Communication Theory ISSN 1050-3293

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A Philosophy of the First-Person Singular*

Vincent Descombes
tudes en sciences sociales, 105 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France Ecole des hautes e

According to Emile Benveniste, there are only 2 grammatical persons (the rst and the second) because being a grammatical person is a matter of taking part actively in a dialogical act of speech. The so-called third person should rather be called the nonperson, the absent of the dialogue. Paul Ricoeur has questioned this interpretation of the third person in so far as it meets a philosophical dogma once maintained by Jean-Paul Sartre in his theory of the novel. Sartre claimed that the author of a novel when introducing a character into the narrative should choose between the rst-person point of view and the third-person one. Ricoeur has rightly argued that this was not the case, as it is obviously possible to use the grammatical third person in order to present the personal thoughts and feelings of somebody else. If one could not do that, it would not be possible to consider oneself as another. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00284.x

me comme un autre (1990/1992), by explaining Paul Ricoeur begins his book, Soi-me why it is necessary to break with philosophies of the subject (p. 4, original emphasis) but without going so far as settling for a philosophy of human action and history, which would claim to do without an agent capable of assuming his own presence, by declaring himself ready, for example, to personally take charge of something or to take his place somewhere in front of you (Here I am),1 or by declaring his intention to do something in the near future,2 or by going over the salient episodes of his own history (For a long time, I used to go to bed early). One way of entering the problem of acting (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 22) proper to this book is to start from two observations: 1. Historically, the philosophy of the Ego Cogitoin other words, the philosophy of the subject, according to the terminology adopted by Ricoeur (1990/1992) was transmitted from one author to the next through a ceaselessly renewed critique of the passage from I think to I am a thinking object. However,

Corresponding author: Vincent Descombes; e-mail: vd@ehess.fr ` re personne, in: M. Revault dAllones et F. Azouvi (dir.), *Une philosophie de la premie ditions de lHerne, 2004, p. 219228. Translated by Patrick Mensah, Ricoeur, Paris, e University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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2.

even if we correct the substantialist philosophy of Descartes in order to convert it into a philosophy of the subject, it leads obviously to an impasse. Any philosophy of the Cogito must be a philosophy of a subject posited in the rst person: The subject spoken of in such a philosophy is ego; in other words, I. But any philosophy of the rst person is not necessarily a philosophy of the subject. It would be so if the effort required to elucidate the meaning of the (grammatical) rst person proceeded by way of an inquiry that should be conducted in the rst person, as if it were by examining oneself or by directing ones attention toward ones own person that one could elucidate the specic meaning of expressing something through the verbal form of the rst person. The philosophy of the subject postulates that the use of verbal forms of the rstperson singular is predicated upon access of the individual in the rst person to his own existence, or at least to the subjective part of himself. Is this postulate not arbitrary? One way of showing the accuracy of this claim is to ask this question from the viewpoint of an assignment to the third person of a use of the rst person: Instead of focusing all ones analytical (speculative) strengths on the single word I, let us consider the way in which we construct various verbs with the pronoun oneself and consider, among these third-person constructions, the ones that imply that the agent of whom we speak (in the third person) is capable of responding (in the rst person) if we ask him what he is doing, what he wants, what he is thinking, and what he is feeling.3

It seems to me that concerning these two points, Ricoeurs diagnosis is fully justified and that the recommended cure of a detour through the philosophical analysis of language is the right one (Ricoeur, 1990/1992). On the one hand, it can be shown that Descartes point of departure should have led him to idealism, in other words, to an impasse. On the other hand, one can imagine applying the linguistic turn in philosophy to the question of the person. I will take up these two points again in order to foreground the way in which a philosophy of the first person is not only not necessarily a philosophy of the subject but also one that begins to make sense only when it has freed itself from the latters postulates.
` e tre moi) How many of us can claim to be me? (Combien sommes-nous a

