The Self in Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages.docx

The Self From Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Cameron, London and New York: Routledge, 2019 (The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 2), 257-278. (This is a copy of my MS as finally submitted, without any changes due to reviewing. But there were no substantive changes between it and the published version. I have indicated the page divisions of the published version.) [p. 257] Introduction: the self, knowledge of the self and subjectivity A fuller title for this chapter would be: ‘The self without subjectivity’. That title might seem a contradiction in terms. Most reflection on the self today is about subjectivity and its importance — the idea that we each have experiences that are ours, a first-personal perspective on the world, and that it matters that it is so. Such reflection begins from the self as the subject of experiences – of thoughts, feelings, images and pains. This self is conceived as something present to each of us: we are each aware of it, some believe, all the time, or at least whenever we wish. Such awareness is bare and inarticulate and, in itself, thin and momentary: an awareness of what has been described as ‘the ultimate private object, apparently lacking logical connections to anything else, mental or physical … which cannot be defined as a kind of object, either physical or non-physical, but must be understood as some subjective consciousness’ (Nagel 1986, 32-33). From this bare self-consciousness we can work towards a self-knowledge based on our subjectivity. To take a famous example: Descartes (Meditation II) puts the bare self we encounter whenever we introspect, at the foundation of his system of knowledge. From awareness of the bare self, the meditator quickly discovers, by reflection, what he is – a thinking thing, where ‘thinking’ (cogitans) means having experiences: not just understanding, affirming, denying, but also willing, imagining and feeling. Although such self-knowledge is not personal, in the sense of being about the peculiarities of Descartes’s or some other meditator’s character, or the particular contents of his mental world, it is subjective — an account in general terms of what I am from within. Such an account can also be developed in another direction. Although we encounter our subjective consciousness moment by moment, most theorists (there are some exceptions, such as Hume) hold that there is a unified self that underlies these moments and makes them belong together. A rather dated, but still widespread, misconception is that such notions of the self and subjectivity are modern ones, anticipated perhaps in late antiquity, but with little purchase on the following centuries until the time of Descartes. [p. 258] Foucault’s The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), published a half century ago, and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) were especially influential sources for the view. The idea that the self is a modern invention set the agenda for many more detailed studies, where the authors simply chose the seventeenth century as their starting point: see, for example, Seigel 2005, Thiel 2011. Foucault’s own view, certainly by the end of his life, was in fact far more nuanced. Medievalists, who before then had hardly considered the self, reacted to this exclusion of their period. Whereas specialists in ancient philosophy questioned the framework imposed on study of the self by this modernity-centred historiography (e.g. Sorabji 2006, Remes 2007), the medievalists accepted the terms of those they were setting out to correct and sought to show that subjectivity is not a modern discovery by finding it in accounts of self-knowledge from centuries earlier. They have been remarkably successful. Augustine’s theory of self-knowledge has been shown to be — as Taylor himself had, indeed, anticipated (1989, 127-42) — a landmark in the theory of subjectivity (Cary 2000). From the late thirteenth-century onwards, university theologians — especially the Franciscans, who were very open to Augustine’s influence — developed sophisticated theories of self-knowledge, which often were based on the idea of the subjective self; according to some historians, even Aquinas was among their number (see VI below). And, recently, specialists in Islamic thought have pointed out that subjectivity is central to the thinking of the Avicenna (d. 1037), and of a whole series of thinkers who followed him, from Suhrawardī in the twelfth century to Mulla Ṣadrā in the seventeenth (see V below). It might still be objected that, although self-knowledge is treated by many medieval writers, the self, as a theoretical concept, is modern; a chapter on ‘The Self’ in a volume on the period 500 – 1300 is a blatant anachronism. No doubt: but is it a useful anachronism? The following pages aim to show that it is, and the Conclusion returns to this methodological point. If the aim of the essays in this collection were to synthesize and present the findings of current scholarship, then the subject of the following pages would be the material just described, in so far as it falls between 500 and 1300. But contributors have been asked, rather, to provide new research. The focus chosen is, therefore, a different one, which puts the elements usually in the historiographical mainstream at the edges so as to look in detail at aspects of the topic that have been neglected. The self is a far wider as a topic than subjectivity. On the one hand, rather than being seen as the centre of our subjectivity, the self can be conceived as that which, for each of us, remains as we change — what grounds our personal identity. Some theories of this sort do, indeed, urge that it is our continuity as subjects of experience that gives us identity, but some look in a quite different direction, even to the extent of leaving anything distinctively mental out of their account. On the other hand, there are theories of self-knowledge which do not involve subjectivity much or at all. They are orientated mainly to a knowledge of the self that is not subjective. Although derived from introspection, this knowledge is not about how it looks from within. These two areas will be the main concern of this chapter — especially the second of them, since much in the first falls outside the philosophy of mind. Not only does this focus allow for a new approach, and give the chance to question some of the assumptions of current scholarship, [p. 259] it also fits the whole period far better, since there are almost no texts dealing with the self in terms of subjectivity from the Latin tradition between Augustine and the thirteenth century. A single chapter can offer only case studies. The first one is about Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, written in the early sixth century, which provides a dense and perhaps far from straightforward example of a common ancient and early medieval approach to self-knowledge without subjectivity, in which the true self, so far from being ever present to each of us, is hidden: an ideal that can only with difficulty be discovered or rediscovered. The second case study looks at the ninth-century philosopher, John Scottus Eriugena, who approaches the self in terms of continuity between life on earth and after death, and also from the point of view of self-knowledge, and in both cases arrives at theories which have no place for the self of subjective experience. The next section uses Anselm’s Monologion to illustrate how early medieval theologians, unlike their thirteeenth-century successors, did not derive a theory of self-knowledge from Augustine’s On the Trinity, although it was a widely-read text, but did use it to develop an equally Augustinian, but non-subjective idea of the self. There