Uniting the Perspectival Subject: Two Approaches more

Phenom Cogn Sci (2011) 10:23–44 DOI 10.1007/s11097-010-9151-5 Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches Patrick Stokes Published online: 20 February 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract Visual forms of episodic memory and anticipatory imagination involve images that, by virtue of their perspectival organization, imply a “notional subject” of experience. But they contain no inbuilt reference to the “actual subject,” the person actually doing the remembering or imagining. This poses the problem of what (if anything) connects these two perspectival subjects and what differentiates cases of genuine memory and anticipation from mere “imagined seeing.” I consider two approaches to this problem. The first, exemplified by Wollheim and Velleman, claims that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the notional and actual subjects secured by a determinate causal history. The second approach posits some distinctive phenomenal property that attaches to genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations and serves to experientially conflate the notional and actual subject. I consider a version of the second approach, derived from Kierkegaard’s discussions of phenomenal “contemporaneity,” and argue that this approach can better account for the possibility of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. Keywords Kierkegaard . Velleman . Wollheim . Contemporaneity . Visualization . Episodic memory . Imagination An oft-noted feature of both episodic memory and visual forms of anticipatory imagination is that the images they present, no matter how detailed, vivid, or rich they might be, contain no intrinsic reference to the subject actually doing the remembering or imagining. This raises the question of what, if anything, constitutes the connection between the self I am now and the self figured or implied in the past P. Stokes (*) Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Farvergade 27D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark e-mail: pst@sk.ku.dk 24 P. Stokes scenarios I remember and future scenarios I imagine. Put another way, what makes episodic memory and projective imagination reflexive? In this paper, I consider two strategies for responding to this problem. The first, as exemplified by Richard Wollheim and especially by J. David Velleman, holds that genuinely reflexive memories and anticipations are phenomenally “unselfconscious,” with the co-identity of the actual subject and the notional subject featured in such visualizations secured by a determinate causal history. The second response claims quite the opposite: a specific phenomenal property of memory and imagination serves to unify the notional and actual subject. A particularly interesting version of the second approach can be recovered from the work of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is, to say the least, an unfamiliar source for discussions of this sort, which are both thematically and historically quite far removed from his philosophical context and concerns. However, Kierkegaard’s philosophical psychology contains a phenomenology of “co-presence” with the past and future that provides useful resources for such debates.1 This phenomenal approach, as I will argue, usefully links what Velleman dubs the “first-personal accessibility” of our past and future perspectives with the question of affective alienation from the selves we were and will be: the way in which our experiential sense of self and awareness of our causal history can sometimes come apart. Perspectival organization and structural indifference The problem we will be concerned with is discussed most frequently in relation to specifically visual forms of episodic memory,2 though it may well have analogues in at least some other senses (Debus 2007, p. 189). Such memories present themselves as ostensible copies of some originally visual experience (even if they do not always appear to depend on one discrete experience (Debus 2007, p. 76)). As Wollheim notes, such memory experiences can be either centered (imagined from a point of view within the imagined event) or acentered, with centered memory the standard case (Wollheim 1999, pp. 102-4). This basic form of event memory has as one of its core features a certain form of visual organization, one that implies an experiencer located at some (at least theoretically) specifiable distance and position relative to the events observed. The literature offers several articulations of this “perspectival organization” feature of visualizations (including experiential memories), but Velleman’s is arguably the clearest: A visual image has a perspective because objects are represented in it by regions whose size and placement depend on the angles subtended by those 1 This reading of Kierkegaardian “contemporaneity” and reflexivity might be unfamiliar to many Kierkegaard scholars, and unfortunately, it falls outside my present task to provide a full exegetical defense of it here. Strictly speaking, nothing in the present argument depends upon whether the approach I outline here is faithful to Kierkegaard (though I believe it is); the unconvinced Kierkegaardian reader is therefore invited to bracket these concerns for the present and see Stokes (2010a) for the requisite exegesis of “contemporaneity” and Stokes (2010b) for an account of reflexivity in Kierkegaardian moral psychology more generally. 2 On the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, see Tulving (1983) p.v and throughout (especially Part I, pp.17–120). Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 25 objects at some common point in space. The representational scheme of the image is governed by lines of sight converging at a single vantage point, whose location the image suggests but doesn’t depict (Velleman 2006, p. 179).3 In any representational visualization of spatially arranged objects (even acentered ones – Wollheim 1999, p. 104), the mere fact of convergent perspective necessarily implies a viewpoint, though as Velleman (2006, p. 179) notes, we do not always think of this viewpoint as actually being occupied—just as, in Williams’ (1973, p. 37) example, when we watch a movie with a tracking shot along the side of a castle wall, or an intimate scene between two lovers, we are not “invited to think of Griffith or Antonioni floating up towers or creeping around lovers.”4 This, according to Velleman, is what distinguishes visualization simpliciter from the more complex exercise of “imagined seeing” (2006, p. 179): in the latter (which will include episodic memory and anticipatory imagination), we do think of the viewpoint as occupied. All secondary mental images—visualizations that purport to present someone’s experience—come equipped with a built-in “notional subject” occupying the viewpoint implied by perspectival organization.5 We might know little or nothing about who this implied observer is meant to be, but we can at least infer the rough position of the observer’s optic receptors relative to the image (even if mediated through a telephoto lens or the like). But although the perspectival organization of images implies a subject, whose eyes are located where the lines of sight converge, there is no requirement that the protagonist of a centrally imagined scene must be me, the self imagining or remembering it (Wollheim 1999, p. 74). Thus, secondary mental images “have two subjects, one actual and one notional” (Velleman 2006, p. 186). The notional subject is the viewer implied by perspectival organization, “the person thought of as occupying the image’s vantage point and undergoing the visual impression of which the image is a copy” (Velleman 2006, p. 182). The actual subject is the person doing the visualization or having the visual memory. And insofar as I can imagine a scene where the notional subject is someone other than me—in Williams’ (1973, p. 43) well-worn example, I can visualize the battlefield at Austerlitz as seen from the viewpoint of Napoleon—the notional and actual subject can be two different people. The question, then, with respect to reflexive secondary mental images such as episodic memories or imaginative anticipations, is what might constitute a connection between the notional and actual subject—and it seems that nothing within secondary mental images themselves will do the trick. Parfit (1984, p. 221) notes that apparent memories, even when experienced in a “first person mode of 3 4 See also Smith (2006), pp. 52–53; Goldie (2000), p. 196. Similar considerations lead Walton (1976, 1990, pp. 337–40) to conclude that visual depictions are not (standardly) mediated through a fictional observer in the same way that narrated events are mediated through a narrator, though there are cases where, for instance, movie shots are framed to imply we are seeing an object through the eyes of one of the film’s characters. See also Goldie (2000), p. 196. 