Is not self-consciousness the evasive thing, the “it,” which escapes the explanation of wissenshaftslehre, of philosophical science, i.e. method? Is not this “it,” the question of philosophy?
From Socrates to contemporary philosophy, the question is the consciousness of the self, that it, the subject.
The concept of the subject is as multiform as philosophy itself.
Socrates method, that of dialectic, was aimed not at things but rather the self (“I investigate not to know these things but to know whether I am a monster or a noble creature”).
Plato’s idealism was in short a theory of forms, the theory of the self.
Aristotle’s science of the self, is the rational animal.
Descartes recast this question of knowledge of self, with a radical self-questioning, the methodological doubt: cogito ergo sum.
Kant’s transcendental deduction and paralogisms turn on the concept of Ich denke, which is the condition of experience as such (of apperception). “It” is the possibility of experience at all.
[Hamann’s metakritik pin points reason’s condition, language!]
The contribution of Fichte’s dialectics in the wissenshaftslehre is that knowing the self is conditioned by knowing the other (self-conscious subject recognized in other self-conscious subjects).
In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s dialectical method parallels the emergence of self-consciousness, the intersubjective synthesis: that consciousness of the self is consciousness of the other, the vanishing subject.
The trope of the subject is the evasion of philosophy, the failure to get the head around itself, that thing. “It” is the limit of method.
Husserl attempts to explain the intersubjectivity of the subject, the Ego, even the objective itself.
Heidegger just drops the concept of consciousness all together, for the phenomenology of Dasein, being-there.
Nietzsche remarked that philosophy’s question mark is the body-without-the-head.
The Wittgenstein of the Tractaus’s anti-Cartesianism elucidates the subject as non-subject (“there is no subject”), laying beyond the limits of language, the silent thing.
The Wittgenstein of the Investigations’ anti-Cartesianism elucidates the subject, the language animal (the best picture of the soul is the human body), only of what behaves like a human being do we say, “it” has consciousness.
The problem of philosophy is just whether there is a beetle-in-the-box.
The evasion of philosophy is the other that eludes the subject; the subject that eludes the other. And yet that otherness of the other is the condition of the subject. The event of self-consciousness is the consciousness of the other, which is to say, the “struggle for recognition.” Is this not the aim of philosophy, of all method?
The vanishing subject. [“To let the fly out of the fly-bottle”.]
fragments of philosophy 