Canisius College, Buffalo, New York

gallaghr@canisius.edu

The question of self-knowledge is an ancient one that was not, at first, divorced from the question of knowing the other. The importance of the relation between self and other is reflected, for example, in Aristotle's writings about friendship. To know oneself, which is from the start an ethical requirement, is to know oneself reflected in the other. The friend is like a mirror image of oneself, and one can see who one is by looking into the face of one's friend.

In practical and ethical contexts self-knowledge is not something to be found in isolation from others. Yet, already in Plato and Aristotle, there is a more theoretical view of the self (or soul) that considers the self to be something sufficient unto itself -- what Plato calls he psuche aute kath' heauten. This view is theoretical in two ways. First, it is developed in a philosophically theoretical way, based on specific metaphysical background assumptions about substance and the nature of the soul--assumptions that make relations to others secondary or accidental, albeit, in this world, necessary. Second, it is a view that identifies theoria as the most self-sufficient way of life. Ethically, the life of the independent, self-sufficient lover of wisdom, in need of no other person, is the preferred life. The life that pursues friendship, that exposes ourselves to others and that is rich in pathos is second-best to the life that pursues theory in what is seemingly an isolated autarkia.1

The self as it is unto itself, is the self inherited and even further impoverished in its social relations by modern thinkers like Descartes and Locke. 2 In modern terms, the self is private and accessible only by first-person conscious reflection. For this, it is all the more certain. For example, self-knowledge, conceived as this first-person access, is immune to error through misidentification (Shoemaker, 1984). When I say "I think X", I can be mistaken about X, but I cannot be mistaken about to whom the 'I' refers. Self-reference is guaranteed. For this, however, it is all the more impoverished. It remains a formal principle, nothing more than a transcendental index that accompanies every experience in life that is meaningful (Kant). The self in itself seemingly has no content, no real history; it is self-sufficient with respect to reference (Bedeutung), but lacking when it come to sense (Sinn). To understand itself as something more than a formal principle it needs experience, which includes the experience of others. Yet the experience of others is theoretically problematic. From Descartes to Kant to Husserl, my experience of the other person is something that blossoms only within the garden of my own mind. Moreover, it introduces uncertainty and ambiguity at the same time that other items in my world are objectively and scientifically sure. My access to the world involves a third-person perspective. Is the other person simply another item in my world that I can discover and explain in a third-person approach? Somehow the other person escapes this objectification and causes trouble. The other person is another subjectivity that refuses to be captured by the epistemic perspectives available to the self-sufficient ego.

This problem, which we might call the problem of philosophical autism, is dramatized in the narrative represented in Hegel's famous dialectic of lord and servant (Hegel, 1807). The other is captured and enslaved, made to work for the master. By definition a slave is a piece of property, a tool to be used at the discrimination of the master. The slave is an object, and nothing more. Yet the master is not a master sole ipse. The master requires the recognition of her mastership by the other, that is, the slave. It is only the slave, in his own subjectivity, who can recognize the master as master in this relationship. Yet the slave's subjectivity has been denied by the master; the slave has been reduced to an object, and as an object he has no power to convey the full sense of recognition the master seeks. This leaves the master with an unfulfilled desire for recognition. On the other side of this dialectic, the slave, for himself, is his own subject. The slave finds fulfillment, and a certain kind of liberty, not in social relations with others where he is defined as an object, but in his work which he has redefined as his own. Thus, on either side of this dialectic we have subjects who from within their own first-person lives are unable to communicate as subjects with others whom they can approach only in third-person perspectives. Relations are purely external and a-pathetic.

Since Hegel we have been wrestling with these problems in both philosophy and psychology. The task is thus to define a second-person perspective, one in which recognition is possible. This is a philosophical aporia precisely because it is a problem developed and delivered in the terms and the conceptual conflicts that are remnants of the Western tradition. According to this tradition one needs to begin with either the first-person perspective which provides subjective certainty, or the third-person perspective which has been made secure by scientific method. Yet from these starting points it seems impossible to access the subjectivity of the other. From either perspective, the other appears as an object. From a strict first-person perspective, it appears as an object constituted within the transcendental realm of ownness (e.g., Husserl). From a third-person perspective it appears as an object that we theorize to be different from all other objects insofar as we hypothesize for it a mental interior (a position psychologists refer to as "theory of mind").

Western philosophy for more than a century has been punctuated (and perhaps implicitly permeated) by considerations that touch on the problems of ipseity and alterity, that is, the problems of first-person identity and our relation with others, the problems of 'the same' and 'the other'. In what has come to be known as the continental tradition, such problems can be traced from post-Kantian philosophy to Scheler, from Husserl through Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre and on to Levinas and Derrida. In the analytic philosophy of mind the issue of personal identity is complemented by the problem of other minds. That these two issues are generally treated as separate problems, however, is itself problematic for this tradition. In psychology and the cognitive sciences we also find diverse approaches. Social psychology emphasizes the emergence of self out of more primary social relations; more nativist approaches suggest that we are genetically hard-wired for the perception of others. This tension between nativist and social interactionist accounts of self and other is reflected in the approach called "theory of mind" (see Legerstee et al., in this volume).

The papers collected here map out this complex philosophical and scientific landscape. They represent a variety of disciplines, including perspectives that are scientific, philosophical, literary, and ethical. They start at the beginning (with newborn experience), and with immediacy (in face-to-face relations); they explore foundations (at a microstructural level of consciousness), and superstructures (in social relations contracted in physical property); they probe body, and soul and mind. Yet these discussions are unified in the pursuit of the same problems and by common themes cutting across a difficult theoretical terrain.

The Science of Self and Other

The question of the origins of self is inextricably tied to the questions of how we come to perceive other people, our conspecifics. Maria Legerstee and her colleagues, starting close to the beginning of life, explore the contributions of nature and social environment in the development of our own sense of self and our ability to recognize others. They identify an issue that comes to be reiterated in a number of the other papers, namely, the role of emotional perception. The dimension of affect, long ignored in philosophical contexts, is also disregarded in many theory-of-mind approaches to the problem of other minds. The work of Peter Hobson (1993), for example, which emphasizes the role of emotion, represents an important correction to this approach, and Legerstee, et al., build on such insights in a variety of experimental contexts. Their paper explores the implications of recent empirical research on how caretakers use affect mirroring with their young babies in order to shape social emotional development and awareness of self. Although infants have conscious access to their internal basic emotions from the beginning of life, adults through affect-reflective interactions provide the inferential basis for constructing the representation of the self. In contrast, caretakers who are not "sensitive", but who are overbearing or unresponsive, hinder the development of a concept of self.

The experimental data show that early social-emotional development has important implications for the infants' developing awareness of self, and their understanding of the mental states of others. Legerstee concludes that for the child the development of a theory of mind is a gradual process, a function that builds upon the infants' pre-existing ability to differentiate between people and objects. From birth, infants identify with other humans and imitate their actions because they understand other people to be like themselves. Infants are born with specified structural information that enables them to recognize that members of their own species are like them and to differentiate these from inanimate objects. Yet, knowledge about the mental states of others is not the result of a purely nativist mechanism that comes on line at certain stages of development (on these issues see also Gallagher and Meltzoff, 1996; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997). Rather, Legerstee argues, infants construct knowledge of self and others through social exchanges. Maternal affect mirroring is partially responsible for the development of emotional awareness in others and the self, and for emotion regulation. Legerstee reviews recent work in her own lab with 2-3 months-old babies that supports the idea that the development of a theory of mind is a product that relies on the integration of aspects of nativism and constructivism, and that requires an essential role of affect.

Helene Tremblay and Philippe Brun continue the exploration of primary intersubjectivity in their contribution to this volume. Specifically they examine the case of autism and provide positive experimental evidence for a primary, and emotionally informed intersubjectivity during the first year of life. In contrast to theories that claim that autistic children lack this primary emotional experience, Tremblay and Brun suggest that they do experience close to normal, early intersubjective interactions and that these interactions provide a capital on which they draw for later understanding of self and others. They argue that when such evidence is taken into account it motivates a different understanding of their socio-emotional disabilities. Although such early experience is accepted as important in the normal developmental course of non-autistic children, it is generally ignored or discounted for autistic children. Tremblay and Brun present good empirical evidence to support their claim that even for autistic children primary intersubjective experience may serve as a springboard to the first explicit emotional knowledge about self and others.

As the developmental literature suggests, perhaps the most important vehicle for the expression and communication of emotion is the face. Jonathan Cole, from the perspective of clinical neurophysiology, explores this theme, which is, again, a theme that is reiterated in other essays in this collection, especially in those that define an ethical perspective. The face, both its unique features and its emotional expressiveness, is an almost universal given in our understanding of others and of our experience of self. Just how important it is can, arguably, be explored only by looking at the experiences of those who live with pathologies that involve the face, including those who live "without face." Cole provides a series of biographical narratives of those who have lost, or have never experienced the faces of others, due to blindness, autism, congenital or acquired loss of facial movement (e.g., Moebius Syndrome and facial disfigurement). From their experiences Cole reflects on the importance of the face as an identifier of others and of self. He paints a portrait of how our own self-esteem and selfhood are calibrated by our experiences of those around us, and how pivotal the face is in this.

The face is the most personal of body parts and is the locus that reveals, often against our will, in certain ambiguous and subjective ways, important facts about who we are. Our emotions and our character are written on the medium of our face. The face thus allows for the sharing of affect and contributes to the refinement of our communication with other persons. For this reason pathologies of the face provide important insights into our relations with others. Pathologies such as blindness, autism, and Möbius Syndrome reveal what we otherwise take for granted. Cole suggests that the face represents something that goes beyond neurological and cognitive accounts of what it is to be a person. His essay is a mirror which reflects the importance of the role of the face in the constitution of one's personal and interpersonal life.

Cole's reflections on the face point to the importance of embodiment for issues of intersubjectivity. The psychiatrist Louis Sass extends this idea by examining the experience of schizophrenic subjects. Persons with schizophrenia often experience characteristic alterations of the lived body that undermine normal structures of bodily subjectivity. Aspects, features, or dimensions of bodily existence that would normally be subjectively inhabited lose their natural status as part of the tacit background of awareness, and instead are experienced as something other than the subject, existing as part of the world, and at a remove. What would normally be experienced as part of the self takes on the characteristics of external objects.

Sass finds useful examples in research interviews carried out by the German psychiatrists Huber and Klosterkoetter on the so-called "basic symptoms" of schizophrenia. He suggests, however, that the most vivid first-person accounts occur in the writings of Antonin Artaud, a writer who suffered from schizophrenia. He considers these altered modes of experience by examining certain uncanny alterations of the lived-face. Again, the focus is on the face. Artaud describes experiences in which what would normally be tacit experiences of one's own face as felt from within (e.g., patterns of kinesthetic awareness and vectors of tension) are objectified to the point where he experiences his own face as a kind of nervous membrane that floats, mask-like, away from his head.

In the schizophrenic this kind of experience involves a state of hyper-reflexivity in which dimensions and cavities of the lived body, or its sensations of solidity and flow, tension and release, come to occupy the focus of awareness. Such phenomena thus seem unreal, distant, dreamlike and unfamiliar, but also (and even simultaneously) somehow exaggeratedly precise, material, electric, or hyper-real. Sass introduces concepts from the philosophers Merleau-Ponty and Michael Polanyi that are useful for clarifying these developments.

The essay by John Barresi shifts the discussion to questions about how we perceive the actions of others in contrast to how we perceive our own actions. People are skilled in applying folk-psychological concepts uniformly to self and other. Thus, I understand that another person is in love in much the same way that I understand that I myself am in love. Yet the information I have about the other person being in love is hardly the same as the information I have about myself being in love. This informational difference can sometimes lead to divergent interpretations of human actions between actors and observers. Social psychologists have stressed this divergence rather than any commonality in social understanding, naming it the 'actor-observer effect'. Barresi provides a critique of the typical "causal attribution" interpretation of the "actor - observer" effect in social cognition. In the actor-observer effect, actors tend to make 'situational' attributions in explaining their actions while observers make 'dispositional' attributions in explaining the actor's behavior. As an alternative to the causal account Barresi argues that there is a difference between 'first person' information and 'third person' information about any action. Both types of information are usually integrated to form an intentional (rather than causal) account of a person's action, whether it be for self or other. However, there is a tendency to emphasize first-person over third-person information when interpreting one's own actions (or the actions of those with whom one identifies). The reverse is true when interpreting the actions of others (or those with whom one does not identify).

