I

I. - In the most comprehensive and most current sense, it designates in the human individual the character of "wholly autonomous," the principle of one's own acts, the subject of one's own determinations, the permanent and internal bond of their multiplicity, their subject of attribution and, possibly, of imputability. Philosophical usage has above all accentuated the sense of autonomy and of principle of unity. For the related concepts of person, soul, character, nature, consciousness, self-consciousness, see the corresponding entries.

Pagan antiquity, although it had not ignored the concept of the I, nevertheless did not make it the object of particular studies. The dominant concept of "soul," as principle of movement, individual or cosmic, immanent or separate; the primacy of the object in knowledge; the primacy of the political-social or cosmic order in ethics; the cyclical conception of time as necessary return partly explain this delay in investigation.

For Christianity, fundamental importance is assumed by the appearance in time (conceived henceforth as renewing duration, in which the individual fulfills an irreversible destiny) of a divine I, substantially united to a human nature. The primacy of Agape accentuates the character of personality of God with respect to man, of man with respect to God, and of men among themselves. The Christological controversies contributed to bringing into relief the distinction between I and nature, between I and soul.

St. Augustine must be remembered for the clear affirmation of self-consciousness (v.) in his celebrated cogito (cf. De Trin., X, ch. 10, § 14); and also for the accurate psychological analyses of the Confessions; for the character of personality with which he invests the impersonal truth of Neoplatonism: "noverim me, noverim te" (Sol., II, 1), where the relation to the true becomes the relation of an I to the eternal Thou, wisdom incarnate in Jesus Christ. A truly new accent that will flourish again in the Franciscan tradition. St. Thomas, in his opposition to Averroism, insofar as the latter claims to deduce the uniqueness of the intellect both from its immateriality and from the unity and universality of the object (a position that will be taken up in another context by J. Lachelier: cf. A. Lalande, Idéalisme, in Vocab. de la philos., 5th ed., p. 423 ff.), has recourse to the primitive fact: "manifestum est quod hic homo intelligit" (De unitate intell., ch. 3, ed. Keeler, p. 39) and points out the immanence in the singular subject of thought, which therefore cannot accrue to the human intellect from a transcendent intellect (ibid., ed. cit. p. 45).

Since Descartes, philosophy has been distinguished by a growing affirmation of the I, followed nevertheless 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 double sense: ontological, of an existent perceived in its convertibility with thought: I or my "spirit" (a term substituted for that of "soul," which Descartes, while retaining it, judges equivocal insofar as it can signify either the substantial form or a mixture of thought and physical life: cf. Oeuvres, ed. A. Tannery, VII, Paris 1905, p. 356); epistemological, of a real principle, not axiomatic (ibid., IV, p. 443), which constitutes at the same time the unity and the apodicticity of knowledge. In Kant, the transcendental unity (or pure apperception) is at once the term of a regressive analysis (Krit. d. reinen Vernunft, Ital. trans. by G. Gentile and L. Lombardo Radice, I, Bari 1910, p. 130 ff.) and the constitutive principle from which there derives, by way of the categories (ibid.), and by means of schematism, the possibility of experience and of science: the "I think," timeless and unique, which is distinguished both from the empirical I, object of inner sense and in continuous flux, and from the substantial I of the classical schools (insofar as substance is a category and substantial being an object that already presupposes the constituting activity of the pure I: ibid., p. 309 ff.) and from the ethical I, whose complete conformity to the moral law, holiness, the condition of the supreme good, demands an infinite progress which for its possibility postulates personal immortality (Krit. d. prakt. Vern., II, Dial., ch. 2, § 4). Fichte seeks to reconstitute the unity compromised by these different 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 term of a regressive analysis of all contingent data, affirms itself at once as principle of itself (author and product of its action: Tat and Tathandlung) and as source of the non-I that opposes itself to it in order to compose, through a "reciprocal determination," the totality of what is (Grundlage der ges. Wissenschaftslehre, Ital. trans. by A. Tilgher, I, Bari 1910, pp. 54-56). For Maine de Biran, a contemporary of Fichte, the I reveals itself in the fundamental relation that links free and conscious effort to the resistance of one's own body: "primitive feeling from which the fundamental categories of science and of psychology originate: causality, substantiality, identity, freedom, personality" (Oeuvres, 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

It has its first clear expression 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, will pass to the associationism of the 19th century and to actualism (Aktualitätstagfassung). In actualism (v.) the essence of the soul is: "die unmittelbare Wirklichkeit der Verginge selbst," nor behind it has the psychologist to 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 I

