I. — In its most comprehensive and current sense, the term "I" in the human individual denotes the character of a wholly autonomous principle of one's own acts, the subject of one's own determinations, the permanent and internal bond of their multiplicity, the subject of their attribution and, where applicable, of their imputability. Philosophical usage has especially emphasized the sense of autonomy and of the principle of unity. For related concepts such as person, soul, character, nature, consciousness, self-consciousness, see the corresponding entries.
Pagan antiquity, although not entirely unaware of the concept of the "I," did not make it the object of special study. The dominant concept of "soul," as the principle of movement—whether individual or cosmic, immanent or separate—the primacy of the object in knowledge, the primacy of the political-social or cosmic order in ethics, and the cyclical conception of time as a necessary return, partly explain this delay in investigation.
For Christianity, the appearance in time (now conceived as a renewing duration in which the individual realizes an irreversible destiny) of a divine "I," substantially united with a human nature, assumes fundamental importance. The primacy of Agape accentuates the personal character of God in relation to man, of man in relation to God, and of men in relation to one another. Christological controversies contributed to highlighting the distinction between the "I" and nature, and between the "I" and the soul.
St. Augustine is noteworthy for his clear affirmation of self-consciousness (see) in his celebrated *cogito* (cf. *De Trin.*, X, ch. 10, § 14); and also for the careful psychological analyses in the *Confessions*; for the personal character with which he invests the impersonal truth of Neoplatonism: *"noverim me, noverim te"* (*Sol.*, II, 1), where the relationship with truth becomes a relationship of an "I" with the eternal "You," wisdom incarnate in Jesus Christ. A truly new emphasis that would flourish again in the Franciscan tradition. St. Thomas, in his opposition to Averroism—insofar as the latter claimed to deduce the uniqueness of the intellect both from its immateriality and from the unity and universality of the object (a position later taken up in another context by J. Lachelier: cf. A. Lalande, *Idéalisme*, in *Vocab. de la philos.*, 5th ed., pp. 423 ff.)—resorts to the primitive fact: *"manifestum est quod hic homo intelligit"* (*De unitate intel.*, ch. 3, ed. Keeler, p. 39) and emphasizes the immanence in the individual subject of thought, which therefore cannot derive from a transcendent intellect (ibid., loc. cit., p. 45).
From Descartes onward, philosophy is marked by a growing affirmation of the "I," followed, however, by a period of dissolution that provokes a return to the "I" in contemporary phenomenologies.
1. The affirmation of the "I." — The Cartesian *cogito* has a dual sense: an ontological one, of an existent perceived in its convertibility with thought: the "I" or my "mind" (a term replacing that of "soul," which Descartes, while retaining it, judges equivocal inasmuch as it can signify both the substantial form and a mixture of thought and physical life: cf. *Œuvres*, ed. A. Tannery, VII, Paris 1905, p. 356); and an epistemological one, of a real, non-axiomatic principle (ibid., IV, p. 443) that constitutes at once the unity and the apodicticity of knowledge. In Kant, the transcendental unity (or pure apperception) is both the term of a regressive analysis (*Krit. d. reinem Vernunft*, Italian trans. by G. Gentile and L. Lombardo Radice, I, Bari 1910, pp. 130 ff.) and a constitutive principle from which, through the categories (ibid.), and by means of schematism, the possibility of experience and science derives: *"I think,"* intemporal and unique, which is distinguished both from the empirical "I," object of inner sense and in continuous flux, and from the substantial "I" of classical schools (inasmuch as substance is a category and substantial being an object that already presupposes the constituting activity of the pure "I": ibid., pp. 309 ff.), and from the ethical "I," whose complete conformity to the moral law, sanctity, a condition of the supreme good, requires infinite progress that, for its possibility, postulates personal immortality (*Krit. d. prakt. Vern.*, II, Dial., ch. 2, § 4). Fichte seeks to reconstitute the unity compromised by these various "I"s, in function of the ethical exigency that posits the primacy of the ought-to-be (*Sollen*) and of freedom. The pure and absolute "I," unconditioned principle of science, abstract, at the end of a regressive analysis of all contingent data, asserts itself as at once the principle of itself (artisan and product of its action: *Tat* and *Tathandlung*) and the source of the non-I that opposes it to compose, through a "reciprocal determination," the totality of what is (*Grundlage der ges. Wissenschaftslehre*, Italian trans. by A. Tilgher, I, Bari 1910, pp. 54-56). For Maine de Biran, a contemporary of Fichte, the "I" is revealed in the fundamental relation that binds free and conscious effort to the resistance of one's own body: *"primitive sentiment from which the fundamental categories of science and psychology originate: causality, substantiality, identity, freedom, personality"* (*Œuvres*, ed. P. Tisserand, VIII, Paris 1908, pp. 1-28; *Essais sur les fondements de la psychologie*, part 1, sec. 2, chs. 1-4).
