The Subject in Question by Priest Stephen

Author:Priest, Stephen. [STEPHEN PRIEST]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2011-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

To be sure, the I manifests itself as the source of consciousness. (51)129

If ‘x manifests itself’ implies ‘x appears phenomenologically’ then it is doubtful whether Sartre’s position may be understood consistently. After all, he has argued so far that the phenomenological findings are incompatible with the Husserlian view of the ego as the ‘source’ of consciousness. For this reason it is better to read ‘manifests itself as something like ‘is easily taken as’ or ‘is easily believed to be’. Then we may read Sartre as criticising a recurrent tendency in modern philosophy to reify the self into a subjective source of consciousness despite the fact that this is not how the self is directly given to consciousness. Not only Husserl, but Descartes, and on certain readings Kant, are guilty of this reification.

Sartre does not produce a reason why philosophers have been systematically misled into postulating an irreducibly subjective ego as the ‘source’ of consciousness. If that is not how the ego appears to consciousness then it is puzzling that the mistake should have been made.

Sartre’s account is however easily supplemented by linguistic considerations adduced by Kant, Wittgenstein and Ryle. The public use of ‘I’ by whoever uses it to denote whoever uses it is carried over into a private metaphysical use as the name of a purely psychical ‘owner’ of consciousness, as though because no physical self appears as the subject of consciousness there must exist a non-physical self as a kind of proxy. Because the self is not a physical object it must be a nonphysical object.130 It is argued by Ryle in The Concept of Mind that Cartesian dualism does not have to be true in order for our ordinary psychological vocabulary to be meaningful.131

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