- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
Like James’s, Strawson’s theory depends on introspection, but he disagrees with
James’s description of ‘the wonderful stream of our consciousness’ which, ‘[l]ike
a bird’s life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings’ (James,
1890, i, p. 243). For him, even James’s acknowledgement of discontinuity does not
capture the radically disjunctive nature of experience. He prefers Hume’s descrip-
tions of consciousness as fluctuating, uncertain, and fleeting. There are gaps and
fadings, disappearances and restartings, and he describes his own experience
when alone and thinking as ‘of repeated returns into consciousness from a state of
complete, if momentary, unconsciousness’ (Strawson, 1997, p. 422). It is as though
consciousness is continually restarting.
People commonly accept that consciousness is ‘gappy’ or that thoughts switch
and flip from one topic to another, says Strawson, but they still assume that the
same self returns after a break. On the Pearl view, as in Buddhism, there is no
such underlying continuity and no persisting mental self. The Pearl view is a rad-
ical version of bundle theory because of its complete rejection of any long-term
continuity. Nevertheless, the pearl-self has unity at any given moment and in that
sense is more than just an untied bundle of sensations and perceptions.
Does it account for the experienced unity and continuity of self? The pearl-self
is similar to James’s idea that each moment entails a new Thought. Its equiva-
lent of the continuous appropriation of ‘ownership’, from one Thought to the
next, is the suggestion that continuing contents help link experiences through
time – the most reliable being the constant presence of our own body. Short-
term memory also helps paste over the jumps and breaks. Thus, ‘constancies
and steadinesses in the contents of consciousness may seem like fundamental
characteristics of the operation of one’s consciousness, although they are not’
(1997, p. 423).
Danish philosopher Dan Zahavi (2011) takes issue with one implication of
Strawson’s metaphor. If the identity of the self does not depend on temporal
continuity, he says, we cannot call experiences pearls on a string, because two
pearls are part of the same necklace only if they are in fact joined by an unin-
terrupted string. For Zahavi, there is no self that actively unites disparate bits
of experience; it is not an extra element that has to be added to the stream of
consciousness to unify it. Unity of experience in a single moment and through
time is constituted by the fact that my experiences are mine, in the sense that
an experience appears to me in a manner that is different from how they can
appear to anyone else. And self in that sense exists whenever we are engaged
or immersed in the world.
Perhaps because of confusions about continuity, Strawson (2011) drops the
string-of-pearls metaphor, and expands on his earlier ideas by proposing that the
self is a ‘minimal self ’, or ‘minimal subject’: it is simply what remains when you strip
away everything except experience, so if you agree that experience exists, you
accept that the minimal self exists. A minimal self need not be self-conscious, and
it may last for only a very short time (and so not be very ethically relevant, as he
remarks in an aside). If ordinary daily experiences involve innumerable short and
unnoticed gaps, then every day involves the existence of many minimal selves.
Any given experience is by definition unified – it is a total experiential field – but
(contrary to Zahavi’s perspective) this unity does not imply anything about conti-
nuity. So maybe a raindrop would be a better metaphor.
The stream of
consciousness, ‘[l]ike a
bird’s life, seems to be
made of an alternation
of flights and perchings’
(James, 1890, p. 243)
‘the existence of the
minimal subject is given
with the existence of
experience’
(Strawson, 2011, p. 254)
‘the existence of a human
being during a normal
waking day involves the
existence of many thin or
minimal subjects’
(Strawson, 2011, p. 262)
FIGURE 16.10 • Perhaps there is no string that
ties selves together and no
requirement for only one to
exist at a time. Selves may be
more like raindrops, forming
and disappearing again,
sometimes lots at a time,
sometimes only one. Being any
one raindrop you would not
know about the rest.