5 For this reason, according to Wollheim, acentered event memories are both rare and unstable: even though these are not meant to represent an event from an observer’s perspective, their very visual organization implies some observer, and so we quickly move to imaginatively “occupy” the point of view around which the memory is organized. 26 P. Stokes presentation,” include no reference to the rememberer herself,6 while Galen Strawson (1999, p. 109) argues that while the perspectival convergence of sensory data gives episodic memory a “from the inside character,” this character “can detach completely from any lived identification with the subject of the remembered experience.” Furthermore, Williams (1973, p. 35) notes that the perspectival structure of any visualized scene no more refers back to the visualizing self than the spatial composition of a movie scene or play refers me back to my situation as viewer. I may be sitting in a theater seat 40 m away from Sir Ian McKellen, but I am not simultaneously at that distance, or any specifiable distance, from Lear.7 Even anamorphic visual effects in two-dimensional images which depend upon the position of the viewer do not thereby reference the viewer’s position in any way. If I find myself in front of Holbein’s The Ambassadors in the National Gallery in London, I will need to stand in exactly the right spot relative to the painting’s surface in order to see the giant skull which would otherwise appear as a puzzling whitish mass in the foreground. But this in no way implies any relation between my position as an observer and any position within the field of objects depicted in the painting. The image does not care, so to speak, about my spatial relation to the image; my present position is simply nowhere to be found in the field of objects captured in the painting, the play, or the movie. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet given this feature of visual organization a name, so let us give it one now: structural indifference. Images are structurally indifferent insofar as they contain no internal or implicit reference to their viewer. It follows that Wollheim’s claim that “the only point from which I can centrally remember an event is mine” must be subject to severe caveats; it is not strictly true that “I am necessarily the protagonist of my event-memories” (Wollheim 1999, p. 105) unless we are using “I” in the sense of a quasi-indicator (Velleman 2006, pp. 184–6).8 Structural indifference would seem to entail that nothing within the image itself can secure the co-identity of the notional and actual subject. So why should any of this be a problem? There are two main reasons why this disconnection between the notional and actual subject of memories might bother us. The first arises if we take the view, associated with Locke,9 that there is some morethan-merely-evidential relationship between memory and personal identity. The objections to a straightforward memory criterion view of personal identity are well known, but the sense that memory somehow matters to the putative dimensions of personal identity that we care about—survival, moral responsibility, egocentric concern, etc.—is nonetheless hard to shake off. But it is the second reason that motivates Wollheim and Velleman: the need to specify in what sense memories are qualitatively different from other mental states such as imagination. It is clear that there is some experiential difference between remembering seeing Austerlitz (whether veridically or not) and imagining being Napoleon seeing Austerlitz. In the latter case, “[t]he notional reflexivity of my thoughts about Napoleon is less than Parfit credits the term “first-person mode of presentation” to Peacocke (1983). Williams (1973), p. 35 (Updating Williams’ reference to Olivier). 8 See also Castañeda (1967), (1968). 9 On the claim that Locke is not strictly a “memory theorist” in the sense that Reid, Butler et al. assumed, see Schechtman (1996), p. 107 and (2005), esp. p. 12. 6 7 Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 27 genuine” (Velleman 2006, p. 187). Specifying just what that difference might consist in, however, is notoriously hard, especially once structural indifference has been acknowledged. One option would be the sense of certitude and veridicality that pervades episodic (though not semantic) memory (Tulving 1983, p. 40), though it also seems possible to have episodic memories that lack this quality; looking back on childhood memories in particular, it can be hard to be sure these are veridical and not mere fantasies. Wollheim claims that “Every memory state comes labeled as such,” containing within itself a thought to the effect that it depends causally upon some earlier event in a way different from imagination or fantasy (1999, p. 118). But structural indifference implies that this “label” cannot be found within the immediate visual contents of the memory. This being the case, what salient features of a memory distinguish it from a mere “imagined seeing”? There have been two main families of responses to this question. The first option is to suggest that memories have some phenomenal property, over and above their sensory contents,10 that is lacking in mere imagination. Call this the phenomenal property approach. This path has a surprisingly distinguished history; it is taken by William James (1950, pp. 331–6), for example, who asserts that a certain “warmth and intimacy” or “animal heat” attaches to our personal memories but not the memories of others11 (to which of course we can only have imaginative access, however vivid). Even Wollheim, who ultimately rejects the phenomenal property approach, speaks of a “sense of familiarity” invested in the remembered event (1999, p. 118). These senses would amount to a phenomenal property of co-identity or ownership (perhaps related to what Heidegger called Jemeinigkeit, “mineness” or what Dan Zahavi [2007, p. 189] calls a quality of “first-personal givenness”), a sense that memories are my experiences in a way imagined scenes are not. The problem with the phenomenal property approach has traditionally been that it is difficult to point to any phenomenal property—or in Wollheim’s terms, any “distinctive aspect of the subjectivity of mental states”—that will hold for all memories (1999, p. 118). As James Giles (1997, p. 86) puts it, for whichever phenomenal quality of memory we nominate as the one that constitutes a sense of identity, “it seems it will be easy enough to find a memory of an earlier self that does not have it, or a memory of another person which does have it.” Even if it is not a necessary condition that only memories and no other states (e.g., imagining the past from some other person’s perspective) would have such a property, it would be necessary that all memories do have such a quality—and that seems empirically dubious. The search for a distinctive “memory affect” that holds for all memories thus looks very much like a non-starter. Let us assume, in fact, that this is correct: there is no distinctive phenomenal quality that is automatically encountered in each and every memory. As I will argue below, that need not be the end of the story for the phenomenal property approach. For the moment, though, we need to consider the compelling alternative. Using “sensory” as shorthand for the five classical senses plus others such as proprioception, etc. Correspondingly, Hazlitt (1805), p. 40, also speaks of “warmth of imagination” and “greater liveliness and force” to explain the interest we take in our projected future selves. 