follows a glimpse at philosophy in Arabic, which looks very briefly at Avicenna’s idea of the self before turning to Ibn Ṭufayl, a twelfth-century philosopher who takes the Avicennian self but adapts and, perhaps, ultimately rejects it. The final section rejoins the bulk of current writing on the area, by looking at the theories of self-knowledge and subjectivity in late thirteenth-century Franciscan theology. But the central question it poses is whether Aquinas also had such a theory, or whether he too conceived a form of self-knowledge without subjectivity. II. Boethius: the self as an ideal Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy does not seem to be a discussion of the self. Set in circumstances taken directly from its author’s own life, it presents Boethius imprisoned and awaiting execution on trumped-up charges of treason. The Consolation was written under the circumstances it describes in c. 524-525, while Boethius awaited execution. For ease of reference to different editions and translations, the standard book, section, and sub-section numbers are used (for verse passages (m), the line numbers). The best edition is Boethius 2005. For background information on Boethius, see Marenbon 2009. He is visited in his cell by Philosophy, a personification of the wisdom he had learned through his studies but has forgotten in the shock of his sudden downfall. Philosophy treats Boethius as a sick man, whom she sets out to cure. One aspect of his sickness is his failure to recognize how God rules the world (I.6.7-8). In the dialogue which follows, Philosophy provides a cure, by showing Boethius that, despite appearances, he has lost nothing of value, the wicked neither prosper nor have power and humans are encompassed in divine providence along with all creation. But, when she is diagnosing his illness, Philosophy judges that it has another, more fundamental cause – Boethius’s ignorance of himself. After Boethius has acknowledged that he is a man, she asks him what a man is. He responds with the classic Aristotelian definition, ‘a mortal, rational animal’ and is unable to add anything further (I.6.14-16). ‘Now’, she says, ‘I know another cause of your illness – the greatest one. You have stopped knowing what you are. And so I have completely discovered both the reason for your [p. 260] sickness and the way to restore you to health’ (I.6.17). Already, almost immediately after her first appearance, Philosophy had identified Boethius’s sickness as that of having ‘forgotten himself’ (I.2.5: ‘… he is suffering from a lethargy, the common illness of deceived minds. He has forgotten himself for a little …’). The theme is taken up again, in the next book, when Philosophy is showing Boethius why none of the transitory goods of fortune, which he has complained about losing, are true goods. She summarizes her point in terms of a contrast between what is inner and proper to humans, and what is external to them. ‘Is there then no good which is your own and within you, so that you seek your goods in things that external and set apart from you?’ asks Philosophy sarcastically (II.5.24). She goes on to complain about how man, a ‘divine animal because of his reason’, ‘similar to God in his mind’ is not content with himself. ‘Human nature’, she concludes, ‘has the condition that, when it knows itself, it excels other things, but it is brought lower than the beasts if it ceases to know itself, because it is natural for other animals not to know themselves, but for humans it is a vice’(II.5. 29). But what is it that humans know when they know themselves, and which Boethius the character, despairing in his prison cell, had forgotten? What are humans beyond being, as Boethius had recognized, rational, mortal animals? The answer Philosophy will imply sounds shocking, although it is a view which was accepted by both pagans and Christians in late antiquity (Boethius 1925, 88; Gruber 2006, 293-294). They are gods. Happiness and divinity itself, Philosophy has established, are identical; and so, given that humans become happy by gaining happiness, they must gain divinity when they become happy. But, in the same way that gaining justice or wisdom makes someone just or wise, gaining divinity makes those who gain it gods. Therefore ‘every happy person is a god’ – though Philosophy hastily adds that by nature God is one ‘but nothing prevents his being many by participation’ (III.10.22-25). Although Philosophy does not connect her comments here with Boethius’s ignorance of himself, the verse section which follows asserts that we gain true knowledge by looking into ourselves: ‘…what the mind strives for outside it possesses concealed in its own treasure-chests: what the black cloud of error long concealed will shine more clearly than Phoebus himself’ (III, m. xi, lines 5-8). My self, then, for Boethius is anything but the bare subject which I might encounter at any moment of introspection, although I do need to introspect in order to discover it. My self is what I am potentially and what I can become in actuality through self-knowledge. This self-knowledge has nothing to do with my individual characteristics: it is simply that of what I am, as a human, beyond being just a rational, mortal animal, as Boethius had believed in his self-forgetfulness when Philosophy first entered his cell. But, just as through self-knowledge I can become what I truly am, a god, so, through a more complete forgetfulness [p. 261] of myself than the prisoner’s I can cease altogether to be human. ‘Whatever falls away from the good’, insists Philosophy (IV.3.15), ‘ceases to be. And so it happens that the wicked cease to be what they were. The fact that the appearance of the human body remains shows that they once were humans: because they have turned to evil, they have lost even their human nature.’ Philosophy goes on to compare wicked people to various animals – the greedy to wolves, the irate to lions and so on, and ends (IV.3.21) by suggesting that those humans who fail to find their true selves as gods will turn in this way into beasts. She is not pointing merely to metaphorical likenesses (cf. Dougherty 2004; Van den Meeren 2012, 157-185). The poem she goes on to incant (IV m. iii) brings out her point very clearly. She tells the story of Ulysses’ crew enchanted by Circe and given the physical appearance of lions, wolves and tigers. But the enchantress is unable to affect their minds: they are the very opposite of the wicked, who keep their human shape but have really become lower than humans. As in his presentation of many of the individual themes in the Consolation, Boethius is deeply unoriginal. His idea of an inner human self that is more-than-human, a tradition that goes back to Plotinus, and ultimately to Plato himself (cf. Remes 2007), and the opposite transformation, of wicked humans into beasts was a common theme, found in Cicero, Stoic and Platonic writers (see Gruber 2006, 331). Yet, arguably, the overall structure of the Consolation adds a layer of complexity to what Boethius takes from his sources. Philosophy gives the Prisoner two different sorts of answer to his complaints that he has suffered unjustly, that the wicked prosper and God has omitted humans from his providential plan, the first plausible, the second strenuously argued but counter-intuitive. The plausible set of answers rests on a varied conception of the good and on a view of God as an efficient cause, arranging the universe for the best. They are intended show the Prisoner that the goods he has lost are not true goods, but only the false goods of fortune, and that his trials have a purpose in a divinely-ordered universe. The counter-intuitive set of answers depends on a monolithic conception of the good, in which only the supreme good, which is God, should be sought, and on a view of God as