Understanding human subjectivity is always a fascinating challenge for philosophers. Jonardon Ganeri’s book, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance is a fresh attempt in this direction. The significance of this book in the philosophical literature on the topic of self is that it tries to bring together two major philosophical traditions together. The general approach of the author is to resolve the problems of human subjectivity originated in the Western Philosophy by offering solutions to those problem by footing on the philosophical debates which took place in the first millennium Indian philosophic discourse. The author tries to assimilate those views in developing a theory of his own; a theory which he calls, ‘a theory of full human subjectivity’.

The book is divided into four parts and sixteen chapters. It discusses a wide range of topics in the philosophy of mind. Ganeri begins by accepting that the question of ‘what is it to be a human being ‘ is the greatest mystery in philosophy. He lists out three most common solutions offered in response to this by philosophers so far and argues that they are all ‘unworkable’ solutions. They are a) human beings are immaterial souls associated with human bodies but separable from it b) human  beings are nothing but especially complex networks of neural circuits and c) human beings are simply causal flows of consciousness. By refuting all three of them, Ganeri offers an alternative view which is capable of providing satisfactory answers to various problems concerning our first-person perspective.  

What are we as conscious human beings? Any answer to such a problem could resolve one of the major the conflict between our conceptions of ourselves as creatures with interiority and as ourselves as animal creatures. As animal creatures, we are controlled by natural laws but our interiority founded upon our mental life does not seemingly follow those laws. This is a classical conflict in the philosophy of man and has many repercussions in various other areas of philosophy namely ethics, for example, debates on free will and so on.  The basic problem which any philosopher who addresses the demand for a conception of human nature is that the subjective nature of human interiority is in conflict with the conception which the natural sciences provide about the reality. On most of the naturalistic account, the reality which is ultimately physical could either avoid or reduce the subjective nature of human consciousness into its fold. Ganeri identifies this problem as an insoluble one in the history of philosophy and tries to circumvent this by taking recourse to the Aristotelian idea of ‘second nature’, the notion that knowing and thinking are natural powers of human beings. Ganeri draws the idea through John Mcdowell’s discussion of the second nature as human nature. The whole attempt of the author is to offer a liberal naturalist account of the self which gets shaped under the conception of human nature as a continuum of the natural world. Liberal naturalism holds that our subjective first-person existence is a part of the natural world and not alien or distinct from it. In that respect, liberal naturalism is opposed to hard/ scientific naturalism which claims that the natural world is the only reality to which every other things can be reduced. So the liberal naturalistic account of self on offer in the present book is a slightly different since it is a qualified naturalistic account.

Ganeri’s reason for choosing the resources to develop a theory from the first millennium Indian thought is that those ideas prevalent among the various schools of Indian philosophy then is uninfluenced by Cartesian dualist notion of mind. According to the Cartesian view the mindedness is a relation which is in conflict with the idea of the natural because the former and the latter are mutually exclusive metaphysical categories. The insight is that the traditional Cartesian separation between the self and the world can be overcome by adopting such a strategy. The second nature, which is the domain of our human nature is a succession of the world of nature. The latter is the domain of science where the governing principles are laws of science whereas the former is a space of reasons in contrast. This strategy does not attempt to directly link the space of reason with that of natural world, rather attempts to enlarge the canvass of naturalism to include the domain of self within it. For that reason, it does not try to explain the existence of self from a thoroughly materialist perspective either by reduction or by elimination for the same in the way in which it is traditionally done. On the other hand, this book pronounces the view that both our mental makeup and the physical make up are the real existents; they are part of the natural world.

Ganeri covers a lot of ground in his pursuit but to reflect specifically upon each one of them here is a task which I would not like to undertake.  Rather, I would like to pay attention to Ganeri’s account of self since it is the main theme of the book around which all the other contents are placed. The author links the conception of selfhood with that of ownership. He identifies three dimensions of selfhood which correspond to three conceptions of ownership. Firstly, there is an immersed self, a self which is the genuine subject in self-consciousness. This self is that which provides a phenomenological sense of mineness which we all experience as a part of our consciousness. This self which is immersed in our consciousness provides the sense of mineness in the first place. Secondly, there is the under self, which functions as an unconscious mechanism of attention and comparison. This has unconscious access to the subject’s mental states and monitors its various functions. Such a form of selfhood is crucial given the unconscious functioning of mental processes. Thirdly and lastly there is the participant self as the engaged occupant of a first-person stance. This is the basis of the normative engagement of the subject in the intersubjective world. These three notions have equal role to play in providing a full account of human subjectivity. In the absence of any one of these dimensions of self, there would not be any subjective life at all in the strict sense of the term. All these three categories of selves together provides a full picture of human subjectivity. Ganeri’s project in that sense is much wider that he tries to incorporate the distinct modes of selves, which are generally considered just as different aspects of self, within a single theory. The phenomenal, the unconscious as well as the intersubjective nature of selfhood are put together in a holistic framework.

From the first millennium Indian Philosophical scene, Ganeri considers mainly the view of Carvakas, who holds an emergentist view of the mind in general, the Nyaya-vaiseshika minimal physicalism, the Buddhist no-self view etc. In addition to this, he brings in the relevant ideas of other Indian philosophical schools and that of individual thinkers from both the west and the east into discussion.   In in the end, Ganeri’s view is sympathetic towards the insights of the nyaya -vaiseshika theory. The special attraction of such insights according to the author is that it provides a picture of ownership which can account for the normative relations which makes the thoughts essentially first-person. Ganeri wants to dissociate himself from hard naturalist views as well as from pure-consciousness and pure phenomenological view of human self. For that reason, he critically keeps the Madhyamika, Advaita, Yogaracra and Animalist, Reductionsist views away as resources for his theory of self. Thus he develops to build a liberal naturalist view of self which in its role as a conception of self is a robust one on the grounds that it encompasses all the aspects of selfhood under its purview. Ganeri also defends an account of subjectivity which is embodied and simultaneously, he keeps away from falling into the trap of animalism. Animalism is the view that the self is bodily and its identity is solely dependent on the identity of the body. “the identity conditions of one’s occupancy of a first person stance are at least in part bodily.” He also argues that “that occupying a first-person stance is a matter of one’s whole bearing” (p. 118-119). The normative, the embodied, and the phenomenal aspects of selfhood are constitutively covered under his theory.

The underlying methodological conviction of the author is that the some philosophical problems which are rooted in a philosophical tradition can be looked up on by banking on any other philosophical traditions which have under them the debates on similar and relevant problems. And the author has clearly succeeded in seamlessly moving back and forth across different schools and traditions of philosophy although the book. The organization of the book is in such a way that it touches all most all the major problems which are discussed in the philosophy of mind. It targets an advanced level readership in the subject.

© 2016 Robin Luke Varghese

Robin Luke Varghese, Assistant Professor, Philosophy, Manipal University Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.