International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol.

17(3), 415–434

The Bifurcated Subject

alweissl@tcd.ie
International
10.1080/09672550902948944
RIPH_A_395066.sgm
0967-2559
Original
Taylor
302009
17
Dr
000002009
LilianAlweiss
& Article
Francis
and(print)/1466-4542
Journal of Philosophical
Francis (online) Studies
Lilian Alweiss
Abstract
Michel Henry wishes to salvage Descartes’s first principle ‘I think, I am’ by
claiming that there is no need to appeal to the world or others to make sense
of the self. One of his main targets is Edmund Husserl, who claims that
thought is necessarily intentional and thus necessarily about something that is
other to thought. To show that this is not so, Henry draws on passages from
Descartes’s texts which emphasize that we should not equate the cogito with
thinking but with sensation and imagination. This allows Henry to explore the
notion that the self has its own form of manifestation. This paper questions
Henry’s reading of Descartes and his critique of Husserl on two fronts. First,
the passages Henry draws upon, if anything only confirm, rather than question
Husserl’s claim that consciousness is intentional. Second, Henry believes that
he can show that the life of the self is infinitely rich without having to appeal
to other persons or, indeed, to the world. Yet, I wish to contend that Henry is
mistaken: as Husserl has shown convincingly, a life without others and the
world is not only impoverished and bereft of meaning, but remains entirely
indeterminate. The self only manifests itself with respect to others and the
world.
Keywords: Michel Henry; Husserl; Descartes; the self; embodiment; first
person perspective

Introduction
Hardly any philosopher today would accept Descartes’s first principle: ‘I
think, therefore I am.’ The general consensus is that Descartes was simply
mistaken when he made the metaphysical claim ‘that this I, that is thinking,
is an immaterial substance with no bodily elements’.1 Modern neuroscience
and phenomenology argue that the idea that thinking can take place without
embodiment must be wrong. Kant and post-Kantian philosophers question
whether it is legitimate to refer to a substance when we look at the nature
of thinking. And Heidegger believes that Descartes presupposes an under-
standing of existence which he leaves unexplored. When I say that there is
hardly a philosopher who would accept Descartes’s first principle, I have
one exception in mind: Michel Henry. What singles him out is that his
philosophy tries to reverse this trend. He believes that something valuable

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.informaworld.com
DOI: 10.1080/09672550902948944
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

can be retrieved from Descartes’s first principle, and that the flaw lies with
those who have accepted the view that ‘man cannot be conceived as a
specific autonomous reality’;2 a view which resulted in what Henry has
termed ‘ontological monism’.3

The Bifurcated Self

One of Henry’s main concerns is that even philosophers who advocate a
philosophy of consciousness (Bewußtseinsphilosophie) and agree with
Descartes that the ego cogito is a first principle fail to do justice to Descartes
and, more importantly, to the self. Rather than taking the first-person
perspective seriously, they alienate the subject from its self. The self is never
investigated as it is in itself; it is only seen as bifurcated or split. The focus is
on self-transcendence, namely the fact that the subject is oriented to the
world or things that are by definition ‘other’ to the subject. Kant refers to
the I think that needs to accompany all my representations (Kant, 1933:
B131); Husserl to the inseparability of the ‘cogito–cogitatum (qua cogi-
tatum)’ (Husserl, 1964: p. 14); and Heidegger to Dasein’s ecstatic structure
(Heidegger, 1962). For Henry this means that the subject has been
wrenched from itself, has been broken apart, bifurcated and ruptured. It is
always in exile, ecstatic and, indeed, alienated from itself. The subject under-
stands itself only through that which is opposite to it, its object or product.
‘Consequently it manifests itself only in the form of the object, and not at all
within itself, not at all as pro-ducing, as manifesting.’4
The problem can best be illustrated by looking at Kant’s depiction of the
subject. In the ‘Paralogisms of Reason’ Kant accuses Descartes of providing
a false syllogism when he says ‘I think, therefore I am.’ The problem is not
that Descartes does not logically (syllogistically) deduce the sum from the
cogito5 and that the equation between thinking and existence is merely
assumed, but that the particle ergo is misplaced since the inference is simply
false. The equation between thinking and existence (sum) cannot be
substantiated because thought is necessarily reflexive. As soon as I am
conscious of an object, including being conscious of myself, there must be a
self that implicitly – as Kant puts it (using Leibnizian terminology) – ‘apper-
ceives’ my being thus conscious. We need to differentiate between a
‘transcendental self’ that accompanies all my representations, even the
representation of myself, and an ‘empirical self’ that appears or can be
represented in time and space. As Kant says, ‘it must be possible for the “I
think” to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would
be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equiva-
lent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would
be nothing to me’ (Kant, 1933: B131/2). Without the transcendental self, no
experience or representation is possible. Representations need to be attrib-
uted to a subject that can have these representations. They are only possible
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if they appear to someone. In short, every appearance has its dative; it is

