Is all consciousness self-consciousness?
(Rough draft)
J.K. Schear
1. Some philosophers think so. I am not sure what to make of it. I propose to survey
some arguments and considerations for and against the claim that consciousness is,
or essentially involves, self-consciousness (hereafter: ‘SC’). I will not arrive at a
settled conviction on the issue in what follows, but the hope is to make some
progress.
Now on its face the slogan that all consciousness is self-consciousness might sound
manifestly false, even for the most extreme narcissists among us. In Sartre’s 1934
essay The Transcendence of the Ego, he makes the point as follows:
“When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in
contemplating a portrait, there is no I. There is consciousness of the streetcarhaving-to-be-overtaken, etc. I am then plunged into the world of objects;…but
me, I have disappeared…There is no place for me on this level. And this is not a
matter of chance, due to a momentary lapse of attention, but happens because
of the very structure of consciousness.”
Sartre here suggests that consciousness is immersed in the world. The form of selfconsciousness that Sartre wants to deny is what one might call reflective selfconsciousness, a form of consciousness in which one takes oneself as one’s topic. A
sample expression of this might be “I am contemplating the portrait.” It is not hard,
then, to appreciate Sartre’s point: in genuinely contemplating the portrait, my
conscious experience is taken up by the portrait, not by myself contemplating the
portrait.
Those who endorse some version of the slogan don’t defend the manifestly false
interpretation of it, according to which all consciousness is reflective selfconsciousness. The thought is rather that there is a distinct species of selfconsciousness, a pre-reflective self-consciousness (‘PRSC’), that is integral to
consciousness. I want to consider two versions of this thought in what follows,
dividing those philosophers who endorse SC into two broad camps. First, there are
those who draw the link between consciousness and self-consciousness through
reason. Call them the rationalists (Burge, Moran, Boyle, Roedl, and others). Second,
there are those who draw the link through the phenomenal character of
consciousness. Call them the phenomenalists (Levine, Kriegel, Zahavi, and others),
with whom I begin.
Phenomenalism about self-consciousness
2. According to the phenomenalist interpretation, PRSC is a kind of implicit
acquaintance with oneself, or background self-familiarity, somehow at work in all
world-directed consciousness. Zahavi and Kriegel have recently written:
“Compare your experiences of perceiving an apple and remembering a banana. In
one respect, these experiences are very different. They differ with regard to their
object or content and with regard to their act type or attitude. In another respect,
however, these two experiences have something very fundamental in common: in
both cases it is for you that it is like something have them. Arguably, for every
possible experience we have, each of us can say: whatever it is like for me to have
the experience, it is for me that it like that to have it. What-it-is-likeness is properly
speaking what-it-is-like-for-me-ness.”
Accodingly, their commitment to a version of SC is cast as follows:
“All conscious states’ phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential
constituent.”
In some earlier work, I criticized this position, at least as it had been presented by
Zahavi. Kriegel, who has been arguing for a similar claim, has recently joined forces
with Zahavi to co-author the paper (“For-me-ness: What it is and what it is not”) from
which I draw the above passage. The paper among other things responds to some of
my critical remarks. I want to review some of the earlier discussion and see if I can
continue the conversation by responding to this recent paper.
My primary objection is straightforwardly phenomenological. Impressed like Sartre by
the intentionality of consciousness, it doesn’t seem faithful to ordinary experience to
describe it as involving a kind of self-presence. Of course any conscious experience I
enjoy or suffer is had by me, but that is not the same as saying that for-me-ness is
experienced in, or part of, each and every experience. At times it seems to me that
the phenomenalist case involves running together the trivial point that my conscious
experiences are had by me with the more robust claim that for-me-ness is invariably
“given” or “manifest” as a “constituent” of all experiences (with the latter claim
inheriting a seeming patina of plausibility thanks to the utter obviousness of the
former). But rather than tease out and dwell on that conflation, I want to take the
phenomenalist case at its word that, as Zahavi put it, “the best argument to be found”
for pre-reflective self-consciousness (as for-me-ness) is a “correct phenomenological
description of our conscious life”.
What precisely is the correct phenomenological description of our conscious life such
that it must include appeal to pre-reflective self-consciousness? Zahavi characterizes
it as a “subtle background presence.” Kriegel offers similar formulations, even
likening the background presence of self to the presence of objects of perception in
the background, as opposed to the figure, in one’s visual field (to use the Gestalt
idiom).
