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Contributions to Phenomenology 121
Saulius Geniusas Editor
Varieties
of Self-Awareness
New Perspectives from Phenomenology,
Hermeneutics, and Comparative
Philosophy
Contributions to Phenomenology
In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced

Research in Phenomenology
Volume 121
Series Editors
Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University
State College, PA, USA
Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University
State College, PA, USA
Editorial Board Members

Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive
KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University
Atlanta, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Sha Tin, Hong Kong
James Dodd, New School University
New York, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa
Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, University of Lille
Lille, France
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Sha Tin, Hong Kong
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University
Seoul, Korea (Republic of)
Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne
Cologne, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Ohio, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA
Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Department of Philosophy Stony Brook
University Stony Brook, New York, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its
establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than
100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to
welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of
scholarship,the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and
depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological
thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly
international reach of phenomenological research.
All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final
acceptance.
The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology.
Saulius Geniusas
Editor
Varieties of Self-Awareness
New Perspectives from Phenomenology,
Hermeneutics, and Comparative Philosophy
Editor
Saulius Geniusas
Department of Philosophy
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong
ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)

Contributions to Phenomenology
ISBN 978-3-031-39174-3 ISBN 978-3-031-39175-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0
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Editor’s Introduction
It is a platitude to observe that human consciousness, like the consciousness of other

non-human animals, relates not only to transcendent things but also to itself. This
claim is undeniable, yet its meaning is heavily overdetermined: one can relate to
oneself in a variety of ways. We can begin by drawing a rather schematic distinction
between three fundamental modes of self-relation: intentional, pre-intentional, and
non-intentional.
First, consider the basic structure of intentionality: any consciousness is con-
sciousness of x, y, or z. But what is this x, y, or z? The object of intentional con-
sciousness need not be transcendent to consciousness itself. Through reflective acts,
consciousness can establish an intentional self-relation. This is one mode in which
consciousness relates to itself. We can call it reflective self-consciousness.
Second, consider what in recent discussions in phenomenology and related fields
has been addressed under the heading of pre-reflective self-awareness. The common
argument unfolds as follows: while being conscious of the cup of coffee on the
table, one is also, at the same time, co-conscious of seeing the cup, of smelling its
aroma, of feeling its texture with one’s fingers, etc. While intending any object
whatsoever, one is also pre-reflectively co-aware of intentionally relating to the
object in question. While any intentional act relates to objects, at the same time it
relates back to itself at the pre-reflective level. Without such a basic self-relation,
consciousness could not intend any object whatsoever. We can identify this mode of
self-relation as pre-reflective self-awareness, understood as a mode of co-awareness:
consciousness is pre-reflectively self-aware while it intends x, y, or z.
Thirdly, even when it does not take on an intentional relation to things and the
world, consciousness can still live through bodily sensations, such as the feelings of
cold or heat, pleasure or pain, or bodily irritation. Some suggest that persons in a
coma find themselves precisely in such a condition. Sensations of this nature, which
in phenomenology are commonly addressed under the heading of “sensings”
(Empfindnisse), are also modes of self-relation. When consciousness lives through
them, it turns back upon itself and comes to terms with what it experiences. In
instances such as these, consciousness can relate to itself without at the same time
relating to anything else: pain, or pleasure, or exhaustion, or irritation – that’s all
v
vi Editor’s Introduction
there is. We face here a mode of self-awareness that is irreducible to the first two
types addressed above. Consciousness neither transforms itself into an intentional
object nor does it co-relate to itself while intending certain intentional objects;
rather, its non-intentional self-relation is lived through autonomously, and it is sev-
ered from all intentional relations and therefore cannot be qualified as a dimension
of an intentional experience. So as to distinguish this mode of self-relation from
pre-reflective self-awareness, understood as a dimension of intentional experience,
we can call it non-intentional self-awareness.
Employing Husserlian terminology, one could further qualify intentional self-
awareness as noematic, pre-intentional self-awareness as noetic, and non-intentional
self-awareness as hyletic. Each of the three modes of self-relation admits of a fur-
ther complexity. The goal of this volume is to analyze this complexity at the levels
of reflective, pre-reflective, and non-reflective experience. The goals are to demon-
strate that self-awareness can be spoken of in many ways, to inquire into these ways,
to discover to what degree they complement each other, and to interpret their philo-
sophical significance.
While self-awareness is one of the central themes in various contemporary philo-
sophical traditions, according to the common view shared by the authors contribut-
ing to this volume, the phenomenon remains under-investigated. At the descriptive
level, we are still confronted by various types of self-awareness that call for a fur-
ther phenomenological analysis. At the interpretive level, it still remains to be shown
how different modes of self-awareness impact our philosophical conceptions of
consciousness and selfhood. It is not enough to claim that all our experiences are
self-aware; to this, one must add that they are self-aware in a variety of ways. One
of the goals of this volume is to broaden the analyses of self-awareness that we
come across in phenomenology, hermeneutics, the philosophy of mind, Buddhist
and Indian philosophies, as well as the Kyoto School. The chapters collected in this
volume focus on embodied self-awareness, historical and social self-awareness, fic-
tional self-awareness, sexual self-awareness, and ecological self-awareness. Yet
other chapters pursue a dialogue between Eastern and Western conceptions of self-
awareness. The volume thereby provides clear evidence that self-awareness can be
spoken of in many ways and that different kinds of experiences are accompanied by
different kinds of self-awareness. Self-awareness thereby emerges as a deeply com-
plex phenomenon, one which is irreducibly multidimensional. The hope is that the
different chapters collected here will contribute to the ongoing discussion of this
fascinating as well as deeply puzzling feature of conscious life.
Contributions to the volume are divided into three parts. Part I includes three
chapters on fictional, possible, and impossible modes of self-awareness, focusing on
how we become aware of ourselves not only in terms of actuality, but also in terms
of possibility and impossibility. In Chap. 1, by focusing on often-neglected details
of Plato’s allegory of the cave, Claudio Majolino puts to the test the conceptual
resources of Husserl’s understanding of self-variation and weighs its relevance with
respect to the concept of self-awareness. Majolino shows how fictions in general
reveal selfhood in its different layers of contingency and which of these layers are
revealed by the Platonic fiction of the cave: a fiction according to which the
Editor’s Introduction vii
prisoners are aware of themselves as shadows among shadows. The chapter pro-
vides a series of reflections on the meaning and scope of fictional self-awareness.
Nicolas de Warren’s chapter examines a specific form of self-awareness in which
we become aware of our existence in a problematic sense. In thinking about what it
means to have a life, one is often haunted by different senses of possibility: of what
could or should be, of what might have been, and of what could never have been. In
latter instances, we become aware of ourselves not in terms of actuality (who I am)
or possibility (who I can or could become), but in terms of impossibility, namely, as
the impossible selves that nonetheless define and hence belong to us. This is attested
to in the experience of regret and remorse, not for what we did (or who we have
been) but for what was impossible for us to be (or do). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s
philosophy of life, the chapter explores the various senses in which we are respon-
sible for ourselves in terms of who we have been and could be, as well as who it was
impossible for us to be.
In my own chapter, I am guided by the supposition that different types of experi-
ence (e.g., perception, memory and anticipation, phantasy, etc.) are characterized by
different kinds of self-awareness. In the present context, I am concerned with one
specific and under-investigated mode of experience: daydreaming. With the aim of
showing how a phenomenological analysis of daydreaming significantly enriches
our understanding of conscious life, I pay special attention to the following three
insights: 1) The life of consciousness is characterized by the intertwining of sleep
and wakefulness. Just as there is wakefulness in sleep, so also is there sleep in wake-
fulness. 2) The life of consciousness is not confined to the here and now. Besides
those experiences which unfold from the present standpoint, there is also another
group of experiences that can be qualified as absorbed, or displaced, experiences.
3) A phenomenological analysis of daydreaming brings to light how different modes
of experience are characterized by different modes of self-awareness.
The chapters of Part II are focused on embodied self-awareness, particularly on
incorporation, kinesthesis, and sexuality. Giovanna Colombetti’s chapter addresses
the experience of incorporating objects into the sense of self, in the sense of being
a bodily or corporeal self. Most of the discussions on incorporations in the literature
have been focused on the body schema, i.e., on how the use of tools can lead to
experiencing them not as external objects, but as constitutive of the lived body.
According to Colombetti, this is not the only way in which we can speak of embod-
ied self-awareness and of being embodied selves. Besides experiencing ourselves as
bodily in the sense implied by the notion of body schema, we can also incorporate
objects into the body image and into the seen body. These forms of incorporation are
not mutually exclusive but usually coexist in experience.
Embodied self-awareness is further addressed in the chapter by Gediminas
Karoblis, which is focused on kinesthetic self-awareness as it has been addressed in
the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. It is remarkable that the phenomeno-
logical tradition always treated Husserl’s concept of kinesthesis as instrumental,
and extremely rarely as valuable in itself. This is the reason why, according to
Karoblis, Husserl’s own confusion regarding this concept has been overlooked in
the literature. Dorion Cairns had remarked that Husserl had reversed his concept of
viii Editor’s Introduction
kinesthesis several times in the early 1930s. Karoblis further shows that
Husserl’s accounts of kinesthesis, which he had provided in his 1907 Ding und
Raum lectures and in Ideas II, are also significantly different from each other.
Husserl’s late manuscripts provide yet further evidence for his revised approach to
kinesthesis in the 1930s. Karoblis’ chapter presents Husserl’s wavering in great
detail and clarifies the reasons for these revisions and transformations.
Lau Kwok-Ying’s chapter presents a further study of embodied self-awareness
by focusing specifically on sexuality. Special attention is paid here to the concepts
of the body schema and the sexual schema of the body-subject in Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of a bipolar structure of
human existence are here explicated through the phenomenon of sexuality. The
analysis of sexual intentionality and sexual self-awareness leads to the explication
of a two-level mode of self-awareness of embodied consciousness: the higher order
reflective self-consciousness is preceded by and based on the primordial mode of
self-consciousness generated by the subject’s lived experience.
Part III is focused on various forms of social self-awareness. David Carr’s chap-
ter addresses the historical aspect of self-awareness. Carr elucidates the insight that
we relate to ourselves not as isolated individuals, but as members of historical com-
munities. Carr’s phenomenological articulation of this insight examines and clari-
fies the narrative character of selfhood and self-awareness, the essential structures
of intersubjectivity and we-intentionality, and the historical nature of temporality.
By historical self-awareness, Carr understands that I am aware of myself as a mem-
ber of a social entity that has a history. The latter is composed of other persons with
whom I share a common subjectivity, one that is expressed when I say “we.”
These social and historical aspects of self-awareness are further analyzed in Eric
Nelson’s chapter, which offers a new interpretation of William Dilthey’s hermeneu-
tical account of self-awareness and individuation. Nelson emphasizes that philoso-
phy remains ensnared between reifying the individual subject and reducing it to the
structuring forces of nature and society. Neither appears suitable to the first-person,
participant perspective of the lived-experience of being a finite, conditional self
within the world. Nelson reconsiders Dilthey’s alternative to the reductive poles of
this dialectic. Dilthey’s felt and reflexive self-awareness entails, through resistance
and relationality, the differentiation of self and others, things, environment, and
world; the formation of an autobiographical sense of self through life’s continuities
and discontinuities; and the interpretive, social, and material activities through
which individuals not only manifest social systems but immanently appropriate,
resist, and transform them.
While some of the chapters collected in this volume focus on “regional” self-
awareness, Mintautas Gutauskas addresses self-awareness in a global framework by
focusing on ecological self-awareness. His chapter aims to explore the characteris-
tics of contemporary ecological self-awareness from a phenomenologico-
hermeneutic point of view. The chapter explains what kind of break occurred during
the transition from modernity to the Anthropocene. According to Gutauskas, moder-
nity most radically realized the tendency of Western thought: nature and animals
were reduced to resources, and human relationships with them became technical.
Editor’s Introduction ix
This is determined by a specifically modern self-awareness in which human activity

and relations with the environment and oneself are grounded in reflexivity and con-
trol. In this regard, the epoch of the Anthropocene should be recognized not only as
a new geological period but also as a turning point in self-awareness. According to
Gutauskas, ecological self-awareness can arise only where the relationship with the
environment is not technical, but ethical. In this new self-awareness, the self is
understood not through a separation from the natural environment, but precisely
through the interconnectedness with it. Finally, Gutauskas focuses on the experi-
ence of nature’s vulnerability, which he interprets as one of the most significant
motives leading to the new sense of responsibility.
The chapters comprising Part IV address self-awareness in the framework of
comparative philosophy. John Krummel’s chapter tracks the development of the
concept of self-awareness (jikaku 自覚) in the thought of the modern Japanese phi-
losopher Nishida Kitarō (Kitarō Nishida, 西田幾多郎) (1870–1945), founder of the
Kyoto School. Nishida’s oeuvre can be divided into distinct periods, from the 1910s
to the 1940s until his passing, during which he thematized and focused on different
issues. Nevertheless, self-awareness is a unifying theme throughout. Krummel
traces how Nishida’s initial focus upon pure experience gives way to his focus upon
its articulation in reflection vis-à-vis intuition as the unfolding of the will. This then
leads to his thematization of the place wherein judgment or propositional thought
unfolds and the broader contextual place wherein that place is situated. That thema-
tization of place, in turn, develops into a look at the world where we interact as
historical and social bodies with others (nature, other people, etc.). On the basis of
Nishida’s references to the mathematics of set theory, Krummel further compares
his understanding of self-awareness to Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and
to more recent mathematical theorists influenced by Gödel, whose understandings
of the infinite resonate with Nishida’s understanding of the absolute nothing as
assumed by self-awareness.
How can we become conscious of consciousness? This is the central question to
which Shigeru Taguchi develops a highly fascinating answer in his chapter. We can-
not naturally become aware of the existence of consciousness because it is as natural
to us as the air in our lives. In order to become aware of it, we need to go through its
negations. The experience of the loss of one’s own or others’ consciousness (e.g.,
sleep, fainting, anesthesia, death, etc.) allows us to have an explicit awareness of the
phenomenon of “consciousness” by contrasting it with its absence. As Husserl
argues, to know that one has a direct experience of consciousness, one must engage
in reflection. Without this mediation through reflection, there is no way to argue for
the immediacy of one’s experience. This fact shows that we cannot address the exis-
tence of consciousness independently of the experience of becoming conscious of
consciousness. This points to one of the deepest phenomenological challenges: the
problem of the primal I and the phenomenologizing I. Taguchi argues that against
the background of this problem, we can better understand the fundamental mediat-
edness of consciousness.
In the final chapter, Yao Zhihua offers an investigation that is rooted in the
Buddhist epistemological tradition, especially its founder Dignāga. In recent years,
x Editor’s Introduction
the self-representational theory of consciousness emerged as a trend that moves

beyond the debates between first-order and higher-order theorists, as well as the
debates among the higher-order theorists regarding HOP (higher-order perception)
versus HOT (higher-order thought). According to Yao Zhihua, the model of con-
sciousness offered by this theory is closer to truth, yet it also has limitations. This
chapter addresses these limitations and attempts to overcome them by developing a
theory of consciousness that relies on the Buddhist epistemological tradition. The
chapter leads to what Yao Zhihua calls a theory of the accumulation of aspects.
It is not the goal of this volume to present a comprehensive framework that would
exhaust the variety of senses in which one could speak of self-awareness in philoso-
phy and related fields. This is simply not possible in a single volume. Despite its
centrality in various philosophical traditions, self-awareness remains an under-
investigated topic. The fundamental ambition of this volume is to bring to light
those modes and features of self-awareness that remain overlooked in the literature,
to stretch the limits of its analysis, and to spark further original inquiries in the
future.1
Shatin, Hong Kong Saulius Geniusas
1
This work was supported by the General Research Fund (GRF) Grant. Project Title:
Phenomenology of Absorption: A Study of Displaced Self-Awareness. Granting Agency: Research
Grants Council (RGC) from the Research Grants Council University Grants Committee (grant
number 14603820). I would also like to express my gratitude to the Faculty of Arts at The Chinese
University of Hong Kong for publication subvention support.
Contents
Part I Possible, Impossible, and Fictional Self-Awareness

1 Husserlian Shadows in Plato’s Cave: Layers of Contingency
and Fictional Variations on Self-Awareness�� 3
Claudio Majolino
2 Ghosts of Ourselves: Self-Responsibility in Georg Simmel’s
The View of Life�� 27
Nicolas de Warren
3 Daydreaming and Self-Awareness�� 45
Saulius Geniusas
Part II Embodied Self-Awareness: Incorporation, Kinesthesis,

and Sexuality
4
Varieties of Incorporation: Beyond the Blind Man’s Cane�� 65
Giovanna Colombetti
5 Kinesthesis and Self-Awareness�� 85
Gediminas Karoblis
6
The Pre-reflective Dimension of Self-Awareness and the Bipolar
Structure of Existence: Merleau-Ponty’s Way from Body
Schema to Sexual Schema �� 101
Kwok-ying Lau
Part III Historical, Social, and Environmental Self-Awareness