necessarily an appearance of something for someone.
Henry applauds Kant for giving significance to the first-person perspec-
tive; however, he deplores the fact that he takes with one hand what he gives
with the other. Although Kant assumes the ego cogito in order to make sense
of experience, he insists that it has no intrinsic property. It can only be
understood in relation to its representation, i.e., as relating to that which is
essentially other to itself. To avoid infinite regress, Kant comes to argue that
this ‘someone’ to whom these appearances are attributed can never be
rendered into an appearance. This leads him to conclude that only the
empirical ego exists to the extent that it can be turned into an object of reflec-
tion; however, the ego that is aware of the fact that it is thinking does not
exist because it can never be represented. Undoubtedly for Kant, Descartes
presents a false syllogism. When Descartes says ‘I think, therefore I am’, he
fails to draw a distinction between the empirical and the transcendental self.
He does not realize that we cannot infer from the formal conditions of
thought (which Kant regards as transcendental) to a substance of thought
(empirical) (see Kant, 1933: A41 / B399ff.). Kant believes that what can be
marked out is the necessity for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my represen-
tations. No further existential claims are legitimate.6 What can be known is
only the self as a representation, but not the pure spontaneity of the repre-
senting self. Ludwig Wittgenstein illustrates this well when he says: When I
look into the mirror, I can see myself (as an object of reflection), however,
I cannot see myself looking: “But you do not really see the eye.”7
Henry is perplexed by this criticism. Not only is the subject treated
schizophrenically – we are meant to be somehow both a transcendental self
and an empirical self at the same time – but, more importantly, we are only
meant to experience ourselves in this schizophrenic tension and never as a
(transcendental) subject as such. There is a paradox here: on the one hand
the ego cogito is treated as a first principle; on the other, we are told that noth-
ing pertains to it – it can only be thought as a necessary correlate of experience
– as it is nothing ‘outside’, or independent of that experience. Indeed, Kant
repeatedly argues that the ‘I think’ or ‘transcendental unity of apperception’
has no other meaning than that of being the unifying activity of combination
and reflection on the sensible given. Moreover, there is no unity of self-
consciousness aside from its spontaneity, effort or conatus toward judgment.
This is why Kant asserts that the transcendental unity of apperception is the
‘highest point’ (Kant, 1933: B134) (höchste Punkt) – an analytic unity, which
can only be thought of as a correlate to the synthetic unity of representations
(cf. Kant, 1933: B134). It is nothing in itself. It only has a function: it is a vehi-
cle for all concepts of the understanding. It can explain the nature of the
appearing and the conditions of possibility for appearances or manifestations
without, however, ever appearing itself. As Wittgenstein observes, it allows
us to make sense of the claim that the ‘world is my representation’ cf.
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Wittgenstein 1981 5.62; however, it does not allow us to say anything mean-
ingful about it. This leads Wittgenstein to refer to this ‘I’ as a philosophical
self. ‘It is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, which
is the subject of psychology, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of
the world – not a part of it.’8 Kant arrives at an equally paradoxical position
when he says that the simple representation ‘I’ is in itself empty of all content
‘and we cannot even say that this is a concept, but only that it is a bare
consciousness which accompanies all concepts’ (Kant, 1933: A346/B404). It
is ‘a simple expression, not even a concept’.9 It has no special designation in
the list of concepts because it serves only to introduce all our thought.
To Henry this proves that Descartes’s first principle has been denied any
significant value. In his view it should not surprise us that post-Kantian
thinkers such as Sartre come to equate consciousness with ‘nothingness’,10
or Wittgenstein the philosophical self with ‘nonsense’.11 To be transcenden-
tal is to fail to be one of the things that constitutes all there is. It is to fail to
be. Indeed, the justification for the use of the first-person pronoun becomes
questionable. Although Kant refers to an ‘I’ that thinks in that it accompa-
nies all my representations, it is no longer clear how to understand this
indexical expression since this ‘I’ points to nothing specific. Apart from
being a facilitator, there is nothing that justifies the use of the first-person
pronoun. The ‘I’ in question is not referring to a personal identity (see Kant
1983: A363) or anything that is indistinguishably mine. It is not surprising
that Kant once even refers to this ‘I’ as an ‘I or he or it (the thing) that
thinks’ (Kant, 1933: A346/B404). Nothing seems to prevent us from taking
the next step (which Kant wishes to avoid at all cost) and argue that we
cannot infer from the fact that ‘there is thinking’ to the fact that there is an
‘I’ that thinks. It turns out to be a linguistic illusion to ascribe states of
consciousness at all.12 In view of this Henry asks disparagingly:

How can one not be struck by this extraordinary conceptual situation:

it is precisely with Kant, who related the Being of all beings to the
Subject, that the Subject becomes the object of a radical dispute which
denies it all possible Being. Or to put it in another way: it is at the very
moment when philosophy sees itself clearly as a philosophy of the
subject that the foundation on which it explicitly and thematically
bases itself, and which it systematically endeavours to elaborate,
escapes it and slipping from its grasp, tips over into the void of inanity.13

In other words, Henry asks how one can accept that the ego cogito is the first
principle while at the same time denying its existence. ‘How can the cogito
… be “certain”, in such a way that everything rests on it, when one has to
admit that it is nothing in itself?’ cf. Henry 1988: 152. Surely philosophy
pulls the rug from under its own feet, because it rests on a foundation which
turns out to be none.
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The ‘New’ Descartes

Henry turns against this trend in philosophy and seeks to breathe new life
back into the subject. He believes that it is possible to do so by returning to
the very thinker the tradition of philosophy has dismissed: Descartes. In his
opinion, the criticisms raised against Descartes’s first principle are not only
illegitimate but moreover miss something fundamental, namely that the
ego cogito does not refer to an empty vessel or a disembodied cognitive abil-
ity. It seems obvious to most readers of Descartes that when referring to the
ego cogito, he assumes that to think necessarily means to represent to
oneself. As Heidegger, for example, observes: ‘In important passages,
Descartes substitutes for cogitare the word percipere (per-capio), to take
possession of a thing, to seize something, in the sense of presenting-to-
oneself by way of presenting before one-self, representing.’14 Yet Henry
believes that a closer look at Descartes’s texts reveals passages which clearly
indicate that ‘the cogito has nothing to do with thought processes nor (sic)
with thought itself.… Cogito means everything, except I think.’15 Henry
acknowledges that Descartes himself is responsible for equating the cogito
with the ‘I think’ because his final goal is to found knowledge (connais-
sance) and through it all theoretical knowledge (science). However, when
we look at the phenomenological description of the cogito, nothing becomes
more apparent than that for Descartes the cogito has nothing in common
with what we call thought and, furthermore, that the cogito itself assumes a
form of embodiment.
Let us take a look at two interrelated aspects of Descartes’s work which
interest Henry – one is that thought is not reflexive or intentional and the
other that the cogito should not be confused with an ‘I think.’
(1) Descartes states clearly that it makes no sense to argue that all thought
is reflexive:

