Vietnamese mode of self-reference

·期刊原文
Vietnamese mode of self-reference: A model of Buddhist egology

by Steven W. Laycock
Asian Philosophy

Vol. 4 No. 1 1994

Pp.53-70

Copyright by Asian Philosophy

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ABSTRACT Buddhist egology concurs with the Husserlian claim that the
empirical ego is `constituted'. The Buddhist `deconstruction' of the
ego will not, however, pace Husserl, permit the pronoun `I' to refer
to a purported extra-linguistic entity. The insights here distilled
from the unique mode of self-reference functional within the
Vietnamese language secure for us an unmistakable confirmation of the
Buddhist thesis and have profound consequences for the philosophical
problems surrounding the existence and nature of the self and the
existence of other minds.

To my knowledge, the Vietnamese language is utterly unique among languages
in its mode of self-reference. I wish to explore self-reference in
Vietnamese, but neither for its intrinsic linguistic interest alone, nor
solely for the sake of illuminating a significant aspect of a rich cultural
heritage. The mode of self-reference operative within the Vietnamese
language has a decidedly philosophical import, and can be generalised to
extend our contemporary understanding of self-reference. Moreover, as I
hope to "how, the Vietnamese-or more generally, a Vietnamese-like-use of
self-reference may have profound consequences for the philosophical
problems surrounding the existence and nature of the self and the existence
of other minds. In particular, the insights which we shall glean from our
investigation of self-reference in Vietnamese will secure for us a clear
and solid confirmation of the Husserlian doctrine that the empirical ego
does not by any means comprise an ultimately founding stratum of sense, but
is itself `constituted' (functions, that is, as the selfsame identity
revealed throughout a potentially endless manifold of profiles). [1] This
confirmation can be purchased, however, only at the expense of rejecting
certain early reflections of Husserl's regarding the logico-linguistic
function of `I'. We shall see, pace Husserl, that `I' cannot serve as a
referring expression. But this surface disagreement permits a more profound
agreement of substance. It is precisely because `I' does not refer to a
purported extra-linguistic `ego' that we can draw from Vietnamese the
appropriate confirmation of its constituted character.

For Husserl, the empirical ego, the `I' which we take, pre-reflectively and
naively, to be immersed in the world alongside the objects which it
confronts, [2] is, of course, phenomenal. But though I welcome certain
aspects of Husserl's theory of ego-constitution, my own Buddhist
predilections prevent acceptance of this phenomenon as benefundata, as
founded, that is, in a unitary and basal stratum of lived subjectivity. [3]
For at least a significant strand of Buddhist thought, the ego is `empty',
not merely `constituted', but ontologically dependent upon an array of
conditions external to itself. Its very being is `borrowed', as it were,
from these conditions, and there remains to it nothing which is properly
`its own'. There remains, that is, no `own-being' (svabhava), no
self-existence. [4] With only apparent paradox, we can say that the self
`itself' has no `self'. Buddhist egology (or `anti-egology' if you prefer)
is vitally concerned to `deconstruct' any notion of a unitary,
language-independent self or ego (atman) which subtends or directs the flow
of our conscious life. And while the Vietnamese language predates the
reception of Buddhism, and cannot, then, be said to exhibit, in its
structure, a pre-existing (anti-)egology, it is all the more remarkable, as
I hope to demonstrate, that the Vietnamese mode of self-reference mirrors
this deconstruction. The Buddha did not, of course, speak Vietnamese. And
it would be hopelessly arrogant (if not irrepressibly comical) to suppose
that the profound message of egolessness (Pali: anatta; sanskrit: anatman)
could only be formulated in a language which the Tathagata did not speak.
English, Pali and Vietnamese are equally efficient vehicles for expressing
the ontology of egolessness. The uniqueness of Vietnamese lies, not in its
capacity to articulate Buddhist doctrine, not, that is, in what it can say,
but in the fact that egolessness is reflected in the semantic conditions
for its `saying' anything at all.

Vietnamese Self-Referential Pronouns

Remarkably, there is no self-referential expression in Vietnamese (no
`V-expression', as I shall affectionately call them) which can be
translated (into English), without serious distortion, as `I'. This is
because, whereas the English pronoun, `I' (along with its counterparts in
the various Indo-European languages) is, as we might say,
`transcontextually invariant', the numerous self-referential expressions of
Vietnamese depend, for the semantic correctness of their application, upon
features of the context of utterance other than those determined by the
English `I'.

In Corless' priceless quip, "Descartes said, `I think therefore I am,' but
Buddhism replies, `Think again.'" [5] Following the Buddhist advice, let us
begin this rethinking by considering the Vietnamese counterparts of the
Cartesian cogito. Each of the Vietnamese sentences,

Bo suy-nghi (spoken by a father)
Me suy-nghi (spoken by a mother)
Con say-nghi (spoken by a child)
Anh suy-nghi (spoken by an elder brother)
Chz say-nghi (spoken by an elder sister)
Em suy-nghi (spoken by a younger sibling)

in company with numerous similar variants, has its counterpart either in
the English sentence, `I think (am thinking)' or in `You think (are
thinking)', depending upon whether the first word of the sentence is used
to refer to the speaker or to the person addressed. The word `say-nghi,
(think) offers little resistance to translation. The words `bo', `me',
`anh', `chz', `em', etc., are particularly recalcitrant. Each is used
self-referentially by the present speaker. Thus, each has its counterpart
in the English `I'. Yet each `refers' [6] to the present speaker only
within a certain delimited context in which speaker and interlocutor stand
in a given familial relation.

This, of course, contrast vividly with the impoverished English `I', which
may be employed self-referentially with no more knowledge of the speaker's
relationship to the person addressed than that the person addressed is,
indeed, the person addressed. `I' has a use in soliloquy, and may, it might
be claimed, be gainfully employed even by the most rigorous of solipsists
(were any extant). In Vietnamese, on the contrary, the self-referential use
of `me' by a child in addressing a parent is not merely an insufferable
breach of etiquette, but a violation of semantic proprieties as well. While
it is not a condition of the truth of a sentence such as `me suy-nghi'
(very roughly: `I-as-your mother think') that the speaker is the
addressee's mother, it is, as we shall see, an entailment of its use.

The Vietnamese language displays within its system of self-reference and
address (loixu'ng-ho) a profoundly Confucian influence. For every type of
familial relation which figures significantly in the Confucian scheme of
things (e.g. being-the-father-of, being-the-mother-of,
being-the-elder-brother-of, being-the-elder-sister-of, etc.), and its
converse (being-a-child-of, being-a-younger-sibling-of, etc.), there exists
a unique pair of self-referential/addressive expressions.

Nozick's unlikely "child who thinks his name is `I'" [7] might, were he or
she sufficiently precocious, take part in the following dialogue:

A: I'm thinking about the Cartesian cogito.

B: (the child): What makes you think I'm thinking about the cogito?
I'm doing no such thing!