7 Historical Self-Awareness�� 121
David Carr
8
Individuation and Self-Awareness in Wilhelm Dilthey�� 135
Eric S. Nelson
xi
xii Contents
9
Ecological Self-Awareness in the Anthropocene�� 153
Mintautas Gutauskas
Part IV Comparative Philosophy of Self-Awareness

10 Self-Awareness in Nishida as Auto-Realization qua
Determination of the Indeterminate�� 173
John W. M. Krummel
11 How to Become Conscious of Consciousness:
A Mediation-Focused Approach �� 193
Shigeru Taguchi
12 Beyond Self-Representationalism: A Neo-Dignāgian
Theory of Consciousness �� 213
Zhihua Yao
Index�� 225
Part I
Possible, Impossible, and Fictional
Self-Awareness
Chapter 1
Husserlian Shadows in Plato’s Cave:
Layers of Contingency and Fictional
Variations on Self-Awareness
Claudio Majolino
A First Disclaimer: Plato’s Cave
An essay mentioning Plato’s allegory of the cave in its title runs the risk of being
either trivial or pretentious – or both. Trivial insofar as it is hardly possible to say
something new about one of the most over-commented on loci in the whole western
philosophical tradition. Pretentious because, at least in this specific case, being orig-
inal often means overinterpreting Plato’s text, turning a demanding allegory into
something more allegorical.
An essay throwing Husserl’s phenomenology into Plato’s cave is even worse.
Although authors such as Martin Heidegger or Eugen Fink have provided rich and
original interpretations of the cave, such phenomenological attempts have only con-
firmed the twofold predicament just mentioned. In the cases of both Heidegger and
Fink, Plato’s allegory, together with its highly iconic elements (the prisoners, the
cave, the fire, the outer world, the sun), is turned into the allegory of something else:
the shift of understanding from truth as ἀληθέια to truth as ὀρθοτής, or the turning
away from the natural to the transcendental attitude. Triviality and pretentiousness
are also the Scylla and Charybdis of phenomenology itself.
Instead of attempting to provide a supposedly “phenomenological” interpreta-
tion of Plato’s cave, here I will focus on a neglected detail in this allegory and use it
as a foil to put to the test the conceptual resources of Edmund Husserl’s eidetic-
transcendental account of self-awareness and highlight the interest of what I will
call “fictional self-awareness.”
C. Majolino (*)
Université de Lille, UMR-CNRS 8163 STL, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France
e-mail: claudio.majolino@univ-lille.fr
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

S. Geniusas (ed.), Varieties of Self-Awareness, Contributions
to Phenomenology 121, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0_1
4 C. Majolino
A Second Disclaimer: Phenomenological Self-Awareness
The contemporary discussion of phenomenology and self-awareness is character-

ized by three distinctive features which I would call “ecumenism,” “syncretism,”
and “interdisciplinarity.”
1. Ecumenism: contemporary scholars maintain that, when it comes to self-
awareness, there is no substantial disagreement among phenomenologists.
Husserl’s consciousness, Heidegger’s Dasein, Jean-Paul Sartre’s for-itself,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s bodily existence, or Michel Henry’s self-affecting life
are varieties of the same position. They all postulate the existence of a pre-reflex-
ive, primitive, non-objectifying form of self-awareness, an original form of non-
observational self-acquaintance by means of which “subjectivity” is implicitly
lived-through in a non-positional and non-thematic way.
2. Syncretism: such a fundamental claim can be translated into analytic jargon.
Phenomenological self-awareness ultimately boils down to what analytic phi-
losophers call the “first person perspective,” the “what is it like-for-me,” the
“subjective feeling of experience,” or “first order” (or “lower order”) phenome-
nal consciousness (as opposed to “second-order,” or “higher order,” conscious-
ness). Additionally, the experiential assumption of such a form of self-awareness
can be supplemented by a series of “arguments” and “counter-arguments” (better
explanatory power, absence of infinite regress, parsimony, etc.).
3. Interdisciplinarity: phenomenological self-awareness is open to cross-
fertilization with the experimental data of the empirical sciences. Examples of
such a primitive form of consciousness can be found in everyday scenarios (“If
you ask me to give you a description of the pain I feel in my foot, or of what I
was just thinking about, I would reflect on it and therefore be one order removed
from the pain or the thought”). These examples can be also corroborated by
sophisticated experiments in cognitive science (such as the “blind view”
experiment).1
Given this triple fact, it does not come as a surprise that in the last 35 years phenom-
enological approaches to self-awareness have gained relevance in the contemporary
philosophy of mind, providing an inclusive, credible, and broadly understandable
account of phenomenology. Despite its advantages, this is not the framework within
which I would like to address Husserl’s take on self-awareness in this chapter and to
put it to the test of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Here are some reasons justifying
my choice.
ad (1). Though I believe that ecumenism could be a value, I am not sure about the
homogeneity of the so-called “phenomenological tradition.” There are some
unbridgeable differences within phenomenology, depending on how
1
The most convincing advocates of this view are Zahavi and Gallagher (2008).
1 Husserlian Shadows in Plato’s Cave: Layers of Contingency and Fictional Variations… 5
phenomenologists understand the structural features of phenomena.2 Arguably,

the very life of phenomenology lies in such unbridgeable differences. While
renouncing the idea of a shared phenomenological account of self-awareness as
a pre-reflexive, non-objectifying consciousness, I will only focus on the distinc-
tiveness of Husserl’s stance.
ad (2). Words matter and language is not indifferent to philosophy. Therefore,
despite its value, there is no reason to be committed from the start to any form of
syncretism. Importing analytic jargon into Husserl’s transcendental phenomenol-
ogy has both advantages and disadvantages. Speaking like Searle or Nagel and
casting a ready-made display of shared questions and answers is certainly useful
to set the common rules of the game, providing a solid conceptual framework for
further discussions. Yet one risks thereby leveling the discussion and leaving
aside many aspects of Husserl’s views which hardly fit the available alternatives
(first personal/third personal, first order/second order approaches, etc.) and
addressing the standard problems to solve (infallibilism, epistemic asymmetry,
self-reference, etc.). Accordingly, I will not only refrain from taking Husserl as
the exemplification of a putative and more general “phenomenological account
of self-awareness,” I will also deliberately avoid framing my discussion through
the “categories” of contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.
ad (3). This brings me to the role of interdisciplinarity and the use of standard
examples of the analytic philosophy of mind drawn from everyday experiences
(“feeling pain in the foot,” “thinking about something”) or scientific experiments
in cognitive science (“the blind view”). If we drop ecumenism and syncretism –
at least provisionally – and stick to the idiosyncratic aspects of Husserl’s phe-
nomenology, we face the awkward idea that phenomenology is, just like
geometry, not only a science but an eidetic science, that is, a science whose
knowledge is synthetic a priori, whose truths are “eternal,” i.e., universal and
necessary, and whose relevant states of affairs do not involve any empirical fact
but only regional ontological essences (Husserl, 1977, §16). Additionally, while
originally giving acts of perception are both prior and necessary with respect to
the synthetic a posteriori knowledge and the contingently universal truths per-
taining to the facts of empirical sciences, when it comes to eidetic sciences the
situation is different. “Free phantasies acquire a position of primacy” and “‘fic-
tion’ makes up the vital element of phenomenology as of every other eidetic
science,” appearing as “the source from which the knowledge of ‘eternal truths’
is fed” (§70). Few phenomenologists beyond Husserl think that phenomenology
is just like geometry and no analytic philosopher would be ready to accept
this claim.3
2
See Majolino and Djian (2018, 2021).
3
Some authors advocating “phenomenological self-awareness” describe the phenomenological
method by adding “eidetic variation” to the “epochê” and the “reduction” (Zahavi and Gallagher
2008, 30). Strictly speaking, however, none of the examples discussed by them involve any phan-
tasy variation. They are all examples of actual or actually possible empirical case studies, either
ordinary or scientific.
6 C. Majolino
The analogy between phenomenology and geometry has some specific implications
with respect to the use of examples from everyday experience or cognitive sciences.
This is of importance for understanding the unique way that Husserl approaches
self-awareness, and for recognizing its philosophical relevance.
A Third Disclaimer: Phenomenology and Poetical Fiction
Why should one test Husserl’s eidetic-transcendental approach to self-awareness on

the basis of an allegedly neglected detail of Plato’s cave? The answer lies, precisely,
in the Husserlian idea that phenomenology is, not unlike geometry, an eidetic sci-
ence in which “phantasies” acquire a position of primacy and “fictions” play a
major role.
Let us remind ourselves of some general features of Husserl’s eidetic project. (1)
Phenomenology and geometry are eidetic sciences insofar as their respective objects
are not individuals but eidê. (2) An eidos is more than a mere “essence,” i.e., a gen-
eral object: it is a “pure essence.” (3) “Essences” and “pure essences” could only be
grasped by a distinctive, originally giving act called “ideation.” (4) Ideation is a
founded act and, accordingly, essences can only be intuitively grasped on the basis
of individuals. (5) “Pure essences” or eidê can be indifferently grasped on the basis
of either actual individuals or fictional quasi-individuals. (6) An actual individual
shows itself as intuitively present through its unique position in time (be it phenom-
enological or objective) and in a harmonious unity of coexistence with every other
existing and empirically perceivable individual (past, present, and future). By con-
trast, a fictional quasi-individual shows itself as intuitively absent through its lack
of position in time and its irreducible conflict with every other existing and empiri-
cally perceivable individual (Husserl, 1980, 67–68).
The fact that the ideation of an eidos is indifferent with respect to its actual indi-
vidual or fictional quasi-individual foundations has important consequences for the
status of eidetic sciences. For instance, when eidetic sciences convene empirical
examples of factual individuals, the latter are neither summoned qua actual indi-
viduals nor qua empirical facts, but only with respect to the content-determinations
they share with their fictional quasi-individual counterparts. The abstractive ide-
ation of a geometrical form (say, a triangle) can indifferently occur on the basis of
the actual perception of a triangular(ish) individual thing (a flag, a sandwich, a leaf,
a patch, etc.), but also out of the quasi-individual correlate of an image-consciousness
(a drawing), of a perceptual phantasy (an actor drawing a triangle by waving her
finger in the air), or even of an act of pure phantasy (through a shape hovering in
front of me in its distinctive protean fashion). Therefore, the geometrical properties
of triangles and the truth pertaining to such properties hold indifferently for trian-
gles ideated in perception, image-consciousness, perceptual phantasy, or pure phan-
tasy. For instance, the angle sum property indifferently applies to, or is indifferently
illustrated by, triangular(ish) shapes that are perceived, drawn, perceptually or
purely fantasized. And it is precisely for this reason that the angle sum theorem is
said to be an “eternal truth,” i.e., a universal and necessary truth whose validity
would be granted even if there were no factually existing triangular individuals to
perceive. For in Euclidian space, a triangle whose internal angles are not equal to
180° is plainly and simply an absurdity.
Phenomenology too, Husserl says, has to do with pure essences and, more pre-
cisely, with pure essences of (transcendentally reduced) Erlebnisse, i.e., lived expe-
riences. Just as the eidos “triangle” can only be ideated on the basis of triangular(ish)
actual individuals or fictional quasi-individuals, the same holds for phenomenologi-
cal eidê such as “perception,” “memory,” “desire,” “imagination,” “fear,” and even
“lived experience” in general. According to Husserl, one can ideate or illustrate the
pure essence of a lived experience – say, an act of “sense perception” – not only by
accomplishing an actual individual act of sense perception, but also by fantasizing
a quasi-individual one. Therefore, a fictional perception – which is not actually lived
through, which has no unique position in the phenomenological time of one’s living
stream, and which appears to be in conflict with every other lived experience tem-
porally individualized in such a stream – is a perfectly acceptable example of the
eidos “sense perception”. As a result, truths about the properties of such an eidos are
just as “eternal” as the truths about the properties of the eidos “triangle.” For a sense
perception whose object correlate is not given through adumbrations is just as
absurd as a Euclidean triangle whose internal angles are not equal to 180°. The same
holds for every other Erlebnis.
But the bond between phantasy and eidetic science is not limited to the fact that
the self-givenness of an eidos can be founded on the self-showing of fictional quasi-
individuals. Phantasy also informs the very activity of the geometer in his search for
new geometrical shapes and the discovery of their relevant properties. The geometer
“operates incomparably more in phantasy than in perception,” since
in phantasy he has incomparably more freedom reshaping at will the figures feigned, and in
running through continuously modified possible shapings, thus in generating an immense
number of new formations; a freedom opens up to him for the very first time an access to
the expenses of essential possibilities with their infinite horizons of eidetic cognitions.
(1977, §70)
This time, Husserl is not simply discussing the role of phantasy in general (imagi-
nal, perceptual, pure), or the fact that, when dealing with actual individuals, eidetic
sciences treat them just as fictional quasi-individuals. He is talking about the role of
free phantasy and its power to produce arbitrary variations and new formations, so
as to bring to appearance fictional quasi-individuals to which no previously per-
ceived actual individual corresponds. He is talking about the power to provide the
intuitive support for eidê which would have never been possible to grasp if free
phantasy had not severed the bond with actual experience and factual existence,
breaking the form of individuation. Thus, as Husserl aptly notes, even the geome-
ter’s drawings are not the reproductions of externally perceived shapes, but freely
fantasized shapes fixed into images.
8 C. Majolino
The situation is no different for the phenomenologist dealing with the Erlebnisse
and their eidetically necessary counterparts. Since “there are also infinitely many
eidetic phenomenological formations,” the phenomenologist too “can use the
resource of originary givenness only to a limited extent” since “he does not have
examples for all possible particular formations any more than the geometer has
sketches or models at his disposal for the infinitely many kinds of solids. Here, in
any case, the freedom of eidetic research also necessarily demands operating in
phantasy” (1977, §70). Accordingly, free phantasy is mandatory in order to discover
new and unexpected forms of lived experiences, with their relevant properties, by
freely transforming actual experiences and bringing to appearance experiences that
one has not actually experienced and, perhaps, will never actually experience.
Thus, the phenomenologist is just like the geometer insofar as he or she operates
“more in phantasy than in perception,” has the freedom to “reshape at will” his or
her feigned lived experiences, and to “generate an immense number of new forma-
tions.” In the same way that geometry “attaches great value to collections of models
[Modelsammlungen],” phenomenology also collects a wide array of “transforma-
tions of phantasy products” (Umgestaltung der Phantasiegegebenheiten) drawn
from experience, history, art, and especially from poetry (Dichtung) (Husserl, 1977,
§70, 148). Poetical fictions are the best source to modify the established empirical
style and to place the phenomenologist in front of Erlebnisse never brought to
appearance, manifesting a wide array of possible or impossible configurations of the
self. Poetical fictions are both free and structured, unrestricted and organized, wild
and consistent. They will eventually “explode” because of their inner and outer
conflicts, but this always occurs after having brought to appearance some seemingly
consistent quasi-individual state of affairs.
The twofold conclusion of these preliminary remarks is the following: phenom-
enology could and should use empirical examples (ordinary or scientific). But since
its aim is not empirical but eidetic, such examples have to function only as supports
for actual or possible ideations. They are not relevant because of their empirical and
factual status, but because of their interchangeability with pure phantasy’s fictions.
They are not significant as such, but as fertilizers to foster new and free phantasy
variations. Ordinary examples, because of their lack of originality, are not half as
good as fictional ones; while scientific examples drawn from experiments in cogni-
tive science, because of their inventiveness and surprising richness, are indeed as
good as fictional ones as soon as their empirical validity is dropped. Poetical fic-
tions are the best source to vary the empirical style of experience, and to put the
phenomenologist in front of the appearance of Erlebnisse that no actual experience
would or could have ever brought to intuitive givenness.
Plato’s cave is a phenomenologically relevant poetical fiction that forces us to
imagine – before it “explodes” because of its inner and outer conflicts – an unex-
pected figure of the self and its only-imaginable form of self-awareness.
epublic VII (514b–517c): A Brief Reminder