On Barresi's account, human understanding of intentional activities of self and other is fundamentally the same under a wide range of circumstances, and humans usually agree on the meaning of their own and each other's actions. But two factors tend to produce biases in social perception and the understanding of human actions. First, our access to the meaning of social behavior requires us to engage in imaginative empathy as well as direct perception. The effort required to use imagination can lead to biases in the perception of the actions of self and other. Second, we are motivated to bias our interpretations of events in a self-serving manner. Under these circumstances, when it is to our advantage not to put extra effort into the imaginative or empathic component, an actor and observer can come to different interpretations of the action. If this analysis is correct then it should be possible to overcome even the worst of interpersonal and intergroup biases. Barresi argues that empathy can overcome and even reverse this effect, and that this has been demonstrated experimentally. Anne Jacobson examines an idea that is pervasive in certain skeptical approaches to understanding human nature, the idea that we are unavoidably in error about ourselves. The skeptical approaches have been part of an attempt to construct a science of the mind, and in this regard Jacobson asks whether or how science invites skepticism. She associates such skepticism with causal explanations, and, like Barresi, she points to a different kind of discourse for understanding ourselves and others. Specifically, she argues, the idea that we are frequently mistaken about ourselves is based on mistaking evaluative discourse for causal discourse.

One of the approaches examined by Jacobson, eliminative materialism, is narrowly academic; the other, Freudian psychoanalysis, has had enormous influence on our culture. Eliminative materialism maintains that our ordinary discourse about psychological states should be discarded or eliminated. Folk psychology is wrong in thinking that we can have true beliefs about beliefs and emotions, since, in fact, there are no such states in the brain, and what we call the mind consists in nothing other than brain states. Although, in contrast to eliminative materialism, Freudian psychoanalysis does allow that there are such things as beliefs, emotions, desires, etc., it maintains that the most important of such states are often inaccessible to ordinary self-consciousness. This inaccessibility is structural; such beliefs occupy an unconscious realm because of the various psychological mechanisms that purposively keep things out of consciousness. For example, psychoanalysis might say that we keep a desire out of consciousness because it would frighten us were we aware of it and we want to avoid fear. Jacobson argues that the problem with each of these approaches is that they take folk-psychological discourse to be causal discourse while it is instead evaluative discourse.

Jacobson traces the historical development of causal explanation and its association with epistemological skepticism through the writings of Descartes and Hume. According to the causal theory of the mind, explanations of mental states like beliefs are about causal episodes internal to the believer, not about how the world may lead us to belief. A belief is caused by another belief, not something external to the mind (or the brain). In contrast, justificatory relations between an action and some feature of the world, relations that involve evaluative judgments, do not depend primarily on causal connections in the agent's head. On this account belief or desire or emotion involve an evaluation of the world. On the causal account, this world-involvement is beside the point. On the causal view there is little room for concepts of values and justifications in understanding our selves and others. Yet our descriptions of actions, beliefs and emotions and our reasons for them are often constructed to suit a justificatory enterprise. Humans do have a basic concern for justifying their actions and evaluating the actions of others. This inclination is part of our capacity to act morally. Yet it complicates our lives and escapes simple causal explanation. Jacobson suggests that we have ways of describing ourselves that are neither singly complete, nor jointly consistent. Self-knowledge is not easy, in this regard, but it is not necessarily in error in the ways described by the skeptical approaches.

The Inside and the Outside of Alterity

On many theories it is assumed that the other is experientially subsequent and external to the self. Certain phenomenological and poststructuralist thinkers, however, argue that a form of alterity can be found already at work in the very structure of selfhood. For example, Emmanuel Levinas contends that ipseity depends upon alterity. Not unlike Hegel, although certainly not in the same way, Levinas argues that the I is a subject only to the extent that it is addressed by the Other. Only in so far as the Other makes an irrefutable appeal to me am I provided with true self-identity and individuality. Dan Zahavi takes this idea as the starting point for his essay, "Alterity in Self," in which he sets out to investigate whether and how self and alterity are intertwined. To avoid begging the question, however, by relying on a developed concept of self, as Levinas seems to do, Zahavi begins with a minimalistic notion of self. This is a primitive sense of selfhood intrinsic to the stream of experience. It is to be found in the very structure of subjectivity itself, through a pre-reflective, first-person access to our experiences. This is not an isolated self, detached from experience, but a basic form of selfhood found within the stream of consciousness, a structural feature or function of our first-person access to our own experience. It is just this first-person givenness that constitutes the myness or ipseity of experience. Zahavi then argues, drawing on the phenomenology of Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, that there is an 'internal alterity' or a 'self-alteration' at various levels of self-experience, and specifically in regard to reflective, temporal, and bodily self-experience.

Zahavi concludes by defending his broad use of the term alterity against specific criticisms raised by Levinas. Zahavi suggests that the encounter with the radical other (e.g., the Other, the other person) is mysterious if there is not some sense of alterity already at play in the self. Indeed, for Zahavi (and in a way that is not inconsistent with developmental views that provide some role for natural propensities toward the perception of others -- see Legerstee et al., this volume) the alterity that is implicit in the very structure of the self prepares the self for, and makes possible, encounters with other persons.

Francisco Varela and Natalie Depraz continue to explore in further detail that same alterity within the very structure of experience. Following Husserl's analysis, the very structure of our self-experience (ipseity) is understood to be temporal. The paper by Varela and Depraz represents a naturalized phenomenological analysis of the key, but much-neglected role of affect and emotions as the originary source of the living present in that temporal structure. Varela and Depraz argue that affect is a foundational dimension of the temporal emergence of consciousness. They site a growing consensus from various sources - philosophical, empirical and clinical - that emotions cannot be seen as a mere "coloration" of the cognitive agent or of a formal or un-affected self, but are an immanent and inextricable aspect of every mental act.