My critic says that to enable a substance to be superior to matter and

wholly spiritual (and he insists on using the term ‘mind’ only in this
restricted sense), it is not sufficient for it to think: it is further required
that it should think that it is thinking, by means of a reflexive act, or
that it should have awareness of its own thought. This is as deluded as
our bricklayer’s saying that a person who is skilled in architecture
must employ a reflexive act to ponder on the fact that he has this skill
before he can be an architect.

(Descartes, AT VII, 559; CSM II: 382 also cited in Marion, 1999b:
p. 104)

By cogito Descartes does not mean cogito me cogitare; rather he refers to a

thinking prior to reflection. There is an ‘internal awareness which always
precedes reflective knowledge’ (Descartes, AT VII, 422, CSM II: 285 also
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cited in Marion, 1999b: 104). Kant is simply mistaken in his criticism: not all
my thinking is accompanied by my awareness that I am thinking.
Moreover, Descartes claims that it does not make sense to argue that the
subject understands itself only through that which is its opposite. In a slight-
ing comment to Gassendi he observes:

It is also surprising that you maintain that the idea of a thing cannot be
in the mind unless the ideas of an animal, a plant, a stone, and all the
universals are there. This is like saying that if I am to recognise myself
to be a thinking thing, I must also recognise animals and plants, since
I must recognise a thing or the nature of a thing.

(Replies to the Fifth Objection, AT VII, 362; CSM II, 250, cited
by Henry, 1993: p. 41)

Descartes does not believe that the ego cogito deprived of its cogitatum
(object of thought) would have no meaning whatsoever. Rather he asserts
that ‘we are only by virtue of the fact that we are thinking’16 and need not
rely on the objects of thought to recognize ourselves as thinking things.
Clearly I can think without an ‘other’ in my thought.
(2) Henry now tries to substantiate this claim by showing that it rests on
a convincing argument. It is the method of doubt that proves to us that we
can arrive at the ego cogito without having to appeal to something that is
‘other’ to thought. Take the following passages as an example:

The fact that it is I who am doubting and understanding and willing is

so evident that I see no way of making it any clearer. But it is also the
case that the ‘I’ who imagines is the same ‘I’. For even if, as I have
supposed, none of the objects of imagination are real, the power of
imagination is something which really exists and is part of my thinking.
Lastly, it is also the same ‘I’ who has sensory perceptions (sentiens), or
is aware of bodily things as it were through the senses. For example, I
am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all
this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This
cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly
just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.

(Descartes AT VII, CSM: 19 29, also cited by Marion 1993: 60, cf.
Henry, 1989: 158)

Thus often when we sleep, and sometimes even when we are awake,
we imagine certain things so forcibly, that we think we see them before
us, or feel them in our body, although they do not exist at all; but
although we may be asleep or dreaming, we cannot feel sad or moved
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by any other passion without its being very true that the soul actually
has this passion within it … we may be mistaken therein regarding the
perceptions which relate to objects which are outside us, or at least
those which relate to certain parts of our body, but that we cannot be
so deceived regarding the passions, inasmuch as they are so close to,
and so entirely within our soul, that it is impossible for it to feel them
without their being actually such as it feels them to be.

(Descartes: Passions of the Soul, cited by Henry, 1989: p. 158)

These citations are of importance to Henry for two reasons: The first is that
when Descartes says ‘it seems to me’ that I am walking or dreaming or being
warmed, he is claiming that even if all the appearances (walking, dreaming,
the sensation of heat) may be false, what cannot be questioned is ‘the imme-
diacy of videor, “it seems to me”’. I cannot doubt my awareness, though I
can doubt that the content of my awareness is real (ontologically ‘in the
world’). ‘It seems to me’ remains valid, even when doubt disqualifies
everything that we see – i.e., all our representations. Even if there is no
intentional object, a seeing and, indeed, sensing still takes place. We shall
return to this observation later.
The second aspect that interests Henry is that these citations clearly show
that when we refer to the cogito, we also refer to our sensory awareness. I
can see light, hear noise and feel heat even when it turns out that I have been
dreaming. This sensory awareness itself is a form of thought. Hence, when
Descartes refers to the cogito, he does not only refer to the cognitive faculty
of a thinking being or, indeed, to something straightforwardly mental, since
it includes imagination and sensation:

By the term ‘thought’, I understand everything which we are aware of

as happening within us, in so far as we have awareness of it. Hence,
thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing
and imagining, but also with sensory awareness (imaginans quoque et
sentiens).

(Descartes AT VIIIA, 7) CSM I: 195

Commentators generally believe that through his argument that sensory

awareness belongs to thinking Descartes’s position becomes problematic as
he concedes that there are certain states which can no longer be classified as
belonging either to thought or to extension. Take the following passage
from the Principles as an example:

But we also experience within ourselves certain other things which

must not be referred either to the mind alone or to the body alone.
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These arise, as will be made clear later on, in the appropriate place,
from the close and intimate union of our mind with the body. This list
includes first, appetites like hunger and thirst, secondly, the emotions
or passions of the mind which do not consist of thought alone, such as
emotions of anger, joy, sadness and love, and finally, all the sensations,
such as those of pain, pleasure, light, colours, sounds, smells, tastes,
heat, hardness and the other tactile qualities.

