reflection and text: revisiting the relation between pre-reflective and reflective experience

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Human StudiesA Journal for Philosophy and the SocialSciences ISSN 0163-8548Volume 36Number 3 Hum Stud (2013) 36:339-355DOI 10.1007/s10746-013-9287-8

Reflection and Text: Revisiting the RelationBetween Pre-reflective and ReflectiveExperience

Wenjing Cai

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THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

Reflection and Text: Revisiting the Relation BetweenPre-reflective and Reflective Experience

Wenjing Cai

Published online: 20 August 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract The paper presents the prevailing understanding of pre-reflective and

reflective experience as a ‘‘data-description model’’. According to this model, pre-

reflective experience is the original datum, the meaning of which is fully determined

in the very beginning, whereas reflection is a secondary layer that purports to

recover faithfully the meaning of the pre-reflective. The paper spells out the diffi-

culty of this model by looking into the scepticism on reflection. Despite its con-

tribution to explicating the basic level of human consciousness, the data-description

model merely attends to the epistemological function of reflection and its orienta-

tion towards the past. The aim of the paper is thus to propose an alternative model

inspired by the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, especially the paradigm

of ‘‘text’’ Gadamer and Ricoeur emphasize. By understanding pre-reflective expe-

rience as a text, we are able to make explicit the essential role reflection plays for

human life and its inherent existential dimension.

Keywords Reflection � Pre-reflective experience � Text � Existential

dimension � Husserl � Gadamer � Ricoeur

The recent decades have seen in philosophical discussions a great increase of

interest in the problem of pre-reflective consciousness or experience. Phenomenol-

ogists and philosophers of mind have found in their respective tradition a notion of

pre-reflective consciousness as a primitive, foundational level of experience that

takes place before a second-order, objectifying reflection. Such a conception of pre-

reflective experience has a wide influence on contemporary philosophical theori-

zation, especially with regard to such issues as what a self consists in and how to

W. Cai (&)

School of Humanity and Institute for Advanced Study in European Culture,

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 800, Rd. Dong Chuan, Shanghai, China

e-mail: [email protected]

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Hum Stud (2013) 36:339–355

DOI 10.1007/s10746-013-9287-8

Author's personal copy

understand our non-conceptual, bodily existence in the world.1 Moreover, the notion

also attracts the attentions of psychologists and neuroscientists who are willing to

take into account the philosophical insights; for instance, some finds it helpful to use

the technique of brain imaging to demarcate such a subtle phenomenon of pre-

reflective experience (Petitmengin et al. 2007; Esslen et al. 2008).

However, the concept of pre-reflective experience is chiefly understood and

defined in contrast to the notion of reflection; it is, so to say, a contrast notion. In

philosophy, reflection often refers to the faculty of turning to oneself and examining

one’s own mental states or acts. The very term ‘‘pre-reflective’’ manifests that such a

notion presupposes and implies a somewhat covert understanding of reflection; or

more appropriately speaking, the two notions, i.e., pre-reflective and reflective

experience, refer to each other so that the study of the one necessarily entails that of

the other. The purpose of the present article is hence to figure out what a conception

of reflection is implied in the prevailing notion of pre-reflective experience and,

moreover, whether it could do full justice to the phenomenon at stake. While a

heated discussion on pre-reflective experience is undeniably significant, the

underlining model it endorses requires a critical examination.

What I wish to propose in this paper is a conception of pre-reflective and

reflective experience that is informed by the phenomenological-hermeneutical

paradigm of text-interpretation. By conceiving of pre-reflective experience as a

‘‘text,’’ we are able to not only discover a more intimate relation between pre-

reflective and reflective experience, but also take into account a dimension of

reflection that is not sufficiently attended to in contemporary philosophy. Such an

understanding will accordingly stress a more vital role of reflection for human life.

A Data-Description Model

Although the contemporary discourses on pre-reflective and reflective experience

have by no means reached a consensus on how we should understand the notions, it

is still possible to point out a few related theses which are more or less endorsed by

the theorists engaging in the discussion.

Pre-reflective Experience as a Fact

The first thesis that can be said to be commonly accepted is that pre-reflective

experience is regarded as something already there, that it is a matter of fact, the

existence of which precedes our knowledge of it. Pre-reflective experience takes

place before a reflective gaze is turned upon it and makes it into the thematic object.

Hence, as Gallagher and Zahavi write, ‘‘one might say the pre-reflective experience

must first be there if I am to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object of

reflection’’ (2010). This is a conclusion which can easily be drawn if we make an

analogy between reflection and the perception of an external object. The thing, say,

1 See for instance Zahavi’s elaboration on a notion of minimal self qua pre-reflective self-awareness, and

Legrand’s work on a notion of pre-reflective bodily experience (Zahavi 2005; Legrand 2006, 2007).

340 W. Cai

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the barren tree that I see at the moment through my window exists before and

independently of my attention towards it; it is already there. Likewise, it seems

evident that the pre-reflective experience, be it a perception or an emotional feeling,

must already be there qua an internal mental fact, only that it remains non-thematic

and non-objective. Husserl affirms such an understanding of pre-reflective

experience by writing the following: ‘‘when I say I, I grasp myself in a simple

reflection. But this self-experience is like every experience, and in particular every

perception, a mere directing myself towards something that was already there for

me…’’ (Hua 15: 492f.).2 On this account, to reflect means to bring to light what

before was in the darkness qua the pre-reflective.