R
and a Neglected Detail
Plato’s allegory of the cave is a literary spot that everyone knows without even hav-
ing read it. Leaving aside the question of its allegorical meaning, most of the read-
ers would probably summarize its literal content as follows: some prisoners are
chained up in a cave since their birth; the only thing they can see are the shadows of,
say, horse-shaped artefacts cast on a wall; the prisoners take the horse-shaped shad-
ows as real beings, despite their being twice removed from the real horses living
outside the cave; once released, the prisoners see the truth and re-establish the onto-
logical order of things; afterwards, they try to reenter the cave and spread the truth
to their fellow prisoners.
What does all this have to do with self-awareness? Nothing, indeed, unless some-
thing is missing in this summary, a missing detail often neglected even by many
well-informed Plato scholars.4 Having set the stage, introduced the main and the
secondary characters (the prisoners, the transporters), put some relevant props in
place (the wall, the parapet, the artefacts, the chains), and explained the material
conditions of both the environment (light, distance) and the body of the prisoners
(immobile, limited to sight and hearing), the very first moment in which Plato men-
tions the relationship between the prisoners and the shadows is not, as one would
expect, with respect to the shadows of the artefacts carried by the transporters, but
in relation to the way in which the prisoners see themselves. Here is the text:
Imagine the condition of men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground, with an
entrance open to the light and a long passage all down the cave. Here they have been from
childhood, chained by the leg and also by the neck, so that they cannot move and can see
only what is in front of them, because the chains will not let them turn their heads. At some
distance higher up is the light of a fire burning behind them; and between the prisoners and
the fire is a track with a parapet built along it, like the screen at a puppet-show, which hides
the performers while they show their puppets over the top. / I see, said he. / Now behind this
parapet imagine persons carrying along various artificial objects including figures of men
and animals in wood or stone or other materials, which project above the parapet. Naturally,
some of these persons will be talking, other silent. / It is a strange picture, he said, and
strange sort of prisoners. / Like ourselves, I replied; for, in the first place, what do you think
they would see of themselves and of one another if not the shadows thrown by the fire-light
on the wall of the cave facing them reflected by the fire from the entrance of the cavern in
front of them? [τοὺς γὰρ τοιούτους πρῶτον μὲν ἑαυτῶν τε καὶ ἀλλήλων οἴει ἄν τι
ἑωρακέναι ἄλλο πλὴν τὰς σκιὰς τὰς ὑπὸ τοῦ πυρὸς εἰς τὸ καταντικρὺ αὐτῶν τοῦ
σπηλαίου προσπιπτούσας] / Not if all their lives they had been prevented from moving
their heads. / And they would have seen as little of the objects carried past. /Of course. /
Now, if they could talk to one another, would they not suppose that their words referred only
to those passing shadows which they saw? / Necessarily. / And suppose their prison had an
echo from the wall facing them? When one of the people crossing behind them spoke, they
could only suppose that the sound came from the shadow passing before their eyes. / No
4
The detail was, however, not unknown to Brunschwig (1999).
10 C. Majolino
doubt. / In every way, then, such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shad-
ows of these things. / Inevitably (Plato., 1941, 514a2–515c3; my emphases).5
A crucial detail was missing in the first sketch of the summary: the prisoners do not
only see the shadows of the artefacts, they also see – and in the first place (πρῶτον) –
their own shadows! More precisely,
1. since the prisoners have been unable to move their heads all their lives, and pos-
sibly their whole bodies, the only thing they see of themselves is the shadow of
their own bodies cast on the wall; and
2. since they take what they see as the only real being (τὰ ὄντα αὐτοὺς νομίζειν
ἅπερ ὁρῷεν), the only real being about themselves they are aware of is nothing
but the shadow of their own unseen body.
We are thus invited to see (ἰδὲ, i.e., to imagine, to figure out) prisoners that are
aware of themselves and of the others (ἑαυτῶν τε καὶ ἀλλήλων) the same way they
are aware of the horse-shaped statues and of every other denizens of the cave – i.e.,
as shadows among shadows. The prisoners see themselves in front of themselves as
shadows whose differences regarding the other shadows (those of the artefacts) are,
at best, differences in movement (the shadows of the artefacts enter and exit the
scene of the wall, the prisoners’ shadows stay in place) and maybe of size and inten-
sity (being closer to the fire, which stands far above the prisoners, the shadows of the
artefacts are likely to look taller, bigger, and more blurred than the shadows of the
prisoners themselves; and the sounds uttered by the prisoners are maybe perceived
as louder than the ones uttered by the transporters and carried by echo). Thus, in its
opening lines, Plato’s poetical fiction shows that the prisoners are victims of a two-
fold illusion, regarding the true nature of things and themselves.6
Twofold Challenge: Plato’s Poetical Fiction and Husserl’s

A
Varieties of Self-Awareness
My contention is that, to put it in Husserl’s terms, because of the originality of its

new configuration (Originalität der Neugestaltung), the abundance of its details
(der Fülle der Einzelzüge), and its narrative coherence (der Lückenlosigkeit der
Motivation), Plato’s fictional poetry of the prisoners in the cave throws a twofold
challenge to Husserl’s eidetic-transcendental phenomenology.
5
I use here Cornford’s 1941 translation, only with some minor modifications.
6
Breaking the first illusion signifies knowing the world as it is, both in its becoming and true being,
and therefore discovering the origin of the illusion itself; breaking the second signifies knowing
oneself, and therefore realizing that one is not a shadow among shadows, not even a thing among
things. Only in this way could the freed prisoner finally decide to go back to the cave to free other
prisoners. Here I will not provide any interpretation of this allegory in the wake of those mapped,
for instance, by Blumenberg (1998).
1. Is it possible to imagine a self who is aware of itself beyond the difference

between self-awareness and object-awareness, as a shadow among shadows? Is
a self that is aware of itself only as the seen shadow of its own otherwise unseen
body only a verbal fiction – something that could merely be said – or is it an
object of a possible intuition, something that could be given, though only provi-
sionally in imagination?
2. Plato’s Socrates says that the strange prisoners are “like ourselves” (ὀμοίους
ἠμῖν) (515c6). If we leave aside the specifically allegoric sense of this claim, one
could still ask if and to what extent the fictional prisoners, with their own puta-
tive shadow-selves, are to be understood as variations of our selves. What does
our factual self – i.e., the self of those who are actually asked to imagine seeing
the prisoners – share with the fictional self of such imagined prisoners? If they
are both contingent examples of the same eidos “self,” what invariant form of
self-awareness do they share, and at what point do they diverge?
None of these challenges would make sense outside the limits of the idiosyncratic
aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology.
Variation, Self, and Self-Awareness
In order to respond to both questions, we should first carry out “self-variation”

(Selbstvariation).7 We have to imagine our-selves not simply as spectators, i.e., as
external observers looking at fictional prisoners in a fictional cave from above, but
as if we were such prisoners, as if we were experiencing and constituting our sur-
rounding world and our-selves within the boundaries stipulated by Plato’s poetical
fiction. If we follow Husserl’s lead, this process of self-variation follows two steps.
1. Since I am asked to imagine myself as a subject who sees shadows, hears echoes,
has beliefs, and talks about what he or she sees or hears, what I fantasize are the
objects of which I am intentionally aware: shadows, echoes, real beings, etc.
While doing this, I also fantasize myself as being otherwise than I actually am,
as performing acts that I am not performing, i.e., as seeing, hearing, believing,
etc. In this process I finally posit the “sameness” between the factual self that I
actually am (i.e., the one who is fantasizing being a prisoner while reading a
copy of Plato’s Republic) and the fictional self that I imagine myself to be. As
Husserl puts it:
If, for example, I yield to the phantasy that I undertook a trip to Mars and had there lived
experiences similar to Gullivers’s, then these fictional lived experiences of consciousness
would belong to me, though as empty phantasies. The fictional world is a correlate of a
fictional self, which, however, is fantasized as the same [dasselbe] as my actual self. Thus,
it is precisely through the relation to the actual pure self that the idea not only of the world
7
On this point, see De Santis (2020).
12 C. Majolino
actually posited by me but also of each and every possible and imaginable world as a world
for this pure self, is firmly delimited. (1952, 120)
2. The array of fictional lived experiences belonging to my actual self as empty

phantasies now appears as a “variation of my real life, which I am apodictically
certain of” (1973, 152). Thus, “I am absolutely given to myself with this state of
presence,” yet as soon as I “concordantly fantasize myself as the subject of
another life, in evident conflict with my experience […] I admittedly also have a
phantasy-self as the subject of a phantasy life” (152–153, my emphasis).8 In this
process, “my being-such-and-such is always contingent, insofar as I could fic-
tionally transform it and imagine myself as experiencing something else; that the
experience that is so would be another” (151). Such a set of transformations
reveals some of the structural features of the concrete essence “subjectivity” of
which my conflicting factual actual-self and my fictional-self are contingent and
arbitrary examples.
Given this necessary point of departure, the first eidetic feature that my factual and
fictional selves have to contingently exemplify necessarily corresponds to the deep-
est layer of conscious life as such. Husserl sometimes calls it “the streaming” (das
Strömen) or “the experiencing” (das Erleben): an ego-less and anonymous “self,”
incessant and continuous, without beginning or end: an absolute flow of unbroken
unity, constituted through the transversal “intentionality” of temporality itself, in
which existing and showing itself are inseparable. This “original appearing” (orig-
inäre Erscheinen) (1969, 368) is sometimes dubbed by Husserl “absolute self-
awareness.” And since “being a subject is being conscious in the mode of being
conscious of one’s self” (Subjektsein ist, in der Weise seiner selbst bewusst zu sein,
zu sein) (1973, 151), both selves – factual and fictional – cannot but be arbitrary
examples of such an absolutely self-aware subject. If I didn’t posit my fictional self
as an absolutely self-aware, streaming consciousness, I wouldn’t be able to imagine
anything.
But the absolute flow has also its waves, as it were. The “streaming,” is indeed “a
single flow that breaks down into many flows” (einen einzigen Fluss, der in viele
Flüsse zerfällt), into this or that individual “stream” (der Ström) (1973, 373). It is a
multiplicity of individual “lived experiences” (die Erlebnisse), fleeting and discrete,
coming to be and passing away, showing themselves within the internal streaming
of time consciousness. Such “waves,” Husserl now says, “could only be viewed”
(auf das wir nur hisehen; dem wir nur zusehen können) (368) through a distinctive
form of longitudinal intentionality, an inner view, also called “reflection”. The
merely virtual multiplicity of the streaming now appears as diffracted into an actual
multiplicity of streams, the continuous rhythm of conscious life is broken into mani-
fold discrete pulses (Puls):
8
See also Husserl 1973, 152–153.
In reflection we find a single flow that breaks down into many flows [einen einzigen Fluss,
der in viele Flüsse zerfällt]; yet the many flows possess a kind of unity that permits us to
speak of one flow. (373)
Though often dubbed by many commentators as “reflexive,” this second mode of

self-awareness in which the virtual multiplicity of the streaming shows itself as an
actual multiplicity of streams – i.e., a multiplicity of individual cogitationes (acts of
perception, desire, imagination, etc.), each with its own ego-pole and its correlative
intentional cogitatatum – has no proper name in Husserl’s texts. However, since the
“self” of which one is aware in this very specific case is always the appearing and
disappearing pole of a relation (both as the object-pole of a reflexive grasping and
as the ego-pole of the reflected act), it is safe to call it “relative self-awareness” as
opposed to the “absolute self-awareness” of the streaming “self.” The articulation
between these two moments is spelled out by Husserl in the following terms:
I grasp myself, and grasp myself in apodictic evidence. The consciousness in which I am
conscious of myself is my consciousness, and concretely seized consciousness of myself
and myself (also in full concretion) is identical. To be a subject is to be conscious in the
mode of being conscious of oneself [= absolute self-awareness]. If I grasp myself in reflec-
tion, then I grasp my identical I as the pole of my life, or I grasp myself, proceeding from
life to life, always reflecting anew, as an identical unity and my life itself as unity of a mul-
tiform stream and so on [= relative self-awareness]. In this process, my being-such-and-
such is always contingent, insofar as I could fictionally transform it and imagine myself as
experiencing something else; that the experience that is so would be another. (1973, 151;
my emphasis)
The closing line of this quote is crucial for our purpose and needs us to pause.
Martians, Giants, and Savvy Horses
Let us imagine ourselves as traveling to Mars, as in Kurd Lasswitz’s science-fiction

novel Auf zwei Planeten (1897),9 or as having experiences as described by Jonathan
Swift’s Gullivers’s Travels (2005). In all these cases, (1) I am actually imagining
myself as experiencing something that I am not actually experiencing. (2) Such a
performance of imagination is not an act of unrestricted free fantasy, since what I
am imagining is bound to and steered by the linguistic stipulations of a coherent,
detailed, and rich poetical fiction prescribing what I actually have to imagine and
how I should actually imagine it. (3) By imagining myself as if I were on Mars, as
if I were Gulliver or a Houyhnhnm, I am not simply experiencing one conflict
between my factual and my fictional self, but I am fictionally transforming my fac-
tual self according to the sets of rules established by Lasswitz’s or Swift’s novels.
(4) In this process, each set of rules reveals a different layer of contingency with
respect to my own factual self.
9
Husserl refers to Lasswitz repeatedly in his letters (1994, 1,5, 5:84) and elsewhere (1956, 384).
14 C. Majolino
If I were to imagine myself travelling to Mars according to the stipulations of

Lasswitz’s novel, the fictional transformations would be limited to the objects I
would feign to see (canals, a desert of red dust, unknown technological devices), the
events I would imagine witnessing (the war between Martians and Earthlings), or
the actions I would imagine myself performing (engaging in the war of indepen-
dence). My factual and fictional selves would still be examples of the same concrete
essence: they would both be personal, human, and psycho-physical beings, abso-
lutely and relatively aware of their streaming conscious life and manifold rising
waves, provided with the same type of body etc. In this case, the contingency
revealed by the conflict between my factual and fictional self would simply affect
the places, objects, and events that I actually see and the actions I actually perform,
not the very structure of my own selfhood.
By contrast, if I were to imagine myself experiencing the world as a giant like
Gulliver or as a savvy horse like a Houyhnhnm, the contingency of my factual self
would reveal itself differently. In the case of Gulliver, my factual self and my fic-
tional self would still be “the same”, as contingent examples of a personal human
being having a certain body and being absolutely and relatively aware of his or her
streaming life in its various streams (perceiving, imagining, think etc.). As a result,
in order to fictionally imagine myself according to Swift’s stipulations, I should
simply vary the contingent experiences I am having with their correlative objects (I
am actually seeing these books on my desk, but I imagine myself as seeing a vast
shore or an abandoned boat). In order to imagine these things seen as Gulliver
would have seen them, I should also imaginarily vary the contingent size of my own
body (I am of average height, and act and see things accordingly, but I imagine
myself as tall as a giant). Beyond these two variations, every other feature of my
own subjective life, as well as the whole appearing style of my own surrounding
world, would remain utterly unchanged. What reveals itself as contingent now is a
certain set of accidental features of my own body.
But if I were to imagine myself as the member of a community of intelligent
talking horses, the nature of my own body would reveal itself in all its contingency.
My factual actual-self and my fictional Houyhnhnm-self would still be the same, but
they would radically differ regarding their manner of embodiment. Thus, a further
effort is required to bridge the gap between these different modes of embodied
experience. Through this additional gap, Swift’s new rules of fictional transforma-
tion reveal a new layer of contingency proper to my own factual self.10
10
It should be readily apparent that the problem here is not that of the “how is it like to be a bat”
(how does a factual animal of the order Chiroptera experience its surrounding world), but rather
how fictional transformations of oneself guided by the linguistic stipulations of a poetical fiction
might end up revealing the various layers of contingency of one’s own selfhood.
Conscious Prisoners
Let us now turn back to the cave and its unusual denizens. On the basis of what we
have just explained regarding the layers of contingency revealed in the process of
Husserl’s self-variation, we are now in a better position to see the actual challenge
represented by Plato’s distinctive poetical fiction.
The problem of imagining oneself as a prisoner described by Plato in Book VII
of the Republic is much more difficult than the problems raised by Lasswitz’s earth-
lings in Mars or Swift’s oversized human beings and equine-bodied, intelligent
creatures. If I follow Plato’s stipulations, I must fictionally transform myself so that
not only intentional objects appear as contingent (I am currently seeing some books
on the table, I imagine myself as seeing some shadows cast on a wall), or what I am
absolutely and relatively self-aware of (despite my own streaming and its rising
waves, I feign myself to be living another conscious life with its manifold conscious
acts). In question is the very possibility of being aware of myself as something
structurally different from any of the objects I am intentionally aware of in my sur-
rounding world.
But how far can we actually go in imagining ourselves as if we were Plato’s fic-
tional prisoners with their own shadowy self-awareness, as seen shadows of unseen
bodies? Does the conflict generated by Plato’s poetical fiction reveal a further layer
of contingency of our factual self, or is Plato’s requirement only an empty prescrip-
tion, something that could be said, but not really imagined? This is precisely what
we should try to establish now.
As Husserl explains, since the prisoners are conscious beings with their own
lived experiences, our fantasized prisoner-self cannot but be imagined as absolutely
self-aware of one ongoing unique conscious life, and as relatively self-aware of his
or her manifold intentional lived experiences while being intentionally aware of
some objects in the doxic modality of the belief. Without this basic structural same-
ness between the factual and the fictional streaming self, and the factual and fic-
tional selves of the streams, it would be impossible to imagine anything whatsoever.
Accordingly, Plato’s fictional prisoners are not unlike Lasswitz’s earthlings and
Swift’s oversized or equine-bodied persons. They are, to speak like Socrates, “like
ourselves”.
Habitual Prisoners
But the prisoners do not simply have intentional experiences with their absolute and
relative modes of self-awareness, fleeting or recurring (mis)perceptions and (false)
beliefs about something. According to Plato’s set of rules, they also have stable
convictions and long-term opinions about their surrounding world and about them-
selves: convictions and opinions motivated by and built upon previous convictions
and opinions, strengthened by the concordant course of their present experience, the
16 C. Majolino
coherent recollection of past events, and the confirmed expectations of future ones.
What Plato’s prisoners see is not a random array of changing events, something they
just believe to be real in a moment and cease to believe in another. Rather, to the
prisoners, the surrounding world of the cave appears as a fully coherent environ-
ment of relatively regular events, coming into view in similar circumstances and
disappearing in a more or less foreseeable way. At a certain point in the dialogue,
Plato explains that the prisoners may have even played guessing games, awarding
their fellow prisoners a prize for having correctly remembered the order in which
the shadows have appeared and anticipating their future appearances (see Plato.,
1941, 516c8-d2).11
Essential to Plato’s poetical fiction is the fact that the prisoners undergo a radical
change after their release. Once freed from their chains, they break their previous
habits: they struggle, endure the clash between conflicting convictions, doubt, hesi-
tate, waver, change their minds, and eventually turn themselves into someone
new (see Plato., 1941, 515c4-d7).
Put in Husserl’s terms, the prisoners are “subjects of persistent convictions” (ble-
ibende Überzeugungen) who change their minds because the progress of actual
experience shows the surrounding world as being different from what it used or
seemed to be (1952, 194). The prisoners’ acts of seeing, hearing, believing, etc.
have to be fantasized as having been experienced not only one-time (einmalig), in
their immanent and unrepeatable singularity, but for the first time (erstmalig) and
time and again (immer wieder), as occurring within the unity of a series, motivating
a sequence of enduring creeds of lasting (dauernde) validity, kept alive throughout
the course of immanent time, and correlated to the persistence of a self-consistent
“habitual theme” with its own familiar style of appearance (311). Accordingly, my
factual actual-self and my fictional prisoner-self appear as contingent examples of
the concrete essence of subjectivity that Husserl calls “habitual” or “position-taking
self” (stellungnehmende Ich). As Husserl writes in one of his manuscripts:
The I pole is not me, I am in my convictions. I maintain my one and identical self, my ideal
understanding self, if I can always and securely strive towards the unity of a total convic-
tion. (1909–1926, 34b)
It is only as a contingent example of a position taking self that my fantasized

