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Continental Philosophy Review 34: 339–351, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

I-ness and otherness:A review of Dan Zahavi’s Self-awareness and Alterity

JAMES G. HARTDepartment of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405-2601, USAE-mail: hart@indiana.edu

1. Overview of the book

Because this book1 addresses in an exemplary way the foundational issues inphenomenology I must rank it among the most important works in the post-secondary generations of phenomenology.

The foundational issues center both around the issue of the phenomenalityof phenomena as well as the condition for the possibility of phenomenologyas a science of the appearing of what appears. Further, the book has to do withhow phenomenology can be a discipline carried out on the basis of first-per-son experience and reference when reflection eo ipso has to do with what isavailable as an object and therefore something in the third-person, i.e., it hasto do with what is given to the reflecting I whose lived reflecting is not itselfsomething given in the third-person. For Zahavi (especially 190ff.) it is a“harmless impasse” that reflection cannot apprehend the anonymous life inits very functioning. Reflection merely “lifts” or surmounts the naivety of pre-reflective experience; it does not reproduce it. Phenomenology avoids thepitfalls of either substantializing its subject matter or resigning itself to a sub-ject matter based on a “regressive deduction” or postulation.

Thus Zahavi holds for a tertium datur and this has its parallel in the waythe Other remains for essential reasons transcendent and yet it is given andexperienceable. As the experience of the Other remains essentially transcendentand, although experienced, never an experiencing of the Other as the Otherexperiences herself, so the anonymous lived functioning I-life remains sucheven though reflection can show the difference between the lived and theunderstood.

It seems to me that we all make use of this parallel when we use the “quasi-indexical,” “he himself” (H.-N. Castañeda).2 When I say, e.g., of RobertSokolowski, that “He knows that he is the author of Presence and Absence,”I express my knowledge of another mind in its intentionality but do not ex-

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press my conviction that Sokolowski is self-aware of his intentional life inthe way I do were I to say: “He knows that he himself is the author of Pres-ence and Absence.” In the former case Sokolowski might be suffering fromamnesia and “he” in the subordinate clause might refer to someone else otherthan the one to whom the subject of the sentence (Sokolowski) is referring orhe (Sokolowski) might be thinking that Derrida is the likely author of a bookwith such a title and he has not realized that the editors had given the title tothe manuscript he just submitted to them without yet informing him.

The quasi-indexical, “he himself,” expresses nicely Zahavi’s parallel be-tween the reflective knowledge of the lived anonymous functioning life ofconsciousness and the second- and third-person knowledge of the essentiallytranscendent Other insofar as it reveals our achievement in the third-personof a knowledge of first-person self-awareness which is different from the third-person awareness of ourselves by ourselves or by others. It is not that thespeaker knows, in the sense of has, Sokolowski’s own self-experiencing whenhe uses the quasi-indexical, but that he knows (in the third-person) thatSokolowski is having inherent first-person experiences. “He himself” indi-cates that he (Sokolowski) pre-reflectively experiences himself knowing andit indicates that this knowing is essentially different from the fallible reflec-tive and objective forms of self-knowledge Sokolowski has of himself, e.g.,that he has authored books, and also from the fallible knowledge of Sokolowskithat is of an intersubjective nature, e.g., that he swims regularly at the univer-sity pool, that he is over six feet tall, etc.

This book also is an indispensable piece of spadework for the ultimate, i.e.,ontological, questions that surface when one attempts to talk about the prin-ciple that enables the appearing of what appears to come forth and what it isthat brings to light all bringing to light and how one would go about showingthe phenomenological thesis of the inseparability of being and display. Andfurthermore, if this principle is, in some sense, self-awareness, then it is anipseity and has the unusual property, like the world, of not being within theworld, not an entity, not an object, but rather, as Husserl says of world, “ex-ists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it.”(Hua VI, p. 146; cf. Zahavi’s discussion of Husserl’s BI 15, at 164ff.). Finally,if that which is the condition for all bringing to light does not easily arrangeitself within the spatial-temporal world which it brings to light, then we comeup against the difficult question of how this, i.e., self-awareness, may be re-lated to its apparent necessary physical conditions, foremost the brain. Eventhough Zahavi’s work has rich dense discussions of all these issues he him-self would be the first to admit that his work here is preliminary, if indispen-sable, spadework. Rather the focus of this book is on the prior nitty-gritty

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phenomenological issues as they are related to first-person reference and self-awareness’s unique mode of manifestation in its internal complexity.

