
democracy
description
dialogue
experience of injustice first-person perspective inner world
interdefinable circle intersubjectivity parity of participation perspective
plurality
political issue pragmatic psychology properties
psychology
quality
reflexive
rushing stream second-person intersubjectivity process semiotic processes social practices “view from nowhere”

we-perspective

Social selves

Sociocultural constructive processes

Soft naturalism

Subjectivity
alterity
caution
cognitive processes concept
description
doxastic matrix doxastic system experience
first-person perspective goal
hard naturalism hierarchical thinking indexical references indexicals
indicators
intersubjectivity intrinsic process intrinsic psychology mineness
monitoring and coordination noumenal
person in perspectives person/self
perspectival diffusion phenomenology properties and structures psychological diffusion psychological method psychology

Quining
radical doubt reflexivity
second-person engagements second-person perspective self-awareness self-consciousness sociality
structural processes structure of experience thinking

SeeThinking use
we experience

Sympathy

Synechistic pluralism

T

The Principles of psychology

Theoretical reasons

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Thinking
first-and third-person accounts indexical references intrinsic phenomenological I-strands
person/self
principles
reflexivity
SeeReflexivity sciousness
self-consciousness unity

Thirdness

Third-person perspective constituted self “conceptual self-understanding”

description

ONEself
personal identity we-experience we-perspective

Trope theory

U

Unavoidable accountability caring and relating categorical imperative desires motivate freedom of will one’s community practical reasons

Underself

Unified science

Unity

Unity of consciousness

V

Virtue ethic

W

We intentionality

We relation

Wealth of Nations

We-experience
action
addresser and addressee categorical imperatives claim
components
dialogical self doxastic pedestal emotions
empathic experience empathy
group-personhood intention dependent objects intentional principles interdefinable circle intersubjectivity liberal naturalism ME-YOU
moral conduct morality
object dependent presuppositions public reason reactive attitudes relational self second-person perspective second-personal context second-personal standpoint social behavior third-person objective unconditional accountability unconditional obligation

Welfare of human beings

We-perspective self-aporetic social justice See alsoSocial justice third-person perspective unified plural

Western intellectual tradition

Y

You-me experience