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Do We Need Pre-reflective Consciousness? About Sartre and Brentano| old_uid | 13661 |
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| title | Do We Need Pre-reflective Consciousness? About Sartre and Brentano |
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| start_date | 2014/03/24 |
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| schedule | 16h-18h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Since Locke at least, pre-reflective self-consciousness has been understood as a means to understand the very perception we have of being “selves”: otherwise, it seems that we could be conscious of ourselves only as something outside of ourselves, namely as a reflected and supposedly observable past consciousness. Thus, it is supposed that we can only be self-conscious as something which is not reflected and cannot be observed: a present self-consciousness, which is conscious of being (in various ways) conscious of the world. But here, and on the face of the difficulties such a theory generates, the problem might be raised, and indeed has been raised, whether this construction might not be purely fictional. Against the very possibility of such a question, Brentano and Sartre (on which this talk will focus) have given a similar answer: pre-reflective consciousness ("internal perception"; "non-thetical self-consciousness") is not only the condition of possibility of self-consciousness, it is moreover the condition of possibility of the Cartesian “Cogito”, according to which the most obvious thing in the world is supposedly not the world itself but the “intentional” consciousness I have of the world. However, such interpretation of the Cogito is itself very dubious, at least concerning the purely “representative” modality of consciousness: can my (unreflected and unobservable) consciousness of the world seriously be said to be more certain than the appearance itself of the world? Starting with the opposite assumption, many other ways to deal with the problem of self-consciousness appear possible. |
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| responsibles | Kriegel |
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