prisoner-self can hold convictions, entertain opinions, that he or she can remain
“unchanged” (unverändert) and “true” (treue) to him or herself, until the course of
his or her experience brings out compelling motives to “change” (ändern), forcing
himself or herself to “become someone else” (sich ein anderer werden) (1952, 113).
For at least to some extent, “to change conviction is to change ‘oneself’” (die
Überzeugung ändern ist “sich” ändern) (311).
11
Due to space constraints, I will have to neglect all the “personalistic” aspects of Plato’s picture,
which include the communicative interaction among prisoners who should constitute a community
of persons; their common reference to a spiritual surrounding world, whose relevant objects are
endowed with practical-axiological predicates; and the problems related to the personal self-
awareness of each prisoner.
What mode of self-awareness belongs to the distinctive self-awareness of any

habitual position-taking self? Husserl doesn’t seem to have chosen any definitive
name for this. In one of his marginalia to Natorp’s Allgemeine Psychologie (quoted
in Kern [1964, 293]), however, he makes a suggestion: in such specific cases, “self-
awareness would be ultimately the concordance of the ‘thinking’ consciousness”
(Selbstbewusstsein wäre also letztlich Einstimmigkeit des “denkenden”
Bewusstseins). For lack of better words, one could thus say that the fictional prison-
ers – insofar as they are varieties of our-selves as subjects of persistent though not
unchangeable views – are concordantly-self-aware.
Although the prisoners are, again, “like ourselves”, there is a difference between
this concordant self-awareness, on the one hand, and the absolute and relative ones
discussed in the previous sections. The latter are by eidetic necessity implied in
every self-variation (and therefore cannot be removed), while the former is only an
eidetic possibility (and therefore rests on the freedom of the fantasizing subject). It
is an eidetic absurdity to imagine myself otherwise than I factually am but not as
absolutely or relatively aware of myself, just as impossible as it is to represent a
triangle in a Euclidean space whose internal angles are not equal to 180°. I can imag-
ine myself as an earthling on Mars, as Gulliver, as a Houyhnhnm, or as a prisoner in
Plato’s cave, but not as a consciousness-less being. By contrast, it is not absurd to
imagine myself otherwise than I factually am but not as a habitual position-taking
self concordantly aware of myself.12 Thus, if my factual actual-self and my fictional
prisoner-self conflict as contingent examples of a position-taking self, it is only
because I decide to comply with Plato’s stipulations, not because it would be impos-
sible to do otherwise.
Human Prisoners
Until now we have imagined our fictional prisoner-selves as being “like ourselves”
at least in three respects: as varieties of our actual selves qua absolute, relative, and
habitual subjects who are absolutely, relatively, and concordantly aware of them-
selves. Plato’s poetical fiction, however, is more demanding. For it not only requires
that we imagine ourselves as subjects who see and have constant beliefs about some
objects, appearing and disappearing more or less regularly in certain given circum-
stances, but it also demands that we imagine ourselves as constantly believing that
some of these objects are “ourselves.” The prisoners, Plato says, see the shadows of
their unseen living bodies and are convinced that they are such shadows. What fur-
ther fictional transformations of our factual self are needed in order to comply with
this requirement?
12
An example of a fictional character devoid of concordant self-awareness is Italo Calvino’s
Gurdulù, appearing in the novel Il cavaliere inesistente (1959). Gurdulù is a peasant who has no
lasting position takings, no enduring convictions, whose thoughts and behaviors constantly shift in
parallel with the things he sees (a pear tree, a duck, a frog) or the people he meets (Charlemagne).
18 C. Majolino
From the Husserlian standpoint, once we start talking of subjects that are “living
bodies” (not just of absolute subjects, ego-poles, habitual subjects) correlated to
“real things” (not just to intentional objects in general or coherently unfolding
events), we introduce a new variety of subjectivity. This new concrete essence is
called by Husserl the “real ensouled subject” (real seelische Subjekt) (1952, 120),
the “embodied-ensouled subject” (leiblich-seelisch Subjekt) (143), the “psycho-
physical subject” (psychophysischen Subjekt) (144), or the “animal subject” (ani-
malische Subjekte) (121). Some explanation is needed.
A “real” embodied-animated subject is “a real unity in that, as unity of psychic
life, it is joined with the living body as unity of the bodily stream of being, which
for its part is a member of nature [Glied der Natur]” (1952, 139). It is, Husserl adds,
a “natural reality [Naturrealität]” which is causally related to every other natural
reality thanks to its very embodiment (126) and undergoing regular changes accord-
ingly (143). It is a psychic being “connected in a real way with its respective human
or animal living body” and making up “the substantial-real double being: human or
brute, i.e. animal” (120). The specific difference between “human self” (Ich-
Mensch) (93) and the “brute” lies in the possibility of a distinctive form of self-
awareness called “ascriptive” (zuschreibende) “self-awareness” (121). A human self
is in fact a “concrete unity of a living body and a soul” (139) experiencing its dual
embodied-animated nature in the mode of the “having” (haben), i.e., as being able
to ascribe to himself or herself all of his or her conscious states grasped in “self-
perception” (erfasst in “Selbstwahrnehmung”) (93–94). As an example, if able to
speak a language endowed with first personal pronouns (Ich-Rede), a “human self”
could refer to himself or herself by saying “I am not my living body, I have my liv-
ing body, I am not a soul, I have a soul” (94); he or she would say: I have thoughts,
feelings, dispositions, leanings, qualities, flaws, but also I have strong muscles,
short size, heavy weight, pale complexion, dirty hands, etc. (94–95).13 A real human
subject is therefore a natural being constituting its “self” as having not only an
ongoing psychic life of persistent convictions causally connected with a “natural”
living body of persisting material properties, but also a living body causally inter-
acting with a “natural” environment.14
A “non-real” embodied-animated human subject, putatively capable of ascrip-
tive self-awareness but not causally engaged with surrounding world, is nothing but
a “ghost” (Gespenst). In fact, “even a ghost has necessarily its ghostly living body
13
The linguistic self-ascription exceeds the pre-linguistic self-awareness to which Husserl is refer-
ring. Nonetheless, although they have an equine-body, the Houyhnhnm are still varieties of “human
selves,” precisely because Swift stipulates that they have to be imagined as being able to ascribe to
themselves bodily as well as psychic properties.
14
The Ich-Mensch is not the homo sapiens, although, conversely, the homo sapiens is a factual
example of Ich-Mensch. Whether other non-human animals are also factual examples of Ich-
Menschen is a question that only the empirical sciences could settle. Additionally, in Husserl’s
account, nothing is said about the features of the Ich-Mensch’s living body, its sensory organs,
shape, limbs, biology, etc. The four-armed, four-legged, two-sexed, roundish bodied, and androgy-
nous creature described in Plato’s Symposium (2008, 189c2–193d5) is just as much an Ich-Mensch
as Socrates.
[Selbst das Gespenst hat notwendig seinen Gespensterleib]” (1952, 94). However,
contrary to a real human subject, the juncture between the “soul” and the “body” of
a ghostly human self is not causal. It is no more causal than the relation between the
ghost’s body and its natural surrounding world. Hence, devoid of material proper-
ties and causally inert, the ghostly body and the whole ghost fail to be “real,” despite
the reality of his or her psychic life granted by the persistence of a position-
taking self.
hostly Prisoners, or: Are Plato’s Prisoners Real Humans

G
After All?
According to Plato’s stipulations, the fictional prisoners ascribe to themselves quali-

ties and properties, both psychic and bodily, and therefore need to be imagined as
contingent examples of human selves. The question arises, however, whether they
have to be imagined as real human selves.
If we follow Husserl’s lead, the only necessary and sufficient condition for the
living body of an ensouled “human self” to be actually constituted as real, and
therefore inscribed in the causal network of his or her surrounding world, is the
presence of localized sensations (1952, 144). Only if this fundamental presupposi-
tion is met can other distinctive features of a subjective living body, such as its being
the organ of the will or the seat of free movements, be eventually constituted (151).
We should now ask whether Plato’s poetical fiction requires that we imagine our
human fictional prisoner-self as experiencing localized sensations the way that our
human, factual, and actual human self does.
There are many reasons to doubt it. Let us remind ourselves of the multiple
bodily impairments suffered by the prisoners drawn, directly or indirectly, from
Plato’s description:
–– an impairment of the sense of view (the prisoners can see only in front of them-
selves and cannot see their own body);
–– an impairment of the sense of local movement (they cannot move their own body
to further explore their environment or the sensible objects they perceive);
–– an impairment of the sense of touch (each part of their body is constantly in
touch with its shackles, but none can touch other parts of the body);
–– an impairment of the sense of pain (only when their “normal” bodily habits are
broken can the prisoners be said to endure some physical suffering).
We might think that all these impairments require that the body of the prisoners be
imagined as a severely limited version of our own real human body. But at a closer
look, we realize that Plato’s stipulations do not merely force us to imagine our fic-
tional self as provided with a living body of limited powers. They plainly and sim-
ply prevent us from imagining our fictional selves as being able to constitute
themselves as endowed with real, full-fledged, living bodies casually interacting
20 C. Majolino
with the causally endowed environment. Surprisingly enough, all these limitations
end up preventing our fictional selves from constituting themselves as real psycho-
physical selves.
As Husserl insists, the presence of a multiplicity of localized sensations is only
possible by constituting the unity of one living body, experienced as a whole and
manifesting itself as a unique field of localization within a causal network of condi-
tionality (1952, 151). Such a unity of the manifold loci of sensation constituting our
living body, as Husserl explains several times, can only be constituted if there is a
sense of touch mapping the different spots where localized sensations are actually
experienced, telling the difference between, say, an unsensitive chain, a sensitive
leg, a painful eye, and an itchy finger, and sensing the togetherness of the latter as
belonging to the same subjective body. As Husserl puts it, “a living body becomes a
living body only by incorporating tactile sensations,” i.e., “localizing sensations qua
sensations” (151). The constitution of the living body can only occur if there is such
an incorporation of visual sensations, identifying the locus of what is seen and the
locus of what is sensed, thus manifesting other persistent properties constituting a
real psycho-physical subject like a human self and
generating the idea of a sensing thing which ‘has’ and which can have under certain circum-
stances, certain sensations (sensations of touch, pressure, warmth, coldness, pain etc.) and,
in particular, have them as localized in itself primarily and properly. (151).
Thus, if the constitution of a living body goes as far as the incorporation of tactile
sensations goes, then even if the prisoners had more freedom in their movements,
even if they saw more of their own bodies, because of their tactile and affective
impairment they would still not be able to constitute a full-blown living body to be
aware of as their “own” living body:
A subject whose only sense was the sense of vision could not at all have an appearing living
body; in the play of kinaesthetic motivations (which he could not apprehend bodily) this
subject would have appearances of things, he would see real things. It cannot be said that
this subject who only sees his body, for its specific distinctive feature as body would be
lacking him, and even the free movement of this “body” which goes hand in hand with the
freedom of the kinaesthetic processes would not make it a body. In that case, it would only
be as if the ego, in unity with its freedom in the kinaesthetic could immediately and freely
move the material thing, living body. The body as such can be constituted originally only in
touching and in everything that is localized with the sensations of touch. (Husserl,
1952, 150)
If this is the case, it is not even correct to say that the impaired prisoners have a form
of bodily self-awareness like our own. Our fictional prisoner-self would have visual
sensations appearing from a specific point of view, but it would definitively have no
awareness of itself as a real ensouled body, a self-constituted body standing as the
zero point of orientation in a space that could freely be explored. If I imagine myself
as Lasswitz’s earthling in Mars, my fictional self would be that of a real human
position-taking self whose body is like my own actual body, i.e., constituted as part
of a fictional causal network of things and events; the same would hold if I imagined
myself as Swift’s Gulliver, though my fictional body would differ in size from my
factual one. Slightly more complicated would be the case if I were to imagine
myself as one of Swift’s Houyhnhnms, although my fictional self would still be that
of a real, position-taking, and human self inscribed in a fictionally real natural
world.15 But if I wanted to imagine myself as one of Plato’s prisoners, the conflict
between my factual actual-self and my fictional prisoner-self would be far deeper,
since the latter, unlike the former, would be utterly incapable of constituting his or
her own living body as a real one.
Hence the following striking conclusion, which is perfectly in line with Plato’s
requirements: as “human selves” the fictional prisoners have to be imagined as
capable of ascriptive self-awareness, bodily and psychic; but because of their mani-
fold bodily impairments, they are unable to constitute a real living body to be
aware of.
Ghostly Human Prisoners
The “psychic life” of my prisoner-self can be fully imagined as real, i.e., as a con-
scious, intentional, motivational unity of persistent convictions that is absolutely,
relatively, and consistently self-aware. But his or her “living body” cannot be imag-
ined in the same way, i.e., as constituting “a unity of permanent properties with
respect to related circumstances” (Husserl, 1952, 136). The prisoners are not aware
of their own bodies as being soft or hard, warm or cold, painful or pleasant, nor as
showing themselves as substrates of material properties changing in a distinctive
way whenever certain circumstances occur or whenever some causal interaction
with other substrates of material properties takes place. Unlike the body of our fac-
tual actual-self, the body of our fictional prisoner-self would be nothing but the
subjective body of a ghost. Husserl writes:
A ghost is characterized by the fact that its body is a pure “spatial phantom,” with no mate-
rial properties at all, which, instead, insofar as they do somehow co-appear, are consciously
stricken out and are characterized as unrealities. (95)
It is a ghostly body, lived through as an absolutely psychic here-now, unmoved and