The interesting and innovative hypothesis explored by Varela and Depraz is explicated in contrast to the traditional phenomenological view, namely that temporality is the most fundamental aspect of experience. They suggest that affect (which involves a schema of alterity) may be even more fundamental, and a prerequisite element in temporal constitution. In specific they argue that the very structure of one's own experience is a self-affection that is already permeated with an emotional polarity. This structure gets reiterated at the level of self-other relations, as well as in what Husserl calls intentionality. But more fundamentally, a self-other (attraction-rejection, pleasure-displeasure) polarity permeates experience "all the way down." As a result, the micro-structure of ipseity and the basic temporality of experience already involve a schema of alterity. The temporal unfolding of experience is from the very start traversed by alterity since self-affection is always an affection that includes otherness.

Zahavi had explored three areas with respect to the question of alterity in the self: reflection, temporality, and embodiment. Varela and Depraz furthered the analysis of the reflective fold and temporality. Beata Stawarska returns us to the theme of embodiment. Her essay, however, shifts the focus to a sense of alterity in its external relation involving recognition. She addresses the problem of self-other relations by focusing on the developmental discovery of the visible unitary body, subsumed in psychoanalysis under the title "mirror stage". One's own body, even though lived from the inside in an immediate way, as in the unsharable feeling of pain, can only be experienced as a totality from the outside. One's complete body appears in the manner of an object seen - in the mirror - but not felt. She confronts two readings of this phenomenon, based respectively on texts by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Her argument is that traditional views, such as those presented by Merleau-Ponty, or as outlined by Zahavi, do not do justice to the role played by others in the process of the self-discovery of the body. This inadequacy, she suggests, can be corrected by means of Sartre's analysis of the "gaze." Stawarska argues that the visibility of the child to others as a body-thing contributes to the child's ability to identify with its body image visible in the mirror.

This analysis allows for a revision of the interrelation between ipseity and alterity as well. The visible bodily form functions not only as an otherness estranging the self from its own life or as the 'self's own other', but it also makes manifest an original dependence of the self on other persons who intervene directly in the discovery and lived experience of one's visibility. If the experience of the otherness of the visible body is not theorized in terms of a necessary preparatory stage to the experience of others (see Zahavi), undergone by an internally constituted self, but in terms of an interpersonal experience involving a plurality of visible/seeing subjects, then the otherness of the body and of others are shown to be concomitantly at work in the life of the embodied self.

Kelly Oliver carries us from reflections that are immediately pertinent to the questions raised by Stawarska, to issues that are directly addressed in the papers on ethical issues that follow. In her essay, Oliver critically engages various theories of recognition and argues that the "demand for recognition" (as found, for example, in Hegel) is a sign of the oppression that perpetuates self-other, subject-object, and same-different hierarchies. Although critical theories that challenge the notion of recognition attempt to expose the illusion of familiarity or sameness, most of them are still caught in the framework of an antagonistic self-other relationship. Even recent theories of recognition concerned with difference and the other do not move us beyond subject-centered notions of relationships. Oliver argues that rather than talk about the other--a discursive move that perpetuates the subject-other hierarchy-we should consider "othered subjectivity."

Many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity are the result of a particular, presupposed notion of vision. Examples of this can be found in notions of the objectifying or alienating gaze (Sartre, Lacan, and Stawarska in this volume), and concepts of the evaluative examination of other cultures in order to confer recognition (Charles Taylor). In such cases vision is conceived as objectifying. Oliver, rather than turning away from vision as some other contemporary theorists have done, reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. She cites evidence for this concept from recent developmental studies and ecological psychology, studies that investigate the experience of self and the perception of others prior to the mirror stage. For example, newborn infants have the capacity to imitate the facial gestures of others (see, for example, Meltzoff & Moore 1977, 1983; Gallagher & Meltzoff 1996; Legerstee, 1999 and Legerstee et al., this volume). This helps Oliver to formulate a theory of witnessing subjectivity where witnessing is something prior to recognition. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eye-witness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing--the possibility of addressability and response-ability--which puts ethical obligations at its heart.

Ethics: The Moral Self and the Moral Other

Considerations about the development of self-awareness and the perception of others, the role played by the face in intersubjective relations, pathologies that involve the alienation of face and embodiment, the possibility of self-deception and divergent perspectives in social understanding, as well as the role of affect and recognition in our self-constitution and our relations with others -- all of these considerations, although not simply preliminary, are certainly preparatory for further investigations that are ethical in nature.

To set a framework for ethical thought that clarifies the relation between self and other, David Vessey explicates and extends the work of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur attempts to untangle the conflation of two distant notions of self-identity. Idem identity, identity in the sense of sameness, includes both numerical identity-being one and not many- and qualitative identity-being substitutable. It also includes a sense of identity that includes change over time, making it possible, for example, to identify an acorn with a later oak tree. Idem identity, however, is not adequate or sufficient for answering a crucial question of personal identity, "Who am I?" Ricoeur suggests that we need the other concept of identity, ipse identity, to explicate the nature of selfhood. In contrast to idem identity, ipse identity is not dependent on something permanent for its existence. Being a self over time does not necessitate being the same (in the sense of idem, sameness).

Vessey helps us understand how these two senses of identity are related to character and the kind of identity that comes through narrative practices. Character is defined by idem identity, a kind of stability across time. Yet to the extent that we are capable of taking up a stance toward our character, to preserve it, or strengthen it, or shape it, character comes under the rule of ipse identity. Precisely because our own attitudes toward our character are implicated in our character so, in us, idem identity has a relation to ipse identity. This relation is a narratival one. The identity of character as it is plotted out in narrative is the result of a dialectic of sameness (idem) and difference (the reflective possibility of ipseity). Character is constructed in the narrative that I can tell about myself, but also in the narratives that others can tell about me. As Vessey makes clear, our narratives are essentially interwoven with other narratives. We come to be characters in other narratives, and they are characters in our narratives. As a result, our identity is never simply our own. It is embedded within the contextualized relations that we have with others, relations that we do not ultimately or fully control.

