The Subject of Experience

It seems strangely appropriate that the binding of my copy of Galen Strawson's The Subject of Experience was flipped in comparison to the rest of my books. (When holding the book horizontal, reading the spine from left to right, I expect the top to be the beginning of the book. For Strawson's book the bottom was the beginning.) For some time, whenever I picked up the book I felt something was deeply amiss; I had to reorient myself to this (for me) unusual format. After a while I realized, of course, that this was just my bias and that this was a perfectly reasonable way to bind a book. I even began to like it for its uniqueness.All of this is appropriate because it resembles an encounter with Strawson's philosophy. At first his views seem odd—the self is a momentary inner thing that ceases to exist when experience ceases; the physical is suffused with mentality; life is fundamentally nonnarrative. They're certainly not the typical views. But as one reads, they begin to seem less strange. Perhaps they only seem strange because of the biases we bring to the matter. Why not think of things this way? After a while, it begins to seem like a perfectly reasonable way to view the world.Whatever one winds up thinking about Strawson's various views about the self, presented here in a collection of fourteen essays written between 1997 and 2015, there is no doubt that one should think about them. It goes without saying that his work in this area is essential reading, but it bears emphasizing just how rewarding it is to follow Strawson down the winding paths of his investigation. There is an excitement to this way of doing philosophy, a sense that there are puzzles we have ignored and that if we just follow along we might find our way to solutions.These essays fall roughly into three categories. They concern the metaphysics of the self, the epistemology of self-awareness, and the sense in which a life is (or according to Strawson is not) a narrative. The work is guided throughout by a deep appreciation of the work of philosophers as diverse as Kant, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Nāgārjuna, with special attention to the work of Locke and Hume.For many philosophers, Strawson's most provocative position will be his metaphysics of the self (or as he prefers to say, the subject of experience). On his view, the self is a mental entity that exists only insofar as there is experience. While this sounds pretty Cartesian, there are several respects in which it is not. For one thing, something's being mental for Strawson doesn't mean that it isn't physical. In fact he's adamant that it is. Our structural conception of the physical is impoverished; the physical involves conscious qualitative experience no less than quarks. (Though there is some wiggle room, Strawson could be considered a sort of Russellian Monist.) Another departure from Descartes—at least as he is usually understood—is that Strawson's subject does not persist when there is no experiencing. Assuming experiential episodes are often interrupted, as they seem to be, these subjects are temporally tiny. A related deviation from the standard Cartesian Ego picture is that for Strawson there is a sense in which the experience and the subject of experience are one and the same thing—they are merely aspects, if you will, of one indissoluble whole. Strawson recognizes, of course, that there is a perfectly good use of “subject” or “self” that refers to a whole body, or a social entity, or many of the other things people insist on associating with the self. What he insists on, however, is that what he is talking about exists, and that it is in some sense more fundamental than these other subjects.It's hard to read Strawson's arguments without feeling that there is something to what he is saying. Nevertheless, there are some important questions that aren't addressed as clearly as one might like. For example, even if one grants Strawson his liberal definition of ‘physical’ so that phenomenal states are physical even if they are unreduced and fundamental, most of the questions surrounding the mind-body problem remain unresolved. Whatever you call physical, there is still the question of how things as they appear “from the inside” relate to things as they appear “from the outside” or from the point of view of physical sciences. There is still the question of what causal work is done by the conscious and qualitative physical given the causal work done by the properties described by physics. When it comes to selves, there is the concern that selves are individuated one way (as fundamental unities, constituted by the unity of thoughts and phenomenal fields) and the brain stuff is individuated another way. What precisely is the relation between these two things?Strawson tends to privilege the experiential or “inner” way of describing things over the physical way of describing them. He thinks our grasp of the mental is so much better and more complete than our grasp of the physical that the way things present themselves to us mentally cannot be denied. We cannot be wrong, past a certain point, about the nature of selves and conscious states—they are what they appear to be. If one