unmoving, corresponding to the viewpoint of visual and eventually auditory inten-
tional acts; at best, it is filled with some sensible determinations that are not subjec-
tively localized – a body which is utterly ineffective with respect to its causal
environment and which has no causal relation with the psychic unity of persistent
convictions.
What kind of surrounding world could be constituted by the conscious being,
intentional life, and persistent convictions of a ghostly and embodied human self?
This could be a world in which events happen with some regularity, coming and
15
The way in which the fictional equine-body of a Houyhnhnm might constitute itself as the unity
of a vast field of localized sensations depends on the manner in which one imagines its physiology.
However, the fact that the Houyhnhnm’s living body is constituted as a real living body by incor-
porating tactile sensations is out of the question.
22 C. Majolino
going, appearing and disappearing from sight, even varying their shapes or colors –
but it could not be a real, natural world of causal intertwinements. Ghostly bodies
can only constitute themselves by constituting a surrounding phantom world. As
long as their living bodies are still un-constituted, what the prisoners see are “pure
visual spatial phantoms” (pure visuelle räumliche Phantome), i.e., “forms fulfilled
purely by color, not only without relation to the tactual and the other data of the
other senses, but also without any relation to the moments of ‘materiality’ and
thereby to any real-causal determinations” (Husserl, 1952, 22).
Material things are constituted through the experience of their conditional inter-
action with the environment, revealing the presence of material properties (hard-
ness, softness, flexibility, resilience, elasticity, etc.); but our prisoner-self does not
see or experience any causal interaction. Material things are also constituted
throughout a perceptual continuum in which the appearance of a manifold of
sensibly-filled spatial determinations is naturally integrated in a continuous synthe-
sis, so that the unity of one and the same thing appears through and beyond the
multiplicity of its appearances and adumbrations. Our prisoner-self cannot go
beyond appearances and cannot explore the horizons of the spatial objects the way
the living body does; he or she cannot follow the chain of Abschattungen, fulfil
empty intentions, or establish a correlation between the awareness of the kinaes-
thetic movements themselves and the sensations representing the properties of the
perceived object.
It is therefore not entirely correct to say that our fictional prisoner-self is seeing
“shadows.” For a shadow is a real natural phenomenon. It is only after the prisoners
are released – after they change, constitute their own living body, and begin consti-
tuting a natural world with causes and effects (the light causes the shadow) – that
the correlates of their old experience will properly be understood, in retrospect, as
“shadows.” But as long as my fictional living body is still un-constituted and
unaware of itself qua living body, what hovers in front of my fictional prisoner-self
is just a series visual objects: located in space, appearing for a certain time, display-
ing some geometrical shapes and various shades of color. But, as we have seen,
these are not material things because: (1) material things are constituted through the
experience of their conditional interaction with a material environment, revealing
the existence of causal relations and manifesting the presence of material properties
(hardness, softness, flexibility, resilience, elasticity, etc.); and (2) the distinctive spa-
tiality of a material things is constituted throughout a perceptual continuum in
which the appearance of manifold sensibly-filled spatial determinations is inte-
grated in a continuous synthesis, so that the unity of one and the same thing appears
through and beyond the multiplicity of its appearances. None of these conditions is
met in the cave. Therefore, my fictional prisoner-self does not see any causal inter-
action and cannot go beyond the appearances.
Although my fictional prisoner-self does not see “shadows” in any naturalis-
tic sense, the word “shadows” (Schatten) is nonetheless perfectly fit to name a series
of one-sided “adumbrations” (Abschattungen) failing to reveal the properties of a
real perceptual thing. Husserl has another name for this, a “spatial phantom”
(Raumphantome), which he describes as
a pure visual spatial phantom (a form fulfilled purely by color, not only without relation to
the tactual and the other data of the other senses, but also without any relation to the
moments of ‘materiality’ and thereby to any real-causal determinations) […] a tonal spatial
phantom, appearing with a determinate orientation, proceeding from a certain position in
space, resounding through the space, etc. (1952, 22)
Shadows (and echoes) are spatial phantoms. This is the only stuff of which the
world of the cave is made, since the living bodies of its “human” denizens are con-
stituted as the bodies of ghosts, not as parts of a natural surrounding world.
Shadow Self-Awareness for Ghostly Human Prisoners
We finally see how Husserl’s idiosyncratic conceptuality meets the twofold chal-
lenge of Plato’s cave. But let us first measure the ground covered so far. By follow-
ing all the way through the rules set by Plato’s distinctive poetical fiction, we have
carried out a series of imaginary self-variations, which have both transformed our
own factual actual-self together with its varieties of self-awareness and revealed its
various layers of contingency in a unique way. We have discovered that Plato’s pris-
oners are indeed “like ourselves” insofar as my actual factual-self and my fictional
prisoner-self are both contingent varieties of:
(1) conscious subjects – absolutely aware of their own streaming life;
(2) ego subjects of intentional acts – relatively aware of their experiencing and of
themselves as emerging poles of such experiencing;
(3) habitual subjects of lasting opinions – concordantly aware of their more or less
coherent life of position-takings as correlated to the intentional awareness of a
more or less consistently unfolding world;
(4) ensouled-embodied human subjects – ascriptively aware of their dual nature:
not only of their conscious life, manifold lived experiences, and lasting convic-
tions, but also of some of their bodily features, properties, capabilities, however
fleeting and enduring.
Features (1) and (2) are eidetic necessities: they are essential conditions of imagin-
ing oneself otherwise. Features (3) and (4) are eidetic possibilities of selfhood
exemplified only because we decide to comply with Plato’s stipulations. Regarding
these four eidetic features, the conflict between my actual factual-self and my fic-
tional prisoner-self always occurs within the boundaries of the same concrete
essence of which they are both contingent examples.
But a deeper conflict arises regarding the nature of the prisoners’ human self-
hood as it is implied by their severe bodily impairments. In this regard, Plato’s
prisoners are no longer “like ourselves” precisely because of the irreality of their
un-constituted living body. Thus, strange as it might seem, there is less of a differ-
ence between my factual actual-self and my fictional self when I imagine myself as
one of Swift’s savvy horses than there is if I fictionally see myself as one of Plato’s
prisoners. For, despite his or her equine appearance, the Houyhnhnm is still a real
24 C. Majolino
ensouled-embodied human subject, constituting his or her own living body as part
of a natural world and causally interacting with the latter. The embodied-ensouled
structure of the prisoners, by contrast, is that of the irreal (un-constituted, causally
inert) body of a real (constituted, motivationally position-taking) soul: not that of a
disembodied spectator but that of a spectator with a ghostly body. A spectator inca-
pable of exploring his or her surrounding space, of seeing anything but objective
spatial phantoms, i.e., “shadows” in the strict phenomenological sense, and, there-
fore, of being aware of his or her own embodiment as a ghostly subjective phantom.
It should be clear now why this new conflict between my factual actual-self and
my fictional prisoner-self is deeper than the others. Because my factual actual-self,
despite all its manifold layers of contingency, does not reveal itself in any meaning-
ful sense as a contingent variety of an
(5) ensouled-embodied human ghostly subject – shadowy aware of his or her own
body only as a visual phantom, i.e., as a distinctive shadow among shadows.
In sum, if we take Plato’s poetical fiction not just as a mere story, as a set of
words to be understood, but as a binding set of rules to be followed to test Husserl’s
conceptuality, to steer our free phantasy, to operate a self-variation, and to make the
effort to imagine ourselves not only as we are not, but also as we could never pos-
sibly be, then three outcomes could be gathered. First, we could encounter what
only a poetical fiction could make manifest, i.e., the figure of a human ghost who
could only be aware of his or her bodily self through the visual experience of a
phantom, aware of himself or herself only as a strange shadow among shadows.
Such a fiction could not only play an allegorical role for philosophical purposes, as
Plato wanted,16 but could also be part of Husserl’s much wanted phenomenological
“Modelsammlung” of the self. By trying to imagine ourselves all the way through as
Plato’s prisoners, we also realize the extent to which Husserl’s self-variation itself,
guided by the rules of a poetical fiction, also appears as a variety of self-awareness.
A new variety of self-awareness by means of which, through the manifold conflicts
between the factual and fictional self, we become fictionally aware of the manifold
layers of contingency of which we are factual examples – but also of the structural
possibilities of selfhood from which our own contingency is removed. Though cer-
tainly not ecumenic, syncretic, and interdisciplinary, these outcomes, drawn from
Husserl’s idiosyncratic conceptuality, strike me as philosophically important.
16
I promised that I would not venture into any putatively “phenomenological” interpretation of the
allegorical meaning of Plato’s cave. Let me note, however, that it is only once they are freed from
their ghostly embodiment that the prisoners’ human selves become real. The way out of the cave
is thus the path from the static vision of moving shadows to talk about (among which one finds the
shadow of oneself) to the moving vision of things to explore, up to the moving vision of the ideas,
and finally of the idea of the good to be motivated by in one’s action. A path that is only possible
thanks to constitution of a real human body: a body experienced in localized sensations and pain,
fully embedded in a natural surrounding world, able to explore such environment by freely mov-
ing, following the track from the effects to their causes, etc. The path towards the ideas can only be
taken by a real ensouled-embodied human self.
References
Blumenberg, H. (1998). Höhlenausgänge. Suhrkamp.

Brunschwig, J. (1999). Un détail négligé dans la caverne de Platon. In L. Bove (Ed.), La recta
ratio. Criticiste et Spinoziste ? Hommage en l’honneur de Bernard Rousset (pp. 65–76).
Presses Universitaires Paris-Sorbonne.
Calvino, I. (1959). Il cavaliere inesistente. Garzanti.
De Santis, D. (2020). ‘Self-variation’: A problem of method in Husserl’s phenomenology. Husserl
Studies, 36(3), 1–15.
Husserl, E. (1909–1926). Manuscript A VI 30. Psychologie (Lehre von der Intentionalität).
Husserl, E. (1952). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.
Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. M. Biemel (Ed.),.
Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1956). Erste Philosophie (1923/4). Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte. R. Boehm
(Ed.),. Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1969). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstesens (1893–1917). R. Boehm
(Ed.),. Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1973). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter
Teil. 1921–28. I. Kern (Ed.),. Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1977). Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.
Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. K. Schuhmann (Ed.),.
Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1980). Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschauli-
chen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). E. Marbach (Ed.),. Martinus
Nijhoff.
Husserl, E. (1994). Briefwechsel. K. Schuhmann & E. Schuhmann (Eds.),. Kluwer.
Kern, I. (1964). Husserl und Kant. Eine Untersuchung über Husserl’s Verhältnis zu Kant und zum
Neukantianismus. Nijhoff.
Lasswitz, K. (1897). Auf zwei Planeten, vols. 1 and 2. Emil Felber.
Majolino, C., & Djian, A. (2018). What ‘phenomenon’ for hermeneutics? Remarks on the herme-
neutical vocation of phenomenology. In S. Geniusas & P. Fairfield (Eds.), Hermeneutics and
phenomenology: Figures and themes (pp. 48–64). Bloomsbury.
Majolino, C., & Djian, A. (2021). Phenomenon. In D. De Santis, B. Hopkins, & C. Majolino (Eds.),
The routledge handbook of phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy (pp. 352–367).
Routledge.
Plato. (1941). The republic (F. M. Cornford. Trans.). Clarendon Press.
Plato. (2008). Symposium (M. C. Howatson. Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
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University Press.
Zahavi, D., & Gallagher, S. (2008). The phenomenological mind. Routledge.
Chapter 2
Ghosts of Ourselves: Self-Responsibility
in Georg Simmel’s The View of Life
Nicolas de Warren
Ich bin. Aber ich habe mich nicht. Darum werden wir erst.
– Ernst Bloch
We are but once. In this once upon a lifetime, we are many, as many as who we may
have become, but also who we have not become; we are as many as there have been
once upon a time, until that last breath of ours when we definitively pass into once
upon a time. We are perpetually not yet, standing as much behind as before our-
selves. And even as near our end of days, we sense that there somehow could and
indeed should have been more to come, not only more life, but more to life. Are
there not times when we feel our life to have been too late for itself? Are there not
times when we feel our life to be too early for itself? For mostly, we seldom feel to
be contemporaneous with ourselves and able to circumscribe the wholeness of our
life within an encompassing embrace of who we are without residue, remorse, or
regret for what could have been. Thus, we are pursued by ghostly apparitions of
ourselves from the past, for these ghosts insist on still being heard, heedless of our
welcome or disregard, and to which, despite ourselves, we are called to respond, if
not atone. Alone with ourselves, we are at times least able to be at one with our-
selves and reconciled with all that could have been. In such hours, we find ourselves
wistfully adrift in the “could have been” of our lives, had it taken another course or
followed upon different decisions. Wistfulness, however, is not synonymous with
nostalgia. Whereas nostalgia tends towards a past to which one would want to return
as it once was, wistfulness wanders within the spaces of what could have once
become of us. In this mournful twilight, we recall ghosts of lives no longer ours and
yet still somehow claiming to could have once been our own. That other life which
I could have had strikes my present life as remote, and yet, uncannily, renders the
life I do have all the stranger. From where does this incredulity stem that I am still
the same person who back then did such and such a thing, but whom in retrospect I
can no longer recognize as having in fact been me? How does this disbelief that I am
N. de Warren (*)
Penn State University, State College, PA, USA
e-mail: njd15@psu.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 27

S. Geniusas (ed.), Varieties of Self-Awareness, Contributions
to Phenomenology 121, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39175-0_2
28 N. de Warren
not the person I once could have been intrude upon the person I am? To what extent
do I harbor within myself the graveyard of my impossible selves? The incredulity of
having been born reverberates across the ages of our life, for much of who we are
remains stillborn in the past within our lifetime. Living is not merely an affair of
carrying forth or leaving behind who we have been. Living the unlived, the scars of
who we have not become, of ghosts borne within us in the hollow spectacle of all
those lives of ours not had, ever wanting, and still waiting for the impossible.
Wistful reminiscing about people and places from our past attests to the unset-
tling awareness that we never truly leave ourselves behind, and more particularly
that who we have not become somehow remains within the ambit of who we are,
haunting us with paths not taken, or abandoned. Such imaginings of “what might
have been” spin fairy tales of ourselves as retrospective projections of hope for an
impossible past. We might seek to disencumber ourselves of this weight of possible
lives permanently made, whether by ourselves or circumstance, impossible – laid to
rest, and yet restless – in wanting to, proverbially-speaking, “go back in time” to
make right what we had done wrong or with whom we had wronged: to say the right
words, to act in ways that we were not able, back then, to judge correctly. Although
we might wish to return to the past in order to change it and become other than who
we presently are, wistfulness for who we might have been is not necessarily tethered
to wanting to change the present. As explored in Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the
Coffee Gets Cold, the principle, as it were, animating wistfulness can be seen with
the novel’s time-traveling café rule that a person can go back to their past only on
the condition that individuals (from the past) whom one wants to address have
themselves visited this urban-legendary café and that there is nothing that one can
do while in the past that will change the present. One must inevitably return from
the past to same present, as measured in Kawaguchi’s storylines by the duration of
a cup of coffee getting cold, and hence find the world exactly as one had left it,
including oneself, even though returning to the past nonetheless allows one to return
differently to the present. The past is what it is. And yet there nonetheless obtains an
affective and imaginative leeway for self-variation in life’s remanence of what could
have been. We should, moreover, not imagine the ghosts of ourselves as hidden
objects, or “selves,” secreted away in dark closers or as a monkey on the shoulder,
as it were, as an inert or petrified “self” at the margins of awareness. A fragmentary
memory seizes upon our awareness, or the name of a long-forgotten lover flashes
through the mind, or a surge of remorse and regret washes over us. Such involuntary
reminiscences do not seem to have been catalyzed by anything in the perceptual
present nor by an intentional act of recollection. We were not looking, and yet, the
unfulfilled promise of what could have been catches us from behind.
Stated in general terms, remembrance is a form of self-awareness whereby an
experience from the past is reactivated – lived again as having once been – along
with, following Husserl’s insight, a reactivation of the dormant ego, or self, from the
past. I must remember myself as having been the one who originally experienced
such and such in order for me to remember once having experienced it. I must
remember myself in both senses as the one who remembers and the one who
becomes remembered. Within the arc of remembrance, we reanimate a
2 Ghosts of Ourselves: Self-Responsibility in Georg Simmel’s The View of Life 29
sedimentation of our own time-consciousness and are thus able to revisit and re-
inhabit not only what I had once experienced (having been to the theatre, etc.), but
also who I once was. I can reassess what I was thinking back then, notice in hind-
sight a friend’s gesture and intonation, and reassess possibilities that were once on
offer. Aspects of what I experienced back then can be seen more clearly, but like-
wise, aspects of my original experience can appear faded or, indeed, remain forgot-
ten.1 In the case of wistfulness, it is less a question of the re-activation of what I once
experienced than it is an imaginative inhabiting of who I have not become. Wistful
remembrance reveals oneself to be in the plural, for every moment in life crystal-
lizes around a decision that separates a time that could have been from a time that
will be. With each decision in our lives, we feel as if life becomes split in two,
between the life one does become and the life one does not become. We might regret
this other life not had, and all those other un-had lives speak to us from afar, calling
upon us to re-make a choice that can in fact never be undone. We are in this way
burdened by the “kipple” of our own lives, cast away as ghosts of what might have
been and who we might have become. We never lose anything about ourselves, and
nothing is ever left behind, for we are condemned to carry ourselves entirely, pos-
sibilities as well as impossibilities, each singularly marked as our own.
Wistful self-awareness exemplifies a fundamental feature of self-awareness, but
not merely of how consciousness becomes aware of itself as consciousness, that is,
as being conscious. As engrained within phenomenological accounts, what charac-
terizes the “being” of consciousness – what it is “to be conscious” – is that “to be
consciousness” just is to be consciousness of being-oneself-consciousness in a tem-
poral manner through and through. Self-awareness is inseparable from temporal
(self)-awareness. Consciousness of something, whether in perceptual experience,
cognition, imagination, or dreaming, entails consciousness of oneself as “the one”
who is conscious. Consciousness, in this regard, is always twofold without being
doubled in vision. Wistfulness brings into view another feature of self-awareness,
one exhibited in other varieties of self-awareness as well, and, indeed, arguably
manifest in all forms of self-awareness. Wistfully reminiscing about who one could
have been attests to the fact that self-awareness involves not merely being oneself
conscious, but an awareness of having – and not just “being” – a life. In the aware-
ness of being alive, there inhabits an awareness of possessing a life to be shaped,
pursued, and accomplished. In wistfulness, this difference between “being alive”
and “having a life” becomes acutely felt in the disjunction between having become
who I am and not having become who I could have been. Self-awareness, in this
manifestation, bespeaks an awareness of life’s sense of wholeness as a problem,
namely, as a life that one cannot avoid having to live as mine, and and yet one that
must be shaped, pursued, and accomplished in a way that leaves remainders and
fragments, not only of my own possibilities, but just as much of my own impossi-
bilities. Aware of ourselves as not just being alive but as having a life before us in a
manner that calls upon us to decide how and who we are to be, self-awareness
1
For Husserl’s conception of remembrance, see de Warren (2010).
30 N. de Warren
becomes inflected into an awareness “standing before oneself,” or, in other words,
an awareness of self-responsibility for this once upon a time of having my life. The
regret and remorse that underlines the poignancy of wistfulness attests to self-
responsibility. As animators of wistfulness, regret and remorse highlight the dis-
junction between who I am and who I should, or ought, to be, of having one life to
live, and caught, as it often is, between who I have become and who I have not
become. As further explored in this essay, it this through this lens of consideration
that the import of Simmel’s astute observation, as an entry point into his philosophy
of life, can be understood: “Man’s possibilities are unlimited, but so too, in seeming
contradiction, are his impossibilities. Between these two – the infinity of what he
can do and the infinity of what he cannot do – lies his homeland” (2010, 165).
Achsendrehung des Lebens
Having motivated these reflections on wistfulness as a variety of self-awareness in