The key question is whether the conditions for the possibility of manifes-tation manifest themselves. Clearly what is actually manifest in the world maybe said to fulfill the possible condition of intelligibility or manifestability. Andthe manifest world itself, as that ultimate horizon within which anything ap-pears and due to whose mediation whatever appears appears the way it does, isalso evidently functioning with a filled condition. Therefore these conditionsmay be said to appear as filled. And, unless we are committed to a doctrine thatconditions are necessarily hidden, these conditions may be said to appear as filledin the actuality of appearings – even though there is more to be said about thedifferent ways in which they appear, how they are founded with respect to theanonymous functioning subjectivity, and how what appears has the power tobe ecstatic to itself in the sense that it is capable of an esse intentionale.

All these issues are inseparable from the condition of the functioning in-tentionality of mind as precisely the power to bring to light, to manifestation,what appears. But does this condition itself manifest itself? Zahavi addressesthe two basic alternative answers to this question. Either it does not manifestitself in actu and therefore it is not conscious, not manifest, until there is an-other, second-order, reflective act that brings the spontaneous first-order oneto light. In this case, that of which we are conscious is an object for an inten-tional consciousness; there is no self-awareness prior to our becoming objectsfor ourselves. Or: There is a unique kind of manifestation that is not a mani-festation of. . . to---, not a result of a reflecting second-order act, but rather aself-manifestation that is prior to all acts. And, assuming the correctness ofthe latter alternative, it is not only the case that the life of the mind has thisprior pre-reflective self-awareness, but, furthermore, there could not be anymanifestation of. . . unless that to which the manifestation occurred were it-self immediately self-aware. This to which appears what appears is not anappearing to anything else but is a “self-shining,” self-manifestation.

Zahavi’s book shows that this is a thesis, in spite of some bumps in the road,of Husserl as well as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Henry, and others. Heidegger,Levinas, Derrida, and others, flirt in a principled way with what may be consid-ered a version of “the reflection theory”: Some sense of the other (to self-aware-ness) is given a primacy in bringing about self-awareness. The HeidelbergSchool, especially the work of Dieter Henrich and Manfred Frank, also presentsa strong critique of the reflection theory of self-awareness. Furthermore, majoranalytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, e.g., Chisholm, Shoemaker,Castañeda, Anscombe, Nagel, and McGinn, have wrestled with this issue andbecause they have recognized the same circle of problems, Zahavi sprinkles

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his presentation of the phenomenological camp with considerations from bothcamps, as well as the Heidelberg School, to make philosophical points that,in a general sense, may be regarded as phenomenological.

The sense in which analytic philosophy does phenomenology when it isinvolved with certain issues of philosophy of mind might, for some readers,be a sub-text of this book. (Castañeda once said that philosophy is done in thefirst-person for the first-person).3 Zahavi’s beginning chapters review how theachievement of “I” is infallible, immediate, non-criterial, and non-inferential.At the most elementary level this is to show that unless I am aware of myselfin a non-perceptual, non-identifying, and non-criterial way I cannot recognizethat that object in the world, which I can refer to in the same way as othersrefer to me, is me myself. If I am known only as an object in the third personthere can be no emphatic sense whereby I claim: That there is mine; let alone:That one there (in the mirror, being described, etc.) is me myself. This is notonly to distinguish what “I” refers to from any worldly, third-person referencebut also to indicate how second- and third-person reference or knowing re-quires first-person awareness.

Furthermore, here the phenomenological theses that (a) the ineluctable self-awareness as the condition for intentionality and (b) all spatial-temporal as-pects of things imply a reference to the lived body, merge with the analyticthesis that third-person perceptual reference coincides necessarily with indexi-cal reference and this with self-reference. “. . .perception is itself an indexi-cal form of experience. It presents me with an object which, to use [David W.]Smith’s phrase, is ‘actually now here sensuously before me.’ ”4 And althoughour identifying reference to a particular might itself not be something iden-tified through a demonstrative indexical reference, i.e., something sensiblypresent, still the identification of this non-experienced particular might wellbe through a demonstrative indexical reference. “But if a demonstrativereference implies self-awareness, all other types of reference depending upona demonstrative reference must imply self-awareness as well.” (p. 25).

Entertaining the atomic structure of sulfur does not entail self-awarenessin the way “that irascible bee over there is heading this way” does. But con-sider that transcendental phenomenology itself claims an implied self-aware-ness in our world-involvement only subsequent to the reduction, i.e., only whenit attends to what appears in its appearings of. . . to--- (e.g., the atomic weightof sulfur, 32.064, appears atemporally to no-one in particular and free of per-spectives on the basis of an act of idealization by me or us – or them, when I,or we, believe them); that is, it does not claim that the transcendental I is auniversal coincidental theme in the natural attitude’s presentation of everytheme whatsoever.

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Along the way, Zahavi has occasion to point out some of the weaknessesin many of the thinkers from whom he has learned much. For example, “dieHeidelberger” make two errors in spite of successfully showing that mostphilosophers are burdened with the “reflection theory” of self-awareness, i.e.,they show successfully that because, for the reflection theory, it takes an actof reflection to bring to light the self as agent of the act, and the act itself; i.e.,because this act transforms the subject and act into objects for the subject andits act of reflection, these latter remain essentially unknown and non-mani-fest as lived and therefore the reflection theory of self-awareness is a theoryof non-self-, i.e., non-egological- or non- first-person-awareness. Yet the “dieHeidelberger” seems to offer merely a via negativa in regard to what self-awareness itself is: We learn more what it is not that what it is. Dieter Henrich’seventual acknowledgment that self-awareness is not merely a primitive phe-nomenon but enjoys a rich complexity whose inner constitution, however,cannot be understood by us is countered by Zahavi’s banquet of analyses ofthe complex interior’s constitution in terms of temporality, self-affection, em-bodiment, and self-othering. Although these discussions draws on the majorphenomenologists of the first three generations, Zahavi’s own contributionsare often stunning.

The second error of “die Heidelberger” is their persistent reading of Husserlas an adherent to the reflection model of self-awareness. In this view, espe-cially as argued by Manfred Frank, but also by Henrich and Tugendhat (see53ff.), Husserl persistently operated with a model of self-awareness based uponthe subject-object dichotomy and never discovered a prereflective awareness.Zahavi gathers numerous texts to show the contrary. We will return to someof these issues soon.

Zahavi has learned from Michel Henry (see, e.g., p. 115) that much phi-losophy has been burdened by “ontological monism,” i.e., the claim that in-tentionality’s disclosure of objects is the sole form of manifestation. The properunderstanding of self-awareness (“auto-manifestation”) requires recognizinga unique form of manifestation that is distinctive from “hetero-manifestation.”But Zahavi shows that Henry tends to neglect, in spite of important textspointing to the contrary, the inseparability of auto-manifestation and hetero-manifestation, ipseity and alterity. As this book is true to its title, i.e., it showsthat alterity is inseparable from the ipseity, so the book is, to a great extent, anelaboration of its epigraphs: “The question is always to understand . . . howthe presence to myself (Urpraesenz) which defines me and conditions all al-ien presence is at the same time a de-presencing (Entgegenwaertigung) thatcasts me outside of myself.” (Merleau-Ponty). And: “In sensory experience Ialways experience myself and the world at the same time, not myself directly

