Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

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Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A

Husserlian Analysis of Person

Jaakko Belt

To cite this article: Jaakko Belt (2019): Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A
Husserlian Analysis of Person, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.2019.1577067

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THE JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY
https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1577067

Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis

of Person
Jaakko Belt
Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC), Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The distinction between minimal self and narrative self has gained Self; selfhood; minimal self;
ground in recent discussions of selfhood. In this article, this narrative self; person; Husserl
distinction is reassessed by analysing Zahavi and Gallagher’s
account of selfhood and supplementing it with Husserl’s concept
of person. I argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible
and complementary notions of self. Nevertheless, the relationship
between minimal self and narrative self requires further
clarification. Especially the embeddedness of self, the interplay
between passivity and activity, and the problems of uniqueness
and persistence are better understood with Husserl’s analysis of
person and its central concepts of position-taking, habitualities,
and overall style. The embeddedness of self is elucidated by
outlining how person is related to its environment, to other
people, and to its past. This relational notion of self is both
passively constituted and actively shaped: person mediates
between minimal self characterized by perspectival ownership
and narrative self based on authorship.

In the contemporary study of selfhood, it is commonplace to distinguish between two

senses of self, namely minimal self and narrative self.1 In this article, I will reassess this
distinction by focusing on the work of Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher, who draw evi-
dence from both phenomenological analysis and empirical studies on topics such as
child development, pathologies, and sense of agency. Zahavi and Gallagher are neither
the only ones who defend this kind of basic distinction, nor do the concepts they use
necessarily rest on a distinctively phenomenological basis.2 But their approach both
draws on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological insights and provides a fruitful framework

CONTACT Jaakko Belt jaakko.belt@tuni.fi Philosophy, Faculty of Social Sciences (SOC), Tampere University, Room
B4144, Tampere FI-33014, Finland
1
The current discussion about selfhood is characterized by a wide variety of different notions and conceptions of self.
During the last two decades, the distinction between minimal self and narrative self has been established as a viable
terminological option amongst the plurality of concepts (see Strawson). Minimal self and narrative self can also be
understood as general terms capturing certain aspects or dimensions of selfhood across different conceptions. As
such, the distinction plays a role in organizing the conceptual landscape of selfhood and framing the debates in
terms of minimal and narrative approaches (see Gallagher, Phenomenology, 131). For different uses of minimal and nar-
rative self and ways of challenging them, see the contributions in The Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011), especially
Gallagher, “Introduction: A Diversity of Selves”. For a recent example on applying the distinction in one relevant field
of study, namely psychopathology, see Parnas and Henriksen.
2
For instance, Antonio Damasio has drawn a parallel dichotomy between core self and autobiographical self on neuro-
biological grounds. See Damasio.
© 2019 The British Society for Phenomenology
2 J. BELT

to which further phenomenological analyses of self can be integrated. Their account is also
open for conceptualization of new dimensions and aspects of selfhood. Narrative self and
minimal self is “a distinction in need of refinement” and “in need of a supplement”, to
quote Zahavi’s own words.3
I shall argue that Zahavi and Gallagher offer two compatible and complementary
notions of self, but the relation between minimal self and narrative self and their intertwi-
nement calls for further clarification. Especially the interplay between passivity and
activity, the embedded nature of self, and the problems of persistence and uniqueness
require more refined distinctions and leave room for supplementary concepts of self. I
suggest that Husserl’s “person” (Person) could serve a role as a kind of bridge concept,
highlighting the differences of minimal self and narrative self and providing phenomen-
ological descriptions needed to understand their connection. In this way, the basic insights
of Zahavi and Gallagher’s distinction could be supplemented with a third concept, result-
ing in a more well-rounded multidimensional model of selfhood. In fact, Zahavi has
acknowledged the need for a more gradual understanding of selfhood with minimal self
and narrative self as two notions at the opposite ends of a scale. To understand their con-
nection and the development of self in general, he has applied a complementary notion of
“interpersonal self” as a sort of intermediary that bridges the other two dimensions of self-
hood. I take my strategy to be in line with Zahavi’s more recent endorsement of a multi-
dimensional account of selfhood.4
I will first address the merits and problems of the basic distinction between minimal
self and narrative self. Then I will turn to Husserl’s analysis of person and his central
concepts of position-taking, habitualities, and horizons. The aim is to clarify the embedd-
edness of self by outlining how person is related (1) to its environment, (2) to other
people, and (3) to its own past and future actions. My argument is that this relational
notion of self is both passively constituted and actively shaped. Thus, person provides
a dynamic concept between narrative self based on authorship and minimal self charac-
terized by perspectival ownership. In the end, I will shortly discuss Husserl’s ideas of
typification and overall style as ways to deal with the problems of persistence and unique-
ness by describing how self can both remain stable and undergo qualitative changes.5 In
this way, my goal is to shed light on an intermediate level of selfhood between minimal
self and narrative self.

3
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”). I will refer to works co-written by Zahavi and Gallagher and chosen publi-
cations written by Zahavi and Gallagher alone. Both have worked on the subject before and after their shared contri-
butions: Zahavi has defended a position he calls “experiential minimalism” from Self-Awareness and Alterity (1999)
onwards and analysed the thin experiential selfhood in terms of minimal or core self (and in contrast with narrative
self) since Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005). (See Zahavi, “Consciousness and (Minimal) Selfhood” for his own take.) Con-
currently, Gallagher introduced the nominal distinction between minimal self and narrative self in his article “Philoso-
phical Conceptions of the Self” (2000) and he has refined narrative and hermeneutical understanding of selfhood in
subsequent writings. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to Zahavi and Gallagher’s shared position when I take
them to agree on the matter at hand.
4
Zahavi (Self and Other 90, 237–38). In recent years, Gallagher has also developed an interdisciplinary and pluralistic
“pattern theory of self”. As a meta-theory of different accounts and interpretations of self, it includes minimal and nar-
rative aspects as possible constitutive features of a multidimensional self. See Gallagher (“A Pattern Theory of Self”).
5
In the current discussion about personal identity, the problem of persistence or identity over time is distinguished from
related but separate questions about who we are or what defines us in terms of individuality and personal character. In
this article, I will treat these questions of persistence and uniqueness as interconnected features of selfhood calling for
phenomenological analysis. For a Husserlian analysis focused on personal identity in particular, see Jacobs (“Towards a
Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity”).
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 3

