Cogito and I: A Bio-Logical Approach

Kimura, Bin, 1931-

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, Volume 8, Number 4, December
2001, pp. 331-336 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/ppp.2002.0019
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BIN / COGITO AND I: A BIO-LOGICAL APPROACH I 331
2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Kimura Bin
1
Cogito and I:
A Bio-Logical Approach
ABSTRACT: The key mutation of the schizophrenic
psyche can be described as a disturbance of the first
person-ness of the I-sense, i.e., of the sense of the I
as personal subject of experience and of action. Under
these circumstances, representations of things are not
definitively experienced as my representations
with the self-evidence of belonging to me. This uncer-
tainty of selfhood, specific to schizophrenia, cannot
be reduced to a disability of intellect, logic, judgment,
or memory. In the course of developing his argument,
the author criticizes philosopher Michel Henrys cri-
tique of Heideggers (1961) interpretation of Des-
cartess cogito ergo sum.
The author hypothesizes that the basic disturbance
of schizophrenia may be related to a discordance
between individual subjectivity and the collective sub-
jectivity to which a person also belongs. The schizo-
phrenic individual seems to be unable to allow the self
to dissolve into a kind of group subjectivity, i.e., to
fuse the human I with auto-affection of living in gen-
eral. This is connected with the fact that the sense of I-
ness (of I as an ongoing subjectivity), which usually
remains too self-evident to be brought to awareness,
comes to arise explicitly in consciousness, with pain-
fully elevated self-reflection and profound uncertainty
about the I-ness of the self or the selfness of the I.
(Abstract written by special issue editor: L.A.S.)
Schizophrenia and the Self
T
HE TRUE CAUSES of schizophrenia remain
utterly unknown. The onset of the psy-
chosis is often instigated by difficulties in
close relationships, particularly with parents or
intimate friends. On the other hand, it is well
established that some genetic or biological factors
play an important role. So far, the phenomenolog-
ical psychopathology of schizophrenia has dealt
little with such etiological questions, limiting itself
to descriptions or analyses of mental states and
behaviors of patients, including their premorbid
characteristics. In such investigations, it has been
remarked that the most essential change of the
schizophrenic psyche can be described as a dis-
turbance of the selfhood of the I or the deter-
mination of I as myself. One young male schizo-
phrenic patient, for example, said the following:
Im a psycho-machine. The psycho-machine denotes
Dr. M, who comes into me and corresponds with me
in such a way [patient imitates writing behavior on a
paper]. Its myself. Its a topological translocation, a
travel within myself.
This patients words clearly suggest that the
I or me as an entity remains identifiable
from outside and recognizable as an object (Im
so and so, he says; he speaks of things being
into me, with me, and within myself; he
refers to my hand). By contrast, the personal
subject or agent of this I-for-himself is no longer
itself but has been altered by what he refers to as
a topological translocation, a psycho-ma-
chine, and manipulation by Dr. M.
Another young male patient said:
Each person has both a real and a virtual being; both
are replacing one another. Its also the case in my
332 I PPP / VOL. 8, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2001
father and myself. Both are not separate, but going in
parallel, passing each other. Not the real being of a
real person, but the virtual one manipulates all events
of my surroundings. Sometimes I suppose it may be a
supernatural force, but sometimes I think of an inten-
tion of others. If that is the case, the origin of the
intention must be the virtual being, which doesnt
show itself. My real being is my own existing self born
with this body. The virtual being is a thinking self,
which cannot be grasped in its true form. Usually
both are going in parallel. But if anything occurs, the
existing self is engulfed into and manipulated by the
thinking self. Influences of the virtual being of others
come just into my thinking self.
It seems that the real being, referred to in
this second case example, corresponds to the I
as a recognizable object in the first example,
while the virtual being of the second example
corresponds to the I as personal subject of
acting in the first. Recalling Descartess concept
of the cogito, it is worth noting that the real
being is referred to as an existing self and the
virtual being as a thinking self. (It is im-
probable, incidentally, that the patient was in-
tending to refer to Descartes.) Here, too, the
patient does not simply say that I am not I. (If the
patient said, I am not I, this would not indi-
cate schizophrenia, but a possession syndrome.)
Rather, the I, remaining still I as real being,
endures influences of others in the dimension of
virtual beingin such a way that the real
being is engulfed and manipulated by the
virtual being instead of both going in paral-
lel, as is usually the case.
Such alterations of selfhood often manifest
themselves in what are recognized as the so-
called ego disturbances of schizophrenia. But
even in the absence of such overt symptoms,
schizophrenics may constantly feel a similar un-
certainty of selfhood. That is why such patients
are always forced into a kind of persistent painful
reflection upon themselves that is rarely observed
in normal people. The loss of natural self-evidence
investigated by Blankenburg (1971) certainly cor-
relates with this disturbance of selfhood.
This disturbance is one of the specific pathol-
ogies that occur only in schizophrenia. It cannot
be reduced to a disability of intellect, logic, judg-
ment, or memory, for even in the case of a severe
destruction of intelligence in senile dementia of
the Alzheimers type, the fundamental structure
of I-ness itself remains thoroughly intact. Thus,
an Alzheimers patient, who no longer knows
with whom she is speaking or what her own
name is, will hardly ever say that she is not
herself, or that she is someone else. Such distur-
bances of the first-person-ness of the I-sense are
not even seen in cases of psycho-genic biograph-
ical amnesia, where the entire memory of per-
sonal history is lost. In spite of this global loss, in
such cases of amnesia, of historical and social
determinates of the I as a publicly accessible
reality, the I as personal subject of acting, the
originality of private I-ness, remains undisturbed.
In his second Meditation, Descartes (1953,
279) explains the concept of cogito, which he
considers to be the ground of sum, I am, as
follows:
I am seeing the light, hearing the noise, feel-
ing the warmth. But it will be said that these
appearances are false, because I am sleeping.
Anyway, at least it is quite certain that it seems to
me that I am seeing, hearing, and feeling the
warmth; and it is properly what is called feeling,
and, taken in such a precise manner, it is nothing
but thinking [emphasis added].
Thus, Descartess cogitoI thinkdoes not
designate active intellectual thinking, as is some-
times assumed, but, rather, a sensitive-passive
mental state, what he calls a feeling of it is
seeming to me that accompanies I am seeing,
hearing, and so on.
Mari Nagai, a Japanese psychiatrist who died
at a young age, noticed the double structure of
self-reference in the phrase, it seems to me that I
am doing so and so, and she suggested that the
specifically schizophrenic excess of self-reflec-
tion was due to a pathologically hyperactivated
concern regarding the seeming to me, which
usually is taken as so self-evident that it is hardly
noticed. According to Nagai, in our nave every-
day life, we take as certain the state of affairs I
am doing so and so, in which the ordinary
subjectobject relationship is grounded. In this
case, we need not reflect explicitly, it seems to
me. Normally, there is a relationship of mutual
foundation between this non-objective evidence
BIN / COGITO AND I: A BIO-LOGICAL APPROACH I 333
of the Cartesian cogito and the objective certain-
ty of I am doing. The excess of self-reflection
in schizophrenia indicates that there has been a
profound change in the relationship between these
two Isnamely, between the me in it seems
to me as a purely private, subjective feeling of
selfness, and the I in I am doing as the
publicly recognizable instance of individuality.
Nagais argument is of great importance, not
only for phenomenological studies of schizophre-
nia, but also for reflection on the conditions that
make healthy self-consciousness possible. Her
argument alerts us to the fact that, as rational
animals endowed with faculties of speech and
thinking, we are not only conscious of a self as
an object of self-recognition unconsciously shared
with othersas an I of I am doing so and so
but also that, prior to this, we are living, embod-
ied, and feeling creatures who are subjects of a
self-evident private selfhoodas the self implicit
in it is seeming to me. In order to pursue this
issue, it is worth considering French philosopher
Michel Henrys analysis of certain passages from
Descartess Meditations that are mentioned by Nagai.
In The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, Henry
(1985) argues that the cogito from which Des-
cartes obtained his certitude of I am did not,
in fact, involve representational thinking, as this
is usually understood, but rather a pure auto-
affection in the sense of an immediate appear-
ance (lapparaltre) that is implicit in the experi-
ence of living itself. Like Nagai, Henry finds a
clue in the above-quoted sentence of Descartes:
at least it is quite certain that it seems to me that
I am seeing, hearing, and feeling the warmth (at
certe videre videor, audire, calescere). Videre is
the infinitive of the verb video (to see), and
videor is its passive voice. However, videor can
also be used as middle voice with the meaning
to seem, to appear (to me), that is, without
implying visual perception but with the more
general meaning that some phenomenon appears
for me and is felt by me. This primitive feeling
of thinking is the feeling of itself (se sentir
soi-mme). It is this feeling that, so to speak,
gives what Descartes calls thinking to itself
and makes it what it is, that is, the original
appearance to itself of appearance (loriginel ap-
paraltre soi de lapparaltre) (31). Contrary to
what Heidegger argued in his famous interpreta-
tion of cogito, this form of appearing or manifes-
tation is not constituted by an objectifying repre-
sentation (Vor-stellung); rather, it precedes it.