Within such contextualized relations intersubjective recognition comes to be a central feature of ethical life. Vessey outlines three models of intersubjective recognition, understood to be, as Ricoeur puts it, "models for the integration of identity and alterity" (1996, p. 4). One might think that in one of these models we could find a way to mediate, along ethical lines, the proposed account of recognition with Oliver's account of intersubjective witnessing (see above, and the papers by Stawarska and Oliver in this volume). For example, Vessey outlines a model of hermeneutic translation. In translation we do not simply appropriate the other. According to Ricoeur, we elevate ourselves through a respect for the world-view of the other. This form of recognition involves a welcoming "hospitality" that does not oppose narratives (the narrative of the lord versus the narrative of the servant) but integrates narratives in a way that opens up possibilities for our relations to be realized differently. Oliver might rightly say that this is already too late; that the model of translation is already an attempt to bridge a difference set up in terms of recognition and the failure of recognition.

It is possible, however, to find in Vessey's reading of Ricoeur, and again in the ethical context, something closer to what Oliver is seeking under the heading of 'witnessing subjectivity'. Indeed, this involves a reiteration of themes explored in the papers by Zahavi, and Varela and Depraz: activity-passivity, embodiment, intersubjectivity, and a form of alterity that is implicit in the self. In regard to intersubjectivity, Ricoeur works out a position between Husserl and Levinas. He contends that one's relation with the other cannot be unilateral, in one direction or the other, entirely from self to other (Husserl) or entirely from other to self (Levinas). Each direction performs a specific function: the first, an epistemic function, allowing us to recognize the other as an embodied self; the second, an ethical function, structuring the call to moral responsibility. This call, which originates as a response (responsibility) to the other's face is something that is, as a form of alterity, already built into the self. Again we need only think of the neonate's natural capacity to see and imitate the other's face. This capacity, to recognize the call of the other, is developed in what Ricoeur calls 'conscience'.

The fact that basic issues about embodiment, the affective passive synthesis of consciousness, and intersubjectivity lead us to and are reiterated in ethical questions is not surprising to Eric Springsted. In his essay he sets out to make it clear that although issues of the self and the other are often matters of the most subtle metaphysics, within which one risks getting fruitlessly lost, it really does matter to us how we think about the self, and how we are related to other persons. Springsted contends that it is often because of the social, moral and theological concerns that we have that we come to examine questions of the self and the other at all. He explores various movements in the macro-space constituted by political and social movements, the decline of religious belief, and the rise of the ethical problem in its current form. It is ironical, he contends, that the erosion of religious faith and the resultant creation of an autonomous human space (with human rights attributed to individual selves) seems to come along with the loss of being able to participate in the life of another human being. There is, we might say, with any gain in the construction of civil society and abstract right a parallel loss of any soul-binding compassion or friendship. Even attempts to outline a communitarian solution are rarely able to escape an individualistic framework. We are plagued by an externalization of ourselves: we look upon our ethical situation from the outside and devise answers that objective observers would count as just. Understanding, memory, and even moral obligation come to be merely instrumental to the success of a self that is objectively defined. In this context, Springsted maintains, relations with others, even if they are important to us, are nevertheless conceived in "thin concepts" (see Lingis, this volume) so that relations become adventitious, abstract and brokered by rules.

Springsted suggests that this problem can be diagnosed in a certain impoverishment of our language, specifically in the loss of the word 'soul'. Importantly, Springsted contends that loss of a discourse about the soul is not only an impoverishment of our language but an impoverishment of ourselves, in a dialectic that is very similar to Ricoeur's understanding of the concept of character and narrative. If talk about the soul is not just a matter of seeing something about persons, but a way of being a person, then the loss of such discourse is not so much the loss of a metaphysical object, but the loss of a certain richness of experience, a way of being with one another. As Ian Hacking (1995) might say, our way of describing ourselves, our self-narratives, have a looping-effect on who we are.

Springsted looks for a way to translate the older metaphysical discourse about the soul into terms that are not reducible to empiricist (and thin) concepts of self or person. He takes a clue from Newman's idea that to be a soul is to be a moral self, a self with a conscience. But he follows Levinas in explicating what this means. Levinas is able to both learn from and criticize Buber's notion of the I-thou. For Buber this relation was not primarily an ethical one; rather the ethical relation was only one particular instance of a more general I-thou relation. Levinas insists on the primacy of the ethical. It is not the case that the moral self can be established vis-a-vis anything that may happen to be other to it (a generic "thou"). The self (like the neonate -- see Legerstee, this volume) responds only to someone who has a face; the other must be another person, and the relationship is from the beginning an ethical one because it is an inter-personal one. Moreover, this relationship is not a reciprocal one; the moral self is constituted by obligations that are prior to any form of reciprocity. To be a moral self (to have a soul) means to be already caught up in a relation to the other. To be a soul, in this sense, is not to not be a body (and it is certainly to have a face). The moral self cannot be a transcendental ego. It can only be a form of flesh that acts in the world and is defined by the character of those actions. It is the soul as the forma unica corporis (Aquinas), which is fundamentally a moral concept.

A contrasting and clearly a more secular view is set out by Gary Madison. His paper too explores the relation between self and other from a moral perspective. Granted that the epistemological problem of other minds can be addressed in ways outlined by phenomenology and the hermeneutics of someone like Ricoeur (see, e.g., papers by Zahavi and Vessey), Madison thinks that the ethical issue of the self is still unresolved. This is because the ethical issue of the self is a social issue. He argues for a social ethics that contrasts in crucial ways with moralities of a merely personal sort (the ethics of "good intentions"). He sets aside (without rejecting) the level of analysis presented in the "ethics of the Other" - approaches to the question of what it means to be a moral self which incorporates (as the case may be) Heideggerian, Lévinasian, Derridean, and other elements. Thus, what Madison has to say clearly contrasts with Springsted, as well as with Vessey and Oliver, or any approach that makes ethics a matter of the asymmetrical.

Ethical theories that emphasize the asymmetrical nature of intersubjectivity ignore the importance of self-interest. This would be an ethics for exceptional figures, a Kierkegaardian ethics of a non-universalizable self, bordering on the religious, and far beyond the world of everyday social reality ("beyond being" as Levinas says). Madison summarizes his position on such questions very succinctly.

