‘I’

At the beginning of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ( lectures published in 1797 ), Kant writes:

The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth [Dass der Mensch in seiner Vorstellung das Ich haben kann, erhebt ihn unendlich über alle alleren auf Erden lebenden Wesen]. Because of this he is a person [Dadurch ist er eine Person]; and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—i.e., through rank and dignity and entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I” [selbst wenn er das Ich nicht sprechen kann], because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I” [ob sie zwar diese Ichheit nicht durch ein besonderes Wort ausdrücken]. For this faculty ( namely, to think ) is understanding.

( Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Louden, 15 )

The text goes on—150 years before Paul Guillaume—to discuss the age when small children stop talking about themselves in the third person and start saying “I”: “durch Ich zu sprechen.” The translator of the French edition of this text, Michel Foucault, renders Kant’s das Ich by le Je. He clearly did not want to adopt the French term—moïté—often used for the technical neologism of the German word Ichheit, invented at the start of the thirteenth century by Meister Eckhart, not only because he considered this a linguistic barbarism, but also because he clearly saw that Kant’s object is the Je ( the possibility of saying “I” ), and not the Moi ( “Me” or “Myself,” that is, the possibility of describing or judging the Self ). At the same time, following the main thread of the text, Foucault had to simplify the doubleness hidden within its opening sentence: to be “a person” ( who is “one” ) is to be able to use the word Ich, but it also means including ( the ) Ich—this “something” that is not a thing—within its representation. In a sense, this is to represent the unrepresentable that the Ich names “for itself [für sich Selbst].”

This formulation is connected to the decisive developments of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the “transcendental subject” is theorized for the first time ( see SUBJECT ). A thesis is here being put forward that is both extremely debatable and determining for the development of Western philosophy. It is debatable because it is Eurocentric, and consequently idealist, and only apparently attentive to the materiality of language. Let us admit with Jakobson that every language contains a complete system of references of the code to itself, from the code to the message, from the message to itself, and from the message to the code—and notably that there is necessarily a class of specific units of meaning ( shifters, or embrayeurs in French ) whose function is to refer to the singularity of an actual message. Personal pronouns correspond exceptionally well to this definition ( as do demonstratives, adverbs of time and place, verb tenses, and so on ). We can thus, following Benveniste’s famous analyses, characterize the individual act of appropriating language as a problem of subjectivity in language—“Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as I” ( Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Meek, 226 )—thereby creating a short-circuit between the instance of utterance ( énonciation ) and the statement ( énoncé ). But the fact of using the word “subjectivity” is an indication of the circularity of such definitions, since it takes as given ( as was the case in Kant’s text cited above ) that the “normal” or “implicit” form is one in which the agent, the support of any attribution in a statement, and the “instance of discourse” ( ibid. ) or what carries the word, that is, the generic speaking being ( “man” ), can all be subsumed under one and the same concept. This situation is only characteristic of some languages, however, or even some of their usages. The “simplicity” of the Indo-European system of personal pronouns is not a “linguistic universal.”

In Japanese, for example, we observe two correlative phenomena ( Takao Suzuki ) that contrast with the usages of modern European languages ( or only occupy a place in European languages deemed to be residual, infantile, artificial, or pathological ). On the one hand, the terms we would call personal pronouns ( above all, the equivalents of “I” and “you” ) have no etymological stability: historically, they are substituted for one another, following a continual process of devaluation and replacement, linked to the transformation of marks of respect into marks of familiarity or condescension. On the other hand, the normal form by which speakers are designated in a statement consists of marking their respective position or role in the social relationships ( which are almost always asymmetrical ) within which communication is initiated. Particularly important in this regard are the terms of kinship that, by a characteristic fiction, can be extended to other types of relationship.

It seems that European languages by contrast are made up, over a very long period of time, of a kind of specific universalism, which neutralizes the qualities and the roles of speakers ( or, by contrast, allows them to be emphasized: “The king wishes it to be so,” “Grandfather is going to get angry!” “Madame is served” ), so as to bring out the abstract, and virtually reciprocal, positions of sender and receiver of spoken language: the one who has spoken will then listen, and vice versa. Jakobson is therefore right when he criticizes Husserl’s interpretation of this point in his Logical Investigations, where he says that “the word ‘I’ refers to different persons depending on the situation, and for this reason takes on a new meaning each time.” To the contrary, the meaning of “I” is the same every time; it is what speakers—subjects—possess in common, that by which they individually appropriate for themselves the instrument of communication. It would of course be important to study the interaction of linguistic usages, of institutional transformations ( the emergence of an increasingly broad sphere of formal equality that encroaches on both the public and the private ), and finally of various logico-grammatical theorizations, all of which have made possible the recognition of this norm, its standardization in scholarly as much as in popular language, and its interiorization and conceptualization in notions such as “person,” “subject,” “agency,” “individuality,” “ecceity,” and so on.

Even though it is falsely universal, this thesis has been a determining one for the history of European philosophy. We can return to it, but critically, particularly by situating it within the horizon of the problem of translation. In elaborating a philosophical discourse concerned with subjectivity, we would have to then pay attention to the reciprocal action between concepts and linguistic forms as they differ from one language to another, against a background of shared characteristics. This is indeed one of the keys to the untranslatable “translatability” that characterizes the sharing or colinguisticity ( colinguisme ) of European philosophy, and it is surprising that there have been no major attempts to use the question of personal pronouns as a basis for developing the same kind of philological and philosophical analyses that have been brought to bear on the syntactical and semantic effects of the verb être ( to be ) in the constitution of classical ontology, from Benveniste to Barbara Cassin. There have been a few notable exceptions, such as Jaakko Hintikka’s analyses of the performative nature of the Cartesian cogito, or, more recently, Marco Baschera’s analyses of the Kantian Ich denke as a linguistic act, and also to some extent Ernst Tugendhat’s analyses of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Hegel. The ground had been laid, however, on the one hand by the tradition of the critique of the metaphysics of the subject as a “grammatical convention,” which goes from David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche to the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, and on the other hand by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reflections on the originary nature of reference to the subject in different languages, developed by Ernst Cassirer in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms into a summary of the forms of expression of the Ich-Beziehung ( I-relation ). (BCDU)