V-expressions are not, of course, proper names. [8] But our brief dialogue
equally illustrates a principle which does govern the use of V-expressions:
If speaker A uses a given V-expression for self-reference within a
particular dialogical context, B cannot use the same V-expression for
self-reference within that context (and conversely). One could imagine a
comic variant of English purged of the second-personal pronoun, `you', and
employing `I' to serve double duty as both a first-and a second-personal
pronoun. We need go no farther than `I love I' to appreciate the abundant
confusions which such an `English' would engender. Vietnamese first- and
second-personal pronouns can, as in this fanciful variant of English, be
used to refer to the speaker of the particular sentence in which they are
embedded, as well as to the individual to whom the sentence is addressed.
This, of course, stands in sharp contrast to the English `I' which never
refers--indeed, cannot refer--to anyone but the present speaker (or
writer). Vietnamese escapes the perplexities caused by the employment of
the same expression for both first-and second-personal reference, not by
dividing personal pronouns into those used for first-, second-, and
third-personal reference (as does English), but by prohibiting participants
in a given dialogue from using the same self-referential expression and
sorting personal pronouns into speaker/addressee pairs. Thus, for example,
a mother speaking to one of her children would refer to herself by using
`me' (or one of several alternatives: `ma', `me', etc.) and would refer to
the child by using `con'. Symmetrically, the child would use `con' for
self-reference, and `me' (etc.) to refer to the mother. Thus, the ordered
pairs (me con) and (con, me) determine unique familial relations. [9]

Accuracy demands some qualification of the claims thus far put forward. It
might reasonably be suggested that Vietnamese does, in fact, contain
several self-referential expressions (such as `toi', `ta' and `minh') which
offer considerably less resistance to straightforward translation as `I',
which do not imply that a given familial relation obtains between speaker
and the person addressed, and which have an appropriate use within
monologue and private musing. Indeed, the English `I', employed within a
wide range of contexts, is almost invariably rendered in Vietnamese as
`toi', and the two words thus seem, in some respects, likely candidates for
synonymy. However, self-referential expressions such as `toi', `ta' and
`minh', while promising in the ways noted, nonetheless lack the crucial
property of transcontextual invariance. `Toi', for example, was originally
used self-referentially by a subject in addressing the king. [10]
Similarly, `ta', suggesting a `royal' plurality, is used by a superior in
addressing an inferior. While the correct use of such expressions does not
imply that the speaker bears a given familial relation to the person
addressed, it does bear the implication that the speaker is not related to
the person addressed via familial bonds. Thus, since there are contexts in
which such expressions cannot be appropriately used in self-reference, they
are not transcontextually invariant, and cannot be translated, without
serious distortion, as `I'.

There are, moreover, expressions in Viemamese signifying `self-'ban-nga'*
usually translates `ego' or the Vedantic `atman'; `vo-ban-nga' translates
the Buddhist 'egolessness'--but nothing which corresponds precisely to
`myself'. Letting `v' vary over V-expressions, the closest we can get to a
literal translation of 'myself into Viemamese is either `chinh v' (`the
very v'or `v itself') or `ban-nga cua v' ('the self of v'). But then there
are as many senses of 'myself in Viemamese as there are V-expressions.

The `Reference' of Self-Reference

There is, it seems, no more fundamental epistemic principle governing
analysis in general, and the analysis of self-referential expressions in
particular, than that which demands that, in knowing the analysans, I
thereby know precisely what I know in knowing the original pre-analytic
analysandum. If:

(1) A am thinking is the correct analysis of

(2) I am thinking (where `A' represents an expression introduced by the
analysis to replace `I'), then surely, in knowing that (1), I thereby know
that (2), and conversely. If not, (1) cannot be a correct analysis.
However, the substitution of a referential term or phrase of any type
whatever for `A' in (1) will, I submit, cause the analysis
straightforwardly to fail the epistemic exam.

On this issue, if not on others, I firmly endorse Zemach's pellucid
argument:

Reference can be achieved by descriptions, names, or demonstratives. A
purely qualitative definite description will never do, since one may
fail to believe it applies to the object it denotes. It may also fail
the uniqueness condition, and denote nothing. A name will not do
either: although it may refer to the right object, the believer may
not know, or forget, what this name denotes. An indexical will not do
at all: although a semantic rule may determine its reference, the
believer may not know this rule or confuse it with another. [11]

A somewhat livelier and certainly more concrete appreciation of the
non-referential character of (purportedly) self-`referential' expressions
may be elicited by reflection upon the imaginary tragedy which Nozick
describes:

Imagine that you and two other persons have been in an accident and
are lying completely bandaged on three beds in a hospital, all
suffering from amnesia. The doctor comes in and tells what has
happened, that examinations have been made, and that (where the three
persons boringly are named X, Y and Z) person X will live, Y will die,
and Z has a 50/50 chance. [12]

Clearly, as this sombre scenario illustrates, self-reference cannot be
achieved in virtue of a definite description.

The situation is not helped if the doctor gives the full life
histories of each of the three. Nor are you helped if she says the
person closest to the window will live, to the door will die, for
being completely bandaged, you still do not know which of these people
you are. [13]

Nor is a proper name of any avail. "Since you are suffering from amnesia
you do not remember your own name, so there is something important you
don't know yet, namely what is going to happen to you." [14] Nor, finally,
perhaps most surprisingly and most poignantly for our own present purposes,
can self-reference be accomplished by means of a demonstrative or indexical
expression. "It will not help if the doctor points you out and says `here
is what is going to happen to you'; for you won't know she pointed to you."
[15] As Nozick ruminates, "it seems we each must have a kind of access to
ourselves which is not via a term or referring expression, not via knowing
that a term holds true (of something or other)." [16] `I' cannot, then,
function as a description, name, or, crucially, as an indexical. In short,
`I' cannot function referentially. [17]

The case at issue is, of course, Husserl's insistence that the word `I' is
an `essentially occasional' expression, an indexical, referring to a given
individual in virtue of certain information embedded in the context of
utterance present on the `occasion' of its utterance. In the Logical
Investigations, the indexical, `I', is governed by a semantic rule (or
`role', as Perry would have it [18]), the latter conceived as a function
from occasional context to referent. Much later, in the Fonnal and
Transcendental Logic, we learn that the `occasion' of dialogue offers
sufficient `cues' to pin an indexical's reference to a particular
individual. The later work offers a theory of `constituting
horizon-intentionality' which `essentially determines the sense of
occasional judgments-always, and far beyond what at any time is, or can be,
said expressly and determinately in the words themselves'. [19] Indexicals
refer, of necessity, only to items within the horizon of consciousness.
Indexical reference to a given `text' is specified by features of context.
And the indexical reference to such contextual features may require, in
turn, specification by features of a more encompassing context. The final
fixation of indexical reference seems, thus, to be rooted in the
pre-articulate fringe of intelligible richness delimited by the outermost
context of conscious reference: the `world-horizon'.

