The Subject of Consciousness

C. O. Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317851714
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. This is Volume VI of seventeen in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology series. Written in 1970, this work is an exercise in constructive philosophy, looking at the subject of consciousness and a theory offered as an explanation of self-awareness.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

[1] Two distinctively different philosophical issues have usually been discussed under the heading of personal identity. One concerns itself with our knowledge of the identity of persons other than ourselves, and the other concerns itself with self-awareness. Although the expressions ‘personal identity’ and ‘self-identity’ have commonly been used interchangeably by philosophers, I would like to suggest that there is point in reserving the first expression to describe the problem of the identity of persons, and the second to describe the problem of self-awareness.

Many philosophers would not agree that there are two different problems involved. In this introduction I try to make out a case that there are. If there were a difference between the problem of personal identity and that of self-identity, it would follow that the two questions, (a) What is a person? and (b) What is the self? are different questions and not merely different formulations of the same question.

It might be thought that what makes the two questions different is not the use of the word ‘person’ in (a) and the word ‘self’ in (b), but the use of the indefinite article in (a) and the definite article in (b). Were this the case it would be possible to make the two questions identical by the simple expedient of using the indefinite article in both. With this I would concur. But the significant point is that we cannot use the definite article in both cases. The sentence ‘What is the person’ is ungrammatical.

It will emerge in due course that there are more powerful reasons for refraining from posing the problem of self-awareness in terms of the concept of a person. At this point, however, all that needs to be pointed out is that the nature of self-awareness has been a preoccupation of philosophers and their curiosity about self-awareness is not satisfied either by knowledge of the identity of other persons or by knowledge of the criteria on which such knowledge is based. It is less misleading, therefore, to phrase the problem ‘Of what are we aware in self-awareness?’ in terms of the question, ‘What is the self?’, than it is to phrase it in terms of a question about persons. Furthermore the question ‘What is a person?’ leaves it open whether or not the reader himself is included within the class of persons. This is not left open with the question ‘What is the self?’ For that question is one which the reader must address to himself if he is to understand it. The question pragmatically implies token-reflexivity – it becomes for each reader the question, ‘In what does my identity as a self consist?’

Many of the best philosophers writing today on personal identity would strongly resist an attempt such as this to insert a wedge between the concepts ‘person’ and ‘self’. Indeed they would prefer to avoid the word ‘self’ altogether, and discuss the problem exclusively in terms of the word ‘person’. Their approach is based on the contention that there is no distinction between identity in one’s own case and identity in the case of others, and hence that an understanding of the identity of persons in general is eo ipso an understanding of one’s own identity.

It needs to be pointed out, however, that this contention could not even be stated unless each of us knew that he was a member of the class of persons. This would give rise to the question of what entitles us to make this knowledge claim. It would be tempting to say that it is analytically true that persons and persons only are able to raise questions about their own identities. The trouble with this move is that it makes it impossible to equate persons with human beings, because it must be left at least a logical possibility for a being other than a human being to raise the question of self-identity. But I shall let that pass.

The approach just alluded to – let me call it the persons-approach – is part of a programme of deliberate reversal of the traditional approach to epistemology. The tradition emanating from Descartes was to begin an epistemological enquiry with one’s own case, and, from that starting point, arrive by inference at knowledge claims about things apart from oneself. However, philosophers have since come to believe that many of the insoluble problems of knowledge can be traced back to the premiss that one must start with one’s own case. From their point of view, therefore, the suggestion that the problem of one’s own identity is distinct from the problem of the identity of other persons appears to be a regression to the unfortunate method of starting with one’s own case.

It is fear of such regression, I believe, that has made philosophers wary of references to the self, and has caused them to see the problem of personal identity as primarily a problem of the identity of other persons, and only derivatively a problem of self-identity. According to the persons-approach we learn all there is to know about self-identity by understanding in what the identity of other persons consists.

The persons-approach has been very successful, and the philosophy of personal identity is one area in which definite progress has been made. Philosophers would therefore have good cause to be suspicious of the apparent re-introduction of a distinction which threatens this hard-won progress. I hope to show that the distinction I have in mind poses no such threat, and that the recognition of a separate problem of self-identity leaves intact the progress made in our understanding of personal identity. I shall in fact be arguing for an even stronger claim than this: namely, that the two problems are complementary and that only when both problems have been solved will we have an adequate understanding of our own identities.

