As Dan Zahavi explains in his introduction, this book draws upon twenty years’ worth of research into the nature of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, concepts of the self, and self-consciousness. Here he introduces, clarifies and argues for his intertwined accounts of subjectivity, empathy and shame. Zahavi says that the book took him far longer to write than he anticipated, and his longanimity shows through: the book surveys a wide range of interconnected topics but presents them as a well-crafted whole.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I gives an overview of various conceptions of consciousness, self-consciousness, subjectivity and selfhood, culminating in Zahavi’s own substantive ‘multidimensional account’ of the self. Key to this thesis is his defense of what he calls ‘the minimal experiential self’. Following Sartre, Zahavi argues that a subject’s experience is itself a pre-reflective form of self-consciousness, and that as such, all lived experience is structured by a minimal form of selfhood. This minimal selfhood is just to be understood as the first-personal dimension of experience. This means that the minimal self is neither to be understood as something separate from first-person experience, as though an ‘inner object’ could be discovered outside experience itself, nor is the minimal self merely to be equated with a certain set or sub-set of experiences. The lived experience of the first-person perspective is the ‘mineness’ or the ‘what-it-is-like-for-me-ness’ (19) of experience, hence not an extra bit of content within our experience, but rather how we experience at all. Zahavi summarizes: ‘At its most primitive, self-experience is simply a question of being pre-reflectively aware of one’s own consciousness, and the experiential self in question is precisely defined as the very subjectivity of experience.’ (24)

In arguing for the ‘minimal self’ Zahavi explicitly treads a middle path between the isolated Cartesian self on the one hand, and the entirely socially constructed self on the other. On this point Zahavi directs most of his energies towards a critique of social constructivism. He recognizes that almost no-one currently takes seriously the Cartesian conception, which considers the self fully-formed without reference its nature as embodied, embedded in the world, or interpersonally related. However, social constructivism, which claims that ‘selves are not born, but arise in a process of social experience and interchange’ (11) does have traction. Indeed, Zahavi claims that this is now the dominant view: that there is no element of subjectivity which is not brought into existence through, and given its total definition by, social interaction. While Zahavi agrees with the chorus of voices that the old Cartesian model amounts to a reductive account of intersubjectivity, he makes the further point that social constructivism, in claiming the absolute contrary, ends up with an equally reductive account of the self. While the Cartesian model treats intersubjectivity as though it were the mere addition of individual subjects, Zahavi argues that social constructivism runs the risk of making the first-personal dimension of the self unintelligible, for this ‘how’ we experience cannot be dismissed as post-hoc fabrication. In this way Zahavi’s account pursues a non-reductive understanding of both the self and its relation to others. 

The first seven chapters are dedicated to building up a picture of the minimal self, weeding out terminological disputes and defending the minimal self against its chief opponents. Having made his case, Zahavi outlines how he thinks the minimal self should be positioned within his ‘multidimensional’ account, arguing that a full-blooded account of the self must also take seriously ‘the interpersonal self’ (the self-in-relation-to-others) and ‘the narrative self’ (which ‘gains intelligibility by having a place in a narrative sequence’ (53)). He argues that versions of these three conceptions of the self have often been pitted against each other, when in fact there is no contradiction in holding them together in an interlocking way.

Part II and III consider the nature of intersubjectivity in the light of claims made about subjectivity and the self in Part I. Zahavi’s account of intersubjectivity likewise feeds back into, and builds up, his multidimensional account of the self. Part II focuses on apprehending and categorizing the phenomenon of empathy, while Part III looks at varieties of self-consciousness (or self-other-consciousness, as Zahavi prefers to call it), with a focus on the phenomenon of shame.

Zahavi maps out significant ways that the term ’empathy’ has been used by different scholars to identify different phenomena. The term is often used to pick out particular experiences of projection or identification. However, having laid out the conceptual landscape, Zahavi argues that there is wisdom in following Husserl and Stein in understanding empathy as a much broader category: simply to refer to all experiences in which we perceive the mental life of another subject. He draws attention to the fact that while empathy is necessarily experienced within my own first-person perspective, the content or quality of the experience crucially includes the ‘foreign-ness’ of the experience that is being empathized with. To empathize with the sadness of another is different to experiences of one’s own sadness. We experience empathy as empathy (and not some other kind of experience) precisely because the quality of the emotion experienced is experienced as belonging to someone other than myself. In the light of this phenomenology of empathy Zahavi rejects accounts which claim that empathy dissolves the boundaries between self and other. On the contrary he claims that this very distinction between self and other is a necessary condition of the possibility of empathy: ‘It is precisely because of…this asymmetry that we can claim that the minds we experience [in empathy] are other minds,’ (130) and ‘To feel sorry for another person is to be sorry for the other as other.’ (117)

This recognition of the importance of alterity to intersubjectivity provides Zahavi with further resource for his account of the minimal self. If this account is correct, then we must understand the other’s minimal self as something we cannot access: ‘the other is precisely characterized by an otherness which resists or exceeds whatever narratives we bring to bear on him or her…Rather than preventing or obstructing a reasonable account of intersubjectivity, I would consider a strong commitment to the first-personal character of consciousness, that is, to the for-me-ness of experience, a necessary requirement for such an account.’ (189) For Zahavi this does not mean that   philosophy should fall back into the position of thinking that the other is completely shut up and inaccessible to us either. Rather, the other is neither totally hidden nor totally transparent.

