Dieter Henrich

Dieter Henrich is cited for drawing a limit around social explanations of self-consciousness: interaction may account for a person’s self-image and recognized identity, but it does not thereby explain the emergence of the subject itself. The distinction separates the formation of a socially legible self from the more difficult question of what makes subjectivity possible.

Henrich’s Intervention

The book places Henrich in a discussion of Daniel Dennett’s brief account of the evolutionary emergence of self-consciousness. Dennett draws on George Herbert Mead’s account of the Self as emerging through social interaction: a person imagines how they appear to another, internalizes that other’s view, and can rehearse possible reproaches in silent inner speech. This account shows how social relations shape the image a person has of themselves.

Henrich is presented as justified in objecting that this dialectic explains only the Self or personhood: the features formed through imaginary or symbolic identification. It does not, on its own, explain the emergence of the subject. The argument does not dismiss social formation; it specifies what that explanation leaves unresolved.

Selfhood and Subjectivity

The distinction matters because the socially formed self-image and the subject are not interchangeable. A person’s identifications can describe how they understand themselves and become recognizable to others, but the book resists treating that description as a complete account of subjectivity. Henrich’s point marks the boundary between explaining the contents of selfhood and explaining the subject to whom those contents are attributed.

The surrounding discussion develops this difference through self-reference. When a person designates themselves as “I,” the act does more than name an already complete collection of bodily and mental properties: the book describes the subject as what is added through that act of designation. The resulting unity is not simply a fiction with no consequences; it functions as a necessary presupposition for real actions. This account extends the distinction at issue without reducing Henrich’s intervention to a claim about the mechanics of self-reference.

Place in the Argument

Henrich’s brief appearance helps prevent an account of subjectivity from stopping at social recognition. Mead’s model clarifies how a Self takes shape through the internalized perspective of others; Henrich’s qualification keeps open the question of the subject that cannot simply be equated with that socially formed self-image. The book’s larger philosophical method similarly cautions against treating a gap as a defect that must be overcome by a higher reconciliation: sometimes the distinction itself is what the analysis must preserve. Here, that restraint leaves the subject’s emergence as a genuine problem rather than an effect already explained by social interaction.