BOOK REVIEW FIRST-PERSON RESEARCH 270 CONSTRUCTIVIST FOUNDATIONs vol. 6, N°2 First-Person Research Is the “Core Self” a Construct? Claire Petitmengin • Institut Télécom and CREA, France • claire.petitmengin/at/polytechnique.edu > Upshot • Is lived experience always the experience of a self? The cen- tral thesis of Dan Zahavi’s book is that there is a “minimal” or “core” self, according to which a quality of “self-givenness” is a constitutive feature of experience. The adoption of a dynamic phenomenological perspective leads us to call this thesis into question. D an Zahavi’s purpose in this book is to investigate the relationship be- tween experience, self-awareness and self- hood: Are experiences always experienced by someone? Does any episode of experi- encing always involve a subject of experi- ence? Is self-awareness always to be un- derstood as awareness of a self? he central thesis of the book – which emerges from a detailed account of the history of this issue in phenomenology and of the arguments in favour of a non-egological theory, provided notably by analytic philosophy – is support- ed by all the major igures in phenomenol- ogy, such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau- Ponty, and Henry: it is that of a “minimal” or “core” self. Consciousness is indeed es- sentially characterized by intentionality; however, the consciousness of the perceived object is always accompanied by the pre- relective consciousness of a perceived sub- ject. It is in fact impossible to conceive of an experience – be it a perception, an emotion, a recollection or an abstract thought – with- out a certain phenomenal quality of “what it is like” or “what it feels like” to undergo this experience: this is what makes the experi- ence conscious. And this “feeling” is nec- essarily for a subject. Experience is always lived as mine, its intrinsic quality is to be an experience I live. A quality of “mineness,” of “irst-personal givenness” or “self-given- ness,” is therefore a constitutive feature of experience. As Zahavi rephrases it in the paragraph entitled “First-personal Givenness” (119), “transparency theorists” consider that ex- perience can only be described in terms of that of which it is an experience: there is nothing in the tasting of the lemon apart from the taste of the lemon itself. Experi- ence is diaphanous: it has no intrinsic and non-intentional quality on its own. Unlike transparency theorists, phenomenologists consider that experience has two sides, the experienced object and the experience of the objet. Although these two sides cannot be separated, what the object is like to the subject is to be distinguished from what the experience of the object is like for the sub- ject, which has speciic features, the main one being precisely its irst-personal given- ness. However this quality of mineness or “ipseity” is not explicitly attended to as an object of experience; it igures “as a subtle background presence” (124). his minimal and thin form of self-awareness, conceived of as an immediate, non-objectifying, non- positional or non-thematic self-acquaint- ance of the self to itself, is considered to be a constitutive feature and integral part of consciousness. However, how is it that this dimension of irst-personal givenness retains its iden- tity throughout the multitude of changing experiences? How is it that one can be self- aware across temporal distance and recall a past experience as one’s own? According to Husserl, this persistency is due to the very structure of self-awareness, the protention– primal presentation–retention structure, which makes consciousness appear to itself as a continuous stream. Due to this struc- ture, irst-personal givenness stands perma- nently, like a rainbow on a waterfall, its own quality remaining unchanged by the events that stream through it. his structure ac- counts for the identity of self through time, in other words for an act-transcendant ego. his basic sense of self is the foundation for a more elaborated sense of self, the “nar- rative” or “autobiographical” self, a linguis- tic and social construction starting in early childhood and evolving across the lifetime that enables us to become and stay not merely “minimal selves” or pure identity- poles, but the persons we feel we are, with our abilities, habits, character traits, beliefs, values, goals and ideals. From this perspective, the self as iden- tity-pole as well as the narrative self are grounded in a minimal but nevertheless sol- id basis, that of the “core-self,” which origi- nates in the structural distinction between the experienced object on the one hand, and the experience of the object with its essen- tial quality of “mineness” or “irst-personal givenness” on the other hand. However, is this distinction really irreducible? Is it pre- given? Is it not possible to detect dimensions of experience where this distinction is more permeable, and subtle processes intended to construct and maintain it? Our attempts to explore empirically 1 the microdynamic 1 | his occurs notably through explicitation interviews, an interview technique aimed at help- ing subjects become aware of the pre-relective Review of “Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective” by Dan Zahavi. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005. ISBN 978-0-262-74034-0. 273 pages.