Narrative Self and Minimal Self

Zahavi and Gallagher follow the prevalent view of narrative identity in their use of the
concept narrative self. On this view, narrative self is constituted in and through the
stories we tell of ourselves and others tell of us. As Paul Ricœur famously put it, narrative
identity is “the sort of identity to which a human being has access thanks to the mediation
of the narrative function”.6 Narrative accounts differ in what they regard as sufficient for
fulfilling this narrative function: suggested narrative practices range from autobiographical
writing or telling and explicitly stated self-descriptions to implicit narration, such as reflec-
tive self-evaluation, making one’s actions intelligible by ordering them into meaningful
sequences, and merely living through narratively structured experiences. Zahavi and Gal-
lagher oppose severing the (developmental) link between language and narrative practices,
in order to avoid making the concept of narration too vague and inclusive.7 Nevertheless,
they deem narratives as constitutive features of our personal identity in both our individ-
ual self-interpretation and social understanding. Following authors such as Charles
Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Ricœur, Zahavi and Gallagher stress the normative and
ethical, temporal, communal, interpretational, and linguistic nature of narrative self.8
According to Zahavi, narrative accounts usually combine an epistemological thesis with
an ontological one: narrative practices are essential in knowing who we are because they
constitute ourselves. Narrative practices are admittedly important in obtaining knowledge
about the self and even shaping who we are, but Zahavi argues against a stronger exclu-
sivity claim, that every possible access to ourselves is mediated through narratives and
that the self as a whole is narratively constructed. In his view, narration is not the sole
and not even the privileged access to the self. Correspondingly, narration constitutes
only one aspect of selfhood, namely narrative self.9 Other dimensions need to be addressed
as well.
Zahavi and Gallagher end up defending a more primitive sense of self, namely minimal
self, against both the non-egological and constructivist theories of self. Although these the-
ories come in many different forms, what they have in common is that the self is seen as a
non-entity, a theoretical or linguistic construct, a certain form of fiction, or an abstraction.
Non-egological theories range from Sartre’s well-known critique of the transcendence of
the ego to Thomas Metzinger’s reductionist theory of self-model and Buddhist theories
of self as an illusion.10 Constructivist narrative theories stretch from Daniel Dennett’s
view of the self as a “center of narrative gravity”, a useful fiction in its own right, to
more detailed and well-rounded hermeneutical theories of self-understanding.11 In
order to meet these challenges on two fronts, Zahavi and Gallagher aim for a concept
of minimal self that has experiential reality but lacks more substantial, metaphysical
nature of any kind of soul substance or an entity understood in naturalistic terms.
To highlight the first-personal character and phenomenal nature of minimal self,
Zahavi and Gallagher also call it experiential self or (experiential) core self, and even

6
Ricœur (73); Gallagher (“Philosophical Conceptions of the Self”); Zahavi (Subjectivity and Selfhood 105).
7
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 215–16). Cf. also Zahavi (“Self and Other”; “Minimal Self and Narrative
Self”); Gallagher (“Pathologies in Narrative Structures”; “Self and Narrative”).
8
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 222–24); Gallagher (“Self and Narrative”).
9
Zahavi (“Self and Other”; Self and Other 59).
10
See Sartre; Metzinger; Albahari.
11
Dennett.
4 J. BELT

the experiential dimension of selfhood.12 In their view, minimal self is pre-reflective, tacit
self-awareness that characterizes our waking life from our early infancy onwards. The
claim is that at least a minimal sense of mineness characterizes our experiences, even in
cases of progressive brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, and cognitive or
mental impairments, which can cause loss of memory, limited or non-existent linguistic
and narrative capacities and even fragmentation of self. In fact, following Antonio
Damasio among others, Zahavi and Gallagher argue that precisely because there are
neurological impairments that affect narrative self but leave minimal self largely intact
– and not the other way around – minimal self is both needed and warranted in order
to make sense of our notion of self and personal identity.13 In their view, minimal self
is both ontogenetically antecedent to narrative self and its precondition, since narrative
self presupposes conceptual knowledge, narrative competence, socialization, and the
first-person access to one’s own conscious experience.14
Minimal self and narrative self offer two ways to understand the problem of persistence.
According to Zahavi and Gallagher, minimal self is persistent because the first-person per-
spective stays the same across time. In other words, qualitative subjective character of
mineness or for-me-ness always accompanies one’s changing experiences. Using phenom-
enological vocabulary, this basic subjective character of experience can be described as
“primary presence”, “first personal self-givenness”, “pre-reflective self-appearance”, and
“self-manifestation of experience”.15 In short, it is what makes experiences mine in the
first place. Zahavi and Gallagher use the concept of “perspectival ownership” to refer to
this experiential feature, that experiences not only occur in me but also are given for
me and, thus, experienced as mine.16
It is important to note that in their view the unity of minimal self does not require an
uninterrupted stream of experiences (that could be disrupted by dreamless sleep, memory
loss, states of unconsciousness, etc.). On the contrary, it is defined by perspectival unity
constituted by first-person givenness of each and every experience one lives through,
even though both the objects and the categories of experience vary.17 Here Zahavi and Gal-
lagher differ both from the Humean non-egological bundle view and Galen Strawson’s
transience view of self, which posits a multitude of ontologically distinct, short-lived
selves that each persist only as long as a single experiential episode lasts. With minimal
self, the unity in question rests on the first-personal accessibility of experiences – the
same dimension of mineness, if you will – which does not depend on temporal distance
between experiences.18 Minimal self is argued to have synchronic unity and at least
some diachronic unity, but the question of temporal unity of minimal self is otherwise
left open.19

12
See Zahavi (“The Experiential Self”).
13
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 231).
14
Gallagher and Zahavi (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness”).
15
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 226); Zahavi (“Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self” 326–
29).
16
The term “perspectival ownership” is adapted from Miri Albahari’s book Analytical Buddhism, see e.g. Zahavi and Galla-
gher (“A Phenomenology with Legs and Brains”).
17
Gallagher and Zahavi (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness”).
18
Zahavi (Self and Other 71–72).
19
Zahavi states that minimal self “is not atemporal or temporally non-extended”, but it has “some temporal extension, and
our pre-reflective self-consciousness includes some awareness of diachronicity” (Self and Other 77; “The Time of the
Self”). At the outset, Gallagher seems willing to make a sharper distinction between a synchronic minimal self
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 5