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and the Other by inference, not myself before the Other, not myself withoutthe Other, not the Other without myself.” (Erwin Straus). Henry, on the con-trary, “operates with the notion of an absolutely self-sufficient, non-ecstatic,irrelational self-manifestation.” He never shows us how such a subjectivity isin possession of an articulate inner temporality, how it, at the same time, isintentionally involved with what is other than itself, how it can be in posses-sion of “a bodily exteriority,” how it is able to know other selves, and howreflection as a self-division is possible. Zahavi treats us at length to just sucha study. Because this brief review cannot possibly do justice to Zahavi’s treat-ment of these issues I will concentrate in the next section on what doubtlessare relatively small aspects of these fully orchestrated themes.

2. Special contributions and questions

(1) Zahavi insists, as did Brough and Sokolowski earlier, that Husserl’s “in-vestigation of inner time-consciousness is nothing apart from an investiga-tion into the temporality of prereflective self-awareness.” But perhaps the mostpersistent version of the reflection model of self-awareness is one made evenby some Husserlians. In this view, the primal impression itself is a blind spotand the primal flow itself is self-aware only through the Laengstintentionali-taet of retention and protention. Zahavi makes a rich contribution here insorting out the issues and calling attention to relevant texts that demonstratenot only is the primal flow not first aware of itself by objectifying itself butthat the primal impression itself is self-luminous. (See pp. 52–86; especiallythe text on p. 86).

(2) Of special interest for many Husserlians is Zahavi’s critique of a reign-ing interpretation of Husserl’s theory of self-awareness as it is rooted in theawareness of inner time, i.e., the awareness of the temporality of the flow ofacts and sensa. Zahavi admits that the well-known theory as first put forwardby John Brough and Robert Sokolowski can find support in various Husserliantexts. And Zahavi seems to agree with these pioneers that Husserl’s positionis that the awareness of inner time is identical with pre-reflexive self-aware-ness. For this reigning interpretation Husserl’s third-level of absolute con-sciousness (a “layer” or “dimension” more basic than objective time and thetime of the stream of acts and sensa) is what accounts for the awareness of thestream by constituting the temporality of acts and sensa. Besides the tempo-rality of objects in the world, there is the temporality of the stream; at thebasement there is the awareness of this stream. Zahavi’s problem is that thisview suggests that we are aware of the stream through a kind of genitive of

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appearing. Thus self-awareness is ultimately absolute consciousness’ marginalawareness of the stream. In which case there would be a kind of intentional-ity and we would border on the reflection theory of self-awareness. The actsand sensa are not self-luminous but rather are something of which we are awarethrough another level, absolute consciousness. And yet this capacity of theabsolute level to disclose the inner temporality of the stream itself is self-shin-ing; it itself is not in need of a more ultimate level.

Zahavi asks: Why can’t we say that of the acts and sensa? Why do we notacknowledge that the acts and sensa are self-aware, self-luminous; why dowe need to posit self-luminosity for only the absolute level? Is this not anexcessive duplication of awarenesses and a reifying of consciousness. Afterall, we are trying to account for how, in our being taken with something in theworld, our being taken with, our intentionality, itself is something self-aware,not something of which we are (also) concomitantly aware. Zahavi holds thatwhat Husserl means by saying that the intentional act is constituted in innertime-consciousness is not that it is brought to givennness by another part ofsubjectivity but that the act is “brought to givenness thanks to itself.” (p. 71).

One of the motivations for the Brough-Sokolowski reading surely is thatthe awareness of inner time itself is not in time; Zahavi would presumablyhandle this by saying that the immanent self-luminosity of acts itself, althoughconstitutive of the inner temporality, is not itself temporal even though the actsare temporal. If the acts are temporal and the self-manifestation non-tempo-ral, do we not move back toward Brough’s and Sokolowski’s interpretation?(Clearly here the very notion of “levels” and “dimensions,” or “parts of sub-jectivity” surely needs to be thought of in terms of moments and not pieces;but this of itself does not answer Zahavi’s question).