10 11 28 P. Stokes Non-stipulation and unself-conscious memory The second approach, which is favored by Wollheim and Velleman, is the inverse of the above: what “labels” memories as such is precisely the absence of something that is found in instances of imagined seeing. Call this the non-stipulation approach. Wollheim suggests that centrally imagining being someone else involves drawing on a certain psychological “repertoire,” a “total body of desires, beliefs and emotions” (1999, p. 87).12 If I imagine being Napoleon seeing Austerlitz, I must imagine the battlefield seen from the viewpoint of a victorious nineteenth century megalomaniac. But, Wollheim notes, before I can draw upon Napoleon’s “repertoire” in this way, I must first “select or assume it” (1999, p. 116). I have to actively take on the psychological outlook of Napoleon first. And this is quite different from how I centrally imagine myself in a given context where instead of having to assume a repertoire, I always simply “slip into” it. Actively assuming a repertoire beforehand is thus a necessary feature of exercises of imagined seeing (at least where the identity of the notional subject is reasonably concrete), but is simply incompatible with episodic memory. Velleman makes a closely related point,13 but at greater length and more closely focused on the question of the relation between notional and actual subject, or what connects me as actual subject to the notional subject figured in “genuinely” selfreflexive images such as those of episodic memories, but not to the notional subjects of my imagined seeing. For Velleman, the question is not how the actual self insinuates itself into the image being “seen” by the notional self in the imaginingbeing-Napoleon case, for it is clear that David Velleman is in no way figured in the image purportedly being “seen” by Napoleon even if David Velleman is the actual subject of this image; the notional subject tends to “crowd out the actual subject as the target of reflexive reference” (2006, p. 182), which expresses (in an equally metaphorical way) the same idea as structural indifference. Any “I” utterances the notional subject makes will refer to the notional subject, not the actual subject. The question then is how that subject comes to be identified with Napoleon? How does Napoleon, in Velleman’s terms, “get into the act” of a structurally indifferent image that does not contain him any more than me? Velleman’s answer is a prior stipulation of identity, akin to Wollheim’s assumption of a personal repertoire. We “center” the image “on” Napoleon more or less by fiat (Velleman 2006, p. 188); “[w]ithout this referential stipulation, my mental image would not be a way of thinking about Napoleon as ‘me,’ and so it would not be a way of imagining that I am Napoleon” (2006, p. 187).14 And just as such assumptions are alien to memory, such stipulations are no less foreign to genuinely reflexive thoughts and images (2006, p. 187). I do not need to specify who I am referring to when I say “I,” whereas if I am imagining being Napoleon, I do need to make such a stipulation (“I, Napoleon, see Austerlitz”).15 Genuine memories pick out the actual subject as identical with the notional subject not stipulatively, but Goldie (2000), pp. 195, 198–201, prefers the term “characterization.” The connection is noted by Mackenzie (2007), p. 279, n.12. 14 Smith (2006) makes much the same move using Peacocke’s distinction between experiential and suppositional imagination. See also Recanati (2007), pp. 203–207. 15 Wollheim (1999) p. 116 makes a similar point about self-ascription. 12 13 Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 29 precisely by being “unselfconscious about their reference, in that they require no other thought about who they refer to” (2006, p. 188). Reflexivity is already present in memories because they unselfconsciously present themselves as copies of past experiences. It is traditionally claimed that memories cannot be mistaken about the identity of the subject who experienced them; Velleman’s account implies that episodic memory cannot misidentify the subject of the original experience “only because it doesn’t thereby identify him at all” (2006, p. 192). And if there are no identity stipulations to be found in the sensory content of experiential memory, then “Memory can thus succeed in making someone “me” to me even if he was Napoleon—not, of course, by making him the same person as me, but rather by presenting him to me in the notional first-person” (2006, p. 192), though of course we can then check this against the causal history of the image to determine whether it is accurate (2006, p. 188). Velleman speaks here of genuinely reflexive forms of visualization as providing the subject with “access” to a “first-person perspective” which they can occupy by virtue of a causal history that is not figured in the image itself. Underlying this claim is a distinction Velleman draws between personal identity as a metaphysical relation holding between persons at different times and reflexivity as a psychological relation holding between subjects who can think of each other first-personally (2006, p. 192– 3). In this latter sense, memory “recruits past selves for me, by putting them within reach of subjectively reflexive thought” (2006, p. 193). Whether I fail to be metaphysically identical with Napoleon or not, I fail to be perspectivally identical because stipulating who the notional subject of my image of Austerlitz is thereby rules it out of contention as a genuinely reflexive memory; “I am not really on firstpersonal terms with Napoleon” but only pretend to be (2006, p. 194). The difficulty is that, insofar as Velleman wants perspectival access to do most of the work that personal identity was traditionally taken to do—secure egocentric concern and moral responsibility, ground our concern for survival, etc.16—then he needs to show that memory and projective imagination “recruit” perspectivally available selves in more or less the same way. If memories are genuinely reflexive because they present a first-personal perspective with no extraneous identity stipulations, then we would expect anticipatory imagination, if it is to preserve the same forms of concern we have regarding our past selves, to present our future selves in the same way. But memory and anticipation might not, in fact, determine the identity of the notional subject in the same way (2006, p. 195). For one thing, if I visualize something that I plan or expect to do, the identity of the notional subject accompanying that anticipatory image would seem to be under my direct control— and that seems to render anticipatory imagination no different from other forms of imagined seeing in that the identity of the notional subject has to be stipulated beforehand (2006, p. 196). Yet Velleman insists that some modes of anticipation are in fact “unselfconscious” in the same way as memories, thereby placing the notional and actual subject of anticipatory images in a genuinely first-personal relation to each other. 16 The literature on whether identity matters in survival is voluminous, but see especially Lewis (1976), Parfit (1984), Sosa (1990), Unger (1992), Martin (1998), and Belzer (2005). 30 P. Stokes This serves, according to Velleman, to “ground a distinction between real and imaginary future selves” (2006, p. 196). Framing intentions, for instance, involves visualizing a future action in a way that always presents a notional subject and which always presents that subject as “me” (2006, p. 197). Once again, the co-identity of this notional subject and the actual subject (the person doing the anticipating) is secured by the “future causal history of the intention itself;” “the referent of “me” in the context is simply whoever fills the role of subject within that perspective” (2006, p. 198). One of the great merits of Velleman’s position is that it turns the apparent weakness of episodic memory as a bearer of identity (namely, structural indifference) into a strength. The phenomenal “unselfconsciousness” about identity that characterizes memory and anticipation, but not imagined seeing, coheres nicely with the lack of reference to the remembering/anticipating subject in the images such experiences present us with. Yet while Velleman is absolutely right to draw our attention to the non-reflective, immediate character of our experience of identity with remembered past selves and anticipated future selves, it can be argued that there is nonetheless some key experiential property of these experiences that distinguishes them from mere imagination, rather than it being the absence of anything additional that marks them out in this way. What I now propose to do is to put pressure on Velleman’s account using a distinction within the phenomenology of memory and anticipation that is (more or less explicitly) identified in different ways by Kierkegaard, Parfit, and Schechtman. What Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral imagination in particular points toward is an active, appropriative property that gets superadded to memory and anticipation, the presence or absence of which is crucial for the sort of concerns that motivate questions about personal identity. First-person perspectives and alienation Several (broadly) neo-Lockean commentators on personal identity have noted instances where we become affectively alienated from our past and future in ways that appear to compromise or destroy our sense of identity with our temporally distant person stages. Such cases are only possible because two levels of identity are in play: a level on which we acknowledge various forms of identity-sustaining continuity (physical, psychological, historical) and the level on which we experience ourselves as what Strawson (2003) calls “Me*”—the mental entity I experience myself as being right now. And these two levels can sometimes come apart. Someone who claims “I’m no longer the person I was when I committed that crime” is clearly not uttering something straightforwardly nonsensical and