the mode of self-responsibility, let me launch into a discussion of Simmel’s philoso-
phy of life in his – by his own acknowledgement – final philosophical testament,
The View of Life (2010).2 In approaching this sagacious philosophical work, a pre-
cursor to mid-century and post-Second World War existential modes of thought, it
does well to remind ourselves of the broader cultural diagnosis of modernity that
Simmel pioneered in his avant-garde sociological writings. What defines modern
life, for Simmel, is the absence of any credible “meta-narratives” or secure onto-
logical foundation. In Lukács’ striking expression, modernity is afflicted by a con-
dition of transcendental homelessness; one could likewise speak, as Max Weber
does, of the “disenchantment” of the modern world. Although Simmel’s own analy-
sis of modern culture differs in significant respects from these two contemporaries
(Lukács had studied with Simmel in Berlin before migrating to Weber’s circle in
Heidelberg), he broadly shares in their basic assessment of modernity as a world
without gods, whether thought in terms of an Absolute, grounding ontological sta-
bility, or an over-arching teleological meaningfulness. Whereas, for example, the
medieval world was anchored in an ontological distinction between created being
and uncreated being (God), and the ancient world was embedded within a funda-
mental distinction between “being” and “becoming,” Simmel argues that, on the one
hand, the transition to modernity during the nineteenth century displaced these his-
torical fundamental ontologies with the metaphysical category of “life,” but that, on
the other hand, life within the modern world becomes ensnared within an inevitable
alienation from the self-generated forms of life’s own meanings (culture, broadly
speaking). What defines the modern world is thorough-going relativism. Within a
world marked by relativism in the absence of the gods, how can life attain funda-
mental meaningfulness and authentic existence? For Simmel, as he addresses in The
2
For the historical context of the First World War for Simmel’s work, see de Warren (2023).
View of Life, meaningfulness for life cannot be discovered beyond life itself. As he
writes: “the great problem of the modern spirit is to find a place for everything
which transcends the givenness of vital phenomena within those phenomena them-
selves, instead of transposing it to a spatial beyond” (2010, 64). In a world without
the sheltering sky of starry heavens above or the rational moral law within, it is
within human existence that life must find its metaphysical purchase. As Simmel
writes in an aphorism appended to The View of Life: “By my existence I am nothing
more than an empty place, an outline, that is reserved within being in general. Given
with it, though, is the duty to fill this empty place. That is my life” (170).
Let us elaborate on the significance of this proposition, interlaced with our own
terms and thinking. What it is to be alive is to have a life that must be claimed; hence
the “duty” to make one’s existence meaningful. This claim upon life emerges from
the empty placeholder of life itself, as if with birth life launched upon an adventure,
the sense and significance of which could not prescribed or settled beforehand. Each
of us stands as an “empty place” awaiting ourselves. This would be another way to
express, in a more conventional metaphysical language, that life is a becoming.
What it is “to be” is “to become,” as in Nietzsche’s memorable rendering of Pindar’s
injunction γένοι’ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών: Werde, der du bist. We must become who we
are. Although Simmel does not employ the terms “existence” or “facticity” in The
View of Life, he addresses human life in terms of its “concrete being” or “concrete
life” without any overlaid and obscuring conceptions of the human as rational ani-
mal, spiritual substance, psychological faculties, or indestructible soul. Moreover,
although Simmel exhibited an interest in Social Darwinism and Herbert Spencer in
his writings before the turn of the century, he emphatically dispenses with any talk
of “human nature.”
Throughout his writings, Simmel deliberately avoids speaking abstractly of “the
subject” and “subjectivity,” but refers instead to “the individual,” “the concrete
human,” and “the actuality of life.” In his essay “Freedom and the Individual,”
Simmel argues that the nineteenth century witnessed a profound transformation in
the conceptualization of human life (1971, 217–226). Traditional conceptions of the
indestructible soul, a subject organized into faculties possessing universal cognitive
capacities, or the noumenal self and the rational will, were displaced by a concept
of life as developed by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche (and in the
early twentieth century by Henri Bergson). This metaphysical discovery of life rep-
resents the defining novelty of modern thought.3 In his pre-war writings, Simmel’s
analysis of the problem of the individual (albeit without an emphasis on individual
life) was shaped around the examination of a constitutive tension between social
conditions and individual differentiation. As Simmel states, “the human being is
never merely a collective entity, much as they are never merely an individual entity”
(1989, 175). To be an individual is to be constituted dynamically through the
intersection of the “external” (the social) and the “internal” (the psychological),
where there is no firm separation of these two relational poles between which a field
3
See Simmel (1922)‘s essay “Henri Bergson.”
32 N. de Warren
of tension becomes established and can be stabilized. Against the rational idealism
of a universal subject and the Romanticism of interiority, an individual is per se
neither “objective” nor “subjective,” since an individual is determined by a host of
relational forces and social-cultural interactions. There is no absolute substantial
self or irreducible core self, but only a process of individuating self-differentiations
in reciprocal interaction with other self-differentiating individuals and social-cul-
tural conditions (institutions, values, etc.). As Simmel writes: “Only the combina-
tion and fusion of several traits in one focal point forms a personality which then in
its turn imparts to each individual trait a personal-subjective character. It is not that
it is this or that trait that makes a unique personality of man, but that he is this and
that trait” (2004, 296). More generally, every element (individuals, institutions, etc.)
in a society is related to other elements through a variety of “reciprocal relational
interactions” (Wechselwirkungen): conflict, domination, exchange, etc.4 These
interactive forms of what Simmel terms “sociation” (Vergellschaftung) are ontologi-
cally primitive; social reality becomes realized, in situ and in re, through sociative
forms of relational interaction. From these “delicate threads of the minimal rela-
tions between humans,” the fabric of society becomes woven, torn, and mended
(2018, 20). An individual is situated in and must navigate a complexity of relational
interactions and forms of differentiation. Fashion, for example, functions as a pro-
cess of individual differentiation and social marking: it allows an individual to dis-
play their uniqueness while subjecting themselves to group conformity and
belonging. By contrast, smug indifference, which Simmel detected to be a distinctly
metropolitan phenomenon, expresses a defense against the hyper-stimulation, over-
complexity, and acceleration of modern life.5 What defines an individual is a coef-
ficient of combinatorial belonging (or not belonging) to different social circles. An
individual becomes more themselves the more they are inscribed within their social
nexus, the more, in other words, reciprocal relational interaction occurs between
themselves and others (1989, 244ff). A society is thus constituted from the totality
of relational interactions among individuals, which, changing in configuration and
forms, admits of no overall regulative principle other than the principle of
Wechselwirkung itself.6 Within any social nexus, individual freedom involves
degrees of available latitude and leeway for actions in negotiating conflicts among
values and navigating relational interactions with others (Riedel, 2021, 48ff).
In The View of Life, Simmel understands human life as necessarily standing
within boundaries that provide place, orientation, and meaning in the world. We are
bounded beings, existing within limits, structures, and forms in the incessant ebb
and flow of their settlement, transgression, and transformation. Boundaries delimit
a range between higher and lower, more or less – a space of variable meaning. To be
so determined is to exist between two poles, pulled and pushed in conflicting
4
For Simmel’s analysis of different forms of social interaction, see his Soziologie (Simmel, 1999).
5
See Simmel’s (1971) essays “Fashion” and “The Metropolis and Modern Life.”
6
As Simmel himself underlines, Wechselwirkung is the metaphysical principle of this thinking
(1993 9).
directions at once. The finitude of human life is situated within a tensile field of
conflictual meanings. Insofar as we are our boundaries, they cannot entirely define
us, since in knowing ourselves to be the bounded beings that we are, we have already
stepped beyond them. As Simmel writes: “We deny the boundary the moment we
know its one-sidedness, without thereby ceasing to stand within it. This is the only
thing that allows us to be released from our despair about it, about our finiteness and
mortality: that we do not simply stand within these boundaries” (2010, 5). To exist
is “to be” and “not to be” bound to the circumstances in which we find ourselves
thrown. We are beholden to the world in determinate and contingent ways which are
historical, cultural, social; but at the same time we project ourselves beyond our
determinations. Life is animated by the polarity of becoming who we are and unbe-
coming who we have been; we exist between bounded immanence and unbounded
transcendence.7 The import of this facticity is that the human is the limited being
who possesses no limit: “we are bounded in every direction, and we are bounded by
no direction” (2).
Boundaries are indispensable for life since it as bounded beings that we have
orientation and place in the world, and, moreover, that we are historical beings. And
yet, we are bounded beings who have no intrinsic boundaries. Life, in other words,
is a movement of transgression, for each step beyond a boundary creates a new
boundary: in unbecoming who we have become, we become once more, time and
again. The human condition of boundedness and unboundedness reflects the tempo-
rality of life itself. Largely taking his cue from Bergson, Simmel distinguishes
between chronological time and lived duration, or durée. Although existing under
chronological time, life transpires within its own intrinsic temporality in which past,
present, and future are not external to each other. This lived temporality makes up
what it is to have a life, for in having a life one’s own past becomes carried into the
present in view of an open future into which one has already stepped. The pastness
of one’s life is not a monolithic block, but rather composed of sedimented layers and
“countless individual elements” that have not vanished in significance, but which
protrude – i.e., “live for the day” (Hineinleben) – into the present. Many are the
ways in which the past “lives into” the present: as remembrance, habit, etc. Every
lived moment becomes transcended in a two-fold sense: through the protrusion of
the past as well as the protrusion of the future. As Simmel writes: “We live perpetu-
ally in a border region that belongs as much to the past as to the future as to the
present [and] insofar as life’s essence goes, transcendence is immanent to it (it is not
something that might be added to its being, but instead is constitutive of its being)”
(2010, 9). Significantly, Simmel proposes that the future is not properly understood
when conceived merely in terms of anticipation or a directed projection. What it is
to have future cannot be reduced to a conception of life as a “goal-setting being”
whereby the future as such would be modeled on the projection of a telos at a fixed
point ahead of us. Although Simmel does not discount the relationality of means
7
“Life is at once flux without pause and yet something enclosed in its bearers and contents, formed
about individualized midpoints, and contrarily it is therefore always a bounded form that continu-
ally oversteps its bounds; that is, its essence” (Simmel, 2010, 9).
34 N. de Warren
and ends, and hence a correlative temporalization of life, a goal (the future as goal-
directed) can only be projected based on an original protrusion (Hineinleben) of the
future into the present. Life, in this sense, is always already ahead of itself. It is not
the future as such that reaches from the present. The projection of a goal or possibil-
ity into the future presupposes an original openness of the future. The future, as an
indeterminate openness, must already have arrived, as it were, in the present in order
for the present to stand directed towards the future. The future of life is always a
future of futures. The future of life is an open multiplicity of possible futures, and
hence, in retrospect, the past resides within us as a multiplicity of possible ways in
which life “could have been.” Given that the temporal openness of life to itself is not
determined by a pre-given or prescribed telos, human existence, for Simmel, is
without purpose in this temporal sense, without a defined end other than existing for
the future as such. One has a life without already knowing what for. As Simmel
writes: “We are not already there [da] at the instant of our birth; rather, something
of us is born constantly” (1999, 299). What becomes born again in each instance of
life is this singular having of life as the wanting of life in both senses of wanting to
be and in want of being. In this temporal sense, the self-transcendence of life is
immanent to life itself. As Simmel writes: “die Gegenwart des Lebens besteht darin,
dass es die Gegenwart transzendiert” (220).8
From these reflections on temporality, Simmel arrives at the insight that life is
animated by an intrinsic polarity between transience and transcendence, or between
“more life” and “more than life.” Along the vector of “more life,” life is transient in
traversing through itself in its becoming: each moment of my life is both more than
the past of who I was, yet still am, and less than who I am yet to become, and still
to be. Along the vector of “more than life,” life searches to transcend itself from
within its own immanent transience. Cultural forms of meaning, relations of purpo-
siveness, and other “spiritual forms” are expressions of life’s movement of “more
than life,” without which life cannot meaningfully exist, that is, endure its own
transience. Simmel in this respect speaks of the “turn towards Ideas,” as encompass-
ing the whole of cultural forms, as offering a transcendent horizon of significance,
by which he understands how life generates forms of meaning that endure beyond
its finitude. These forms of meaning – culture, broadly construed – detach them-
selves however from life, attain their own independence (Eigenleben), and, in the
process, subjugate, or “subjectify,” life itself: rather than these forms serving life,
life becomes subservient to the forms of its own generation, and hence, degenera-
tion. Evidencing the influence of Nietzsche’s thought, Simmel speaks of the
Achsendrehung des Lebens – of the turning of life around its own axis against itself,
but by the same token, turning back against itself through transvaluation of those
forms of meaning to which it has become beholden, and hence, deadened.
8
“The present of life consists in that life transcends the present.”
Another random document with
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That is, as I say, the most characteristic and the most significant
episode, as it is the most amazing, of the defence. Paris was not to
fall, was not even to be attacked. Attila was surfeited with destruction
and loot, he was forced now to concentrate his attention upon the
attack on the Visigoths of the south lest Rome and Aetius should
stand in his way and imperil his whole campaign. His plan must be to
defeat the Visigoths before he was forced to face Aetius coming up
out of Italy, and with this on his mind he set out from Metz with his
main army, passed through Toul and Rheims, which were gutted,
through Troyes and Sens, which he was in too great haste to
destroy, and over the Sologne, held then by his ally the King of the
Alans, Sangibanus, and marched directly upon Orleans. That march
represented the work of a whole month. He left Metz in the early
days of April, he arrived before Orleans in the early days of May.
Orleans stands upon the most northern point of the Loire, the
great river which divides Gaul east and west into a northern and a
southern country. It has been the point around which the destinies of
the Gauls have so often been decided—one has only to recall the
most famous instance of all, the deliverance under Joan of Arc—that
it is without surprise we see it fulfilling its rôle in the time of Attila
also. From time immemorial, before the beginning of history, it had
been an important commercial city, for it stood not only on one of the
greatest and most fruitful rivers of western Europe, but, as I have
said, upon the marches of the north and south, whose gate it was.
No one could pass without its leave, at least in safety. Anciently it
was known as Genabum and there had been planned and conceived
the great revolt which so nearly engulfed Julius Cæsar, who burnt it
to the ground. It stood then, as later when it rose again, upon the
northern bank of the river and was joined with the south by a great
bridge. The resurrection after that burning was not long delayed, but
it seems to have been less magnificent than might have been
expected and it certainly suffered much from war, so that in 272, in
the time of Aurelian, it was rebuilt with a wall about it, and for this
cause took the name of the Emperor. Times, however, were sadly
changed with the great city when Attila came into Gaul. Much
certainly was in ruin, the municipal government in full decadence or
transition and it was therefore with a dreadful fear in her heart that
Orleans watched the oncoming of the Huns. Nevertheless the city
put herself into a state of defence. The first direct assault upon her
was made by that Sangibanus, King of the Alans, and Attila’s ally,
who requested to be allowed to garrison it. Orleans refused and
closed her gates. At the same time she sent forth her bishop (and
this is as significant of the true state of affairs of government in Gaul
as the facts about Tongres, Rheims and Paris) into the south, still
Roman, to Arles to learn when Aetius might be expected in relief and
how far the Visigoths would move, not for their own defence only, but
against the common enemy.
Anianus, for such was the bishop’s name, thus appears as the
representative, the ambassador and the governor of the city. In
Arles, to his delight, he found not only a secure and even splendid
Roman government, but the great general himself, Aetius, who
received him with impress. Anianus urged the necessity of an
immediate assistance. He reckoned that it would be possible to hold
out till the middle of June, but no longer. Aetius heard him patiently
and promised that by then he would relieve the city. Anianus was not
too soon, he had scarce returned to Orleans when Attila began the
siege.
It will be asked, and with reason, why it was that Rome had waited
so long before interfering to defend her great western province
against this “wild beast”? Why had Aetius not marched out of Italy at
the head of his armies months before? why had he waited till all the
North was a ruin before he carried the eagles over the Alps and
confronted this savage and his hordes with the ordered ranks of the
army of civilisation? The answer may be found in the war we are
fighting to-day against a similar foe. The French failed to defend the
North against the modern Attila because they were too long
uncertain which way he would come and where he would strike
hardest. They could not be sure which was the decisive point of the
German attack. This it was that kept so great a proportion of their
armies in Alsace and upon that frontier. They credited the German
with more subtlety than he possessed. They failed to grasp the
gigantic simplicity of the Barbarian plan; the mighty hammer-stroke
that shattered Belgium and plunged in to destroy all the North of
France. They looked for something less blindly brutal and more wise.
They could not believe that the German would destroy his whole
case and outrage the moral consciousness of the world by violating
the neutrality of Belgium. They failed to comprehend the essential
stupidity of the Barbarian. They were wrong.
Aetius was wrong also, but with perhaps more excuse. He could
not make up his mind where the real attack of Attila upon the Empire
was to be delivered. What if the descent upon Gaul were but a feint
and Italy were the real objective, Lombardy the true battlefield?
There was this also; in Africa, Genseric, Attila’s ally, waited and
threatened to descend upon the coast. Aetius overrated the
intelligence of his enemy as much as did Joffre. Neither understood
the force which opposed him, which it was to be their business and
their glory to meet and to break.
Like Joffre, too, when Aetius at last found himself face to face with
the reality of the situation he must have dared only not to despair.
The successes of the Huns had decided the Visigoths to remain on
the defence within their own confines; they refused to attack.
Everywhere the Roman delay had discovered treason among the
tribes who should have been their allies against a common foe.
Aetius could only not despair. He addressed the Visigoths, though
perhaps with more right, much as we might address to-day the
Americans. “If we are beaten you will be the next to be destroyed;
while if you help us to win yours will be the glory.” The Visigoths
replied as America is doing to-day: “It is not our business; see you to
it.”
They were wrong, the victory of Rome was as necessary for the
future as our victory is to-day.
Much indeed was already achieved to that end by the mere
presence of Aetius in Gaul. Suddenly the whole country was
changed, everywhere the peoples sprang to arms, the noble and the
peasant, the bourgeois of the cities, the bond and the free. From
Armorica came an heroic company, the Ripuarian Franks and the
Salian Franks having seen the ruin of the Roman cities of the
country they had been permitted to occupy, the Burgundians also
returned to, if they had indeed ever left, their old allegiance. So
successful at last was the diplomacy of Rome that when even
Sangibanus appeared Aetius feigned to be ignorant of his treason.
The great general prepared with a good heart for the attack, but was
determined to do everything possible to mobilise the Visigoths with
his other forces. It was with this object that at last he sought the aid
of Avitus, the senator, a very great Gaulish nobleman who lived in
the city of Clermont, the chief town of the Auvergne.
In Avitus we have a figure which at once arrests our attention amid
all the welter of Barbarians of which even Gaul was full. In him we
see, and are assured, that the civilisation of Rome was still a living
thing in the West, that it had not been overwhelmed by savages or
lost in a mist of superstition. Avitus indeed seems to have stepped
suddenly out of the great Roman time, he reminds us of what we
have learned to expect a Roman noble of the time of Marcus
Aurelius, or for that matter of St. Ambrose, to be. In him we see one
we can greet as a brother; we should have been able to discuss with
him the decline of the Empire. A rich man, coming of a noble family
which for long had enjoyed the highest honour and the heaviest
official responsibility, a scholar, a connoisseur, above all a somewhat
bored patriot, he was also a soldier distinguished for his personal
courage. He had already in 439 been successful in arranging a
treaty for Rome with the Visigoths, and it was to him in this hour of
enormous peril that Aetius turned again. He found him in his
beautiful, peaceful and luxurious villa of Avitacum amid the foothills
of the mountains of Auvergne, living as so many of our great nobles
of the eighteenth century lived, half a farmer, half a scholar, wholly
epicurean and full of the most noble self-indulgence, surrounded by
his family, his son and daughter, and his friends, poets and scholars
and delightful women. His son Ecdicius was the heir both of his
wealth and his responsibilities, his daughter Papianella had married
Sidonius Apollinaris of Lyons, a man already famous as a poet and
coming of a distinguished Gallo-Roman family. It was this man who
in the moment of crisis appeared on behalf of civilisation at the
Visigoths’ Court—we could not have had a more noble
representative.
His mission was wholly successful; but the time spent in showing
the Visigoths where their interests lay was to cost Orleans dear. The
devoted city wholly surrounded and every day submitted to the
assaults and the clouds of arrows of the Huns, hearing no news of
any relief, was in despair. In vain the Bishop Anianus went in
procession through the streets, and even among the troops on the
ramparts, bearing the relics of his church; they called him traitor. Still
firm in his faith in God and in the promise of Aetius, daily he made
men climb the last high tower in expectation of deliverance. None
came, no sign of the armies of Aetius could be discerned. Day after
day the mighty roads southward lay in the sun white and empty of all
life. At last he sent by stealth a messenger to Aetius with this
message: “My son, if you come not to-day it will be too late.” That
messenger never returned. Anianus himself began to doubt and at
last heard counsels of surrender almost without a protest; indeed
consented himself to treat with the Huns. But Attila was beside
himself at the length of the resistance, he would grant no terms.
Nothing remained but death or worse than death.
Upon the following morning, the week having been full of thunder,
the first rude cavalry of the Huns began to enter the city through the
broken gates. The pillage and massacre and rape began, and, as to-
day in Belgium, we read with a certain order and system. Nothing
was spared, neither the houses of the citizens, nor their holy places,
neither age nor sex. It seemed as though all would perish in a vast
and systematic vandalism and murder.
Suddenly a cry rose over the noise of the butchery and
destruction. The Eagles! The Eagles! And over the mighty bridge
that spans the Loire thundered the cavalry of Rome, and the
tumultuous standards of the Goths. They came on; nothing might
stop them. Step by step they won the bridge head, they fought upon
the shore, in the water, through the gates. Street by street, fighting
every yard, the Imperial troops pushed on, the glistening eagles high
overhead. House by house, alley by alleyway was won and filled with
the dead; the Huns broke and fled, the horses stamped out their
faces in the byways, in the thoroughfares there was no going, the
Barbarian carrion was piled so high; Attila himself was afraid. He
sounded the retreat.
That famous and everlasting day was the 14th of June, for Aetius
had kept his word. Orleans had begun the deliverance of Gaul and of
the West.
VII
THE RETREAT OF ATTILA AND THE BATTLE OF
THE CATALAUNIAN PLAINS
The retreat of Attila from Orleans would seem to have been one of
the most terrible of which we have any record. The Gothic chronicler
Jornandes, writing a hundred years after the events he describes,
wholly or almost wholly at the mercy of a Gothic and so a Barbarian
legend, would seem, though poorly informed as to facts and details,
to be fully justified in the general impression he gives of the horror
and disaster which befell the Hunnish host. It is certain that Attila’s
withdrawal of his army must have been not only difficult but
impossible without disaster: too many and too brutal crimes had
been committed for the ruined population of northern Gaul to permit
it an easy passage in retreat. The devastated country could no
longer supply its needs, everywhere ruined men awaited revenge: it
can have been little less than a confused flight that Attila made with
his thousands towards the Rhine, with Aetius and Theodoric ever
upon his flanks.
Nor was he to escape without battle. The Imperial armies pressing
on behind him gained upon him daily, a sufficient comment upon his
state, and it was really in despair that he reached at last the city of
Troyes, more than a hundred miles from Orleans, an open city which
there might, he hoped, be time to loot, and so to restore to some
extent the confidence and the condition of his people. That he was
not able to loot Troyes is the best evidence we could have of the
energy of the Imperial pursuit; but here again we meet with one of
those almost incredible interpositions of the spiritual power that we
have already seen at Tongres, at Rheims, at Paris, and not least at
Orleans. It must have meant almost everything to Attila on his
hurried and harassed road north-east out of Gaul to be able to feed
and to rest his army at Troyes, where the great road by which he had
come crossed the Seine. That he was not able to do this was
doubtless due fundamentally to the pressure of Aetius upon his
flanks, but there was something more, we are told. Just as Anianus
of Orleans had by his prayers saved his city, so Lupus of Troyes
defended his town in the same way. He, the Bishop, and now
perhaps the governor, of Troyes went forth to Attila, faced and
outfaced him, and indeed so impressed and even terrified the
superstitious Barbarian that he left Troyes alone and passed on,
taking only the Bishop himself with him a prisoner in his train. “For,”
said he, mocking him even in his fear, “if I take a man so holy as you
with me I cannot fail of good luck even to the Rhine.”
Attila passed on; he had crossed the Seine; before him lay the
passage of the Aube, and it was here that the advance guard of the
Imperial armies first got into touch with their quarry. It was night.
Attila had left the Gepidae to hold the crossing, and it was they who
felt the first blows of Aetius whose advance guard was composed of
Franks; the fight endured all night and at dawn the passage was won
and some 15,000[12] dead and wounded lay upon the field. Attila had
crossed into Champagne, but the Imperial army was already at his
heels; he would have to fight. The battle which followed, one of the
most famous as it is one of the most important in the history of
Europe, whose future was there saved and decided, would seem to
have been fought all over that wide and bare country of Champagne
between the Aube and the Marne, and to have been finally focussed
about the great earthwork still called the Camp of Attila by Châlons;
it is known to history as the battle of the Catalaunian plains.
It may well be that the fight at the passage of the Aube had given
Attila time to reach that great earthwork, one of the most gigantic
and impressive things in Europe, which rises out of that lost and
barren country of Champagne like something not wholly the work of
man. There he halted; convinced at last that he could not escape
without battle, he encamped his army and made ready for the
conflict.
In this terrible and tragic place he held council, and superstitious
as ever in the supreme moment of his career, began to consult an
endless procession of soothsayers, augurs and prophets upon the
coming battle. From the entrails of birds, or the veins upon the bones
of sheep, or the dying gestures of some animal, his sorcerers at last
dared to proclaim to him his coming defeat, but to save their heads,
perhaps, they added that the general of his enemies would perish in
the conflict. It is sufficient witness to the genius of Aetius, to the fear
he inspired in the Hun, and should be a complete answer to his
enemies and traducers, that Attila, when he heard this, from despair
passed immediately to complete joy and contentment. If after all
Aetius defeated him at the price of his life, what might he not recover
when his great adversary was no more! He therefore made ready
with a cheerful heart for the conflict. Jornandes, whom we are bound
to follow, for he is our chief, if not quite our only authority for all this
vast onslaught of the Hun upon the Gaul, describes for us, though
far from clearly, the configuration and the development of the battle.
In following this writer, however, it is necessary to remember that he
was a Goth, and relied for the most part upon Gothic traditions; also,
above all, it is necessary not to abandon our common sense, protest
he never so insistently.
Jornandes tells us that Attila put off the fight as long as possible
and at last attacked, or so I read him, not without fear and
trepidation, about three o’clock in the afternoon, so that if fortune
went against him the oncoming of night might assist him to escape.
He then sketches the field. Between the two armies, if I read him
aright, was a rising ground which offered so much advantage to him
who should occupy it that both advanced towards it, the Huns
occupying it with their right and the Imperialists with their right,
composed of auxiliaries.
On the right wing of the Romans Theodoric and his Visigoths held
the field, on the left wing Aetius and the Romans; between them
holding the centre and himself held by Aetius and Theodoric was the
uncertain Alan Sangiban.
The Huns were differently arranged. In the midst, surrounded by
his hardest and best warriors, stood Attila considering as ever his
personal safety. His wings were wholly composed of auxiliaries,
among them being the Ostrogoths with their chiefs; the Gepidae with
their King; and Walamir the Ostrogoth; and Ardaric, King of the
Gepidae, whom Attila trusted and loved more than all others. The
rest, a crowd of kings and leaders of countless races, waited the
word of Attila. For Attila, king of all kings, was alone in command and
on him alone depended the battle.
The fight began, as Jornandes insists, with a struggle for the rising
ground between the two armies. The advantage in which seems to
have rested with the Visigoths, under Thorismund, who thrust back
the Huns in confusion. Upon this Attila drew off, and seeing his men
discouraged, seized this moment to harangue them, according to
Jornandes, somewhat as follows:
“After such victories over so many nations, after the whole world
has been almost conquered, I should think it ridiculous to rouse you
with words as though you did not know how to fight. I leave such
means to a new general, or to one dealing with raw soldiers. They
are not worthy of us. For what are you if not soldiers, and what are
you accustomed to if not to fight; and what then can be sweeter to
you than vengeance and that won by your own hand? Let us then go
forward joyfully to attack the enemy, since it is always the bravest
who attack. Break in sunder this alliance of nations which have
nothing in common but fear of us. Even before they have met you
fear has taught them to seek the higher ground and they are eager
for ramparts on these wide plains.
“We all know how feebly the Romans bear their weight of arms; it
is not at the first wound, but at the first dust of battle they lose heart.
While they are forming, before they have locked their shields into the
testudo, charge and strike, advance upon the Alans and press back
the Visigoths. Here it is we should look for speedy victory. If the
nerves are cut the members fail and a body cannot support itself
upright when the bones are dragged out of it. Lift up your hearts and
show your wonted courage, quit you like Huns and prove the valour
of your arms, let the wounded not rest till he has killed his enemy, let
him who remains untouched steep himself in slaughter. It is certain
that nothing can touch him who is fated to live, while he will die even
without war who will surely die. And wherefore should fortune have
made the Huns the vanquishers of so many nations if it were not to
prepare them for this supreme battle? Why should she have opened
to our ancestors a way through the marshes of Azov unknown till
then if it were not to bring us even to this field? The event does not
deceive me; here is the field to which so much good fortune has led
us, and this multitude brought together by chance will not look into
the eyes of the Huns. I myself will be the first to hurl my spear
against the enemy, and if any remain slothful when Attila fights, he is
but dead and should be buried.”
These words, says Jornandes, warmed the hearts of the Huns so
that they all rushed headlong into battle.
We know really nothing of the tremendous encounter which
followed, the result of which saved the Western world. It is true that
Jornandes gives us a long account of it, but we are ignorant how far
it is likely to be true, whence he got it, and how much was his own
invention. That the battle was immense, we know; Jornandes asserts
that it had no parallel and that it was such that, if unseen, no other
marvel in the world could make up for such a loss. He tells us that
there was a tradition that a stream that passed over the plain was
swollen with blood into a torrent: “they who drank of it in their thirst
drank murder.” It was by this stream, according to Jornandes, that
Theodoric, King of the Visigoths, was thrown from his horse and
trampled under foot and slain, and so fulfilled the prophecy which
Attila’s sorcerers had declared to him. The fall of the King appears
so to have enraged the Visigoths—and here we must go warily with
Jornandes—that they engaged the enemy more closely and almost
slew Attila himself in their fury. Indeed, it was their great charge
which flung him and his guard, the Hunnish centre, back into the
mighty earthwork which before them seemed but a frail barrier so
enormous was their rage. Night fell upon the foe beleaguered and
blockaded within that mighty defence.
In that night Thorismund, the son of Theodoric, was lost and found
again. Aetius, too, separated in the confusion of the night from his
armies, found himself, as Thorismund had done, among the
waggons of the enemy, but like Thorismund again found his way
back at last and spent the rest of the night among the Goths.
When day dawned, what a sight met the eyes of the allies. The
vast plains were strewn with the dying and the dead, 160,000 men
had fallen in that encounter, and within that terrible earthwork lay
what was left of the Huns, wounded and furious, trapped as Alfred
trapped Guthrum later upon the Wiltshire downs.
The battle had cost the Imperialists dear enough. Nor was their
loss all. The death of Theodoric brought with it a greater anxiety and
eventually cost Aetius his Gothic allies. A council of war was called.
It was determined there to hold Attila and starve him within his
earthwork. In the meantime search was made for the body of
Theodoric. After a long time this was found, “where the dead lay
thickest,” and was borne out of the sight of the enemy, the Goths
“lifting their harsh voices in a wild lament.” It is to be supposed that
there Theodoric was buried. And it is probable that the bones and
swords and golden ornaments and jewels which were found near the
village of Pouan by the Aube in 1842 may well have been the
remains of Theodoric and his funeral, for the fight doubtless raged
over a great territory, and it is certain that the king would be buried
out of sight of the foe. On the other hand, these bones may have
belonged to a Frankish chief who had fallen in the fight for the
passage of the Aube.
But it is in his account of the events that followed the burial of
Theodoric that we most doubt our guide Jornandes. He declares that
Thorismund, Theodoric’s son and successor, wished to attack the
Hun and avenge his father’s death; but that he consulted Aetius as
the chief commander, who “fearing if the Huns were destroyed, the
Goths might still more hardly oppress the Empire, advised him to
return to Toulouse and make sure of his kingdom lest his brothers
should seize it. This advice Thorismund followed without seeing the
duplicity of Aetius.” Such an explanation of the treason of the Goths
was doubtless accepted by the Gothic traditions and especially
comfortable to Jornandes. It is incredible, because any observer
could see that Attila was not so badly beaten that he was not a far
greater danger to the Empire than ever the Visigoths could be. To let
him escape, and that is what the departure of Thorismund meant,
was treason, not to the Goths, but to the Empire. It served the cause
not of Aetius but of Thorismund, not of Rome but of the Goths,
whose loyalty was never above suspicion and whose slow adhesion
to the Imperial cause had been the talk of Gaul and the scandal of
every chancellery.
But Aetius could not have been much astonished by the desertion,
and it was no less, of Thorismund. Rome was used to the instability
of her Barbarian allies who if they really could have been depended
upon, if they had really possessed the quality of decision, and known
their own minds would no longer have been Barbarians. It was Attila
who was amazed. He had given himself up for lost when looking out
from that dark earthwork at dawn he saw the Visigothic camp empty
and deserted, and at the sight “his soul returned into his body.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, broken as he was, he began a retreat
that Aetius was not able to prevent or to turn into a rout, which he
could only ensure and emphasise. Upon that long march to the
Rhine all the roads were strewn with the Hunnish sick and wounded
and dead, but the main army, what was left of the half-million that
had made the invasion, escaped back into the forests of Germany.
Gaul was saved, and with Gaul the future of the West and of
civilisation. But Attila was not destroyed.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Jornandes, R. Get., 41. According to the Abbe Dubos the
“XC millibus” which appears in the text of Jornandes is the
mistake of a copyist for “XV millibus.”
VIII
ATTILA’S ATTACK UPON AND RETREAT FROM
ITALY
It might seem to be a hard question to answer whether Attila was