seriously doubts this, and many do, Strawson's arguments are likely to be uncompelling. But there are some more internal worries as well. It seems that even on Strawson's view we don't get the whole nature of experiential states or selves from the inside—after all, they bear some deep and intimate relation to brain states. Given that this is not evident from the inside, how confident can we be about other metaphysical claims made on the basis of phenomenology?Strawson's views on the epistemology of self-awareness are a good deal less heterodox. He agrees with the vast majority of phenomenologists that all experience involves a pre-reflective self-awareness. To his credit, he tried to go beyond what others have said to figure out just what this claim amounts to. In particular, he recognizes that there is something deeply puzzling about the fact that simple unreflective consciousness, which seems to be “flat” and involving nothing but its content, is in some sense reflexive. In the end, though, Strawson seems to feel that this is a case where we simply must let the mystery be. Our discursive modes of thought impose structures on consciousness that prevent us from fully understanding it. Perhaps this is correct, but we are again in a slightly uncomfortable place. Our grasp of consciousness is said to be so strong that we must recognize first the shortcomings of physical ways of understanding it and now intellectual discursive ways of understanding it. One could be forgiven for wondering whether we do, in fact, understand it at all. Strawson's work is characterized by an intriguing mix of humility and certainty. When it comes to consciousness and the way it presents itself to us, he is utterly confident. In light of that, he insists that we must be intellectually humble when it comes to demanding other sorts of explanations. He is perfectly aware of this and would no doubt justify it by insisting on the revelatory nature of conscious experience. If you are like me, however, you find consciousness a slippery business. My humility kicks in a bit earlier, when I try to draw conclusions based on introspection. When Strawson asks me to think the thought “This” and recognize its reflexive yet unstructured nature, I'm a little unclear what I'm to be doing. I'm a little unsure that discursive thought hasn't already polluted my attempts to manufacture such an odd thought. (I can hear the word “This” in my head, and can construe it as a reflexive thought, but that's probably not what he has in mind. Still, I have a hard time getting to the “This” thought without linguistic crutches that seem to introduce some complexity to the thought or at least alternative explanations of its self-referentiality.) It's true, I think, that there are some certainties about consciousness that make Dennett-style dismissiveness implausible, but I wonder whether we are entitled to swing so far to the other side such that scientific and discursive reasoning are questioned while introspection and experiential revelations are sacrosanct. Even if one doesn't follow Strawson all the way, however, taking consciousness seriously will require one to deal with his arguments. At the very least they force us to recognize that hard decisions must be made, and that there are a number of problems that are harder than they first appear.In two of the volume's most literary essays, Strawson pushes back against the narrative picture of the self. Perhaps best developed by Marya Schechtman, but with numerous influential advocates, the view that one's life is narrative, or that we constitute ourselves by creating a story of our lives, often gets taken onboard without much scrutiny. Strawson provides a welcome voice responding to this chorus. Drawing from a wealth of sources, Strawson makes a compelling case that not only is it entirely possible, and perhaps even widespread, that life is lead nonnarratively, but that some of our most creative and inspiring artists—from Paul Klee to Alice Munro—see their lives this way. Of course it's not always clear what is required to narrate one's life, but Strawson makes the case that unless the thesis is trivial—requiring something so thin as a sense of cause and effect in one's life—many of us don't tell the story of our lives. It's probably a matter of degree, and no doubt people differ, but here I find myself firmly in Strawson's camp. To me, considering my life as a narrative is a rather contrived and somewhat narcissistic enterprise. It's one I'd rather avoid. More natural, it seems, is the engaged life where my diverse projects and relationships eclipse any such narrative and my character is expressed by my involvement. That's not to say a story can't be told about my life, just that it needn't be.I've touched only on a few of the main themes of the essays in this book, but I hope to have conveyed the significance and originality of Strawson's work. There are not many philosophers who bring such passion to the page and who so thoroughly embrace the philosopher's role as a seeker. As a result, Strawson's work is a pleasure to read and is recommended to anyone working on topics related to the self and self-knowledge

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