To those who would say that "the very least we can ask from an ethics is that it guard against the moral collapse that accompanies genocide" (Mensch, 1999), I would reply that, on the contrary, that is, so to speak, the very most we can ask from an ethics. The "very least" that we can demand from an ethics is, rather, that it provide us with principles applicable to the more ordinary situations in which we find ourselves on a day-to-day basis.

Guy Mercier explores the political landscape as it would be defined in a system similar to the one proposed by Madison. His focus in on the concept of property and how it sets the relationship between self and others. He begins with Proudhon's provocative proclamation: "Property is theft," a statement meant to challenge the usual opposition between owner and robber. Proudhon argued that those two figures, understood by common sense to be antithetical, were in fact similar. To possess something implies at the same time that the other is deprived of the same thing. Even if ownership is legal, it is nevertheless a deprivation, according to Proudhon, and as such is immoral because it causes unequal distribution of wealth.

Proudhon's analysis of this paradox of property has the merit of emphasizing an important issue about self-identities. It brings out that by means of property the self makes itself the same with the other: all owners are robbers. At the same time, property makes the self implacably different from the other: the owner is robbing everyone except himself. If property is a universal feature of human nature (Hoebel, 1966), do the diverse forms that property take in various societies tell us something important about the self-other relationship? The question is made significant if we adopt Hoebel's definition of property: "a network of social relations that governs the conduct of people" (1966, p. 424).

In typical social-contract theory property is conceptualized as a guarantee of individual social sufficiency and protection against others; it is also a point of transition from individual right to common good. Mercier begins his analysis in this context, and suggests that we understand property to be first of all a text--a contractual statement that constitutes a set of social rules--rules that define our relations with others. As such it is an interdiction that sets us off from our biological nature, sets us off from nature itself. That is, by submitting to the set of rules we give up satisfying our needs by an immediate and arbitrary access to nature. So property first involves deprivation rather than appropriation. Through this deprivation it establishes a positive order that defines the individual self, indeed, bestows identity, precisely in relation to nature and to other selves.

Within this relation of property Mercier finds a dimension that Madison (this volume) might consider unworkable, namely, an asymmetry in the form of a demand made by the other, albeit one that is subsumed into a mutuality through the medium of property. Yet, one could claim, this asymmetry is the motivation for the institution of property. Citing Ricoeur and Levinas, Mercier contends that property commands acknowledgment and respect for the other's humanity. Property, no matter how it is distributed, equally, or by equal opportunity, or unequally, implies that such arrangements are in the view of the other. It is in this relation that the other is acknowledged to have a certain authority. As Hegel indicated, even the slave who is without property can have an authority over his master-- an authority that bestows identity and recognizes a dignity. According to Hegel, however, this works only if the propertied lord is willing to bestow a minimal dignity on the servant. This is possible only if the servant himself is not reduced to mere property, but, in Kantian terms, is recognized as an end, as having dignity.

Alphonso Lingis in his consideration of personal identity, returns us to the plane of personal ethics by examining this Kantian notion of human dignity-an expression that seems to assert some kind of superiority of the human over other species of animals. But is dignity a property that one has (or does not have) simpliciter? Is it not possible that dignity comes in degrees? Lingis considers this idea in relation to another idea, namely, the idea that being a person is something that comes in degrees. If this is so, then, as Bernard Williams (1985) suggests, the category of person may be an unsatisfactory foundation for ethical thought. Rather than a natural kind or totality, the category of person signals characteristics that come in degrees. There exists nothing like absolute and final responsibility, complete self-consciousness, or an infinite capacity for reflection. This means the notion of person is ambiguous and at best stands for those entities who meet some set of criteria that are set out on a scale. To what use can this ambiguous concept be put in the ethical domain?

Lingis questions Kant's narrowing down of the term 'dignity', from the various ways it is used in the fullness of conversation and discourse, to designate something that is an end in itself. Kant, among others, thins out the concept of personal identity to designate the rational faculty in the human animal, and the rational faculty only when it is not being used for any practical or cultural purpose. Lingis asks how much one can build on such thin concepts. He suggests that a return to the fullness of experience would provide a better foundation for morals.

The fullness of experience, for Lingis, is not equivalent to existential or metaphysical solitude, nor does it mean simply being a biological unit. The person is someone who is intertwined in contexts that are physical and social. Our sense of personal identity is tied up with actions that we identify as our actions. Our sense of ourselves is centered on a sense of what we do, what we can do, and what we have done. Following Merleau-Ponty, Lingis makes it clear that such actions are embodied, and that embodiment is fully contextualized in a surrounding environment. The fullness of experience, however, is not reducible to our actions. Returning us to the importance of affect (see Legerstee, this volume), Lingis claims that we are not only our actions, but also our passions. Our life is impinged by the contextualized environment that includes others. We can be led to action, or paralyzed by others, when, for example, we fall in love. The integration of life, the integration of past and future (of alterity) into the present (see Varela and Depraz, this volume), the integration of action and passion, is always imperfect. Indeed, it is imperfect to the extent that we sometimes lose ourselves in the otherness (in the demands of other people, in what Heidegger calls Das Man, the they). The word 'I' can come to signify a struggle, an ethical struggle to disengage oneself from others. It is an evaluative word that removes me from the language game of others, and, as Jacobson (this volume) suggests, a word that displaces me as a subject who could be explained in purely causal terms.

Lingis provides a wealth of examples of those world-involved justificatory concerns that form part of our capacity to act morally and to form our own character. The word 'character' however, must be understood, not in a "thin" sense (as an abstract shell to capture various characteristics) but as a "thick concept" (Williams) that, as Lingis suggests, is more adequately found in examples from literature and art, than in the thought experiments of ethical texts.

The Words and Images of Self and Other

Lingis thus motivates us to turn from purely ethical and political concerns to look at an ethics informed by literary examples. Kathleen Wider helps to develop this approach in her essay on Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. The secret Morrison explores in this novel is the self-loathing which constitutes one of the Black community's responses to racism. To clarify this notion Wider turns to Sartre's philosophical analysis of our existence for others which suggests the possibility that the oppressed themselves can take on the view of the oppressor; they can see themselves as they are seen. Any objectification of the self whether through the gaze of others or through self-objectification produces shame. This kind of internalization of the gaze of the other allows us to understand the self-loathing response and the sense of shame and complicity Morrison suggests attaches to such a response.