Ricoeur (following an entire tradition of critical philosophy) thinks that Descartes, having taken his point of departure inside the Cogito, ought to have realized that he should profess a philosophy of the subject (and not of the soul). But Ricoeur adds (thereby separating himself here from that same tradition) that this will not have gotten him off the hook. Without a doubt, this clarification of the status of the Ego will have enabled the diations of First Philosophy (Descartes, 1641/1993) to directly conauthor of the Me front the passage from a representation that is certain with a merely subjective certitude to a representation that is genuinely true (because of being objectively
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certain). Or to confront this difculty, if you will, in a manner other than through the enigmatic reciprocal reference of the proof of my existence to that of the existence of God (by way of the presence in me of the idea of God), and from the proof of the veracity of God to that of the objective certainty of my representations. But our position on the classical problems of Cartesianism and its circle is of little consequence here. Indeed, according to Ricoeur (1990/1992), a genealogical perspective on Cartesian posterity shows us that there is a bifurcation in the latter. Some refuse to formulate the Cogito in the rst person and thereby renounce the subject who posits himself (homo cogitat, writes Spinoza, 1677/2005). Others maintain the subject, the I think, but they do not escape bad idealismthe one that is subjectivist and that almost no one wantsexcept by stripping what they call the subject or the I of all humanity. The transcendental life of a nonsubjectivist subject does not resemble what one narrates when telling ones story. The transcendental I is not a power or presence in whom I could recognize my own kind or a possible companion. It has recently become fashionable to place in opposition to a classical philosophy of the Ego, one that centers on a monological subject, a contemporary philosophy supposedly capable of conceiving of a dialogical and intersubjective thinking subject in order to show that a fundamental openness to others. This opposition between a closed subjectivity and a welcoming intersubjectivity is, perhaps, too hasty. Ricoeur observes that the thinking subject staged by Descartes is not really the subject of a monologue. A subject who is monologuing is one who, like a character in a play performing a soliloquy, is speaking to himself rather to another. In his very solitude, he conserves a position of interlocution: The actor playing this role says aloud things that we spectators understand very well, in exactly the same way that a second character would if there were one on the stage. Conversely, the philosopher meditating in the Cartesian way is not preoccupied with speaking to himself in the same way as he would to another. We cannot even say that it is a monologue, in the sense that a monologue presupposes an interruption of a dialogue (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 6, n. 8). The thinking subject is not supposed to play the role of his own interlocutor, for he has disengaged himself right away from any condition of interlocution, and particularly, from the adoption of a common form of expression, the language in which he articulates the reections he is having. And, when we notice to what degree the solitude proper to the thinking Ego is more profound than that of an isolated speaker, we understand, at the same time, why it is not possible to restore his humanity to him through half-measures. We would have to ask the subject, whom the thinking philosopher wants to be subject to the conditions of an authentic interlocution, to learn to participate in some language games. That, however, is precisely one thing that this I claims he can dispense with, for, by virtue of a rational emancipation with regard to all matter, all nature, and all history, this subject cannot truly tell the difference between monologue and dialogue. That is why it serves no purpose to endow him with an intersubjective relation until it is decided whether the other subject with whom he is placed in a relationship is only another