contradictory (to the effect of “I am and am not the person who committed the crime”), but nor is she merely speaking metaphorically either. Rather, she is acknowledging identity on one level while failing to experience a sense that the past/future actions she contemplates where the actions of the self she is now. A classic example is Parfit’s (1984, p. 327) Nineteenth Century Russian, an idealistic young socialist who tries to safeguard his commitment to giving away his eventual inheritance from being rescinded by the older conservative he knows he will likely become. In cases like this, we can still outline a causal history connecting Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 31 us with the selves in question; it is precisely because he foresees such a causal sequence unfolding that the Russian sees a need to frustrate the actions of his future self. Yet his relation to this future conservative completely lacks egocentric concern: it is not that the Russian is horrified that he, the self he feels himself to be now, will change so much, but more that it seems to him as if some other future person will intervene to frustrate the interests of the person he now is. In other words, the complete lack of what Schechtman (2003) labels “empathic access,” the ability to identify with the emotions, concerns, and dispositions of his far-future self, means the Russian does not experience himself as being the same self as a being whose perspective is nonetheless fully first-personally available to him given their causal connection.17 But why should what happens on this affective level matter for Velleman’s account? After all, in the cases of affective alienation we are describing, there is no problem with securing, via a causal history, non-stipulative first-personal access to the perspective of the past or future self. It is this perspectival access that allows us, in Locke’s phrase, to become “self to ourself.” But Velleman claims that when we talk about personal identity, what we fundamentally care about is perspectival access rather than metaphysical sameness; Locke’s mistake (which has haunted the literature ever since) was confusing the two (Velleman 2006, p. 193). It is our capacity to occupy some past or future perspective that is in question when we ask about whether it will be us who was there in the past or will survive into the future;18 our egocentric concern and sense of moral responsibility track this perspectival question rather than any metaphysical facts about continuity across time. But experiences like that of the Nineteenth Century Russian suggest such concern can become detached from unselfconscious perspectival availability. The young man is sufficiently causally connected to be able to unselfconsciously occupy the perspective of his older self (though his capacity to frame intentions for his future self to enact will be greatly curtailed), but still feel that the old man is not him in any way that captures what we care about in personal survival. This would not be a problem if we could dismiss cases like the Nineteenth Century Russian as exceptional instances where the usual mechanisms of perspectival access have somehow gone awry, such that the link between perspectival access and a sense of identification have to be repaired in some (presumably self-conscious) way. But self-alienation of this sort is more pervasive than we might imagine; the Russian stands at the far end of a continuum of experiences which includes more localized and less radical forms of alienation (“Ugh, look at these old photos: I can’t believe I wore those hideous shirts back in the mid-90s!”), which suggests that whatever sense of identity is ordinarily secured by perspectival access per se will be highly susceptible to decay even over relatively Jan Branson (2008, p. 104) has recently put Velleman and Schechtman together here, arguing that “the unselfconscious access the actual subject is supposed to have to the perspective of the notional subject is part of the phenomenology of memory and intention only if it is backed up by the actual subject’s empathic access to the notional subject’s perspective […] empathic access in Schechtman’s sense is a requirement for unselfconscious access in Velleman’s sense.” Only perspectives that are “characteristically “colored” by the subject’s stance toward the world and himself as agent” are susceptible to the sort of unselfconscious co-identity Velleman describes—a view which in some ways seems to be pushing in a similar direction to the one I here ascribe to Kierkegaard. 18 Also a key thesis of Martin (1998). 17 32 P. Stokes short periods of time. My various person stages, by contrast—my falling off a pier at the age of four, wearing dreadful flannel shirts in the 1990s, and eating a sandwich twenty minutes ago—are all equally perspectivally accessible to me now. And this suggests that causally secured, unselfconscious perspectival accessibility cannot, by itself, reliably secure affective identification with past and future person stages across more than a short part of its range. Even for a sense of identity with relatively recent past person stages, it seems we need something additional to constitute our connection with the selves figured in the past and future. As noted, the phenomenal property approach has offered several candidates for this additional element, such as James’ “warmth and intimacy” or Schechtman’s “empathic access.” I’ve argued elsewhere (Stokes 2008) that Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity” (Danish samtidighed) offers us another picture of a sort of phenomenal “glue” that unites the phenomenal and narrative selves that come apart in cases of affective self-alienation—one that, unlike other such phenomenal properties, is essentially normative in character. I do not propose to rehash this argument in full here; instead, I will outline the concept of contemporaneity with reference to the linkage between the notional and actual subject as raised by Velleman. Kierkegaardian contemporaneity “Contemporaneity” (samtidighed) is a topic that runs throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship from his first major publication in 1843 right up to his final writings in 1855 (when he declares contemporaneity “the decisive point” and “my life’s thought” – Kierkegaard 1998 p. 290). Contemporaneity, however, has received relatively little attention in the critical literature on Kierkegaard,19 and even less that engages with contemporaneity as a phenomenal property of experience rather than a description of the epistemological condition of the Christian believer. Moreover, contemporaneity occurs mostly in Kierkegaardian discussions of the nature of revelation, which has lead commentators such as C. Stephen Evans (1992, p. 114) and Michelle Kosch (2006, p. 180) to assume that samtidighed is some form of religious experience. Such a reading is at least compatible with Kierkegaard’s most sustained discussion of contemporaneity (in Philosophical Fragments), but it is much harder to reconcile with what Kierkegaard says about contemporaneity in The Book on Adler and Practice in Christianity—and even more so with Either/Or where samtidighed occurs as a property of everyday, direct experience that the figure “Johannes the Seducer” finds he cannot recreate in episodic memory (Kierkegaard 1987, p. 339; 1997a, p. 387).20 Accordingly, the (necessarily truncated) discussion Discussions of samtidighed (and related concepts) can be found in Taylor (1975), Evans (1992), Gouwens (1996), Rocca (2004), Westphal (2004), Rae (2004), Kosch (2006), Welz (2007), Martens (2008), Stokes (2008), and Stokes (2010b). The concept has also been adopted and put to other uses by Gadamer (1975) and Bonhoeffer (1966). 