One descriptive strategy here would be to accentuate the distinctive character of this
subtle background presence by describing cases of conscious experience that lack
pre-reflective self-consciousness. This would be to make its purported presence
conspicuous by its absence. One might look, say, to cases of meditative trance or
peak-level athletic performance in which people report a complete loss of any sense
of self whatsoever, even a tacit or implicit one. Faithful and effective descriptions of
these forms of “self-less” conscious experience would move the reader to recognize
and appreciate the more normal case in which conscious experience purportedly
comes wrapped up with the pre-reflective sense of self.
This strategy is not available to the phenomenalist. After all, to recognize the
existence of cases of conscious experience unaccompanied by pre-reflective selfconsciousness would amount to a refutation of SC. This thesis, recall, is a claim of
necessity, that conscious experience as such entails pre-reflective selfconsciousness, i.e., that all conscious experience involves pre-reflective selfconsciousness. (One might retreat to the claim that consciousness is generally selfconscious, but not universally, allowing use of a method of contrast. But neither
Zahavi or Kriegel display any commitment to the weaker claim.)
3. I will adopt a contrastive descriptive strategy to try and motivate the contrast
between what one might call plain experience and self-conscious experience. The
aim is to shed doubt on the phenomenalist claim, or at least render it really not at all
obvious that for-me-ness is ordinarily part of the phenomenal character of each and
every experience. Consider another passage from Sartre, attempting to capture the
quotidian experience of reading.
I was absorbed…in my reading. I am going to try and remember the
circumstances of my reading, my attitude, the lines I was reading. I am thus
going to revive not only these external details but a certain depth of
unreflected consciousness since the objects could only have been perceived
by that consciousness and since they remain relative to it…I must direct my
attention to the revived objects, but without losing sight of the unreflected
consciousness, by joining in a sort of conspiracy with it and by drawing up an
inventory of its content... There is no doubt about the result: while I was
reading, there was consciousness of the book, of the heroes of the novel,
but…there was no I in the unreflected consciousness.1
Contrast the above experience of reading a novel with a different case. Once again
we can turn to Sartre, as he offers a helpful case of this in the “Body” section late in
Being and Nothingness. Imagine it is late, you’ve been reading a novel all evening
and you are getting tired; the words on the page start to tremble and quiver;
discerning their meaning requires a bit more effort than before. You press on as you
are wrapped up in the story, but some of the words on the page begin to be given to
you, for example, “as-to-be-re-read.” Here is a case that is aptly described as reading
a book self-consciously. You are present to yourself as a reader as you are reading,
and unlike the fully absorbed case, in this case there is an I to be found in the
“unreflected consciousness.”
So one can draw a phenomenological contrast between two kinds of reading
experience. Appreciating the absence of self in the absorbed reading case helps
render conspicuous the subtle background presence to self in the tired late night
reading case. It might be objected that in this latter case the self-consciousness
present in the experience is not genuinely pre-reflective. However, as I have
described the case, you are still wrapped up in the story. The foreground theme of
your conscious experience while reading remains “the heroes of the novel,” and so
on. You sustain the “thesis,” only now that thetic consciousness is accompanied by a
background non-thetic self-consciousness of your own reading activity. (Contrast the
pretense of sitting in a café with a book open, a book picked out only to impress the
person you are about to meet, rather than be read. Here one is not reading selfconsciously, for oneself, or maybe one’s image, has displaced the novel as the topic
of one’s consciousness. Though not involving the use of the word ‘I’, this is reflective
self-consciousness rather than conscious experience accompanied by a prereflective self-consciousness.)
Suppose we accept the phenomenological contrast between plain experience
and self-conscious experience, what then are we to make, if anything, of the alleged
mineness of conscious experience?
An alternative construal of the phenomenon is as follows. The seeming
presence of a form of self-consciousness at work in all world-directed experience
amounts to this, and no more: Being possessed of the first-person conceptual
capacity always, or at least for the most part, puts one in a position to know
immediately about one’s own conscious mental life as one’s own, as mine, or for me.
1
Sartre (1957) pg. 46
This “privileged” position is exploited if and when the capacity for reflective selfconsciousness is exercised. But it does not follow from the ever present availability of
taking up a distinctively first-personal relation to one’s own conscious experience that
there is an actual consciousness of oneself that, experientially, always accompanies
one’s conscious experience of the world. And since the capacity for first-person
thought well captures the “mineness” of mature conscious experience, the alleged
need for a notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness to account for the phenomenon
is hardly compelling.