The precise specification of how the indexical `I' functions attends,
however, the recognition that, for Husserl, `I' is a referring expression.
And this, we have seen, is simply unacceptable. And, again, `although a
semantic rule may determine its reference, the believer may not know this
rule or confuse it with another'. On the basis of no sentence of the form
`A am thinking', may I be said thereby to know that I am thinking. I must
know significantly more than `A am thinking' in order legitimately to infer
that I am thinking (namely, that, given the present context, `A' refers to
me). And this, quite patently, I may, for whatever reason, fail to know
while still knowing that I am thinking.

The Presentation of the Ego

Husserl finds that although self-reference is achieved by the individual
ego, its expression is universally comprehensible, and thus distinguishes
between the `universal semantic function' [20] of the indexical, `I', and
the individual to whom it refers on any particular occasion, between its
anzeigende Bedeutung and its angezeigte Bedeutung, [21] or again, as Tyler
Burge would have it, between the `sense' of the indexical and its
(linguistic) `meaning'. [22]

This segregation of the `sense' and the `reference' of `I' is, of course,
powerfully reminiscent of Frege's parallel distinction. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Husserl also echoes Frege's view that the
unique sense of `I' is utterly incommunicable. [23] The `echo', however, is
not a straightforward reproduction. For it is vital to see that, in place
of Frege's notion of the unique `sense' that `I' has for a given
individual, Husserl substitutes the notion of a unique `I-presentation':
"Each man has his own I-presentation (and with it his individual notion of
I)." [24] The language suggests that, whatever an `I-presentation' might
be, it may be accompanied by, but is not entailed by, a unique `I-sense'.
Thus, Husserl claims that the indexical, `I', "has not itself directly the
power to arouse the specific I-presentation". [25] As Mohanty speculates,
it may well be that Husserl intends, by `I-presentation', "an unvarying,
non-conceptual, inarticulate self-understanding". [26] And perhaps, indeed,
some such pre-conceptual self-understanding is precisely what Husserl means
by `individual notion of I'. If I might carry the speculation forward yet
another small step, perhaps, despite Husserl's untoward commitment to the
doctrine that `I' is an indexical, and thus, a referring expression, one
might envision Husserl as labouring to articulate, within the most useful
logico-linguistic framework available to him, the insight that
self-reference, while linguistically expressible, is itself pre-linguistic.
And thus, perhaps, the pre-articulate self-understanding, the
`I-presentation' of which Husserl speaks, is best understood precisely as
the self itself revealed in self-referential sentence. [27] ' is not a
referring expression, we part company at precisely that corner at which his
view is most saliently akin to that of Husserl. Zemach takes his cue from
Strawson's discussion, in `On Referring', of the sign, posted at a
particularly ill-supported bridge, reading `Unsafe for Lorries'. For both
Strawson and Zemach it is the bridge itself, not some submerged linguistic
item referring to it, which is the subject of this apparently truncated
sentence. "The entity of which the referential part of the sentence is
predicated is present in the sentence, so to speak, `in person'. The
grammatical subject of this sentence is the bridge itself." [28] A sentence
of this sort, in which the subject is `displayed', not `referred to', is
not inappropriately termed by Zemach a `display sentence'. Self-referential
sentences are display sentences. `I' is either semantically pleonastic or
functions merely to mark the pre-linguistic presence of the self to itself.
The self is, then, a self-referential `mental term' [29] which, as it were,
displays itself to itself. [30] It is, more specifically, a `mental
description' which picks itself out. [31] Like `Unsafe for Lorries', `[I]
am thinking' displays its subject. The self (itself) is the very subject of
the sentence. [32] And Zemach records a remarkable virtue of this ploy:
"Display propositions cannot be erroneously believed, or disbelieved, due
to misidentification of the subject." [33]

It is striking to find among the lucid and penetrating insights of the
Neo-Vedantist, K. C. Bhattacharyya, commitments which run parallel to that
of Zemach. And it is important to note that Buddhist `anti-egology' grows
in, but grows, nonetheless, from, the rich humus of accumulated insights
represented by Bhattacharyya's remarks. For Bhattacharyya,

The I is not unmeanable nor is it meant-meant even as unmeanable ...
Meaning is the thinnest presentation of the object, as existing apart
from introspection. I has no meaning in this sense: it has not even
the meaning of being unmeant or unmeanable ... [34]

And we find here a distinctive resonance with the Husserlian notion of `an
unvarying, non-conceptual, inarticulate self-understanding': an
introspective `I-presentation'. Indeed, the word `I' does not refer to the
self, but rather expresses the self's qown reference to itself "The word",
Bhattacharyya tells us, "has a meaning function but not a meaning: it is
the expression of introspection or what may be called the I-function." [35]
And remarkably akin to Zemach's self-referential 'mental term' is
Bhattacharyya's understanding of the use of 'a word like I': ". . . which
is like a pointing gesture at once self-evidencing and self-evident. My
self-consciousness is not the understanding of the meaning of the word I:
the word only reveals it to another." [36] Indeed, "The word may be said at
once to symbolize and to be symbolized by my introspective self.... I, the
speaker, symbolize it by myself or in a sense ... incarnate myself in it."
[37]

One should expect, then, assuming the cogency of the Zemach/Bhattacharyya
rendering, that precisely the same considerations would apply in the case
of V-expressions. The replacement of a given V-expression by a description,
name, or indexical straightforwardly violates our fundamental epistemic
condition. Yet if '[me] suy-nghi, is, as the Zemachian-Bhattacharyyan
analysis would have it, a display sentence, it cannot be the self which is
displayed. For we would then have no way of distinguishing the two
propositions, 'I am thinking' and 'me suy-nghi.' Whatever might be
displayed in the Vietnamese sentence must be able to account for the fact
that 'me suy-nghi, presupposes, as a condition of assertability that, if
speaking candidly, the speaker believes herself to be the mother of the
interlocutor, while 'I am thinking' is not supported by this condition.
Does 'Me suy-nghi display, then, the fact (or state-of-affairs) represented
by this statement-condition? This, of course, will not do. It is not a
fact, but a concrete individual person, who is thinking. Perhaps a more
reasonable response to this quandary would be to suggest that what is
displayed is not the-self's-being-your-mother (the fact), but rather
the-self-as-your-mother. In vivid contrast to their English cousin, the
statement-conditions presupposed by the Vietnamese mode of self-reference
would seem to assume an ontology of 'ego-profiles', each revealing the self
in one of its relational aspects. [38]

Yet again, Vietnamese has no pronoun which could represent the display of
the ego itself in self-referential sentences. And it may therefore seem
implausible that a Vietnamese ontology of self-reference could, by itself,
accommodate the Husserlian insight that ego-profiles are the various
manners in which a single ego exhibits itself to itself. And lacking any
pronoun which could represent the ego simpliciter, the only sense of 'ego'
accessible to speakers of Vietnamese might seem to be that of a mere
collection, a mere bundle, of ego-profiles. The self appears to fragment
into a multiplicity of externally related shards. [39] But in fact the
typical Vietnamese has no difficulty at all in recognising the identity of
a single self as given through the manifold of disparate ego-profiles.
The-self-as-your-mother and the-self-as-your-child are not experienced as
distinct selves, but as disparate modes of presentation of a single self.
The unity of all is a unity present in each. Vietnamese stands in no need
of a self-referential expression representing this unity as such, for the
unity as such is an internal component of each ego-profile. The English 'I'
(or Husserl's 'Ich') is lamentably impoverished. An ontology of
ego-profiles entails an ontology of the ego, but the converse does not
hold. The Vietnamese self-referential ontology thus enjoys a richness of
content which vastly exceeds that of English.

