conclusion 413role in this predominantly epistemological theory. This means that
the theory can still threaten to revive the tired old sceptical problems
about the existence of the ‘external world’ that obsess some analytical
epistemologists.
In the light of these strengths and weaknesses it seems rational to
incorporate the best of both approaches into our understanding of self-
consciousness. But what do we do with the fact that the positions are
structurally incompatible? If self-consciousness is a function of reflec-
tion, it is always already imbued with the content of its historical world,
and so poses the question as to how real individuality is possible. If,
in contrast, self-consciousness has an existence that is in part indepen-
dent of reflexivity, it is hard to say how this existence relates to the
world at all. This can lead one to wonder whether the notion of pre-
reflexivity does any real work beyond being a condition of possibility
of self-identification. The debate on this issue has a long way to run,
for both intra- and extra-philosophical reasons, because it affects our
self-descriptions in fundamental ways. We are therefore left precisely
with the question of how we, as situated subjects who have no choice
but to come to terms with ourselves, relate to what seems an inescapable
philosophical dilemma.
Rather than try to find a way beyond this dilemma based on the
advancing of philosophical arguments, I want, then, to suggest how
the issue of pre-reflexivity may be approached in relation to music.
The initial way is via what is actually a serious problem for the pre-
reflexive account, namely that the self’s pre-reflexive ‘familiarity’ with
or awareness of itself has to be articulated as a relationship, as the words
‘with’ and ‘of’ make clear. The point of pre-reflexivity is, though, that
it does not involve a relationship of one aspect to another, because this
leads to the regress of being conscious of being conscious, etc., when
the point is that self-consciousness has to be non-relational. The linguis-
tic means for articulating self-consciousness therefore fail to articulate
what the theory demands: they inherently divide what in some sense has
to be one. An intersubjective, discursive explanation of pre-reflexive
consciousness will consequently only make sense, as we saw Henrich
claim above, if what is to be explained is always already understood in
some other way.
For many conceptions of philosophical argument the failure of lan-
guage to convey the basis of an answer to a philosophical problem has
to be a reason for rejecting the answer. This demand for discursive
articulation would seem to take us back to what constituted the basis