The Enduring Significance of the Minimal Phenomenological Self: Disclosure & Subjectivity

Abstract

Certain recent influential commentarial trends - predominantly philosophical, but adaptive to the findings of current neuroscience and theoretical psychology - seek to extrapolate a coherent, foundational account of the first personal nature of experience as constitutive of “self-hood” in a so called “minimal” sense. Such research professes a strict adherence to a 1 very specific interpretation of key classic phenomenological sources. What is questionable, we shall suggest, is the controvertible need to identify reflexivity, envisaged in largely neo-Sartrean terms, as the apparent locus for so-called “minimal” self-hood. Reflexivity so envisaged - as a first-personal, non-positing, self-givenness and qualitative “mineness” - is claimed to represent a “dative of manifestation,” a minimal experiential structure that is argued to underwrite other derivative accounts of “self-hood” across the disciplines. Principally by means of re-examining certain source texts, our enquiry aims to critically engage and challenge this thesis. To this end we propose to thematise and interrogate the direct equation Heidegger makes in Being & Time (and elsewhere) between Dasein (human being) and disclosedness: “To say that [Dasein] is ‘illuminated’ means that as Being-in-the-world [Dasein] is cleared in itself…in such a way that it is itself the clearing….Dasein is its disclosedness.” Building on the phenomenological research of Husserl, 2 Heidegger positions his account of the subjective field as essentially disclosive in terms of a retrieval and restoration (as he sees it) of the classical conception of truth as alêtheia, or “unconcealment.” We shall thereafter consider the extent to which an analogous interpretation of disclosedness may also be found in the phenomenological work of Sartre. Despite their conspicuously divergent terminologies and agendas, we aim to demonstrate that Sartre’s conception of the subjective field, or consciousness, as a fundamentally disclosive “decompression of being” converges in significant and illuminating ways with Heidegger’s account of Dasein as a disclosiveness “in-the-world.” We argue that selfhood in its most originary, “minimal” sense is thus most convincingly conceived in terms of a recurrent, historical “event” of unconcealment and “self-constitution” - always in and through the achievement of an intelligible and meaningful world. As we shall see, both thinkers reject a substantivized conception of the self (as a bearer of predicates) - including the idea of a minimally substantivized “dative of manifestation” - in favour of a view of the self as the process or “event” of being disclosed. Precisely in these terms, Heidegger and Sartre may both be said to envisage the subjective field as a foundational “event,” or “space,” of disclosedness itself.