Vietnamese does not allow a direct and undifferentiated access to the self,
but requires rather that the self itself be variously presentable to
itself. The Vietnamese ontology of self-reference features a type of
self-referential act which is essentially 'mediated'. A significant
footnote of Husserl's logical Investigations advances the insight that the
self (ego) is as much an instance of transcendence as a table or a chair.
[40] For Husserl, the empirical ego is a 'pole' of reflexive intentional
reference, an 'object' (or objectivity), that is, constituted as an
identity across a manifold of alternative manners of appearing. Yet though
the Vietnamese language provides powerful confirmation of a certain
egological unity laced through the manifold manners of its appearing, it is
not clear that the pole-model of transcendence is adequate to account for
it. The 'pole', stolid, uncompromised, indifferent to its modes of
appearing, is an ideal candidate as a purported referent for the
transcontextually invariant 'I'. I submit, however, that the unitary sense
of self enjoyed by Vietnamese, no less than by speakers of English, cannot
be accounted for by a 'maypole' which tethers the coloured streamers of
alternative ego-appearances. Nor is the ego a mere button-collection of
ego-profiles. It is, rather, their Gestalt: Each ego-profile discloses, not
a pole, but rather the organically unified whole of ego-profiles itself.

The English 'I' and the self-referential expressions of Vietnamese are
'referential' only in a derivative and secondary sense. Neither 'I' nor
'me' refers, in the strict and proper sense. Such expressions serve rather
to 'reveal' or 'mirror' the self's reference to itself. The Vietnamese mode
of self-reference illustrates the self's capacity, not merely to refer to
itself simpliciter, but to refer to itself as ... Were it possible for
'reference-as' to be construed in terms of simple reference, the
V-expressions might be absorbed without remainder into English with the
simple deployment of disjunction. And if so, then V-expressions would
present no philosophical quandaries for self-reference beyond those that
surround the analysis of 'I'.

'Me suy-nghi does (propositionally) imply that I am thinking and, in the
real-world context, that I believe myself to be your mother. It is the
converse that we must reject as untenable. For what could account for the
severance of what is, in appearance at least, a single Viemamese
proposition into two English propositions? The predicate, 'suy-nghi goes
over without a complaint into the English 'am thinking'. Nothing about the
meaning-content of the Vietnamese predicate could account for this curious
episode of propositional mitosis. We must, then, look directly at the
pronoun, 'me', for the answer. 'Me', however, if it were to refer
(simpliciter) at all, could refer only to what 'I' refers to: my/self.
Without invoking 'reference-as', it is extremely difficult to see what
basis might remain for the bifurcation, if not that 'I' and 'me' reveal
different modes of self-reference. It is not that the two pronouns reveal
different selves. The one rather purports to reveal the see and the other,
the self-as. And this, of course, runs counter to an extensionalist concern
to rid the discourse of self-reference of 'as'-talk. Yet in what could the
difference of presentational mode consist if not in the fact that 'I'
presents the self to itself 'as such', tout entier, whereas 'me' presents
the self to itself as a single 'ray' of illumination, as it were, within an
entire effulgence of 'ego-profiles'. There is, then, no more reason for
regarding 'Me suy-nghi as a single sentential mask concealing a diptych of
propositional conjuncts than for the converse view whereby 'I am thinking'
and 'I am your mother' are regarded as an illusory duality of sentences
united in the mysterious depths by a single (Vietnamese) proposition. The
English and Vietnamese self-referential expressions are simply irreducible
to one another. [41]

Assertability and the Real World

We find, to be sure, a rough second-personal analogue of the V-expressions
in German and in the romance languages. French, to take a familiar example,
generally employs 'tu' in addressing familiars, and 'vous' in addressing
those with whom a more formal and distant relationship is maintained. Do
the sentences, 'tu penses' and 'vous pensez', express different
propositions? Were this so, we should expect them to differ in
truth-conditions. However, it would seem not to be a condition of the truth
of 'tu penses', for example, that the interlocutor is a close friend or
member of the speaker's family. It is entirely possible for 'tu penses' to
be true while the individual addressed stands beyond the range of social
familiarity. Thus, it would be inappropriate for the interlocutor to
retort, 'What you say is false, because I do not know you'.

But if 'tu penses' does not of itself support the implication of
familiarity, what does account for the offense which might be taken when
one is addressed in the 'tu' form by a perfect stranger? Why do we assume a
'suggestion' of contempt or belittlement? Something, it seems, conveys to
us the distinct impression that the other is 'saying': 'You are my social
familiar'. And this we may find audacious and offensive. What, then,
delivers the suggestion? It is neither the sentence, 'tu penses' nor the
proposition expressed by it which bears the implication of familiarity, but
rather certain propositions articulating features of the speech-act
environment, analysable, perhaps, in terms of Grice's notion of the
'conversational implicature'. We must leave for others the presentation and
defence of a thoroughly nuanced account. But it would not be out of place
to nod to the obvious. If the offending suggestion is not implied by the
proposition (or sentence) 'tu penses', we must find it in the 'assertion'
(the use of the sentence in expressing the proposition) or in the
contextual conditions of assertability. The relevance of these
considerations to the V-indexicals is immediate. 'Me suy-nghi, and 'Con
suy-nghi have precisely the same propositional entailments, but differ
sharply in 'assertion-entailment'.

Indeed, assertion-entailment is particularly relevant to self-reference. It
is a condition of the assertion of 'I am thinking' that I produce (and can
produce) the token, 'I', in the sentence (not, it would seem, an
implication of the proposition). 'I can produce the token, "I",' is not
logically tautologous, but pragmatically required. And 'I cannot produce
the token "I"' does not represent a logical contradiction, but rather a
pragmatic self-refutation analogous, perhaps, to the sentence 'Nothing is
written on the blackboard' written on the blackboard. Though we do not
accept the token-reflexive analysis of 'I' (as a theory of reference), [42]
token-reflexivity does seem to be an assertion-condition.

Of course, there is more to the assertion-conditions of the V-indexicals
than tokening capacity. At first thought, one might, for example, assume it
to be a straightforward condition of the stating of 'me suy-nghi that the
speaker actually be the addressee's mother. Yet there are contexts (such as
that of make-believe) in which a statement of this sort does not require
that 'me' be tokened by the mother. A Vietnamese child, for example, could
always throw protocol to the winds and perversely use 'me' for
self-reference in addressing a parent. The mere use of a given
V-expressions such as 'me' for self-reference does not thereby guarantee
that the speaker is the mother of the addressee.