This basic idea of pre-reflective experience may lead us to two further beliefs.

One is that pre-reflective experience has such autonomy that though it is able to

summon a subsequent reflection, its existence nevertheless does not rely upon the

latter. In other words, pre-reflective experience constitutes a self-sufficient realm or

layer, in contrast to which reflection is merely adjunctive and secondary. Connected

with this point is the second belief that pre-reflective experience per se has its own

distinctive meaning. Although objective knowledge or explicit meaning-intention

has not yet come on the stage on the pre-reflective level, it is nevertheless

acknowledged that even the most primordial form of human life is penetrated with

meaning. Rather than being bestowed by a subsequent reflective cognition, the

meaning of the pre-reflective experience is already determined beforehand, that is,

before reflection enters the scene. It is precisely this very meaning of the pre-

reflective experience that reflection aspires to unveil.

Pre-reflective Experience as the Foundation and as Self-aware

The second thesis is that reflection, as higher-order cognition, is grounded upon the

first-order, pre-reflective experience. A reflection that directs its attention to oneself

or one’s present experience must have its origin in a non-reflective experience. This

seemingly trivial idea entails the crucial point that pre-reflective experience is at the

same time pre-reflective self-awareness; more precisely, pre-reflective experience,

instead of being totally unconscious, is characterized by a certain reflexivity that

makes reflective self-reference possible. Despite their respective orientations and

motivations, philosophers, including phenomenologists, analytical philosophers as

well as Buddhist philosophers, tend to agree that consciousness, in addition to its

object-directedness, is given to itself in a primordial way that does not take itself to

be an object.3 In the Hindu-Buddhist tradition, intentional experience, metaphor-

ically speaking, is like a light that illuminates all things and at the same time is itself

luminous in a special way. Such self-luminosity or self-acquaintance takes place

before a reflective intention is directed towards the experience, that is, before this

2 Husserl’s Complete Works (Husserliana) is abbreviated to Hua in this articles.3 The recently published book Self, No Self? is an attempt to bring together views from different

traditions, including phenomenology, analytical philosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The book has

shown that whatever theories or schools the contributors are committed to, they tend to agree that

consciousness is characterized by a basic type of self-reference or self-luminosity (Siderits et al. 2011).

Revisiting the Relation Between Pre-reflective and Reflective Experience 341

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experience is present to itself as an object, and it is the condition of possibility of a

subsequent reflective self-consciousness.

To a certain extent, a theory of pre-reflective self-awareness is necessary in

clarifying the possibility of reflection; we are led to it if we ask such questions as

how come our reflective self-knowledge is characterized by what Shoemaker calls

the ‘‘immunity to error through misidentification’’ (1968: 556). Pre-reflective

experience as self-aware helps to explain how one’s consciousness is given to

oneself in the distinctive first-person perspective, which does not amount to a

consciousness of somebody who happens to be this person called ‘‘I’’. The fact that I

do not mistake my own experience—say, my pain in the left hand—as mine rather

than someone else’s (though I might make mistake about the content of it) indicates

that my experience is related to myself in an intrinsic and non-objective manner,

unlike the way a mere thing is related to me. More precisely, it is by virtue of pre-

reflective self-awareness that a subsequent reflective self-reference characterized by

immunity to error through misidentification becomes after all possible.

An important argument for the thesis of pre-reflective self-awareness concerns

the defect of the so-called reflection theory of self-consciousness. According to such

a theory, a mental state only becomes conscious as it enters into a relation to itself in

a higher-order reflection. This account, however, involves an intrinsic circularity.

As Dieter Henrich correctly points out, reflection theory cannot avoid being circular.

Given that this model takes consciousness to first arise from reflection, i.e., from a

self-identification, it inevitably has to presuppose that the subject must somehow

already have some knowledge about itself so that it can identify what it encounters

in reflection with itself. In other words, the subject ‘‘must have some notion that that

with which it becomes acquainted in self-consciousness is itself,’’ and this makes

the theory circular, for it already presupposes what it intends to explain (Henrich

1971: 11f.). Starting from a critique of the reflection theory, Henrich proceeds to

propose a solution that would get rid of the circularity, and this solution, for him,

lies in pre-reflective self-acquaintance that precedes and grounds any reflective

consciousness (1971: 20f.). Such self-familiarity denotes an intuitive, immediate,

and non-objective relation to oneself, on the basis of which an explicit self-

consciousness becomes possible. Like Henrich, many phenomenologists also

believe that such a pre-reflective self-awareness can enable us to acquire a more

convincing account of consciousness in general, although they might disagree with

him as to how one may elaborate the structure of this pre-reflective self-awareness.4

Reflection as Description of Pre-reflective Experience

The third thesis naturally follows the previous two and concerns a more precise

relation between pre-reflective and reflective level. While pre-reflective experience

provides the foundation, the purport of reflection is to describe and recover the

meaning of the former. Different viewpoints can be found among scholars with

4 In his article ‘‘The Heidelberg School and the Limits of Reflection,’’ Dan Zahavi, for instance, argues

that although the account of the Heidelberg School, of which Henrich is a representative, is illuminating,

it nevertheless fails to offer a positive and detailed analysis of the structure of pre-reflective self-

awareness. He feels unsatisfactory with Henrich’s mainly negative and formalistic account (2007: 281).