only a final cause: the good are rewarded simply by doing good, and the evil punish themselves whenever they do evil (Marenbon 2003, 96-121). One reason why the Prisoner’s ignorance of himself, although diagnosed as the fundamental cause of his illness, receives only passing treatment as the dialogue progresses may be that Philosophy’s solution as to what he really is, a god, and what the wicked have become, beasts, makes sense only in connection with the counter-intuitive set of answers, along with which it is indeed presented. Many interpreters consider that Philosophy intends the counter-intuitive answers as the correct ones, and the plausible ones are given merely as a preparation, a gentler remedy before the stronger medicine. But this interpretation is at odds with the way in which the debate between Philosophy and the Prisoner actually unfolds. [p. 262] Philosophy is forced to return (IV.6.32-56) to the plausible answers in order to respond to the Prisoner’s objections. Boethius may, then, have intended to put a question-mark over the counter-intuitive arguments and, along with them, the conception of the true human self as divine. Such complications are absent from the way most Latin authors in the period up to 1200 thought about self-knowledge as an ideal. Pierre Courcelle (1974, 232-91) has traced a whole tradition, found especially among the twelfth-century Victorines (Hugh, Achard and Richard of St Victor) and Cistercians such as Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St Thierry, of how the injunction to ‘Know yourself’ was treated. The maxim was treated as a call to focus on one’s inner self, rather than the external world, but the result was neither the discovery of subjectivity nor an abstract knowledge about the nature of the self nor, as for Boethius, the discovery that one is a God, but rather the discovery of God. What is called self-knowledge here is really a call to a type of interiority that leads to the abandonment of the self for an ideal that lies beyond it. III. Eriugena: the unknowable self John Scottus Eriugena, who finished his masterpiece, a five-book dialogue between student and master called the Periphyseon, in the 860s at the court of Charles the Bald, is a fascinating thinker because he takes, not just Augustine but, even more, the Greek Christian Platonic tradition (Gregory of Nyssa, pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor) as his starting point and subjects their ideas to his idiosyncratic, bold and systematic rethinking. He is one of the only Latin thinkers between Augustine and the thirteenth century to elaborate a theory of self-knowledge. But he also looks at the self when he is thinking about personal identity from earthly life through to the hereafter, and his views on this area make his stance on self-knowledge more comprehensible. Christian thinkers faced the problem of explaining how a human being could remain the same self when passing from embodied existence during this life to disembodied existence as a separate soul in the period between death and the Last Judgement, when the body would be resurrected. Eriugena gave detailed attention to the nature of this disembodied post-mortem existence, both in the Periphyseon and in an earlier work, De praedestinatione (early 850s), mainly because he wished to argue against the generally held views about eternal punishment. In De praedestinatione, he made a distinction, in the case of the souls of the damned, between their human nature and their wills. Human nature, he insists, will not be punished, but merely the movement of the sinners’ wills: - … <Human> nature is punished in nothing, because it is from God and does not sin. But the voluntary movement of the will, using the good of its nature according to wrongly-directed desire, is punished: deservedly so, because it transgresses the law of nature, which without doubt it would not transgress were it a substance created by God. (420A) References to Eriugena’s De praedestinatione and Periphyseon are to the editions cited in the bibliography John Scottus Eriugena 2003; 1996-2003, but are given using the column number and letter references from Patrologia Latina 122, since these are also given in the editions and are a standard way of citing this author. [p. 263] On its own, this passage might be taken as saying no more than that the universal nature of humanity will not be punished. But Eriugena makes it clear that he is also talking about single instances of human nature — individual human beings — since he says that ‘no nature’ will be punished (418B), and in the passage quoted he makes it clear that no substance at all, and so no individual substance will transgress and therefore be punished (cf. Marenbon 2016). Is he then, so far from trying to preserve the identity of sinners, their selves, from mortal life to the hereafter, splitting it into two: in each case, the substance, which is human nature, and the voluntary movements of the will? Not exactly, since people are not at all distinguished from each other with regard to human nature, and so there is an important sense in which Eriugena’s theory does indeed explain the survival of the self. It survives as just the other element: the movements of wrongly-directed desire, which remain in existence only so as to be subjects of punishment, or rather of self-punishment, since they are tortured by being prevented from fulfilling their evil aim which would be their own entire non-existence. In this work, Eriugena does not discuss the condition of the blessed, but it is hard to see how, on his theory, they could persist as selves; rather, they would survive only as identical instances of human nature. The Periphyseon makes clear that this is, indeed, his outlook. Here he does also discuss the condition of the blessed, introducing the idea of theōsis, which he had learned from his Greek writers. It is, as the name suggests, a state of becoming Godlike: those so favoured not only lose their individual but even their human identity, since their nature is transformed into something more-than-human. As for sinners, Eriugena maintains his view that it is ‘the wicked and unlawful movements of a rational and intellectual creature’s own will’ which are the objects of punishment (Book 5; 959C). But he adds an extraordinary and daring suggestion, which throws into even sharper relief the contrast between loss of self for the blessed, and its continuance for the others. He evokes (Book 5; 1014AB) the state of many, content with purely earthly goods – nobility of birth and an influential family, a sturdy body and good health, a penetrating minds and quick tongue, a beautiful and attentive wife, numerous offspring , riches in goods and lands along with various honours and marks of dignity. It is to this state, he declares, that at the end of time all those who are not deified will return (cf. Marenbon 1990, 322). It would be wrong to conclude that Eriugena has failed to provide an adequate theory about the survival of the self in the case of the blessed. Rather, the self, in so far as it stands for something absolutely distinctive to me, or to you – whether because it is each person’s subjectivity, or what as a whole we each are – is of no concern to Eriugena in his extravagantly optimistic account of human potentiality. Even in this life, the highest of the soul’s three motions, that of intellect, is around God and beyond the nature of the soul itself (Book 2; 572C-79A). The question of self-knowledge shows even more strikingly how Eriugena leaves subjectivity out of the picture. His thought about the topic rests on two of his characteristic positions. On self-knowledge in Eriugena, see Beierwaltes 1965/66; Moran 1989, 186-211. First, he considers that individuation of substances by accidents is merely superficial – they