When it comes to narrative self, personal identity depends more straightforwardly on a

life story, more or less coherent and open-ended single narrative, in which something is
included and something left out. Whereas minimal self remains stable, narrative self con-
stantly evolves as our changing experiences, actions and ideals are integrated, evaluated,
and articulated in stories of us. Thus, the unity of personal identity is simply understood
as the unity of our meaningful life stories. Narrative self has diachronical unity, just like
our lives have a beginning, a middle point, and an end.20
The problem of uniqueness is also treated differently in cases of minimal self and narra-
tive self. Zahavi and Gallagher claim that pre-reflective, tacit self-awareness already amounts
to a minimal sense of self. To be clear, their notion of minimal self is not just a Kantian
formal or abstract principle of identity that merely binds the changing experiences together.
On the contrary, it is closer to a bodily and affective self-experience, in which a perspectival
sense of ownership is at least sometimes coupled with a basic sense of agency. Describing
minimal self from developmental perspective, Zahavi and Gallagher emphasize the role of
proprioceptive awareness and kinaesthetic sense in constituting our sense of position, move-
ment, and relationship to environment and other people. The argument is backed by some
empirical findings in developmental psychology. For example, Zahavi and Gallagher cite
studies showing that newborns as young as 24 hours old can discriminate between external
tactile stimuli and self-stimulation, arguably developing an early perceptually based sense of
self. Furthermore, infants no more than a few weeks old are inclined to detect whether
objects are within their reach or not. This suggest that perception of objects involves
“self-specifying information”, since infants must be aware of the object’s position in relation
to themselves. Already in the first months of life, infants are thus claimed to experience
“where they are, how they are moving, what they are doing, and whether a given action
is their own or not”.21 Drawing from experiments on neonatal imitation, Gallagher has
suggested an interpretation that newborns have a minimal self, which is not only embodied
but also enactive and ecologically tuned.22
In this way, the argument goes on, our bodily sense of self is formed well before any
linguistic abilities or metacognition, not to even mention narrative self-understanding
or any kind of theory of mind. In other words, minimal self is always already inherently
individuated and situated in the world. But at the same time, Zahavi and Gallagher
acknowledge that one’s minimal self is more or less the same kind as others’. Minimal
self lacks personal character, or at least a detailed personal history, reflective valuations
and interpretation of one’s deeds, traits and social attributes characterizing narrative
self. The notion of minimal self, then, seems to amount to little more than formal indivi-
duality, whereas the notion of narrative self is needed to describe the substantial indivi-
duality of a human person understood both individually and collectively.23

“unextended in time” and “devoid of temporal extension” and a diachronic narrative self involving “continuity across
time”. But rather than making a final claim, Gallagher seems to point out a difference in focus: minimal approaches
limit themselves to the immediately accessible and leave out the question to what degree minimal self is extended
past the “specious present” (Gallagher “Philosophical Conceptions of the Self”; “Self and Narrative”).
20
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 222–24).
21
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227–31); Zahavi and Gallagher (“A Phenomenology with Legs and
Brains”).
22
Gallagher (“Philosophical Conceptions of the Self”).
23
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227–28); cf. also Zahavi (Self and Other 22–23; Self-Awareness and
Alterity 165–66).
6 J. BELT

Relationship Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self

Zahavi and Gallagher stress that they do not propose there are two (or more) ontologically
different selves. Instead, they are dealing with two different aspects or dimensions of self-
hood. Their weaker claim is that minimal self and narrative self are compatible notions.
Their stronger claim is that minimal self is more basic of the two – the temporal, devel-
opmental, and experiential precondition of narrative self. In fact, it is something at the
core of selfhood that every more substantial and complex notion of self has to take into
account.24
The weaker claim of compatibility is easier to defend. Contrasting minimal self and nar-
rative self highlights their differences. But Zahavi also uses the same strategy to argue that
the two notions are not incompatible or contradictory precisely because they aim at
different aspects of selfhood at different levels of complexity.25 What is more, Zahavi
and Gallagher never claim that the two concepts – or any two or three concepts, for
that matter – would jointly combine for an exhaustive account of the self. Rather they
stress the complexity and multifaceted nature of selfhood, which demands working
with several notions, searching for commensurable interpretations, and integrating comp-
lementary views.26 As long as minimal self and narrative self demonstrably capture
different aspects, serve distinct functions, and involve no clear contradictions, I see no
reason to question their compatibility. Furthermore, openness to additional complemen-
tary notions paves the way for a multidimensional approach to selfhood.
This inclusive and multifaceted account of selfhood has led some commentators to cri-
ticize the purported multiplicity of selves. Different notions for different sides of selfhood
might be seen as superfluous. Even though one would grant that Zahavi and Gallagher are
not committed to ontologically separate entities, it is not totally clear what kind of expla-
natory work minimal self and narrative self are meant to do. Simon Gusman has argued
against Zahavi’s allegedly “unnecessary duplication of selves”. He states that both minimal
self and narrative self account for the same thing, namely unification and coherence of
individual’s subjective life. Where do we need narrative self if minimal self already
unifies every stream of experience? What is the function of minimal self if narrative self
is already responsible for connecting the seemingly disconnected subjective episodes in
life? Gusman himself provides one possible answer, acknowledging that in Zahavi’s
(and Gallagher’s) scheme the two selves account for different kinds of unification:
minimal self provides a stable reference point, which unifies one’s experiential life; narra-
tive self creates coherence by constantly interpreting one’s experiences socially and
linguistically.27
I think Gusman misrepresents Zahavi’s view on the function of minimal self. Zahavi
states clearly that his intention is not to provide a unifying principle of identity over
and above consciousness that hangs experiences together. On the contrary, his aim is to
offer a principle of individuation, clarifying what makes the experiences mine and me
the subject of those experiences. This constitutive aspect of experience that they are

24
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227–28); Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”); Gallagher (“Self
and Narrative”).
25
Zahavi (Self and Other 50, 90–91).
26
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”); Gallagher (“A Pattern Theory of Self”).
27
Gusman (“Against Unnecessary Duplication of Selves” 327–28).
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 7

given from first-person perspective is, to quote Zahavi’s claim, “a necessary condition of
possibility for manifestation”.28 One could thus argue that minimal self is not to be
regarded as an explanatory concept, accounting for the unification of lived experiences.
Rather, it should simply be taken as a descriptive concept, highlighting “the invariant
dimension of first-personal givenness throughout the multitude of changing experiences”,
to follow Zahavi’s formulation.29
Another line of criticism maintains that minimal self and narrative self are in fact com-
patible, but also inseparably entangled. Minimal self is too narrow, abstract, formal, thin,
or primitive a notion to warrant any reality of its own. In fact, the argument goes on, it has
to be accompanied by or coupled with more complex or substantial forms of selfhood.
To be sure, minimal self is never to be found in isolation. On the contrary, Zahavi states
that
[i]t will always already be embedded in an environmental and temporal horizon. It will be
intertwined with, shaped, and contextualized by memories, expressive behaviour, and
social interaction, by passively acquired habits, inclinations, associations, etc.