This affectivity of thinking, writes Henry (1985,
39), must be understoodas auto-affection in
which thinking immediately reveals itself to itself
and feels itself in itself as what it is. It is the
original feeling, the feeling of itself of the feeling
(le se sentir du sentir).
Heideggers (1961) interpretation of Des-
cartess cogito ergo sum, which is criticized by
Henry, focuses unequivocally on the ego cogito,
I think. For Descartes as interpreted by Heideg-
ger, to think means to perceive in the sense of to
represent, to set before myself (mir vor-stellen),
to dispose (zustellen) something to be represent-
ed to myself as something available. To the ques-
tion of what must be brought to certainty by
means of such representation, Heidegger answers
as follows:
Descartes says: every ego cogito, I think, is cogito
me cogitare, I think myself thinking; every ich
stelle etwas vor, I represent something, represents
me at the same time, the me who represents it
before myself in my representing act. Every human act
of representing is, in an easily misleading manner of
speaking, ein Sich-vorstellen, a representation of
oneself. (153).
For Heidegger, human consciousness is essen-
tially self-consciousness. The I necessarily de-
velops itself by means of being represented; the
I and the condition of being represented are
ultimately one and the same. When an object is
represented, the one who represents it is also
represented; he is in such a way already present
as the one who disposes this object to himself.
According to Henry, however, this is not real-
ly the case. If the appearance of the Cartesian
cogito means self-representation, it is not be-
cause the setting before myself (mir Vor-stellen)
of an object signifies, as the structure of repre-
sentation, eo ipso to set myself before (mich
Vor-stellen), as Heidegger seems to imply. Ac-
cording to Henry, the appearing itself is already
and implicitly Self (Soi)both the Self of self-
hood (lipseit) and the Self of living, because the
334 I PPP / VOL. 8, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2001
Self is the identity of what affects and what is
affected.
We must notice here an essential difference
between the Self (Soi) in Michel Henrys writings
and what Heidegger wants to express with the
equivalent term (Selbst, sich). What Heidegger
calls Self is what Descartes focuses on in the
cogito, i.e., ego, the I. But in the Self of which
Henry speaks, the first-person I, is not yet given.
It involves selfhood in the sense of the ipseit
(itselfness) of the appearance as such, but does
not yet imply the meaning of a unique I that is
absolutely irreplaceable by an other. Neverthe-
less, Henry simply equates this prepersonal Self
with the personal Self or first-person I of Heideg-
ger. He writes:
But the reason the representation is a Self is not
because the ob-jectified and the op-posed [i.e., the Self
as I] is represented and opposes itself to the represen-
tation. The representation can represent to itself what
it represents only because it is already a Self and bears
the Self within it (Henry 1985, 97).
For Henry, ipseityin the sense of the sameness
of what is affecting and what is affected in the
event of appearanceis the more primordial or
foundational condition. That is to say, it is be-
cause the auto-affection of the cogito maintains
its self-identity and affects itself in itself, that it
can also be, post factum, as it were, the repre-
sentation of itself in the sense of I myself.
To this argument from Henry as well as to
Heidegger, we must add immediately, But not so
with schizophrenics! This, however, amounts to
saying, but not in all human beingsfor what
cannot truly be said of human beings called schizo-
phrenics cannot truly be said of all human beings.
Schizophrenics are profoundly uncertain about
the I-ness of the self or the selfness of the I
aspects of experience that are perfectly self-evi-
dent for all non-schizophrenic persons, includ-
ing, of course, both Henry and Heidegger. The
key feature of schizophrenia consists in the fact
that representations of things are not definitively
experienced as my representations, that is, the
self-evidence of belonging to me, articulated in
the mental state of it is seeming to me, is lost,
as Mari Nagai argued. This means that, in schizo-
phrenia, the Self in Henrys sense is not able to
serve as an adequate a priori of the Self in Heideg-
gers sense; as a result, the first-person I is not
present in the pure auto-affection of appearance
in the immediacy of living. But that is not be-
cause schizophrenics have lost this first-person I.