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version of himself (alter ego) or if this other subject is well and truly someone else (another agent). Of course, to pluralize the subject, it is not enough to declare that henceforth we want it to be plural. Does the philosopher of the subject really accept that his subject be conceived in the plural? If he accepts it, he must explain how to pluralize the notion of the subject by providing a principle of individuation. This principle will enable me to tell, on any occasion, whether a subject with whom I happen to be dealing is me all over again, whether the same agent as myself, or whether it is someone other than me. If the philosophy of the subject is limited to responding that others are alter egos because they are each, like myself, an I, then this philosophy is not capable of individuating its subject. Indeed, we know how to count agents, but we do not know how to count Is because we do not know how to place the word I in the plural.4 To monologue is to speak to oneself rather than to another. A subject who is monologuing expresses himself in the absence of others, but he expresses himself the way he would in their presence. He, therefore, speaks a language that he shares or could share with others. That is why the monologue ought to be seen as an interrupted dialogue. When someone speaks, the place of others is dened, even if it remains empty with no others to occupy it, which ultimately enables the speaker to replace them and to address statements to himself. On the other hand, the I of the philosophy of the subject .is oblivious to the lack of any sort of other. [i]t is, in truth, no one (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 6), for this philosophy sees in the relationship of myself to others only a relationship of myself to myself (of an I that is distinct from the natural and historical man that I am to another I, an Alter Ego who is certainly a human individual distinct from the one that I am, but who is also the same I as he, who is therefore the same impersonal I as the I that the philosopher was able to emancipate from my material and contingent person). In short, as long as the thinking philosopher, who sees himself as a pure Ego only, accepts to recognize other subjects through a recognition in the rst person, he does not concede anything at all, for the intersubjective relationship with which he endows himself only places him in relationship with himself as a subject. Thus, the philosophy of the subject is a doctrine that imposes on us to choose between being the single subject (and refusing this title to the other candidates of personal life) or being any subject whoever that may be (being, more precisely, the unique Subject whom all the other subjects are, in the same way as myself). It is evident that this doctrine has lost its way, and that its radicality is only apparent. The postulate (at least that of the philosophy of the Cogito taken as the philosophy of the subject, if not that of Descartes taken literally) is that you are a subject if you are my alter ego, which means that you and myself are one and the same I. It is this postulate that must be contested. As long as we conceive of the person as an I, we are caught in a trap. Indeed, we have no difculty expressing the noun person in the plural, whereas we do not know how to place the word I in the plural; hence, how to make it an authentic noun.
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Consequently, the special character of the word I that excludes plurality tends to invade our idea of the person: Because we cannot be many and I, there can (at least for me) be only one person. The linguistic turn helps us out of this predicament. How many of us add up to an I? The question is disconcerting, and its meaning is not clear. But how many of us say I and can express ourselves personally? The question is trivial. When philosophy agrees to operate this linguistic turn and to analyze language rather than antepredicative representations, the chapter entitled The I disappears from the table of contents, and it is replaced by a chapter entitled The conditions of meaning of the use of the word I. This chapter proposes a philosophy of the rst person. I shall concentrate on one of the conditions of this use, of which Ricoeur has foregrounded the importance: The difculty will be instead understanding how the third person is designated in discourse as someone who designates himself as a rst person (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 35). We can say the following about a person: She suddenly thought about something, she wants to go out, she wishes to talk, she is overjoyed at what she hears, and so on. If this person were to speak, she would say: I have thought of something, I want to go out, and so on. That is why when we are elaborating a philosophy of the first person, we must agree to put it to a test: Does our analysis enable us to understand that we can say, in the third person, what someone else has only been able to express in the first person? A lay person who does not know philosophies of subjectivity could think such a test is too easy, and that all the candidates will be declared successful at the examination. He would be wrong. In reality, the condition posited by Ricoeur is among the most selective ones, and it enables us to measure the power of the prejudice in a reverse order and to unmask its source.
Is the third person ambiguous?