Only in some cases and stages of severe pathologies, such as Alzheimer’s disease, and
similar “limit situations” the minimal form of self might be “encountered in its
purity”.30 At least for the sake of argument, Zahavi and Gallagher do entertain the possi-
bility that minimal self is in fact a “subsequent abstraction” or a “stripped-down version”
of more a substantial and complete notion of self – it is just not a mere abstraction or a
theoretical construct. Zahavi even admits that one reason to speak of minimal or thin
self in the first place was to underline how limited the notion is. This is not to deny its
reality as a primitive but fundamental form of self-experience that is arguably essential
to selfhood, but to acknowledge the need to supplement it with more tangible complemen-
tary notions.31 This amounts to yet another plea for a multidimensional account of
selfhood.
What could be said about the stronger claim, namely that minimal self is a prerequisite
for narrative self? Admittedly, Zahavi and Gallagher provide quite a compelling develop-
mental story of early forms of selfhood. But this also opens up possibilities to challenge the
primacy and independence of minimal self precisely on developmental and pathological
basis. Marya Schechtman has stated that language learning and the ability to self-narration
affect not only the content but also the character of the first-personal experience. In other
words, acquiring narrative capacities and socialization allegedly transform minimal self-
awareness and, thus, minimal self. This argument can be interpreted both ontogenetically
and phylogenetically. It is meant to highlight possible differences between infants and
language-using adults, but also between humans and other animals. Schechtman concedes
that we might share “brute first-personal awareness” with every human being, and perhaps

28
Zahavi (“Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self” 324–25, 327). Instead of having to rely on a self as a principle of
identity or an active unifying ego, consciousness is self-unifying in the process of temporalization. This is why Zahavi and
Gallagher argue, following Husserl, that the analysis of structural features of inner time-consciousness is at the same time
analysis of the structure of first-personal givenness and pre-reflective self-appearance (Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phe-
nomenological Mind 88, 226); Zahavi (“Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self” 321–25; “The Time of the Self”)).
29
Zahavi (Subjectivity and Selfhood 132); cf. Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 226–27).
30
Zahavi (“Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self” 332–33; Subjectivity and Selfhood 130).
31
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227–29); Zahavi (“Thin, Thinner, Thinnest”).
8 J. BELT

some animals, right from the birth, but qualitatively different kind of self-consciousness
separates “self-narrators” from “non-narrators”.32
Does this imply that minimal self is not the invariant core structure of selfhood?
Zahavi’s answer to this challenge is to underline the formal nature of minimal self.
Even though conceptual capacities might transform the content of our experiences radi-
cally, it does not have to change the manner of how experiences are manifested to us. I
find this answer unsatisfactory. First of all, it seems to sidestep the issue, namely
whether or not and how minimal self evolves. It is one thing to argue on phenomenolo-
gical basis or by using thought experiments, that minimal self is an integral formal feature
of experience as its ubiquitous first-personal character. It is a different thing to claim that
minimal self is not only ontogenetically primitive form of selfhood but also unchanging
throughout the development process and across human or animal lifetime. I take
Zahavi to endorse both positions but here to defend the previous claim, while Schechtman
challenges the latter.33 Secondly, emphasizing the formal nature of minimal self leaves the
question of bodily nature of minimal self unsettled. One would have to argue in more
detail why and how minimal self is at the same time both formal and embodied. If
minimal self is an embodied first-person perspective from the beginning but only
imbued with few core features early in ontogenesis, do developmental changes in our
bodily capacities transform or extend the minimal self? Is the case different when it
comes to language acquisition, narrative competency, and socialization?34 To be sure,
the burden of proof falls on the proponent of a strong narrative or constructivist approach
to specify how acquiring linguistic capacities (or social interaction) could and factually
does alter the fundamental structures of experience. Zahavi is also right in pointing out
that critics should be able to account for the developmental continuity between infants
and language-using adults, if there is no underlying common core between minimal self
and narrative self.35 But in the same way, the relationship between formal and unchanging
minimal self and constantly evolving narrative self remains unintelligible until their devel-
opmental and constitutive connection is laid out in detail.
Not surprisingly, Zahavi himself has been somewhat hesitant to fully embrace the
stronger claim, even though he deems minimal self as a fundamental and indispensable
notion. He concedes that it might be of little relevance to ask whether it is true or false
to claim that minimal self is necessary and/or sufficient condition for being a self, since
the minimal self is never to be found in isolation and rarely if ever in its purity.36 On a
charitable reading, Zahavi eschews focusing on minimal self too narrowly and in abstracto
precisely in order to understand its entanglement with and relation to other aspects of

32
Schechtman (410–11); see Zahavi (Self and Other 61–62).
33
For the first claim and Zahavi’s interpretation of the arguments put forward by Schechtman, see Zahavi (Self and Other
18–19, 22–24, 61–62, 88). For the second claim, see especially Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227).
Zahavi offers a similar answer to Matthew Ratcliffe’s argument that minimal self is dependent on and changed by social
development. While Ratcliffe views minimal self in terms of self-development and interpersonal transformation process,
Zahavi underlines the formal, structural, and thin nature of minimal self. See Zahavi (“Thin, Thinner, Thinnest”).
34
See Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 227). Zahavi states unequivocally that minimal self is an embo-
died first-person perspective but is hesitant to describe it in terms of a spatiotemporal locus or as interpersonally con-
stituted (Zahavi, “Minimal Self and Narrative Self”; “Thin, Thinner, Thinnest”). When it comes to the formation of self,
Gallagher has entertained that self-narratives extend and enhance minimal self (see “Pathologies in Narrative Struc-
tures”; Phenomenology, 178).
35
Zahavi (Self and Other 62).
36
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”).
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 9

selfhood, especially narrative self, more concretely. In this interpretation, then, the task is
to analyse the embeddedness and relational nature of self, i.e. its relation to its environ-
ment, to other people and to its own (experiential) past.
There are a few different strategies to cope with this entanglement and embeddedness
both terminologically and analytically. Gusman’s strategy described above was to argue
that a single notion of self could account for all aspects of selfhood. My suggestion is to
introduce a third concept, namely “person”. Interestingly, Zahavi and Gallagher do
suggest a similar terminological move by renaming the narrative self as person.37 But I
think their move is unwarranted, since it widens the scope of narrative self to personal fea-
tures that are not articulated in narratives and have no inherent narrative structure. This
runs the risk of trivializing the basic idea of narration at the heart of the concept – a risk
that both the proponents and opponents of narrative self are well aware of.38 It also makes
it harder to distinguish the distinctively Husserlian descriptions of person from more
generic narrative depictions of selfhood, while potentially clouding the issue on how
minimal self is entangled with non-narrative personal features. On the one hand, personal
character and individuality shaped by our previous experiences and enduring and chan-
ging convictions are thus interpreted as belonging to the narrative understanding of the
self.39 On the other hand, minimal self is said not only to be embedded in temporal
and environmental horizons but also to be intertwined with expressive behaviour and pas-
sively acquired habits and associations.40 These are all features that Husserl considered
pertaining to a person.
Husserl’s formulations do play a crucial role especially in Zahavi’s analyses of prelin-
guistic social life, empathy, and “communicative intertwinement” between self and
other. In stressing the social origin of becoming a person and the role of social interaction
in developing as a person, Zahavi and Gallagher advance Husserl’s analysis of personaliz-
ing self-apprehension and use his terminology of person.41 However, they do not utilize
Husserl’s concept of Person on a par with minimal self and narrative self as a third
notion in its own right. Zahavi has rather opted for “interpersonal self” as his choice
for the bridge concept. Following Neisser, Zahavi defines interpersonal self as the “self
in its relation to and interaction with the others”. More specifically, he is interested in
the way our self-experience is “mediated through others” and “constitutively dependent
upon others”. Furthermore, the notion of interpersonal self is meant to capture the inter-
mediary dimension between pre-social minimal self and language dependent narrative
self. This can also be seen as an attempt to make sense of the “developmental trajectory”
between minimal self and narrative self.42
I believe there are still other facets of selfhood analysable in terms of person alongside
the prelinguistic social aspects captured by interpersonal self. My goal is to show that
minimal self, person, and narrative self can all play specific roles in differentiating,

