Recently, I have begun to read Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung (Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination) of a lately dead german philosopher, Ernst Tugendhat, for preparing a seminar on the book. While doing this, I realized that there is a lot of things and names I've even never heard before. So, I thought it might be nice, if I could get some critical feedback or informative indications or pathbreaking suggestions from my beloved colleagues in our forum 서강올빼미 on what I am going to summarize. I also want to express apologies to those who should bare my terrible English beforehand. Writing this in English would be with no reason at all, but that I just wanted to practice to use English in written form when I started this paper. So, by any chance It could be changed to another language. Of course, some corrections or suggestions for expression would be fantastic for me.
Tugendhat reviews among others the position of Dieter Henrich who was, according to him, the chief of the "Heidelberg School (Heidelberger Schule)" of the self-consciousness. His work and works of his disciples provided a systematic model of the structure of the self-consciousness, reviewing and mostly criticizing prominent foregoing thoughts on the topic including Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau, and German idealism. Especially, he and his school dedicated much of their work to Fichte's critical constitution of the problem of the self-consciousness.
According to his framework, there are two main models to analyze the self-consciousness: egological model and non-egological model. The egological model is traditional one for many modern philosophers to explain the phenomenon of the self-consciousness. It depends basically on the idea that the self-consciousness is a result of the act of reflection of one's ego (not in Freudian sense, but in egological sense which is almost equivalent to the theory of subject emerging from Descartes, as I guess). On the other hand, the non-egological model argues that it is just a subjectless phenomenon without any devotion of reflective action of the self.
Henrich divided the egological position into two sub-models: the reflection model and Fichte's model named by him as the production model. Following the first model, the self-consciousness comes from the act of reflection of the self based on the subject-object relation that can be seen in the long traditional thought of idealism from Descartes to Hegel (but in this matter particularly also including Locke, Hume, and other empiricists).
This model was fundamentally criticized by Fichte. He argued that the act of reflection itself requires the existence of the self-consciousness. Explaining the self-consciousness with the reflection fails because of this circular construction of the self. This is just a circular reasoning, explaining nothing about the self-consciousness itself. His alternative solution takes the Self, the I (das Ich), as a starting point. The Self posits the Non-I (das Nicht-Ich) first and from this positing (Setzungsakt), it proceeds to product the knowledge of self-consciousness.
In Henrich's view, however, the production model of Fichte also cannot be successful, since it is circular just as the reflection model he criticized. He maintained that the Self should entail the knowledge of itself from the outset to make it possible for it to come to the self-knowledge through the positing (Satzungsakt).
On the contrary, the non-egological model of Brentano, Schmalenbach (who the hell he is), and Sartre takes no account of reflection of the self to explain the self-consciousness. The consciousness is, according to this, a respectively occurring relation of content or data to itself in each case. The self-consciosness is, then, an objective process of those particular elements of the consciousness.
Henrich thinks that this model cannot give an account of our daily experience of the consciousness and the self-consciousness altogether. The consciousness is being aware of the relation between various givenness and the factual appearance of the self cannot be occur without one given thing to be distinguished from other givenness. In the view of the non-egological model, this phenomenon cannot be explained in terms of absence of distinguishing and synthesizing things.
His framework helps to understand the fact that the self has its own structure. In this respect, it might be that his critics on previous theories of the self-consciouness have a great effect on what Tugendhat sets out to do.