20 This is an important clue: what Kierkegaard says in The Book on Adler suggests that visualized events can have the property of phenomenal contemporaneity, but it seems that Johannes the Seducer, as a nonethical “aesthete,” lacks it in his episodic memories. Hopefully, it will shortly become apparent why this is so. 19 Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 33 that follows assumes contemporaneity to be a phenomenal property that can be a feature of non-religious experiences, but that also has special application to religiously qualified exercises of visual imagination (and I would suggest ethically qualified ones as well). In Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus (among the more overtly philosophical of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms) asks whether a historical contemporary of Jesus enjoys any sort of epistemic advantage, qua believer, over the believer who happens to be born after Jesus’ death. It seems truistic that a participant in some distant historical event, about which we have only sketchy details, has some sort of special access that the rest of us lack—“for otherwise what help is it to be contemporary?” (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 66; 1997b, p. 268, translation modified). The contemporary saw how it really was, while we can only ever get a partial reconstruction through historical records and under-informed imagination. Yet this is, of course, simply a contingent empirical fact about human psychology: if we had a sufficiently detailed historical report, coupled with a sufficiently vivid imagination (or perhaps an extraordinarily detailed virtual reality machine), there is no theoretical impediment, at least, to our seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling everything that the contemporary did. However, Climacus claims that the situation of the Christian qua believer is qualitatively different: as it is a feature of Christian belief that Jesus appeared in all respects like a normal human being (“The presence of the god in human form— indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching” [Kierkegaard 1985, p. 55; 1997b, p. 258]), there is no purely empirical access to the putative fact of Christ’s divinity. Hence, no historical contemporary will find it easier to believe in the incarnation simply by virtue of having seen the “God-Man” in the flesh;21 the historical contemporary, even the closest and most keenly observant, “will be in the very same situation as the follower at second hand” (1985, p. 59; 1997b, p. 261). Yet having thus dismissed historical contemporaneity as epistemically advantageous with respect to the question of the divinity of Christ, Climacus goes on to speak of a “real” contemporary who “is not that by virtue of immediate [i.e. historical] contemporaneity but by virtue of something else” and who does hold some sort of advantage thereby (1985, p. 67; 1997b, p. 268). As both the historical contemporary and the follower at second hand are in the “same position” epistemically, it follows that this “real” contemporary can either live in direct physical contact with Christ or live thousands of years later, without this affecting their ability to become “contemporary,” in some higher sense, with the event of the incarnation.22 In his imaginatively mediated engagement with the events described in biblical narratives, the believer who is “not an eyewitness (in the sense of immediacy)” is 21 It could be objected that New Testament accounts of miracles present a problem here: surely in such cases, it is easier to believe what one has seen with one’s own eyes? However, Kierkegaard elsewhere seems to claim that the extraordinary is actually harder to believe when it is directly before one, precisely because one cannot defer the decision on whether it is occurring. See Stokes (2010b). 22 Gouwens (1996), pp. 134–135, notes that this “event” increasingly takes on the form of an extended narrative rather than just “a bare historical ‘that’ of ‘the moment’ of Incarnation, an icon of eternity invading time.” 34 P. Stokes nonetheless “contemporary in the autopsy of faith” (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 70; 1997b, pp. 270–71) “Autopsy” is used here in the sense of “seeing for oneself” (autos+optos), a capacity to look at the putative event of the incarnation made available by a different mode of vision—seeing “with the eyes of faith” (1985, p. 103; 1997b, p. 299)23—that constitutes a form of contemporaneity with the event available both to historical contemporaries and those living thousands of years later. A sort of “direct inspection” of the event is made available to the modern-day believer, but conversely, the direct historical contemporary is not necessarily contemporaneous with the event of the incarnation in this eminent sense; unless he “sees with the eyes of faith,” his direct physical access to Jesus is of no avail. It is only by seeing the envisioned events in a particular way that one becomes contemporary with them— and this applies, quite indifferently, to both direct sensory perception and imaginative reconstruction (and also memory, for Climacus also discusses the recollections of an historical contemporary after Jesus’ death - 1985, p. 65; 1997b, p. 267). Kierkegaard posits, therefore, a way of seeing that makes a radical qualitative difference to an experience. Yet this difference is unrelated to the visual content of the experience: the historical contemporary who “sees with the eyes of faith” and the historical contemporary who does not could both take in precisely the same visual information, yet “see” something completely different. Equally, the follower at first hand and follower at second hand see may experience utterly different visual content, given the vicissitudes of imagination and paucity of historical data, yet each is exactly as phenomenally “contemporary” with the event in question such that we are no longer even allowed to speak in terms of followers at first- and second-hand anymore (Kierkegaard 1985, p. 103; 1997b, p. 299). While this does not yet tell us much about what this supposed form of vision consists in (we will have more to say shortly), it should begin to be apparent how this relates to the question of how the notional and actual subjects of a visualization are connected: seeing “with the eyes of faith” amounts to phenomenally collapsing the distinction between notional and actual subject. Danish samtidighed, literally “same-time-ness,” can also be translated “simultaneity,” and this tells us something about the contemporaneous experience of an event like the incarnation: the believer experiences the event with a property of direct presence, experiencing it as if it is happening right now. A believer’s engagement with the incarnation has a property of being “right in front of” them whether their visual image of this event is primary (the believer at first hand) or secondary (the believer at second hand).24 But as the historical contemporary can fail to become phenomenally contemporary with such an event, this property of phenomenal contemporaneity cannot be a function of the sensory input or visual constitution of the experience. It has to be something phenomenal, but not sensory, that attends the image—something affective. Contemporaneity of this sort thereby removes any question over whether the perspectives of the notional and actual subject are identical: if one encounters the 23 24 On this topic, see Rocca (2004). It is worth noting at this point that much of Climacus’ discussion of contemporaneity is strikingly visual in character. Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 35 incarnation with the property of phenomenal contemporaneity, the experience will be the same, in some salient respect, regardless of whether the follower is physically colocated with the event or imaginatively reconstructing it thousands of years later. But this crucially differs from imagined seeing in that, like memory, it is immediate and “unselfconscious” in Velleman’s strictly cognitive sense: the later follower does not stipulate that she is some historical contemporary of Jesus’ standing at a specifiable distance from him as he talks, nor does she imagine or believe that she is somehow causally continuous with someone who lived two thousand years ago in Romanoccupied Judea, understood Aramaic, etc. The actual subject of the image utters no identity-stipulative phrase equivalent to “I, Napoleon, see Austerlitz”, but nor is the fact that it is the subject personally—the actual subject—who is addressed elided from the experience. How is this possible? How does the actual subject “get into the act” here? To answer this question, we need a better specification of what this phenomenal property of simultaneity with some past event is like. In remarks scattered throughout his writings, Kierkegaard speaks of contemporaneity as a property of co-presence, as opposed to an experience of imaginative distance: the sort of distance we can use to keep the full implications of what we are contemplating at bay. In the unfinished Book on Adler, we are told that it makes an “infinite difference” whether “one for one’s own sake considers something in the situation of contemporaneity” or instead “casually thinks about something in the delusion that it was eighteen hundred years ago” (Kierkegaard 1995, p. 44)—which “becomes identical with leaving it undecided” whether the narrated events, with their soteriological implications, are true or not (1995, p. 41). Whether we experience the event as a historical eyewitness or later follower, the outlandish event of a human being claiming to be God and offering personal salvation demands a response, one way or the other, from the individual. Both the historical contemporary and those who read their reports have the option of merely suspending judgment or of paying lip service to the belief without fully and personally confronting what is really at issue in this