Nothing about the Vietnamese mode of self-reference detracts in the least
from the possibility of make-believe, imaginary conversations,
role-playing, language-acquisition dialogues, etc. A Vietnamese child may,
for example, address her doll as 'con' and refer to herself as 'me'
implying only that, within this particular context of make-believe, the
child is playing the role of mother, not that the child is, in the
real-world context, quite literally the mother of the doll. Thus, we must
recognise that the use of a V-expression determines a context, C, such
that, in C, the speaker bears a given relationship to the addressee. And
where 'C' designates the real world, the use of such an expression implies
that, in reality, the speaker stands in that relationship.

Semantic correctness for real-world use involves, among other things, a
belief on the part of the speaker that the implied relationship really
obtains. 'Me' for example, cannot achieve self-reference in the real-world
context unless the speaker believes that she is the mother of the person
addressed. Without such a belief, the context of use becomes that of
make-believe, imagination, insult, prevarication, etc. Yet it remains a
strict condition of assertion that whenever the speaker believes herself to
be speaking in the 'real world' context, she also believes herself to be
the mother. The real world context is thus 'privileged'. One simply cannot
believe oneself to be making the statement, 'me suy-nghi', in the real
world context without holding the appropriate belief about oneself. In this
sense, the real world context specifies, for each V-indexical, a certain
range of beliefs concerning the speaker's identity. Vietnamese thus
establishes determinate 'sincerity conditions' for certain of the
assertion-entailments associated with its self-referential expressions.
English does not.

The Impossibility of Solipsism

In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl confronts the question of the constitution
of other minds within one's own subjectivity. To be sure "... if what
belongs to the other's own essence were directly accessible, it would be
merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself
would be the same". [43] Husserl's problem is not that of how we know what
the other is experiencing. He seeks, rather, to articulate the intuitively
given conditions without which awareness of the other would be impossible.
In order to bring these conditions to light, Husserl first limits his
attention to the 'sphere of ownness' brought about by the 'egological
reduction':

If I 'abstract' (in the usual sense) from others, I 'alone' remain.
But such abstraction is not radical; such aloneness in no respect
alters the natural world-sense, 'experienceable by everyone', which
attaches to the naturally understood Ego and would not be lost, even
if a universal plague had left only me. [44]

The 'sphere of ownness' leaves experience untouched. But the methodological
exclusion of any pre-reductive reference to the other enables the
phenomenologist to discover the constitutive conditions for our awareness
of the other precisely within the residual field of experience thus
disclosed. Husserl is now prepared to pose the question to which the
Vietnamese ontology of ego-profiles provides an admirably feasible
response: "How can appresentation of another original sphere, and thereby
the sense 'someone else', be motivated in my original sphere and, in fact,
motivated as experience ...?" [45] The theory of appresentational 'pairing'
developed in the Cartesian Meditations is, and has frequently been argued
to be, unsuccessful. [46] This is not the place to expand on that issue.
But I do want to suggest that the theory of ego-profiles meets a crucial
desideratum implicit in Husserl's description of pairing as involving an
'intentional overreaching' [47] conceived as 'a living mutual awakening and
an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other'. [48] We shall
see that the Vietnamese mode of self-reference requires a surprisingly
intimate, and surprisingly significant, 'overlaying' of the senses of self
and other.

We have thus far presented the various V-expressions as representing
ego-profiles of the form, 'the-self-as-your...' this formulation is, in
fact, elliptical. For as noted earlier in passing, there are as many
addressive expressions in Vietnamese as self-referential expressions. And
any expression used for self-reference can be used for address. There is,
in Vietnamese, no word which can be straightforwardly translated as 'you'.
And thus, to characterise 'me', for example, as referring to
the-self-as-your-mother, while harmless given our earlier purposes, is
nonetheless misleading. Just as Vietnamese self-referential expressions
represent the various ways in which a given ego presents itself to itself,
Vietnamese addressive expressions represent the various ways in which a
given alterior ego appears to oneself "Me', used addressively, represents
the-other-as-my-mother.

But a curious difficulty arises at this point. 'My', of course, means 'of,
or belonging to, me,' and 'me' differs from 'I' only in grammatical case.
Despite the grammatical awkwardness, and ignoring whatever contribution the
case may make to the meaning of the expression, 'my' can quite legitimately
be said to mean 'of, or belonging to, I'. Vietnamese, in fact, does not
distinguish cases, and, for every V-expression, there is a distinct and
corresponding expression for 'my'. For 'me' there is 'cua me'; for 'con'
there is 'cua con', etc., 'cua' being unproblematically translatable as
'of' or 'belonging to'. Now the problem is this: We have claimed that 'me'
represents 'the-self-as-your-mother' and must now substitute for 'your' an
expression representing an 'other-profile'. Suppose, then, that for 'your'
we substitute 'the-other-as-my-child'. 'Me' thus represents the self as the
mother of the-other-as-my-child. But now 'my' has not yet been
accommodated. Suppose, then, that for 'my' we substitute 'of
the-self-as-your-mother'. 'Me' then represents the self as the mother of
the-other-as-the-child of the-self-as-your-mother. We need not proceed much
farther to see that we have thus initiated an infinite regress.

The runaway regress is unavoidable so long as we insist upon
surreptitiously concealing 'I' within 'me', as patently we have done by (1)
formulating 'me' as the-self-as-yourmother, and then (2) substituting for
the transcontextually invariant 'your' an expression representing
the-other-as-my-child (i.e. with apologies to grammarians, the other as the
child of I). We can respond to the regress in one of two ways: First, we
might insist that there exists, concealed within the dark and hidden tissue
of the V-expression's meaning, a meaning-component semantically equivalent
to 'I'. But we have already seen that this supposal leads to its own
regress problems. Thus, second, it seems that we are compelled to
acknowledge once again that V-expressions are primitive, logically
indefinable in terms of the semantic resources of English.

