Naturalising the Austrian self: comments on Erwin Dekker

Erwin Dekker’s causal-genetic account of the Austrian self offers an important corrective to radical subjectivist accounts of creativity, agency, and choice. This commentary argues that the account is powerful but incomplete. First, it risks oscillating too quickly between mind, self, subjectivity, individuality, individualism, and consciousness, thereby obscuring the fact that some dimensions of mentality are more culturally constructed than others. Second, it would benefit from a more explicit dual-inheritance framework that integrates cultural cognition with biologically evolved human nature. Drawing on Hume, Smith, contemporary evolutionary anthropology, and research on animal and infant consciousness, I argue for a naturalised Austrian theory of the self in which cultural institutions and processes modify, amplify, and diversify our partly innate mental capacities. This biocultural perspective preserves Dekker’s insight that selves are socially mediated while better avoiding both radical subjectivism and cultural determinism.