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regard to whether reflection is able to fulfil its aim or is doomed to fail. It remains a

question whether reflection is a valid method that enables us to access the pre-

reflective experience as it is.

At one time, reflection was conceived of as ‘‘an internal infallible perception’’.

As Locke remarks, the knowledge about our own existence and the being of our

inner states is intuitive—it is given to us most directly without any need of proof

and has the ‘‘highest degree of certainty’’ (2001: 514f.). Nevertheless, this

understanding of reflection as an absolute perception faces various challenges in

the twentieth century philosophical discussions, a time when objectivity and

neutrality in research method is perhaps more demanded than at any other time. A

strong scepticism on reflection or reflective introspection is in play: how do we

know that what we gain in reflection accords with the intended pre-reflective

experience? Could it be that reflection involves a certain distortive effect? This

scepticism is first directed towards the method of introspective psychology at the

beginning of last century and then towards phenomenology; according to Husserl,

the latter ‘‘proceeds solely in the method of reflection’’ (Hua 3/1: 162). Criticism

of its methodology has been posed not only by Husserl’s contemporaries, but also

by his followers such as Heidegger, who no longer commits himself to reflection

as the standard method for phenomenology. Gilbert Ryle, another opponent of the

reflective method, argues that phenomenological reflection is by no means more

certain than any act of consciousness, for ‘‘we often make mistakes about our

mental condition’’ (1932). As Petitmengin and Bitbol summarize in their recent

article, such mistakes about our own experience may take various forms; there are

different accounts as to what causes the reflective result to be distortive and thus

unreliable (2009).5 Without listing these various accounts here, I shall only

mention one crucial reason that makes reflection dubitable. The temporal gap

between pre-reflective experience and reflection as well as the objectification of

the former in terms of the latter indicates an unavoidable modification that occurs

in reflection. The modification upsets the very purpose of reflection, namely, the

recovery of the pre-reflective and immediate experience. It seems, as Merleau-

Ponty correctly says, ‘‘it is not the unreflected which challenges reflection; it is

reflection which challenges itself,’’ for the moment a reflection is carried out, it

departs from its own intended goal (2005: 300). To justify itself, reflection is

faced with an embarrassing situation: its product, namely, the experience grasped

by and in reflection, must precisely not be a product, but the original experience

independent of reflection.

It is, however, not necessary to reject the validity of reflection, even though we

acknowledge its modificatory nature. Husserl’s view on reflection is representative

in this respect. Husserl considers reflection the methodological norm of phenom-

enology; yet he is at the same time well aware of the modificatory nature of

5 In their article, Petitmengin and Bitbol draw up an elaborated inventory of various criticisms towards

introspection or reflection. The major reasons that cause introspection to be unreliable are summarized as

follows: stimulus error, impossible split, observational distortion, temporal distortion, interpretative

distortion, verbal distortion, blindness of introspection, non verifiability of results.


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reflection. He makes it rather explicit that every reflection, no matter what kind, has

the character of ‘‘modification of consciousness’’ (Bewusstseinsmodifikation; Hua

3/1: 148). Viewing reflection basically as an attitudinal change, Husserl does not

deny that in reflection there occurs a transformation of the mode of givenness,

namely, from being-lived to being-objectified. Yet, what he does deny is that such a

reflective modification amounts to a distortion and should threaten the legitimacy of

phenomenological reflection. As he argues, it is an unreasonable demand to expect

reflection to ‘‘repeat’’ (wiederholen) the original experience, for its purpose is

‘‘rather to observe it [the original experience], and to explicate, what was present in

it’’ (Hua 1: 72f.). It is henceforth inevitable that the reflected experience, while

becoming thematic, undergoes certain modification with regard to its mode of

givenness; but this does not affect the fact that the reflective experience is the same

as the previous unthematic one and that a truthful description of it by means of

reflection is possible (Hua 1: 73). On this account, as Zahavi notes, the position of

Husserl is somewhat between the two extremes, namely, viewing reflection either as

a pure repetition of the pre-reflective experience or as a distortive process

(2005: 95). Such a middle standpoint prompts Husserl to believe, at least in his early

period, that phenomenological reflection is able to facilitate an authentic and

indubitable description of the structure of our experience, which is pre-phenom-

enologically non-thematic. I shall return to this in the later part; for now, the

purpose is simply to show how the issue of the validity of reflection is raised and the

various takes on it.

Despite the diverse positions people may take towards whether reflection can

faithfully reveal the pre-reflective experience, there seems to be a common

presumption that all these accounts tacitly endorse, namely, the presumption that the

relationship between reflection and the pre-reflective is a one-sided relation of

correspondence. It is one-sided insofar as the pre-reflective experience alone qua the

foundational substratum is the measure of the faithfulness of reflection, whereas

reflection is non-essential and subsidiary. Either reflection matches, mirrors or

faithfully reveals the meaning of the pre-reflective in itself, or it does not but distorts

or reifies the lived experience, which already took place with its meaning fixed and

unfolded beforehand. Even Husserl’s middle course approach does not sufficiently

contemplate this hidden presumption. As long as Husserl holds that the experience

gained via phenomenological reflection is the same as the pre-reflective one, with a

minor modification in the mode of givenness that would not affect its faithfulness,

he seems to be saddled with the preconception that reflection has a purport to accord

with the pre-reflective experience.