are all really universal. See e.g. Periphyseon I, 470D-71A. Cf. Erismann 2011, 193-291. (For this reason, in considering Eriugena, homo needs to be translated as ‘Man’, rather than ‘a person’ [p. 264] or ‘a human being’, in order to capture this understanding of the universal indistinguishable from its singulars.) Second, Eriugena believes that things originate from their intellectual notions (rather than vice versa). Indeed, although he is not a straightforward idealist monist, since he allows that there are bodies, produced by a concourse of accidents, Eriugena considers that these individual accidents too are not distinct from their universals (Cf. Marenbon 2014, 362-64). Moreover, these intellectual notions are not, at least not directly, separately existing Platonic Ideas, or Ideas in the mind of God: they are in Man’s intellect – the incorporeal natures of things subsist ‘in their notions, in the soul of one who is wise’ (Book 4; 769D). Man is the ‘workshop of all things’ (officina omnium – Book 5; 893C): all things are contained in him and created in him (Book 4; 763D-64C; cf. 760A and Moran 1986). Cf. Periphyseon Book 4; 769A: ‘Is it any wonder, therefore, if the notion (notio) of things which the human mind possesses, as it is created in it, should be understood to be the substance of the things themselves of which it is the notion …?’; and see Gracia 1978, n. 16 for further references. Gracia (156-57) traces the view back to Maximus the Confessor. All things do not just happen to be in Man’s intellect. Eriugena explains that the human mind, disciplina (by which he means the art which encompasses the notions of created things) and skill in disciplina are a triad, all sharing the same essence (Book 4; 766C-67D; cf. Gracia 1978, 161). Although, because of sin, we seem to be born lacking this skill and so ignorant, we can recover it (Book 4; 767C). This knowing is therefore – as Eriugena’s own language makes clear (Book 4; 770AB) – self-knowledge. Yet Eriugena also holds that Man cannot be known by any created thing, including himself. He has made this position clear in the Periphyseon long before his discussion of self-knowledge. It derives from Eriugena’s views about God, what it is to know something, and Man as the image of God. Like all Christians, Eriugena holds that God is infinite, but he takes this position very literally. If God is infinite, he reasons, then God is entirely unbounded. But to know what something is involves defining it – that is to say, placing it within bounds. And so even if only God could know what he is, God would have to be in some way bounded. What God is must remain unknown, therefore, even to God himself (Book 2; 586B – 98C). But Man is created in the image of God: if our intellect ‘understood in any way what it is, it would necessarily deviate from the likeness of its creator’, and so ‘what it is in essence is not known by itself nor by anything other than God’ (Book 2; 585B). Eriugena faces up directly to the apparent contradiction. ‘How is it’, the pupil asks, that you already said earlier that the human mind has a notion, by which it knows itself, and a discipline by which it learns about itself, and now in turn you assert that it is known neither by itself nor by any other created thing? (Book 4; 771B) The Master’s answer is that the human mind both knows itself and does not: it knows that it is, but not what it is. In this way it is able most fully to be the image of God, who is comprehensible to his creatures because they know that he is, but incomprehensible because ‘what he is is understood neither by any human nor [p. 265] angelic intellect, nor by himself, because he is not a what …’  (By this strange phrasing, Eriugena indicates that we cannot answer the question ‘What is God?’, not because we lack the ability, but because it is an ill-formed question.) But this still leaves the question of how every creature can be made in the knowledge of Man, when Man does not know what he is (Book 4; 771D-72A). The Master answers by bringing up an idea that already had been raised far earlier (Book 1; 443B, 487A): what he there calls ‘ousia’ – essence – and here refers to as the ‘substance’ of all the things that exist cannot be defined as to what it is. Eriugena’s idea seems to be that the specific identity of created things other than Man is always a matter of definition, which must be added on by limiting and circumscribing, through accidents, that on account of which it exists, which remains indefinable. Man and God alone have an identity not just as they can be circumscribed, but also in their incircumscribability. Eriugena has, therefore, a rich theory of self-knowledge, in which subjectivity plays no part. Note especially the so-called Eriugenian ‘cogito’ (Book IV; 776B). As Jeauneau (1995) points out, so far from trying to use it, like Descartes, to grasp what I am, Eriugena emphasizes that the thinker in question knows that he is a rational and intellectual nature but does not know what intellect and reason are. In any case, this passage is part of a longer argument designed to show how naturally (although it is obscured by the effects of the Fall) humans are endowed with knowledge of all things: self-knowledge turns out to be complete knowledge of everything but the self (and God). IV. Anselm’s Monologion: avoiding Augustinian self-knowledge No Christian author was better known in the early Middle Ages than Augustine, and among his works On the Trinity appealed especially to philosophically-minded theologians from Alcuin (who abridge and adapted it) onwards – and to Anselm perhaps more than anyone. In the prologue to his Monologion (1075-76), Anselm claims that there is nothing in his work that is inconsistent with Augustine and refers those who accuse him of asserting novelties or falsehoods specifically to that author’s On the Trinity (Anselm 1946, 8:13). Especially in the later sections, where he discusses the Trinity, he makes extensive use of this work of Augustine’s. But he almost entirely leaves out the discussion there of self-knowledge. Augustine himself does not set out to discuss human self-knowledge for its own sake. On the Trinity is, as the name suggests, a work of Trinitarian theology. Augustine considers the human mind because he finds analogies in its processes and their relations – in particular, the mind, its knowledge and its love; and remembering, understanding and loving – to the persons of the Trinity. But in doing so he focuses on self-knowledge and, with his characteristic inability either to leave philosophical insights aside, or to draw them together into a finished theory, ends by sketching a suggestive position, which some later medieval theologians would develop into theories of self-knowledge and subjectivity. Unless the soul knows itself, it cannot love itself, and because it is incorporeal, it must know itself through itself (IX.3.3). The soul ‘does not seek to make itself out as if it were something absent, but carefully scrutinizes itself as something present’ (X.9.12) – and Augustine goes on to argue that all people know they think, exist and live (X.10.13) and, in his pre-Cartesian cogito, that if anyone doubts he or she lives, thinks, knows, judges or wills, then it follows from the very act of doubting that the person does indeed live, think, know, judge and will (X.10.14). Augustine [p. 266] puts the point in the third person, but it would go more neatly in the first, since what he has in mind is essentially subjective. Even when, in a short passage, the Monologion discusses self-knowledge explicitly, Anselm leaves this side of Augustine’s thinking aside and proposes a very different account. In this work, Anselm sets out to show, by reason alone, not merely that one, all powerful, eternal, immutable and supremely good and wise God exists, but that also he is triune. One move towards this conclusion is to say (Chapter 32; Anselm 1946, 50-51) that, because God is wise, he must understand, and, if he understands, he must understand something, and that which he understands can be called his Word. But what if there were to be no creatures? It cannot be that God would have no Word, and so not understand and so not be wise. The solution is that God must understand himself. In order to make this solution clearer (cf. Visser and Williams 2009, 139-40), Anselm turns to human self-knowledge. ‘How can we even think that there is any time when the highest wisdom does not understand itself, when the rational mind can remember not only itself but also the highest wisdom, and understand itself and it?’ (Chapter 32; Anselm 1946, 51:7-9) Anselm thus insists that we are capable of self-understanding, but immediately links to it our ability to understand God. In the next chapter, in order to explain how God, in understanding himself begets a likeness or Word that shares his substance, Anselm uses the comparison with human self-understanding again, and gives more detail about what he takes the process to be. The rational mind understands itself by giving rise to an image of itself in thought – it is ‘a likeness as if formed by an impression of it’ (Chapter 33; Anselm 1946, 52:15). The process, says Anselm, is exactly the same as when the mind tries to think about anything truly, and it is most evident when it is thinking about things other than itself, especially bodies. If I wish to think about a man who is absent, the gaze of my thought (acies cogitationis meae) is formed into the image which I stored in my memory as a result of seeing him: this image is the ‘word’ of this man in my thought, and the image and the thought can be distinguished only by reason, not in reality. The implications as an analogy for the Father and Son are obvious. But it is striking that the mechanism of self-knowledge underlying it is so unAugustinian: rather than direct knowledge, the process of cognition requires an image; and so far from being seen as a special type of basic knowledge, self-knowledge is obtained by the same process as any other type of knowledge – a process which is seen more clearly in the cognition of bodily things. In later chapters (especially 48-61), Anselm makes use of Augustine’s analogy of understanding, memory and love to help understand the Trinity, but without drawing out the theme of self-knowledge. But he finally returns to it (Chapters 66-67; Anselm 1946, 184-85). We can see God in this life only ‘in a glass darkly’ (per speculum in aenigmate: I Corinthians xiii, 12): that mirror, says Anselm, is our own mind, because alone of all things that are made, it can remember, know and love itself. The more carefully, therefore, each rational mind seeks to learn about itself, the more successfully it rises to cognition of [p. 267] God. The self’s subjectivity has much less interest for Anselm than for Augustine, but both thinkers were equally keen to explore a different model of the self, as an analogical structure, allowing us to understand the Trinity through understanding ourselves. V. Extinguishing the Avicennian self: Ibn Ṭufayl As recent scholarship has revealed, a century before Anselm and three thousand miles to the East, Avicenna put an idea of the self founded on self-awareness at the centre of his thought (Black 2008; Kaukua 2015). His often repeated example of the ‘flying man’ lends itself to this reading. A human is created instantly and with a fully developed intellect, but is without input from the senses, floating in a void with eyes veiled. Such a flying man affirms the existence of his self, but not of any part of his body or any external thing (Marmura 1986 – for the various texts; Kaukua 2015, 30-42). Although some have interpreted this so-called thought experiment differently (Hasse 2000, 80-87), passages from the Ta‘līqāt (Kaukua 2015, 51-54) show beyond doubt that Avicenna championed a notion of the self, based on self-awareness, unlike anything found in the thought of Latin authors between Augustine and the thirteenth century. Self-awareness individuates selves; indeed, ‘self-awareness is innate to the self, it is [the self’s] very existence; so nothing external is needed by means of which to apprehend the self – rather, the self is that which apprehends itself’ ( Ta‘līqāt 161, transl. Kaukua 2015, 53). Thérèse Cory made this interesting suggestion to me: - The way in which Avicenna describes this self-awareness, especially in the Flying Man example, where the protagonist has to be brought to notice the existence of his own soul, suggests that it is self-awareness without subjectivity. Since for Avicenna the self is self-awareness, his theory would be another instance of the self without subjectivity. Avicenna’s approach to the self was taken up and further developed by later Arabic thinkers, such as Suhrawardī (d. 1191). Not everyone in the Arabic tradition followed this side of Avicenna’s thought, however. Al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), who introduced many Avicennian ideas into theology, rejected it (Black 2008, 20-21). Ibn Ṭufayl (d. 1185), who worked in Islamic Spain, seems at first to embrace it, but turns out to have a rather different view. His only surviving work, Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān, is a philosophical novel, about a baby, Ḥayy, who grows up in an island on his own, suckled by a deer. Ḥayy gradually, through careful observation and deduction, teaches himself what contemporaries would have recognized as a sophisticated, scientific view of the world. Then, going beyond the visible, he deduces the existence of a God who corresponds both to Quranic teaching and that of Avicenna, a being ‘the existence of which there is no cause, and it is the cause of the existence of everything’ (Ibn Ṭufayl 1936, 90 [translation 68]). Ḥayy then turns his attention inwards, asking how he gained his knowledge of this necessary being. It could not be from any of his bodily senses, he reasons, because they cognize only bodily things, whereas the necessary being is entirely incorporeal. Ḥayy decides that he must know it because of a notion in his own self or essence (thāt), and that this self itself must therefore be incorporeal. He further infers that, being incorporeal, his self must be incorruptible, and he concludes that it is supremely happy when its contemplation is of God, and that if he can keep himself in contemplation of God then, when his body dies, his self will remain forever in this blissful state. [p. 268] The next stage, therefore, of Ḥayy’s spiritual journey is to seek how, through ascetic practices and exercises in contemplation, he can come to a grasp of God himself. Gradually he manages to clear his mind of every image, since none of them applies to God, but even when he has cleared from his thought and his memory everything else, his self remains. Finally, however, Ḥayy achieves ‘the extinction of his self’ (al-fanā ‘an nafsihi) (Ibn Ṭufayl 1936, 120 [translation 86]), and only then can he enjoy this indescribable vision of the divine. The self of Ḥayy is as obviously Avicenna’s as the necessary being. But it plays a quite different role in Ibn Ṭufayl’s novel than for Avicenna. The story of Ḥayy’s self-education suggests that, so far from being the object of constant and immediate awareness, the self is something we discover only after long-drawn enquiry or instruction, and only through our knowledge of God, just as we understand its incorporeality through understanding God’s. There is also another, less obvious difference. Avicenna’s idea of the self fits with his views about the character of survival after death, in which he put himself at odds with Islamic tradition, by insisting on the