As to the I in I am doing so and so, no
specifically schizophrenic change can be found,
though its content may often be delusionally
distorted. In two patients mentioned above, no
substantial changes are found with regard to the
I of self-recognition in the first patient, or in the
real being as existing self in the second. The
schizophrenic alterations are apparent, rather, in
the I as personal agent as virtual being or
thinking selfor, as seems more likely, in the
relationship between both Is or selves.
Schizophrenia and Collective
Subjectivity
Each living being must interact with its envi-
ronment in order to survive. For living beings,
vital contact between organism and environment
must always be maintainedin the face of all the
risks of breaking away, in a manner of continu-
ous discontinuity, so to speak. We can call this
principle of sustaining contact the Subject of
life in the precise etymological sense of sub-
jectum, which designates what lies at the base of
all living behavior. In so far as the Subject can
be effective only as long as the organism contin-
ues to live, it certainly belongs to this organism,
but it by no means resides inside of it. Its place of
being is between the organism and the environment,
therefore in a certain sense outside the organism.
What we are referring to here with the term
organism is not limited to a single individual.
Nearly all living creatures, including human be-
ings, live and act in groups of the same species.
Each of these groups must pursue subjective
behaviorin our sensein interface with an
environment in order to maintain survival as a
whole. Which kind of group will eventually
emerge may depend on the interests of its mem-
bers, e.g., procreation, childcare, change of liv-
ing place, and so forth. In highly complex human
societies, each individual simultaneously partici-
pates in a number of groups, e.g., the married
BIN / COGITO AND I: A BIO-LOGICAL APPROACH I 335
couple, family, community, church, nation, up to
the totality of humankind, although at any given
moment, he can consciously engage with only
one of them. But at the same time, each group
member also has to pursue his or her own indi-
vidual concerns in order to survive. We may say,
then, that the behavior of living organisms, in-
cluding human beings, is necessarily ruled by a
dual subjectivityan individual as well as a col-
lective one.
Speaking of a collective subjectivity, we have
to ask, Where is the interface of contact between
a group and its environment? Even for the indi-
vidual organism, we cannot say the contact with
its environment occurs only at the physical sur-
face of a body or its surrogate, the walking stick
for a blind person, for example. Our own psy-
chophysical conditions also constitute an impor-
tant environment for our living behavior. The
difficulty of spatially locating the interface be-
comes even greater in the case of group behavior.
We may provisionally say that each individual
member of a group participates in its own indi-
vidual interface with its environment within the
overall subjectivity of the group as a whole, so that
it is embedded within or overlaid by the latter.
Now the specificity of a human being consists
in the fact that it alone can consciously distin-
guish its own self from others and be aware of
this self as its own self with a unique and irre-
placeable I-ness. The consciousness of the origi-
nality of I necessarily goes along with alienation
from others who, obviously, do not participate in
my history and life-world, who do not have my
sense of inner I-nessthus constituting a charac-
teristic insideoutside distinction. And according
to the common understanding, the inside is cate-
gorized as a sphere of safety and the outside as
that of danger or death. Hence it can happen,
especially in some schizophrenic delusions, that
others are experienced as terrifying beings. Hu-
man self-consciousness is not merely that of being
a subject vis--vis an environment; it also involves
a distinct reflection on the privileged I myself,
that is, a representation of the Self in Heideggers
senseas a self that the I sets before itself.
In order to maintain vital contact with the
environment, living creatures have to encounter
it; the environment has to manifest itself to them.
But what appears as an environment will depend
in large measure on who encounters it and how
this being encounters it. The same landscape of
woods appears differently to squirrels that live
there and to people who go there for a picnic.
Even for the same individual, the environment is
not the same when he or she is hungry or not.
The environment always appears to organisms
as having sensual and vital significance.
What Michel Henry understood by the Carte-
sian cogito was nothing other than a pure self-
confirmation of the living subject in such imme-
diate, vital, and sensual encounters with the
environment. The consciousness of the humanly
specific I as the self that Heidegger regarded as
subjectum, on the other hand, does not yet par-
ticipate in this confirmation. However, as men-
tioned above, Henry does not differentiate suffi-
ciently between these two selves. His analysis
treats the Iin the sense of the specifically hu-
man, reflective determination of the self to itself
in contrast with othersas if this I were secretly
present at the scene of the most immediate or
basic contact with the environment. In other
words, he ignores the difference between the I
that is represented in human self-consciousness
and the subject itself as the vital ground of this
self-consciousness.
