the first person in cognition and moralityTHE FIRST PERSON IN COGNITION AND MORALITY BEATRICE LONGUENESSE UNIVERSITY PRESSOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6pP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of (Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Béatrice Longuenesse 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries conceming reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946772 ISBN 978-0-19-884582-9 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.Preface Lecture 1. Lecture 2. CONTENTS “1,” Singular and Universal 11 Introduction 1.2 The Fundamental Reference Rule for “I” 1.3 “I” and Self-consciousness 1.4 Christina, the “Disembodied Lady” 1.5 Concluding Remarks “T” in Morality: Enlightenment and Suspicion 2a Preliminary Remarks 2.2 Freud on the Structure of Mental Life 2.3 Kant on the Categorical Imperative of Morality 2.4 Lessons from Freud: Enlightenment and Suspicion 2.5 “I” and Morality Bibliography Name Index General Index Vii 34 34 39 45 53 57 71 75Matetial com direitos autoraisPREFACE In the spring of 2017, I held the Spinoza chair in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. When Beate Roessler first wrote to me with the invitation to be the next Spinoza chair, the mere name: “Spinoza chair” was both daunting and thrilling. How can anyone be up to the honor of holding a chair named after Baruch Spinoza? Once in Amsterdam, however, I gradually forgot to be daunted and remained only thrilled. I passed the statue of Spinoza every day when I walked from my little apartment by the Amstel to the philosophy department on the Rokin. I relished the beauty of the city, its canals, its unique light, its quaint streets, its bridges, and, of course, the uncontested reign of bicycles. I spent hours at the Rijksmuseum and night after night at the Conzertgebouw. But most of all, I was kept in a state of unabated intellectual excite- ment by my interactions with the philosophy department. Weekly seminars with a lively group of students, two colloquium talks giving me the opportunity to discuss my work with my colleagues in the department of philosophy, two public lectures in front of a broad and lively audience, and last but not least, countless informal conversations with colleagues and administra- tive staff in the lovely cafes and pastry shops in the vicinity of the University kept me busy, laughing, and feeling wonderfully alive. The two lectures gathered in this volume are a revised version of the public lectures I presented on May 11 and June 8, 2017, in theviii Preface big aula of the University, located in the beautiful Oude Lutherse Kerk on the Singel. The lectures are developed from investigations of the first-person pronoun “I” that had occupied me for a good part of the previous decade. As a happy coincidence, the book that resulted from those investigations (I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again) had appeared just a few months before my visit to Amsterdam. Some of the material I present in the lectures is drawn from the book, and at several points in the written version of the lectures I refer to particular chapters of the book, either as support for my argument or as suggested further reading on the topics at hand. But the lectures are independent from the 2017 book. Their central questions are different from those addressed in the book. My main concern in the book was to defend the view that two fundamental types of self-consciousness support our use of the first-person pronoun “I”: consciousness of ourselves as an embodied entity, a living being located in space and time, on the one hand; and consciousness of being engaged in a process of thinking, on the other. The investigation drew on an unusual combination of resources: contemporary philosophy of language and mind belonging to what we philosophers call the “analytic tradition” opened by the nineteenth-century logician and philoso- pher of mathematics, Gottlob Frege, and continued by the likes of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein; history of philosophy, in particular the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, the seventeenth-century founder of modern philosophy René Descartes and the twentieth-century existentialist. philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre; and, for the final part of the book, Freudian psychoanalysis. Central to my effort in the book was the goalimage not availablex Preface investigation is systematic rather than historical. Nevertheless, I appeal to what I learned from historical figures in philosophy’s past as much as to what | learned from recent and contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition. My appeal to historical figures is especially salient in the second lecture, where my discussion is framed as a confrontation between the views of Immanuel Kant (eighteenth century) and Sigmund Freud (late nineteenth/early twentieth century). In the course of the discussion that followed the lecture, one participant wondered why my discussion was framed in that way when so much has happened in moral philosophy since the early twenti- eth century. This is a fair question, which was also raised, albeit in slightly different terms, by another auditor: “why is Freud relevant here and now?” My answer is that the temporality of philosophy is a slow temporality. Problems do not die out, insights offered in the past may, especially when it comes to moral philosophy, be fully alive in contemporary debates rather than being archaic relics. As for the question: Why especially Freud? my hope is that the reader will be convinced, as I have been in thinking about these issues, that the confrontation between the views of Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher with universalist ideals, and those of Freud, the pessimist observer of the human mind and behavior on the eve of the most horrific episode of twentieth-century history, yields illuminating insights for our time. In deference to the questions of my interlocutor, | have added at the end of Lecture 2 a section that was not presented in the public lecture, outlining some of the proposals for thinking about our moral attitudes I derived from thinking about Kant and Freud and relating my views to those of some of my contemporaries.image not availableimage not availableimage not availablexiv Preface beyond my own. And, yet, his enthusiasm and clarity of purpose made discussing his work and its ramifications for