I shall in this paper call the account of pre-reflective and reflective experience

that is briefly featured by the above-mentioned three theses a data-description

model. This is mainly to designate a typical understanding of the relation between

reflection and the pre-reflective. In this model, a wedge is driven between the

level of pre-reflective experience and that of reflective experience, and they are

again connected by an external relation of correspondence; that is to say,

reflection relates to the pre-reflective by either matching or not matching it. By

calling pre-reflective experience the original data, I do not mean to understand it

in the sense of a lifeless and passive matter, like the classical empiricists; rather, it

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is viewed as a self-sufficient fact, which carries its determinate meaning and can

in principle be apprehended and described in reflection. In contrast, the reflective

layer is added upon the substratum of pre-reflective fact and serves to bestow an

explicit form onto the lived, pre-reflective experience, raising the latter to a stage

of conceptual articulation and intersubjective accessibility. Here an epistemolog-

ical dualism is at play which separates the autonomous pre-reflective experience

and our conscious description of it, just as the dualism of an independent object

and our knowledge of it. It is precisely in the framework of such a model that the

following questions come to the fore: does reflection truly unveil the pre-reflective

experience, or rather fail its object by virtue of reification or fabrication? While

ordinary reflection may involve distortion, could any particular type of reflection

be pure, as Sartre once claims, in that it provides adequate, non-reifying

description of the pre-reflective experience? (1957: 65).

Scepticism and the Problem of the Data-Description Model

As was already pointed out, the data-description model avoids the problem of

circularity endemic to the reflection theory of consciousness and underlines the

priority of pre-reflective experience as the origin of reflection. It draws the

research attention to a level before and presupposing that of reflection, which, in a

reflective philosophy, may not be sufficiently taken notice of. As Legrand states,

‘‘restricting one’s scope to observational self-consciousness would let unexplored

the specificity of self-consciousness’’ (2006: 498). Theorists have thus revealed a

fundamental level of experience which has its unique structure. Moreover, this

model contains a reflection upon reflection, which may guard one against a naive

conviction to an unlimited power of reflection. Reflection cannot tell us everything

about our own experience, and what it tells us may not all be true. When

we employ reflection to acquire knowledge about ourselves or investigate

subjectivity, we have to do with discretion and perhaps to complement it with

other methods.

However, as I wish to make explicit in the following, the data-description model

of reflection and pre-reflective experience is not without problem and difficulty.

This could be shown if we look into the issue of scepticism that emerges within this

model. Here I shall draw on Husserl’s counterargument against the scepticism in

Ideas I, and we shall be able to see through it the untenable position of scepticism

and further the loosening of its preconception.

In the later part of §79 in Ideas I, Husserl makes an attempt to invalidate the

sceptical view towards reflection presented by psychologist H. J. Watt. As was

already touched upon, according to a sceptical view, reflection involving a certain

kind of objectification and reification may not be able to catch the lived experience

it purports to describe. Instead of trying to eliminate the doubt of the sceptics

directly, Husserl deconstructs their view by revealing its hidden presupposition. He

insightfully unveils the ‘‘absurdity’’ (Widersinn) of scepticism in the following

sense:


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All genuine scepticism of whatever kind and persuasion is indicated by the

essentially necessary countersense that, in its argumentations, it implicitly

presupposes as conditions of the possibility of its validity precisely what it

denies in its theses. (Hua 3/1: 174; 1983: 185)

According to Husserl, all kinds of scepticism stand on grounds to which they are

blind and even try to deny. This general remark is illuminating. As Husserl goes on

to explicate, he who expresses his doubt about the validity of reflection and the

possibility of knowing the pre-reflective experience factually makes use of reflective

insights to argue against reflection; had he not already de facto had an experience of

reflection and thereby gained certain ‘‘knowledge’’ about the pre-reflective

experience, he would be unable to doubt. To speak more clearly, statements such

as ‘‘pre-reflective experience is something non-objective’’ and ‘‘reflection modifies

the pre-reflective immediate experience’’ are all based upon insights acquired in

reflection and hence their validity must depend upon the validity of reflection. As

Husserl says, pre-reflective experience ‘‘can only be known in terms of reflection’’

(Hua 3/1: 174). The moment one calls into question the reality of the reflected

experience, one is at the same time justifying reflection by factually making use of it

and the knowledge gained by it. To this extent, scepticism can be said to be self-

defeating.

The absurdity of scepticism has its root in the understanding of reflection it

implicitly adopts. The background assumption is that pre-reflective experience is

self-sufficient as the original datum and should be understood purely on its own, i.e.,

without being affected by the observational reflection qua the method. As a

consequence, the sceptics take a method to be trustworthy only if it provides

understanding that fully coincides with the meaning of the pre-reflective experience

per se. As long as reflection cannot fulfil this criterion or be proven to fulfil it, that

is, it cannot embrace the pre-reflective without contaminating the latter, it does not

merit the name of an appropriate method from a sceptical point of view.

