THE EARLY PHENOMENOLOGISTS

There is an extraordinary parallelism in fin-de-siecle concepts of the self in psychology, art, philosophy, and our subject, immunology. Such a sweeping claim may not be judicious to make, and it could be contested by arguments concerning the artificial construction of a Zeitgeist or the inadmissibility of extending analogical cases from one discipline or activity to another. But attempting that claim largely structures the remainder of this essay. In this chapter the phenomenological critique is used to explore further the basis of the immune self concept as understood from this position. The last chapters deal with metaphysical issues that, I believe, underlie our understanding of selfhood. To reach well beyond the confines of immunology is obviously risky, but aware of these dangers, I am still committed to sketch what I perceive to be a widely pervasive understanding of how the world was viewed (and what the nature of the perceiver was) during the same formative period that witnessed the birth of modern immunology. New conceptions of the knowing subject in his or her personal cosmos were evoked by a startling reassessment of the self. This is the same mission identified for immunology, but in a different scientific domain. My exercise is pointed toward a critique of immunology as a discipline that has as its basis the self metaphor. This fundamental concept has the same philosophical construction of personal identity as that formed from novel late nineteenth-century psychological concepts.