In my thesis I argue for a philosophical-anthropological approach which enables investigations in empathy and care by opening up a window on the motivation of recognition. I show how biographies as narratives can help to understand the other within her or his own life-world, even if the life-world is the very part of our personality as a dividually conceived relational self. Therewith, personhood can be conceived in a new concept of personhood that is understood as a category of the human (...) being endowed with a stronger focus on culturally and historically founded dividuality and relationality, instead of relying exclusively on individuality and subjectivity. To show this relational movement in our life-world, I introduce ‘the Melanesian’ worldview on personhood. This worldview assumes that we are holistically relational. Thus, it lets the perception of an objective world shift into a world of animated entities which become parts of the human. Other people are also part of our life, and, in this way, take part in the life-world − and thus in life. In consequence, the life-world as the place where humans get in touch with each other builds up the social community: others have a particular role just as we take part in their lives. Our relationship with others is related to certain tasks in the social community and to definitions of personality and character. In academia, it is common ground that increasing individuality causes an increasing claim to recognition, especially since Honneth’s revival and actualization of Hegel’s concept of recognition. It is also Honneth who is inseparably linked with the recent philosophical discussion about recognition. We are recognized and we recognize others both on a personal as well as on a social level. The leading question, still unsolved and at the same time unsolvably linked with the relationship of individual and society, is: why are we relying on recognition? In other words: how do we recognize me, my self, and the other? My approach of a self-based model of mutual recognition follows two methodological paradigms: hermeneutics and phenomenology. Unsurprisingly, the hermeneutical investigation of our self in relation to mutual recognition has to start at the current state of the recognition debate, and takes its way to the anthropological state of personhood- and self-debate. The phenomenological approach constitutes the second main basis for an approach to a self-based concept of mutual recognition. Also the connection of philosophical and anthropological approaches to identity, personhood, and self-recognition is very fruitful in the way of developing a holistic approach of mutual recognition. To support this, I connect Western approaches in the phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions as well as theories of narrativity and human biography with non-Western approaches to elaborate and emphasize the intersection of both approaches. In consequence, the Cartesian Ego is rejected in favour of a decentral, cosmomorphic, and sociocentric approach to personhood. This anthropological approach is merged with a narrative concept of identity to emphasize the self-reflexive way of personal identity. Building on this set of philosophical and anthropological arguments, my purpose is to draw up a self-based model of mutual recognition which includes all stages of mutual recognition: recognition of one’s own identity, recognition of one’s own acting, recognition of others, and evaluative recognition. I begin this journey with preliminary remarks on recognition, person, and self by elaborating the state of the art in approaches to mutual recognition, the Anthropological notion of personhood, individual, and self, and their Philosophical notion. In the second part of my work, I show how these approaches compose a self-based model of mutual recognition. Here we receive the idea how we are recognized: through empathic understanding an act of knowledge is performed, in which the other is perceived and acknowledged as another human similar to ourselves. Therefore, empathic understanding, feelings of sympathy, care and solicitude, personal ethos, and theories of mind are related to mutual recognition. The definition of our being through empathy highlights our social wellbeing. By implication we refer to the recognition of others as constitutive of the community, since we recognize others and take care of them. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that self-awareness is intertwined with one's awareness of possibilities for action. I show this by critically examining Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self. I argue that the distinction Zahavi makes among 'pre-reflective minimal', 'interpersonal', and 'normative' dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call 'pre-reflective self-understanding'. The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person’s (...) pre-reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre-reflective self-understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi’s claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre-reflective self-awareness. To carve off self-awareness from the self’s practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre-reflective action shows that pre-reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-understanding are co-constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience. (shrink)

Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. Both contend that caring is bound up with the fact that we are finite beings related to our own impending death, and both argue that caring has a distinctive, circular and non-instantaneous, temporal structure. In this paper, I explore the way Heidegger and Frankfurt each understand the relations among care, death, and time, and I argue for the superiority of Heideggerian version of this (...) nest of claims. Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity. Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”. (shrink)

Many political philosophers argue that interference threatens a person’s agency. And they cast political freedom in opposition to interpersonal threats to agency, as non-interference. I argue that this approach relies on an inapt model of agency, crucial aspects of which emerge from our relationships with other people. Such relationships involve complex patterns of vulnerability and subjection, essential to our constitution as particular kinds of agents: as owners of property, as members of families, and as participants in a market for labor. (...) We should construct a conception of freedom that targets the structures of our interpersonal relations, and the kinds of agents these relations make us. Such a conception respects the interpersonal foundations of human agency. It also allows us to draw morally significant connections between diverse species of unfreedom—between, for instance, localized domination and structural oppression. (shrink)

: Heidegger describes Dasein as subject to a constant pressure to bring its intentional performances into agreement with those of its peers and thence with a generic description of ‘what one [das Man] does’, called Dasein's conformism. I argue that extant accounts of this pressure, which appeal to the essential social embeddedness of intentional performance, fail to account for both the scope and modal force of the demand to act as one does. I propose that we can better understand the (...) role of das Man in Heidegger's account of intentional agency by exploiting a structural similarity between ‘Dasein’ and the familiar notion of epistemic capacity, or a power of knowledge. The result is an account that locates the source of das Man's authority not in our social nature but in our shared aspiration to ontological understanding. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose an existentialist-phenomenological model that conceives of mental illness through the terminology of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In particular, the concepts of existentiality, disturbance and the relation between ‘being-with’ and ‘the one’, will be implemented in order to reconstruct the experience of mental illness. The proposed model understands mental illness as a disturbance of a person’s existentiality. More precisely, mental illness is conceptualized as the disturbance of a person’s existential structure, the process of which leads to (...) a becoming explicit of the otherwise implicit dynamical structure that constitutes a person’s experience. In particular, the existential component of ‘being-with’ comes to play a central role in the disturbance of existentiality, thus, I will claim, that it enables a person’s structure of experience to be ‘open for normativity’. By adopting a pragmatist stance on Heideggerian phenomenology, the suggested model proves compatible with naturalist and normativist theories of mental illness while still offering a phenomenological description of the phenomenon. (shrink)