I, You, and We: Beyond Individualism and Collectivism

ABSTRACT

The contemporary debate on collective intentionality in analytic philosophy has lasted several decades, but questions concerning the nature of ‘we’ and the relation between the individual and the community are obviously far older. We can find a particularly rich discussion in early phenomenology. Indeed, while starting out with an interest in the individual mind, phenomenologists began their exploration of dyadic forms of interpersonal relations shortly before the start of World War I and were already deeply engaged in extensive analyses of collective forms of intentionality a few years later. A distinctive feature of the phenomenological contribution was its exploration of the relation between the first- and second-person singular and the first-person plural perspectives. How are I, you, and we intertwined? The aim of this paper is to present some core insights from this early debate.

KEYWORDS:

• phenomenology
• philosophy of mind
• collective intentionality
• social cognition
• minimal self

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jelle Bruineberg, Felipe León, Lucy Osler, Mikko Salmela, Marilyn Stendera, and especially Andrew Inkpin for helpful comments. This paper is based on project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 832940) and from the Carlsberg Foundation (Grant ID: CF18-1107).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 But not all. For a dissenting view, see Heidegger [1934: 50, 130].

2 In more recent years, some of these phenomenological nuances have been captured by Tuomela when he distinguished the I-mode and the we-mode [2005: 332], and by Tomasello when he differentiated we-intentionality with a particular other from collective intentionality among more anonymous groups of individuals [2014: 5–6].