Zahavi develops his account of the interpersonal self in Part III, outlining ways various states of sophisticated self-consciousness which require reference to the self as a social object. He argues that  the structure of emotions such as shame sheds light on the interpersonal self and argues further that that the interpersonal self makes possible the relationship between the minimal self and the fully-formed narrative and normative self. (238) ‘A self that can be shamed is a more complex (and complicated) self than the minimalist experiential self,’ (235) he tells us, and there are hence ‘certain forms of self-experience [which] are constitutively dependent upon others.’ (237) Zahavi’s account of shame again demonstrates a ‘middle way’ between previously dichotomized accounts — those that insist the crux of shame is given solely in terms of exposure to the other, and those which understand shame as a type of self-evaluation which makes no essential reference to another subject. Finally, having argued for a non-reductive but fundamentally interconnected account of self and intersubjectivity, the book culminates in some thoughts about what might come next. Zahavi begins some thoughts on the structure of different types of intersubjective relations, namely the ‘I-You’ and the ‘We’, sketching further research to be undertaken.

Self and Other should be recognized as an important text in contemporary philosophy of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Zahavi here, as elsewhere, offers an excellent historical overview of certain philosophical concepts, such as subjectivity and empathy, sketching skilfully and accessibly the philosophical work of figures from the phenomenological tradition such as Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Stein, Max Scheler and Alfred Schütz. Similar exposition is afforded to contemporary work in analytic philosophy by the likes of Alvin Goldman, Galen Strawson and Christine Korsgaard. Zahavi’s writing gives voice to a philosophy which equally honors the phenomenological and the analytic traditions, bringing these two approaches into a collaborative, rather than competitive, relationship. Zahavi does not merely give equal space to surveying figures from these two traditions, but also embodies the virtues of the methodologies characteristic of these two traditions in his own argumentation and analysis.

The book is not an introductory text; Zahavi assumes a familiarity with certain terminology and style of argumentation such that it doesn’t recommend itself to absolute beginners in philosophy or to casual readers. However it is accessible to undergraduates or those with some other background familiarity with the discipline. Zahavi’s writing is dense, but never obscure. He surveys complex ideas with great clarity, without ignoring the ambiguity and richness of the debate. The book is worth reading simply for its historical overview of philosophical concepts such as ‘the self’, ‘subjectivity’ and ’empathy’. However, Zahavi offers something much more substantial than an overview of the field, namely his own positive account of the self. It is a compelling account that will be rightly recognized as an important contribution to the field.

One of the challenges of a book like this is that it covers a lot of ground, ranging over issues such as temporality, corporeality and personal identity. Inevitably Zahavi can only skim the surface of such issues, and often deliberately brackets such topics to focus only on what he takes to be most relevant to his central thesis. It is difficult to see this as a criticism of the work, however, and indeed Zahavi is to be commended at the balancing act he achieves here, even if there are points where the reader might like to press a little further into a tangentially related detail. A more legitimate worry might be that more could have been done to disambiguate the type of relationship between the three ‘levels’ of selfhood Zahavi argues for. In one of his most helpful metaphors, Zahavi states that the narrative self permeates all the way through the experiential self like dye through water, but stresses that this shouldn’t stop us recognizing that dyed water is water all the way through. This metaphor offers a way of thinking about how we are always already steeped in social, normative and narrative contexts, whilst also recognizing the irreducibility of the first-person perspective. This metaphor is key, I argue, to the persuasiveness of Zahavi’s thesis. Without it, we might be apt to interpret him as presenting an archaeological model, with the interpersonal self somehow layered on top of the minimal self, and the narrative self built on top of this. A correct reading of Zahavi, I would submit, should not interpret him as such, but the text could perhaps have found a way of developing and emphasizing the dyed-water metaphor further.

Apart from this minor niggle, Zahavi is extremely convincing in his argument that the ‘multidimensional model’ can reconcile insights from existing models of selfhood that have otherwise been seen as irreconcilable. In this and throughout Zahavi embodies his own good advice that ‘One should…be wary of monolithic approaches, since they tend to ignore those forms in the theory that the theory in question cannot explain.’ (186) This multi-faceted approach is one that all philosophers and thinkers can learn from.

© 2015 Sarah Pawlett Jackson

Sarah Pawlett Jackson is a doctoral researcher in the Philosophy Department at The Open University and a Philosophy Tutor at Heythrop College, University of London and at the Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford.