Rocío Garcés / The paradox of (self-)reflection and alterity

cfs-blog-rIt is a commonplace in the philosophical literature of the XX century to consider that the phenomenological method of reflection is a kind of internalism or introspection. This is so partially due to the fact that reflection is the process whereby consciousness directs its intentional aim at itself, thereby taking itself as its own object. In this regard, reflection appears to be a higher-order act that reifies a state into a sort of mental item. Or to phrase it differently: reflection — as King Midas’ golden touch — turns all that which it reflects upon into an object, and thus subjectivity into a form of self-objectification. As a consequence, reflection paradoxically leads to an infinite regress.

However things are not as simple as they seem at first glance: neither the phenomenological method of transcendental reflection is a sort of psychological introspection, nor the self-objectification is its major problem. What is really at stake here is the very possibility of phenomenology according to Husserl’s principle of principles. As is well known, this principle stated that phenomenology is supposed to base its considerations on that which is given intuitively in the phenomenological reflection. The crucial question is therefore whether intuition and reflection manage to apprehend the self-manifestation of subjectivity as such.

All these perplexities notwithstanding, my postdoctoral research project during my stay at the Center for Subjectivity Research deals with the possibility to reformulate this paradox from Dan Zahavi’s interpretation of prereflective self-awareness and Husserl’s later works on inner time-consciousness and affection. The question that immediately emerged hereof was the following: to what extent may the prereflective dimension of affection contribute to widen the intentional model of reflection? And what is more: in which sense might affectivity (understood as self- and hetero-affection) be a prereflective extension of intuition, or a prereflective givenness of life itself?

The paradox of self-reflection could also be named as the paradox of reflective self-awareness. In this sense, the reflection model of self-awareness operates with a self-division between the reflecting and the reflected. And since the aim of reflection is to overcome such division, self-awareness is the result of considering both moments as identical. But given that the reflection theory of self-awareness concedes priority to intentionality and involves a subject-object split, we are then confronted once again with an infinite regress; or alternatively, as the defenders of the higher-order theory suggest, we are compelled to accept some nonconscious starting point.

Strange though it may seem, not all types of consciousness are intentional or object-consciousness. On the contrary, one way to halt the infinite regress and to reformulate the paradox of self-reflection has been exemplary undertaken by Dan Zahavi in Self-Awareness and Alterity (Northwestern UP, 1999), and this is the possibility of prereflective self-awareness. According to him, being prereflectively self-conscious does not amount to be aware of oneself as an object; rather, my prereflective access to myself in first-personal experience is immediate, passive, unthematic and nonobjectifying.

What we have as a result is a pervasive mode of self-acquaintance in terms of self-affection, which entails a basic self-manifestation preceding and motivating reflection. Here is by no means at issue a pure self-presence — for self-manifestation always occurs in the form of an impressional sensibility —, but an equiprimordial self- and hetero-manifestation. So what the cogito discloses is not any self-sufficient identity as much as some openness toward alterity, a dynamic restlessness or a movement of perpetual self-transcendence. And hence reflection manifests itself, so Zahavi cogently claims, as a process of “self-othering”.

But at the same time we are facing what it may be called the paradox of the paradox; namely: the impossibility to ensure an apodictic evidence of this prereflective givenness, or the impossibility to thematize the structures of the prereflective functioning life through reflection. When all is said and done, we find out that it is about a paradoxical phenomenology of the invisible; about of “something” manifesting itself in its elusiveness and inaccessibility, as when we experience the self-givenness of the Other. Exists then a “profound analogy”, as Zahavi himself concludes, between reflection and empathy. In both cases it is about a “phenomenon” that demands an extended definition of phenomenology, beyond act-intentionality and object-manifestation.

To be honest, I came to Copenhagen with the firmly purpose of finding a reformulation of the paradox of self-reflection in Husserl’s later works on temporality and affection, and in a few days I will go back home having found instead a new fruitful analogy that eventually could give me a clue to better understand this paradox. I discovered it reading Husserl’s Crisis text. While tackling the paradox of human subjectivity, he draws the following analogy between self-temporalization as de-presentation or recollection, on the one side, and alterity or empathy on the other:

“Self-temporalization through de-presentation [Ent-Gegenwärtigung], so to speak (through recollection), has its analogue in my self-alienation [Ent-Fremdung] (empathy as a de-presentation of a higher level — de-presentation of my primal presence [Urpräsenz] into a merely presentified [vergegenwärtigte] primal presence). Thus, in me, ‘another I’ achieves ontic validity as copresent [kompräsent] with his own ways of being self-evidently verified, which are obviously quite different from those of a ‘sense’-perception” (Hua VI, 185).

It seems as if Husserl were making a virtue of need when mentioning this analogy related to self-reflection. But, actually, he found a possible solution to the paradox of human subjectivity in transcendental intersubjectivity. All in all, even if the most fundamental self-manifestation of subjectivity — or the anonymous functioning life — cannot be given intuitively, the first-person authority, the question of self-responsibility and the method of reflection are never abandoned by him. The first-person perspective is situated instead in the intersubjectively constituted life-world.

And the Center for Subjectivity Research has definitely provide me the opportunity to experience by myself how significant is this first person and at the same time intersubjective perspective of phenomenology. Overall thanks to all those others that have made me manifest, with their projects, papers, comments and questions, the relevance of sharing actions, atmospheres, attention, emotions, empathy, intentionality, perception or reflection.

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