School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemBe a body: from experiential self-awareness to a truly bodily self( 2023-08)Dan Zahavi has defended a systematic and influential account of our most basic form of experiential self-consciousness, pre-reflective self-awareness (PRSA). For Zahavi, PRSA explicates the subtle way in which we are always immediately aware of the experiences we are having, are aware of them as being our experiences, and, in being so aware, are minimally self-aware. Zahavi’s model of PRSA (hereafter Z-PRSA) has proven influential in contemporary debates on the nature of self-consciousness and selfhood across analytic, Buddhist and continental philosophical traditions. However, one aspect of Zahavi’s model that is underdeveloped is its relation to the body. In his first major work, Self-Awareness and Alterity ([1999] 2020), Zahavi argued that Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily by drawing on the analyses of bodily self-experience developed by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Yet, in more recent works, Zahavi has either remained silent on the topic of the body or indicated newfound neutrality on the question of embodiment, without adequately accounting for this change. By contrast, over this period, body awareness has become the focal point of philosophical and empirical investigations into self-consciousness and minimal phenomenal selfhood. Various forms of body awareness have been proposed to play a foundational role in grounding self-consciousness: the sense of body ownership, proprioceptive self-awareness, interoceptive self-awareness, spatial self-awareness, and the implicit self-awareness we have in perceiving the world as ripe for bodily action. An important question arises of how these modalities of bodily self-consciousness relate to Z-PRSA. Should we identify Z-PRSA with one of these forms of bodily self-consciousness, in a deflationary move? Alternatively, does bodily self-consciousness constitute a phenomenological condition of possibility for Z-PRSA? To find an answer, in this thesis I examine a series of descriptive and transcendental phenomenological arguments to determine whether, as Zahavi originally claimed, Z-PRSA is intrinsically bodily. I show first that Z-PRSA should not be identified with any of the above forms of bodily self-consciousness. Except for spatial self-awareness, they do not share with Z-PRSA its key phenomenological characteristics as a mode of awareness. While spatial self-awareness does, Zahavi’s strident opposition to any identity between it and Z-PRSA motivates me to consider an alternative connection between them: transcendental dependence. In evaluating Zahavi’s Husserlian enactivist argument from Self-Awareness and Alterity, I consider objections to its claim that object perception depends on spatial self-awareness, bodily movement, and kinaesthetic self-awareness. I show that Zahavi’s original argument for embodying Z-PRSA must be adapted to overcome an empirical challenge from cases of locked-in syndrome. While identifying a path for future research to more definitively determine the character of bodily experience in long-term locked-in syndrome, I provisionally conclude that the adapted argument succeeds in proving that Z-PRSA is only possible for a bodily subject of experience. Through my investigations, I aim to bring together a diversity of philosophical and empirical perspectives towards a perspicuous understanding of pre-reflective self-awareness and bodily self-experience.
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ItemThe feeling of metaphor( 2019)There is a tendency in analytic philosophy of language to separate a metaphor’s affective powers, often identified with its ability to make us ‘see’ things in new ways, from a conception of its meaning. This is the case in the non-cognitivist denial that there is such a thing as a metaphorical meaning—metaphors are only prompts to view things in certain ways—and also in the pragmatist construal of metaphorical meaning as being no different in kind from other utterances by which a speaker manages to communicate something other than their literal sentence meaning. It is also the case in David Hills’ more recent work on metaphor as a form of “make-believe”, despite his recognition of a fundamental interplay between their “aesthetic” and “semantic” dimensions. Something common to these approaches is that they all make a distinction between what the metaphor appears to say, and what it ‘really’ says. Theorists who think that metaphors do have a semantically or cognitively special power—that they say something that literal language cannot—are more likely to acknowledge a fundamental role for feeling in our experience of metaphor. By suggesting metaphors can be indispensable expressions that let us access something, they challenge the deeply-engrained idea that language is meaningful when it represents things, through literal correspondence, reference, and the like. The view of language that challenges this, and that lets us understand metaphors themselves saying something meaningful, is one that acknowledges a constitutive function of language. Through a consideration of constitutive metaphors and the fundamental integration of meaning and feeling therein, I suggest that the above-mentioned analytic theories—by separating meaning from feeling, and taking word meanings to be static—necessarily misunderstand them. To elucidate the working of constitutive metaphors and flesh out the perspective that can properly understand them, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of language as an embodied behaviour. I propose that metaphors can be understood as creative linguistic “gestures”, a conception which enables us to understand why feeling is fundamentally related to a metaphor’s semantic import. This Merleau-Pontyan view lets us understand why we sometimes speak in ways that appear unusual, why such speech can be nonetheless meaningful and truthful, and the fundamental role of feeling in such expressions.