(Descartes: AT VIII A, 23; CSM I, 208–9)

There are certain sensations which require the union of mind and body.
Yet this implies that the body belongs to the sphere of the cogito (or, as
Henry would put it, the sphere of immanence). Indeed, Descartes suggests
as much. When Frans Burman interviewed Descartes in April 1648, asking
him what he means when he says that sensation and imagination are ‘facul-
ties for special modes of thinking’, he is reported to have responded:

When external objects act on my senses, they print on them an idea, or

rather a figure of themselves. And when the mind attends to these
images imprinted on the gland [i.e., on the pineal gland] in this way it
is said to have sense-perceptions (sentire). When, on the other hand,
the images on the gland are imprinted not by external objects but by
the mind itself, which fashions and shapes them in the brain in the
absence of external objects, then we have imagination. The difference
between sense-perception and imagination is really just this, that in
sense-perception the images are imprinted on the brain by external
objects which are actually present, while in the case of imagination the
images are imprinted by the mind without any external objects, and
with the windows shut, as it were.

(Cited by Cottingham, 1985: p. 238. Descartes: AT VI, 162–3; see

also Cottingham, 1976: pp. 27, 74ff.)

Sense-perception, just like imagination, requires physiological activity.

The point here is not that we need an eye or a nose to see or smell things
or that we need a brain in order to receive information, because this
would not distinguish our cognitive faculty from sensation. Rather,
Descartes’s point is more subtle. What is distinct about imagination and
sense-perception is that they require a physiological activity or something
corporeal, unlike doubting, affirming, denying, willing, which refer to
‘pure actions of the soul’ and can occur without any physiological inter-
vention. We need to have a body to feel heat or pain. This is why only
corporeal beings have sensations.17 As Descartes states in a much-cited
passage of the Sixth Meditation:
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If this were not so [that is if the I and the body did not form a unit] I
who am nothing but a thinking thing would not feel pain when the
body was hurt but perceive the damage purely by the intellect, just as a
sailor perceives by sight if anything in his ship is broken. Similarly,
when the body needed food or drink, I should have an explicit under-
standing of the fact, instead of having confused sensations of hunger
and thirst. For these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain and so on, are
nothing but confused modes of thinking which arise from the union
and as it were intermingling of the mind with the body.

(Descartes: AT VII, Sixth Meditation, 76, line 9; SCM II, 53; also
cited by Cottingham, 1985: p. 240)

These passages suggest that there are sensations that require the union of
the mind and body. A purely intellectual judgment could never reveal to us
“what it is like” to have sensations of pain and hunger.18
There are various ways of interpreting these passages. As I said above,
the standard reading is that Descartes clearly defies his own dualism: it
cannot cope with the causal interaction between mind and body.
Conversely, John Cottingham argues that these passages prove something
quite different. They show that Descartes ‘classifies human attributes in
terms not of a dualistic but of a threefold or trialistic pattern’ (Cottingham,
1985: p. 225). There are faculties that belong strictly neither to a res cogitans
nor to a res extensa. Certain phenomena including perceptions, emotions
and sensations belong neither to the mind nor to the body alone but to the
union of the two.
Henry pursues an entirely different line of interpretation. Instead of
questioning Descartes’s dualism, he believes that these special modes
confirm that there is a special form of existence that pertains to the subject.
They do not suggest a trialism or causal picture but show that what
Descartes calls ‘thought’, i.e., the ‘cogito’, goes far beyond what we call
thinking. The point is that ‘thinking’ is not to be identified merely with
“understanding, willing and imagining, but also with sensory awareness”.19
Sensory awareness is a mode of thinking. These passages clearly suggest
that what is distinctive about thinking is not its cognitive activity, but affec-
tivity. In a word, ‘affectivity belongs to the essence of pure thought’ and not
extension.20
Henry advances this view to show what is distinctive about our self. What
marks out the self is that it experiences itself as being alive. We experience
ourselves as living beings, as beings who have a certain sensory awareness
or pathos. When we think, we experience our own living. For Henry this
literally means that we sense ourselves breathing, moving, laughing, being
anxious or in pain.21 Thought does not happen in a void, but is accompanied
by sensory awareness.
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We need not go outside ourselves to find this life. Our awareness is not
of something other to thought; rather our sensory awareness pertains to
thinking or to the subject itself. When we experience pain, are embar-
rassed, happy or anxious, critical or bored, we cannot draw a distinction
between the object of awareness and our awareness. These feelings or
moods define our way of being. We have no control over them; rather we
are subjected to them. To this extent they are immediate and passive. This
is how I am given to myself. Henry calls this auto-affection. In the same
way as I think, I am; I feel, I am; I fear, I am or I cry, I am; we are by virtue
of the fact that we think, feel and have passions.22 In these affective states
we feel ourselves; they manifest our very singularity. Pain is not simply
pain but my pain, a pain that no-one can bear with me. It can only be
understood from my first-person perspective. It is precisely our sensory
awareness that singles us out. Only I sense myself moving, feeling, touch-
ing, laughing; and there need be no object for this experience to take place.
This insight leads Henry to claim that there is an understanding of self-
hood or egoity that precedes any alterity. The cogito needs no other to be
itself; I sense, (therefore) I am.
In Henry’s view, Descartes thereby shows how the self manifests itself
without leaving itself. It does not need to appeal to an object to know itself;
it is an originary subjectivity which is truly in itself. Initially it is difficult to
understand why Henry believes that he has avoided what he has called an
‘ontological monism’. Clearly sensory awareness is a bodily awareness. In
this case the passages suggest the opposite, namely that a dualism is unten-
able because embodiment necessarily inheres in thought. Henry realizes as
much, but this does not deter him from arguing that there is more than one
type of manifestation or phenomenality. There is a type of manifestation
that inheres in the subject and another that inheres in the world. He draws
on Edmund Husserl’s distinction between the lived body (Leib) and an
objective one (Körper) to articulate the difference.23 The lived body refers
to our kinaesthetic sensory awareness.24 For example, our hand touching
another hand which is distinct from the hand that is being touched. Our
lived body refers to a life or sensing that is prior to and invisible to our
bodies. It has its own form of manifestation. It is immediate and cannot be
objectified. My sense of touching, breathing, of what it is like to experience
fear or happiness or to taste something sour. This sensory awareness is
quite distinct from the objective body, the object that is being touched,
feared or tasted.
Henry believes that the distinction allows him to claim that he can uphold
a dualism: that of the lived body and the objective world. He draws on the
passages cited above to illustrate what is at issue. There Descartes showed
that I can doubt that the content of my awareness is real, but I cannot doubt
my awareness. This sensory awareness points to what Henry calls a radical,
‘acosmic’ and monadic interiority which is totally distinct from any worldly
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manifestation and hence distinct from the visibility of objects. This is his
dualism. I feel, I am.
Henry thinks that Descartes has thereby paved the way for what he calls
a ‘material phenomenology’:25 the self is no longer understood as an empty
vessel or ‘highest point’, but as infinitely rich and diverse.