However, in Husserl’s deconstruction of scepticism’s presumption and the

unveiling of its absurdity, the relation between pre-reflective experience and

reflection presents itself as more complicated than is regarded by the data-

description model. This brings forward the following two intriguing questions: can

pre-reflective experience be accessed on its own, that is, without any reference to

reflection? And moreover, are we able to, by all means, verify or reject a

correspondence between the two levels, i.e., the level of the pre-reflective and that

of the reflective? It seems that what Husserl calls attention to in terms of the analysis

is precisely the fact that reflection is the innate form of any disclosure of pre-

reflective experience. As long as scepticism makes assertions about our experience

(it has to, for a negative statement such as ‘‘our experience cannot be faithfully

revealed by reflection’’ is also an assertion), it inevitably presupposes reflection as

its own form. In other words, reflection is in essence the medium by means of which

one gains thematic access to one’s own consciousness.

The examination on scepticism indicates that reflection has an intimate and

essential relation to pre-reflective experience; it cannot be sufficiently characterized

as a one-sided relation of data-description or correspondence between two externally

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correlated levels. In the rest of the paper, I shall suggest a way of understanding that

takes into account this innate relation between the two levels and, furthermore, the

existential bearing reflection intrinsically has.

Data or Text? A Hermeneutical Model

The critique of the scepticism on reflection enables us to see that a one-sided model

of data-description would give rise to certain problems or even absurdities. If

reflection were merely a method or function to describe or represent the pre-

reflective data, which in themselves carry the whole meaning, then one might

assume that the sole power of reflection lies in an epistemological one, namely, to

faithfully retrieve the unattended and yet self-aware consciousness. If somehow the

relation of correspondence cannot be established or simply cannot be proven, then it

becomes dubitable whether we should after all trust the reflective results. On the one

hand, the sceptics focus on the fact that in everyday life reflective understandings of

oneself are not always true but may involve construction or deception. Yet on the

other hand, scepticism, as Husserl claims, is in essence self-contradictory, for while

it doubts about reflection, it at the same time secretly carries out the act of reflection,

in terms of which it can claim that reflection is questionable. Given this, we have to

ask whether it is possible to both validate reflection and admit its fallibility and

limitation. This requires that we take a new look at the relation between pre-

reflective experience and reflection; it should no longer make reflection a secondary

layer conferred onto some autonomous experience from outside and aiming at a

coincidence with the latter.

What I have in mind is a model that is inspired by the phenomenological-

hermeneutical tradition, especially the notion of ‘‘text’’. I shall not attempt to

provide an all-inclusive account of this model, for this would require a extended

discussion on phenomenology and hermeneutics. Instead, I shall draw a sketch of

this model, hoping that it would facilitate a new understanding of reflection.

Husserl’s counterargument against scepticism makes explicit the universal

function of reflection: it is the medium in terms of which the pre-reflective

experience presents itself as the origin and the condition of possibility of this

reflection. As long as our experience is concerned, reflection is not merely one path

among others which we can choose to get thematic access to the experience, but

rather the sole means of access that enables one’s own experience to manifest

explicitly. It is precisely for this reason that the sceptics cannot take a sideways-on

viewpoint towards the pre-reflective, that is, they cannot not get involved in

reflection in order to understand and make assertions about the pre-reflective. To

this extent, the relation between pre-reflective and reflective experience is not one-

sided but, in Moran’s term, mutually responsive (2001: 60). Pre-reflective

experience goes ahead of reflection and provides the silent background from which

a reflective experience may emerge; conversely, pre-reflective experience can only

be as such, i.e., as a mental fact qua the origin and condition of reflection, in the

medium of reflective understanding.


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Here a possible objection may arise with regard to the relationship between pre-

reflective and reflective experience I am trying to suggest. To argue that the pre-

reflective unfolds itself only in and through reflection might sound as if the idea

were to reduce the former to the latter, that is, to propose that pre-reflective

experience is merely projected by reflection rather than an actual event occurring

before reflection. It is intuitive, however, that, first, there are experiences which will

never be reflected upon, and secondly, as a matter of fact, certain non-reflective

experiences anticipate reflection. Suppose I am in a bad mood and make some

offensive remarks when talking to a friend; my friend, being an easy-going and

tolerant person, does not seem to care about it. The next moment I may forget this

and attend to something else I have to do; or I might reflect upon my terrible

behaviour and apologize to my friend. But whether I reflect or not, it is undeniable

that the non-reflective experience, namely, my having a bad mood and being rude to

a friend, did take place as a fact; henceforth, one must admit that, in a certain sense,

this experience exists autonomously and independently of my reflection.

I have no intention to argue counter-intuitively that the pre-reflective experience,

if not being reflected upon, does not really exist. It would be odd and fall prey to

certain subjectivism to claim that, if neither my friend nor I reflect upon the

offensive behaviours afterwards, then they simply cannot be said to have happened.

But let me make clear the point of view I am urging here: the meaning of the non-

reflective experience cannot be accessed in itself and as a whole but only bit by bit

from a vantage point of reflective experience. The pre-reflective experience is surely

a fact, but it is a fact in a very specific sense, which, rather than ‘‘data,’’ might be

better depicted in terms of the notion of ‘‘text’’ as a key concept in hermeneutics.

Drawing on Gadamer and Ricoeur who both treat the paradigm of text as

extraordinarily significant, I shall first clarify what a text is and then make explicit in

what sense pre-reflective experience can be construed as a sort of ‘‘text’’.

