Reflection and Text: Revisiting the Relation Between Pre-reflective and Reflective Experience

See for instance Zahavi’s elaboration on a notion of minimal self qua pre-reflective self-awareness, and Legrand’s work on a notion of pre-reflective bodily experience (Zahavi 2005; Legrand 2006, 2007).

Husserl’s Complete Works (Husserliana) is abbreviated to Hua in this articles.

The recently published book Self, No Self? is an attempt to bring together views from different traditions, including phenomenology, analytical philosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The book has shown that whatever theories or schools the contributors are committed to, they tend to agree that consciousness is characterized by a basic type of self-reference or self-luminosity (Siderits et al. 2011).

In his article “The Heidelberg School and the Limits of Reflection,” Dan Zahavi, for instance, argues that although the account of the Heidelberg School, of which Henrich is a representative, is illuminating, it nevertheless fails to offer a positive and detailed analysis of the structure of pre-reflective self-awareness. He feels unsatisfactory with Henrich’s mainly negative and formalistic account (2007: 281).

In their article, Petitmengin and Bitbol draw up an elaborated inventory of various criticisms towards introspection or reflection. The major reasons that cause introspection to be unreliable are summarized as follows: stimulus error, impossible split, observational distortion, temporal distortion, interpretative distortion, verbal distortion, blindness of introspection, non verifiability of results.

Schleiermacher, for instance, holds a view like this and thinks that the task of interpretation is to understand the author better than the author understood himself.

In the article “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” Ricoeur applies the paradigm of text to meaningful action, and in terms of the phrase quoted here, Ricoeur wants to stress the autonomization of action and its dissociation from the agent. It seems to me that what Ricoeur says here also holds true for our experiences, which are submitted to further inquiries and evaluations and hence escape the initial intention.

An anonymous referee kindly points out to me that some pre-reflective experiences are modes of implicit understanding and are preconditions for our practical actions; these pre-reflective experiences hence require no reflection, or interpretation, or exposition. I partly agree. In our everyday life, many experiences provide the silent background for our explicit actions and they are probably never reflected upon. However, it seems to me that even though these experiences are usually not explicated, they are by nature open to interpretation—this is what is unique to human experience. Such openness to reflection can be manifested when a philosophical inquiry is carried out towards these pre-reflective experiences.

The text-reading model might give rise to a certain worry with regard to the authenticity of reflection. If reflection should be understood as the act of interpretation, in terms of which the pre-reflective manifests itself as such, under what condition can we call a reflection a good and authentic one? To put it differently, would an emphasis on the textual nature of pre-reflective experience and the existential dimension of reflection henceforth result in some relativism that annuls any claim to truth? It seems to me that this needs not be the case. A way to fend off relativism is to insist that any reflection has a purport to reveal something that is true to my own experience. This view, however, must be cautiously distinguished from that of the data-description model. Just as an interpretation necessarily postulates for itself a goal to reach the true meaning of the text and hence would see itself as more authentic than the others which it openly or implicitly objects, for any reflective experience, it is constitutive that the reflected experience emanates in it as a fact transcending this reflection, as possessing its own nature and resisting any mistaken understanding. The issue that I’m briefly mentioning here, however, exceeds the framework of this paper.