immortality of the immaterial soul in place of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. For standard views in Islam, see Smith and Haddad 2002, 31-61. Ḥayy seems to adopt this Avicennian view when, from the immateriality of his self, he concludes that it is incorruptible and seeks to ensure that it – he himself – remains after death for ever in a state of blissful contemplation of God. But, if extinction of the self is to be taken seriously, then this Avicennian view of personal immortality is one that Ḥayy finally learns to reject. Reaching God should not be seen, Ibn Ṭufayl is apparently arguing, as a meeting between the self and the divinity, but as an encounter in which there is no room for the self at all, entirely beyond the register of subjective experience. Space does not allow an investigation of this theme of immortality without the self in Ibn Ṭufayl's two famous Andalusian successors, Averroes and Maimonides. Averroes (Incoherence of the Incoherence: ‘About the Natural Sciences’ – 4th discussion) treats corporeal resurrection as a religious doctrine to be accepted by the learned, not because they think it true but because it serves the aims of religion in keeping public order. Maimonides declares the belief obligatory for Jews, but undercuts his position by stating that bodies will be regained only for a limited period (Letter on the Resurrection of the Dead). Both thinkers identify grasping the unchanging truths of all things as our goal, and the essentially impersonal, non-subjective character of this understanding is especially evident in Averroes, since for him individual humans are mere facilitators, through their sense faculties, of a process that takes place in a single intellect, which belongs to no human in particular. VI. Aquinas and the Thirteenth Century: self-knowledge without the self The striking development in thinking about the self in the Latin tradition in the years after 1250 was the beginning of a sustained discussion of self-knowledge. In the work of some Franciscan thinkers, this discussion allowed them to develop an idea of subjectivity and subjective knowledge. According to a number of recent specialists, Aquinas too developed a theory on these lines. But did he? Thirteenth-century accounts of self-knowledge began from an encounter between two new sources. One of them was Aristotle’s On the Soul, which had started to become available shortly after 1200. In this treatise, Aristotle distinguishes between sensory cognition, which is of particulars, and intellectual cognition, which is of universals. As most interpreters understood him, each human has a ‘possible’ or ‘potential’ intellect: just as formless matter is in potency to the particular forms which make it into some sort of a thing (a tree, a horse, a human), so the potential intellect is in potency to universal forms: when it grasps, for instance, the universal form of horse, it is changed from potency to act, actually understanding what it is to be a horse. On this model, the intellect does not seem as if it has the power to know itself. Yet Aristotle says (430a3) that ‘it is [p. 269] itself an object of thought, just like <other> objects of thought’ and goes on to explain that, since the intellect is without matter, what thinks and what is thought are the same. For Aristotle, then, the intellect knows that it knows, but only when it knows something other than itself. The second new source was, in a sense, anything but new. Augustine’s works had been widely read ever since he wrote them. Books 9 and 10 of On the Trinity were, as already discussed, texts that had been carefully read and taken over by writers such as Anselm (and, in the twelfth century, Richard of St Victor), but they had not been mined, as they now were, for a theory of self-knowledge. Perhaps the thirteenth-century theologians were led to see them in this light through having studied Aristotle’s On the Soul, although Augustine provided them with a theory of self-knowledge that contrasted sharply with the one found there. The soul, he says, knows not just its own acts, but itself, and it does so directly. Rather than its self-knowledge depending upon knowing other things, the starting-point for the soul’s knowledge is itself (Perler and Schierbaum 2014, 37-38). This idea of direct self-knowledge was complemented by a more obviously new source, Avicenna. Although the Ta‘līqāt were unknown, the flying man argument was often discussed (Toivanen 2015). The late thirteenth-century theologians who argued about self-knowledge usually tried to harmonize the apparently conflicting views of Aristotle and Augustine, but often lent more towards one than the other. The Franciscans favoured Augustine’s account. For example, Roger Marston, writing in the early 1280s, contends that the soul knows itself through a combination of deduction, based on its acts, and more directly, by seeing its own nature ‘in the eternal light’ (in the same way, he considers, as it grasps the principles of justice) (Disputed Questions on the Soul, q. 1; Perler and Schierbaum, 2014, 177-217). Another Franciscan, Matthew of Aquasparta, writing in 1277-78, allows for the soul to know itself in three ways. Two of them, which fit the Aristotelian picture, are, he says uncontroversial: first, I can come to understand in general what souls are; and, second, my soul can know itself in particular and its dispositions by a process of argumentative reasoning starting from my acts. But he insists that there is also a third sort of self-knowledge: it depends on the second sort in order to become possible, but it is quite different from it, consisting in a direct, spiritual vision of one’s own soul and its dispositions (Disputed Questions. On Cognition, q. 5; Matthew of Aquasparta 1903, 317-41; cf. Perler 2017, 122-23). Both of these theories definitely imply quite extensive knowledge of the self, not merely in general terms, but seen from the inside. But the dissident Franciscan, Peter-John Olivi goes further in developing a notion of subjectivity (On the ‘Sentences’ Book II, q. 76; Peter-John Olivi 1926, 145-49). Like Matthew, he believes that the soul can have a direct grasp of itself (he calls it an ‘experiential, quasi-tactile’ sort of knowing), and he distinguishes it from the grasp of what the soul is in general and how it differs from other things – universal, scientific knowledge. But he does not think any other sort of indirect knowledge is needed to make the direct sort possible. On the contrary, universal knowledge of the soul [p. 270] must be founded on this direct experiential knowledge, otherwise it will be ‘false and bestial’. Olivi, much more clearly than his two colleagues, envisages the self as a centre of subjective knowledge. Describing the experiential sort of knowing, he says: - In this way <the soul> indubitably perceives (sentit) that it exists and lives and thinks and wills and sees and hears and that it moves the body, and so with regard to its other acts, of which it knows and perceives that it is the principle and the subject. So much is this so that it cannot actively know or contemplate any object or act without always perceiving and knowing itself as the foundation (suppositum) for the act by which it knows and considers these things. It is for this reason that always in its thinking the proposition to which it gives force is ‘I know or I believe this or I am doubtful about this.’ (Peter-John Olivi 1928, 146). Olivi goes out of his way to stress here that the self which is known in this direct self-knowledge is not just the intellect, but the soul in its many aspects: rational (thinking and willing), sensitive (seeing and hearing) and also as the principle of motion. Working from our subjective consciousness, Olivi tries to construct a solid concept of the self, which plays an important part throughout his writings. See Piron 2007. For a general survey of thirteenth-century theories of self-knowledge, see Putallaz 1991b. All three of these Franciscans developed their theories of self-knowledge in explicit conflict with the view proposed by a thinker of the preceding generation: the Dominican, Thomas Aquinas. Their main reproach is that Aquinas does not allow the soul any direct knowledge of itself – a position adopted because of his wish to follow Aristotle closely. Looking at Aquinas’s mature theory (anticipated in Sentences commentary III, d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, ad3; put forward in detail in On Truth, q. 10, a. 8 and Summa Theologiae I, q., 87; cf. Summa contra Gentiles, III.46; Commentary on On the Soul III, lectio 9 on 429b22-430a9), the Franciscans’ characterization seems to be accurate. Intellect does indeed, Aquinas believes, grasp itself intellectually in a direct way, through its essence, as can be seen in the case of God’s and the angels’ self-knowledge. But humans, although endowed with intellect, have it only in a limited way. In its embodied state, the human intellective soul remains a pure potency until it is made actual by receiving an ‘intelligible species’ – a form that has been abstracted from material things. Aquinas points out that only what is actual, not merely potential, is known, and so the embodied human intellect cannot, like other intellects, know it itself through its essence, since it is in essence potential. Could it, however, know itself in the way it knows other things, not in essence but still directly? When the intellect receives an intelligible species, it grasps through it the universal quiddity of the material thing from which the quiddity has been abstracted. So, for example, through the intelligible species abstracted from sense-impressions of Socrates, the intellect grasps the quiddity of human beings – it knows what is essential for something to be a human. But the intellect itself is not [p. 271] material and so it is not the sort of thing that can be known directly through an intelligible species abstracted from matter. It can, however, be known indirectly, not through its own intelligible species (of which there could be none) but through any of the intelligible species by which it grasps other things. Aquinas distinguishes two ways in which a human intellect knows itself in this way, through its act of understanding something else. It can do so, as he puts it in the Summa Theologiae, (a) ‘particularly, in the way that Socrates or Plato perceives himself to have an intellective soul, because he perceives himself to understand’ (intelligere), or (b) ‘in another way, universally, in the way that we consider the nature of the human mind from the act of the intellect.’ The longer account in On Truth describes (a) as a cognition ‘by which any person’s soul knows just what is particular (proprium) to it’: through this cognition, he explains, ‘it is known whether the soul exists, as when someone perceives that he has a soul’. He explains further: ‘Someone perceives that he has a soul, and lives and exists by perceiving that he has sense impressions and thinks of universals (intelligere), and that he performs other life activities of this sort.’ Whereas everyone can have this sort of particular cognition – (a), by contrast the universal sort – (b) – requires ‘careful and subtle enquiry’; many people, indeed, do not have knowledge of the nature of the soul, but rather mistaken beliefs about it. The argument leading to this universal knowledge is described in On Truth: since our soul cognizes universal natures, the species by which they are understood must be immaterial, so as not to be individuated, and so the intellect must be something not depending on matter. Aquinas also recognizes that we have a dispositional version of (a), and he divides (b) into the process of apprehending the truth, which is described, and that of judging that it is true. From this description, it would seem that Aquinas wants to give, especially, an account of self-knowledge in the sense of knowledge of its nature in general – (b). There is, in a sense, a subjective element in discovering this knowledge, since we need to begin from our ability to know our intellectual acts. But even here there is no notion of knowing from the inside. It is simply that we can think about our own acts of thought. From this beginning, through a difficult intellectual process in which many go wrong, an understanding can be gained, not of our selves, but of the nature of one type of item in the world, the human intellective soul – in particular, its immateriality. Aquinas has, however, to take account of texts from Augustine (such as On the Trinity IX.6.9) which speak of an everyday ability of each soul to know itself – (a). Though rejecting any type of direct self-knowledge, Aquinas finds a way in which it can indeed be said that we have everyday knowledge of ourselves — one which is cashed out not in terms of our being aware of or knowing a self, but of knowing a fact: that, in the case of each of us, I have soul. But this way of reading Aquinas is not favoured by many of his recent interpreters, although some readings (Pasnau 2002, 330-60; Perler and Schierbaum 2014, 70-77) would are at least compatible with it. Most of the other interpreters put the emphasis on (a), the everyday ability, and insist that, according to Aquinas, every time the intellect grasps something in understanding, it is also aware of [p. 272] itself. They thus put an idea of the self at the centre of Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge. But they differ over how Aquinas conceived this self. According to Chris Martin (2007, 99), what is involved is ‘an undifferentiated self-awareness’ and, he adds, ‘nothing that Aquinas says shows how my awareness of my act of understanding can be either an awareness that the act is my act or that it is an act of understanding.’ By contrast, Putallaz (1991) presents what Alain de Libera (2014, 569) calls a ‘quasi-Sartrean’ reading of Aquinas’s self-awareness, whilst de Libera himself, in a long and nuanced discussion of the texts (2014, 511-77), takes a middle course. In the most recent and thorough treatment of the whole question, Thérèse Cory (2014; 2016) goes perhaps even further than Putallaz in providing Aquinas with an elaborate theory of the self and our awareness of it. Like Putallaz, she claims that in one and the same act as we grasp anything intellectually we also have an awareness of our self. For Aquinas, she explains (2014, 104), ‘to perceive an act is necessarily to perceive the agent directly in itself’. What, therefore, we perceive in direct awareness is ‘not a bare “I” or “self”, but a first-person principle of action: “I thinking”.’ (2014, 105). Cory goes on to argue that Aquinas thickens this ‘I’ into a developed concept of psychological personhood, using his ideas of habitual self-awareness, implicit self-awareness and intellectual memory to provide an account of diachronically unified consciousness (2102; 2014, 207-14). Cory sums up her reading in a brilliantly pithy sentence: according to Aquinas, ‘the mind merely needs to be “lit up” by its act in order to perceive itself from the inside’ (2014, 216). Cory and her precursors have constructed an impressive theoretical edifice, taking remarks (often in isolation) from all over Aquinas’s corpus and elaborating arguments to see them as making a coherent whole. An interpretation along their lines, in which Aquinas becomes a champion of the concept of the self and subjectivity is therefore an attractive possibility, one that should be accepted according to the canons of charitable interpretation. For a balanced review, appreciative of Cory’s genuine achievement in this book, see Pasnau 2015. But some objections can be raised against it. The view held by some of these theorists that in one and the same act the intellect understands some object and its own act of understanding is explicitly rejected by Aquinas: ‘… there is one act by which the intellect understands a stone, and another act by which it understands that it understands the stone, and so on’ (Summa Theologiae I, 1. 