Center for Subjectivity Research

The Self, The Other, and The Mirror: Merleau-Ponty revisited

Dan Zahavi

Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication

University of Copenhagen

Julian Keenan

• “Where in the brain is the self?”

• “Where am I? The neurological correlates of self and other”

• The Face in the Mirror: How we know who we are

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Facial self-recognition

• Right frontal lateralized activation for self-face recognition

• Right hemisphere model of self-awareness

• Mirror self-recognition

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Gallup’s interpretation

• Passing the mirror mark test testifies to mirror self-recognition

• This provides empirical evidence for the presence of conceptual self-awareness

• Concept of self

• Litmus test for the presence of consciousness

• Creatures incapable of passing the mirror self-recognition task are mindless

Keenan

• Self-awareness = higher-order consciousness and metacognition

• Self-awareness = consciousness

• Higher-order representational account of consciousness

• Absence of mirror self-recognition correlated with absence of other self-aware behavior

• Mirror sign

Problems

• Underestimates the complexity and variety of self-experience• Why should mirror self-recognition

presuppose a self-concept?• Why should mirror self-recognition be linked

to introspection• Why should creatures who cannot pass the

mirror task lack conscious experiences?

• Kinesthetic feedback

• Different kinds of mirror self-experience (Amsterdam)

Perfect match vs. new knowledge

• Identity of the observer and his reflection

• Self-identity is presupposed

• To recognize one’s mirror-image is to cease responding socially to it

The Child’s relation with others

• Sorbonne lectures

• Substantial philosophical investigation of the self-other relation

• Criticism of argument from analogy

• ”The perspective on the other is opened to me from the moment I define him and myself as conducts at work in the world.”

Merleau-Ponty

“since at the same time the other who is to be perceived is himself not a ‘psyche’ closed in on himself, but rather a conduct, a system of behavior that aims at the world, he offers himself to my motor intentions and to that ‘intentional transgression’ (Husserl) by which I animate and pervade him. Husserl said that the perception of others is like a ‘phenomenon of coupling’. The term is anything but a metaphor. In perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled, resulting in a sort of action which pairs them. This conduct which I am able only to see, I live somehow from a distance. I make it mine; I recover it or comprehend it. Reciprocally I know that the gestures I make myself can be the objects of another’s intention. It is this transfer of my intentions to the other’s body and of his intentions to my own, my alienation of the other and his alienation of me, that makes possible the perception of others.”

Undifferentiation

• The ego and the other are not in possession of absolute consciousness of themselves

• The perception of others becomes comprehensible if one assumes that there is an initial state of undifferentiation

• The child is initially unaware of itself and the other as different beings

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Mirror self-experience

• The mirror furnishes the child with a new self-presentation

• Facial features

• Bodily gestalt and unity

• Objectification

• Self-spectator

• The mirror permits the child to see itself as it is seen by others

Merleau-Ponty

“At the same time that the image makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. I am no longer what I felt myself, immediately, to be; I am that image of myself that is offered by the mirror. To use Dr. Lacan’s terms, I am “captured, caught up” by my spatial image. Thereupon I leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the first outline. In this sense I am torn from myself, and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others. For others have only an exterior image of me, which is analogous to the one seen in the mirror. Consequently others will tear me away from my immediate inwardness much more surely than will the mirror.”

Merleau-Ponty’s account

• Mirror self-experience as a troubled form of self-knowledge

• The felt me has an exterior dimension

• I see myself as if I was an other

• The me I see is distant and yet close, me and alien

• Embarrassment, confusion

Theory of Mind

• The ability to process information about other minds rests upon the ability to process information about one’s own mind

• Conceptual self-awareness is a precondition for both mirror self-recognition and the ascription of mental states to others

• Tomasello: to develop a self-concept the child must be able to adopt the perspective of the other on itself

Merleau-Ponty

• Denies that the recognition of a visual representation of one’s own face counts as the paradigmatic and fundamental instance of self-experience

• Disputes that facial self-recognition is as socially and culturally impoverished as it has often been made out to be.

• To recognize one’s own mirror-image is not to cease responding socially to it.

Rochat

• More children touched and removed the mark when they were the only one with it

• When everybody was marked, children showed more hesitation in touching and removing the mark

• Social conformity

Non-human animals

• Is human mirror-experience identical to non-human mirror-experience?