'Me' and 'con' (in company with the numerous other
self-referential/addressive pairs of Vietnamese) are, however,
interdefinable expressions. 'Me' represents the-self-as-the-mother-of-con;
and 'Con' represents the-other-as-the-child-of-me. It is impossible, in the
real-world context, to refer to oneself as 'me' without assuming the
existence of a 'con'. And this curious feature of V-expressions has decided
relevance to the problem of other minds. It might, of course, be claimed
that something similar holds in the case of the English 'I' and 'you'. The
English expressions are conceptually linked in such a way that it is
impossible to understand the one without understanding the other. While
this is undeniably true, the point I wish to make cuts deeper. The
well-bred solipsist could assuredly maintain that, while 'I' and 'you' are
necessarily interdefined, this is merely a consideration of language or of
conceptual scheme, and not a consideration of existential status. The self,
regardless of the semantic connections among terms invoked to denote it and
its purported complement, may nonetheless exist while the other fails to
exist. The conceptual connections obtain, that is, between the 'mental
representations' of self and other which enter into self-referential and
addressive propositions. They may not obtain between the self and other
themselves which are displayed 'in person' in self-referential and
addressive sentences. And if not, there is no reason to suppose that the
existence of the one entails the existence of the other. The case of
Vietnamese ego-profiles is radically different. What is displayed 'in
person' in the sentence, 'Me suy-nghi,, is the-self-as-the-mother-of-con.
The connection with the other is not merely a matter of semantic
relationships which hover over the heads of me and con. In her very being,
me is inseparable from con. What we have called an 'ego-profile' cannot be
conceived on the order of a monadic property exemplified by an ego, but
must, rather, be understood as a relational entity capable of being
considered in two alternative ways, or possessing a duality of aspects or
'nuances'. The self, then, in Buddhist terms, arises dependently as a
certain node in a complex tapestry the filaments of which we have called
'ego-profiles', but might now more appropriately consider as modes of
intersubjective relatedness. The interpersonal precedes the personal. The
ego is a derivative construct presupposing a network of intersubjective
filaments.

In referring to the ill-fated 'pairing' theory of the Cartesian
Meditations, Fink objects that "Husserl's analysis remains caught in the
reduplication of the ego". [49] The problem is that Husserl there fails to
see that self and other are ontologically integral, assuming rather an
ontological chasm between one monadic ego and the next. As the Vietnamese
mode of self-reference makes plain, however, the-self-as-the-mother-of-con
is not entitatively distinct from the-other-as-the-child-of-me. The
empirical ego, then, as an ideal 'pole' unifying the manifold of
ego-profiles, embraces the other within itself in a strikingly intimate
way. In presenting itself to itself in a given manner, it thereby
inescapably presents the other to itself. It is only fair to point out that
the theory of the Cartesian Meditations is not Husserl's final word on the
constitution of the other. In the posthumous intersubjectivity texts
Husserl reverses his earlier disposition to consider self and other as
ontologically distinct. He there speaks of a primordial intersubjective
impulse, analogous to the sexual impulse. "A relation to the other as other
is found in the impulse per se and to its correlative impulse." [50] In its
"primal fulfillment we do not have two fulfillments that must be separated
into the one and the other primordialities, but a unity of both
primordialities which produces itself through the interpenetration of
fulfillments." [51] The unitary 'primordiality' of which Husserl here
speaks can be illustrated by that single relational entity indifferently
nuanced as 'the-self-as-the-mother-of-con' or
'the-self-as-the-child-of-me'.

If, within Vietnamese every reference to oneself within the real-world
context involves not only a reference to the interlocutor, but a belief in
his or her existence, the question of the mother's existence cannot arise
in the real-world context. Since self-reference via the English 'I' does
not, in virtue of its very logic, involve belief in the existence of the
person addressed, one is free in English (though not in Viemamese) to
entertain the possibility that solipsism might be true of the real world.
The Vietnamese child, speaking to an imaginary playmate, certainly need not
believe in this playmate's existence. But the same child, in addressing her
parents, cannot escape belief in their existence. Solipsistic doubts can
arise, for the speaker, in the very presence of the (apparent) Other. Such
doubts can arise, for the speaker of Vietnamese only in a context other
than that of the real world. Solipsism, then, cannot be taken seriously by
the Vietnamese speaker (as such). It is not, of course, that speakers of
Vietnamese are endowed with insufficient imaginative or conceptual power.
Surely, any Vietnamese can conceive the possibility that the individual
addressed is merely fictional. But an address to the fictional other is, in
principle, an address within a fictional, not the real-world, context. Nor
are speakers of Vietnamese afflicted with a curious psychological inability
to believe that the individual presently addressed fails to exist. An
address to an individual whom one does not believe to exist, however, may
involve make-believe, role-playing, etc., but assuredly cannot take place
within the real-world context. The possibility that others might not exist
is, for the Vietnamese, both conceivable and believable (though, as it is
for the speaker of English, implausible). Yet Yet addressive employment of
a V-indexical as in 'me do not exist' cannot occur within the real-world
context. By definition, the real-world context is such that 'me do not
exist', if believed, is semantically excluded. Solipsism thus appears to be
a language-relative philosophical problem.

NOTES

[1] An initial caveat regarding the Husserlian notion of 'constitution' is
called for here. While the etymological overtones of this term may seem
irresistible, constitution, in the phenomenological sense, is by no means
to be conceived by analogy with the construction of a house out of boards.
In its strict application, the constitution of an object through its
'profiles' signifies no more than the evident fact that a single and
selfsame object is variously presented, that its 'look' is different from
here than from there, but that one and the same object is presented
throughout the manifold of alternative 'looks'. In its strict application,
the notion of constitution is ontologically neutral.

[2] In Lispector's graphic portrayal, "'I' is merely one of the world's
instantaneous spasms". LISPECTOR, CLARICE (1988) The Passion According to
G. H., trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota
Press) p. 172.

[3] Dogen is clear that "There is a 'who' in beyond-thinking. That 'who'
upholds the self'. DOGEN, Shobogenzo Zazenshin, as quoted in MENZAN, ZUIHO
OSHO (1988) Jijuyu-zanmai [Same & of the self], in: SHOHAKU OKUMURA &
DAITSU TOM WRIGHT, trans. Dogen Zen (Kyoto, Kyoto Soto-Zen Center) p. 95.
Yet the response to this 'who?' can only be 'no one!' The 'who' is not a
self or ego.

[4] As Nagarjuna expresses it: "Whatever comes into existence presupposing
something else is without self-existence (svabhavata)." NAGARJUNA (1967)
Fundamentals of the Middle Way: Mulamadhyamika-Karikas, in: FREDRICK J.
STRENG, trans. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning (New York, Abingdon
Press) 7:16, p. 191.

[5] CORLESS, ROGER J. (1989) The Vision of Buddhism: The Space Under the
Tree (New York, Paragon House) p. 125.

[6] Later we shall see that no expression can, in any straightforward,
literal sense, refer to oneself. As employed in this context, the
'reference' of an expression to the self is more accurately understood as
the 'representation' (or, as we shall say, 'revelation') of pre-linguistic
self-reference. In this connection, let me invoke the wisdom of Fa-yen
Wen-I (885-958) concerning reference in general:

A monk asked, "As for the finger, I will not ask you about it. But
what is the moon?" The Master said, "Where is the finger that you do
not ask about?" So the monk asked, "As for the moon, I will not ask
you about it. But what is the finger?" The Master said, "The moon!"
The monk challenged him, "I asked about the finger; why should you
answer me, 'the moon'?" The Master replied, "Because you asked about
the finger."

CHANG CHUNG-YUAN, trans. (1971) Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism (New
York, Vintage) p. 242.

[7] NOZICK, ROBERT (1981) Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press) p. 77.