2. The dissolution of the "I." — Its first clear expression is found in English empiricism. In the *Treatise of Human Nature* (I, part 4, sec. 6), Hume, for whom every real idea is a function of an impression, denies the existence of a permanent and invariable impression that could establish the identity of the "I." This thesis, after Hume, passed to the associationism of the 19th century and to actualism (*Aktualitätssauffassung*). In actualism (see), the essence of the soul is: *"die unmittelbare Wirklichkeit der Vorgänge selbst,"* and behind it the psychologist need not seek a transcendent substance (W. Wundt, *Grundriss der Psychologie*, 6th ed., p. 384; id., *Physiologische Psychol.*, 3rd ed., p. 760; apud K. Oesterreich, *Die Phänomenologie des Ich in ihren Grundproblemen*, p. 258).
3. The return to the self
The empiricist thesis has clashed with the general critique of associationism, both from the side of psychology (cf. Gestalt psychology) and from that of new philosophies. Bergson’s “duration,” as an interpretation and reciprocal interiority of “qualities,” reconstructs, surpassing “substantialism,” a deep self, opposed to a superficial self (Essai sur les données immédiates, 33rd ed., Paris 1946, chaps. 2–3; La pensée et le mouvement, 22nd ed., ibid. 1945, pp. 157 ff.). Husserl’s phenomenology (in its primitive formulation) resumes the Cartesian ideal of apodictic certainty of knowledge, isolating, through an even more radical “reduction” (inasmuch as it excludes from the cogito every existential residue), a pure or transcendental ego that would comport itself toward another ego as a detached observer, disinterested in the world, which must first be lost in order to be better found (Méditations cartésiennes, Paris 1931, pp. 15–23; 28–35). Existential phenomenology, by contrast, claims that this transcendent ego (which must not be hypostasized into a substance or an “absolute” Ego) is superfluous, being nothing other than the objectified duplication of the single real ego in its function of objectifying knowledge, and that “losing” the world or the empirical ego risks not finding them again. The only real ego, which can later found science and experience, is one solidly rooted in the totality of its concrete relations, and the task of phenomenology is solely to describe its fundamental structures. To better emphasize this shift of perspective, it would be fitting to replace the term “ego” (an ego that always risks “escaping”) with “existence” (ex-stare), which does not tower over the world from a transcendent height nor suffocate in a stifling solipsism. Weary of constructing the world and the ego, contemporary phenomenologists prefer to experience and describe them. They thus start from an ego and a preferential cogito in strict and essential union with the world and with other egos: “in der Welt sein,” “Miteinandersein,” “sympathy,” “Ich und Du,” “reciprocity of consciousness”—these are some of the structures favored by contemporary phenomenology.The foregoing historical indications lead to a twofold conclusion: namely, that it is not only impossible to isolate the ego in an absolute transcendence where it would appear in a pure state, but also impossible to dissolve it entirely into its representational contents. The Thomist thesis, according to which the ego can only be grasped in its own acts—acts that are themselves oriented toward an object (this being the positive aspect of intentionality theories)—seems to point the way for a proper investigation of the ego. By positioning itself as a function of the object, our acts are at once functions of the “subject”: and this subject is not to be understood as an inert zone in which anonymous movements occur, but as the dynamic bond that coordinates them and gives them the unity proper to a living reality that is made in and through them. This allows us to distinguish a direct movement, oriented toward the object, where the “consciousness of self” is said to be “concomitant,” from a contrary movement (or movement of reflection) where the ego, in Kierkegaard’s definition, posits itself as “a relation that converges upon itself” (Traité du désespoir, bk. 1, chap. 1). This reflective movement has its degrees and modes: it can tend toward its limit, as occurs in some Indian thinkers who practice the “ascesis of emptiness,” toward a possession of the ego in its “pure existence” (cf. J. Maritain, L’expérience mystique naturelle et le vide, in Études carmélitaines, 23 [1938], pp. 11–139); or it can more simply serve as the starting point for an analysis divided into three stages: psychological, phenomenological, and metaphysical-ontological:
1) Psychological analysis, in the scientific sense of the term, is preferably a functional analysis corresponding to the different planes qualified by Maine de Biran as the “affective system” (here Freudian psychoanalysis may render some service), the “perceptive system” or “plane of perception” (of which Gestalt psychology has formulated certain laws), and the “reflective system,” the plane of higher operations of intelligence and will (Husserl’s “intentional” analysis can sometimes be of great use).
2) Phenomenological analysis aims to uncover, beneath the functions as their conditions of possibility, the so-called fundamental structures, whose convergence defines a kind of “configuration” of the human ego. One may first distinguish a “dimension of interiority,” in which two fundamental types of relation stand out: the relation of the ego to its own body (this relation does not seem reducible, as Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have rightly noted, to Biran’s “primitive” relation of an effort with a resistance); and the relation of self to self or interiority properly so called (the exaggeration of which often leads to “introversion”), understood here, however, to better convey the impression of a perfect equation of the ego with itself, as “presence” to itself. There is also a dimension, improperly called “of exteriority.” This dimension splits into two relations: ego-world (not to be confused with the subject-object relation, grounded by the first), analyzed by Heidegger as the “existential” (“in der Welt sein”), upon which all relations of knowledge and action are projected as on a backdrop; and the relation to others (Sein für Anderes; Miteinandersein; being-for-others; Buber’s Ich und Du). 3) Dimension of “transcendence” or relation to values, to the supreme “end” (axiological analyses, Blondel’s phenomenology of action, may here be greatly valorized). Finally, drawing on these structures and sometimes revalorizing them, Jaspers’ analysis of boundary-situations (death, guilt, struggle) would complete the definition of the “condition of the human ego.” This general phenomenology can be further concretized. Above all, the second dimension, being-for-others, has given rise to the richest analyses: those of sympathy (Scheler), fidelity (Marcel), and love (Nédoncelle, Sartre, etc.).
3) Ontological analysis. Yet all these analyses do not exhaust the ego. The ego cannot be reduced to its functions or relations; each expresses it without exhausting II. Nor can it be reduced to a bundle of all its impressions or to a fabric of all its fundamental structures. It is precisely in this sense that one may speak of the ontological mystery of the ego, both immanent to and transcendent over the structural-functional framework in which it unfolds. But to determine this “quid intimum” is difficult. Boethius’ definition—“rationalis naturae individuata substantia”—may offer some elements for research, provided that none of its terms is taken in a univocal sense, as is usually done in contemporary philosophy: “substance” is not a simple permanence in time, still less inertia, but autonomy of existence; “individual” is not reducible to the organic or the spatial; “nature” does not have an exclusively physical sense; and “rational” is not resolved into “rationalistic.” The scholastic controversies over the constitutive elements of personality may serve to illuminate the problem by way of conceptualization grounded in the prior analysis whose main stages we have sought to outline. The same may be said of the categorial determinations attempted by N. Hartmann.
(cf. Mt. 1, 11-12). It is not known how many more years he lived or when he died.