[C] [Wittrs] Evans and Wittgenstein on the Self
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The Subject of Consciousness
© C.O. Evans
Chapter 5
The Experiential Self - 5.4.10
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4. A Defence Against Some Objections
[10] I now come to the difficulties facing the theory which immediately
threaten to overwhelm it. In the first place it might be objected that it is
nonsensical to translate 'I have an experience' as 'Unprojected consciousness
has an experience'. This at once disqualifies the theory since to be successful
a theory of the self must be able to offer an intelligible analysis of such
sentences as 'I have a pain in my arm' and 'I am swimming'. But if the self is
equated with unprojected consciousness, this would seem to commit us to the
absurdity that one sphere of consciousness could 'have' another
-page 174-
sphere of consciousness, and even worse that it could 'have' a swim.
Consequently the theory fails, since it does not permit us to say that a self
has experiences, or engages in actions. A corollary to this objection would
consist in pointing out that although it makes no sense to say 'I have a self',
it makes perfectly good sense to say 'I have an unprojected consciousness'.
Once again this proves that the self and unprojected consciousness cannot be
identical.
In the second place it might be objected that the theory is incoherent in
that unprojected consciousness is itself said to be composed of elements, and
they too would require a self whose elements they were. But, on the theory, no
self exists to which the elements comprising unprojected consciousness could be
ascribed. Thus after all the theory is unable to escape postulating
experiential elements which are subjectless.
Lastly, it might be objected that the theory fails in that it cannot
account for the persistence of the self through time. This it cannot do because
it is not only possible but likely that from time to time the entire content of
unprojected consciousness will be replaced, and that would mean one self
replacing another just as often as that happens. In short, the theory may be
allowed to succeed in accounting for the unity of the self at an instant, but
it is powerless to account for the continuity of the self through time.
Of these objections I shall leave the last until the next chapter since
the issues it raises will be investigated there. Nevertheless it is my
contention that in the last analysis all the objections originate from a
failure to distinguish the self-approach from the persons approach. 148 They
essentially consist in putting persons-approach questions to the self-approach,
and arguing for the incoherence of a self-approach theory on the ground of its
inability to handle such questions.
The objections are based upon what it does and what it does not make
sense to say in ordinary language. At the level of ordinary language,
statements about unprojected consciousness if understood as statements about
persons become paradoxical. The reason for this quite clearly has to do with
the fact that the conceptual scheme we use presupposes that we are talking
about persons, as distinct from subjects of states of consciousness - where it
is characteristic of our talk about persons that we are concerned with
questions of identification. Now in terms of a subject's
-page 175-
enjoying a particular experience, there is no question of his either
identifying himself to himself, or of his referentially identifying his
experience to himself. Such issues simply do not arise when one is concerned
exclusively with one's own case. It is for this reason that Geach is quite
right when he points out that when a person is thinking to himself about his
own experiences there is no need for him to denote the subject by using the
personal pronoun 'I' and no need for him to describe an experience he is having
as 'mine'. 149 In other words, in self-address ascriptive language can have no
logical point.
But if we do use the personal pronoun, then we are doing more than
referring to the subject as he experiences himself as being. By using the
personal pronoun one draws along with it the entire conceptual scheme for the
use of ascriptive language. In short, one presupposes the concept of a person,
as Strawson has shown. This means that the identification of the subject with
unprojected consciousness is not the same as the identification of the referent
of the personal pronoun 'I' with unprojected consciousness. It is for that
reason that any such substitution is nonsensical. In sum, we have here the
explanation of the fact that the self-approach is characterized by a refusal to
treat the subject of inner experience as the referent of first person
sentences.
This reasoning would still seem to allow, however, that the 'I' as person
could be said to possess an unprojected consciousness, whereas it would still
make no sense to say that 'I' as person possess a subject. The reason the
latter statement is nonsensical is that a person is a subject and something
more. That is to say, the concept of person is logically more complex than the
concept of subject, and is logically dependent on the latter concept. It
therefore needs to be shown what is odd about the sentence, 'I (as person) have
an unprojected consciousness.' If this statement is meant not only to identify
the person who makes it, but also is meant to individuate a particular
unprojected consciousness then we must understand the unprojected consciousness
as 'put forth' by attention. In order to be able to refer to a particular
unprojected consciousness it must already have drawn some attention. The
ascriber of the unprojected consciousness could not otherwise report its
existence. But this is ex hypothesi impossible. We can conclude that the
statement 'I have an unprojected consciousness' considered as a report of a
state of consciousness is meaningless.
-page 176-
If my thinking is on the right lines, we are in a position to understand
why so many philosophers have maintained that the personal pronoun 'I' does not
refer to an inner subject. We can also understand why they should have been led
to conclude that since the 'I' refers to a publicly identifiable person, the
search for some other referent for the word 'I' is out of place. In fact all
that this proves is that for purposes of communication we require no notion
other than the notion of a person as a publicly identifiable particular. It
does not prove that there is no subject of experience, and it cannot establish
that the awareness of being such a subject is delusive.