[8] The hunchback, Igor, refers to himself as 'Igor'. And thus, according
to Lycan and Boer, could all of us follow suit, dropping the word 'I' from
our disparate ideolects, and replacing it with our own proper name. Cf.
BOER, S. E. & LYCAN, W. G. (1990) 'Who Me?', The Philosophical Review, 89,
pp. 427-466. The proposal, while intriguing in certain respects, is,
nonetheless, unacceptable. My own name, 'Steve', is almost embarrassingly
common. (I have, on occasion, wished that at least my name were logically
proper.) Suppose, however, that we lived in a world in which 'Steves' did
not so exuberantly proliferate. Suppose, in fact, that am the only 'Steve'.
On the Lycan-Boer account this latter supposal permits the elimination of
the word 'I' in favor of my name: Steve is (uniquely) named 'Steve'. In a
'logically perfect language', this sentence is, of course, a tautology. But
'I am (uniquely) named "Steve" ' is far from tautological-a disparity which
of itself entails a negative assessment of the Lycan-Boer proposal.

[9] In Mu-mon's report, "Old Zuigan sells out and buys himself. He is
opening a puppet show. He uses one mask to call 'Master' and another that
answers the master.... If anyone clings to any of his masks, he is
mistaken." REPS, PAZ (Ed.) (n.d.) Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen
and Pre-Zen Writings (Garden City, KA, Anchor), pp. 99-100.

[10] The compounds 'toi-doi' and 'tot-to' mean 'servant'; and 'toi-moi'
carries the additional connotation of 'slave'.

[11] ZEMACH, EDDY M. (1985) De Se and Descartes: A New Semantics for
Indexicals, Nous, 19, p. 194.

[12] NOZICK, op. cit., note 7, p. 73.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid., p. 81.

[17] I am indebted to Professor William Vallicella for his very helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Vallicella formulates the
implicit assumption of this argument thus: 'I' is a referring term only if
it can be replaced salva significatione by a referring term. To negate this
assumption, however, one must assert that 'I' is a referring term and that
'I' cannot be replaced salva significatione by a referring term. Needless
to say, I reject the first conjunct. And I think there is good reason to
reject the second as well. I must say, paraphrasing Voltaire, that if a
synonym for 'I' does not exist, we shall have to invent one. Let it be 'J'.
If 'I' refers, so does 'J', and conversely. I see no reason to frown upon
this supplementation. Surely, I have not thereby shifted to a different
language (an 'English*'). Thus, 'I' can be replaced salva significatione
with 'J'. If 'I' refers (and thus, if'J' refers), it cannot be impossible
to replace 'I' by a referring expression. Of course, it might be countered
that 'J' is no more than an orthographical variant of 'I', or simply an
alternative acoustical or inscriptional realisation possessing precisely
the same meaning as 'I'. But what else could synonymy amount to? If we
replace 'I' with any expression salva significatione, surely that
expression must be a synonym. The denial of my assumption would thus seem
to entail an intriguing, but patently untenable, theory of the relationship
between meaning and realisation. If synonymy is impossible for 'I', it
would seem to be so because the inscriptional/acoustical realisation is
taken to be essential to the meaning.

[18] Cf. PERRY, JOHN (1977) Frege on Demonstratives, Philosophical Review,
86, pp. 474-497; (1979) The Problem of Essential Indexicals, Nous, 13, pp.
3-20.

[19] HUSSERL, Edmund (1969) Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion
Cairns (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff) p. 199.

[20] HUSSERL, EDMUND (1970) Logical Investigations, I, trans. J. N. Findlay
(New York, Humanities Press) p. 315.

[21] Cf. MOHANTY, J. N. (1982) Husserl and Frege (Bloomington, IN, Indiana
University Press) p. 59.

[22] Cf. BURGE, TYLER (1979) Sinning against Frege, Philosophical Review,
88, p. 398-32.

[23] Cf. PERRY, Frege on Demonstratives, op. cit., note 18.

[24] HUSSERL, op. cit., note 20, p. 316.

[25] Ibid.

[26] MOHANTY op. cit., note 21, p. 61. It may not be excessively naive to
presume a certain resonance with Mu-mon's 'true self' given poetic
expression in the following verse:

You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it, You cannot admire it,
you cannot sense it, It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.
When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed.

REPS, op. cit., note 9, p. 109.

[27] Here we echo Suzuki's query: "Where is this 'I'? What does it look
like?" Suzuki, DAISETZ TEITARO (1981) The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind: The
Significance of the Sutra of Hui-Neng (Wei-Lang), Christmas Humphreys (Ed.)
(New Beach, Samuel Wiser), p. 115.

[28] ZEMACH, op. cit., note 11, p. 195.

[29] Ibid., p. 200.

[30] Rather than positing, with Husserl and with Zemach, an
extra-linguistic ego as the locus of self-reference, Merleau-Ponty,
concurring in the language-relative character of the self, rather
discloses, at the heart of consciousness, a certain ineliminable anonymity:

I read, let us say, the Second Meditation. It has indeed to do with
me, but a me in idea, an idea which is, strictly speaking, neither
mine nor, for that matter, Descartes', but that of any reflecting man.
By following the meaning of the words and the argument, I reach the
conclusion that indeed because I think, I am; but this is merely a
verbal cogito, for I have grasped my thought and my existence only
through the medium of language, and the true formula of this cogito
should be: `One thinks, therefore one is.'

MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul) p. 400.

[31] Consider, in contrast to Zemach's self-displaying thought, the
structurally similar, but phenomenologically quite different, self-feeling
thought of Merleau-Ponty: "I am not simply a constituted happening; I am
not a universal thinker [naturant]. I am a thought which recaptures itself
as already possessing an ideal of truth (which it cannot at each moment
wholly account for) and which is the horizon of its operations. This
thought, which feels itself rather than sees itself, which searches after
clarity rather than possesses it, and which creates truth rather than finds
it ..." MERLEAU-PONTY, MAURICE (1964) The Primacy of Perception (Evanston,
MI, Northwestern University Press) p. 22. In a more literary vein, Clarice
Lispector contributes: "as for myself, I have always kept one quotation
mark to my left and another to my right." LISPECTOR, op. cit., note 2, p.
23. She speaks, accordingly, of "the quotation marks that made me a
reference to myself". Ibid., p. 34.

[32] Nozick articulates a view substantially similar to that Zemach:

If a nonlinguistic item can be used to refer, then, why cannot the
self place itself into the blank [of, e.g. `-- is (am) tired'[, and in
so doing refer to itself? The word "I" might be the marker for the
blank, holding space in which the self can appear. The self would thus
be part of a reflexively self-referring thought; it, not another
mental item, refers to the self.

NOZICK, op. cit., note 7, p. 83.