The Model of Text

Gadamer writes that ‘‘one may define the text as a series of signs that fixates the

unified sense of something spoken even if it is merely something spoken to one’s

self as it is being written down’’ (1980: 4). A text, so to say, has the fundamental

trait of the fixation of meaning. When a text is written, it takes on a material form

and receives a temporal mark; that is, it constitutes a unity of meaning taking place

at a particular time-point. In his article ‘‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action

Considered as a Text,’’ Ricoeur elaborates a paradigm of text (1973). In his view,

apart from the fundamental feature of meaning fixation, text is characterized by

three further traits; they are its dissociation from the mental intention of the author,

its reference to a world, and its addresses to an indefinite range of possible readers.

For our purpose, I shall, however, slightly modify Ricoeur’s paradigm here and

emphasize two major features of text, which in my view can be extracted from

Ricoeur’s four-fold description. These two traits are summarized as follows: (1) the

fixation of meaning and its distance from the initial context, and (2) its openness

towards endless interpretation.

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A text is transcendent. This means in the first place that as a discourse is

inscribed, it obtains certain exteriority and becomes a meaningful material that can

be approached by anybody. This transcendence or exteriority is in contrast with the

author’s intention that makes such transcendence possible when the text is created.

In other words, as Ricoeur says, with text, ‘‘the author’s intention and the meaning

of the text cease to coincide. […] Not that we can conceive of a text without an

author; […] But the text’s career escapes the finite horizon of its author. What the

text says now matters more than what the author meant to say, and every exegesis

unfolds its procedures within the circumference of a meaning that has broken its

moorings to the psychology of its author’’ (1973: 95). The meaning of the text is

dissociated from the original context and surpasses the mental state of the author;

this is why a text is not merely relevant for the author or her contemporaries who are

more or less situated in a similar context; rather, a text also has significance for the

readers who come from a completely different background or time. Classics, to this

extent, are never out of date. A text extends beyond its own horizon and addresses

anyone who is able to read it and hence unveils new meanings of it. This is precisely

the second constitutive feature of text, namely, the endless unfolding of its meaning.

As Gadamer illuminatingly says, a text is not an ‘‘end product’’ (Endprodukt) but

rather ‘‘a mere middle product, a phase in the emergence of understanding

(Verstandigungsgeschehen)’’ (GW 2: 341).6 By these words, Gadamer points to the

fact that a text is by no means ready-made with all its meaning determined in the

very beginning, short of any reference to an interpreting reader; rather, it is a text in

the sense that one can always return to it, query it, and find in it what it has not yet

said. To this extent, a text is always on the way of becoming itself by virtue of

interpretation and reinterpretation, and conceals in itself inexhaustible aspects and

facets of meanings.

Gadamer’s conception of ‘‘concurrence’’ (Gleichzeitigkeit) can be used to better

illustrate what a model of text is. According to Gadamer, in reading a text, one is

together or ‘‘at the same time’’ (zugleich) with what she intends to understand, just

as being with a dialogue partner (GW 8: 387). Instead of being fixed at two different

points on the time-sequence, the present interpretation of the text and the text to be

read are concurrent. This is surely not to say, as the romantic tradition of

hermeneutics once assumes, that one must give up her position, get transplanted to

the past when the text first emerged and restore what was already there or simply the

author’s mental intention;7 as Gadamer insists in the essay ‘‘What is truth?’’ (Was ist

Wahrheit?), to understand a text is ‘‘not merely a reconstruction of something

meaningful, a conscious explication of an unconscious production’’ (GW 2: 55). On

the contrary, the text is encountered from the current standpoint or in light of the

hermeneutical situation which the interpreter, living historically, possesses at this

moment; to this extent, the text and the interpreter are brought into a space of

dialogue like two interlocutors, whose horizons, as both Gadamer and Ricoeur

formulate, fuse with each other the moment the meaning of the text is understood

6 Gadamer’s Complete Works (Gesammelte Werke) is abbreviated to GW in this article.7 Schleiermacher, for instance, holds a view like this and thinks that the task of interpretation is to

understand the author better than the author understood himself.


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(GW 1: 311; GW 2: 55; Ricoeur 1981: 158–192). The text is therefore a fact that is

unfolded in endlessly new hermeneutical situations; no one possesses the final word

and can claim that the meaning of the text is exhausted.

Pre-reflective Experience as Text

If we now apply the paradigm of text-reading to the issue at stake, we shall at least

take a new look at pre-reflective and reflective experience as well as their relation.

As a general paradigm for understanding certain phenomena, text can not only be a

written manuscript, but more broadly be a thing, a piece of art work, or in the

present context, one’s own experience. As was shown, following a data-description

model, pre-reflective experience is viewed as the primary data, the meaning of

which is fully determined the moment the experience happens and has to be

recovered by means of a subsequent reflection. However, if pre-reflective

experience, rather than data, is a text characterized by the above-mentioned two

related features, we shall be able to appreciate a far more important role of reflection

in human life than is depicted by the data-description model.

