In this article I argue that Zahavi's Sartre-inspired combination of the experiential and narrative self entails an unnecessary duplication of selves. Sartre himself accused Husserl of the same mistake in The Transcendence of the Ego. He claims that Husserl's combination of the transcendental I and the Me is unnecessary, and that we can do without the first. I try to show that Sartre's critique of Husserl also applies to Zahavi. Sartre's critique is based on his idea of impersonal consciousness, which (...) I explain by comparing it to Armstrong's example of the long-distance truck-driver. Furthermore, I explicate how the alternative notion of self that Sartre proposes in the same work avoids unnecessary duplications of selves, and thereby evades further problems concerning how the two selves relate to one another. (shrink)

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For the phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena must be accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, selfconsciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects (...) or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or in the instant of self-recognition of one's image in the mirror, or in the proper use of the first-person pronoun, or in the construction of a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth. (shrink)