belief-claim, but to do so is precisely not to become phenomenally contemporary with the event (Kierkegaard 1991, p. 41; 2008, p. 55). In the situation of phenomenal contemporaneity, we encounter this event, whether directly or through imagination, with the same urgency as an event occurring right before our eyes, one that speaks to us directly and personally and makes demands of us. This answers a question we might have about how the same property of contemporaneity could be a feature of both episodic memory and anticipation on the one hand, which involve apprehensions of events in our own lives, and events outside our own lives such as episodes in the life of Jesus on the other. This seems dangerously close to collapsing the distinction between remembering and imagining, though with the added complication that I am not imagining being anyone in the scene I recreate in imagination. How can contemporaneity with my own past and future be the same, phenomenally speaking, with events that fall well outside my own experience and in which I am in no way a participant? The pseudonym AntiClimacus, at least, asserts explicitly that this is possible: “Thus every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living—and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred 36 P. Stokes history, stands alone by itself, outside history” (Kierkegaard 1991, p. 64; 2008, p. 76). But what qualification of phenomenal experience could be common to genuinely reflexive memory and imaginatively mediated engagements with sources such as scripture? In the passage just cited, Anti-Climacus provides an answer: the qualification that makes us contemporary with both types of events, “which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all religiousness is—for you” (Kierkegaard 1991, p. 64; 2008, p. 76). This “for you” character of events in “sacred history” consists in the way they are experienced as addressing themselves personally to the person who contemplates them. It is this quality of experiencing an event (whether directly perceived or imaginatively mediated) as issuing a personal and direct demand upon the observer, and not its sensory detail or realism, that gives the experience its quality of “happening now” regardless of whether they are events in the biological life of the subject or certain events (here, events with soteriological significance for the subject) that fall outside it. Whereas we can normally view historical events from the outside, in the position of dispassionate observers—for history is structurally indifferent—events encountered in scripture have, for the believer, the property of engaging them personally, of being about them. Kierkegaard calls this “being alone with” scripture a continuous (if non-thematized) awareness that “It is I to whom it is speaking; it is I about whom it is speaking” (1990, p. 31).25 Being “alone with scripture” amounts to experiencing it as talking to the reader as a specific individual, not as the generalized, abstract figure of “the reader.” As Nishitani (1982, p. 27) notes, this individuating power of religious narratives cuts across religious traditions: compare Paul’s declaration that Jesus “gave himself for me” and Shinran’s claim that “When I carefully consider the Vow which Amida brought forth after five kalpas’ contemplation, I find that it was solely for me, Shinran.” There is no mediation here: the believer is addressed directly and personally as if they themselves were interlocutors. It is Paul for whom the event of Jesus’ death occurs, and it is Shinran for whom the event of Amitābha’s vowing to save all beings from suffering occurs. On the propositional level, it is of course true that the death and the vow occur for all people, and thus, they are done for Paul and Shinran only insofar as they are members of that set; but on the phenomenal level, the effect is of a direct personal address, whereby the viewer sees themselves as personally involved every bit as much as if they had been historically present at the event. The net effect of this is to claim that where I regard some past event as making some sort of normative claim on me—as being something for which I am responsible, that for or to which I am to respond—I can experience it with a certain property that connects me as actual subject to the perspective of the notional subject figured in the image. This says nothing about the origin of that normativity (and therefore does not rule out mistaken beliefs about what we are and are not obligated by) but does, I hope, make it clear that it is the experience of this phenomenal property, not the fact of being normatively enjoined per se, that does the work of 25 I offer a much fuller treatment of this topic in Stokes (2010a). Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 37 uniting the notional and actual subject here. The unity is a felt, subjective one, not an objective state of affairs (even if it does in fact track some objective set of facts).26 Our discussion has centered on the question of co-presence with the (in Kierkegaard’s view, uniquely privileged) historical event of the incarnation; but insofar as Anti-Climacus claims I can also become contemporary with events in my own life, this same property can also be a feature of standard episodic memories, not just imagined scenes from the distant past. Contemporaneity is therefore not a property of purely religious experience, nor simply a (somewhat metaphorical) description of the epistemic situation of the religious believer, but a property of ordinary moral experience that applies when contemplating any situation involves a sense that it concerns the contemplator directly and individually. Yet as the experience of Johannes the Seducer (who cannot reproduce the element of contemporaneity in his recollections of meetings with his soon-to-be latest conquest) shows, it is not always a feature of episodic memories. Accordingly, it will not supply us with the “memory affect”—the phenomenal property always present in memories and always absent from imagined seeing— that we despaired of finding earlier. What this suggests is that whatever the causal accessibility of the perspective figured in some past remembered/imagined scene, on the phenomenal level, the connection of the notional and actual subject in both memory and imagination is contingent. This last point agrees with the split we noted above between causal connectedness and affective identification. Someone who considers their past deeds and declares “I’m no longer that person” still acknowledges a vast amount of physical and psychological continuity and causal connectivity between themselves now and the person figured in their memories, and perhaps some sort of liability (legal, social, etc.) for that person’s actions; yet their denial of identity with that person is, as I suggested earlier, more than merely metaphorical. Whatever we might say about the metaphysical basis of personal identity (which is not Kierkegaard’s concern here), phenomenal identification with the past person is contingent upon an affective sense that the past deeds figured in memory are what the present self is responsible for. While it may be the case that imagined scenes and memory feel different in other respects, this is not what makes them reflexive: their reflexivity comes from my feeling myself responsible for them by envisaging them as making a direct demand upon me, as if they were happening for me right now. Shifting the locus of reflexivity in this way, such that imagined images can also have the property of reflexivity regardless of their causal history, actually helps in dealing with puzzles about the perspectival accessibility of acentrally remembered events. As one example, “observer memories,” where we envision ourselves from the outside— as an object within the visual field rather than merely implied by its perspectival organization—are surprisingly common (Nigro and Neisser 1983; Robinson and Swanson 1993; McIsaac and Eich 2002; Deebus 2007, pp. 198–202). If episodic 26 There is a certain unavoidable ambiguity here, insofar as contemporaneity centrally involves a sense of being “claimed” by the event—a sense of having something imposed on us—while still being dependent upon our subjective engagement with the event; thus, when we fail to experience this sense of being claimed, we are ourselves responsible for this failure. On these sorts of volitional ambiguities in Kierkegaard, see Ferreira (1998) and Stokes (2010a), pp. 130–133. 