ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I said that Kant’s response to empiricism led to two distinct conceptions of the subject, neither of which could yield knowledge of a self. Despite this, Kant’s efforts bring to light the inherently bi-perspectival character of refl ective self-consciousness (something that remained concealed in Locke and Hume’s accounts). More precisely, this highlights the scope and complexity of selfhood, which extends from the purely formal fi rst-personal ‘I’ of apperception, through one’s actual fi rstpersonal perspective, to the detached third-personal perspective of oneself as an object of experience. In this chapter, through a consideration of key ideas from Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I will show how the multiperspectival character of selfhood originates in human embodiment. Central to this account is the idea that consciousness is primarily perceptual and that perception is the work of one’s sensing-sensible body. The shift to a model of embodied perceptual consciousness allows us to see how the subject of thought and experience is, in fact, one’s own body, the same ‘one’s own body’ that appears as an object in one’s perceptual fi eld. In short, the subject or self is a ‘my body,’ an ambiguous unity in which fi rst-personal and the third-personal perspectives mutually imply and constrain each other. The mutual dependency of these constitutive perspectives undercuts mind/body dualism. For this reason, talk of the self should be replaced by talk of selfhood, which better captures the active character of embodied consciousness, and discourages us from sliding into the language of entities. In Chapter 3 I will add the second-personal perspective to the complex structure of embodied selfhood. We will then be in a position to understand how the narrative model of identity best responds to these complex features of embodied selfhood.