37
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 228). See also Zahavi (“Self and Other”; Subjectivity and Selfhood 129).
38
Schechtman; Zahavi (Self and Other 57–58; “Self and Other”).
39
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 228). See also Zahavi (“Self and Other”; Subjectivity and Selfhood 129–
30).
40
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”).
41
See Zahavi (“Self and Other”; Self and Other, especially 81–82, 236); Gallagher and Zahavi (“Phenomenological
Approaches to Self-Consciousness”); cf. also Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 228).
42
Zahavi (Self and Other 90, 237–38; “Minimal Self and Narrative Self”; “Reply: … Even in the Absence of Social
Interaction?”).
10 J. BELT

describing, and integrating different dimensions of selfhood. As Zahavi acknowledges,

minimal self has
clear limitations, and it must be supplemented by thicker notions that do justice to other
important aspects of self. More specifically, our account of human selfhood will remain
inadequate as long as we fail to consider the self that forms plans, makes promises, and
accepts responsibilities, the self that is defined and shaped by its values, ideals, goals, convic-
tions, and decisions.43

As I will show below, in addition to full-blown narrative accounts, these aspects of self-
hood have been analysed by Husserl in his treatment of person. Underlining this connec-
tion makes it also possible to integrate Zahavi’s earlier insights on Husserl’s analysis of
person into the context of minimal self and narrative self and develop them further sys-
tematically.44 On the whole, I take my suggestion to be in line with Zahavi and Gallagher’s
aim for a multidimensional account of selfhood.

Husserl’s Analysis of Person

As we saw before, Zahavi and Gallagher stress the manner or how of experience more than
what is experienced. In other words, minimal self lacks content in the sense that it is not
comprised of and cannot be reduced to any single experience or combination of or con-
nection between experiences.45 Rather than any specific experiential content, minimal self
is part of the structure of experience – this is what Zahavi and Gallagher have in mind
when they say minimal self is formal and it might involve an abstraction. Person, by con-
trast, has an experiential history of its own. Our personal history is not to be understood as
a collection of separate or isolated experiences or episodes ready to be remembered at will.
It also has more enduring and layered features, which Husserl calls habitualities (Habitua-
litäten). These do not only include habits in the narrow sense but also convictions, abiding
interests, character traits, dispositions and even some cognitive abilities and patterns of
expressive behaviour.46 Husserl speaks of “sedimentation” when describing how habitua-
lities are formed on the basis of “position-taking” in judging, volition, evaluation, and so
on.47
By position-taking (Stellungnahme) Husserl means a class of intentional acts that are
not mere consciousness of object but active and free comportment towards objects. Pos-
ition-takings are not restricted to theoretical stances but refer to acting, willing, and think-
ing in general.48 Neither do they require explicit self-reflection, subsequent interpretation
or linguistic articulation to be recognized as mine or acknowledged as part of my personal
character. Rather, Husserl states, “each ‘new’ position-taking institutes a persistent
‘opinion’” and “each ‘opinion’ is an instauration which remains a possession of the
subject”.49 These persistent opinions and possessions Husserl calls “sedimentations
43
Zahavi (Self and Other 50).
44
Zahavi has examined Husserl’s account of person in connection to a variety of topics, including the egological structure
of consciousness and the body, mundane self-awareness, and self-reflection, individuality, intersubjectivity, and com-
munality, and even the unconscious. See Self-Awareness and Alterity (147–48, 157–60, 164–66, 207–08).
45
Zahavi (“Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self” 327); Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 226).
46
In addition to Latin word habitus and German equivalents Habitus and habituell, Husserl speaks of Gewohnheit and uses a
Greek term hexis in his analysis of person. See Moran.
47
Hua I 100–01; EU 329–31.
48
Hua IV 277–78, 326; EU 329.
49
Hua IV 112–13; Id II 119–20.
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 11

[Niederschläge] in the pure Ego”.50 Along the same lines he writes: “all my habitualities
[…] begin with institutive acts of my own and become constituted as abiding convictions
in which I myself become abidingly convinced of such and such”.51
Should we thus conclude that for Husserl our personal character is a matter of free
choice and even our habitual basis can be shaped at will? Husserl does indeed emphasize
the conscious, goal-directed, and self-determining character of habit formation. By habi-
tuating itself “the Ego [das Ich] ‘acquires’ capacities, posits goals, and in attaining these
goals acquires practical skills”.52 But this is only half of the story. In addition to an
active side of position-taking, habitualities have a passive and temporal side of prevailing.
A belief, an opinion, or a decision, for example, does not hold only when one is consciously
thinking about it. If you decide something, the act of choosing may fleet but the decision
persists (and, correlatively, you remain “so-and-so decided”). It remains the same until
you revisit it. You may strengthen your belief, stand by your opinion or come to
change your mind, but later modifications are always made on the basis of the initial
act and the original acquisition of conviction.53 The original experience may be forgotten
and can never be repeated exactly the same, but its “results” can be re-activated and re-
established.54 In other words, when the present experience is no longer lived through
“in its actuality”, it settles down as something that future experiences can build on and
add on. Precisely this temporal stratification of experiences and continual transformation
of what was originally established and habitually adopted Husserl calls sedimentation
(Sedimentierung).55 Our personal history, then, is formed by such sedimentations of
experiences. Husserl writes: “The Ego [das Ich] always lives in the medium of its
‘history;’ all its earlier lived experiences have sunk down, but they have aftereffects in ten-
dencies, sudden ideas, transformations, or assimilations of earlier lived experiences”.56
Active and passive constitution of personal features can be further elaborated with what
Husserl calls “horizons” of experience. Since position-taking is relational and intentionally
directed activity towards objects, those objects must be given beforehand for such actions,
decisions, or evaluations to take place.57 In more general terms, position-taking always
takes place in the midst of our pregiven surrounding world and against the background
of what Husserl calls the “world horizon”.58 By surrounding world Husserl does not
refer to the natural world of physical objects, but the personal and interpersonal world
of our intentional life with all kinds of actual and potential thematic objects, such as cul-
tural objects, instruments, goals, values, institutions, and other people.59
The horizon of world serves as a passive ground for our intentional action in two ways.
Firstly, the world functions as the context for every possible experience because we always

