or belonging to, me,' and 'me' differs from 'I' only in grammatical case.
Despite the grammatical awkwardness, and ignoring whatever contribution the
case may make to the meaning of the expression, 'my' can quite legitimately
be said to mean 'of, or belonging to, I'. Vietnamese, in fact, does not
distinguish cases, and, for every V-expression, there is a distinct and
corresponding expression for 'my'. For 'me' there is 'cua me'; for 'con'
there is 'cua con', etc., 'cua' being unproblematically translatable as
'of' or 'belonging to'. Now the problem is this: We have claimed that 'me'
represents 'the-self-as-your-mother' and must now substitute for 'your' an
expression representing an 'other-profile'. Suppose, then, that for 'your'
we substitute 'the-other-as-my-child'. 'Me' thus represents the self as the
mother of the-other-as-my-child. But now 'my' has not yet been
accommodated. Suppose, then, that for 'my' we substitute 'of
the-self-as-your-mother'. 'Me' then represents the self as the mother of
the-other-as-the-child of the-self-as-your-mother. We need not proceed much
farther to see that we have thus initiated an infinite regress.

The runaway regress is unavoidable so long as we insist upon
surreptitiously concealing 'I' within 'me', as patently we have done by (1)
formulating 'me' as the-self-as-yourmother, and then (2) substituting for
the transcontextually invariant 'your' an expression representing
the-other-as-my-child (i.e. with apologies to grammarians, the other as the
child of I). We can respond to the regress in one of two ways: First, we
might insist that there exists, concealed within the dark and hidden tissue
of the V-expression's meaning, a meaning-component semantically equivalent
to 'I'. But we have already seen that this supposal leads to its own
regress problems. Thus, second, it seems that we are compelled to
acknowledge once again that V-expressions are primitive, logically
indefinable in terms of the semantic resources of English.

'Me' and 'con' (in company with the numerous other
self-referential/addressive pairs of Vietnamese) are, however,
interdefinable expressions. 'Me' represents the-self-as-the-mother-of-con;
and 'Con' represents the-other-as-the-child-of-me. It is impossible, in the
real-world context, to refer to oneself as 'me' without assuming the
existence of a 'con'. And this curious feature of V-expressions has decided
relevance to the problem of other minds. It might, of course, be claimed
that something similar holds in the case of the English 'I' and 'you'. The
English expressions are conceptually linked in such a way that it is
impossible to understand the one without understanding the other. While
this is undeniably true, the point I wish to make cuts deeper. The
well-bred solipsist could assuredly maintain that, while 'I' and 'you' are
necessarily interdefined, this is merely a consideration of language or of
conceptual scheme, and not a consideration of existential status. The self,
regardless of the semantic connections among terms invoked to denote it and
its purported complement, may nonetheless exist while the other fails to
exist. The conceptual connections obtain, that is, between the 'mental
representations' of self and other which enter into self-referential and
addressive propositions. They may not obtain between the self and other
themselves which are displayed 'in person' in self-referential and
addressive sentences. And if not, there is no reason to suppose that the
existence of the one entails the existence of the other. The case of
Vietnamese ego-profiles is radically different. What is displayed 'in
person' in the sentence, 'Me suy-nghi,, is the-self-as-the-mother-of-con.
The connection with the other is not merely a matter of semantic
relationships which hover over the heads of me and con. In her very being,
me is inseparable from con. What we have called an 'ego-profile' cannot be
conceived on the order of a monadic property exemplified by an ego, but
must, rather, be understood as a relational entity capable of being
considered in two alternative ways, or possessing a duality of aspects or
'nuances'. The self, then, in Buddhist terms, arises dependently as a
certain node in a complex tapestry the filaments of which we have called
'ego-profiles', but might now more appropriately consider as modes of
intersubjective relatedness. The interpersonal precedes the personal. The
ego is a derivative construct presupposing a network of intersubjective
filaments.

In referring to the ill-fated 'pairing' theory of the Cartesian
Meditations, Fink objects that "Husserl's analysis remains caught in the
reduplication of the ego". [49] The problem is that Husserl there fails to
see that self and other are ontologically integral, assuming rather an
ontological chasm between one monadic ego and the next. As the Vietnamese
mode of self-reference makes plain, however, the-self-as-the-mother-of-con