38 P. Stokes memories are veridical copies of past experiences, it seems problematic that some memories could be “from the outside” in this way; yet while there appear to be experimentally discernible differences in emotional content and the salience of recalled details, for all intents and purposes, these do seem to be genuine memories. They are also generally unselfconscious in Velleman’s sense. But if we make contemporaneity the key to genuine reflexivity, this problem disappears. If I visually remember an event with the subjective phenomenal property of being personally responsible for it (whatever the source and scope of that responsibility), it does not matter whether the physical perspective from which the event is presented as having been recorded is one that could have been physically available to me or not. Moreover, we can imaginatively experience past actions we have no recollection of (due to age, amnesia, intoxication, etc.) as being the deeds of selves we are on genuinely first-personal terms with, precisely because we see them as deeds we are answerable for. Interestingly, this secures quite a lot of what Locke (1975, pp. 344-6) himself wanted his account of personal identity to vouchsafe: the “forensick” concept of the person, which holds together everything that we shall be held accountable for on “the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open.” Locke saw that the notion of an immaterial soul could not do the work of constituting personal identity, but nonetheless sought a way, using the extension of consciousness across time, to preserve the soul’s eschatological function as a bearer of moral responsibility and worth. Locke never seems to anticipate the possibility of affective alienation like that of the Nineteenth Century Russian. But he did raise the problem of responsibility for actions committed in states of drunkenness, somnambulism, etc. to which we cannot now extend our consciousness because memory does not connect us with them.27 Locke found no satisfactory answer to this problem, but perhaps here we can see one emerging, at least in vague outline: if I can imagine the past deed with an affectively rich sense of it as something for which I am responsible, then it is genuinely perspectivally recruited to me (whether this could form the basis of a metaphysics of identity, however, seems unlikely). Thoughts about this past event are as genuinely reflexive as standard memories are taken to be if the same property of normative for-me-ness is present in them. Finally, we can recruit images that present events that I was clearly not physically co-located with at all. Locke held that if I can extend my consciousness to the Deluge, then the self I am now is indeed the same self as one that saw the Deluge (1975, pp. 340–1). This looks like a reductio ad absurdum of the memory criterion for personal identity, unless I can tell some bizarre story that links me causally to someone living thousands of years ago. Without making any claims about metaphysical identity, Kierkegaard also talks about becoming contemporary with biblical events and in other contexts suggests we could similarly become “present” with events in the Middle Ages should they acquire “decisive reality” for us (1987, p. 224; 1997a, p. 218). In such a case, the subject would be co-present with visualized long-ago events because she would experience them with the phenomenal sense that they make demands of her as she is here and now. We could, moreover, 27 See, e.g., Allison (1966). Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 39 include events for which I bear agent responsibility despite not being physically present: if I was the person who betrayed Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, I could imagine their deaths, at different times and various places, as events in my life understood as the life I am to answer for. These may not, strictly speaking, be events within the spatiotemporal history of my body, but they might, in the normative sense discussed here, fall within a perspective with which I can still be on first-personal terms. And this leads us to the broader question of the relation between contemporaneity and imagination per se. Anticipatory imagination It is a pervasive claim throughout Kierkegaard’s work that certain forms of selfreflexive thought or vision involve seeing oneself within remembered and projected scenarios (Stokes 2010a). In the account of moral imagination offered by the Kierkegaardian pseudonym Anti-Climacus, we find a persistent concern for the importance of recognizing ourselves in representations of our projected future actions, seeing “oneself” in the “mirror of possibility” instead of seeing only a human being (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 37; 2006, p. 152). But what might it mean “to see oneself” as the person who carries out the intentions I frame in projective imagination? For Velleman, as we have seen, framing an intention (or simply anticipating the future) involves experiencing the notional subject of the image of the future we project as first-personally accessible by virtue of the image’s causal history rather than any extraneous stipulations. We do not stipulate the identity of the person who “turns up” to fill the position; he is “simply the person who will confront the envisioned future with this image at his back,” his identity “picked out by the natural history of the image, as the person whom it presents in the notional firstperson” (Velleman 2006, pp. 198–9).28 But there is nonetheless something distinctive about these modes of anticipatory imagination when compared to, say, simply visualizing some future event: in both cases, we do not stipulate the identity of the notional subject, but our way of anticipating colors how the future will eventually be experienced. “I don’t just anticipate experiencing the future; I anticipate experiencing it as the payoff of this anticipation, as the cadence resolving the present, anticipatory phrase of thought” (Velleman 2006, p. 198); thus, I cannot, for instance, anticipate being shocked by an event that I am already anticipating (2006, p. 199). It is because of these forms of “intercommunication” between the notional and actual perspective that I care more about what I anticipate happening to me than to others: to imagine the future event “befalling a mind that has somehow been prepared” by precisely this anticipation is to be “caught up in it” in a way that, “to some degree, already constitutes [the event’s] mattering” (2006, p. 199). 28 This forecloses, according to Velleman, the possibility that we could be on genuinely reflexive terms with the persons created in “fission” thought experiments, as we could not anticipate having their experiences without specifying which post-fission person’s experience it is. Shipley (2002) and Belzer (2005) reject this argument. 40 P. Stokes What Kierkegaard brings to this sort of discussion, however, is an awareness that there are different ways of imagining a causally connected first-person perspective, some of which contain a sense of identity and some of which do not—even when the causal connectedness of the two perspectives is not in question. There are, for instance, ways in which we can imagine future actions that are strongly connected or contiguous with the circumstances of our lives right now and which we frame specifically as intentions, and yet which we do not fully “inhabit” in some sense. In his discussion of imagination and agency, Anti-Climacus casts the images of possible actions we present to ourselves in terms of a “mirror” that shows us selves to which we bear a rather curious ontological/modal relationship: The mirror of possibility is no ordinary mirror; it must be used with extreme caution, for, in the highest sense, this mirror does not tell the truth. That a self appears to be such and such in the possibility of itself is only a half-truth, for in the possibility of itself the self is still far from or is only half of itself. (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 37; 2006, p. 152). The selves presented in anticipatory or intention-framing imagination are, truistically, selves that have realized (or are in the process of realizing) possibilities that have not yet in fact been realized. But for Anti-Climacus, what is at issue here is not just the causal history by which the prefigured intention comes to be realized but the particular way in which we see the selves we encounter in projective imagination: “Even in seeing oneself in a mirror it is necessary to recognize oneself, for if one does not, one does not see oneself but only a human being.” (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 37; 2006, p. 152). It is clearly not a feature of projective imagination that we sometimes have to work out reflectively whether it is us involved in the projected scenario—that is simply given in the experience of anticipation or framing an intention. That, after all, is one of the unassailable strengths of Velleman’s account: there are no overt cognitions of the sort “and that will be me,” just as no comparable such cognitions attend memory. Velleman and Anti-Climacus agree, I think, that we have an “immediate” relationship