cognitive psychology an exciting and rewarding voyage of discovery. Iam deeply grateful to him for the example of intellectual and personal integrity he offers, and for his generosity in sharing his knowledge and discoveries with me. There too, I wish there had been more time. While I was revising the lectures for publication, I had the honor of delivering the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard University. I thus had the opportunity to present some of this material to the exceptionally demanding audience of the department of philoso- phy at Harvard. I am deeply grateful for their searching com- ments, which helped me in the final revision of this material. I am grateful to Richard Moran, Quassim Cassam, and to an anonymous reader for their comments on the revised version submitted to Oxford University Press. The final version is better for their probing critiques. Needless to say, lam solely responsible for the many imperfections that remain. Thank you, as always, to Peter Momtchiloff for his patience and good humor in guiding the publication process. Finally, my gratitude goes to Joy Mellor for her excellent work in copy-editing the book; to Chandrakala Chandrasekaran for her help as the project manager for SPi Global; and especially to Chris Prodoehl for his meticulous work in preparing the index.image not availableimage not availableimage not available4 “I,” Singular and Universal of “I” express egoistic concern: using “I,” for example in “I think,” may on the contrary be the expression of a rational standpoint that is not just mine as the particular human being I am, but rather one that can and ought to be shared by all. Against this hopeful view, I noted the familiar objection that any claim to achieve such a universally shareable standpoint rests on nothing but the illu- sion that one has rational control over one's thoughts. Such perplexities and ambivalences about “I"—or any other form of the first person, most notably the first-person inflection of the verb—are not new. They have a long history. They became especially prevalent with the onset of modernity. What we call, in philosophy, “modernity” is the period that starts in the sixteenth— seventeenth centuries with the rise of the mathematical science of nature: Copernicus in the sixteenth century (1473-1543), Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1570-1612), Newton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1642-1726). This is the period in which, in Descartes's words, in coming to know “the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment,” we could hope to “make ”° Now, in the ourselves, as it were, the lords and maters of nature.’ philosophical narrative of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes’s optimistic state- ment is prefaced by his methodical liberation from his skeptical doubts, a liberation whose first step is the certainty that the thought “I am thinking, so I exist” is immune to even the most radical skeptical challenge. Since then, modern philosophy has been obsessed with “I.” Questioning the role and relevance of the concept and word “I,” and especially “I” in “I think,” has been at the forefront ofimage not availableimage not availableimage not available8 “I,” Singular and Universal At the same time, having available the concept and word “I” is understanding that any other person using “I” thereby refers to herself, the thinker or speaker. This is not an easy acquisition. That's why, for instance, it’s not obvious for small children to learn the use of “I” in language. They are initially confused between “I” and “you.” This calls for the question: what is involved in learning the use of the concept and word “I”? Rather than exploring this question of learning, however, I want to continue exploring the question: What is going on when we use the word “I,” supposing we have learned to use it? It's not just that we have the word available. Using the word “I” is having available the concept “I,” and having the concept is related to having a specific type of consciousness: self-consciousness. | now want to explore the types of self-consciousness supporting the use of “I” in language and thought. This exploration, I will submit, provides grounds for the thought that uses of “I” are not neces- sarily the expression of an egoistic obsession with our individual person. It will also help to understand the striking combination, in some cases of the use of “I,” of the singular character of “I” and the universality of the claim we make on others, using the singular term and concept “I.” 1.3 “I’ and Self-consciousness We use “I” in asserting something about ourselves, the current speaker and thinker of the assertion ‘I feel pain,” “I walk,” “I decide,” “1 think.” What I want now to examine are two kinds of informa- tion on the basis of which we may assert something of ourselves. One is a particular kind of information we have about the stateaa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is 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knowledge first person, by avowal 59 theoretical 38-9 possibility of, Kant’s account 48-9 scientific 48-9 third person 59 love 24, 41-2, 44, 69n.21 and loss 44, 58-9, 63-4 and rationality 64 maxims 52-3, 670.16 and willing 52-3 individual 52-3 see also imperatives memory 2 meta-psychological 38-9 see also metapsychology metapsychology 42, 48-9 moral attitude 45, 53-4, 56, 64-5, 661.3 morality 27-8, 39, 49 archaic roots of 64-5 categorical imperative of 39, 49-53, 55, 670.16 norms of 61 obligations of 63-4 debunking objection to Kant’s view of 55 Freud’s genealogy of 45-6, 54 grounded in archaic aspects of our mental life 27-8 universal foundation for 55 universalist, rationalist view of 27-8 modernity, modern philosophy 4-s, 25-6 norms 24 categorical 61, 64-5 see also morality, categorical norms of internalization of 56, 61 moral 56, 66n.3, 69n.21 religious and social 44-5, 54, 69n.21 see also internalization Oedipus complex. 45-6, 5374, 64-5, 69n.21 pleasure 24, 40-1 principle 40-2 pleasure/unpleasure principle 40-1, 58-60 primary process 48-9 proprioception 9-1, 13-14, 19-20, 22-4, 30n.17, see also awareness; body, consciousness of; consciousness, proprioceptive; information, about our body; sense rational, rationality 26, 58-9 and love 64 conflict with 24-5 control 2 form 24-5, 41-2 organization 24 thinking, for Freud 24-5aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.aa You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.