If I am right about this, then a solution to the one problem must not contradict the solution to the other problem. That is to say, an answer to the question ‘What is the self?’ must not contradict the answer to the question ‘What is a person?’ Furthermore, an answer to the first question must not be thought to supply the answer to the second question and vice versa. I wish to stress this because it rules out any attempt to arrive at a theory of personal identity by reverting to the traditional method of starting with one’s own case. Once it is realized that the distinction between person and self has no such implication, nothing is lost in at least allowing the distinction to go forward for the sake of argument.

The problems of personal identity and self-identity can only be logically separate from each other if the identity sought is different in the two cases. I shall argue that this is indeed the case.

The concept of identity is a difficult one to understand at the best of times, and this difficulty is added to in discussions of personal identity because identity is apt to be confused with identification. In answer to the question ‘Which is it?’ we provide what I shall call referential identification. In answer to the question ‘What is it?’ we provide what I shall call sortal identification. (I shall not be concerned at the moment with a third type of identification in which we answer the question ‘Whose is it?’ by providing what may be called possessive identification.) It is clearly the case that successful referential identification will give us some broad knowledge of the sort of object identified. It can reveal whether the object in question is a physical object, an animal, or something less solid like thunder and lightning. The relevance of this point is brought out by Shoemaker who notes:

‘To say what sort of criteria we use in making judgments about the identity of objects of a certain kind is to say something, often a great deal, about the nature (essence, concept) of that sort of object. Thus it is that the problem of personal identity is a problem about the nature of persons.’¹

It must nevertheless be insisted that referential identification has a different logical function from sortal identification.

[2] The persons-approach connects personal identity with questions of identification. Its method is to reach sortal identification through a discovery of the conditions necessary for successful referential identification. Its point of view is exhibited in the question, ‘What must we take a person to be if we are to achieve successful referential identification of persons (as we are)?’ It would follow on this approach that if referential identification of persons depended on identification of their bodies, then we must take a person to be at least a bodily x. This would lead to a consideration of such questions as, ‘Is it sufficient to take a person to be a certain body, or is such a sortal identification incomplete?’

I have said enough for it to be evident that the persons-approach is primarily concerned with the identity of other persons and only derivatively concerned with the identity of one oneself. This is inevitable once referential identification is made the key to personal identity. For in normal circumstances none of us makes either a referential or a sortal identification of himself to himself. It is only to others that we referentially identify ourselves. Thus even when we do refer to ourselves it is only because we are obligated to consider ourselves in relation to other people; it is for their benefit that we make identifying references to ourselves. To say that I can identify myself to myself is as absurd as it is to say that I can introduce myself to myself. (The sense in which one discovers who he is following amnesia is not in question here.)

To the objection that we do seem to make identifying references to ourselves in soliloquy (when there is no question of identifying the speaker to hearers) the correct reply is that we continue to use public language in soliloquy (for want of a better), but that in soliloquy the referring expression ‘I’ is not used for the purpose of identification. I leave it open here whether the personal pronoun has any function at all in soliloquy, or is simply redundant as Geach maintains.¹ Moreover from a logical point of view soliloquy is conceptually more complex than dialogue, so the former should be explicated in terms of the latter.

The persons-approach attempts to tell us what we must take ourselves to be. It aspires to be theoretical knowledge of what we are, and its attempt to find out what we are is an attempt to fit us into the scheme of things; to explain in what respects we are like and in what respects unlike other things such as material objects, organic entities, fanciful robots, and spiritual beings (granted there are such). It is an attempt, in short, to locate us among the furniture of the world.

Another aspect of the persons-approach needs to be stressed, because its implications do not seem to have been fully appreciated by those who adopt it. It should lead to an account of what we have reason to take persons to be, and should not lead to an account of what we know persons to be. We do not know that persons are what we take them to be apart from supporting philosophical argument. I cannot, in other words, have immediate knowledge – knowledge not based on argument or evidence – that I am one of the following: a mere body, a pure ego, a bundle of perceptions, a non-spiritual substance, or a unique type of basic particular. It would be odd for a philosopher to say that he knows that he is nothing but a body, but at least intelligible for him to say that he takes himself to be nothing but a body. It is conceivable that I know that I am a person without knowing what a person is, but I may take a person to be any of these things. Thus I understand the problem of personal identity to be the problem of what to take ourselves to be, provided the qualification is added that the conception we form of persons permits persons to make referential identifications of one another.