50
Hua IV 111.
51
Hua I 134; CM 104.
52
Hua IV 253; Id II 265.
53
Hua I 100–02; Hua IV 111–14; EU 330–31.
54
Hua XVII 321. Husserl’s term Stiftung has been translated as institution, instauration, founding, and establishment. It
refers to the sort of experiential or cognitive possession (Gesitz) acquired by the subject living through her position-
takings. In Husserl’s genetic theory of sedimentation, original acquisitions or primal establishments (Urstiftungen) embo-
died in decisions, convictions, and resolutions of the will are open to transformation through re-establishment (Nach-
stiftung). See Hua XXXIX 47–48.
55
EU 330–31.
56
Hua IV 338; Id II 350.
57
EU 53.
58
EU 52–54; cf. also Hua IV 279.
59
Hua IV 218, 326–27; EU 52–53.
12 J. BELT

have a passive belief in pre-existing world, and in the course of everyday practical life our
surrounding world is imbued with familiarity.60 Secondly, in addition to actively comport-
ing towards objects, we also comport passively towards objects that motivate, stimulate,
affect, influence, and attract us. Relations in which intentional objects draw subject to
engage in goal-oriented action towards the object Husserl calls motivation. In motivation
it is the experienced object and its qualities that have “effects” on subject.61 A rose arouses
aesthetic pleasure and serves as a basis for an aesthetic judgment; a facial expression might
be an invitation to ask someone to dance or a trigger to hold a grudge; smelling or imagin-
ing a cigarette pulls an addict to smoke one; hearing one’s name lifts the uttered words
from a buzz of conversation to the fore, prompts us to take notice and perhaps urges
us to respond.62 We can take interest in and take position on only what already draws
our attention or presents us with practical possibilities through association and free motiv-
ation.63 Husserl even speaks of “the relation of reciprocal determination between the per-
sonal subject and its surrounding world”, claiming that the “Ego [das Ich] and
surrounding world belong together and are inseparable from each other”.64 In other
words, person is what it is only in relation to a common surrounding world.65
Husserl also stresses that personal life is always lived in a community-horizon (with
such forms as families and nations).66 Husserl’s emphasis on a common surrounding
world is mirrored in Zahavi and Gallagher’s claim that persons are always socialized
into a communal horizon and become fully developed by living in a shared communal
world with others.67 Zahavi refers approvingly to Husserl’s views in stating that personal
I has “a relative mode of being” and that this “I is only constituted as I in contrast to the
you”.68 Because the basic forms of social relations and interactions arguably constitute an
important aspect of selfhood and mediate our self-apprehension, Zahavi introduces “inter-
personal self” as a potential bridge concept for minimal self and narrative self.
Husserl’s analysis of person brings to the fore social and public dimensions of selfhood
that are usually regarded as features of narrative self. We are not only intentionally
directed towards intersubjectively shared natural and cultural objects, values, and goals
in our position-taking. Also the norms guiding our self-understanding are interpersonally
constituted and partly shaped by tradition, historical situation, cultural categories (such as
class, gender and race), and our belonging to different groups. Contrary to what at least
some proponents of strong narrative accounts assert, this social sphere is not thoroughly
narratively mediated or patterned by narrative practices. The claim about the public
sphere is even stronger: most narrative accounts maintain that it is precisely in and
through narratives that the self is brought to public domain.69 But as I later argue, the

60
EU 53–54. See also Hua VI 145: “Leben ist ständig In-Weltgewißheit-leben”.
61
Hua IV 219–20.
62
See Hua IV 111–14; Hua XIII 403–04.
63
Hua IV 257.
64
Hua IV 321, 326; Id II 333, 338.
65
Hua IV 377.
66
Hua VI 314–15.
67
Gallagher and Zahavi (The Phenomenological Mind 228); Zahavi (Subjectivity and Selfhood 130).
68
Zahavi (Self and Other 80–81), referring to Hua IV, 319 and Hua XIII, 247. Cf. also Gallagher and Zahavi (“Phenomeno-
logical Approaches to Self-Consciousness”).
69
Zahavi (“Self and Other” 181–82). In contrast, Zahavi and Gallagher assert that it is already embodiment in its externality
that puts us and our actions into the public sphere. Gallagher and Zahavi (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-
Consciousness”).
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 13

interest we take in our surrounding world, our overall style that expresses itself on the
outside, and social understanding based on typification are forms of social and public
interaction that shape who we are without necessarily relying on narrative practices.70
Whether to explicate this aspect of selfhood in terms of interpersonal self or person
depends on the focus of analysis. “Interpersonal self” serves to capture the developmental
and constitutive significance of prelinguistic social interactions, self-other-conscious
emotions, and adopting the perspective of others on oneself.71 In addition to these impor-
tant relational aspects of the socially constituted self, “person” uncovers self in relation to a
common world and to the temporal formation of habitualities underlying its publicly
expressed personal character. Both concepts clearly reveal a non-private and non-isolated
dimension of selfhood between minimal self and narrative self.
Besides world horizon and communal horizon, our experience is always accompanied
by what Husserl calls temporal horizons. Every experience carries with it past actualities
and unfulfilled possibilities as an indeterminate past horizon – a sort of temporal back-
ground of sedimentations in one’s personal experiential history.72 To take an example,
an experience of a beautiful rose refers back and is related to earlier acts of consciousness
that constitute the object (e.g. a continuous perception of a red rose), preceding attentional
acts (e.g. this flower is apprehended as a rose because of the similarities with other objects
of the same kin I have encountered since childhood), former position-takings (e.g. I think
roses in general are the most beautiful flowers) and habitualities (e.g. I am fond of roses).73
Actual experiences not only refer back to these kinds of past horizons, but also open up a
horizon of potential future acts. When I see a red rose, it has an “external horizon” of pre-
delineated possibilities for future course of action: I can smell the rose, admire its beauty,
regard it as a symbol for love, compare it to the last perception of a similar flower etc. In
this way, current experiences and position-takings form a new background for every
future position-taking.74
To sum up: in Husserl’s analysis, person is constituted as a subject of position-takings
in relation to its environment. In addition to a pregiven world and social relations, person
is determined by its personal history that is sedimented as habitualities and convictions.
Our habitual personal features form the temporal background for character shaping pos-
ition-taking in the future. Underlining this horizontal and habitual side of person, Husserl
talks of a “sedimented underground” of passive efforts, associations, and passive synth-
eses.75 In his words, person is in part dependent on nature and on “an obscure underlying
basis of traits of character, original and latent dispositions”.76 There is no room for analys-
ing this side of selfhood in greater detail in this article, but in can be added that Husserl
also speaks of hidden and “buried” motivations, innate and latent capabilities, and even
drives and instincts.77 It is thus clear that he sees free and spontaneous action conditioned
and complemented by passivity. In Husserl’s notion of person there is passivity in the
heart of active self.

