Abstract

THE CARTESIAN IDEA that a self is a private consciousness has been subject to criticisms from many points of view. The most basic of these criticisms are that once we admit that the self is private, we cannot be certain of a common world, cannot conceive of outward actions of the self, and cannot have reasonable assurance of the existence of other selves. Those who hold fast to the private self might be willing to admit these criticisms and to hold that the private self is indeed the only immediate object of experience and to regard the common world and other selves as objects of problematic hypotheses to explain the contents of the private self; on the other side, those who find these criticisms decisive might be willing on this account to deny private consciousness altogether and to regard the self as a form of behavior of the human organism. The one side seems to lose the world to save the self; the other side seems to lose the self to save the world. My aim in this article is to show that we can maintain that a self is a private consciousness without giving up the immediate certainty of a common world, outward action of the self, or assurance of the existence of other selves and that we are therefore not faced with the alternatives that the critics of Descartes suppose.