Like a written text, pre-reflective experience obtains certain autonomy or

transcendence as it takes place; in other words, it becomes an event or episode, fixed

on a certain temporal point. Unlike a literature, though, pre-reflective experience

does not take the form of a written inscription; rather, it exteriorizes itself in actions

and behaviours, in the way one comports to things or others. But can we say that

there is also a dissociation of meaning and authorial intention in the pre-reflective

experience qua text? Does the meaning of the pre-reflective experience transcend

the author’s, i.e., my intention and horizon? It seems to me that the answer should

be yes. Following Ricoeur, insofar as my experience ‘‘develops consequences of its

own’’ (1973: 100),8 its meaning is richer than my initial intention that is limited by

the situation I was confined in. More significantly, my experience, like a text, has to

be encountered and unfolded in endlessly novel perspectives. This is why, as

growing older and more mature, one often gains new perspectives and values that

would again shed new lights on one’s past experiences; she might find unfair her

former aversion to a person, or be touched by certain experiences to which she was

totally indifferent before. As I reflect upon a past experience, there is also a

‘‘concurrence,’’ a togetherness of the I as the person who now tries to understand

oneself and the I that once lived the experience under a certain condition. In such a

reflective interpretation, I do not merely transplant myself back to the past and

reproduce or relive a bygone moment, but rather engage in a dialogue with myself.

The meaning of the pre-reflective experience is completed neither objectively in the

past and qua some given data nor subjectively as a purely arbitrary construction of

the present reflection; it rather unfolds itself in the space of interpretation reflection

opens up. For instance, on reflecting upon my rudeness towards the friend, I make

8 In the article ‘‘The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,’’ Ricoeur applies the

paradigm of text to meaningful action, and in terms of the phrase quoted here, Ricoeur wants to stress the

autonomization of action and its dissociation from the agent. It seems to me that what Ricoeur says here

also holds true for our experiences, which are submitted to further inquiries and evaluations and hence

escape the initial intention.

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the fact—that I was in a bad mood and behaved aggressively—present in this

particular reflection; nevertheless, my reflective experience is not just oriented

towards a finished moment, as if I were merely standing aloof and attending to an

unnoticed internal event like a spectator. Due to the concurrence of the text and the

interpreter, my pre-reflective experience has its relevance for the present and even

for the future. In the reflection of my rudeness towards my friend, and in the feeling

of shame which penetrates it, I first confront myself and thereby take responsibility

for my own behaviour. More precisely, my reflective understanding which enables

me to see the pre-reflective rudeness is not so much a theoretical-epistemological

issue concerning the knowledge of some pre-existing data as rather an ethical-

existential stance I take in order to be true to myself by, say, being ashamed. I shall

dwell on this point again in the final part.

The model of text, as applied to our experience, suggests that pre-reflective

experience is no longer some determined original data that ought to be matched and

recovered. The pre-reflective is surely the precondition that makes reflection

possible, but as the origin, it is at the same time the telos or end to the extent that its

meaning presents itself in terms of endless reflective understanding. We as human

being cannot grasp the pre-reflective experience from a viewpoint that is outside

reflection. Above all, it is through reflection that our own experience qua text

unfolds itself in a meaningful way. Henceforth, reflection is far from a mere

secondary layer that is external and supplementary to the non-reflective experience

qua substratum. To conceive of pre-reflective experience as text is to view it as

essentially involving an appeal to reflection or the possibility to be queried and

thematized. For human being, reflection is the capacity to submit one’s experience

to inquiries, which are primarily normative ones such as ‘‘did I do it right’’; in

reflection, one confronts oneself, calls into question one’s own deeds and takes

responsibility for one’s life. These all point to an existential dimension of reflection

that is beyond its epistemological function.

Orientation Towards Future: An Existential Dimension

As was mentioned, reflection has an existential dimension which has been more or

less neglected in contemporary theoretical understanding. This is partly due to the

data-description model that predominates our covert conception of reflection, and

this model is mainly based upon an epistemological paradigm, namely, the

paradigm of reaching something that already exists independently of the knowing

consciousness—even though in the case of reflection, this knowing consciousness

and the consciousness to be known belong to the same stream. The whole picture,

however, changes if we take pre-reflective experience to be a text that calls for

reflective interpretation. I shall here briefly suggest the implication the text-reading

model has for a proper understanding of the existential dimension of reflection.

According to the data-description model, reflection is chiefly past-oriented,

which means, it seeks to be transposed backwardly and coincide with the intended

mental fact in the past. The temporal gulf between pre-reflective and reflective


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experience is thus an obstacle that has to be overcome. It is, however, precisely the

ambition to eliminate the temporal distance that gives rise to the perplexity of

reflection we touched upon before, for reflection cannot close a gap that it itself

opens by nature. In contrast, the text-reading model sees no threat in the temporal

distance between the pre-reflective and the reflective, but rather regards it as a

source of meaning. According to the text-reading model, a text, by definition, is

open to its readers; or more precisely, it is so structured as to lend itself to

interpretation. The meaning of the pre-reflective experience qua text is to be

unfolded in terms of reflective interpretation. The distance hence shows its positive

quality insofar as it makes possible a fusion of horizons, a concurrence of the past

and the present, in terms of which the pre-reflective experience manifests itself.

Different from the retrospective gesture of reflection depicted by the data-

description model, what is captured in the concept of concurrence or fusion of

horizons is a reversed orientation of reflection, namely, an orientation towards the

future; and this future-orientedness is inherently entangled with the existential

dimension of reflection. To make this more intelligible, we may take a look at

Gadamer’s notion of ‘‘application’’ (Anwendung).

Gadamer dwells upon the concept of application in order to spell out the

normative aspect of understanding as a constitutive moment that cannot be

separated from its cognitive aspect. In Gadamer’s view, to understand a text is to

apply its meaning to the present existential situation of the interpreter; that is to say,

such an understanding has a normative element in that it says about what is good or

right and what should be done by oneself. It is not that we first cognitively grasp the

meaning of the text and then subsequently and accidentally apply it to the concrete

situation; it would be so if to understand a text were simply a matter of recovering

the independent, objective meaning or authorial intention of something in the past.