Now although on the self-approach there is no need to refer to the
subject of states of consciousness because it is not concerned with the problem
of communication with others, someone who is philosophically minded might wish
none the less to describe his experiences to himself in such a way that the
description brings out the structure of experience in its exhibition of a
subject over against an object. If he simply described his experience as, say,
'this toothache now' his description would fail to do justice to the fact that
the toothache is 'put forth' from the self, and stands over against the self.
He would have an overpowering reason for wanting to use a personal pronoun, and
describe his experience as 'my toothache' or 'the toothache I am having' in
order to bring out the subject-object duality of the experience. But he would
not want to do this in order to identify the subject: there would be no
question of that. What he wants is something with which to symbolize the
subject of consciousness in contrast with the toothache that is predicated in
the description. Now if the personal pronoun cannot do this because its
function is exclusively an identificatory one, some other expression would have
to be chosen to symbolize the subject. Now for those philosophers who have not
been aware of the need to see the personal pronoun as essentially belonging to
ascriptive language about persons, there seemed no reason why the personal
pronoun should not be used to perform this symbolizing function as well. They
have thus asserted that the "I' refers to a subject other than the public
identifiable person. This has, I believe, been one of the strongest
considerations in favour of the Pure Ego Theory.
In order to supply a token which can be used to symbolize the subject of
consciousness let us choose the token I. This would enable us to bring out the
subject-object duality of consciousness in the descriptions we give ourselves
of our experiences in the form
-page 177-
I have an experience X'. In such a sentence the I has no identificatory
use: we are considering its use exclusively in self-address.
This distinction between the ordinary language use of 'I' and the
philosophical use of 'I' to symbolize the self is, I suggest, what Wittgenstein
was driving at in his Cambridge Lectures of the early thirties when he was
reported by Moore as saying that the word 'I' is used in 'two utterly different
ways'. 150 In one of its uses the 'I' denotes a possessor, in its other use it
does not. I suggest that we can understand his distinction between the 'I'
which denotes a possessor and the 'I' which does not, as being equivalent
respectively to the identificatory 'I' of ordinary language, and the
symbolizing 'I' of philosophical description. It is obviously 'I' in the latter
sense which is the origin of the 'no-ownership' theory of the self. If my
interpretation of this use of 'I' is correct, then indeed the symbolizing 'I'
does not 'own' its experiences, but the point has no mysterious or
counter-intuitive implications. In essence the 'I' which denotes a possessor is
the 'I' of the persons-approach, and it belongs to ordinary language. The 'I'
which does not denote a possessor is the 'I' of the self-approach, and it is
not an ordinary language term.
Wittgenstein made a further remark about the meaning of the word 'I'
which suggests intriguing parallels to the theory I am developing. As Moore
reports:
In speaking of these two senses of "I" he said, as what he called a
final thing", " In one sense 'I' and 'conscious' are equivalent, but not in
another", and he compared this difference to the difference between what can be
said of the pictures on a film in a magic lantern and of the pictures on the
screen; saying that the pictures in the lantern are all "on the same level" but
that the picture which is at any given time on the screen is not "on the same
level" with any of them, and that if we were to use "conscious" to say of one
of the pictures in the lantern that it was at that time being thrown on the
screen, it would be meaningless to say of the picture on the screen that it was
"conscious". The pictures on the film, he said, "have neighbours" whereas that
on the screen has none. 151
This could be interpreted as an illustration of the theory I have arrived
at. Whether it should be so interpreted is difficult to say.
-page 178-
But I understand Wittgenstein's analogy to mean that the pictures in the
magic lantern represent the 'I' which is identical with 'conscious', in
contrast with the picture thrown on the screen which is not 'conscious' in that
sense. The analogy suggests, does it not, that the pictures in the lantern
stand for unprojected consciousness, and the one on the screen stands for the
experience which is detached and 'put forth' as an object of attention. Not
only that, but the suggestion that all the pictures in the lantern are
'neighbours' expresses my thought that unprojected consciousness contains a
plurality of undifferentiated elements in contrast to the unity of the object
of attention. If I am right, then the 'I' which is identical with 'conscious'
is the 'I' which does not denote a possessor: it is the 'I' of the
self-approach. It is more than likely that Wittgenstein has expressed the
essential vision that lies behind the theory I have constructed. If I am
interpreting him correctly then the authorship of the idea for the theory
belongs to him, and that I would be happy to acknowledge. I must confess,
however, that I had to arrive at the theory independently before I was able to
understand Wittgenstein's obscure words.
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Footnotes
148. See above, pp. 19-26.
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149. See above, p. 23.
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150. G.E. Moore, Philosophical Papers (London, 1959), p. 310.
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151. Ibid.., p. 310.
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