Subjectivity and the Elusiveness of the Self

'Where am I?' This is something we might expect to hear from hapless explorers or academics with no sense of direction. If we can, we'll explain to our inquirer that he is east of East St. Louis and hope he can find his way from there. If he persists, insisting that he is not really lost, but only cannot find himself no matter how hard he looks, we might reasonably suspect that we are dealing with that peculiarly incorrigible academic explorer, the philosopher. When we hesitantly point to his body, we hear him explain, exasperated, 'No, don't you get it? That's my body, but I'm looking for my self! And I cannot find it!' At this point it is tempting to slip away, convinced that our philosophical friend is throttling himself with the noose of his own cleverness and is at risk of intellectual suicide by denying that he in fact has a self. Nevertheless, we shouldn't turn away so quickly: some pretty ingenious people from radically diverse schools of thought have endorsed the claim that the self ineluctably evades detection. Hume gets credit for this 'insight' in analytic circles, but in the continental tradition we can find Sartre making a similar claim, and even further from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition we find the Buddhists suggesting that the liberation from the very idea of a self is necessary for enlightenment.¹ It behooves us to take a closer look at these claims.

As is the case with many philosophical inquiries, it is difficult to provide an outright answer to the question as to whether or not the self is elusive. The question itself is vague, but the interpretation of the question risks prejudging the answer. I do not wish to pretend innocence of this passive/aggressive intellectual strategy, so I will state my goal at the outset, distinguishing my project from other investigations into the elusiveness of the self.² To start, let me be clear about the thesis I intend to explain and defend:

The Elusiveness Thesis: from the first-person perspective one's self is particularly unavailable to one's own awareness.

Two features of this thesis are worth noting at this point. First, it maintains that the self is particularly elusive. The thesis fails, therefore, if the only construal of awareness according to which we are not aware of a self leaves us unaware of other things we would expect to be aware of. The second part of the thesis that deserves mention is that the relevant awareness or lack thereof must be from the first-person perspective. This is a contentious phrase, and it lacks rigorous definition in the literature. Here it is enough to say that the first-person perspective is the perspective that one can take on oneself that is not available to another. It excludes, therefore, the perspective one has on oneself by looking in a mirror, viewing a CAT-scan, or touching one's nose.

In what follows I provide an account of the elusiveness thesis that affirms it, but does not trivialize it. The self is elusive in a familiar and substantive sense, and this fact carries with it interesting implications about the nature of the self, subjectivity, and our most intimate perspective on ourselves. My explanation will not, however, remain agnostic about the existence of a self. On the contrary, I will present my explanation as if it presupposes the existence of a self. The nature of the self is worth debating, but the claim that there is no self seems a genuine non-starter for reasons that have been made quite clear elsewhere.³ The view I advance, then, will claim that the self is elusive, but not because it doesn't exist, but rather because of peculiarities arising from subjects being objects of awareness.

I Arguments for the Elusiveness Thesis

There are at least three different arguments for the elusiveness of the self: two come from Hume, and one can be attributed to Sartre.⁴ Although I ultimately think they are closely related, it is...