The empiricist thesis has clashed with the general critique of associationism on the part both of the psychologies (cf. Gestaltpsychologie) and of the new philosophies. The Bergsonian "duration," as interpenetration and reciprocal interiority of "qualities," reconstructs, going beyond "substantialism," a deep I opposed to a superficial I (Essai sur les données immédiates, 33rd ed., Paris 1946, chaps. 2-3; La pensée et le mouvant, 22nd ed., ibid. 1945, p. 157 ff.). Husserl's phenomenology (in its primitive draft), taking up again the Cartesian ideal of the apodicticity of knowledge, isolates, by means of an asceticism of "reduction" even more radical (insofar as it excludes from the cogito every existential residue), a pure or transcendental I which would behave toward the other I as an outside observer, disinterested in the world, who must first lose it in order better to find it again (Méditations cartésiennes, Paris 1931, pp. 15-23; 28-35). Existential phenomenology claims on the contrary that this transcendental I (which must not be hypostatized into a substance or into an "absolute" I) is superfluous, being nothing other than the objectified doubling of the one real I in its function of objectifying knowledge, and that to "lose" the world or the empirical I is to expose oneself to the danger of never finding it again. The one real I, which can subsequently ground science and experience, is an I 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 change of perspective, it would be advisable to replace the term I (an I that always risks "evading itself" into a "transcendental" from which it would dominate the world, or into an asphyxiating solipsism) with that of existence (ex-sistere). Weary of constructing the world and the I, today's phenomenologists prefer to experience and describe it. They therefore start from an I and from a pre-reflective cogito in strict and essential union with the world and with other I's: "in der Welt sein," "Mitsein," "sympathy," "Ich und Du," "reciprocity of consciousnesses" — these are some of the structures favored by contemporary phenomenology.

The preceding historical indications lead to a twofold conclusion: namely, that not only is it impossible to isolate the I in an absolute transcendence where it would present itself in a pure state, but that it is not even possible to resolve it totally into its contents of representation. The Thomist thesis, according to which the I can be grasped only in its own acts, oriented in turn toward the object (this is the positive aspect of the theories of intentionality), seems to indicate the true direction for an investigation of the I. Positing themselves as a function of the object, our acts are at the same time a function of the "subject": and this must not 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

"makes" itself in them and through them. This makes it possible to distinguish a direct movement, turned toward the object, where "consciousness of self" is called "concomitant," from a movement in the opposite sense (or of withdrawal) where the I posits itself, according to the Kierkegaardian definition, as "a relation that converges upon itself" (Traité du désespoir, I, I, chap. 1). This movement of reflection has its degrees and its modes: it can tend to its limit, as happens among certain Indian thinkers practicing the "asceticism of the void," toward a taking possession of the I in its "pure existence" (cf. J. Maritain, L'expérience mystique naturelle et le vide, in Etudes carmélitaines, 23 [1938], pp. 11-139); it can also, more simply, be the starting point for an analysis, distinguished into three degrees: psychological, phenomenological, metaphysical-ontological:

1) Psychological analysis, in the scientific sense of the term, is preferably a functional analysis, corresponding to the different levels qualified by Biran as the "affective system" (and here Freudian psychoanalysis can render some service), the "perceptive system" or "plane of perception" (of which the Gestaltpsychologie has formulated certain laws), the "reflective system," the plane of the higher operations of the intellect and the will (Husserl's "intentional" analysis can sometimes be very useful).

2) Phenomenological analysis intends to discover beneath the functions, as their condition of possibility, certain structures called fundamental, whose convergence defines a kind of "configuration" of the human I. 1) One can distinguish first of all a "dimension of interiority," in which two types of fundamental relations are noted: the relation of the I to its own body (this relation does not seem able to be reduced, as was rightly noted by Marcel, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, to the Biranian "primitive" relation of an effort with a resistance); the relation of self to self, or interiority properly so called (the exaggeration of this relation often leads to "introversion"), understood, however, in order better to point out the impossibility of a perfect equation of the I with itself, as "presence" to self. 2) A dimension improperly called "of exteriority." This dimension splits into the relation: I-world (not to be confused with the relation: subject-object, founded by the former), analyzed by Heidegger as the "existential" ("in der Welt sein") against which, as against a background, all the relations of knowledge and action stand out; and the relation with others (sein für Anderes; Mitsein; being for others; Buber's Ich und Du). 3) Dimension of "transcendence," or relation with values, with the supreme "end" (the axiological analyses, the Blondelian phenomenology of action, can here be greatly valorized). Finally, linking back to these structures and at times revalorizing them, the Jaspersian analysis of limit-situations (death, finitude, struggle) would complete the definition of the "condition of the human I." This general phenomenology can be further concretized. Above all the second dimension, "being for others," has given rise to the richest analyses: that of sympathy (Scheler); of fidelity (Marcel); of love (Nédoncelle, Sartre, etc.).

3) Ontological analysis. All these analyses, however, do not exhaust the I. The I cannot be reduced to its own functions or relations. Each one expresses it without exhausting it. 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 has been able to speak of the ontological mystery of the I, immanent in and at the same time transcending the structural-functional framework in which it unfolds. But to determine this "quid intimum" is arduous. The Boethian definition: "rationalis naturae individua substantia," can offer some element of research, on condition, however, of not understanding any of its terms in a univocal sense as is habitually done by contemporary philosophy: "substance" is not a simple permanence in time, and still less inertia, but autonomy of existence; "individual" is not reduced to the organic or the spatial; "nature" does not have an exclusively physical sense; and the "reasonable" is not resolved into the "rational." The scholastic controversies on the constitutive element of personality can serve to illuminate the problem by way of conceptualization, founded on the prior analysis whose principal stages we have attempted to specify. The same must be said of the categorial determinations attempted by N. Hartmann.

Stanislao Breton