really beaten or not in Gaul. This at least is certain, the retreat from
Orleans to the Camp by Châlons was a disaster for him, and the
great battle which followed was only not annihilating because of the
desertion of the Visigoths. Attila saved what that retreat and battle
had left of his army, and without delay, for necessity pushed him on,
turned to prove upon the body of Italy itself that he was still the
“universal tyrant” and the “scourge of God.”
Historians of the decline and fall of the Empire, of the invasions of
the Barbarians, have consistently expressed surprise, often not
unmixed with contempt and derision, that Attila was allowed to
escape. But it must be remembered that it is the almost unbroken
characteristic of the Barbarian wars that the invaders did escape; so
Alaric continually avoided destruction at the hands of Stilicho; and if
the Visigoths were thus able to save themselves how much more
was Attila whose armies were so largely composed of mounted men.
It might seem that the superiority of the Barbarian lay in just that,
mobility; the rude and savage men that composed their armies were
content and able to live upon the country they ravaged, they were
not dependent as were the Imperial armies upon their bases and
their supply; they were always a bolt shot at a venture. Their success
is paralleled in our own day by that of the Boers in South Africa. We
do not blame Roberts and Kitchener that they allowed De Wet to
escape them for so long; we understand that it was inevitable it
should be so. Not thus argued the Romans. Full of discontent, rotten
with intrigue and corruption as the Imperial Government was, there
were many who from personal hatred and ambition, or mere treason,
blamed and traduced Aetius for the escape of Attila which they had
planned and prayed for in their hearts. Any weapon was good
enough to use against the great general who apparently suffered
neither fools nor traitors gladly, and was as ambitious if as able as
Stilicho. Every sort of calumny was used against him. It was recalled
that he had had intimate relations with Roua, the uncle of Attila, it
was suggested that he had purposely spared the Huns.
To all this bitterness much was added by the acts of Aetius
himself. Immeasurably proud, like Stilicho, he pretended to claim the
hand of the Princess Eudoxia, the daughter of the Emperor
Valentinian, for his son; moreover, among his other preparations
against a new attack of Attila was a plan to remove the Emperor into
Gaul; that he might replace him himself, his enemies declared. So
violent grew the opposition to this last project that it had to be
abandoned. Aetius was content to send Valentinian to Rome, while
he himself, with his army, held Ravenna and the line of the Po.
In the first chapter of this book I have briefly explained the Imperial
theory of the defence of Italy; that theory I have at greater length,
and I think for the first time, set forth in a previous work.[13] Here I
must very briefly recapitulate in saying that the valley of the Po, the
whole Cisalpine Plain between the Alps and the Apennines, was in
the Imperial theory, and rightly, the defence of Italy. That defence
was barred again upon the inward or southern side by the barren
and therefore impassable range of the Apennines,—impassable, that
is, save at the eastern extremity, where the Via Emilia ran between
the mountains and the sea into the city of Rimini. That narrow pass
was commanded and held not by Rimini, which was indefensible, but
by Ravenna which, on account of its position in the marshes, could
not be taken and scarcely attacked. It was the due and wise
recognition of these facts that caused the Emperor Honorius to take
up his residence in Ravenna when Alaric crossed the Alps. That city
had been the key to the defence of Italy ever since; it remained so
now, therefore Aetius went thither gathering his army along the Via
Emilia behind the line of the Po to await the final adventure of Attila.
Having failed to destroy the Eastern Empire, having failed in his
attack upon the western provinces, the only thing that remained for
Attila to attempt was the destruction and rape of the soul of all, the
citadel of civilisation, Italy and Rome. It was the hardest task of all,
therefore in his prudence, and he was always prudent, he had not
tried it till now. It was his last throw. It was to fail, and that so
contemptibly that his campaigns East and West in comparison seem
like triumphs. Like Kaiser Wilhelm II., what Attila lacked in real force
he strove to supply with blasphemy and boasting. He was as ill-
informed and as ignorant of the real nature and strength of the forces
opposed to him as the German statesmen of our day; he
exaggerated and relied upon the corruption of the Empire; above all,
like the Kaiser, he failed to see that the future frowned against him
dark and enormous as the Alps.
CISALPINE GAUL AND THE DEFENCE OF ITALY

