Die Struktur der Subjektivität

In post-war Germany, the “philosophy of the subject” was seen to be on the “wrong track”. This was the unanimous conviction of Heidegger and the so-called linguistic analysis (Tugendhat). Dieter Henrich was the only important German philosopher who attempted to prove that the subject-philosophical legacy was in fact unfulfilled – provided that his “original insight” was accepted as such. In an exchange of views with the leading minds of the emerging “Philosophy of Mind”, Henrich showed that self-consciousness cannot be explained by “reflection”, i.e. not as the result of a higher-level mental turning back to a first-level mental state or its subject. Such an explanation, on which all previous subject theories have been based, leads to circularity and recourse: It either presupposes what it is supposed to explain or postpones the ground of explanation to infinity. Henrich later returned to the view that self-consciousness is a “knowing self-relation” whose structure cannot be explained any further. The question that Manfred Frank is guided by in this discussion of Henrich's subject-philosophical intuitions is whether a theory of self-consciousness can dispense with any form of reflexivity. Sartre's theory of “prereflective self-consciousness” considers a virtualization of the opposition between the reflective and the reflected and offers a possible way out.