When we speak of the unity of the absolute life of the ego, we in no

way wish to say that this life is monotonous; actually it is infinitely
diverse, the ego is not a pure logical subject enclosed within its tautol-
ogy; it is the very being of infinite life, which nevertheless remains one
in this diversity.26

The self that feels pain is not identical to the self that is happy or the self that
thinks abstract thoughts; rather the self is infinitely rich and diverse.
There are two issues I should like to address. First, I am not at one with
Henry’s reading of Descartes. The passages Henry draws upon, if anything,
only confirm rather than question Husserl’s claim that consciousness is
intentional. Second, Henry believes that he can show that the life of the self
is infinitely rich without having to appeal to other persons or, indeed, to the
world. Yet, I wish to contend that Henry is wrong: As Husserl has shown
convincingly, a life without others and the world is not only impoverished
and bereft of meaning, but remains entirely indeterminate.

The ‘Other’ Descartes

When we take a closer look at the passages Henry cites to underpin his
position, I believe that they disclose something entirely different. Henry
claims that they show that Descartes’s material phenomenology is distinct
from traditional, Husserlian phenomenology insofar as Descartes returns to
a subjectivity that is not marred by transcendence.27 Were this the case,
Descartes’s position would clearly be contrary to that of Husserl, who
claims that we can only understand the ego cogito with respect to its cogi-
tatum. This claim in itself would reveal nothing new as Husserl has distanced
himself from Descartes precisely for this very reason. We only need to recall
the following passages from the Cartesian Meditations and the Paris
Lectures:

The expression ego cogito must be expanded [erweitert] by one term.

Every cogito contains a meaning: its cogitatum, as that which it grasps
in intentionality [als Vermeintes] … the fundamental property of modes
of consciousness, in which I live as my own self, is what is known as
intentionality. Consciousness is always consciousness of something.

(Husserl, 1964: pp. 12–13)

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The transcendental heading, ego cogito, must therefore be broadened

by adding one more member. Each cogito, each conscious process, we
may also say, ‘means’ something or other and bears in itself, in this
manner peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum.

(Husserl, 1960: Sec. 14, p. 33)

However, in this critique Husserl does not have Henry’s Descartes in mind
but Descartes as he is traditionally understood, namely as affirming that the
only thing that we can be certain of is that we are a thinking thing. Contrary
to this, Husserl wishes to show that we cannot think without thinking of
something. Thought is necessarily intentional.
It is important to understand how Husserl arrives at this position. It may
shed some light on why Henry was perhaps too ready to dismiss the claim that
consciousness is necessarily intentional. Husserl argues that we can arrive at
this insight by radicalizing Descartes’s method of doubt. For Descartes, doubt
is a form of negation: it negates what we had previously affirmed. However,
Husserl believes that doubt reveals that whatever cannot be seen clearly and
distinctly cannot be judged: we can neither affirm nor deny its existence since
we can see neither its existence nor its non-existence clearly and distinctly.
This leads Husserl to argue that doubt should be a moment not of negation
but of suspension of judgment. Husserl calls it epochē or bracketing.28 What
should be bracketed or questioned is our capacity to judge, since we have no
way of asserting or denying the existence of the object. However, what lies
beyond doubt is that we see an object even though we do not know whether
it actually exists. When we dream of the sea, or imagine what it must be like
to walk on Mars, or, indeed, when we think about impossible objects like
round squares, or objects which we clearly know do not exist, such as Pegasus,
we still dream, imagine or think of something and not of nothing.
This is precisely what Henry wishes to deny when he draws on Descartes.
Indeed he seems to defend Descartes’s view that doubt is necessarily a form
of negation. When Descartes says ‘I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be
warmed’ (CSM II, 19), even though it may turn out to be false because I am
asleep, Henry believes that what remains after the reduction (doubt) is the
‘at certe videre videor – yet I certainly seem to see’ (cf. Henry 1993: 42). The
videor (it seems to me) remains valid and incontestable even when doubt
disqualifies the videre and all the other forms of representations. Descartes,
so Henry, ‘holds that this vision, however fallacious it may be, at the very
least exists’29. This leads him to conclude that Descartes is justified in refer-
ring to thought as an ‘immediate awareness of itself which excludes the exte-
riorisation of exteriority’.30 In contemporary philosophy of mind this
position would be called ‘individualism’ or ‘internalism’: our thoughts do
not depend on our relation to the physical or social environment.31 In other
words, one’s introspectively based judgments about one’s mental states
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enjoy a range of epistemological privileges that judgments about non-

