The distinction between minimal self and narrative self is common in discussions of selfhood. This article reassesses that distinction by analyzing Zahavi and Gallagher's account and supplementing it with Husserl's concept of person. The two notions of self are compatible and complementary, but their relationship needs clarification. Issues of embeddedness, the interplay between passivity and activity, and problems of uniqueness and persistence are better understood through Husserl's analysis of person, including position-taking, habitualities, and overall style. The person is related to its environment, other people, and its past, mediating between the minimal self's perspectival ownership and the narrative self's authorship.
The article addresses a longstanding puzzle in Husserlian phenomenology: the identity of the transcendental ego, the subject of transcendental phenomenology, and its relation to the empirical ego of the individual phenomenologist. Drawing on Eugen Fink's concept of a "personal union" between these two egos in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation and on Husserl's First Philosophy lectures, the author develops an account in which the transcendental ego is a mode of self-investigation by the phenomenologist. This interpretation, the author argues, preserves the transcendental status of phenomenology while deflecting certain criticisms.
Jan Patočka's philosophical anthropology in the 1940s defined human existence by the capacity to distance oneself from pre-given reality, echoing Sartre's existentialism. However, Patočka rejected Sartre's ethical implications and the notion that self-consciousness entails an inner duplication and negation of consciousness itself. While Patočka still conceived consciousness as negation, he offered a different account of what it negates by interpreting Socratic knowledge of not-knowing existentially. This opened an original perspective in the debate over existentialism, distinct from other participants.