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ItemCan we read Nietzsche as a proto-phenomenologist?( 2016)This thesis asks the question whether we can interpret Nietzsche as anticipating the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century in his own philosophy. I begin by exploring some of the deep connections between his philosophy and Husserl’s founding phenomenology, before looking at some irreconcilable differences between them. I then argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as it is laid out in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, bears the strongest relations to Nietzsche’s thought, and is the most promising way to consider whether Nietzsche really practiced a form of proto-phenomenology. With these connections established, I then consider two themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy that seem to contradict important aspects of phenomenology: his “falsification thesis” and his perspectivism. Regarding his falsification thesis – the thesis that our descriptions necessarily falsify experience – I show that Nietzsche had no reason to hold onto this by the time of his mature works, and indeed abandoned it and in doing so made something of a “phenomenological turn”, particularly regarding his position on metaphysics. Furthermore, I also show how Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on language in Phenomenology of Perception provide helpful insights that Nietzsche’s philosophy could accommodate and which would make his overall argument more phenomenological in nature. Regarding his perspectivism, I begin by showing how this is potentially problematic in considering Nietzsche as proto-phenomenological because of two reasons: firstly, it seems to say, like the falsification thesis, that our experiences are necessarily falsifications of realty. Secondly, it has often been interpreted in a way that leads Nietzsche towards relativism, whereby we have no notion of intersubjective truth. Again by showing how his metaphysical views changed throughout his career, I argue that his mature understanding of perspectivism rather than preventing access to an intersubjective truth, actually guarantees it, by arguing for our necessarily embodied perceptual access to the world, much in the same manner that Merleau-Ponty came to argue in his phenomenology of perception. With these potential conflicts resolved, this thesis shows that there are fundamental connections between Nietzsche and existential phenomenology – particularly via Merleau-Ponty – and that we should seriously consider the phenomenological credentials of Nietzsche’s philosophy.
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ItemSublime flesh: a Merleau-Pontian alternative to Deep Ecology( 2015)In this thesis, I bring the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to bear on Deep Ecology, arguing that Merleau-Ponty enables us to abandon Deep Ecology’s problematic emphasis on identity and the self while remaining faithful to its overarching commitment to a biospherical moral community. I begin by showing that despite the laudable commitments that underpin Deep Ecology’s program for improving humans’ relationship with nature, the conceptual schema it embraces in articulating that program is inadequate. This is because Deep Ecology relies on and so reinforces the very account of human behaviour – according to which we are inherently self-centered agents – that it admirably seeks to overcome. This emphasis, I suggest, is motivated by Deep Ecology’s failure to articulate our being in a community with others in a way that can accommodate both sameness and difference. Merleau-Ponty’s description of the body/world and self/other dialectics provides a means for doing just this. His description of our relationship with nature would do better at promoting the kind of comportment towards it that Deep Ecology seeks to precipitate. While an environmental ethic consistent with the Merleau-Pontian framework would enable us to remain true to the spirit of Deep Ecology, it would represent a serious departure from and improvement to Deep Ecology – calling us to abandon concern with the self and pay an ever-renewed, respectful attention to that which is other. This vision of ethical agency, which I elucidate via a Merleau-Pontian reading of the sublime, opens up new and attractive possibilities for approaching contemporary environmental issues – possibilities that are not, moreover, available to the Deep Ecologist.