In sum, we shouldn’t mistake the presence of a capacity for self-consciousness as
the actualization of that capacity in our experience of the world beyond ourselves.
Moreover, if Sartre is right about consciousness and its objects in The
Transcendence of the Ego, the consequence of this mistake is phenomenological
distortion. After all, our consciousness is generally immersed in the world, taken with
its objects. Accordingly, self-consciousness is more justly construed, on
phenomenological grounds, as a potentiality of the world-immersed experience of
someone capable of first-person thought (which is generally unactualized, but always
actualizable).
4. A phenomenalist rejoinder runs as follows: Our conscious experience is
automatically and immediately available to first-person thought, we can grant. But
this is so because we are pre-reflectively self-conscious. The exercise of reflective
self-consciousness, that is, rests on the basis of a prior pre-reflective selfconsciousness. How else could we knowingly report on our own conscious
experience with such immediacy? So all conscious experience must be prereflectively self-conscious after all.
Here the attempt to establish PRSC is not by a perspicuous description of
how self-consciousness figures in our experience. Rather PRSC is something we
must recognize to meet a pressing explanatory demand. Pre-reflective selfconsciousness must be in place to account for something else, namely, a piece of
first-person knowledge of our own mental lives one has when exercising the capacity
for reflective self-consciousness.
Zahavi for one seems to have precisely this kind of argument in mind at one
point:
“If I am engaged in some conscious activity, such as the reading of a story, my
attention is neither on myself nor on my activity of reading, but on the story. If my
reading is interrupted by someone asking me what I am doing, I immediately
reply that I am (and have for some time been) reading; the self-consciousness on
the basis of which I answer the question is not something acquired at just that
moment, but a consciousness of myself that has been present all along. To put it
differently, it is because I am pre-reflectively conscious of my experiences that I
am usually able to respond immediately, that is, without inference or observation,
if somebody asks me what I have been doing, or thinking, or seeing, or feeling
immediately prior to the question.”
Call the argument presented in this passage “the interview argument.” (Compare
Sartre’s counting cigarettes example in section 3 of the Introduction to Being and
Nothingness.) Is the argument good?
The key move of the interview argument is an appeal to a moment of
reflective self-consciousness in action to demonstrate the existence of distinct type of
self-consciousness, namely pre-reflective self-consciousness. I successfully report
what I am up to in response to a question about what I am doing. Does this success
imply a prior pre-reflective self-consciousness? Am I always already enjoying an
implicit self-experience that enables me to pass the interview test?
The answer to this question, I suggest, is no. If I am tempted to answer yes, I
think my sense of self-presence is a mistaken interpretation of the following truism: it
is not exactly news to me that I am reading. When asked what I am doing, and then
responding, I did not discover something. I did not discover that it is me that is
reading, nor did I discover that I am reading. I already knew what I was doing, in
some ordinary colloquial sense of the verb ‘to know’. While this may help explain
some vague sense of pre-reflective self-presence, it does not help the interview
argument much. After all, that I know what I am doing is one thing; a pervasive and
omnipresent awareness of myself figuring in my experience of doing what I am doing
is quite another thing.2
Compare the following scenario to bring out this difference. As I am reading a
novel, suppose someone asks me “Is the world more than 5 minutes old?”, to which I
reply at once “Of course it is.” Are we to conclude from my success at this interview
that I was enjoying a pervasive pre-reflective conscious experience, subtly present in
the background of my reading, of the world’s being more than 5 minutes old? It
seems clear that the answer in this case is a straightforward “no”. So appealing to
success, however effortless, at an interview question about x, is not sufficient to
serve as unproblematic evidence for conscious experience of x. Put back into the
context of self-awareness issue: the move from an epistemological self-relation
(knowing what I am doing in doing what I am doing) to a phenomenological selfrelation (experiencing myself doing what I am doing in doing what I am doing) is a
move, and it is not an obvious move to make.
