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C h a P t e r 1 ................................... the transCendental tradition In his introduction to the notoriously difficult Star of Redemption, titled “The New Thinking,” Franz Rosenzweig (2000 [1925]) identifies three main epochs within the course of Western philosophy: cosmological antiquity, theological Middle Ages, and anthropological modernity. Each epoch can be best characterized by the kind of theoretical reduction it enacted: to the cosmos, to God, and, most recently and lastingly, to “the darling idea of the modern era, ‘the’ I” (115). Modernity institutes “the I” as its central notion, the foundation of independent philosophical inquiry liberated both from the received dogmas of the Church and the traditional cosmological accounts inherited from the Ancients that were being challenged in the face of dramatic advances in mathematical physics (Newton, Galileo, Keplar). As all philosophical children know, it was Descartes’ who initiated such a search for absolute certainty in his Meditations on First Philosophy, applying systemic doubt to both untrained quotidian and scientifically informed convictions, in view of attaining a piece of truth immune to doubt. The irreducible remainder of Descartes’ method is “the darling idea of the modern era, the ‘I.’” What is less often observed is that the reduction to “the I” of modernity does not simply privilege a naturally existing entity (the subject, the self) over others (the cosmos, God), and it does not simply shift the emphasis from the larger-than-human to the all-too-human realm. On such a modest interpretation of modernity, its philosophical figuring of humanity would simply mirror the already-established reality in a neutral manner. Yet it may be more appropriate to interpret the reduction to “the I” in terms of a constructive and profoundly constrictive reshaping of humanity by means of the primarily epistemic lens of philosophical inquiry and the individualist bias imported into it. In this sense the reduction to “the I” does not simply represent but rather produces a novel conception of the person as a repository of inner private events accessible by means of first-person insight, with the kind of 4 Between You and i intuitive luminosity of rational understanding that no doubt can seemingly obscure. Importantly, the conception of personhood modeled on the ideal of apodictic knowledge gained via intuitive insight leads to an exclusion of second person relatedness, and a forgetting of the inseparability of I and you.1 For the modern turn inward is facilitated not only by a focus on the firstperson perspective as the purported point of entry into the rational mind and by a focus on the personal stance of the “I,” over against the personal stance cast in other personal pronouns (notably “you” and “we”). It is also the case that a peculiar distortion of the “I’s” ordinary linguistic function underpins this turn and produces far-reaching consequences for how we think about who and what we are. Having picked up “the I” or its currently widespread (in both philosophy and psychology, as well as popular parlance) Latin equivalent “the ego,” modernity departed from the ordinary use of “the I/ego” as an indicator of the speaker role in discourse (that is, the one who is speaking at a given time) to an unprecedented use of “the I/ego” as a name designating a discourse-independent referent (such as the mind or the thinker), and cast it grammatically as a substantive noun, typically prefaced with a definite article. Modernity therefore divorced the pronoun “I” from its native context of speech and covered over its ordinary discursive role of marking the speaker, who stands in relation to a present or at least a potential addressee. It construed the pronoun “I” as a label for the tacit domain of inner and private thought that can be accessed exclusively in solitude, by means of focused introspective insight with “the mind’s eye.” Modernity thus divorced the firstfrom the second-person experience. It produced a construct of a solitary and silent subject, it being optional whether or not this subject may “express” itself to others in public discourse. Interestingly then, the distortion of the ordinary grammatical category of personal pronouns has helped to forge the idea of an extralinguistic, intrapsychic entity, the supposed referent of “the I” or “the ego.” It has thus initiated what will be termed in this monograph an egocentric tradition, along with its commitment to the conception of humanity as a collective of lone individuals. The egocentric tradition has deeply informed what Aaron Gurwitsch (1979) calls the “phenomenology of...

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