Enough has now been said about the problem of personal identity for a meaningful contrast to be made with what I have suggested should be regarded as the separate problem of self-identity. As persons we are aware of each other, but we are also aware of ourselves. We possess self-awareness. The problem of self-identity, then, is the problem of the identity of the self of which we have this awareness. For those philosophers for whom the persons-approach exhausts the problem, self-awareness of necessity reduces to the possession of the concept of oneself, or to the having of an idea of oneself.¹ And this concept of necessity reduces to that of a person. Apart from the dubiousness of the latter equation, however, it cannot be denied that it is prima facie implausible to interpret awareness of something as an idea of something. Normally an awareness is taken to be experiential in a way that an idea or concept is not. Thus ‘I am aware of myself’ contrasts with ‘I have a concept or idea of myself’. The dilemma facing philosophers who adopt the persons-approach is that given their refusal to consider one’s own case, the only analysis of self-awareness open to them is the reductive analysis in terms of which being aware of oneself is having an idea of oneself.

What needs to be recognized is that in addition to having an idea of what we must take ourselves to be (personal identity), each of us also has the experience of being a self. It is with this experience that we are concerned when we deal with self-awareness. On this basis I have reserved the description ‘the problem of self-identity’ for the problem of ascertaining in what the identity of the self consists of which we claim awareness. And I have given the name ‘the self-approach’ to the method that I take to be the right method to employ if we are to reach a solution to the problem.

Of course it is possible on the persons-approach to deny that we are aware of ourselves in any sense not covered by their analysis. Persons-approach philosophers may claim that the so-called self-awareness is nothing more than the self’s recognition that his experiences are his experiences; that the awareness of being a self just consists in having experiences of this, that and the other kind. However, on this view it is not ruled out in principle that an experience of the sort I have been discussing could feasibly be had. Rather it presents a challenge, i.e. to produce an experience of the appropriate sort. It may be read as corresponding to Hume’s method of challenge.² Such a move may preserve the consistency of the theory, but, I claim, experience just does not bear it out. If no other explanation of self-awareness was forthcoming, then one might have little option but to accept this interpretation. However, there is I believe an alternative, and my aim is to put forward a theory of self-identity that is based on the experience each of us has of being a self.

What the persons-approach seems to ignore is the awareness we have of ourselves and with it our knowledge that we have this awareness, which I shall call our native knowledge of the self.¹ Knowledge of what we take the self to be is not such knowledge. Whereas the latter sort of knowledge is theoretical and hence propositional in nature, native knowledge of self is non-theoretical and non-propositional; it is the knowledge we have of a self because selves are what we ourselves are. In short, it is experiential knowledge of the self.

I shall try to give a preliminary indication of the nature of this native knowledge we possess. Such knowledge can be reached by a consideration of the relation between a self and his experiences. For grammatical reasons I shall refer to the self as the subject. I do so because we cannot speak grammatically of ‘the self of experiences’, or ‘the person of experiences’, whereas we can comfortably speak of ‘the subject of experiences’. Now most philosophers, when they refer to the relation between a subject and his experiences, have a special vocabulary for the purpose. Among the variety of expressions used to describe the relation in question are the following: ‘belonging to’, ‘owning’, ‘having’. Alternatively the experiences are said to be ‘experiences of a subject’, ‘states of a subject’, ‘predicates characterizing a subject’, or ‘experiences ascribed to a subject’. I list these expressions because I would like to make the point that these expressions are most naturally understood from a third person point of view. They are not the most apt expressions we can find to disclose what is true in our own cases. When we come to the relation between ourselves as subjects and our own experiences, the experiences appear as experiences to the subject. The subject ‘undergoes’ an experience, ‘enjoys’ an experience, ‘suffers’ an experience, is ‘aware of’ an experience, and so on. In sum, from the subject’s point of view, experiences happen to him.

This distinction between on the one hand an experience being an experience of a person and on the other hand an experience being an experience to a subject is central to an appreciation of the distinction between the persons-approach and the self-approach....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orignal Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. CONSCIOUSNESS
• 3. ATTENTION
• 4. UNPROJECTED CONSCIOUSNESS
• 5. THE EXPERIENTIAL SELF
• 6. YESTERDAY’S SELF
• 7. BODILY EXISTENCE
• INDEX