• Magpie’s conceptual repertoire

• We need more complex as well as more leaner accounts of mirror-self-experience

Does Merleau-Ponty offer what we need?

Problem I: The mirror and others

• Mirror self-recognition > objectification of body > self-other differentiation

• “the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others”

• Is mirror self-recognition a condition of possibility for the awareness of the attention of others? Or is it perhaps rather the other way around? Or should one refrain from positing any clear connection

• Developmental issues – blind people – people with autism

Problem II: Deep anonymity

• “The solitude from which we emerge to intersubjective life is not that of the monad. It is only the haze of an anonymous life that separates us from being; and the barrier between us and others is impalpable. If there is a break, it is not between me and the other person; it is between a primordial generality we are intermingled in and the precise system, myself-the others. What ‘precedes’ intersubjective life cannot be numerically distinguished from it, precisely because at this level there is neither individuation nor numerical distinction” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 174).

• Wallon: there is an initial confusion between me and the other, and the differentiation of the two is crucially dependent upon the subsequent objectification of the body (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 120).

The issue of difference

• How should we understand the notion of undifferentiation?

• A lack of an explicit recognition of difference?• Is the very distinction between self and other

derived?

• Criticism of panpsychism and its denial of the individuation of consciousness.

Insurmountable solipsism in PP

• Even if I perceive the grief or the anger of the other in his conduct, in his face or hands, even if I understand the other without recourse to any ‘inner’ experience of suffering or anger, the grief and the anger of the other will never quite have the same significance for me as they have for him. For me these situations are displayed, for him they are lived through (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 415).

• There is an insurmountable solipsism that is rooted in lived experience (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 417).

• Although I am outrun on all sides by my own acts, and submerged in generality, the fact remains that I am the one by whom they are experienced. In the end, Merleau-Ponty even refers to the indeclinable I (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 417).

Self and other

• Self and other are equivocal concepts. It makes little sense to make claims regarding their respective relation (interdependence, independence, priority, equiprimordiality, etc.) unless one specifies what notion of self, and what notion of other, one has in mind.

Husserl – a classical phenomenologist?

• “self-consciousness and consciousness of others are inseparable” (Hua 6/256)

• If there were no thou, there would also be no I in contrast to it (Hua 13/6)

• The I is only constituted in contrast to the thou (Hua 13/247)

• “According to our presentation, the concepts I and we are relative: the I requires the thou, the we, and the ‘other.’And furthermore, the Ego (the Ego as person) requires a relation to a world which engages it. Therefore, I, we and world belong together” (Hua 4/288)

• “The other is the first human being, not I” (Hua 14/418).• The absolute I is […] an ego that is wrongly so called, since

for it an alter ego makes no sense (Hua 15/586)• The absolute I of the reduction is unique in a way that rules

out multiplication as meaningless, for which reason it cannot be an ego (among many) (Hua 15/589–90)

• When it comes to the peculiar mineness (Meinheit) characterizing experiential life, this aspect can be understood without any contrasting others (Hua 15/351).

Social constructivism

• The social origins of the subjective sense of self • “it is the experience of one’s current internal

states being externally ‘mirrored’ or ‘reflected’back through the infant-attuned contingent social reactions of the attachment environment that makes it possible to develop a subjective sense and awareness of one’s primary affective self states” (Gergely, 2007, p. 60).

• It is the fact that the caregiver behaves as if the infant is already in possession of subjective experiences which serves as the mechanism by which the infant comes to acquire subjective experiences.

Social constructivism

• Subjectivity and selfhood relies on, and is maintained in, various discourses on subjectivity (Prinz 2003, 515).

• Indeed on his account selves are sociocultural constructs rather than naturally givens.

• Human beings who were denied all socially mediated attributions of self – like, say, the famous case of Kasper Hauser – would lack a self, and consequently remain unconscious zombies (Prinz 2003, 526).

Rejecting the strong anonymity thesis

• It doesn’t solve the problem of intersubjectivity, it dissolves it

• Intersubjectivity needs differentiation, needs a plurality of selves.

• Subjectivity and intersubjectivity

• Phenomenology as a heterogenous tradition (Husserl, Stein, Scheler, Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Schutz, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas)• Visibility and invisibility• Anonymity vs. face-to-face encounter• Similarity, co-existence, interdependence vs.

irreducibility, alterity, transcendence

Thanks for your attention!

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