to the selves so figured, without any cognitive stipulations. To that extent, Anti-Climacus could probably accede to the claim that purely imaginary exercises such as imagining being Napoleon seeing Austerlitz are not genuinely self-reflexive. But what Anti-Climacus takes genuine self-reflexivity to consist in is a mode of experience that forms a phenomenal connection between the present and future perspectives. Like recognition—an immediate, essentially perceptual experience in which we suddenly see something as what we recognize it to be—this amounts to seeing a future perspective as mine in some phenomenally decisive sense, independent of causal facts about which human it belongs to. Conversely, we can frame intentions or anticipate possibilities without experiencing a sense of phenomenal identification with the self figured in those possibilities. Consider someone who decides that someday soon she is going to give away all her possessions, move to an isolated spot in the countryside, and live a life of rustic simplicity and ecological sustainability. She envisions, with great frequency and in exquisite detail, how she will divest herself of the trappings of modern life, how she will deal with her family’s responses, and what her country life will be like. She tells Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 41 anyone who will listen of the move she is “planning.” But—and here is why the scare quotes around “planning” seem justified—weeks, months, and years pass and the move to the country never happens. It remains always off in the “someday soon,” continually planned for but never actually carried out. What can we say about our would-be latter-day Thoreau’s relation to this intention? She is not straightforwardly akratic, and it seems too hasty to claim that she does not honestly intend to realize her plan. But we can have serious misgivings as to whether she seriously holds this intention—she frames it as a genuine intention and imagines a human being causally connected with herself as “turning up” to carry this intention out, but she does not experience a phenomenal sense that she, the self she experiences herself as being right now, is enjoined to take action to this end. Without the sense that this possibility speaks to her personally as presenting what she, here and now, is to bring about, the intention degrades into mere reverie or fantasy. The future scenario appears not as a task but as a mere diversion, a plaything. As Kierkegaard’s jaded aesthete notes in Either/Or, possibility is an intoxicant that, unlike pleasure itself, never disappoints (1987, p. 26; 1997a, p. 50). As cases like this show, we can indulge in such pleasures while insisting that we are seriously and soberly framing intentions, all the while quarantining ourselves from the implications of what we envision. In such reveries, we “transmute,” as Catriona Mackenzie puts it, from centrally imagining being me (the actual subject) to imagining from the notional first-person perspective of a person I would like to be— but unlike in the example Mackenzie (2008, p. 127) cites (of a timid child imaging standing up to bullies in ways inconsistent with her actual personality), the distance between the notional and actual perspectives is constituted by a lack of reflexive identification rather than an awareness of dispositional difference. In such cases, we do not, as Anti-Climacus puts it, see ourselves in the mirror but only a human being—even though it is clear that on Anti-Climacus’ account, we do not see it as another human being. In other words, we acknowledge our co-identity with the human figured in the scenario we imagine, but we do not see this as being the same self. This is, clearly, a future-directed counterpart to the forms of affective alienation from our past that we have been discussing above. In that sense, it resembles Parfit’s Nineteenth Century Russian, yet what Kierkegaard is talking about here is altogether more subtle. The young Russian explicitly and firmly denies his co-identity with the older conservative he imagines he will become. In the sort of cases Anti-Climacus is gesturing toward, however, there is no such overt denial, or even reflectively acknowledged sense of alienation. We fail to “occupy” the position of the notional subject of the projected experience without any awareness that we are doing so. Conclusion The merit of the Kierkegaardian version of the phenomenal property approach to the question of what links us with our first-personally accessible past and future perspectives is that it allows for the gap that is sometimes experienced between the causal and phenomenal accessibility of our memories and projected futures. An account such as Velleman’s that claims that an unselfconscious causal history provides 42 P. Stokes the sort of perspectival access that underpins egocentric concern will struggle with cases where such access is taken as given but egocentric concern fails to hold. That is not to say that the Kierkegaardian version does not bring along some problems of its own. Whether we can recognize anything in our own experience that answers to Kierkegaard’s scattered (and occasionally opaque) descriptions of the phenomenal property of contemporaneity may not be universally accepted; certainly, the précis I have given of it here may not evoke an instant sense of familiarity in all readers. We might try to flesh out the concept by appealing to Wollheim’s notion of “cogency”: the capacity of episodic memories to leave the actual subject in the same affective condition as the notional subject, such as where remembering some terrifying event leaves me feeling as terrified as the protagonist of that memory (Wollheim 1999, p. 105).29 That certainly captures some of the sense of urgency of Kierkegaardian samtidighed, but not its normative aspects, nor is it clear that I would have to experience the same emotions when remembering an event as when originally experiencing it in order to be phenomenally contemporaneous with it. Ultimately, how convincing we find the phenomenology of samtidighed may differ for each reader who encounters it. The model I have outlined also stands in pressing need of some criterion for determining what we are and are not responsible for and therefore the limits of the phenomenally accessible self. Not everyone would want to sign up for Levinas’ (1969, pp. 244–5) picture of a self individuated by infinite, unbounded responsibility (perhaps not even Kierkegaard—after all, Anti-Climacus limits contemporaneity to events in our own lives plus events in “sacred history,” though Kierkegaard’s concern to close off avenues of reflective escape from moral responsibility would give him important pedagogic reasons not to supply a clear boundary criterion), so some account of how far our “moral selves” stretch is clearly required. Such a question is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of the present paper. Equally, Kierkegaardians might object both to removing Kierkegaard from his proper historical context and to importing a concept from Kierkegaard’s religious epistemology into a purely philosophical discussion of personal identity on the basis that this does a kind of exegetical violence to Kierkegaard’s work. There is always the risk, as Gordon Marino (2001, p. 69) puts it, of reducing Kierkegaard to “Heidegger evangelicized.” But even removed from its religious context, the concept of contemporaneity remains robustly and irreducibly normative in character insofar as the notion of responsibility is inseparable from contemporaneity. And in that sense, the phenomenal property of contemporaneity connects with many of our intuitions about the relationship between identity and factors like moral responsibility and survival—precisely the concerns that personal or perspectival identity is supposed to secure. As an account of how the notional and actual subjects of memories and of anticipatory imagination are linked, contemporaneity therefore seems to deliver more of what we are seeking in personal identity theory than the non-stipulation approach.30 29 30 See also MacKenzie (2008), pp. 124–126. This paper was made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Danish Research Council — Humanities. I would also like to record my thanks to audiences at St. Olaf College, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre and the University of Copenhagen, and to anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of some of this material. Uniting the perspectival subject: Two approaches 43 References Allison, H. (1966). Locke’s theory of personal identity: A re-examination. Journal of the History of Ideas, 27(1), 41–58. Belzer, M. (2005). Self-conception and personal identity: Revisiting Parfit and Lewis with an eye on the grip of the unity reaction. 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