CHAPTER TWO. I-WHO-EXPERIENCE.

Where shall we begin? If we take nothing for granted, we may not even take for granted that we know what the self is; so we do not know, at the outset, what to look for or where to look for it. As a heuristic clue only, let me suggest the following: We are doing phenomenology, which is biasless, reflective examination of experience. Clearly, such a project presupposes that I experience. Phenomenology is something that I do; it presupposes that I act. Therefore, let us examine our experience to see if there is any experienceable object which is I-the-experiencer-and-actor. In this chapter, however, we shall ignore I-the-actor for the moment and try to find I-the-experiencer. This procedure is by no means necessary; I have no justification for starting this way except that it is the way that I followed originally. In this chapter, I am reporting not only the results of my investigations but the path that the investigation took as well, hoping thereby to lead you to find out what I have found out.

My investigation was prompted by a story I once heard Ralph Metzner tell about a certain guru in India who used what he called the “direct method.” A seeker would come to him and ask, “Master, what is the Self?” The master would reply, “Who asks that questions?” If the inquirer said he didn’t understand, the master would reply, “Who does not understand?” If the seeker expressed confusion, the reply would be, “Who is confused?” The dialogue would go on like this until the seeker left in anger (“Who is angry?”) or until it dawned on him that the master was trying to tell him something.

What was the guru trying to tell the naïve seeker? I think it was something like this: Do not identify yourself with anything that you are aware of; for you are the Self who is aware, not the objects of which you are aware. You are aware of the questioning, the failure to understand, the confusion, the anger – but you are not any of these things. In this chapter, I shall adopt this “direct method” and try to go straight to the heart of the matter. Note that the truth of the claim that I am not any of the things of which I am aware is not established at the outset. Again, it is only a heuristically useful clue. As this report proceeds, it will become clear in what sense it is true and in what sense false to say that I am not what I am aware of, as will the reason for capitalizing the word “Self” in this context.

Let us start from the natural attitude and consider the various classes of objects of which I am aware, discarding all that is not the Self. Husserl’s own description of the natural attitude or, as he says, of the world experienced “from the natural standpoint,” is a useful categorization of the various types of objects of experience.1 There are, first of all, Objective things, events, affairs and affair-complexes, such as physical things, people, animals, institutions, cultural objects, positive laws, natural regularities, etc. At this point, it is quite clear what the Self is not – it is not the Objective world which I experience and take for granted that others experience also. We can dismiss the whole of reality experienced as external to me and public as not being the Self.

In addition to the Objective, public world, there is the private world of my own mental acts and objects. I have ideas and concepts about myself and my world, memories and anticipations of my surroundings, nearly subconscious schemata or “maps” of my environment, knowledge and mental images of all sorts. All these are objects for me, objects of which I am aware. Since I am aware of them, they too are not the Self, not I-who-am-aware. To be sure, there is a certain intimacy about them, for only I can be aware of my subjective experience, but it is a mistake to think that my subjective experience is that which is aware of the Objective world. On the contrary, both subjective and Objective elements of experience are objects for me, not I myself.

In addition, I experience values and value-qualities; things are not simply there, but are there as beautiful, ugly, admirable, disgusting, etc. An adequate discussion of Husserl’s theory of how values are experienced is beyond our scope here.2 Suffice it to say that although he describes the value-characters as being aspects of the perceived things, as being Objective and other than himself, in fact the values themselves (the qualities, for instance, beauty, pleasantness, strangeness, friendliness, etc.) are not perceived by means of sense-perception, but by means of interpretive ideas and feelings present in experience with the objects or, as it were, attached to them. Through these ideas and feelings, the characters “beautiful,” “friendly,” etc., appear as belonging to the objects. These interpretations and feeling-responses are thoroughly subjective, available directly only to me; beauty is in the eye of the beholder. From the phenomenological point of view it is possible to distinguish these feelings and interpretations from the things, people, events, and so on, to which they are initially attached. Then we are left with the objects themselves, which are clearly not the Self, and interpretations and feelings. Interpretations, in the broad meaning I give to the word, are mental objects – images, words, schemata or maps of the world, concepts, etc., which may or may not be the result of deliberate thinkings, but which do play a determining role in what I notice and how it appears to me (e.g., as threatening, friendly, ugly, beautiful, etc.). These mental objects are there for me to be aware of, though usually quite obscurely and penumbrally. Thus they are not the Self. We are left with feelings.

I shall reserve a detailed discussion of feelings for Chapter Four. Let me say at this point only that by “feeling” I mean anything immediately present in experience, such as bodily feelings, sensations, emotions, moods, and impulsions to action. They are distinguished from external and other internal objects such as physical things, people, concepts and images, etc., in that the latter are present in experience mediately, in the form of feeling or sensation plus interpretive elements. The only point I want to make about feelings, at this stage, is that they, too, are objects of which I am or can become aware. Sometimes I am aware of them only dimly, sometimes I am conscious of them quite vividly. Sometimes they occupy most of my attention, but more often they are present only as a vague background or accompaniment to that toward which I am chiefly directing my attention. But they are nevertheless objects for me, affairs of which I can be aware. They too, then, are not the Self.