Yet the temporality which is here constituted is that of the duration and thestretched out character of the flow. If this is so then it would seem that theawareness of the duration (not merely of objective “clock” time which wouldbe a form of measuring by an enduring worldly standard external to the meas-ured worldly motion) of the world would be the result of the awareness of theacts and sensa by which we know the world. We would not know directly theduration of worldly objects but know this duration only via the awareness ofacts and sensa; this duration would then be somehow extended to the world.But it is evident that we have direct knowledge of the duration of the objectsof the world. (A good part of the studies of inner time-consciousness as wellas of passive synthesis demonstrate that this is a condition for our having anyknowledge of change, motion, and objective clock time). Therefore therewould seem not to be an identity between, on the one hand, the constitutionof the elemental duration and temporality of whatever object or dimension (the

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stream as well as worldly objects) and, on the other hand, the pre-reflectiveknowledge of the acts and sensa. In so far as both the Zahavi and Brough/Sokolowski interpretations make an essential link between inner time-con-sciousness which is essentially knowledge of duration and self-awareness ourdirect knowledge of the duration of the world would seem to pose a problem.

Yet we may recall that the primal impression is also a primal-sensing thatis not to be identified with the sensed (see p. 118); as such it is an awarenessthat is constitutive not only of the duration of acts but it also, as the sensing ofthe sensed (the being-impressed of the impression), is constitutive of the du-ration of sensa/impression. Because the primal impression (a being impressedthat is a time-constituting awareness) is a sensing it is always at once consti-tutive of ipseity (sensing’s and/or the acts’s self-manifestation) and the im-pression/sensed/hyle, i.e., the duration of alterity and eventually of worldlyobjects in the world. I think this formulation is congenial to the positions ofboth Zahavi and Brough/Sokolowski. In this view the primal impression as aprimal sensing is the self-luminosity of the stream of acts and “sensa”; it istherefore at once constitutive of ipseity and alterity. And we further see thatthe sensa are acknowledged to be sensed immanently; and so likewise the actsand the elemental world-involvements are sensed, empfunden, bewusst, erlebt,etc. Zahavi asks: Do we need another “layer” to account for this? Perhaps onlyif the features of this primal sensing, retaining, and protending, e.g., its non-beingness, unique uniqueness, non-temporality, and non-spatiality, can andmust become a theme. Acts and sensa enjoy a different kind of being, tempo-rality, spatiality, etc. than does the primal awareness of them.

(3) The basic thesis on the interrelation and interdependence of ipseity andalterity receives a special foundation in the discussion of auto-affection andhetero-affection. Husserl’s theses that all egological activity presupposespassively being affected, that any attending-to presupposes something affectingserving as the motivation for the attending-to and making sense, that I canreflectively turn to myself because I am already affected by myself, etc. arenicely worked out (116ff.). Zahavi, I believe, shows implicitly (he does notexplicitly enter into this discussion) that there is a certain short-sightednessamong Gurwitsch and those following him who wish to abolish “every dif-ferentiation between a hyletic affection and an object manifestation” becauseit is doubtlessly true that “our sensing is already an openness toward the world”and the sensum cannot be any sort of immanent worldless content. This viewis shortsighted in two respects. The first “mundane” respect is that it remainspossible, e.g., “to distinguish hearing an increasing loudness and hearing anapproaching object, feeling a pain and feeling the prick of a needle” (p. 120).Also, it also remains possible, I would like to add, e.g., to recall the medita-

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tive moment where the focus on a corner of the table dissolved itself into anundifferentiated massive affect of color and no longer presented itself to be acolored corner of anything; or to recall waking up in the night now knowingwhere one is and, while faced with the not-yet differentiated darkness, havingto wait until the apperceptions kick in that, e.g., I am staying at a friend’s house,the dresser is there, and the bathroom is over there. Whereas the hyle remainsunderdetermined and never itself any thing apart from the interpretative appre-hending, there is no justification for a hegemony of the Auffassung or elimina-tion of the hyle as a mere non-phenomenological postulate.