70
See also Jacobs (“Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity” 146–47).
71
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”; Self and Other 237–38).
72
Hua XVII 318–19.
73
Cf. Hua IV 277–79.
74
EU 32–33; 437; Hua I 82–83.
75
Hua IX 481.
76
Hua IV 276; Id II 289.
77
See Hua IV 222–24, 252, 255, 280.
14 J. BELT

Active and Passive Self

Husserl’s analysis of person helps us to understand and clarify the relationship between
active and passive dimensions of selfhood in general. Take for example the topic of
agency. Narrative self is usually defined in terms of activity and authorship. Different nar-
rative theories see personal identities shaped by how we lead a life, pursue a goal, enact our
own narrative, reflectively evaluate or at least actively interpret our actions in a meaningful
or intelligible way – even if we are not explicitly telling a story or spinning a narrative.78
Narrative accounts differ in whether they regard subjects as self-authors or co-authors –
as the sole author or only one of the writers of our own story – or merely actors in a
story. Perhaps we are even caught up or entangled with intertwined stories not made
but found by us.79 In any case, narrative accounts understand selves predominantly as
agents, whereas minimal self is characterized by a more passive perspectival ownership.80
Husserl would agree that active position-taking is paramount to being a person. Never-
theless, his analysis also shows the importance of passive constitution of enduring personal
characteristics through habituation and sedimentations that is often neglected in narrative
approaches. Moreover, the active normative evaluation emphasized by narrative accounts
rests on a passive experiential dimension: our habitualities and convictions underlying
them are in principle open to reassessment, continual renewal, and critical appropriation
because they are my abiding acquisitions. In other words, they are recognized and
acknowledged as “habitually my own” – as something “I have a stake in” and something
I can “take up” and “take part in” anew.81
Husserl’s analyses point to a wide range of bodily, behavioural, and cognitive traits
that are at least partly passively acquired, such as the way one walks, the manner of
speaking, or how one remembers associatively. These habitualities are not intrinsically
narrative in form, not to even mention linguistically articulated. Thus I do not see a
point in labelling them as part of narrative self, without stretching the concept
beyond its limits. But they are not part of minimal self either. Minimal self is intertwined
with but nonetheless separate from these kinds of features. I suggest these kinds of per-
sonal characters are grasped with a Husserlian concept of person described above. It can
shed light on why and on what basis Zahavi maintains that minimal self is not only
embodied but also embedded in environmental and temporal horizons.82 Husserl’s
analysis of person, its temporal becoming, and its reciprocal relation to a common sur-
rounding world outlined in the previous section can serve as a starting point for further
clarifications.

78
Schechtman; Tengelyi.
79
See Carr (Time, Narrative, and History 80–93).
80
Zahavi makes a similar observation by stating that narrative approach to selfhood underlines the importance of author-
ship, whereas experiential (or minimal) approach emphasizes ownership. See Zahavi (“The Time of the Self”; Self and
Other 90).
81
Hua I 100–02; Hua IV 112, 117; Jacobs (“Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity”). Jacobs has under-
lined this deliberative and evaluative element of Stellungnahme by translating it as “critical stance (taking)”. In her
reading, the capacity for taking a critical stance amounts to a form of socially and historically embedded reflection.
In taking stances, we may, for example, scrutinize our ways of taking over communal practices and appropriating
through language. When motivated by evidence or challenged by others, taking critical stances can lead to upholding
or rejecting our own habitual ways of intending the world (our beliefs, feelings, desires, projects etc.). Jacobs (“Socializa-
tion, Reflection, and Personhood”).
82
Zahavi (“Minimal Self and Narrative Self”).
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 15

Relying on a more grounded concept of person might also alleviate the often expressed
worry with narrative accounts that self is more or less arbitrarily invented or constructed, a
sort of linguistic, theoretical, or artistic fiction. Habitualities put restraints on self-narra-
tion – on what can and should be reflected upon retrospectively. Narrative accounts
emphasize the active interpretive task of integrating experiences into coherent and mean-
ingful wholes, but at the same time something is left out. To use Zahavi’s phrase, stories
always “involve deletions, abridgements, and reorderings”. Person’s habitualities and sedi-
mented experiential history might offer additional criteria for truth and falsity of self-nar-
ration and stories others tell of us by comparing what is included and excluded when our
lived lives are described in narrative terms.83 László Tengelyi has emphasized the impor-
tance of both Husserl’s and Zahavi’s insights in showing the limits of narrative self by
evoking the passive sphere of selfhood. In Tengelyi’s words, the self is discovered, rather
than invented – or as Husserl puts it, always learned to know.84
Along the same lines, David Carr has stressed the experiential constraints on narrative
fabulation: “Unlike the author of fiction we do not create the materials we are to form:
we are stuck with what we have in the way of characters, capacities, and circum-
stances”.85 Husserl’s analysis of person shows how habitual and relational aspects of
self are passively constituted and sedimented in our personal character, providing the
aforementioned material for our self-formation. I think Carr is also right in arguing
that while the facticity of lived life does restrain our authorship, it does not mean experi-
ential life lacks selective and voluntary aspects. We might not possess full freedom to
determine who we are, but we are not hapless spectators either. Carr mentions our
capacity for attention, planning, conducting our endeavours, and ranking our experi-
ences in importance as examples of ways in which selection takes place.86 According
to Husserl, this is precisely what is at stake in dynamic habit formation by position-
taking: focusing one’s attention, taking interest in, strengthening our commitments
etc.87 Thus, the phenomenological concept of person provides tools to analyse how self-
hood is both passively constituted and actively shaped.