The entire contents of the Objective world and my private subjective world have been discarded; they are not the Self. All that is left is pure transcendental consciousness itself. The Self, it seems, is that pure consciousness which is aware of everything present to it. But what is pure transcendental consciousness? Surely we can now answer the question of the Self definitely from the phenomenological point of view by describing pure consciousness itself.

But I can’t describe pure transcendental consciousness, for I cannot become aware of it at all! I am barred from becoming conscious of the I, the Self, that is itself aware; for to do so would require that the I be no longer the conscious subject, but an object. The I that is aware cannot be seen or heard, it cannot be intuited through thought (for then I would be aware, not of the I, but of an image or concept of the I). The I which is aware, I-the-experiencer, is unintuitable. It is ungraspable, a void, a nothingness – it is no thing. I can characterize the Self as that to which the world is present, that for which there is the world, but what it is in itself I cannot grasp in the mode, “it itself,” I cannot be aware of in any way. It is a mystery.

This state of affairs is so peculiar and unique that there is no adequate language for it. If by the term “I” or “Self” we mean I-who-experience, then I am not there at all! There is no experienceable object which is I-the-experiencer. It seems misleading to use a noun or noun phrase, for there is nothing to which such a noun or noun phrase refers. This, I take it, is the point behind Sartre’s talk of Nothingness and the Buddhists’ talk of the Void. And yet I take it for granted that I exist, that I experience the world; nothing could be more obvious than that experience is going on and that it is my experience, if only because it is mine and not someone else’s. Thus, the Upanishads and the later Hindu tradition speak of the Atman, that innermost Self which experiences the world; and Husserl speaks of the “pure Ego,” “the phenomenological Ego which finds things presented to it . . . .”3

If, following Husserl, we choose to put a name to that-which-experiences, such as the “transcendental Ego,” or as I prefer, the “transcendental Self,” we must always keep in mind that it is not in any sense an object: “ . . . we shall never stumble across the pure Ego as an experience among others within the flux of manifold experiences . . . nor shall we meet it as a constitutive bit of experience appearing with the experience of which it is an integral part and again disappearing. . . . it can in no sense be reckoned as a real part or phase of the experiences themselves,”4 where “real” means experienceable, present in experience, or present to pure consciousness. Because, in spite of the fact that I cannot experience I-who-experience, nevertheless I do experience, Husserl says, “The Ego appears to be permanently, even necessarily there . . ., it belongs to every experience that comes and streams past, its ‘glance’ goes ‘through’ every actual cogito and towards the object.”5 The word “appears” should not be taken literally. It is clear that the Ego does not appear as an object; rather it is that to which both the cogito and the object appear. The cogito is the noetic (loosely: subjective) aspect of an experience, the object the noematic (loosely: objective, but not necessarily Objective) aspect. Thus the noesis is an object for pure transcendental consciousness as is the noema – only in the natural attitude it is overlooked. Husserl’s clearest characterization of the pure Ego appears almost sixty pages later:

. . . the experiencing Ego is still nothing that might be taken for itself and made into an object of inquiry on its own account. Apart from its “ways of being related” or “ways of behaving,” it is completely empty of essential components, it has no content that could be unraveled, it is in and for itself indescribable: pure Ego and nothing further.6

There is a very good reason why it is “in and for itself indescribable.” To be able to describe something, you must be able in some way to perceive it – and the pure Ego is that which perceives but which cannot itself be perceived.

Thirteen years later, in The Paris Lectures, Husserl had not changed his position. He speaks of the “transcendental ego” which is a “transcendental spectator,” “the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life.”7 His translator comments:

The transcendental Ego . . . is not given as an object, but as the subject for which the object manifests itself. . . . the Ego is not one object among others [but] the perennial observer of existence . . . . The examiner itself, the observer proper, the unbeteiligte Zuschauer (disengaged observer) is mercurial and elusive: it is the camera-eye that focuses, but can never film itself.8

There is another aspect of the transcendental ego which I have not mentioned. Husserl speaks of the ego’s “ways of behaving.” He also speaks of the pure Ego as “free spontaneity and activity,” the “primary source of generation,” the “subject of the spontaneity.”9 The transcendental Self is not, in fact, solely passive and receptive; it is also the source of action. The activity of attending to something, for instance, is what Husserl means by acts of consciousness:

. . . the focal is girt about with a “zone” of the marginal; the stream of experience can never consist wholly of focal actualities. These indeed determine . . . through the contrast with marginal actualities . . . the pregnant meaning of the expression “cogito,” . . . “I perform an act of consciousness.”10

The transcendental Self is the source not only of active attending but of all my action. Koestenbaum comments, “The transcendental Ego is not only passive . . . but also active. In numerous instances I experience myself as agent or creator. In these cases, the transcendental Ego is experienced not merely as an observer or spectator, but as a spontaneous initiator as well.”11 He speaks loosely; strictly speaking the transcendental Self is not experienced, but can only be had in the mode, “thinking about it;” but his point is well taken. Because I am reserving for Chapter Five a complete discussion of action, at this point we abstract from the full nature of the transcendental Self and consider it only as I-who-experience. The point remains the same; the Self as transcendental agent is also unintuitable, unperceivable.

As long as this point is kept clearly in mind, it need not be misleading to use a noun phrase, “transcendental Self,” to refer to the basic state of affairs that is always and everywhere evident regarding myself, that I experience and act. Strictly speaking, we can say that experiencing and acting are functions of the self to which no particular experienceable object corresponds; we’ll see that there are other functions of the self to which experienceable objects do correspond. For the moment, let us continue to use the noun phrase, potentially misleading as it is, because it is convenient to do so. The important point remains: I cannot become aware of myself in the mode, “I myself,” for I am that which is aware, I am pure transcendental consciousness. I can characterize the transcendental Self as that to which the world is present, but what it is in itself – what I am, what my Self is – I cannot directly experience in any way. I am a mystery.

This is as far as the phenomenological evidence will take us. We have reached, in a sense, the ultimate – that beyond which it is impossible to go. Pure transcendental consciousness is of necessity a mystery, unperceivable. Is this the end of our quest then? Can nothing more be said about the self? I think not – that we have arrived at an ultimate does not mean that we cannot fit that ultimate into a conceptual, interpretive framework. In the interest of knowledge we must go beyond the pure phenomenological evidence and try to make something of our findings. But what direction shall we take? The first should be simply a recognition of the facts.

We have found an ultimate mystery. Simply to recognize that there is indeed a mystery at the heart of the self, at the core of my being, is at least a healthy and realistic appraisal of the way things are. Bernard Steinzor, a psychotherapist whose theories, it is obvious, have arisen from his daily practice, has made this generalization concerning the object of our quest:

The Self is a more or less fluid patterning of a diversity of relations at the core of which lies a relation to the unknown – sometimes called God, sometimes mystery, sometimes creativity, sometimes the future.12

Steinzor points to something that the purely phenomenological approach has led us to overlook – that even if I cannot be conscious of the Self as pure consciousness, at least I who search am in relation to it. I cannot be directly aware of the Self; I can only imagine a sort of picture of the Self being aware of the world but not of itself – like an eye that cannot see itself or a spotlight that illuminates the stage but not its own casing and wiring. Nevertheless, I know that I cannot be aware of the Self. And that fact, of which I am quite well aware, is a mystery – not just something that I don’t know, and not even something indifferently unknowable, but a mystery which seems at once to culminate and thwart my search for myself. I am awed and humbled at this knowledge, as well as confused and searching for another clue.

At this point, I am left not simply with the bare fact of unperceivability, but with a variety of other things as well: knowledge of that fact, in the sense of mental entertainment of an idea of it; a noticeable, if mixed, emotional reaction to that discovery and knowledge, including wonder as well as a certain dissatisfaction with the conclusion; and the impulsion to keep on looking to find some other, more satisfactory, answer. These things too, not simply pure consciousness watching the world go by, are present in the situation – that is, at least these things are present to pure consciousness. At this point we can go in two directions. One is to say, “Yes, all this is present to pure consciousness; therefore it is not the Self, but only an object for the Self.” This path only leads in a circle. The other way is to note that there are definite objects of which I am aware present at the end of the inquiry and that they do not seem to be simply accidentally or indifferently there, but on the contrary have arisen out of the inquiry itself. Let us then take this as a clue and say, “Aha! Therefore the Self must be at least these things – a mental concept, an emotional reaction, and an impulsion to further action!”

But a doubt arises. Is this not simply an interpretation? And are we therefore, if we adopt this suggestion, being phenomenological no longer? My reply is two-fold. First, recall that phenomenology, as I define and practice it, is a matter of reflective seeing (in an extended, metaphorical sense) without letting interpretations, biases, prejudices, etc., blind me to what is there to be seen. I must notice, make thematic, all that is there, including both what was previously thematic and what was only operative. But once I have observed and described something, or my experience of something, without biases, then the results of my inquiry are available for me to make something of, to incorporate somehow in a system of knowledge, to place conceptually in a broader scheme of things. I must not let interpretations bias my seeing; but what I have seen I must then interpret. Thus, the interpretation that certain classes of subjective objects before me comprise me need not bias clear seeing of those objects.

