This is a collection of Galen Strawson's previously published essays, focusing on the notion of the subject of experience, in the light of his panpsychism. There are fourteen chapters, including the introduction and three very interesting essays on the history of philosophy, one on Locke's theory of personal identity and two on Hume's theory of the self. The rest deal with such topics as the ephemerality of the self; that the self cannot be the living body; that the self is not a narrative construction but a primitive entity, and the radical nature of self-awareness.
The attack on identifying the self with the body – which Strawson calls ‘corporism’ is a convincing defence of what one might call the ‘Cartesian intuition’ that our sense of ourselves as the home of inner experience is more fundamental to our identity as selves than any third-person-ish appreciation of the history of our bodies.
The attack on the narrative theory of the self is also convincing. He nicely puts the theory down as follows.
Some psychologists use the term ‘identity’ not to how one fundamentally is, psychologically, but how one conceives oneself to be – however misguided one is. Some also use the term ‘self’ in this way. On this view, one's self is just one's self-conception. One's identity, one's actual psychological identity, is how one conceives of oneself. This seems to me like saying that one's VW is a Rolls Royce (or conversely) because that is what one thinks it is. (111)
History involves some interpretation, but if it is just a ‘text’ then pictures without Trotsky are as accurate as those with him. The same would go for a free-floating narrative theory of the self – if Germaine Greer were right in the quotation Strawson gives on page 125, that ‘human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves’, there could be no standard of intellectual integrity in self-knowledge.
It is not easy to review a collection of this kind, but there are certain recurrent themes in the essays that are brought together in the introduction to the volume. One of these notions is that of the thin subject. One could say that this is Strawson's attempt to dissolve the difference between a sophisticated bundle theory and a minimal substantial theory of the self. It consists of the following claims.
(i) There is no notion of experience which does not entail that of the subject of that experience.
(ii) A subject cannot exist at any time at which it is not experiencing something.
(iii) A single subject experiences all the phenomena presented at a given time (i.e. it is not the case that each datum requires a different subject).
(iv) A subject endures as long as, and only as long as, the experience is unbroken.
So far, the conception might be Cartesian, but there is a Humean addition.
(v) Hume is correct that we cannot experience the self as a separate entity from our experiences and hence do not have an ‘intelligible’ idea of it.
As far as I can tell, Strawson says no more about the nature of such a subject – that is, he does not say what sort of a thing would meet these conditions. These conditions define what the subject is. It might be questioned whether this will do. That it will do is, I think, behind Strawson's claim at the outset, on pages 1–2, that it is a mistake to think that there is anything mysterious about the nature of the self. This issue focuses naturally on the interpretation of Hume, whom Strawson sees as sharing the thin theory of the self, rather than denying its existence. It might seem that Hume believes in subjectivity, but not in a subject.
There is, I think, what some might think of as a Humean or bundle conception, according to which the experientiality or subjectivity of an experience is a feature of the content itself. So just as for example, a red datum has a hue as an intrinsic feature, it also has subjectivity as an intrinsic feature. Strawson claims that his notion of the subject is so thin that it need claim no more than the presence of subjectivity (266–7), but there seems to be a serious difference between the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘subject’ options. On a strict bundle theory, an impression could float off on its own, carrying its subjectivity with it, but if its existence depended on its relation to something that it shared with other data, it is not clear how it could do this. Hume appears to be committed to the former option:
All these [particular perceptions] are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other, and may be separately consider'd, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence. (Treatise, Part IV, section 6: my italics)
Most bundle theorists feel the need to invoke something like a co-consciousness relation to explain the unity of the bundle, but if this is made such that the relata in this relation cannot exist without it, then it comes to seem to be more than just a relation. Hume himself tries to model the unity of the bundle on the account he gives for physical objects. Their unity is the product of a mental act of ours, associating the different impressions that constitute the object together. Hume's worry in the Appendix is that it does not seem that we can make ourselves in that way, because it seems to require that there be some entity which considers the members of the bundle to be one thing, and what could that be if there is no more to the self than the bundle it ‘creates’? What is it that is doing the associating? Just one more mental event in the bundle would not be the imaginative binding of the bundle.
Difficulties with the minimality of ‘thinness’, I think, relate to other ways in which the thin conception which is required by ‘smallist’ panpsychism (a quark cannot have a rich mental life) fails to meet certain requirements. There is nothing in Strawson's account about either agency or thought. This is understandable in a form of panpsychism that is traceable back to Russell's neutral monism, for empiricism of that kind treats thought in either an associationist or a behaviourist manner, so thinking can be constructed either from sensations or overt behaviour; and agency is treated as just another sensation which tends to be followed by certain effects. But Strawson shows elsewhere that he believes in cognitive phenomenology. One can just about pretend that one can dim sensation down from the human level, to earthworms and on to quarks, but how is that treatment to be given to thought as such? Somehow fusing the minimal sensations of minute particles might add up to a human sensation, but how could it add up to a thought about the ontological argument or about Manchester United? Similarly, it is hard to see what primitive form of volition an electron has. Is it willing its negative charge and its mass?
I say above that a quark would have a very dim form of awareness, but Strawson seems committed to a form of Cartesian reflexiveness and transparency at all levels. He claims that ‘all awareness involves awareness of awareness’ and ‘all awareness comports awareness of itself’ (198). This seems a pretty tough standard for the minutest of particles! Doesn't ‘awareness of awareness’ involve something like recognition of the content of one's state, with discrimination of its various features, and doesn't this involve a complexity of mentality that seems to make no sense for an elementary particle that wholly lacks further structure?
Strawson does not, I think, discuss Berkeley's treatment of the self, but Berkeley's treatment of its elusiveness might be nearer to what Strawson wants than is Hume's. Berkeley agrees that we cannot form an idea of the self, for things that are active cannot be captured in this way, we can only have what he calls notions of them. (Strictly speaking, we do not have ideas of things, because sensible things are ideas. It is unclear whether Berkeley would say, in a similar fashion, that the self, thinking, and other mental activities are notions, as opposed to saying that we have only notions of these things. ‘Notion’ would then be a name for an active mental thing.) Berkeley's idea that the dynamism of the self makes it both elusive and implicit in all mental life seems very close to what Strawson wants.
Galen Strawson's originality and willingness to develop ideas in wholly unfashionable ways makes this a very valuable collection of essays. Few will agree with everything that he says, but everything is stimulating and provocative.