mental reality or, indeed, the mental states of others do not enjoy. They are
immune to error, we cannot doubt that we are doubting, but we can doubt
the existence of others and the world.
However, I believe that quite a different scenario comes to light. Unwit-
tingly Henry draws on citations that in my view substantiate, if anything,
rather than question Husserl’s articulation of the epochē . Henry admits
that the passages on which he draws do not present the full picture of
Descartes. The truth is that Descartes himself comes to understand the ego
cogito as a representing self. As we move from the Second to the Third
Meditation, the initial insights are lost. ‘The cogito is dismembered; the first
semblance of the videor (it seems to me) is suppressed in favour of the
semblance of the videre and all other forms of representations.’ This leads
Henry to conclude that in the final analysis ‘Cartesian “thought” is no
longer the soul and no longer life, but its opposite: it becomes the thought
of the moderns, knowledge.’32 Yet this thought of the moderns is precisely
linked to the view that doubt is a form of negation leading to knowledge
which Husserl comes to criticize. It is the stage where the cogito becomes
the condition of the cogitatum. The cogito ‘“becomes the clear and distinct”
perception of what is known as the criterion of all possible truths’.33
Yet, what is so intriguing about the passages of the First Meditation cited
by Henry is that something quite different comes to light. They actually
confirm Husserl’s contention that even if we have reasons to doubt an
object, even if we come to realize that the object does not exist, we cannot
deny that ‘it’, nonetheless, appears in our imagination and dreams. We still
sense something and, indeed, have sensations. In my view precisely this
proves Husserl’s insight that thought is intentional. This remains true even
though the object of thought does not exist. When we dream, we dream
about something; when we think about something impossible or when we
imagine an object, our thought and imagination are still about something
even when we know that the object we are thinking about does not exist.
What cannot be doubted is that I was dreaming. My dreams are not empty:
they are clearly about something.
When Husserl says that “there is no cogito without its cogitatum”, he is
not so naïve as to assume that the cogitatum necessarily exists. In such a case
we would not be able to differentiate between illusion and reality. However,
the purpose of the reduction is to show that at this stage such an assumption
is illegitimate. We can neither affirm nor deny the existence of the object of
thought. All we can affirm with certainty is that our thought is necessarily
about something even when the question of existence has been bracketed.
This reflects exactly what Descartes is saying in the passages that Henry
cites. There can be a sensing even if it turns out that there is no object that
has caused these sensations in me. We nonetheless sense something. I am
still feeling the heat of what turns out to be an imaginary flame; I am
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imagining an object; I am thinking of Pegasus. In each instance I am think-

ing about something despite the fact that I know that none of these objects
exist. The passages above, if anything, indicate a proximity between Husserl
and Descartes in so far as both realize that the cogito is not free from tran-
scendence or intentionality even when we think about objects that do not
exist.34 What cannot be questioned is the intentional structure of conscious-
ness: thought is outside itself even when we are concerned with our affective
states.

Against Henry’s ‘Acosmism’

As I have said, one of Henry’s aims is to show that the subject is not an
empty shell, as Kant has come to conceive it, but infinitely rich. It does not
simply accompany our representations, but has a life of its own. Yet I
believe that Husserl shows convincingly that as long as the self is treated in
isolation – Henry calls it “acosmic” – it remains nothing more than an empty
shell. The ipseity of the self only becomes meaningful in the presence of the
world and other selves. Without the other I have no sense of a self; indeed,
I have no sense of what makes me distinct. In Husserl’s opinion, Henry
would appear too hasty in attributing a selfhood to this affective awareness.
As noted above, Husserl would be in agreement with Henry that experience
is necessarily owned and that this ownership is ‘felt’ and can be felt without
ever being represented. The fact that it cannot be represented does not
mean that it does not exist. However, Husserl holds that this alone is not
sufficient to single out a notion of selfhood. Although Husserl constantly
refers to a ‘self’, ‘ego’ and, indeed, ‘I’, he comes to realize that he has not
taken account of its manifestation. By simply attributing a life, existence and
kinaesthesia to this unsubstitutable viewpoint, he has failed to mark out
what is unique about our perspective or sense of mineness.35,36
It should be possible to specify criteria of singularity and identity of the
self. My sense of mineness cannot emerge in isolation; it requires the pres-
ence of others. As Husserl points out: ‘The I has its peculiar ownness in the
thou and is only constituted in contrast to it’ (Husserl, 1973: p. 247). To
recognize experience as mine, to apprehend itself as an ‘I’ or self, the ego
requires a thou. As long as the self is treated in abstraction from the world
or any ‘hetero-affection’, there is nothing that can possibly single out my self
from others. The indexical ascription only becomes meaningful in the pres-
ence of others and the world and is empty and meaningless without them.
Husserl realizes that we cannot make sense of our perspective as a
perspective if no other perspective is available. I only recognize that I have
a particular point of view or take on the world when I realize that it refers
to one of many possible points of view. For Husserl this has an important
implication. It leads him to affirm the existence of an objective, i.e.,
intersubjective world. We only recognize the point of view of the other if it
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is a point of view of one and the same object. Were the other ego to perceive
a world that is radically distinct from mine, I would never be able to draw a
comparison between my perspective and that of the other; indeed, the other
would simply fail to manifest herself as other.37 Talk about perspectives only
makes sense when we refer to different points of access to one and the same
object/world. In short, we recognize our take on the world to be perspectival
only because we realize that there is a shared (intersubjective) world, i.e.,
that there are other points of view. As Husserl says in Cartesian Meditations:

A priori, my ego, given to me apodictically – the only thing I can posit

in absolute apodicticity as existing – can be a world-experiencing ego
only by being in communion with others like himself: a member of a
community of monads, which is given orientedly, starting from
himself…. I cannot conceive a plurality of monads otherwise than as
explicitly or implicitly in communion. This involves being a plurality
of monads that constitutes itself an Objective world.