Although we cannot escape our existence for others, we do have a choice about how to respond to it. Wider makes it clear that the underside of Morrison's secret is freedom. Because freedom is inherent in the very structure of human existence victims of oppression can never be completely deprived of their humanness. This freedom which allows for a response that increases the damaging effects of the look of the racist society also allows for the overcoming of this response. Morrison not only gives literary expression to these Sartrean ideas but adds an important dimension of our relation with others which Sartre neglects in his early work. There is always a possibility of a self-affirmation in the way we objectify ourselves. To overcome self-hate it is necessary for a community to offer to its members a different vision of itself than the one created by the look and objectification of the dominant society. The images that one provides for oneself can, if not remove oppression, set the stage for such removal. In the Afterword to her novel, Morrison discusses "the reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties" (Morrison, 1998, p. 210), a self-affirmation on the part of the Black community to oppose the internalization of the racist gaze. Similarly, the Black Power movement sought to foster values arising from an image that originated in the Black communities.

The message discerned in Morrison, and made clear by Wider, is that images and words, our own and those of others, play an important role in the constitution of self-identity. This is precisely the power of literature: to provide images, words, and narratives that enable us to discover who we are. This message is reinforced by Martin Moreto in his considerations of the representation of the self and of others in the poetry and fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Moreto pursues the theme of "the Double" (Doppelgänger) and how it illuminates the play of self and other. The Double is an imaginary figure that, like the soul or the image in the mirror, obsesses the subject as its other. In literature the figure of the double comes to represent the individual's expectations and fears with respect to himself and his mortal destiny. Likewise, it serves to sort out the notion of intersubjectivity. In Borges, the double appears with an element of horror because of what it represents: something that cannot take place in the world. Its mere presence is scandalous and must be extirpated. We become executioners and victims: on killing the double we kill ourselves. Yet this death is not tragic but liberating. Even if with humiliation and terror, but also with relief, we realize that not being anyone allows us to be everyone.

Borges, through his exploration of the theme of the Double, suggests an image of personal identity. Moreto explicates this image as follows. Lines between myself and the world are blurred; not only is it true that I am in the world but also the world is within me. The order of subjectivity and objectivity coexist but are not coincidental, and for Borges there is no possibility of resolution or synthesis. The search for identity is a common feature of the characters in his stories, but they pursue the enigma of their own personality without ever catching up to it. I cannot grasp what it is that binds the child that I was with the old man that I now am, neither can I be sure that the events of my life correspond to a deep vocation, or to an unchanging metaphysical character. Thus, I am not what I think I am and that means, at the limit, I am not my self.

Moreto explains that to be a self is to be prisoner of a past, of certain habits, of certain tastes, of obsessions that accumulate from childhood. To be a self is to be unable to approach life with the freshness that can only occur in childhood. Is it possible to live as a non-self? The proposal put forward by Borges involves a life of aesthetic creation. We play or represent different roles because deep down we have no self-identity. We give ourselves the fictional identities that we need; we invent stories to give our life an intensity that is otherwise absent. Everything is or can be literature, itself a certain kind of Double, or image of what we can be. What I can be, then, is everything other than who I am, limited only by the lines of humanity. Nothing human is alien to me, Moreto explains, since empathy and imagination provide the capability of understanding the other, even if she has lived a destiny totally different from mine.

Literature, as Lingis, Wider, and Moreto, each in their own way, suggest, provides a way to fill in our philosophically "thin" concepts, and to transform them into "thick" ones. P. Christopher Smith in his essay on the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, tries to understand why our theoretical concepts have become so thin. He explores a certain abstraction that took place in the early stages of Western metaphysics, a decisive abstraction from the original encounter with otherness in the acoustical experience of poetic speech. This abstraction is to be found implicit in Plato's conception of the soul or self "itself by itself" which he develops in conjunction with the opticality of the eidos. This development suppresses the original experience of poetic words spoken to us by another. It forms part of Plato's critique of Homer and the tragic poets in the Republic, a critique that involves a retreat of the self from exposure to alterity and into itself, by itself. To listen is to give oneself up to the other who speaks; to see is to impose limitations and control over what we observe.

To the extent that the philosopher turns away from the audition of poetic expression, he abstracts from a dimension of pathos that we undergo at the hands of the incomprehensible otherness of fate. Detached from this, the philosopher stands unaffected and sovereign as a spectator who knows a theory of life, but not necessarily life itself. In literature we learn, not by doing, nor by thinking of doing, but by having undergone something, Aeschylus' pathei mathos. Literature exposes us to the other and does so in such a way that something happens to us; we are affected by the experience. All of the themes that Plato explicates in the Phaedo can be understood by this detachment from experience: the suspicion of sensuality and pleasure, the denial of the body and time in the celebration of death and immortality.

But this does not end with Plato. Smith shows that it is reinforced in Aristotle, despite Aristotle's criticism of Plato and his emphasis on pathos. Ideas of self-sufficiency and the transcendence of alterity permeate his metaphysics, his ethics and politics, as well as his aesthetics. As Plato and Aristotle go, so goes the Western philosophical traditions. The theoria that is the inspection of things internally, within one's own mind is not foreign to Augustine, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Husserl, or most other thinkers. The theoria of philosophy is not the pathos of poetry, theater, and literature-- a pathos that can undo the self's isolation from alterity, that can, as Smith puts it, "wrench the self loose from its solipseity and throw it back into the dance with the other."

This theoretical turn from poetic audition to philosophical vision has an effect on our understanding of language as well. The audible word which has the power to disrupt the self's self-possessive power is suppressed in favor of the written text, a true sign that can be read from an affective distance. I can close the book if it is too upsetting. There is an inversion involved here. In life, or in what Lingis calls the fullness of experience, we learn what something is by hearing others talk about it, and others are essential in this process of learning about the world and about who we are. In theory, the self within itself learns by seeing the form or eidos of what something is, and only then attaches a conventional sign to it, for the sake of later exposition. As Smith points out, this inversion characterizes Western thinking about language since the time of Plato. Only recently have we come to recognize the effects of the equivocal, multiply allusive, unstable and ultimately uncontrollable alterity of language. Jean Grondin explores this side of things by focusing on two philosophical approaches to literature that may or may not be alternatives to each other: hermeneutics and deconstruction.