5. Against the analogy between the fact that the world is older than five minutes and
the fact that you have an experience as of reading, Kriegel and Zahavi have pointed
out the following disanalogy:
“The fact the world has been older than 5 minutes has been around for a long time –
long enough for your acquire knowledge of it (indeed familiarize yourself with it) that
you now possess independently any conscious awareness of this fact. But at the
time a fact comes into being, the only way you can be in a position to report on it is if
you are consciously aware of it. Therefore, the fact that as soon as a conscious
experience comes into being you are in a position to report on it…means that as
soon as it comes into existence you are consciously aware of it. This would very
much be explained by the notion that it is in the very nature of the experience that it
like something for you. Thus experiential for-me-ness appears explanatorily useful
after all.” (pg. 15; italics in original)
I accept the relevant asymmetry. I accept that in the case of conscious experience,
being well positioned for interview success is a pervasive condition, unlike my
relation to non-conscious facts. So I agree there is something to explain. Whether
experiential for-me-ness is “useful” is another question.
About the interview scene above, the reading case, let me re-sketch the
outlines of an alternative account. The interview question, when put, prompts the
exercise of the capacity for first-personal thought, and therewith emerges an
occurrent consciousness of one’s own experience as of reading. It is by virtue of
being capable of first person thought (answering the question) that consciousness of
oneself as (just then) reading (consciously, of course) was so much as able to
emerge. This manifestly does not imply that the “stream” of reading-experience was
2
Compare Charles Siewert’s dicussion of the ‘conscious-of’ trap in Siewert (1998).
an impersonal stream before answering the question. Rather, because that stream is
the stream of someone capable of first-person thought, it is available to being taken
up immediately, first-personally, within the purview of that person’s thought. Once
conscious experience and activity are informed by this ability to think of oneself firstpersonally, conscious experience and activity are always already, one might say,
personal – that is, not the experiential life of no-one in particular, but rather one I live
through, and take up in thought and conversation when the occasion arises. So: why
the felt need to read the potentiality of self-consciousness back into the experiential
reality of being absorbed by a good book? Why refuse to recognize that that the
interview question might bring on a transformation of conscious experience – a shift
of mental posture – rather than merely trigger the revelation of some alleged
omnipresent “for-me-ness”? The appeal to a consciousness informed by the capacity
for first-person thought is sufficient to respond to the call for explanation generated
by interview success.
Now, Kriegel and Zahavi have offered two objections to this “capacity-based
account”. (“The Schear dispositionalist explanation faces serious difficulties.”) First,
they have complained that this account, such as it is, restricts itself to creatures who
have this capacity for first-person thought. But surely many creatures are conscious
despite lacking such a capacity. So the “for-me-ness” account is superior.
But here Kriegel and Zahavi are moving the goldposts. The explanatory demand
generated by the pervasive phenomenon of interview success is clearly a
phenomenon of adult human conscious life. To charge that an account that attempts
to explain this success is wanting because it doesn’t explain a much broader target
(consciousness as such) clearly lacks warrant. After all, my claim that the relevant
self-consciousness presupposes the capacity for first person thought hardly commits
me to claim that creatures that lack such self-consciousness thereby lack
phenomenal consciousness. Our topic, as I understand it, is the relationship between
consciousness and self-consciousness, pursued from a resolutely first-personal
methodological point of view. Whatever is going on with lizards, cats, and babies is
beside the point. (Note: I would not deny that such creatures have some variant of
what Rousseau called a sentiment de soi. Though even here, this wouldn’t commit
me to construing the primitive self-consciousness as constitutive of phenomenal
consciousness as such. I see no reason to rule out forms of conscious experience
that do not exhibit even the most primitive self-consciousness – e.g. some creatures
very “low” on the ladder of conscious life. At any rate, a theory of phenomenal
consciousness is not what is at issue in the interview argument.)
Now I turn to the second objection Kriegel and Zahavi offer, which reads as follows:
“While the dispositionalist explanation proposes to account for the immediate and
effortless capacity to respond to questions about one’s experiences, it is not clear
that it does anything to illuminate the sense of familiarity and lack of surprise
underlying this capacity. This is important, because insofar as the original datum is
itself construed dispositionally (‘the capacity to respond’), it is somewhat inviting to
offer a dispositional explanation of it. But dispositional phenomena always
presuppose categorical bases, so in the vicinity of every dispositional explanandum
there must also be a categorical explanandum that underlies it. In this case, the
categorical explanandum with which we started is the occurrent sense of familiarity
and lack of surprise with respect to what one is experiencing as the experience
unfolds. It is natural to suppose that this occurrent sense is precisely the categorical
basis of the capacity to answer questions immediately and effortlessly, so it is this
more fundamental phenomenon that is most in need of explanation. Our own
explanation is that this ever-present sense of familiarity and lack of surprise is
grounded in the ubiquitous for-me-ness of experience, which itself is the categorical
basis of one’s capacity for first-person thought in the right kind of creatures…There is
here an undeniable gain in explanatory depth, since in general the dispositional can
be explained in terms of the categorical but not the other way around (the vase’s
fragility can be explained in terms of its being made of thin glass but its being made
of thin glass cannot be explained in terms of its fragility.” (pg 16)
I have several replies to this objection. First, the closing sentence strikes me as a
dubious transfer of a form of explanation that may be suitable to material objects to a
domain, namely the mind, for which it is not clearly applicable. What about
functionalists who construe the basic metaphysical fabric out of which the mind is
woven in capacity-based terms, independent of whatever (if any) material basis
might “house” these capacities? For them, identifying “categorical bases” would not
be a gain in explanatory depth but rather a change of subject. Dispositional
phenomena do not always explanatorily presuppose categorical bases.