The philosophy of the subject flourished in the 20th century in an ontological dualism, which opposed two great meanings of the idea of being. The first of these meanings is valid for everything that exists in the third person (including my own self as something to be described from without in the objectifying way). The second is only valid for what can be posited, affirmed, and decided in the first person. All I am doing here is recalling a well-known thesis in order to emphasize that it only retains two out of three grammatical persons. Where does one place the second person in this antithesis? It seems that it must nd its place inside the rst. Because everything I say about myself (e.g., I must hurry) can be repeated without a loss of meaning in the second person provided that it is I who says it (You must hurry), one is allowed to think that the couple of the I and the you, on its own, does not allow a break with the curse of solipsism. Indeed, a philosopher of the subject is always at liberty to reduce the second person to the rst by replacing a real interlocution with a monological substitute, that is a dialogue with an interlocutor brought forth within or from oneself rather than with a real partner.
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The ontology opposing the two modes of being has received some support coming from theoretical linguistics that was unexpected to say the least. As Ricoeur recalls, Emile Benveniste maintained that personal status ought to be reserved only for protagonists capable of intervening in an exchange, hence for those who are present in a situation of interlocution. It would be necessary to exclude the third person from the field of application proper to the concept of a personal (grammatical) status, for the individual whom it situates is in the position of neither a speaker nor an interlocutor, but in that of the object of the speech act. The arguments in favor of this exclusion can be narrowed down to a single one: I and you are sufficient to determine a situation of interlocution (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 46). But this argument, if it is one, is a nonsequitur. From the idea that the two rst persons are enough to determine what the interlocutory situation under consideration is, it does not follow that mentioning someone in the third person implies that the object of the statement thus designated is deprived of all personal status and is assimilated to a thing. Where one is given an elementary interlocutory situation with two partners, it is true that the question of the person, in the sense of a position determined in the speech act common to both, is limited to the protagonists capable of personally responding to the question: Who is speaking? Understood this way, the one who is in the process of speaking can only be I or you. But it goes without saying that this same question, who is speaking, can be asked by one of the two partners and call for a response in the third person. You arrive late, for example, at a big colloquium that you and I must attend, and as the speakers words ring out in the conference hall, you discreetly take a seat beside me and ask me in a whisper: Who is speaking? To this question youre asking, I do not respond by saying that it is you who has just spoken to me in a whisper, but rather by letting you know the identity of the present speaker in the third person: It is Professor N. who is speaking. In what way will Professor N. be reied by this? Here, in order to restore the third person to the legitimacy of its personal status, Ricoeur chooses to ground himself on literary fact: [.] A great part of literature, rature en il/elle]. I do not see why including the novel, is a literature of he/she [une litte he/she might not be a person (1987, p. 65, my translation). The interest of this reference to the novel made by Ricoeur is that it points to a well-known literary controversy: Does the coherence of a novelistic narration require that the novelist choose once and for all his narrative position in relation to a character? Should the author either position himself outside and see the character from outside or should he do so inside the consciousness of the character and see from the interior all sorts of thingsthoughts, sentimentsthat others can only ever assume exist on the basis of various external evidence. In 1939, Sartre wrote a few brilliant but falsely limpid pages on what he calls the novelistic ambiguity of the third person in an article in which he denounces the way re ` se Desqueyroux in La Fin de la nuit in which Mauriac presents his heroine The (Sartre, 1939/1947, my translation).5 This article had an inuence that extended far
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beyond the initial circle of readers of the Nouvelle revue franc xaise. Indeed, the majority of theories of the novel elaborated in the two decades following the Liberation found in it the tenets of their critical dogma: A novel can only be realistic by being objective (by eliminating the lived experience of characters) or otherwise it must be perspectivist. Having decided right from the start to take the upper hand against the adversary he had chosen for himself, Sartre begins his text by wondering whether Mauriac was capable of creating a convincing character. He establishes a condition: Whoever wants to succeed in such an operation must choose a narrative mode and stick to it. However, if one were to believe the critic, Mauriac simply does not know his re ` se profession of novelist. He could have recounted an episode of the life of The Desqueyroux by adopting the point of view that she had of herself. He could have recounted this episode as if he were the reader in front of her. But once a mode is adopted, the novelist must stick to that choice. Mauriac practices, however, a to and fro (Sartre, 1939/1947, p. 44, my translation). Sometimes he identifies with the heroine, sometimes he examines her from outside, like a judge, (p. 41, my translation) as if this character were a dossier (p. 44, my translation) to compile. Mauriac, Sartre explains, played with a novelistic ambiguity of the third person (Sartre, 1939/1947, p. 42). In fact, novels written in the rst person from cover to cover in the autobiographical form are rare. But the fact that the story is told in the third person does not as yet inform us what position the novelist has adopted. Sartre explains this point with the help of examples. Imagine we were reading: I saw that she