It may be only in schizophrenia that this dif-
ference appears so expressly in awareness as a
kind of intrapsychic splitting that cannot be ig-
nored. But as I stressed above, what the case is
for schizophrenics suggests a potentiality inher-
ent in all human beings. In those who carry some
kind of predisposition to schizophrenia but who
do not break down and can adapt reasonably
well to social life, this splitting might be an
intrinsic and natural aspect of their experience.
Is it to be considered a pathological phenomenon
produced by some organic disturbance? Or is it,
rather, a de jure, innate structure of all human
beings that happens to be hidden in healthy peo-
ple owing to some mechanism or other?
Remember what we said about the dual sub-
jectivity of the individual in the group. Human
beings, like all creatures, live this dual subjectiv-
ity in their relationship between themselves and
336 I PPP / VOL. 8, NO. 4 / DECEMBER 2001
the environment. The collective kind of subjec-
tivity is shared by all group members without
distinctions among them. By contrast, individual
subjectivity is entirely in the hands of each per-
son, so marked differences are seen even in the
same group. It is above all the personal history of
each human being that makes up this individual-
ity, and vice versa. The substantial part of what
human self-consciousness represents as I is
nothing but an individual subject personalized in
such a way. This consciousness of I constitutes a
privileged inside against others on the outside,
each with its own vital interests, so that self-
consciousness is entirely colored by this differ-
ence of I versus others. That is why, in the human
being, individual subjectivity assumes such great
importance, whereas the collective kind of sub-
jectivity usually remains almost unconscious.
The videor (it seems to me) of the videre
videor (it seems to me that I am seeing)taken
by Henry to be the genuine meaning of the Car-
tesian cogitois less a reflective kind of thinking
than a sensual feeling implicit in the immediate
experience of living. It is the self-confirmation of
the subject that takes place at the interface be-
tween living organismwhether human or not
and its environment. But in human beings, it can
only be pursued under an overwhelming hege-
mony of the I. That is why Descartes could de-
rive from it the certainty of I am, and Heideg-
ger could understand it as the self-representation
of I. And this is why Henry himself, though
recognizing the auto-affection of appearance in
it, could confuse this self with the Self in the
sense of I.
2
Perhaps this dissolving of the self into a kind
of group subjectivity that is not specifically hu-
man, this fusion of the human I with the auto-
affection of life in general, constitutes a neces-
sary condition of a healthy mental state. And I
dare to hypothesize that the basic disturbance of
schizophrenia may be found in a certain funda-
mental dissociation, probably grounded in ge-
netic factors, between individual existence and
existence as a constituent of the species. Because
the latter realizes itself in a sense of group mem-
bership, the basic disturbance I am hypothesiz-
ing can also be expressed as a discordance be-
tween individual subjectivity and the collective
subjectivity to which one actually belongs. In
such cases, the selfhood of Self seen by Henry in
the auto-affection of living, i.e., the videor that
usually remains too self-evident to be brought to
awareness, comes to arise explicitly in conscious-
ness, sometimes with painfully elevated self-re-
flexion.
Because the self as auto-affection appears con-
sciously to be certain or self-evident in each indi-
vidual, but is originally shared with other group
members, it is apt to take on the quality of
something originated by a not-self or foreign
agent, something foreign coming to be experi-
enced as a strange subjectivity inherent in the
very foundations of the I. In agreement with the
second patient quoted above, we might say, Each
person has both a real and a virtual being, [and]
not the real being of the real person, but the
virtual one manipulates all events of my sur-
roundings. [Supposing an intention of others,]
the origin of the intention must be the virtual
being, not showing itself.Influences of the vir-
tual being of others come just into my thinking
[virtual] self.
Notes
1. This article is a free translation of an article that
appeared in French: Cogito et Je, Evolution Psy-
chiatrique 62(6):33548, 1997.
2. The I, this specifically human determination of the
self, necessarily has the structure of being-for-oth-
ers, because I am I myself only in relationship with
others. The self in the immediacy of living, in auto-
affection, and the being-for-others of the I are
absolutely different in the level of reflection that
they involve.
References
Blankenburg, W. 1971. Der Verlust der natrlichen
Selbstverstndlichkeit. Stuttgart: Enke.
Descartes, R. 1953. Mditations. In Descartes Oeu-
vres et Lettres. Paris: Editions Gallimard.
Heidegger, M. 1961. Nietzsche II. Pfullingen: Neske.
Henry, M. 1985. Gnalogie de la psychanalyse. Le
commencement perdu. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.