(Husserl, 1960: Sec. 60, p. 139)

I can only experience the world by being in communion with others, and I
only experience the alter ego if we share a common ground.38
In view of this, Husserl argues that I can only make sense of my perspec-
tive as a perspective if other viewpoints are available to me. Reference to
mineness without a contrasting viewpoint is simply non-sensical. Husserl
suggests as much in the following passage:

The absolute I – which in utterly unbroken constancy is prior to every

existent and bears every existent within itself, which in its own ‘concre-
tion’ is prior to all concretions – this absolute I bearing each and every
conceivable existent within itself is the first ‘ego’ of the reduction – an
ego that is wrongly so called, since for it an alter ego makes no sense.

(Husserl, 1973: p. 586)

Here Husserl makes clear that we cannot refer meaningfully to an ego if

there is no alter ego. Without a thou we cannot truly refer to an ‘I’. Without
reference to an alter ego, there is no objective world for the subject, and
without world, there is no I.39
This, I believe, points to something important. If Henry does not wish to
understand the self as an empty vessel but as infinitely rich, then he has to
realize that this ‘richness’ only manifests itself with reference to the world
and others. Without the world and without others, the ‘I’ remains indistin-
guishable and can only be ‘called “I” by equivocation’ (Husserl, 1970:
p. 185). Husserl compares the ‘I’ without community with a dreamless
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sleep40 because it would be an ‘I’ that could not function as an ‘I’. In many
ways it would be truly mad (verrückt):41 it could not make sense of its view-
point as a viewpoint.
Henry can only refer to an acosmic interiority when he is able to justify
the claim that it is radically distinct and indeed unsubstitutable from any
other perspective. Yet, as I have shown via Husserl, we can only recognize
our perspective as a perspective if another perspective is available to us.
Hence, otherness is thus paramount to the ipseity of the self. It does not, as
Henry believes, undermine our fundamental subjectivity; rather it allows
for its manifestation. That is why without the world there is no subject.
This analysis should demonstrate that Henry presents us with a false
alternative. He believes that either the subject is alienated from itself and
the subject turns out to be not ‘anything but the objectivity of the object’,42
or there is an acosmic interiority, a subjectivity which need not pass through
the world. Yet Husserl shows convincingly that we need not opt for either
alternative. The subject is not an empty shell, nor is it self-enclosed. Rather,
the subject is necessarily bifurcated. This does not mean that it is alienated,
but that it has a dual nature. It is something in itself – namely a sensing
bodily consciousness – and, at the same time, it is necessarily outside itself
toward the world, for without the world and others the self can be called a
self only by equivocation.

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Abbreviations
AT Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds) Œuvres de Descartes, new
edition, 11 vols, Paris: CNRS and Vrin, 1964–76 (cited by volume,
page and sometimes line number)
CSM John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (trans.)
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985–6
CSMK John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and
Anthony Kenny (trans.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
Vol. 3, The Correspondence, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991

Notes
1 Descartes: Letter to Mersenne, 25 May 1637. AT I, 376 (not included in the
English translation), cited by Marion, 1999a: p. 131.
2 Henry, 1988: p. 147.
3 Henry, 1973: p. 74.
4 Henry, 1989: p. 154.

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 THE BIFURCATED SUBJECT

5 It is worth noting Descartes’s response: ‘When someone says “I am thinking,

therefore I am, or I exist”, he does not deduce existence from thought by means
of a syllogism, but recognizes it as something self-evident by a simple intuition of
the mind. This is clear from the fact that if he were deducing it by means of a
syllogism, he would have to have had previous knowledge of the major premise:
“Everything which thinks is, or exists”; yet in fact he learns it from experiencing
in his own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing. It is in
the nature of our mind to construct general propositions on the basis of our
knowledge of particular ones’ (AT VII, 140/1; CSM II).
6 To follow Kant: ‘The proposition “I am simple” must be regarded as an immedi-
ate expression of apperception, just as what is referred to as the Cartesian infer-
ence, cogito, ergo sum, is really a tautology, since the cogito (sum cogitans)
asserts my immediate existence. “I am simple” means nothing more than that
this representation, “I”, does not contain in itself the least manifoldness and that
it is absolute (although merely logical) unity’ (Kant, 1933: A355).
7 Wittgenstein, 1981: pp. 116–17, 5.633. A similar objection was already raised by
Gassendi when he said: ‘And why, do you think, does the eye, though incapable
of seeing itself in itself, yet see itself in the mirror?’ (‘Objection Against the
Meditations of Descartes’, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes II, trans.
Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1967), pp. 162–3), cited by Henry, 1973: p. 376. Descartes’s response to this
is discussed below.
8 Wittgenstein, 1981: 5.641.
9 Henry, 1988: p. 149.
10 J.-P. Sartre, 1979.
11 Wittgenstein, 1981: p. 27.
12 Strawson calls such a view a non-ownership theory (see Strawson, 1959: p. 106).
It is ascribed to Nietzsche and Lichtenberg.
13 Henry, 1988: p. 148.
14 Cited in Henry, 1989: p. 152.
15 Henry, 1988: pp. 152–3, my italics.
16 CSM I, 195; AT VII, 362.
17 For Descartes such a being is clearly a human being. He holds that God has no
body and animals ‘do not see as we do when we are aware that we see’ (CSMK
61–2; AT I, 413; II, 14–20). They are like automata. They do not ‘think’ or sense
what they mechanically perceive.
18 Descartes explicitly states that a non-corporeal being (e.g. God) does not have
sensory experience. See Principles I, 23 (CSM I, 200f.; AT VIII, 13).
19 The point is to show that ‘imagination, sensation and will are intelligible only in
a thinking thing’ (CSM I, 211; AT VIIIA, 25).
20 Henry (1975: 141). It is important to note that Henry does not wish to reinstan-
tiate Descartes’s dualism of res cogitans and res extensa as such; rather he draws
on Descartes to show what is unique about the subject, a uniqueness that
precedes any worldly manifestation.
21 There is the ‘knowing-how-to-move one’s-hands, the knowing-how-to-move
one’s-lips, the knowing-how-to-move one’s-eyes’. Henry, 1989: p. 164.
22 ‘We are only by virtue of the fact that we think’ (Principles: CSM I, 194; AT IX-
2, 28).
23 Although Henry draws on Husserl, he insists that he nonetheless departs from
him. According to Henry, the problem is that Husserl seeks to account for the
self-manifestation of the self by insisting that it has its own form of temporaliza-
tion. This leads Henry to conclude that Husserl still regards the self as ecstatic,