was trembling. Here the character is presented in the third person, which means that the reader has a point of view on her that could be that of another character. We discover what the character thinks and feels through her visible behavior. The function of the pronoun she is then to designate otherness, that is to say, an opaque object, someone of whom we only ever witness the exterior (Sartre, 1939, p. 42, my translation). This explanation is important: A person is necessarily opaque for others. Why is the character trembling? From the exterior, we are reduced to making hypotheses about it. One should be able to see what it is about from the inside. The contrast established by the philosophy of the subject between seeing another person from the outside and seeing the same person from within obliges us now to posit that a subject has access to interior appearances that only he can inspect or introspect. However, through a poetic license that is authorized by the conventions of his art, the novelist, Sartre continues, will use the grammatical third person again to present his character, no longer from the exterior but as he himself could present himself. For example, he will write: She was hearing her own words resounding in shock. Sartre begins this way: This time, the pronoun no longer designates an opaque object; it draws us into an intimacy which ought logically to express itself in the first person (1939/1947, p. 42, my translation). According to this reading, the reader cannot know what is happening to the character unless he positions himself in the consciousness of the character. In effect, I cannot know that unless
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it is I who am her, that is to say, unless I am in a position to say: I was hearing my own words resound (p. 42, my translation). Sartre gives a third example. We read the following sentence in the novel: re ` se was ashamed of what she was feeling. If I, as a reader, can learn that, I The re ` se herself would: It is something happening in her. have to do so in the way The ` That Therese is a subject, it is an I held at a distance from myself and I know about re `se because The re ` se herself knows that she is feeling it. But, in that this shame in The case, since it is with her eyes that I read into her, I can only ever know from her that which she knows: everything she knows, and nothing but what she knows (1939/ 1947, p. 42, my translation). The thesis is, therefore, that by virtue of a novelistic convention, the pronoun she must be understood, sometimes as an authentic third person, that is, as the designation of otherness as an opaque object, sometimes as the equivalent of I, that is to say, of I, the reader of this sentence. It ought to be decided if we are dealing with a she-subject or a she-object. Upon what is this grammatical thesis founded? It is absolutely not upon an analysis of the conditions of meaning of the personal pronoun but rather upon epistemological prescriptions that are addressed to the novelist and arise therefore from literary convention. From the grammatical point of view, the question is not about knowing how I learnt that the character was ashamed but about whether I understand she was ashamed. It is advisable to resolve this confusion of epistemology and grammar. Let us assume, therefore, that the epistemological problem is resolved in one way or re ` se is ashamed because another. In one possible scenario, we understand that The we see that she is filled with confusion, she is red from shame. In another scenario, we know it because she said: I was ashamed of what I was feeling. If I am the inter re ` se was addressing, I know henceforth what she has felt (or at locutor whom The least what she says she has felt). Like the novelist, I can recount it to you, and how re ` se was else to do it except by saying: If I believe what she is telling me about it, The ashamed of what she was feeling? For I absolutely cannot recount the episode of the re ` se has told me about her shame by maintaining the Sartrean ction story The re ` se is none other than myself (at a distance). The one according to which The who speaks must remain distinct from the one who is experiencing the shame. In reality, the correct use of the rst person supposes, to restate Ricoeurs formula, that I know how to transfer the rst person onto the third each time that is necessary in order to establish the difference between what I say about her and what I say that she says about herself using the rst person to do that. There exists, therefore, no novelistic convention that authorizes the novelist to write contradictory sentences (insofar as it is normally impossible to attribute thoughts and feelings that we understand to opaque objects that we cannot understand, except by way of fiction). On the other hand, there can be an out-of-context ambiguity of the third-person pronoun. That is the example of the sentence, which Sartre takes as the example of the necessity to replace she with I: She heard her own words resound with shock. When the narrator reports facts like this, he establishes
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that the words that are resounding are those of the character who hears them. According to the most natural reading, we will understand that she recognizes in the words she hears resounding her own words, in which case there occurs here precisely this transfer of the rst person onto the third that enables a narrator to ascribe to someone in the third-person thoughts and feelings that the subject ought to express in the rst person. However, this interpretation adds something that is not logically implied by the sentence given as an example. In point of fact, it is not difcult to imagine a situation in which a heroine would hear words echoing and be stupeed to hear a voice reproduce in such a perfect way words that she herself has proffered on another occasion. It would be enough for an echo phenomenon or an electroacoustic device to have the effect of slowing down the reproduction of words (speech) by distorting the sonorous qualities of the voice. The ambiguity lies, therefore, in the fact that a person can very well hear the words that we know to be theirs without realizing that he is hearing himself. Out of context, we do not know who speaks when ones own speech is at stake: Is it the character or a narrator who is distinct from him? Could the character say: I hear my own words in shock?
The first person in the third person

