Intersubjectivity

Shared understanding between subjects - and the argument that it comes before individual subjectivity rather than after it.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Continental
Term fixed: 1913

In plain terms

Start with one mind and you have to explain how it ever reaches another. Start with two people who already share a world and the question looks different.

Intersubjectivity is the name for what is shared: not just agreeing about facts, but the prior condition that makes agreeing possible - that we take ourselves to be looking at the same thing, that a gesture means something to both of us, that a word can be used again tomorrow and still work.

The strong version of the claim reverses the usual order. On it, you do not first have a self and then meet others; you become a self by being addressed by them. The evidence for that is developmental rather than philosophical, and it is quite strong.

As a philosopher would put it

Husserl's problem is set by his own method: if everything is described from the first-person standpoint, other subjects appear as objects in my field, and phenomenology looks solipsistic. His answer is pairing - the other's body is apprehended as analogous to mine and so as another zero-point of orientation - and it has never satisfied his critics.

Heidegger's reply is that the problem was posed wrongly. Being-with is a structure of existence from the start; the world is already a shared world, and an isolated subject is a derivative and unusual condition rather than the starting point.

Hegel's account of recognition supplies the dialectical version: self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged by another self-consciousness, and the master-slave passage traces what happens when the acknowledgement is one-sided. Buber's I-Thou distinguishes a mode of relation from the I-It of use and description. Habermas turns the whole tradition practical, grounding norms in the conditions of communication itself, which makes intersubjectivity a standard rather than a description.

Where you meet it

At around nine to twelve months, infants begin to point at things for someone else - not to request them, but to share attention. Around the same time they start checking a caregiver's face when something is unfamiliar, and adjusting their own reaction to what they read there.

Developmental psychologists call this joint attention, and its arrival is one of the most reliable milestones there is. Before it, an infant can engage with a person or with an object. After it, the infant can engage with a person about an object - a triangle rather than a line.

What makes it philosophically interesting is the order of events. The capacity to share attention arrives before language and before anything that looks like a concept of oneself as one mind among others. It is not built out of a prior understanding of other minds; the understanding is built out of it. That is the empirical shape of the claim that the shared world comes first.

What is actually disputed

Whether intersubjectivity is achieved or presupposed.

The Husserlian view starts from a single consciousness and has to construct the other, which invites the objection that the construction can never deliver more than a projection. The Heideggerian and Hegelian views make sharedness a starting condition, which answers that objection and raises another: if being-with is basic, it is unclear what work is left for the first-person standpoint that phenomenology was built to describe.

A further dispute concerns how far shared understanding is normative. Habermas holds that communication presupposes commitments to truth and sincerity that can ground a moral theory; critics reply that this reads a great deal into an ordinary competence, and that plenty of communication succeeds while being manipulative throughout.

Commonly confused with

Objectivity 1781 Objectivity is independence from any standpoint. This is a relation between standpoints, and some accounts make it what objectivity actually amounts to.

Defined against

Subjectivity The whole dispute is over which of the two is prior, and almost every position in modern European philosophy takes a side

Philosophers

Edmund Husserl The term, and the problem it was invented to solve
Martin Heidegger Being-with as basic rather than derived
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Recognition, and self-consciousness as requiring another
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty Shared bodily existence before shared belief

Works

Logical Investigations The phenomenological groundwork
Being and Time Being-with as a structure of existence
The Phenomenology of Spirit Recognition and its failures
I and Thou Two modes of relation, distinguished
Totality and Infinity The other as prior to any theory of them
The Theory of Communicative Action Norms grounded in the conditions of speech

Schools

Phenomenology Where the concept is formulated
Hegelianism Where recognition does the work
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where it becomes a theory of communication and society
Personalism Where the person is constituted relationally
Ubuntu Philosophy Where the same priority is asserted from a different tradition

Related concepts

Other minds 1865 · Relationality c. 150 · Self 1694 · Embodiment 1945 · Meaning 1892

Husserl introduces the term to answer the charge that phenomenology traps him inside one consciousness; the later tradition inverts his order and makes the shared world prior.