Tradition rightly imposed upon Aetius the defence of Italy at the
expense as it were of Cisalpine Gaul; it insisted that Cisalpine Gaul
was to be the scene of the encounter. He determined to hold the line
of the Po as he had held the line of the Loire; there was no need to
be doubtful of his success. Already so many Barbarian invaders had
found destruction in the immensity of that great plain. Nevertheless
Aetius reinsured himself and Rome; he reinsured himself with
Constantinople. It was no longer Theodosius the Calligrapher who
sat on the Eastern throne, but Marcian the soldier. To him Valentinian
sent ambassadors; Marcian heard them and promised an army. If,
then, Aetius could lure Attila on far enough, but not too far for the
safety of Italy, if he could hold him in the Cisalpine Plain, Marcian
coming into Pannonia would be in time to cut off his retreat, and so
at last the Hun would be utterly destroyed, and the bones of his great
host might bleach beside the rivers of Lombardy. There at any rate
we have the best explanation of what followed.
Before the winter was over, the winter of 451-452, Attila was
already moving south-west out of Barbary over the Danube, and at
last by the great Roman road through Pannonia, crossing the Julian
Alps as Alaric had done before him to cross the Isonzo, to lay siege
to the first great Italian fortress, then perhaps, save Ravenna, the
strongest place in all Italy, Aquileia, the capital of the province of
Venetia. The walls of this mighty stronghold which was some sixty
stadia from the sea were washed by the rivers Natiso and Turrus. I
say it was, save Ravenna, the strongest place in Italy. It had been
made so about the end of the fourth century, but it had much longer
ranked third among Italian fortresses, only outstripped by Milan and
Capua. Though set in the plain it was so strongly held with walls and
towers that it enjoyed the reputation of being impregnable. Both
Alaric and Radagaisus had passed it by; in the early spring of 452
Attila laid siege to it. For three months he laboured in vain; no engine
he possessed, no contrivance he could command, no labour he
could compel, were enough to break those Roman walls and to
batter down the gates of this virgin fortress. He hoped to starve it
out, but in three months the number of his armies, their depredations
and ravages of the countryside began to tell far more against him
than against the beleaguered city. Living on the country as he must
do he was himself like to go hungry; moreover the spring heats in the
marshy plains were already due, his hosts were discontented, they
expected the loot of Italy, they began to remember the siege of
Orleans and the battle of Châlons.
Furious at being denied, enraged with his people, and perhaps
most of all with himself, the Hun was about to pass on as Alaric had
done in spite of the danger which was greater far now than in the
time of the Goth, when one evening, so it is said, as he moodily rode
within sight of the walls and towers of his inaccessible prey after the
heat of the day he saw by chance a stork preparing to leave her nest
on one of the towers of the great city, and to fly with her young into
the country. In this he saw an assurance of victory. On the morrow
once more he hounded his Huns to the assault: and no man since
that day has found even the ruins of Aquileia.[14] It was not defeat, it
was extermination, complete pillage, and fire. So horrible were the
cruelties there committed that they can only be compared with what
the Germans have done, and in our day, in Belgium. History records
the fate of a young and beautiful woman, Dougna by name, who,
pursued by a band of Huns, wrapped her head in her veil and flung
herself from the walls into the Natiso.
The fall of Aquileia, the extermination of its inhabitants and the
horrors that were committed terrorised all Venetia. It was the
Prussian doctrine of “frightfulness” carried out with as little scruple
as, though more excuse than, that we have seen at work with so
great an amazement, and rage, and disgust here in the West upon
the body of our Godchild Belgium. Attila marched on; Altinum and
Concordia suffered the same fate; they too disappear from the pages
of history; Padua and Modena were ravaged and burnt. Vicenza,
Verona, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan and Pavia opened their gates, they
were but spoiled, their inhabitants exchanged death for slavery. In
that long night such as might flee fled away doubtless demanding of
God whither they should go. God led them to the lagoons.
That Attila thought he was already victorious when he looked on
his ruins as Kaiser Wilhelm did when his “heart bled for Louvain”
(blood from a stone indeed!) an incident twice recorded by Suidas
bears witness. It seems that in Milan, among the mural decorations
of the palace, was one representing two Roman Emperors
enthroned and clothed in the purple with certain Barbarians, Huns or
Scythians, prostrate, demanding mercy at their feet. This work Attila
ordered to be effaced and in its stead to be painted one in which he
himself sat enthroned, while before him the two Roman Emperors
poured gold from great sacks which they bore on their backs. A witty,
if brutal jest; futile, too, since along the Po still flashed the eagles of
Aetius and already over the Alps came the rumour of the armies of
Byzantium.
And, indeed, in the heart of Attila there was more fear than hope,
fear of the gods of this strange and lovely country he had ruined, of
the gods of the marshes and the heats that were already devastating
his armies with fever, of those gods Peter and Paul whom he had
already learnt to dread in Gaul and whose City, the most ancient and
the most holy in the world, it was in his heart next to ravage and to
sack; fear of his own armies now heavy with loot and riches, anxious
for home and already on the verge of starvation in a country they
had made utterly barren; fear most of all, perhaps, of his own
destiny. “What,” he asked himself, “if I conquer like Alaric only to die
as he did?”
That the very name of Rome was still terrible to the Barbarians is
certain. They feared her name. Nevertheless the pride of Attila and
his ambition conquered his fear of his army, of his destiny, of the
name of Rome. He was determined to go on, and with this intention
he ordered his troops to concentrate from Padua, Vicenza, Verona,
Brescia, Bergamo, Milan and Pavia upon Mantua, whence he
proposed to cross the Po, probably at Hostilia, and so to descend
upon the Via Emilia at Bologna.
This move seems to have disturbed Rome profoundly. The
enemies of Aetius were there in the ascendant with the Emperor,
and their influence with the government was enough to cause a deep
disquietude with regard to the strategy of the great general. They
remembered Alaric; they remembered Radagaisus; they recalled the
fate of Orleans, and the escape after the battle of Châlons, above all
they whispered of Aquileia, Altinum and Concordia which were no
more. In this state of panic they left Aetius out of account, they forgot
the army of Marcian already on the move, they repudiated the whole
strategy of their general and with it their own traditions. They decided
to send an especial and unprecedented embassy to Attila, to offer a
price for the safety of Italy. The ambassador they chose was the
Pope.
Perhaps this amazing act ought not to astonish us, for we have
seen the like so often in Gaul. The acts of Anianus of Orleans, of
Lupus of Troyes, should have prepared us for the supreme act of S.
Leo the Great. That they have not done so is sufficient to prove to us
that we have failed to understand the time. Moreover, this great
embassy was not the first Leo had undertaken on behalf of the
Imperial Court. During the pontificate of Sixtus III (432-40), when Leo
was Roman Deacon, Valentinian III had sent him to Gaul to settle a
dispute and bring about a reconciliation between Aetius their chief
military commander in that province and Albinus the chief
magistrate. Sixtus III died on August 19, 440, while Leo was in Gaul,
and the ambassador was chosen as his successor.
The great Pope did not go alone upon this his last great mission,
with him were two illustrious nobles, the Consul Gennadius Avienus,
who after the Emperor was the greatest noble in the West, and the
Prefect Trigetius. They set out from Rome by the Via Flaminia and
met Attila as they had intended before he crossed the Po, on the
Mincio near Mantua—in a place called the Campus Ambuleius. It
was there one of the most grave and famous conferences that have
ever been held in Europe met.
The ambassadors were all in official dress, Leo wore his pontifical
vestments, the golden mitre, a chasuble of purple with the pallium. It
was he who dealt with Attila, in what manner we know not, but with
complete success. It was not the armies of Aetius after all that saved
Italy, and with Italy all that was worth having in the world, but an old
and unarmed man, Leo our Pope, for above him in the sky the Hun
perceived, so he declared, the mighty figures of S. Peter and S.
Paul; his eyes dazzled, he bowed his head. Yielding, he consented
to retreat and evacuate Italy and the Empire. It is as though the new
head and champion of civilisation, of Christendom, had declared
himself. It was the Pope.
The terms of the treaty then made were doubtless shameful
enough to old Roman ideas, for they certainly involved an annual
tribute to the Hun, from whom, moreover, no indemnity was exacted
for the ruin of the Transpadana. But the great fact of the situation
created by Leo overshadowed all this; Italy, the soul of the West, was

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Varieties of Self Awareness New

Perspectives from Phenomenology

Trauma and Its Impacts on Temporal Experience New

Conflict and Harmony in Comparative Philosophy Selected

Materialist Phenomenology: A Philosophy of Perception

The Philosophy of Social Science New Perspectives 2nd

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological

Phenomenology and Perspectives on the Heart

The Integral Philosophy of Aurobindo Hermeneutics and

Saulius Geniusas Editor

In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced

Editorial Board Members

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)

This work was supported by University Grants Council

Paper in this product is recyclable.

It is a platitude to observe that human consciousness, like the consciousness of other

This is determined by a specifically modern self-awareness in which human activity

the self-representational theory of consciousness emerged as a trend that moves

Shatin, Hong Kong Saulius Geniusas

Part I Possible, Impossible, and Fictional Self-Awareness

Part II Embodied Self-Awareness: Incorporation, Kinesthesis,

Part III Historical, Social, and Environmental Self-Awareness

Part IV Comparative Philosophy of Self-Awareness

A First Disclaimer: Plato’s Cave

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 3

A Second Disclaimer: Phenomenological Self-Awareness

The contemporary discussion of phenomenology and self-awareness is character-

­phenomenologists understand the structural features of phenomena.2 Arguably,

A Third Disclaimer: Phenomenology and Poetical Fiction

Why should one test Husserl’s eidetic-transcendental approach to self-awareness on

 epublic VII (514b–517c): A Brief Reminder

 Twofold Challenge: Plato’s Poetical Fiction and Husserl’s

My contention is that, to put it in Husserl’s terms, because of the originality of its

1. Is it possible to imagine a self who is aware of itself beyond the difference

Variation, Self, and Self-Awareness

In order to respond to both questions, we should first carry out “self-variation”

2. The array of fictional lived experiences belonging to my actual self as empty

Though often dubbed by many commentators as “reflexive,” this second mode of

Martians, Giants, and Savvy Horses

Let us imagine ourselves as traveling to Mars, as in Kurd Lasswitz’s science-fiction

If I were to imagine myself travelling to Mars according to the stipulations of

It is only as a contingent example of a position taking self that my fantasized

What mode of self-awareness belongs to the distinctive self-awareness of any

 hostly Prisoners, or: Are Plato’s Prisoners Real Humans

According to Plato’s stipulations, the fictional prisoners ascribe to themselves quali-

Ghostly Human Prisoners

It is a ghostly body, lived through as an absolutely psychic here-now, unmoved and

Shadow Self-Awareness for Ghostly Human Prisoners

Blumenberg, H. (1998). Höhlenausgänge. Suhrkamp.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 27

Achsendrehung des Lebens

Having motivated these reflections on wistfulness as a variety of self-awareness in

It might seem to be a hard question to answer whether Attila was

CISALPINE GAUL AND THE DEFENCE OF ITALY

You might also like

Shatin, Hong Kong Saulius Geniusas

Part I Possible, Impossible, and Fictional Self-Awareness

Part II Embodied Self-Awareness: Incorporation, Kinesthesis,

Part III Historical, Social, and Environmental Self-Awareness

Part IV Comparative Philosophy of Self-Awareness

A First Disclaimer: Plato’s Cave

A Second Disclaimer: Phenomenological Self-Awareness

phenomenologists understand the structural features of phenomena.2 Arguably,

A Third Disclaimer: Phenomenology and Poetical Fiction

epublic VII (514b–517c): A Brief Reminder

Twofold Challenge: Plato’s Poetical Fiction and Husserl’s

Variation, Self, and Self-Awareness

Martians, Giants, and Savvy Horses

hostly Prisoners, or: Are Plato’s Prisoners Real Humans

Ghostly Human Prisoners

Shadow Self-Awareness for Ghostly Human Prisoners

Achsendrehung des Lebens