Secondly, the view is shortsighted because it does not attend to the deep-stratum of hyle which is constitutive of self-awareness. Husserl clearly statesthe I is dependent on and penetrated by alterity in the form of hyle (p. 118).Whereas this can be taken to refer to the affection exerted by worldly objectsas act-transcendent identities there is the prior affection exerted by preonticalunities presenced in the primal impression (p. 117), i.e., the temporal phasesand unities of the wordly hyle. Here the primal impression along with reten-tion and protention are understood to constitute the immanent Erlebnis oraffections of the stream of acts and sensa, which serve as the motivation forreflection; but they also, as I earlier suggested, are what constitute our aware-ness of worldly durations.

Zahavi (p. 121) rightly takes Husserl’s important C 10, 15b manuscript onthe two basic sources of the constitution of what is, namely, my primal I asfunctioning in its affections and acts, and my primal not-I as primal stream oftemporalization, to be a support for the thesis on the inseparability of ipseityand alterity and the fissure in consciousness. This test must also be seen asarticulating the transcendental I as a whole with these two Urgruende as ab-stract moments of what ultimately is one and inseparable. That is, here thehyletic is my primal stream of temporalization constituting the original im-pressions or affections upon which the primal egological source acts. This“non-egological” principle or form of alterity is still a moment of the tran-scendental I! Alterity here is still radically immanent. But that precisely isZahavi’s point: Ipseity in its inmost core is in and of itself pervaded by andinseparable from alterity. At the heart of I-ness there is a fissure that involvesthe presence of otherness.

(4) Self-awareness as self-affection is also wonderfully orchestrated inZahavi’s discussion of self-awareness as embodiment. Self-awareness isshown to be inseparably embodiment (as kinaestheses), temporalization, self-othering, and self-affection. He revives the Landgrebe thesis (p. 126) that “inthe hyletic affection we are confronted neither with an objective world norwith a wordless subjectivity but with their prior unity.” This means at least:

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“I am not kinaesthetically aware of the moving object; rather, I am kinaes-thetically aware of my own body and am thereby able to perceive the motionof the object.” (p. 99). This is taken to mean that the essential role kinaesthe-ses play, as the fundamental self-affection of our embodiment, make of thetranscendental foundation an “I-am-here-now” (p. 126). Yet as the foundationof temporality is itself not in time so perhaps one might say that the I-can/Imove is not in space. The lived body precedes the perceived body (p. 104)and this sense of spatiality and temporality is not coincident with the perceivedNows or Heres; indeed, it is constitutive of them. And the I here of course isnot “an I.” (Cf. 164ff.). And if being or what exists is what is for conscious-ness, for the I, then there is something meontic about the I. Thus there is anodd, i.e., unique transcendental sense to “I-am-here-now” as the transcendentalfoundation (and transcendental “prefix”) for all worldly constitutions (andsubordinate clauses that might follow the intentional verb, as “I [being-here-now] think that. . .).

(5) One of the most stunning among numerous brilliant discussions is Za-havi’s wrestle with the various senses and gradations of egoness (egocentric-ity) present in self-awareness. As is well known, Sartre and Gurwitsch, as wellas Husserl of the Logical Investigations, held for an egoless view of conscious-ness. Castañeda, in analytic philosophy, held for a possible “Externus” formof consciousness, i.e., a consciousness that is thoroughly diaphanous and inno way pre-reflectively conscious, in no way knows that it knows when it isknowing. Further he held that there are experiences of mental episodes that areunowned, and I-less articulations of the world. Pothast holds that if the I is con-ceived as something standing opposed to or above the experience why shouldthe ego’s awareness of the experience count as a case of self-awareness? (p. 144).Iso Kern holds that the “I” as center of attention is a structural moment in theintentional act and not a principle of self-awareness (p. 140). Zahavi discussesthese and other issues here, some of them having to do with pathological cases.Zahavi handles most of the above-mentioned philosophical issues by arguingthat the subjectivity enjoys a more or less explicit I-consciousness in itspresentiating, or self-othering, acts, e.g., of perceiving, remembering, imagin-ing, deciding, etc., whether these be in regard to the same object or not. I canregard an experience as mine, as owned, if I note a difference between the ex-perience and the owner; that difference is secured by noting that the I retains itsidentity throughout the flux of different experiences (p. 150). Yet there is a prioridentity and unity and an extended but less pronounced sense of I-ness in theway the self’s temporalization happens. “That the process [of temporalization]is not initiated by the ego does not imply that the ego is absent, but merelythat its manner of participation is a being-affected-by.” (p. 153).

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As to some of the pathological problems where one believes that she isthinking someone else’s thoughts, Zahavi has numerous intriguing sugges-tions. Even depersonalized experiences that doubtless are intrusive seem toinvolve the subject being aware that it is “he himself rather than somebodyelse who experiences these foreign thoughts.” (p. 154). “To believe that athought which occurs in my mind is somebody else’s thought can be com-pared to a situation where I acknowledge that my arm went up while denyingthat I raised it.” (p. 155). Zahavi believes that the phenomena of depersonali-zation not only do not contradict his own theory of self-awareness but evenanticipate and illuminate it. And a phenomenological theory, e.g., of reflec-tion, can facilitate understanding the kind of depersonalization and reificationthat we find in pathological cases. (p. 156).

(6) An extraordinarily rich discussion of the unconscious is given in theappendix. Besides gracing us with clear and often original discussions of (e.g.,Freudian) notions of the unconscious, the distinction between self-awarenessand self-luminosity, and the conditions for the possibility of forms of disso-ciation (such as sleepwalking and hypnosis), Zahavi discusses transcendentalphenomenology’s analyses of passive synthesis as forms of the phenomenol-ogy of “the unconscious” (Hua XI, p. 154; Zahavi, 209ff.). Here Zahavi holdsthat Husserl’s ultimate analyses of the Living Present wherein the “feebleprocesses of preaffective passive synthesis” occur are not available to reflec-tion but only to an archaeological effort which moves from what is consciousto what is not conscious. Here the Levinasian and Derridian theme of the pri-macy of the trace and the limitation of the principle of principles and reflec-tion are acknowledged as especially meritorious. How are we to understandZahavi’s claim that reflection “cannot uncover the deepest layers of subjec-tivity” and that the deepest layers of the Living Present are available onlythrough a move from what is conscious to what is unconscious? (see p. 208).

Recall that Zahavi seeks an alternative ground, i.e., a position whereinphenomenological reflection is not burdened with either transforming the livedinto a substantial thing, or with merely reproducing the naivety of life, or withresigning itself to a subject matter based on deduction or inference. Perhapswe need a clarification of what precisely is meant by “the deepest layers ofsubjectivity.” Zahavi acknowledges that Husserl’s occasional references to aI-less foundation of the Living Present must be balanced by the I-pole’s be-ing present everywhere in the Living Present (p. 152). Zahavi works withvarious Husserlian examples: (a) dreamless sleep as a form of undifferenti-ated experiencing; (b) how the particular affections of wakeful consciousnesspass from lively retention into a zero-point of affection and form an undiffer-entiated total affection which serves as a background marginal consciousness