Persistence and Uniqueness of Person

Now it is possible to outline how a multidimensional account of self might handle the
problem of persistence. As we remember, minimal self is claimed to be more or less
stable the whole waking life of an individual, while narrative self is constantly evolving
in different developmental stages and stages of life. In other words, minimal self is
83
Zahavi (“Self and Other”).
84
Tengelyi; see Hua IV 252, 311.
85
Carr (“Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative” 166).
86
Carr (“Discussion: Ricoeur on Narrative” 163–65).
87
Interestingly, Carr also stresses Husserl (and Dilthey before him) assumed that a certain kind of deliberative stock-taking
(Besinnung) is needed to make sense of our actions, their background, and perhaps even life as a whole. I will not pursue
the methodological significance of Besinnung in Husserl’s philosophy and its connection to self-understanding any
further in this article, but it is worth noting that Carr’s suggestion implies important parallels between a Husserlian
reflective stance on lived experience and his narrative account of selfhood. See Carr (Time, Narrative, and History 55–
57, 111). Jacobs has also suggested that both repeated phenomenological reflection and deliberative critical stance
taking (Stellungnahme) can bring about an enduring change in our personal character by transforming our ways of
intending the world and giving rise to new habitualities. Thus, reflective stance might be said to have constitutive sig-
nificance for a socially embedded and relational personhood in a Husserlian sense as well. Jacobs (“Phenomenology as a
Way of Life?”; “Socialization, Reflection, and Personhood”).
16 J. BELT

closely connected with what stays the same and narrative self is related to what changes.
But how could these aspects of selfhood be united?
Husserl’s notion of person combines both these features by describing the self as a “sub-
strate of habitualities” (Substrat von Habitualitäten). Experiences are not only imbued
with a formal character of mineness, as is the case with minimal self. Husserl stresses
they are also sedimented “as new abiding properties” (the aforementioned habitualities)
that constitute a “fixed and abiding personal I”.88 Figuratively speaking, experiences
leave a trail on the one who has lived through them; that is why we speak of a personal
history in the first place. The qualitative changes in self occur, then, when habitualities
change. As Husserl puts it: “The Ego remains unchanged as long as it remains ‘of the
same conviction’, ‘of the same opinion’. To change the conviction is to change
‘oneself’”.89 This interconnection between personal activities and habitualities renders
us with a dynamic concept of personal life that is constantly developing. For Husserl,
person is living in the state of permanent becoming.90
This brings us to the last point. How does the concept of person address uniqueness?
Minimal self is unique in the sense that no one can share the one and the same perspective
(think of only the restrictions on spatiotemporal orientation). But it has no substantial
individuality, since all the perspectives can be described in pretty much the same way.
According to Husserl, being a person involves both individual and general characteristics.
Let us recall an example mentioned before, namely the way one walks. Even though all
human beings walk generally in the same way (with two feet, in a standing position,
step by step etc.), there is also individual variation on this more or less universal way of
walking – one could almost speak of a signature walk. The same goes for written and
spoken language: basic syntactic rules, some shared meanings and, say, anatomical and
physiological basis of speech production give some preconditions for successful language
use, but the combination of vocabulary, dialect, stylistic preferences, intonation etc. is
unique and distinctive for everyone. Husserl generalizes this insight by stating that indi-
viduality is always a combination of general types and what is typical for oneself in
particular.91
It is important to notice that Husserl does not have unchanging essences, predeter-
mined concepts, Platonic ideas or something like natural kinds in mind when he speaks
about types and typicalities. Rather, he refers to the sort of associative and vague general-
izations we make based on similarities and perceived likeness of individuals or groups of
individuals. These “empirical generalities” are based on previous acquaintance and famili-
arity with typical characters of objects in our everyday surrounding world described
above.92 According to Husserl, the factual world of things is thus first known as
typified, but we adopt and use types as a sort of heuristics in apprehending and under-
standing intentional behaviour too. Because of the horizontal nature of experience, typifi-
cation is based on our previous (sedimented) experiences and our habitual ways of
knowing. But types also guide our future expectations. In understanding others and our-
selves as persons, both a general type (i.e. what characterizes all humans) and a particular

88
Hua I 100–01; CM 66–67.
89
Hua IV 311 (see also 112); Id II 324. See also Jacobs (“Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal Identity”).
90
Hua VI 272.
91
Hua IV 270–72.
92
EU 385–86, 397–99.
 JOURNAL OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY 17

individual type (i.e. what is distinctively typical for this human being) are in play.93 I come
to know someone in person by learning how she comports herself and how she lets herself
be motivated in relation to our common surrounding world. In order to grasp someone’s
character, we might need both empathic identification and a sort of reconstruction of her
current situation, upbringing, development, and transformation in different stages of
life.94 Husserl also speaks of person’s unique character becoming a theme of inductive con-
siderations.95 But in his analysis, this understanding is formed in a rather intuitive fashion
relying on typification rather than conceptual or rational reasoning. As a person everyone
manifests a general type, reflecting how people in general act in a normal and familiar way,
but one also has a particular individual type with its own regularities, peculiarities, and
even idiosyncrasies. Neither general type (human) nor particular typicality (this person)
can entirely predict how one acts – otherwise we would be regarded as stereotypes and
not unique persons. However, they are essential in telling who we are and guiding our
expectations of other’s behaviour.96
Personal character is then closely tied not only to habitualities, but also what Husserl
calls one’s “overall style” (Gesamtstil). By this term he means the aforementioned particu-
lar typical ways of comporting oneself. In other words, one’s style is exemplified in how
one acts and is affected and motivated in different circumstances, or to use Husserl’s
more concrete examples, in the way one values things aesthetically or how ideas or meta-
phors pop up to one’s mind. Facial expressions, gestures, speech, mannerisms etc. express
one’s thinking, feeling and desiring and thus also convey one’s style.97 In other words,
overall style gives person a publicly manifested and socially interpreted content with
both general and particular characteristics. Changes and alterations are integrated in
one’s overall style or interpreted as anomalies in an analogous way a coherent life story
of narrative self is created. Husserl also asserts that a pervasive unitary style manifests
itself even in and through more significant changes between different stages of life,
since even if nothing else stays the same, at least the characteristic way of changing
endures.98
The main difference in comparison with narrative identity is that the unitary style of
person is not tied to self-narration or to any narrative practices, for that matter. It is
more passive, experiential, and behavioural – or motivational, to use Husserl’s terminol-
ogy – in nature. One’s style is expressed in one’s overall comportment, which is something
we neither freely choose nor necessarily succumb to. Person develops by living and
changes in taking new stances on the basis of earlier ones, instead of relying solely on nar-
ratively mediated ways of including and excluding life events to form coherent wholes, life
stories. To end with a quote from Husserl, the uniqueness of person consists in “the overall
style and habitus of the subject, pervading, as a concordant unity, all his modes of behav-
iour, all his activities and passivities”.99

93
Hua IV 270–72; EU 397–404.
94
Hua IV 270–72; 377–79.
95
Hua IV 332.
96
Hua IV 270–72, 378. Meacham even suggests in the article “What Goes Without Saying” that one who would behave
entirely predictably should not be regarded as a person in the full phenomenological sense but an automaton.
97
Hua IV 234–35, 270–72, 277–78. Here Husserl seems to have in mind a subgroup of habits that William James calls “per-
sonal habits”, including “vocalization and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address”. James (122).
98
Hua IV 270.
99
Hua IV 277; Id II 290, translation modified.
18 J. BELT

Funding
This work was supported by Kone Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

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