From the point of view of linguistics, the first plurality of persons that one has to take into account is not that of self-conscious beings (viz., this plurality that was excluded by solipsism), it is the plurality of grammatical persons, which is the fact that there (1878) puts it very well, three possible positions for the individual in are, as Littre relation to the speech act.6 Grammatical persons are not entities that one must place in relationship to each other (under the names of Ego and Alter Ego); they are positions, statuses in relation to a particular speech act. Nothing forbids us, therefore, from ascribing to an individual who is in the position of an object in relation to our present act a position of author or subject with regard to another act. As Ricoeur (1987) reminds us, this can be done in two ways (pp. 6566). First of all, the artifice of citation enables one to reproduce the very words belonging to the person being cited and therefore also the words that were formulated in the rst person. One can also invent the speech that someone could have made and ascribe it to him as if one were citing him. Furthermore, the technique of speech in the indirect style allows one to do away with quotation marks (in writing) and to transpose into the third person everything that has been previously formulated in the rst person. In the story, a sentence such as She said, I shall come becomes She said she would come. In this last sentence, the second she is a she-subject, if you will, not because the reader should identify with her in order to understand or even to know that she will come, but because this pronoun she transposes into indirect speech an I of the character. These two narrative devices enable one to report statements made by someone else. However, they can be extended to the description of unexpressed thoughts, according to the biblical model, which assimilates the act of judging to that of
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saying in ones heart: God says in His heart, I shall destroy the cities of Baal (Ricoeur, 1987, pp. 6566, my translation). The very principle of the linguistic turn in philosophy is precisely this logical priority given to speech over thought, to the logic of the concept of saying over the logic of the concepts of judging, cogitating, or self-representing.7 As a speaker, I can speak of someone else by adopting one of these three styles: make him speak in the rst person (technique of citation), address myself to him as an interlocutor, and describe him by identifying him as the individual of whom I want to speak. In this last case, it is up to me to organize the division between what I say about him (ordinary third person) and what I say that he says about himself, therefore of oneself (third person of indirect discourse). This ambiguity is absolutely not due to a particular opacity of others. One becomes better aware of it if one takes note of a similar ambiguity occurring on the side of the rst person. notes in his article personne this remarkable use of the third person: A Littre letter in the third person, a note in the third person: a letter, a note in which the speaker speaks of himself in the third person (1878, p. 1077, my translation). Thus, the diversity of grammatical persons enables the speaker to speak of himself in three ways: in the rst person, as if addressing someone else (which may, at any rate, be the case); in the second person, as if receiving a message that concerns him (you must hurry, you are going to miss your train); and in the third person, as if someone else were involved (and that is what the note written in the third person does). In the third-person note, the author of the note is speaking of himself as he could have done of someone else. He does not say: I have the honor to invite you to dinner, but rather the Marquis of Carabas has the honor to invite you to dinner. However, the note qualies as a note only if the third-person formulation is understood as having the meaning of a third person in etiquette and not as marking any distance whatsoever between the author of the invitation to dinner and the author of the note. Indeed, if I receive a note from my secretary telling me that I have been invited to dinner by someone, this third-person note does not have the performative force of an invitation, for it is only an assertion, either true or false, about an independent fact. Hence, contrary to the thesis of the so-called philosophies of human existence, the position proper to the grammatical third person is not at