1. The Question of Subjectivity

The first chapter of this volume is devoted to a critical overview of the modern and contemporary theories about the self. The aim of this overview is to highlight the centrality of this question in the modern scientific and philosophical discourse, as well as to provide a background for a better appreciation of the originality and specificity of Mou’s thought on self. Thanks to the development of the neurosciences, with its research into the neural correlates of our mental life, as well as the emergence of the cognitive sciences, the question of the self has acquired an unprecedented centrality in the philosophical debate. The method and scope of such debate are moreover often determined by requests for theoretical clarification that have arisen in the scientific field, and therefore present a marked gnoseological character. I individuated three main topics running through the discussion, and tried to synthesize the state of the art in the philosophy of mind around these three questions.

The first question examines the necessity of the idea of self, intended as an “ego,” i.e., a stable and persistent fulcrum of self-identification in mental life. Some scholars argue that we need a fixed and centralized point of perspective embedded in our thought or hovering above it, in order to maintain in our mind order, continuity, and sense of “mineness.” Other scholars, starting from Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), theorize that one’s flux of representation is self-ordering and self-structuring, and possesses therefore coherence and meaning even before an “ego” is reflexively constructed.

The second topic is self-consciousness. In what way do I become aware of myself? Some thinkers argue that the knowledge of myself is not essentially different from the knowledge of any outer object. Self-consciousness emerges when I look at myself in an objectifying manner, like through an ideal mirror. Other thinkers object that the process of self-recognition seems to require a preventive acquaintance with oneself, and therefore the phenomenon of self-consciousness presents itself as a familiarity and intimacy with oneself that precedes and makes possible any act of reflection.

Finally, I investigate the relationship between the self and the outer reality, starting from the body and extending to the consciousness of other human beings. Some scholars represent the self as structurally embodied or constituted in the sight of the others. The question is to which degree can I admit a “transcendentality” of the self, thinking of it as an a priori scheme making my experience possible. Furthermore, can I attribute to the self an autonomy, i.e., a capacity of detaching itself from its neural conditions, for example as an “emergent property” new and irreducible to the brain which is its corporeal basis? May I legitimately represent my mental life as an inner and secluded domain, or should I locate my self outside of me, in the contact membrane between consciousness and the world?

I finally provide an overview of the scholarly work attempting to answer to this question through a comparison between Western and non-Western ideas of self, highlighting that these kinds of comparative attempts are still very limited in numbers and in their capacity to challenge the epistemological-oriented mainstream of contemporary philosophy of mind. However, these works are advocating for a paradigm shift from the cognitive self to a performative, dynamic, and multidimensional idea of self which could impart an unexplored and groundbreaking turn in studies of self. In my literature review, I did not find monographs that systematically approach these aspects in the wider horizon of contemporary research about philosophy of mind, nor works which recognize the original contribution that Mou can offer on the debate about the question of “I” and self-consciousness. For these reasons, in my research I tried to follow the red thread of the question of subjectivity throughout the development of Mou’s thought, sometimes using the conceptual tools of philosophy of mind to highlight the similarities and differences between Mou’s idea of subjectivity and some of the most debated theories about the notion of “I.”