87, a. 4, ad2) – and Aquinas accepts that this process can be reiterated in a potential infinity of distinct acts. Pasnau (2002, 342, n.9) cites this passage against Putallaz. Cory explains very clearly that the evidence in Aquinas seems to point in two directions, and (2014, 142-43) she lists a set of alpha-texts that support the view that we understand ourselves in numerically the same act as that in which we understand something else, and beta-texts which deny it. She resolves the contradiction by saying that the alpha-texts describe implicit, and the beta-texts explicit self-awareness. This argument does not rule out interpreting Aquinas as providing an account of subjectivity grounded in a self-consciousness that grasps one act in terms of a higher-order act – but that interpretation has not yet been developed. I am grateful to Thérèse Cory for directing me to this point. Those who wish to present Aquinas as the champion of the subjective self must also accept that he was drastically misunderstood by his early Franciscan opponents, despite their care in citing him and that their view corresponds to what is ostensibly stated in the texts explicitly on the subject. Why would Aquinas go to such trouble to hide his thinking? But Cory can reply that Aquinas’s meaning is not always obvious from the surface, and some of his underlying ideas, about intellectual being, for instance, need to be reconstructed. Moreover, we sometimes [p. 273] lack the conceptual framework to make sense of his remarks, which is why his real views might seem to be hidden. If, none the less, a more straightforward interpretation is accepted, it might seem that Aquinas does put forward a theory of the self in his account of self-knowledge, but of a self – as in the case of many of his early medieval Latin predecessors, without subjectivity. This theory would be found in the cognition, (b), Aquinas says is gained, with enquiry, of the universal nature of the soul. Aquinas's theory of the self would thus be of the same sort as Boethius's. The knowledge about the self which the character Boethius lacks at the beginning of the Consolation of Philosophy does not concern him in particular or from inside, but is about the sort of thing he is: not a rational, mortal animal, but a god. There is, however, good reason to think that even this sort of theory of the self is not to be found here. Aquinas does, indeed, think that it is very important for us to know the nature of our intellective souls, especially their immateriality. But he does not think that we, our selves, are our souls. No theme runs more strongly through all Aquinas’s thinking than that human beings in this life are hylomorphic composites of soul and body. At the end of time, they will return to this status, each soul, of the blessed or the damned, regaining its own matter (Aquinas has an elaborate theory to explain how. A study of this side of Aquinas’s thought by Antonia Fitzpatrick is forthcoming (Oxford University Press).) Aquinas accepted the Church’s doctrine that, between these times, human souls existed separately. His main consideration of questions about the self falls under these problems of continuity and identity. His is a theory of self-knowledge without the self. VII. Conclusion: the subject, the self and the archaeologist All who write today about the self and subjectivity in the Long Middle Ages do so in the light from, and under the shadow cast by, Alain de Libera’s on-going study (3 volumes have appeared 2007-14; see de Libera 2015 for an introduction; de Libera 2008 is less useful), his Archéologie du sujet. This chapter is no exception. But ‘the subject’ does not name the same topic as ‘the self’, although the two are closely related: ‘the subject’ designates a field that is wider in one way, but narrower in another. The notion of the subject, as used since the seventeenth century, and in some cases before then, immediately poses the question that de Libera very rightly puts at the centre of his enquiry. How was the Aristotelian notion of subject, the bearer of properties, transformed into that of subjective consciousness, of the ‘I’? This question opens up a wide field of enquiry not directly relevant to the topic of the self. But, as most of the preceding pages illustrate, the self has often been seen in terms that do not involve subjectivity. Discussions of the self come in various guises, and in many different parts of philosophy. This diversity raises a problem. Whereas the extra breadth of the topic of the subject adds an element that helps to fix and specify it, the extra diversity of the topic of the self seems merely to produce incoherence. Is it a problem of anachronism? The self is not a medieval [p. 274] concept. Is there any reason to think that applying it to medieval texts will lead to any valuable results? By contrast, an investigation of ‘the subject’ fastens clearly on to the vocabulary of medieval philosophy, avoiding anachronism by putting its focus on how the term has changed its meaning. That clarity of focus allows the archaeologist to dig deep and expose the hidden shifts in usage that underlie the language and conceptual framework available to philosophers at a given time. I discuss the archaeological method, as applied to philosophy by Alain de Libera, in Marenbon (forthcoming). Such criticisms can, however, be answered, at least partially. Although the run of contemporary philosophers regard the self in terms of subjectivity, some of those who specialize on the topic today emphasize, rather, its diversity (see the range of material in, for instance, the Oxford Handbook of the Self). ‘The self’ has an imprecise but easily graspable meaning in ordinary language: our selves are what we each are, what is important and lasting (if anything is) about us. Why not try to understand this notion better by approaching it through using the whole range of philosophical, and indeed scientific, tools that promise to be useful? Despite this diversity, the topic will remain coherent, because it is based on a vague but well-understood and basic notion from everyday life. So basic, indeed, that we can assume that those in past periods shared it in some form. That is why the anachronism of investigating the self in medieval philosophy is, arguably, benign, and the diversity in the results need not mean incoherence. It is true that such investigations must remain above ground. They cannot dig down to reveal the hidden transformations which, supposedly, shape the framework of what can be thought and argued, restricted to the texts written by the medieval authors, their interrelations and contexts. But perhaps it is here, on the surface, that philosophy has its history. I am very grateful to Christophe Grellard, who delivered a fascinating response to a shorter, oral presentation of some of this material in Geneva in 2016, and to Thérèse Cory, for her detailed and perceptive comments on this chapter. John Marenbon References Anselm (1946) Opera omnia I, ed. Franciscus Schmitt, Edinburgh: Nelson. Boethius (1925) De consolatione Philosophiae,ed. Adrian Fortescue, London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne. Boethius (2005) De consolatione Philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, ed. Claudio Moreschini, Munich and Lepizig: Saur (revised edition). Boulnois, Olivier (ed.) (2007) Généalogies du sujet. 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