[33] Ibid., p. 196. Zemach's `display sentence' seems akin to and may
simply coincide with what is sometimes called a `concrete proposition',
i.e. a sequence containing an object and a property attributed to that
object. To circumvent possible confusion from the outset, it is important
to distinguish the display sentence from the display proposition. In the
Zemachian view:

The meaning of a sentence is a proposition. Now if the meaning of a
display sentence includes such hefty items as bridges, how can we
understand it? Surely we cannot take it, so to speak, into our heads:
There is not enough room there for a bridge, a cereal box, or even for
written words. Instead, we do as Strawson suggested: the subject of
the display sentence is "understood"; i.e., we make a "mental word" or
"mental picture" to represent it in a certain way. Thus the
proposition we understand and believe when we encounter most display
sentences is usually not the meaning of the displayed sentence itself,
but a counterpart proposition: a proxy which includes the sense of
some mental representation of the bridge, instead of the bridge
itself.

ZEMACH, op. cit., note 11, p. 196. Accordingly, we should, perhaps, speak
of `I' as representing the self, not as referring to it, meaning by this
that the word `I' serves as a `proxy' bearing the sense of a mental
representation of the self.

[34] BHATTACHARYYA, K. C. (1976) Search for the Absolute in Neo-Vedanta,
George Bosworth Burch (Ed.) (Honolulu, HI, The University Press of Hawaii)
p. 159.

[35] Ibid., p. 160.

[36] Ibid., p. 162.

[37] Ibid., p. 160.

[38] Casteneda, with his doctrince of `I-guises', seems, at least prima
facie, to approximate a recognition of ego-profiles. `I', on each occasion
of its use, refers to a distinct `I-guise', an ontological constituent of
the `I' (the self) canonically designated by a definite description. Thus,
for example, Jocasta's son and Jocasta's second husband are distinct, but
`consubstantiated', guises ontologically comprising Oedipus. `I' could, on
a given occasion, refer to the father of the addressee--surely a viable
candidate for I-guise status. Or, on another occasion, `I' might refer to
the child of the addressee (yet another I-guise). Setting aside whatever
differences we might have with Casteneda's account of self-reference
(including the problem of who a self composed of such consubstantiated
I-guises might be), we might initially be tempted to identify I-guises and
ego-profiles. After all, `the father of the addressee' and
`the-self-as-your-father' seem, at the level of surface grammar, remarkably
similar. But this turns out to be illusory. `Bo, of course, is an
expression which represents the `display' of the self-as-your-father. Were
we to identify this ego-profile with its associated I-guise, `Bo would then
function, within Casteneda's scheme of things, as a name, or covert
description, denoting a given I-guise. Barring Casteneda's theory of
`consubstantiation', we seem to be faced with the dissolution of the self
into fragments. But even should such shards be consubstantiated to comprise
a single self, the resultant `self' would be the product of a peculiar
logical or ontological operation, not the principle whereby such `pieces'
of the self are gathered in attendance upon this operation. If `Bo'
`represents, as Casteneda's view itself would seem to demand, an item of
`grist' for the consubstantial `mill', then ego-profiles can be identified
which I-guises only at the cost of forfeiting the very pre-operative unity
which would deliver them from the unfortunate status of a rattling
assemblage of extensionally denotable, externally related items. If
ego-profiles are conceived as merely analytically atomic `bricks' which
lend themselves to certain manipulations, the resultant `brick wall'
patency does not possess the integral internal unity of the Husserlian
empirical ego. And, despite our tentative expectations to the contrary,
Casteneda has not, then, embraced an ontology of ego-profiles. Cf.
CASTENEDA, HECTOR-NERI (1981) The Semiotic Profile of Indexical
(Experiential) Reference, Synthese, 49, pp. 275-316; (1977) Perception,
Belief, and the Structure of Physical Objects and Consciousness, Synthese,
35, pp. 285 - 351; Cf. also ADAMS, R. M. & CASTENEDA, HECTOR-NERI (1983)
Knowledge and Self (a correspondence), in: JAMES E. TOMBERLIN (Ed.) Agent,
Language, and the Structure of the World: Essays Presented to Hector-Neri
Casteneda, with his Replies (Cambridge, MA, Hackett) pp. 293-309.

[39] Judge William of Kierkegaard's Either/Or levels the sobering query,

... can you think of anything more frightful than that it might end
with your nature being resolved into a multiplicity, that you really
might become many, become like chose unhappy demonics, a legion, and
you thus would have lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man,
the unifying power of personality?

KIERKEGAARD, SOREN (1959) Either/Or, II (Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press), p. 163.

[40] HUSSERL, Logical Investigations, II, p. 544, n. 1. Though Sartre is
often credited as the original exponent of this thesis, it is interesting
to find chat Husserl gave voice to this view over a decade before the
publication of The Transcendence of the Ego.

[41] Analogously, Vietnamese uses a single word, `xanh', to refer to the
range of colour which English would denote by `green' and `blue'. Yet it is
simply untenable to suppose that, in referring to the xanh of a given
object, a Vietnamese means `either green or blue'. Disjunction does not
enter in any way into the sense that `xanh' has for the Vietnamese.

[42] In the sentence, `I'm dirty', etched in the dust on the back of a
truck by some furtive would-be calligrapher, the `I' represents, not the
tokener of `I', but the truck. Thus, of course, derives the humour of the
sentence. Moreover, if the voice-synthesiser at the local supermarket can
produce a token of `thank you for shopping with us', after tallying the
cost of groceries, there would seem to be no special difficulty in its
announcing: `I hope to see you again soon'. A significant lesson to be
drawn from illustrations such as these is that we can quite readily
understand a self-referential sentence even though there is, properly
speaking, no self to be referred to. The meaning of `I' cannot, then,
coincide with its (purported) referent. Derrida advances "A more or less
argot translation of the cogito", namely: "I am therefore dead." "This," he
tells us, "can only be written." DERRIDA, JACQUES (1986) Glas, trans. J. P.
Leavey and R. A. Rand (Lincoln, NB, University of Nebraska Press) p. 92.
Blanchot supplements: "When the Cartesian `I think, therefore I am' is
written it is, in effect, rewritten as `I think, therefore I am not' "
BLANCHOT, MAURICE (1973) Thomas the Obscure, trans. R. Lamberton (New York,
David Lewis) p. 99.

[43] HUSSERL, EDMUND (1970) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to
Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff) p. 109.

[44] Ibid., p. 93.

[45] Ibid., p. 109.

[46] See, for example, Chapter V, Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation, in:
PAUL RICOEUR (1967) Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (Evanston,
MI, Northwestern University Press), pp. 1 15-142.

[47] Ibid., p. 112.

[48] Ibid., p. 113.

[49] Cited from Schutz's paper, The Problem of Transcendental
Intersubjectivity in Husserl, in: ALFRED SCHUTZ, Collected Papers, III, p.
84.

[50] Husserliana, XV: pp. 593ff. Cited in LANDGREBE, LUDWIG (1977)
Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History, trans. Jose
Huertas-Jourda and Richard Feige in: FREDERICK A. ELLISTON & PETER
MCCORMICK (Eds) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals (Notre Dame, IN,
University of Notre Dame Press) p. 111.

[51] Ibid.

~~~~~~~~

By STEVEN W. LAYCOCK

Professor Steven W. Laycock, Department of Philosophy, The University of
Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA.
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