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that is the reservoir for a subsequent affection which, when it is actual, awak-ens a cluster of specific associations; (c) the impulses or urges which may setin motion a train of unnoticed actions (like reaching for a cigar, lighting it,breathing the smoke in, etc.); and (d) the beginning of life, one’s birth, infancy,etc. Doubtless all of these are elusive “deep layers” of subjectivity, i.e., theyare mostly non-objectifiable “influences” functioning in the present in a waywhich escapes our being aware of them. And besides these, as Zahavi furtherobserves, we do not even have knowledge of the very formation of the con-cepts and habitualities that play decisive and ubiquitous roles in our wakinglife. Yet life is lived on the basis of the “traces” of these non-conscious fac-tors that suffuse and surround our waking life (p. 207). But is it not somewhatmisleading to say “it is a dimension of opaque passivity which makes up thefoundation of our self-aware experience” (p. 210, italics added), if this leadsthe reader to infer – per impossible, given most of the book – that self-aware-ness’ core, i.e., the primal presencing, is itself a blindspot or that an inferredalterity is more basic than ipseity? Doubtless Zahavi is right that at the deep-est level our self-aware Living Present is a happening that is passive to whatis opaque to reflection and recollection; but we learn also from Zahavi thatthe receiving and passivity itself is the self-aware primal presencing orUrgegenwaertigung, along with the actual whole segment of self-aware aware-ness, “The Living Present” (with its moments of primal impression, retention,and protention), even though such receiving and passivity immerse the hap-pening of the self-aware primal presencing in an impenetrable background.

(7) In the course of developing the book’s basic theme of the inseparabil-ity of ipseity and alterity Zahavi develops what appears to be an analogy ofVeranderung (Theunissen), i.e., alter-ation, or self-othering: the self-ontificationof the primal presencing in its retentions and protensions, the self-othering ofthe lived body into the perceived body, the self-othering of the pre-reflectiveinto the reflected self, and the presencing of the Other as requiring a kind ofself-displacing and de-presencing. The beauty is in the detail but perhaps thefollowing general statements best indicate the course of the discussion: “Todeny alterity in the self [as perhaps the Heidelberger and some phenomenologistsdo: JGH] might be to deny the possibility of intersubjectivity. But to exagger-ate the moment of alterity [as Levinas does: JGH], and to overlook the differ-ence between intra- and intersubjective alterity [as do most phenomenologistsperhaps prior to Zahavi: JGH], is to deny not only self-awareness, but ulti-mately intersubjectivity as well. . .” (p. 173). We might say that the self-othering intrinsic to self-awareness and its involvement in time, embodimentand intersubjectivity can never be simply a relation to the absolutely other.As a self-othering the self and the other are sustained and nurtured by the

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othering agency of the self and not merely or primarily by the othering agencyof the other and, a fortiori, the selving agency of the other. Of course I canexperience myself as mediated by the other, e.g., as alienated, by my takingover the Other’s objectifying apprehension of me. But this itself depends onthe recognition of the radical alterity of the Other as an unbridgeable abyss(pp. 153, 164). But an ingredient in this recognition of another self-experi-encing and self-othering that in principle remains an abyssal transcendenceto my own is my own self-othering.

Notes

1. Dan Zahavi, Self-awareness and Alterity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,1999), 291 pp.

2. See H.-N. Castañeda, The Phenomeno-logic of the I: Essays on Self-consciousness, ed.James G. Hart and Tomis Kapitan (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1999).

3. See Castañeda, p. 97.4. A quibble here: It seems to me that lived perceptual experience as such is not “indexi-

cal.” Indexicality has to do with a speech act and as such articulates lived perceptualexperience by way of a referring that always involves a direct or indirect reference tothe speaker. Indexicality is implicitly immanent in lived perception but is not itself afeature of lived perception. Nevertheless the basic point stands that what we mean byperception is well explicated by what we mean by indexicality, i.e., the standpoint ofthe perceive/speaker is essential to the sense of what is being referred to. We can neverhave indexical reference without lived perceptual experience but we can have the latterwithout proper indexical reference.