A irredutibilidade da autoconsciência e sua pré-reflexibilidade: Dieter Henrich, Manfred Frank e o legado da Escola de Heidelberg

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the treatment of self-consciousness in the so-called Heidelberg School on the basis of a single problem, that of the circularity of the reflective model, which presupposes the self-knowledge it was meant to explain. It traces this problem from Fichte's original insight, as recovered by Dieter Henrich in 1966, to Manfred Frank's divergence, which proves to be less a dispute between authors than a fundamental alternative: does the irreducibility of self-consciousness point beyond itself or rest within itself? Henrich, after attempting the theory of the anonymous field and of polyfactoriality, comes to acknowledge the limit of any factorial analysis and turns the self-relation into an index pointing toward a ground and a world; Frank refuses the return to relation and resolves self-consciousness into a pre-reflective self-familiarity, irreducible and non-relational, in dialogue with the analytic theory of the de se and with phenomenology. It is argued that, on either path, the school's contribution consists in securing the irreducibility of the subject, both against the reflective model and against culturalizing, psychologizing, and sociologizing reductions, thereby allowing philosophy to lay claim to a domain that is strictly its own.