Second, it not being exactly news to me that I am reading – my lack of surprise, my
distinctive acquaintance with my ongoing conscious experience – is here being
construed positively, as a sense of familiarity (the “categorical explanandum”). There
may be something right about the idea of a sense of familiarity, but surely to claim
that the basis of this familiarity is “experiential for-me-ness” is to presuppose rather
than argue for the truth of their view.
Third, note how the ubiquitous for-me-ness of experience is cast above as the
categorical basis of one’s capacity for first-person thought (where I have underlined
in the passage above). Initially, the promise of the interview argument was narrower,
that is, to deliver an explanation of successful exercises of the first-person
conceptual capacity. So: ‘I am reading’ as a triumphant moment of interview success
is explained in terms of the experienced for-me-ness of my reading experience. But
this narrow explanatory target does indeed naturally open onto the broader one. After
all, it is not hard to get into a frame of mind in which the first-personal knowledge we
have of our conscious life shows up as a remarkable thing. What accounts for it?
How does it work? What does it take to have it? It clearly involves the capacity for
first-personal thought. But rather than rest satisfied with an appeal to the possession
of this capacity (and register its semantic peculiarities), we should explain it by
appeal to something more basic. Pre-reflective self-consciousness, accordingly,
ought to figure in those basic materials. While pre-reflective self-consciousness as
for-me-ness is, accordingly, not sufficient for first-person thought (presumably the
creature would need language as well), the purportedly promising claim of
explanatory priority is that without pre-reflective self-consciousness in place, no first
personal thought of one’s own conscious experience would be possible.
But here I must confess that it is not clear how the appeal to pre-reflective selfconsciousness is at all explanatory. The phenomenon of mineness or for-me-ness
that purportedly demands recognition is repeatedly characterized by Zahavi and
Kriegel as “intrinsic” or “integral” to conscious experience. At one point, it is dubbed a
“sui generis phenomenon.” The worry naturally arises: Why is this characterization
any more explanatory than saying mineness or for-me-ness is “intrinsic” to the
capacity for first-person thought? When it comes to deciding what is “intrinsic” to
what, why should we believe that the explanatory locus of mineness is conscious
experience as opposed to possession of the first-personal conceptual capacity?
My point in these remarks has been that phenomenology that is supposed to support
the former view is, I believe, at best undermotivated and underdescribed – and at
worst, seriously distorting. Perhaps then the relevant illumination will come from
inquiry into the power to represent oneself in thought itself. Which leads me to one
version of this inquiry, namely the contemporary rationalist tradition about the place
of self-consciousness in human consciousness, to which I now turn.
References
Kreigel, Uriah (2007) “The Phenomenologically Manifest” in Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences, v. 6, no. 1-2, pgs. 115-136.
Sartre, J.-P. (1936) La transcendence de l’ego. Paris: Vrin; The Transcendence of
the Ego. Trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: The Noonday Press, 1957.
Sartre, J.-P. (1976) Being and Nothingness. Trans. H.E. Barnes. New York:
Philadelphia Library.
Schear, Joseph (2009) “Experience and Self-Consciousness” Philosophical Studies
Shoemaker, Sydney (1968) “Self-Reference and Self-Awareness”, Journal of
Philosophy, 65, 556-579.
Siewert, Charles (1998) The Significance of Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Zahavi, Dan (2006) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Zahavi, Dan and Kriegel, Uriah (2015) “For-me-ness: What it is and what it is not”
forthcoming in eds. Dahlstrom, D and Hopp, W. Philosophy of Mind and
Phenomenology: Conceptual and Emprical Approaches (Routledge)