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Abstract

Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a “notional subject” of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the “actual subject,” the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere “imagined seeing.” I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal “contemporaneity,” and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart.

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Notes

  1. This reading of Kierkegaardian “contemporaneity” and reflexivity might be unfamiliar to many Kierkegaard scholars, and unfortunately, it falls outside my present task to provide a full exegetical defense of it here. Strictly speaking, nothing in the present argument depends upon whether the approach I outline here is faithful to Kierkegaard (though I believe it is); the unconvinced Kierkegaardian reader is therefore invited to bracket these concerns for the present and see Stokes (2010a) for the requisite exegesis of “contemporaneity” and Stokes (2010b) for an account of reflexivity in Kierkegaardian moral psychology more generally.

  2. On the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, see Tulving (1983) p.v and throughout (especially Part I, pp.17–120).

  3. See also Smith (2006), pp. 52–53; Goldie (2000), p. 196.

  4. Similar considerations lead Walton (1976, 1990, pp. 337–40) to conclude that visual depictions are not (standardly) mediated through a fictional observer in the same way that narrated events are mediated through a narrator, though there are cases where, for instance, movie shots are framed to imply we are seeing an object through the eyes of one of the film’s characters. See also Goldie (2000), p. 196.

  5. For this reason, according to Wollheim, acentered event memories are both rare and unstable: even though these are not meant to represent an event from an observer’s perspective, their very visual organization implies some observer, and so we quickly move to imaginatively “occupy” the point of view around which the memory is organized.

  6. Parfit credits the term “first-person mode of presentation” to Peacocke (1983).

  7. Williams (1973), p. 35 (Updating Williams’ reference to Olivier).

  8. See also Castañeda (1967), (1968).

  9. On the claim that Locke is not strictly a “memory theorist” in the sense that Reid, Butler et al. assumed, see Schechtman (1996), p. 107 and (2005), esp. p. 12.

  10. Using “sensory” as shorthand for the five classical senses plus others such as proprioception, etc.

  11. Correspondingly, Hazlitt (1805), p. 40, also speaks of “warmth of imagination” and “greater liveliness and force” to explain the interest we take in our projected future selves.

  12. Goldie (2000), pp. 195, 198–201, prefers the term “characterization.”

  13. The connection is noted by Mackenzie (2007), p. 279, n.12.

  14. Smith (2006) makes much the same move using Peacocke’s distinction between experiential and suppositional imagination. See also Recanati (2007), pp. 203–207.

  15. Wollheim (1999) p. 116 makes a similar point about self-ascription.

  16. The literature on whether identity matters in survival is voluminous, but see especially Lewis (1976), Parfit (1984), Sosa (1990), Unger (1992), Martin (1998), and Belzer (2005).

  17. Jan Branson (2008, p. 104) has recently put Velleman and Schechtman together here, arguing that “the unselfconscious access the actual subject is supposed to have to the perspective of the notional subject is part of the phenomenology of memory and intention only if it is backed up by the actual subject’s empathic access to the notional subject’s perspective […] empathic access in Schechtman’s sense is a requirement for unselfconscious access in Velleman’s sense.” Only perspectives that are “characteristically “colored” by the subject’s stance toward the world and himself as agent” are susceptible to the sort of unselfconscious co-identity Velleman describes—a view which in some ways seems to be pushing in a similar direction to the one I here ascribe to Kierkegaard.

  18. Also a key thesis of Martin (1998).

  19. Discussions of samtidighed (and related concepts) can be found in Taylor (1975), Evans (1992), Gouwens (1996), Rocca (2004), Westphal (2004), Rae (2004), Kosch (2006), Welz (2007), Martens (2008), Stokes (2008), and Stokes (2010b). The concept has also been adopted and put to other uses by Gadamer (1975) and Bonhoeffer (1966).

  20. This is an important clue: what Kierkegaard says in The Book on Adler suggests that visualized events can have the property of phenomenal contemporaneity, but it seems that Johannes the Seducer, as a non-ethical “aesthete,” lacks it in his episodic memories. Hopefully, it will shortly become apparent why this is so.

  21. It could be objected that New Testament accounts of miracles present a problem here: surely in such cases, it is easier to believe what one has seen with one’s own eyes? However, Kierkegaard elsewhere seems to claim that the extraordinary is actually harder to believe when it is directly before one, precisely because one cannot defer the decision on whether it is occurring. See Stokes (2010b).

  22. Gouwens (1996), pp. 134–135, notes that this “event” increasingly takes on the form of an extended narrative rather than just “a bare historical ‘that’ of ‘the moment’ of Incarnation, an icon of eternity invading time.”

  23. On this topic, see Rocca (2004).

  24. It is worth noting at this point that much of Climacus’ discussion of contemporaneity is strikingly visual in character.

  25. I offer a much fuller treatment of this topic in Stokes (2010a).

  26. There is a certain unavoidable ambiguity here, insofar as contemporaneity centrally involves a sense of being “claimed” by the event—a sense of having something imposed on us—while still being dependent upon our subjective engagement with the event; thus, when we fail to experience this sense of being claimed, we are ourselves responsible for this failure. On these sorts of volitional ambiguities in Kierkegaard, see Ferreira (1998) and Stokes (2010a), pp. 130–133.

  27. See, e.g., Allison (1966).

  28. This forecloses, according to Velleman, the possibility that we could be on genuinely reflexive terms with the persons created in “fission” thought experiments, as we could not anticipate having their experiences without specifying which post-fission person’s experience it is. Shipley (2002) and Belzer (2005) reject this argument.

  29. See also MacKenzie (2008), pp. 124–126.

  30. This paper was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Danish Research Council — Humanities. I would also like to record my thanks to audiences at St. Olaf College, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre and the University of Copenhagen, and to anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of some of this material.

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Stokes, P. Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 23–44 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9151-5

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