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bifurcated or mediated. Henry here adopts Derrida’s criticism of Husserl.

Derrida understands this self-temporalization of the self as a loss of presence
(Derrida, 1973). However, as I have shown elsewhere, Husserl widens the notion
of presence rather than questioning whether the self can ever be truly present to
itself. He thus equally argues that the self is fully present to itself. See Alweiss,
(1999a, 1999b and 2003: Ch. 2).
24 When Descartes refers to our sensory perception, he has various kinds of
movements in mind (see CSM I, 280; AT VIIIA, 316).
25 Henry, 1993: p. 45.
26 Henry, 1975: p. 92.
27 A phenomenological elucidation of Descartes ‘gives the idea of phenomenology
a radical meaning still unnoticed today’ (Henry, 1993: p. 40).
28 See Held, 2000: pp. 43ff.
29 Henry, 1993: p. 42.
30 Ibid., p. 44.
31 Tyler Burge claims that ‘individualism is a theory of mind derive[d] from
Descartes’ (1986: p. 117), more specifically Descartes’s First Meditation which
reveals that the individuation of thoughts is unaffected by possible different
environments (p. 122).
32 Henry, 1993: p. 48.
33 Ibid.
34 For a detailed discussion of how we can make sense of non-existent objects see
Alweiss, 2009.
35 Although in Ideen I he constantly refers to the self, he acknowledges that he has
not yet shown how he arrives at this notion of mineness (see Husserl, 1982:
pp. 61, 85).
36 Husserl does not merely wish to argue that we live in our experiences but, more-
over, that all our experiences are unified by an Ego-pole which stands apart from
the experiences. There is as Husserl put it famously a ‘transcendence in imma-
nence’. This comes to light when we concern ourselves with recollection and acts
of presentification. In such cases self-awareness is act-transcendent. I can
remember my childhood and think of myself now and I can compare myself with
the way I was when I was 13. I do not merely live in these experiences; rather I
experience a fissure or gap. I experience myself both as remembering the past
and experiencing my self sitting at home remembering the past. As Eduard
Marbach has shown, it is only at these moments when the subject displaces itself
from its present situation that the pure ego emerges. Yet this would imply (and
indeed Marbach suggests as much) that experience is not necessarily egological
but merely becomes so in such acts of self-division. Marbach believes that this has
led Husserl to argue that only humans have a true sense of self precisely because
they have the ability to make themselves present through acts of imagination,
reflection and recollection (Marbach, 1974: Ch. 9).
37 Husserl seems to anticipate Donald Davidson, who convincingly shows that radi-
cal perspectivism is incoherent. ‘Different points of view make sense, but only if
there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence
of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability’ (Davidson,
1984: p. 184.
38 There is a fundamental asymmetry between the first-person and the second-
person perspective. They are asymmetrical not because we can never have access
to another person’s mental life but because I necessarily have a different view-
point and thus type of access to that of another person. I can only see the other’s
perspective from my point of view. I believe that Husserl would argue just like

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 THE BIFURCATED SUBJECT

Wittgenstein that ‘my thoughts are not hidden from [the other] but are open to
him in a different way than they are to me’ (Wittgenstein, 1982: pp. 34–5). That
is, the problem is not one of introspection but of points of view or types of access.
I can never occupy an alter ego’s first-person perspective. As Wittgenstein would
say, when ‘you see the eye you see something going out from it. You see the look
in the eye’ (Wittgenstein, 1967): Sec. 222). When I experience a person’s
perspective or ray of regard (Blickstrahl) I can only experience it from my
perspective. I can draw analogies between my perspective and the perspective of
the alter ego; however, this analogy is never complete, and I can never take over
another person’s perspective. The other is never really present but made present
(Husserl, 1960: Sec. 51) from my perspective. There is no pure third person’s
perspective. Whatever is experienced as given necessarily involves a first-person
perspective.
39 Cited by Marbach, 1974: p. 330 from an unpublished manuscript: K IV 3, 57.
40 Cited by Smith, 2008 and Zahavi, 2001: p. 112.
41 Marbach, 1974: p. 331.
42 Henry, 1993: p. 49.

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