Having a distinctive perspective or point of view on the

be-
164 Chapter 7
cause the most obvious way of understanding how the environment can
be apprehended from a particular perspective or point of view is in spatial
terms. Having a distinctive perspective or point of view on the environment
is something that a self-conscious subject does at least partly in
virtue of occupying a particular spatial position. Of course, though, as I
stressed in my discussion of Gibson’s ecological optics, it is a mistake to
view this in an atomistic way. It is only in the experimental laboratory
that cognition takes place from a fixed spatial point. Perspectives and
points of view move through the world, retaining continuity through
change. The real challenge is understanding what this sort of perspectival
movement involves.
Kant is the philosopher who has had the clearest grip on the relation
between self-awareness and awareness of the environment, and the whole
of the Transcendental Analytic in the Critique of Pure Reason can be
viewed as a sustained working out of the interdependence between them.
To go into the details of Kant’s treatment, although fascinating, would
take us into murky waters far from the matter at hand. I propose to use
P. F. Strawson’s (1966) discussion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of
the categories as the philosophical point of departure. Strawson felicitously
uses the notion of a point of view and places it at the very heart
of Kant’s treatment of the interdependence between self-awareness and
awareness of the environment.
To appreciate what is going on here, we need to step back a little.
Strawson’s Kant is concerned with the structure of self-conscious experience.
What, he asks, are the necessary conditions that must be fulfilled
for self-conscious experience to be a genuine possibility? What must hold
for a series of thoughts and experiences to belong to a single, unitary selfconscious
subject? He begins thus:
It is a shining fact about such a series of experiences, whether self-ascribed or
not, that its members collectively build up or yield, though not all of them contribute
to, a picture of an unified objective world through which the experiences
themselves constitute a single, subjective, experiential route, one among other
possible subjective routes through the same objective world. (Strawson 1966, 104)
According to Strawson this “shining fact” is the key to understanding the
conditions that Kant places upon the possibility of genuinely selfconscious
experience. The central condition is that a subject’s experiences
Points of View 165
must “determine a distinction between the subjective route of his experiences
and the objective world through which it is a route” (Strawson
1966, 104). And it is this, of course, that Strawson terms the subject’s
point of view on the world. He explains:
A series of experiences satisfying the Kantian provision has a certain double aspect.
On the one hand it cumulatively builds up a picture of the world in which
objects and happenings (with their particular characteristics) are presented as possessing
an objective order, an order which is logically independent of any particular
experiential route through the world. On the other hand it possesses its own
order as a series of experiences of objects. If we thought of such a series of experiences
as continuously articulated in a series of detailed judgements, then, taking
their order and content together, those judgements would be such as to yield, on
the one hand, a (potential) description of an objective world and on the other
the chart of the course of a single subjective experience of that world (Strawson
1966, 105).
Strawson’s fleshes out the notion of a point of view in a way that draws
together two distinct (sets of) conceptual capacities: the capacity for selfascription
of experiences and the capacity to grasp the objectivity of the
world.
Let us take a further step back and ask why Strawson’s Kant thinks that
these two sets of conceptual abilities need to be brought together. The first
point is that the question of the possibility of self-conscious experience is
inextricably bound up with the question of the possibility of any form of
experience. Strawson brings this out by considering the hypothesis that
there might be an experience whose objects were sense data: “red, round
patches, brown oblongs, flashes, whistles, tickling sensations, smells”
(Strawson 1966, 99). This would not count as anything recognizable as
experience, he maintains, because it would not permit any distinction to
be drawn between a subject’s experiences and the objects of which they
are experiences. In such a case, the esse (being) of the putative “objects
of experience” would be their percipi (being perceived). There would be
no distinction between the order of experiences and the order of the “objects
of experience,” and this, according to Strawson, effectively means
that we cannot talk either about objects of experience or about a subject
of experience, and hence we cannot talk about experience at all.
Strawson’s central claim is that no creature can count as a subject of
experience unless it is capable of drawing certain very basic distinctions
between its experiences and the objects of which they are experiences.
166 Chapter 7
Experience that reflects a temporally extended point of view on the world
will ipso facto permit these basic distinctions to be drawn in virtue of
possessing the “double aspect” outlined in the passage quoted earlier.
The matter can be further clarified through the concept of a nonsolipsistic
consciousness, which Strawson introduces in Individuals. There he
refers to “the consciousness of a being who has a use for the distinction
between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself
or a state of himself, of which he has experience, on the other”
(Strawson 1959, 69). The notion of a point of view elucidates what any
creature’s experience must be like for it to count as nonsolipsistic in this
sense.
Nonetheless, Strawson’s conception of a point of view needs some modification
before it can be fitted into the current framework. As Strawson
understands the matter (unsurprisingly, given his Kantian inspiration),
experience reflecting the double aspect required for the development of
a point of view is available only to creatures who have mastered both
the sophisticated conceptual skills involved in being able to ascribe experiences
to themselves and the basic concepts required for understanding
the objectivity of the world. Although he does not offer an explicit argument
for why the notion of a point of view must be defined in that way, I
think the following captures his position:
1. Genuine nonsolipsistic consciousness requires the capacity to distinguish
one’s experiences from the objects experienced.
2. That requires the capacity to identify one’s experiences as one’s
experiences.
3. Identifying one’s experiences as one’s experiences is a form of selfascription.
4. The self-ascription of experiences requires reflexive self-reference.
The discussion of nonconceptual first-person contents in the preceding
two chapters, however, should have generated a certain suspicion of this
line of argument. The previous chapter in particular showed that nonsolipsistic
experience both can and does exist in the absence of the sort of
conceptual skills that Strawson takes (without argument) to be necessary
for it. A creature who, in virtue of somatic proprioception, can register
the distinction between self and nonself has clearly arrived at a form of
nonsolipsistic consciousness.