Rather, the cognitive and the normative dimensions form ‘‘a unified phenomenon’’

of understanding a text (GW 1: 316). As Gadamer writes, here ‘‘the knower does not

stay opposite to the matter, which he merely asserts, rather he is immediately

connected to what he knows. It is what he has to do with’’ (GW 1: 319). As was

explicated before, to understand a text means to confront it from a viewpoint that is

embedded in the present horizon. The interpreter is hence not a mere spectator who

is brought in front of the text to be understood and aims at the cognition of the

objective meaning of the latter. Understood in light of one’s background and

tradition, the text immediately shows itself as significant for one’s present life, for

who one is and what one concerns. In other words, there is a fist-person involvement

in the text interpretation. It is to this extent that Gadamer calls it a concurrence or a

fusion. On this account, each understanding bears a practical, existential dimension

in that the meaning of the text necessarily has relevance for the situation of the

person who understands.

If we now look at the relation between pre-reflective and reflective experience in

view of the above discussion, we shall be able to underline an existential dimension

reflection intrinsically bears. A hermeneutically-informed model of reflection has

made clear the following point: pre-reflective experience is not fully determined on

its own and can be observed objectively, i.e., with no reference to reflection; rather,

its meaning is unfolded in and through reflective interpretation which carries its own

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horizon. What to add now is that reflection, grasped in such a way, is not a purely

cognitive act, but most importantly a matter of application in the sense we just

explicated. Reflection is far from a distant observation of a past and completed

experience that is detached from the current moment; one does not first grasp the

pre-reflective experience cognitively as a finished fact and then try to relate or

apply it to one’s present situation. Rather, what is revealed in reflection is in

essence pertinent to the present and future of the reflecting person. That is to say,

it always already manifests itself as something that has a value for oneself, that

one should take responsibility for, etc.; it always tells something about how one is

at the moment and what one should do next. Take for example my rudeness to my

friend; upon reflection, I may feel ashamed for what I have done. Yet this feeling

of shame does not come after the cognition of my past experience, but is one with

the latter; more precisely speaking, the action of being rude to my friend

manifests itself in my feeling of shame as something that I should not have done

and should anyhow mend for by, say, apologizing to her in the telephone.

Reflection, to this extent, is a distinctive phenomenon that combines a cognitive

and a normative dimension. Each reflection is a step taken to let the fact done by

myself shine in the reflective light which makes the pre-reflective a fact of mine, a

fact that has to be taken responsibility for and taken into account for future acts:

‘‘I should not have done that,’’ ‘‘I was so unhappy when I did that and I shall

never do that again,’’ ‘‘I was not brave enough to stand up to tell the truth—I am

a coward,’’ etc. As Christine Korsgaard suggests in her book The Source of

Normativity, the reflective nature is connected with a conception of one’s

‘‘practical identity,’’ a conception ‘‘under which you value yourself,’’ ‘‘you find

your life to be worth living and your actions to be worth undertaking’’ (1998:

101).

To think of reflection under the model of text-reading is to hand back to it its

significance for human life. The above discussion has aimed at illuminating not

merely the possibility of reflection, which the theory of pre-reflective experience

has contributed to, but more importantly, its facticity and necessity in our life. The

approach of a data-description model accounts for the possibility that a reflective

gaze can always be turned towards a non-reflective experience, but in the

meantime, it somehow downplays the constitutive role of reflection for human

experiences. Is reflection just a higher-order layer supplementary to a meaningful

and fully determined bottom layer, and does it merely function as an explication of

the experience that is already completely self-intimating? Would a life form still

be counted as human life if the reflective layer is never actually realized? People

tend to say that reflection changes human experiences by making us explicitly

aware of them; but reflection is more than that. It is constitutive of a full-fledged

human life form, for the reason that it is the sole medium in terms of which one

faces, examines, and values oneself, takes responsibility for one’s own acts, and

makes decision for one’s future. The possibility of reflection is an actual and

necessary possibility to the extent that human experience is so structured as to lend

itself to reflection.

Notably, to stress the facticity and necessity of reflection does not mean that each

of our experience must be reflected upon in order to be a human experience; nor


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does it imply that our pre-reflective experience is totally unintelligible.9 The text

model of understanding pre-reflective and reflective experience is not contradictory

to the insight that our pre-reflective experience is structured in its own way and its

meaning should be unveiled in an original manner. Theories of pre-reflective

experience have shown that our experience, prior to reflection, is self-intimate,

embodied and norm-governed; yet such an understanding is gained in the medium

of reflection and can only be possible if our experience is in principle open to

reflection. The application of the text model to our experience is to urge the

following understanding: it belongs to the unique nature of human experiences that

they are built to be responsive to reflective, normative inquiries, just as a text is by

nature responsive and inviting to its reader.10

Acknowledgments This paper is sponsored by Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of Ministry

of Education of China (Project No. 13YJC720003) and Shanghai Pujiang Program. The initial idea of the

paper was formed during my study at Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. I wish

to thank my colleagues there who discussed with me a lot of issues in this paper and helped me make

myself clearer. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the post-doc seminar at Fudan University

and I’d like to express my gratitude to those who commented on it. I would also like to thank two

anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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