Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Philosophy Education Society Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to The Review of Metaphysics
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF*
THOMAS LANGAN
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
20 THOMAS LANGAN
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 21
C. The Ur-entw?rfe
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
22 THOMAS LANGAN
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 23
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
24 THOMAS LANGAN
particular groups and individuals, and with which one can hope
to do battle.
Of course, the relative scope given human nature when such
a distinction is made is of paramount importance. When presen
ing the reality of brute givenness, the existentialist is inclined b
his perspective to emphasize the scope of personal attitude; the
way I assume my situation transforms much of the "given" into
"chosen." Suppose as I grow up I become aware of being slightly
fat, by temperament laconic and slow, and that I have by up
bringing all the forms needed to think, look and act like a typica
Brooklyn drugstore cowboy. Should I actually become aware o
these things, I may reinforce them and unify them into a style by
the very way I accept "what comes naturally"; or I may revol
against some of them.3 I can even revolt against what I cannot
change; I can champ at the bit in frustration at being a Puerto
Rican.
However, there are limits to our capacity for "revolt." Can I
refuse to accept my human nature? There are those, Kierkegaard
warns, who try to be a self the wrong way. But even our very
refusal to accept the responsibility of selfhood is a way of exercis
ing it; my nature asserts itself even in my efforts to deny it.
This primordial, brute givenness of "nature" as inherited
common ground of all possibility of becoming tends to be lost
sight of as the existentialist concentrates his gaze on "Existenz"
conceived as Self constructed by previous projections and thus, as
personal history, directing future projections. Indeed, in such a
philosophy, all the other givens in our catalogue tend to be
subordinated to the dominant reality of the Ur-entw?rfe. A kind
of integration is indeed thus achieved; but, alas, it is not without
serious problems of its own, problems threatening to endanger
the sense of the very freedom the existentialist thinkers would
crown. Even granting that much of the game of liberty is played,
not in the bad faith deliberations masking the true roots of my
reaction to given circumstances, but rather in the fundamental
choices which created and keep creating the life-style governing
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 25
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
26 THOMAS LANGAN
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 27
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
28 THOMAS LANGAN
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 29
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
30 THOMAS LANGAN
perplexing suggestion has been added to this. And that is, that a
person's essential reality may conceivably be one so fully alienated
by a cultural situation as to frustrate his chances of leading a full
human existence until the whole objective situation undergoes a
revolutionary dissolution. We are haunted by the Hegelian Un
happy Consciousness (das ungl?ckliche Bewu?tsein), and by the
Marxist insistence that the Proletariat, having been divested of the
fruit of that human labor by which alone they can transform the
world into a habitation for man, now find their intersubjective
relationships mediated through the impersonal and de-personaliz
ing element of money; these are notions which must not be dis
missed with a wave of the hand simply because common sense
strongly suspects that the fundamental human situation is never
caught up exclusively and hopelessly in just those chains. Yet the
common sense reaction can again legitimately serve us as a guide
here, by urging us to look for the grounds of any possibility for
communication, and to seek the cause of any intelligibility that
might actually inhere in cultural things in the common essence of
all the subjects projecting, acting in and sharing one inter
subjective world. Instead of accepting uncritically the suggestion
that we owe what we are to the inter-subjective world, with its
corollary, that we might become separated from what is essential
to our being human, the realistically guided phenomenologist will
attempt to elaborate a full description that will show rather that
the inter subjective world owes what it is to us in virtue of a fond
of nature which forms in us the essential and the inalienable. He
will seek to give a precise and full sense to, and look for evidence to
support, the suggestion that this inalienable fond is capable of
surging up through all historical accretions, and that there lies a
person's chance for freedom beyond all the limitations of class,
nation, and epoch. This demands, of course, hyper sensitivity to
any evidence of a level of common humanity at work in the most
primitive circumstances.
Laying down the details of the guide in this dogmatic fashion
makes acutely obvious the abyss separating such a phenomeno
logical guide as principle for a proposed program, and such a
program really carried out and fully self-justified. We can appre
ciate the exasperation of those devoting their lives to pointing out
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 31
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
32 THOMAS LANGAN
Conclusion
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF 33
This content downloaded from 146.155.94.33 on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 13:31:06 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms