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Human Studies
Published in: Human Studies 4/2021

30-07-2021 | Theoretical / Philosophical Paper

Personal Uniqueness and Events

Author: Petr Prášek

Published in: Human Studies | Issue 4/2021

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Abstract

In contrast to Anglophone debates on personal identity initially formed by John Locke’s investigation of personal identity in the sense of personal continuity or persistence through time, the Continental tradition focuses on what constitutes ipseity (ipséité, Selbstsein, selfhood) in the sense of individuality or uniqueness of the human being “constituted” by its continuous transformation through changing experience. In this study, I claim that contemporary phenomenological research in France—especially the “phenomenology of the event” as represented by Henri Maldiney and Claude Romano—contributes to this Continental discussion in a significant way: it formulates the conditions of personal uniqueness or distinctiveness with regard to other persons, conditions not to be found in Heidegger’s existential conception of selfhood in Being and Time. More precisely, Maldiney and Romano allow us to answer the principal questions of this study: In what does the personal uniqueness consist? What exactly individualizes the first-person selfhood disclosed in Dasein’s relation to death? In my three-stage analysis, I first deal with Heidegger’s conception of selfhood in Being and Time and its limits with respect to the question of personal uniqueness. Next, I analyse Maldiney’s conception of “eventful selfhood” in which he “completes” Heidegger’s conception of selfhood by describing Dasein’s openness to ontical, and yet fully authentic events. Finally, I develop the argumentation by presenting Romano’s even more radical conception of the “happening subjectivity” (advenant), which allows us to return to the second major feature of personal identity: personal persistence. Nonetheless, I conclude that the connection between personal uniqueness and persistence is not sufficiently examined in the phenomenology of the event, which opens the path towards another related inquiry into the following problem: What is the proper subjective dimension or the “underlying thing” (ὑποκείμενον) in the background of personal persistence which somehow resists events?
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Footnotes
1
See Ricœur’s definition of individual character: “By ‘character’ I understand the set of distinctive marks which permit the reidentification of a human individual as being the same” (Ricœur 1992: 119).
 
2
Note that Latin ipse is employed to emphasize that it is precisely the person in question, the person herself. Romano (2016a: 45) clearly defines Latin ipse in this manner: “ipse Caesar: Caesar himself […] ipse is only employed as an expression of emphasis by which one indicates that it is the person herself, or the very person who is in question”. See with Ricœur’s definition (1992: 3) of “oneself”: “‘Oneself’ (soi-même) is only an emphatic form of ‘self’, the expression même serving to indicate that it is precisely a matter of the being or the thing in question”.
 
3
As J.-L. Chrétien remarks, before becoming a widely known philosopher, Maldiney had long been respected in artistic and psychiatric circles (Chrétien 2012: 7–29). His conception of human existence draws upon his encounters with friends and acquaintances from both disciplines: for example, with artists such as Tal Coat, J. Bazaine, F. Ponge or A. du Bouchet, and with psychiatrists such as J. Schotte, L. Binswanger, L. Szondi or R. Kuhn.
 
4
Maldiney describes such a transcendence that is irreducible to the transcendence of Dasein’s projection. That is why he groups together (under the name of event) what Levinas strictly distinguishes: the metaphysical transcendence of the Other and the transcendence of impersonal element from which subjectivity lives (vivre de…). Moreover, Levinas does not employ the term “event” for an individualizing event but for “an event of being, as the openness of a dimension indispensable, in the economy of being, for the production of infinity” (1979: 240).
 
5
“L’émotion ressentie excède l’attente et le sens de la quête. Elle est bouleversante à la mesure du monde bouleversé. L’apparition du chamois ne s’inscrit pas dans une configuration préalable qu’au contraire elle annule” (Maldiney 1991: 406). I use and slightly modify S. Thoma’s translation of this passage (Thoma 2014).
 
6
“L’identité n’est pas l’ipséité. L’ipséité, c’est le soi-même qui est toujours en jeu. L’identité, c’est déjà quelque chose d’établi, à quoi on ramène le reste […] C’est l’ipséité qui compte: l’identité, c’est tout ramener au même” (Maldiney 1997: 113; see Maldiney 1991: 351).
 
7
“Résoudre la crise c’est intégrer l’événement en se transformant” (Maldiney 1991: 320).
 
8
Even though they both define event as an existential transformation, it seems that they do not agree on what leads to this reversal. While Maldiney considers every single small sensation as an event, Romano focuses on rare intense transformations through events like the above-mentioned death of a close friend. Thus, Romano’s books on events lack reflections on what is crucial for Maldiney: on sensation (sentir). (see Dika et al. 2012: 201).
 
9
Inspired by Heidegger, Romano (2009a: 32–39) distinguishes events in their evential (événemential) and evental (événementiel) sense: while the latter is the usual French adjective referring to events as they occur in everyday interpretation as innerworldly facts, the former is a neologism referring to their existential definition.
 
10
I have to remark here that Romano’s position is still evolving and it is not absolutely clear what the relation is between his early theory of selfhood, laid out in his books on the event, and the theory he holds today. With regard to his habilitation work (Romano 2015), one may say that while “evential selfhood” is still relevant for Romano’s current theory, he takes into account two other important aspects of human existence neglected in his books on event, namely “natural” capabilities (corporeality) and culture. However, although he recently published a book on “being-oneself” (Romano 2019), he shed no light on the relation between what he designates as three different capabilities (capacités) of the existent, that is, “‘natural’ capabilities that we share with other living beings, capabilities that depend on a specifically human culture, [and] capabilities-of-being in the Heideggerian sense” (see Romano 2015: 400).
 
11
I deal with these questions in a related study on the subjective continuity of happening existence according to M. Richir (Prášek 2021).
 
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Metadata
Title
Personal Uniqueness and Events
Author
Petr Prášek
Publication date
30-07-2021
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Human Studies / Issue 4/2021
Print ISSN: 0163-8548
Electronic ISSN: 1572-851X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-021-09597-0

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