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AS MINIMAL AS IT GETS: THE ESSENTIALLY EMBODIED SELF

Abstract
Within contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of mind, experiential minimalism is a promising approach to the problem of the self which postulates an intrinsic connection between subjectivity and selfhood. In this paper, I outline two radically different versions of an experiential minimalist account of the self, developed most notably by Galen Strawson and Dan Zahavi, before presenting several important objections to each account. I argue that both views face similar conceptual difficulties — those of ontic depth and diachronic identity — due to their shared commitment to certain additional presuppositions that are not required by the methodological framework of experiential minimalism and which constitute what I term hyperminimalism. Finally, I sketch out one non-hyperminimalist approach, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and other authors from both phenomenology and the embodied/enacted cognition paradigm, according to which the minimal self must be understood as essentially embodied. This view is still experientially minimalist insofar as the self is necessarily conscious (and states of experience necessarily belong to a self), but it abandons the additional, and unnecessary, presupposition that the self can have no other necessary properties. I argue, in other words, that the embodied self is as minimal as one should go in order to resolve the problems of diachronic identity and ontic depth while maintaining phenomenological rigor and, among other things, relevance of the minimal self for psychopathology and phenomenological psychiatry.

Keywords
minimal self, experiential minimalism, embodiment, psychopathology, enactivism.

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