Derrida's deconstruction likes to play on just that unstable, equivocal, and multiply allusive alterity of language. For that reason it has been elusive of and perhaps even hostile to any type of definition. Yet, Grondin points out, Derrida has set forth just such a definition in his latest writings. Deconstruction is plus d'une langue. Although it remains somewhat ambiguous, Grondin attempts to work out a coherent interpretation of this definition in his essay.

His interpretation takes as its point of departure the experience of the limits of language. Derrida writes: "Now, this language, the only one I am doomed to speak, as long as speaking will be possible for me, for life and for death, this language alone, you see, will never be mine. In truth, it never has been" (1996, p. 14). This limitation, which is also an excess, an alterity of language, involves what Derrida calls the "monolingualism" of the other. Derrida approaches this idea by providing an autobiographical confession. Derrida's concept of personal identity is similar to Borges' (see Moreto, this volume): "An identity is never given, received or reached; what is achieved is only the never-ending, indefinitely fantasized process of identification" (1996, p. 53). Nonetheless he presents his credentials as an Algerian Jew who found himself cut of from his double origin as a Jew and an Arab. He never was able to speak what would be his languages (Hebrew and Arab), but came to learn and live with the language of the "other" which was imposed on him: French, pure, metropolitan, and colonialist French. Thus he is able to say, "I have only one language and it is not mine." And yet it is his to the extent that he is chauvinistic and intolerant of any variant of French that is not pure metropolitan French.

This confession, as Grondin interprets it, is not to be taken on an idiosyncratic level, but as reflecting a universal condition: we all learn a language which always remains the language of the other. Language is never truly my own, and this involves limitations. Deconstruction makes it clear that there are things unspeakable-- situations in which no words can capture the suffering, the death, the joy that is experienced. This is a complaint about the blinding conformity imposed by monolingualism, which is characteristic of language per se, and not simply a language. Indeed, as Grondin points out, it is characteristic of culture which always imposes some form of taboo, or frame, or norm. The task of deconstruction is to keep these limitations in mind, to preserve the memory of what language forgets, to respect that which does not fit within the limits of language. Alterity.

Thus, according to Grondin this autobiography and this definition, plus d'une langue, makes it clear that deconstruction involves an ethical respect for the other, in the Levinasian sense of the radical other--the other that cannot be confined to our words or images. And this is where deconstruction comes into conflict with hermeneutics, if hermeneutics is understood to mean the devising of interpretations that could capture alterity. At least one definition of hermeneutics is to make everything intelligible and understandable. Everything that is understandable is within language. Yet this definition of hermeneutics is not acceptable to Grondin. He finds that plus d'une langue could equally define the kind of philosophical hermeneutics proposed by Gadamer. In his most recent formulation Gadamer (1995) characterizes the soul of hermeneutics as being the acknowledgement that the other may be right. Understanding here is an opening up to the other and to the other's reasons. Moreover, if language is an important vehicle of communication in the hermeneutical tradition, then this does not rule out the alterity that escapes language. Hermeneutics does not claim that everything is fully understandable and speakable. Rather by interpretation we seek to understand because we are so brutally confronted with the incomprehensibility, the alterity of fate, tragedy, evil, and death--as we have learned, those things that are often made manifest to us in the fullness of experience or in great literature and art.

The essays collected here, then, span heterogeneous traditions that run in heteronymous paths from Plato to Derrida, and through disciplines diverse as psychology, ethics, economics, literary theory, political science, and hermeneutics. At stake in each case, however, is the common theme of how we come to know self and others. The fact that no consensus emerges, or that no simplistic summary is possible, speaks of the complexity of the problems. Let me conclude by plagiarizing Ricoeur, who, in confessing his plagiarization of Plato, noted the appropriateness of the diversity of discourse on the theme of otherness (1992, p. 356). The dispersion seems to me well suited to the very ideas of ipseity and alterity.

Derrida, J. 1996a. Le monolinguisme de l'autre ou la prothèse d'origine. Paris: Galilée.

Gadamer, H-G. 1995. Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 10: Hermeneutik im Rückblick. Tübingen: Mohr.

Gallagher, Shaun & Andrew Meltzoff. 1996. The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies, Philosophical Psychology 9: 211-236.

Gopnik, A. and Meltzoff, A. 1997. Words, Thoughts, and Theories. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1807. Phänomenologie des Geistes. English translation: Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.

Hobson, R. P. 1993. Autism and the Development of Mind. Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Hoebel, E. A. 1966. Anthropology: The Study of Man. New York: MacGraw-Hill.

Legerstee, M. 1999. Mental and bodily awareness in infancy: Consciousness of self-existence. In S. Gallagher and J. Shear (eds). Models of the Self. (pp. 213-230). Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Meltzoff, A. & M. K. Moore. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates, Science ,198, pp. 75-78

Meltzoff, A. & M. K. Moore. 1983. Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures, Child Development, 54, pp. 702-709

Mensch, James. 1999. Rescue and the Face to Face. Manuscript cited in Madison (this volume).

Morrison, T. 1998. The Bluest Eye. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1996. Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe, in Richard Kearney, ed., Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action (pp. 3-13). London: Sage Publications.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shoemaker, Sidney 1984. Identity, cause, and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Watson, S. 1997. Traditions : Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought. Indiana University Press.

1 Aristotle expresses this view clearly in the Nicomachean Ethics. Yet his position is not unambiguous. In the Metaphysics (993a) he articulates a kind of epistemic insufficiency that implies a certain epistemic 'friendship' (993a): "no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed." I thank Stephen Watson for pointing out this passage.

2 Thinkers in the modern era, like Descartes and Locke, not only were confronted by the requisites of modern science but could no longer rely upon appeals that Aristotle could readily make. That is, Aristotle readily appealed to shared and reliable community practices, the reliability of past opinion, and finally to the reliability of the nature that unites 'rational animals'. Both science and history, however, intervened to complicate such appeals, rendering them if not simply dogmatic then uncertain (see Watson, 1997).