voraus, was sie erklären soll, oder schiebe den Erklärungsgrund ins Unendliche auf. Später ist Henrich zur Auffassung zurückgekehrt, beim Selbstbewusstsein handele es sich um eine „wissende Selbstbeziehung“, deren Struktur nicht weiter aufzuklären sei. Die Frage, von der sich Manfred Frank in dieser Auseinandersetzung mit Henrichs subjektphilosophischen Intuitionen leiten lässt, lautet, ob eine Theorie des Selbstbewusstseins auf jede Form von Reflexivität verzichten kann. Sartres Theorie des „präreflexiven Selbstbewusstseins“ erwägt eine Virtualisierung des Gegensatzes von Reflektierendem und Reflektiertem und bietet einen möglichen Ausweg.

In post-war Germany, the “philosophy of the subject” was seen to be on the “wrong track”. This was the unanimous conviction of Heidegger and the so-called linguistic analysis (Tugendhat). Dieter Henrich was the only important German philosopher who attempted to prove that the subject-philosophical legacy was in fact unfulfilled – provided that his “original insight” was accepted as such. In an exchange of views with the leading minds of the emerging “Philosophy of Mind”, Henrich showed that self-consciousness cannot be explained by “reflection”, i.e. not as the result of a higher-level mental turning back to a first-level mental state or its subject. Such an explanation, on which all previous subject theories have been based, leads to circularity and recourse: It either presupposes what it is supposed to explain or postpones the ground of explanation to infinity. Henrich later returned to the view that self-consciousness is a “knowing self-relation” whose structure cannot be explained any further. The question that Manfred Frank is guided by in this discussion of Henrich's subject-philosophical intuitions is whether a theory of self-consciousness can dispense with any form of reflexivity. Sartre's theory of “prereflective self-consciousness” considers a virtualization of the opposition between the reflective and the reflected and offers a possible way out.