all that of a reified or impersonified being, for it can very well be that of a person about whom one wishes to note that he is not participating at present in a dialogue with us. For the same reason, the fact that a speaker must present himself in the third person must not be understood as a flight into reification or the impersonal. The third person, used instead and in place of the first, can mark a withdrawal of the speaker from the interlocutory relationship of which the aim is to protect oneself from tensions inherent in a confrontation. But the note in the third person shows that it could also be a matter of a convention that enables the person who is speaking to me not to call out too violently to his interlocutor and to install between us a relationship of exquisite courtesy.
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Notes
1 The certication of self that its me here expresses (when I declare that I am going or when I answer for what I have done to those who are asking for explanations) publicly demonstrates the assurance of being oneself acting and suffering (Ricoeur, 1990/year of translation, p. 22, original emphasis). To declare ones intention to do something in the future is to indicate that the thing to be done is to be done by me, the same (ipse) as he who says that he will do (Ricoeur, 1990/year of translation, p. 73). To say self is not to say I. The I is positedor is deposed. The self is implied reexively in the operations, the analysis of which precedes the return toward this self (Ricoeur, 1990/1992, p. 18). As is well known, we is not the plural of I in the sense that horses is the plural of horse. Another way of noting the absence of a principle of individuation attached to the me] concept of being oneself is to emphasize, as Ricoeur does, that the word self [me me]) cannot be underthat works to reinforce the reexive pronoun (oneself [soi-me stood in the sense of the concept of identity (such as the one we have in Socrates, the master of Plato). We know how to speak of the (self)same man or the self(same) child or the (self)same cyclist, but we are unable to speak of the (self)same I (unless by deciding that this means something like the same living person). However, unlike Ricoeur, I prefer not to speak of two concepts of identity, the rst corresponding to our understanding of the words the same man (idem), and the other to our understanding of the words oneself (ipse). It is indeed necessary to distinguish between these two uses of the word me, but I wonder whether seeing in it only a difference between two notions of me identity does not diminish it. cit (1985, t. III, p. 291, n. 4) and Ricoeur alludes to this article of Sartre in Temps et Re considers his polemic to be futile: Whether he opts for the convention of the omniscient narrator, that of the nite narrator, or that of a plurality of points of view, the novelist remains no less a creator who determines with supreme sovereignty what his own privileges are. , in the article entitled personne, no. 11: A grammatical term. Person, the Littre diverse positions of beings in relation to the speech act: the rst person, the one who speaks; the second person, the one who is being spoken to; the third person, the one about whom one is speaking. In this sense, person is also applicable to things: Every object about which one speaks occurs in the third person (1878, pp. 10761077). For the equivalence of judging and saying in ones heart, see Geach (1957, pp. 1718).

References
ditations of rst philosophy (D. A. Cress, Trans.). Indianapolis, Descartes, R. (1993). Me IN: Hackett. (Original work published 1641) Geach, P. (1957). Mental acts. London: Routledge. , E. (1878). Dictionnaire de la langue franc Littre xaise (Vol. 3). Paris: Hachette. Mauriac, F. (1935). La Fin de la nuit. Paris: Grasset. cit. Paris: Le Seuil. Ricoeur, P. (1985). Temps et re
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Philosophy of First-Person Singular

personnelle. In P. Veyne et al. (Authors), LIndividu Ricoeur, P. (1987). Individu et identite (p. 5472), Paris: Le Seuil. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as other (K. Blamey, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1990) . In Situations (Vol. 1, p. 42). Paris: Sartre, J.-P. (1947). Monsieur Franc xois Mauriac et la liberte Gallimard. (Original work published in Nouvelle Revue Franc xaise February, 1939) Spinoza, B. (2005). Ethics (E. Curley, Trans.) New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1677)

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