Second, I want to note something that previously I avoided mentioning. Recall that our original project was to examine experience from the point of view solely of pure consciousness and try to find the Self. We used as a clue, or guiding principle, the exhortation not to identify the Self with any object of which I am or can be aware. Now note that not only does this guiding principle determine the results from the outset (although that was not initially obvious), but that it is itself an interpretation, an idea by reference to which we categorized classes of experienced objects as being of a certain type, namely not-me – but this interpretation did not bias clear perception of the situation, i.e., that perception of pure transcendental consciousness is impossible.

We have been operating under the guidance of an interpretation from the outset. Not only that, we have also been active – we have engaged in a search, a quest, looking at possibilities and discarding them, etc., trying to reach a dimly-envisioned goal. Finally I, the writer and investigator, have felt from the outset a certain eagerness, a certain excitement, a certain tantalizing attraction to an unknown goal, and perhaps I have communicated some of this to you, my reader. There has been emotional element throughout the quest.

(I refer not only to the process of writing this exposition of ideas that were for the most part already clear to me, but even more to the original process of discovery that I underwent more than five years ago. I was impelled to displeasure with myself-in-the-world in general. When the first intimation of the conclusion we have reached occurred to me, obscure but beckoning, I was puzzled. I had vague premonitions of something overwhelming about to be discovered, some great illuminating realization about to dawn. I was pulled onward, pausing at each step only long enough to feel that I was on the right track. I am not this, I thought, I am not this. I am aware of myself. But I that am aware am not myself of which I am aware. Therefore . . . therefore . . . I am not! I cannot become aware of myself, and thus I do not exist! For a long time, as I recall, I was close to ecstatic contemplation of that absurd and yet apparently indubitable conclusion. I felt awe, wonder, dread – and then a great laugh of relief as I thought to myself, if I don’t exist then I don’t have to worry about how I shall live my life – I can’t because I don’t exist! What I now recognize as a quite erroneous conclusion at the time filled me with a curious euphoria and sense of peace.)

Thus, from the very beginning there has been present not only an interpretation guiding our procedure, but the activity of proceeding itself, as well as the emotions that, as it were, motivated that activity and kept it going. But what are these but characteristics of the subjective point of view? Let this be a clue for a new quest; let us say that if it is discoverable at all, the Self must be discoverable from the subjective point of view!

We have an even clearer clue. At the end of this phase of our question, we are left not only with a mystery, but with three other things as well – a mental idea or concept; emotional feelings; and an impulse to further action, to keep on looking. Steinzor has said that at the core of the self there lies a relation to the unknown, to mystery. Therefore, not only because it seems to be all we are left with, but even more because it seems that we find ourselves in a kind of limiting situation, where reality is most starkly, but also most clearly, revealed, I shall now adopt a new interpretation to guide our quest. Reserving the capitalized form of the word for the transcendental Self, we’ll now say that the self is composed of mental events, of feelings, and of actions. I’ll now report the results of my investigations into each of these types of subjective objects.

(Husserl agrees that the self as it is ordinarily understood, i.e., what in the natural attitude I call “me,” “myself,” is an object or is composed of objects and is not the same as the transcendental Self. In Ideas, he speaks of “the intentional empirical unities, body, soul, empirical ego-subject.”13 He says that “the psychical in general in the psychological sense, . . . psychical personalities, psychical properties, experiences or states are empirical unities, and are therefore . . . unities of an intentional ‘constitution’ . . . .”14 For now, we can understand “intentional unities” to mean coherent complexes of objects present to pure consciousness. (A fuller discussion of intentionality appears in the next chapter.)

In the The Paris Lectures as well, Husserl notes that the phenomenologist “discovers that he, as a human being, exists . . . as a cogitatum,”15 that is, as something perceived. Koestenbaum comments that “what we ordinarily mean by ‘me,’ by ‘I,’ by ‘myself,’ by ‘my ego,’ is really merely one of many objects within the totality of experience . . . .”16)


1 Husserl, Ideas, pp. 91-93.

2 See, for instance, Ibid., sections 116 and 117, pp. 300-307.

3 Ibid., p. 156.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., p. 214.

7 Husserl, The Paris Lectures, pp. 15, 16, emphasis omitted.

8 Peter Koestenbaum, Introductory Essay, in Husserl, The Paris Lectures, pp. LII, LIII.

9 Husserl, Ideas, pp. 315, 316.

10 Ibid., p. 107, emphasis omitted.

11 Koestenbaum, p. L

12 Bernard Steinzor, The Healing Partnership, p. 240.

13 Husserl, Ideas, p. 152.

14 Ibid.

15 Husserl, The Paris Lectures, p. 15.

16 Koestenbaum, pp. XLIX-L.


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