Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness

First published Sat Feb 19, 2005; substantive revision Tue Dec 19, 2023

For phenomenologists, the immediate and first-personal givenness ofexperience is accounted for in terms of a prereflectiveself-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term,self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment oneattentively inspects or reflectively introspects one’sexperiences, or recognizes one’s specular image in the mirror,or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, orconstructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds ofself-consciousness are to be distinguished from the prereflectiveself-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through orundergoing an experience, e.g., whenever I am consciously perceivingthe world, remembering a past event, imagining a future event,thinking an occurrent thought, or feeling sad or happy, thirsty or inpain, and so forth.

1. Prereflective self-consciousness

One can get a bearing on the notion of prereflectiveself-consciousness by contrasting it with reflectiveself-consciousness. If you ask me to give you a description of thepain I feel in my right foot, or of what I was just thinking about, Iwould reflect on it and thereby take up a certain perspective that wasone order removed from the pain or the thought. Thus, reflectiveself-consciousness is at least a second-order cognition. It may be thebasis for a report on one’s experience, although not all reportsinvolve a significant amount of reflection.

In contrast, prereflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in thesense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflectingon our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awarenessrather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness.Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible onlybecause there is a prereflective self-awareness that is an on-goingand more primary kind of self-consciousness. Although phenomenologistsdo not always agree on important questions about method, focus, oreven whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimousagreement about the idea that the experiential dimension alwaysinvolves such an implicit prereflective self-consciousness. In linewith Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that consciousnessalways involves a self-appearance(Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens), and in agreement withMichel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is alwaysself-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states thatconsciousness is always given to itself and that the word‘consciousness’ has no meaning independently of thisself-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes thatprereflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to theexperience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode ofbeing of the experience:

This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a newconsciousness, but asthe only mode of existence which is possiblefor a consciousness of something (Sartre 1943, 20 [1956, liv]).

We find the same view, to mention just one more thinker, in RomanIngarden, who writes that I don’t need any kind of introspectionor reflection in order to gain acquaintance with my experiential lifesince the first-order experience is already characterized by aparticular kind of conscious self-penetration (Ingarden 1992,155–156). And as he then points out, the original mode of being ofconscious life is precisely to be in the form of being self-conscious.In the absence of such self-consciousness, an experience would not bean experience (Ingarden 1992, 156). In short, unless a mental processis prereflectively self-conscious there will be nothing it is like toundergo the process, and it therefore cannot be a phenomenallyconscious process (Zahavi 1999, 2005, 2014). An implication of this isobviously that the self-consciousness in question is so fundamentaland basic that it can be ascribed to all creatures that arephenomenally conscious, including various non-human animals.

As just noted, the notion of prereflective self-consciousness isrelated to the idea that experiences have a subjective‘feel’ to them, a certain (phenomenal) quality of‘what it is like’ or what it ‘feels’ like tohave them. As it is usually expressed outside of phenomenologicaltexts, to undergo a conscious experience necessarily means that thereis something it is like for the subject to have that experience (Nagel1974; Searle 1992). This is obviously true of bodily sensations likepain. But it is also the case for perceptual experiences, experiencesof desiring, feeling, and thinking. There is something it is like totaste chocolate, and this is different from what it is like toremember or imagine what it is like to taste chocolate, or to smellvanilla, to run, to stand still, to feel envious, nervous, depressedor happy, or to entertain an abstract belief.

All of these different experiences are, moreover, also characterizedby their distinct first-personal character. The what-it-is-likeness ofphenomenal episodes is properly speaking awhat-it-is-like-for-me-ness. This for-me-ness doesn’trefer to a specific experiential quality like sour or soft, rather itrefers to the distinct first-personal givenness of experience. Itrefers to the fact that the experiences I am living through are givendifferently (but not necessarily better) to me than to anybody else. Imay see that you are sad, but my seeing your sadness is qualitativelydifferent from my living through my sadness. It could consequently beclaimed that anybody who denies the for-me-ness of experience simplyfails to recognize an essential constitutive aspect of experience.Such a denial would be tantamount to a denial of the first-personperspective. It would entail the view that my own mind is either notgiven to me at all—I would be mind- or self-blind—or ispresented to me in exactly the same way as the minds of others.

We can distinguish two uses of the term ‘conscious’, atransitive and an intransitive use. On the one hand, we can speak ofour being conscious of something, be itx,y, orz. On the other, we can speak of our being conscioussimpliciter (rather than non-conscious). For some time awidespread way to account for intransitive consciousness in cognitivescience and analytic philosophy of mind has been by means of some kindof higher-order theory. The distinction between conscious andnon-conscious mental states has been taken to rest upon the presenceor absence of a relevant meta-mental state (e.g., Armstrong 1968;Carruthers 1996, 2000; Lycan 1987, 1996; Rosenthal 1997). Thus,intransitive consciousness has been taken to depend upon the minddirecting its intentional aim at its own states and operations. AsPeter Carruthers puts it, the subjective feel of experiencepresupposes a capacity for higher-order awareness: “suchself-awareness is a conceptually necessary condition for an organismto be a subject of phenomenal feelings, or for there to be anythingthat its experiences are like” (1996, 152). But for Carruthers,the self-awareness in question is a type of reflection. In his view, acreature must be capable of reflecting upon, thinking about, and henceconceptualizing its own mental states if those mental states are to bestates of which the creature is aware (1996, 155, 157).

One might share the view that there is a close link betweenconsciousness and self-consciousness and still disagree about thenature of the link. And although the phenomenological view mightsuperficially resemble the view of the higher-order theories, we areultimately confronted with two quite different accounts. Thephenomenologists explicitly deny that the self-consciousness that ispresent the moment I consciously experience something is to beunderstood in terms of some kind of higher-order monitoring. Ratherthan involving an additional mental state, it should rather to beunderstood as an intrinsic feature of the primary experience. That is,in contrast to higher-order accounts of consciousness that claim thatconsciousness is an extrinsic or relational property of those mentalstates that have it, a property bestowed upon them from without bysome further state, the phenomenologists would typically argue thatthe feature in virtue of which a mental state is conscious is anintrinsic property of those mental states that have it. Moreover, thephenomenologists also reject the attempt to construe intransitiveconsciousness in terms of transitive consciousness, that is, theyreject the view that a conscious state is a state we are conscious ofas object. To put it differently, not only do they reject the viewthat a mental state becomes conscious by being taken as an object by ahigher-order state, they also reject the view (generally associatedwith Brentano) according to which a mental state becomes conscious bytaking itself as an object (cf. Zahavi 2004; 2014).

That prereflective self-consciousness is implicit, then, means that Iam not confronted with a thematic or explicit awareness of theexperience as belonging to myself. Rather we are dealing with anon-observational self-acquaintance. Here is how Heidegger and Sartreput the point:

Dasein [human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even whenthe ego does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner ofits own peculiar turning around and turning back, which inphenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. Theself is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and withoutinner perception,before all reflection. Reflection, in thesense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-apprehension,but not the mode of primary self-disclosure (Heidegger 1989, 226[1982, 159]).
In other words, every positional consciousness of an object is at thesame time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count thecigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosingan objective property of this collection of cigarettes:they are adozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a propertyexisting in the world. It is very possible that I have no positionalconsciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting.Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen,I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyonequestioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doingthere?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.”(Sartre 1943, 19–20 [1956, liii]).

What arguments support the phenomenological claims, however?Phenomenologists don’t simply appeal to a correctphenomenological description but provide additional, more theoretical,arguments. One line of reasoning found in virtually all of thephenomenologists is the view that the attempt to let (intransitive)consciousness be a result of a higher-order monitoring will generatean infinite regress. On the face of it, this is a rather old idea.Typically, the regress argument has been understood in the followingmanner. If all occurrent mental states are conscious in the sense ofbeing taken as objects by occurrent second-order mental states, thenthese second-order mental states must themselves be taken as objectsby occurrent third-order mental states, and so forthadinfinitum. The standard response to this objection is that theregress can easily be avoided by accepting the existence ofnon-conscious mental states. This is precisely the position adopted bythe defenders of higher-order theory. For them a second-orderperception or thought does not have to be conscious. It would beconscious only if accompanied by a (non-conscious) third-order thoughtor perception (Rosenthal 1997, 745). The phenomenological reply tothis solution is rather straightforward, however. The phenomenologistswould concede that it is possible to halt the regress by postulatingthe existence of non-conscious mental states, but they would maintainthat such an appeal to the non-conscious leaves us with a case ofexplanatory vacuity. That is, they would find it quite unclear why therelation between two otherwise non-conscious mental processes shouldmake one of them conscious. Or to put it differently, they would bequite unconvinced by the claim that a state without subjective orphenomenal qualities can be transformed into one with such qualities,i.e., into an experience with first-personal character, by the mereaddition of a non-conscious meta-state having the first-state as itsintentional object.

The phenomenological alternative avoids both vacuity and regress. AsSartre writes: “[T]here is no infinite regress here, since aconsciousness has no need at all of a reflecting [higher-order]consciousness in order to be conscious of itself. It simply does notposit itself as an object” (1936, 29 [1957, 45]). That is,prereflective self-consciousness is not transitive in relation to thestate (of) which it is aware. It is, as Sartre puts it, the mode ofexistence of consciousness itself. This does not mean that ahigher-order meta-consciousness is impossible, but merely that italways presupposes the existence of a prior non-objectifying,prereflective self-consciousness as its condition of possibility. Toquote Sartre again, “it is the non-reflective consciousnesswhich renders the reflection [and any higher-order representation ofit] possible” (1943, 20 [1956, liii]).

There are also lines of argumentation in contemporary analyticalphilosophy of mind that are close to and consistent with thephenomenological conception of prereflective self-consciousness.Consider for instance the following quotes from Alvin Goldman andHarry Frankfurt:

[Consider] the case of thinking aboutx or attending tox. In the process of thinking aboutx there isalready an implicit awareness that one is thinking aboutx.There is no need for reflection here, for taking a step back fromthinking aboutx in order to examine it…When we arethinking aboutx, the mind is focused onx, not onour thinking ofx. Nevertheless, the process of thinkingaboutx carries with it a non-reflective self-awareness(Goldman 1970, 96).

An instance of exclusively primary and unreflexive consciousness wouldnot be an instance of what we ordinarily think of as consciousness atall. For what would it be like to be conscious of something withoutbeing aware of this consciousness? It would mean having an experiencewith no awareness whatever of its occurrence. This would be,precisely, a case of unconscious experience. It appears, then, thatbeing conscious is identical with being self-conscious. Consciousnessis self-consciousness. The claim that waking consciousness isself-consciousness does not mean that consciousness is invariably dualin the sense that every instance of it involves both a primaryawareness and another instance of consciousness which is somehowdistinct and separable from the first and which has the first as itsobject. That would threaten an intolerably infinite proliferation ofinstances of consciousness. Rather, the self-consciousness in questionis a sort ofimmanent reflexivity by virtue of which everyinstance of being conscious grasps not only that of which it is anawareness but also the awareness of it. It is like a source of lightwhich, in addition to illuminating whatever other things fall withinits scope, renders itself visible as well (Frankfurt 1988,161–162).

A related view has been defended by Owen Flanagan, who not only arguesthat consciousness involves self-consciousness in the weak sense thatthere is something it is like for the subject to have the experience,but also speaks of the low-level self-consciousness involved inexperiencing my experiences as mine (Flanagan 1992, 194). As Flanaganquite correctly points out, this primary type of self-consciousnessshould not be confused with the much stronger notion ofself-consciousness that is in play when we are thinking about our ownnarrative self. The latter form of reflective self-consciousnesspresupposes both conceptual knowledge and narrative competence. Itrequires maturation and socialization, and the ability to access andissue reports about the states, traits, dispositions that make one theperson one is. Other philosophers who have defended comparable views,include José Luis Bermúdez (1998), who has argued thatthat there are a variety of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousnessthat are “logically and ontogenetically more primitive than thehigher forms of self-consciousness that are usually the focus ofphilosophical debate” (1998, 274), and Uriah Kriegel (2009) whohas argued that there is a type of self-consciousness that isintrinsic to and inherent in phenomenal consciousness. We will returnto Kriegel’s self-representationalism in a section 2. Across avariety of philosophical studies, then, one finds support for thephenomenological conception of prereflective self-consciousness.

2. Philosophical issues and objections

The concept of prereflective self-consciousness is related to avariety of philosophical issues, including epistemic asymmetry,immunity to error through misidentification and the possibility ofself-reference. Let us examine these issues in turn and also considersome recent objections.

It seems clear that the objects of my visual perception areintersubjectively accessible in the sense that they can in principlebe the objects of another’s perception. A subject’sperceptual experience itself, however, is given in a unique way to thesubject herself. Although two people,A andB, canperceive a numerically identical object, they each have their owndistinct perceptual experience of it; just as they cannot share eachother’s pain, they cannot literally share these perceptualexperiences. Their experiences are epistemically asymmetrical in thisregard.B might realize thatA is in pain; he mightsympathize withA, he might even have the same kind of pain(same qualitative aspects, same intensity, same proprioceptivelocation), but he cannot literally feelA’s pain thesame wayA does. The subject’s epistemic access to herown experience, whether it is a pain or a perceptual experience, isprimarily a matter of prereflective self-consciousness. Ifsecondarily, in an act of introspective reflection I begin to examinemy perceptual experience, I will recognize it as my perceptualexperience only because I have been prereflectively aware of it, as Ihave been living through it. Thus, phenomenology maintains, the accessthat reflective self-consciousness has to first-order phenomenalexperience is routed through prereflective consciousness, for if wewere not prereflectively aware of our experience, our reflection on itwould never be motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on somethingwith which I am already experientially familiar.

The ease with which we self-ascribe experiences is partially to beexplained by appeal to prereflective self-consciousness. It isimportant to emphasize, however, that prereflective self-consciousnessis only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for reflectiveself-ascription and first-person knowledge. Many animals who possessprereflective self-consciousness obviously lack the cognitiveresources needed for reflective self-ascriptions (see, e.g., Bekoff2003).

When I experience an occurrent pain, perception, or thought, theexperience in question is given immediately and noninferentially. I donot have to judge or appeal to some criterion in order to identify itasmy experience. There are no free-floating experiences;even the experience of freely-floating belongs to someone. As WilliamJames (1890) put it, all experience is “personal.” Even inpathological cases, as in depersonalization or schizophrenic symptomsof delusions of control or thought insertion, a feeling or experiencethat the subject claims not to be his is nonetheless experienced byhim as being part of his stream of consciousness. The complaint ofthought insertion, for example, necessarily acknowledges that theinserted thoughts are thoughts that belong to the subject’sexperience, even as the agency for such thoughts are attributed toothers. This first-person character entails an implicit experientialself-reference. If I feel hungry or see my friend, I cannot bemistaken about who the subject of that experience is, even if I can bemistaken about it being hunger (perhaps it’s really thirst), orabout it being my friend (perhaps it’s his twin), or even aboutwhether I am actually seeing him (I may be hallucinating). AsWittgenstein (1958), Shoemaker (1968), and others have pointed out, itis nonsensical to ask whether I am sure thatI am the one whofeels hungry. This is the phenomenon known as “immunity to errorthrough misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun.”To this idea of immunity to error through misidentification, thephenomenologist adds that whether a certain experience is experiencedas mine, or not, does not depend upon something apart from theexperience, but depends precisely upon the prereflective givennessthat belongs to the structure of the experience (Husserl 1959, 175;Husserl 1973a, 28, 56, 307, 443; see Zahavi 1999, 6ff.).

Some philosophers who are inclined to take self-consciousness to beintrinsically linked to the issue of self-reference would argue thatthe latter depends on a first-personconcept. One attainsself-consciousness only when one canconceive of oneselfas oneself, and has the linguistic ability to use thefirst-person pronoun to refer to oneself (Baker 2000, 68; cf. Lowe2000, 264). On this view, self-consciousness is something that emergesin the course of a developmental process, and depends on theacquisition of concepts and language. Accordingly, some philosophersdeny that young children are capable of self-consciousness (Carruthers1996; Dennett 1976; Wilkes 1988; also see Flavell 1993). Evidence fromdevelopmental psychology and ecological psychology, however, suggeststhat there is a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousnessalready in place from birth.^[1] This primitive self-awareness precedes the mastery of language andthe ability to form conceptually informed judgments, and it may serveas a basis for more advanced types of self-consciousness (see, e.g.,Butterworth 1995, 1999; Gibson 1986; Meltzoff 1990a, 1990b; Neisser1988; and Stern 1985). The phenomenological view is consistent withsuch findings.

Does prereflective self-consciousness contain a reference to self? Asalready mentioned, our experiential life isn’t distinguishedmerely by itsqualitativefeatures but also by itssubjective character. Intentional experiences areJanus-faced. They areof something other than the subject andthey are like somethingfor the subject. When feeling astomach-ache, I am not faced with a two-step process in which thepresence of an unpleasant experience is first detected, and I thenwonder whose experience it might be. To put it differently, in virtueof their self-presentational character experiences are neitheranonymous nor impersonal, they are preciselyfirst-personal.

On a standard metaphysical conception of the self, the self is viewedas an enduring substance (say a physical brain or an immaterial soul)distinct from its changing experiences but capable of retaining itsidentity across those experiences. In contrast, some phenomenologistshave argued that one can define a (minimal) form of selfhood inprocessual and experiential terms as the very first-personal mode ofexperiencing (Zahavi 2005, 2014). The French phenomenologist MichelHenry argued that the most basic form of selfhood is the oneconstituted by the very self-manifestation of experience (Henry 1963:581; 1965: 53), i.e., self-consciousness is not something that theself has, but what the self is. It is not a thing that has experiencesbut is the very subject(ivity) of experience, which is something noexperience can lack, neither metaphysically norphenomenologically.

On this construal, the self is something that is necessarily presentin each experience. It is present, not as a separately existingentity, i.e., as something that exists independently of, in separationfrom or in opposition to the stream of consciousness. Nor is it givenas an additional experiential object or as an extra experientialingredient, as if there were a distinct self-quale, next to and inaddition to the quale of the smell of burnt hay or roasted almonds.No, the claim is that all experiences regardless of their object andregardless of their attitudinal character are necessarily subjectiveor self-involving in the sense that they feel like something forsomeone, they necessarily involve a point of view.

To be self-aware, on this account, is not to capture a pure self orself-object that exists separately from the stream of experience,rather it is to be conscious of one’s experience in itsintrinsic first-person mode of givenness. Accordingly, we should notthink of the self, in this most basic sense, as a substance, or assome kind of ineffable transcendental precondition, or as a socialconstruct that gets generated through time; rather it is an integralaspect of conscious life and involves this immediate experientialcharacter.

At this point it will be clarifying to compare the phenomenologicalnotion of prereflective self-consciousness with the one defended byBrentano. According to Brentano as I listen to a melody I am awarethat I am listening to it. He acknowledges that I do not have twodifferent mental states: my consciousness of the melody is one and thesame as my awareness of perceiving it; they constitute one singlepsychical phenomenon. On this point, and in opposition to higher-orderrepresentation theories, Brentano and the phenomenologists are ingeneral agreement. But for Brentano, by means of this unified mentalstate, I have an awareness of two objects: the melody and myperceptual experience.

In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to ourminds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. Whatis more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar asit has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself ascontent at the same time. We can say that the sound is theprimaryobject of theact of hearing, and that the act ofhearing itself is thesecondary object (Brentano 1874,179–180 [1973, 127–128]).

Husserl disagrees on just this point, as do Sartre and Heidegger: myawareness of my experience is not an awareness of it as an object.^[2] My awareness is non-objectifying in the sense that I do not occupythe position or perspective of a spectator or in(tro)spector whoattends to this experience in a thematic way. That a psychologicalstate is experienced, “and is in this sense conscious, does notand cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, inthe sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directedupon it” (Husserl 1984a, 165 [2001, I, 273]). In prereflectiveself-awareness, experience is given, not as an object, but preciselyas subjective experience. For phenomenologists, intentional experienceis lived through (erlebt), but does not appear in anobjectified manner. Experience is conscious of itself without beingthe intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre1936, 28–29). The more general claim that has been made is thatobject-consciousness necessarily entails an epistemic divide betweenthat which appears and that to whom it appears, between the object andthe subject of experience, and that this is why object-consciousnessmight be singularly unsuited as a model for basic self-consciousness(Zahavi 1999; Legrand 2011, 207). Again, this is not meant to suggestthat we cannot direct our attention towards our experiences, andthereby take them as objects of reflection (Husserl 1984b, 424), butthis mode of objectifying self-consciousness has a non-objectifyingprereflective self-consciousness as its condition of possibility.

The notion of prereflective self-consciousness is much more acceptedtoday than it was 20 years ago and has become part of the standardrepertoire in philosophy of mind. The notion’s increasingpopularity not surprisingly has also led to an increasing amount ofcriticism. One criticism that has been directed against thephenomenological proposal precisely turns on the allegednon-objectifying character of the awareness. Uriah Kriegel has for thepast twenty years done much to revitalize Brentano’s account andhas defended a form of self-representationalism that can be describedas neo-Brentanian. For Kriegel, a conscious perception of a tone is amental state with a twofold representational content, it has anoutward-directed content (the tone) and an inward-directed content(the perception). For that reason, prereflective self-consciousnessmust be viewed as a species of object-consciousness, and Kriegelexplicitly argues that the non-objectifying alternative, or as helabels it, the reference to asui generis intrinsic glow(Kriegel 2009: 102), should only be considered as a last resort, sinceit remains too mysterious. It is noticeable, however, that Kriegelhimself eventually admits that the relationship between the innerawareness and what it is aware of is far more intimate that thestandard relationship between a representation and what it represents(Kriegel 2009: 107–8), and that self-representation consequentlyconstitutes a very unusual form of object-awareness. At that point,one might wonder whether the difference between a highly unusual formof object-awareness and a non-objectifying form of awareness is allthat substantial.^[3]

Another line of attack has focused on what might be called theuniversality question. Is it truly the case that all conscious mentalstates involve prereflective self-consciousness, for-me-ness, or whatis sometimes referred to as a sense of mineness or sense of ownership?Does the link hold by necessity such that it characterizes allexperiences, however primitive or disordered they might be, or mightit, for instance, be something that only holds true for a more limitedgroup of experiences, say, normal, adult, experiences (Lane 2012;Dainton 2016; Guillot 2017; Howell & Thompson 2017). Whetherinfantile or pathological or meditative or hallucinogenic experiencesconstitute relevant exceptions, i.e., experiences that lackprereflective self-consciousness, for-me-ness and sense of ownership,is to a large extent dependent upon how robustly one interprets thesenotions. If prereflective self-consciousness is interpreted simply asa non-inferential awareness of the experience one is having ratherthan as an awareness of some self-object, and if for-me-ness and senseof ownership are interpreted not as involving an awareness of thepossessive relation between oneself and the experience, but rather asthe distinct perspectival givenness or first-personal presence ofexperience, it is far from obvious that there really are exceptions tobe found.^[4]

Finally, some critics have also claimed that the sense of ownership isan inflationary by-product of reflective or introspective processes(e.g., Bermúdez 2011; 2018; Dainton 2007). They insist thatthere is nothing like a prereflective sense of ownership that is“something over and above the changing stream of thought,perception, volition, emotion, memory, bodily sensation, and soon” (Dainton 2007, 240; emphasis added). But as should alreadybe clear, phenomenologists do not claim that prereflectiveself-consciousness or the sense of ownership is something “overand above” experience, something extra that is added as a secondexperience. Rather, the claim is that it is an intrinsic feature ofexperience itself. In this respect, the phenomenological claim is asdeflationary as the critics would want (Gallagher 2017a).

3. Temporality and the limits of reflective self-consciousness

One advantage of the phenomenological view is that it is capable ofaccounting for some degree of diachronic unity, without having toposit the self as a separate entity over and above the stream ofconsciousness. Although we live through a number of differentexperiences, the experiencing itself remains a constant in regard towhose experience it is. This is not accounted for by a substantialself or a mental theater. On this point Hume was right. There is nopure or empty field of consciousness upon which the concreteexperiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencingis nothing apart from the specific experiences. Yet we are naturallyinclined to distinguish the strict singularity of an experience fromthe continuous stream of changing experiences. What remains constantand consistent across these changes is the sense of for-me-ness (orperspectival ownership) constituted by prereflectiveself-consciousness. Only a being with this sense of ownership could goon to form concepts about herself, consider her own aims, ideals, andaspirations as her own, construct stories about herself, and plan andexecute actions for which she will take responsibility.

According to Husserl’s analysis, experience of any sort(perception, memory, imagination, etc.) has a common temporalstructure such that any moment of experience contains a retentionalreference to past moments of experience, a current openness (primalimpression) to what is present, and a protentional anticipation of themoments of experience that are just about to happen (Husserl 1966; seeGallagher 1998). The retentional structure of experience, that is, thefact that when I am experiencing something, each passing moment ofconsciousness does not simply disappear at the next moment but is keptin intentional currency, constitutes a coherency that stretches overan experienced temporal duration. Husserl’s favorite example isa melody. When I experience a melody, I don’t simply experiencea knife-edge presentation (primal impression) of one note, which isthen completely washed away and replaced with the next discreteknife-edge presentation of the next note. Rather, consciousnessretains the sense of the first note as just past, as I hear the secondnote, a hearing that is also enriched by an anticipation (protention)of the next note (or at least, in case I do not know the melody, asense that there will be a next note, or some next auditory event).Husserl claims that we actually do perceive melodies—inopposition to an earlier view propounded by Brentano, viz., that withthe help of our imagination or recollection we construct orreconstruct such unities out of a synthesis of mental acts. That weactually perceive melodies (without first constructing them usingmemory and imagination) is possible only because consciousness is sostructured to allow for this temporal presentation.

Importantly, the temporal (retentional-impressional-protentional)structure of consciousness not only allows for the experience oftemporally extended objects or intentional contents, but also entailsthe self-manifestation of consciousness, that is, its prereflectiveself-consciousness. The retention of past notes of the melody isaccomplished, not by a “real” or literal re-presentationof the notes (as if I were hearing them a second time andsimultaneously with the current note), but by an intentional retainingof my just pastexperience of the melody as just past. Thismeans that this retentional structure gives me an immediate awarenessof my ongoing experience in the ongoing flow of experience, aself-awareness that is implicit in my experience of the object. At thesame time that I am aware of a melody, for example, I am co-aware ofmy ongoing experience of the melody through the retentional structureof that very experience—and this just is the prereflectiveself-consciousness of experience (see Zahavi 1999, 2003).

The temporal structure that accounts for prereflectiveself-consciousness is also the structural feature that accounts forthe limitations imposed on reflective self-consciousness. Reflectiveself-consciousness yields knowledge of prereflective subjectivity thatis always after the fact. Reflective self-consciousness, which takesprereflective experience as its object, is itself (like any consciousexperience) characterized by the same temporal structure. Inprinciple, however, the retentional-impressional-protentionalstructure of reflection cannot overlay theretentional-impressional-protentional structure of prereflectiveexperience in complete simultaneity. There is always a slight delaybetween reflection and the prereflective object of reflection. Onemight say that the prereflective experience must first be there if Iam to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object ofreflection. Husserl writes: “When I sayI, I graspmyself in a simple reflection. But this self-experience[Selbsterfahrung] is like every experience[Erfahrung], and in particular every perception, a meredirecting myself towards something that was already there for me, thatwas already conscious, but not thematically experienced, notnoticed” (Husserl 1973b, 492–493). This delay is one ofthe reasons why there remains a difference or distance between thereflecting subject and the reflected object, even though the reflectedobject is my own experience. As a reflecting subject, I never fullycoincide with myself.

As Merleau-Ponty puts it, our temporal existence is both a conditionfor and an obstacle to our self-comprehension. Temporality contains aninternal fracture that permits us to return to our past experiences inorder to investigate them reflectively, but this very fracture alsoprevents us from fully coinciding with ourselves. There will alwaysremain a difference between the lived and the understood(Merleau-Ponty 1945, 76, 397, 399, 460). Self-consciousness providesus with the sense that we are always already in play. This leads somephenomenologists to note that we are born (or “thrown”into the world) and not self-generated. We are caught up in a lifethat is in excess of our full comprehension (Heidegger 1986). There isalways something about ourselves that we cannot fully capture in themoment of self-conscious reflection.

Pervasive prereflective self-consciousness is consequently not to beunderstood as complete self-comprehension. One can accept the notionof a pervasive self-consciousness and still accept the existence ofthe unconscious in the sense of subjective components which remainambiguous, obscure, and resistant to comprehension. Thus, one shoulddistinguish between the claim that consciousness is characterized byan immediate first-person character and the claim that consciousnessis characterized by total self-transparency. One can easily accept thefirst and reject the latter (Ricoeur 1950, 354–355).

If reflective self-consciousness is limited in this way, this shouldnot prevent us from exercising it in an adequate way for attainingmoral self-responsibility, as Husserl points out. Reflection is aprecondition for self-critical deliberation. If we are to subject ourdifferent beliefs and desires to a critical, normative evaluation, itis not sufficient simply to have immediate first-personal access tothe states in question.

We take as our point of departure the essential ability forself-consciousness in the full sense of personal self-inspection(inspectio sui), and the ability that is based on this fortaking up positions that are reflectively directed back on oneself andone’s own life, on personal acts of self-knowledge,self-evaluation, and practical acts of self-determination,self-willing, and self-formation. (Husserl 1988, 23).

Self-consciousness is, therefore, not epiphenomenal. Our ability tomake reflective judgments about our own beliefs and desires alsoallows us to modify them.

One might see the position of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty asbeing situated between two extremes. On the one hand, we have the viewthat reflection merely copies or mirrors prereflective experiencefaithfully, and on the other hand we have the view that reflectiondistorts lived experience. The middle course is to recognize thatreflection involves a gain and a loss. For Husserl, Sartre, andMerleau-Ponty, reflection is constrained by what is prereflectivelylived through. It is answerable to experiential facts and is notconstitutively self-fulfilling. At the same time, however, theyrecognized that reflection qua thematic self-experience does notsimply reproduce the lived experiences unaltered and that this isprecisely what makes reflection cognitively valuable. The experiencesreflected upon are transformed in the process, to various degrees andmanners depending upon the type of reflection at work. Subjectivityconsequently seems to be constituted in such a fashion that it canand, at times, must relate to itself in an “othering”manner. This self-alteration is something inherent to reflection; itis not something that reflection can overcome.

4. Bodily self-awareness

Much of what we have said about self-consciousness may still seemoverly mentalistic. It is important to note that for phenomenologistslike Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, pre-reflective self-awareness is bothembodied and embedded in the world. The first-person point of view onthe world is never a view from nowhere; it is always defined by thesituation of the perceiver’s body, which concerns not simplylocation and posture, but action in pragmatic contexts and interactionwith other people. Prereflective self-consciousness includes aspectsthat are both bodily and intersubjective.

The claim is not simply that the perceiver/actor is objectivelyembodied, but that the body is in some fashion experientially presentin the perception or action. Phenomenologists distinguish theprereflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes every spatialexperience, from a reflective consciousness of the body. To capturethis difference, Husserl introduced a terminological distinctionbetweenLeib andKörper, that is, between theprereflectively lived body, i.e., the body as an embodied first-personperspective, and the subsequent thematic experienceof thebody as an object (Husserl 1973a, 57). Prereflective body-(Leib-) awareness is not a type of object-perception, but itis an essential element of every such perception. If I reach for atool, I don’t first have to find my hands; I know where to reachbecause I have a sense of where the tool is in relation to myself. Ialso sense that I will be able to reach it, or that I will have totake two steps towards it. My perception of the tool must involveproprioceptive and kinaesthetic information about my bodily situationand the position of my limbs, otherwise I would not be able to reachfor it or use it. If in such cases, we want to say that I have anawareness of my body, such bodily awareness is quite different fromthe perception that I have of the tool. I may have to look or feelaround in order to find where the tool is; but, under normalcircumstances, I never have to do that in regard to my body. I amtacitly aware, not only of where my hands and feet are, but also ofwhat I can do with them. This tacit awareness of my body alwaysregisters as an “I can” (or “I can’t,”as the case may be). Primarily, my body is experienced, not as anobject, but as a field of activity and affectivity, as a potentialityof mobility and volition, as an “I do” and “Ican.”

The body provides not only the egocentric spatial framework fororientation towards the world, but also the constitutive contributionof its mobility. Perception does not involve a passive reception, butan active exploration of the environment. Husserl calls attention tothe importance of bodily movements (the movements of the eye,manipulations by the hand, the locomotion of the body, etc.) for theexperience of space and spatial objects. He further claims thatperception is correlated to and accompanied byproprioceptive-kinaesthetic self-sensation or self-affection (Husserl1973c). Every visual or tactile appearance is given in correlation toa kinaesthetic experience. When I touch a shaped surface, it is givenin conjunction with a sensation of finger movements. When I watch theflight of a bird, the moving bird is given in conjunction with thekinaesthetic sensations of eye movement and perhaps neck movement.Such kinaesthetic activation during perception produces an implicitand pervasive reference to one’s own body. The implicitself-awareness of the actual and possible movements of my body helpsshape the experience that I have of the world. To be clear, however,bodily self-awareness is not an awareness of the body in isolationfrom the world; it is embedded in action and perception. We do notfirst become aware of the body and subsequently use it to engage withthe world. We experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed tous in our exploration of the world. Primarily, the body attainsself-awareness in action (or in our dispositions to action, or in ouraction possibilities) when it relates to something, uses something, ormoves through the world.^[5]

Bodily self-awareness, like self-consciousness more generally, haslimitations. I am never fully aware of everything that is going onwith my body. Indeed, my body tends to efface itself as I perceive andact in the world. When I jump to catch a ball that is thrown over myhead, I certainly have a sense of what I can do, but I am not aware ofmy precise movements or postures—for example, that my right legbends at a certain angle as I reach with my left hand. I can executemovements without being explicitly conscious of them, and even what Iam tacitly aware of is somewhat limited—for example, I am notaware of the shape of my grasp as I reach to grab the ball. Although Imay not be aware of certain details about my bodily performance, thisdoes not mean however that I am unconscious of my body. Rather itmeans that the way that I am aware of my body is fully integrated withthe intentional action that I am performing. I know that I am jumpingto catch the ball, and implicit in that, as an immediate sense ratherthan an inference, I experience my body jumping to catch the ball.

Furthermore, experiential aspects of my embodiment permeate myprereflective self-consciousness. There is something it is like tojump to catch a ball, and part of what it is like is that I am in factjumping. There is something different about what it is like to sit andimagine (or remember) myself jumping to catch the ball, and at leastpart of that difference has to do with the fact that I am sittingrather than jumping, although none of this may be explicit in myexperience.

Another way to think of the self-awareness involved in action is toconsider the sense of agency that is normally an aspect ofprereflective self-consciousness in action. If, as I am walking downthe street, I am pushed from behind, I am instantly aware of my bodymoving in a way that I did not intend. The fact that I feel a loss ofcontrol over my actions suggests that there had been an implicit senseof agency or control in my walking prior to being pushed. In voluntaryaction, I experience the movements of my body as my own actions, andthis is replaced by a feeling of loss of bodily control in the case ofinvoluntary movement. Voluntary actions feel different frominvoluntary actions, and this difference depends respectively, on theexperience of agency or the experience of a lack of agency—asthe case may be if my body is being moved by someone else.^[6]

Hubert Dreyfus has famously argued that in the case of expertperformance we are not self-conscious, but rather “usuallyinvolved in coping in a mindless way” (Dreyfus 2007a, 356). Onhis account, our immersed bodily life is so completely and totallyworld-engaged that it is entirely oblivious to itself. Indeed, intotal absorption, one ceases being a subject altogether (Dreyfus2007b, 373). It is only when this bodily absorption is interruptedthat something like self-consciousness emerges. Dreyfus consequentlydoesn’t deny the existence of self-consciousness, but hedefinitely wants to see it as a capacity that is only exercised oractualized on special occasions. Moreover, when this capacity isexercised it necessarily disrupts our coping and radically transformthe kind of affordances that are given to it (Dreyfus 2005, 61; 2007,354). A number of theorists, however, have taken issue with thischaracterization of expert performance and have argued that in theperforming arts (e.g., in dance, musical performance) and in athletics(e.g., baseball, cricket) expert performers may employ an enhanced butstill prereflective awareness (Legrand 2007), a heedful consciousnessof the situation (e.g., Sutton et al. 2011), or even a skillfulreflective monitoring (Montero 2010; 2014), or some variablecombination of these (Høffding 2018), and that suchconsciousness does not impede performance but improves it.

Bodily self-awareness is not influenced only by action-orientedmovement or motor control processes; it is also modulated by variousaffective (emotional), autonomic and interoceptive processes that arecontingent on current bodily states and closely related toenvironmental variations. What Dainton (2007) calls backgroundsensations, as well as what Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) calls existentialfeelings, are part of a mix of sensory processes that can provide whatWilliam James (1890) terms the “warmth and intimacy” ofbodily sensations, or what Thomas Fuchs (2013) calls “thefeeling of being alive.”

5. Intersubjective and social forms of self-consciousness

A focus on embodied self-experience inevitably leads to a decisivewidening of the discussion. The externality of embodiment puts me, andmy actions, in the public sphere. Self-consciousness, which involvesan ability to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs anddesires, is always shaped by others and what we have learned fromothers. This intersubjective or social influence can also affectprereflective self-consciousness, including my sense of embodiedagency.

I can become aware of myself through the eyes of other people, andthis can happen in several different ways. Thus, embodiment bringsintersubjectivity and sociality into the picture, and draws attentionto the question of how certain forms of self-consciousness areintersubjectively mediated or how they may depend on one’ssocial relations to others. My awareness of myself as one person amongothers, an awareness that I may frame from the perspective of others,attempting to see myself as they see me, involves a change in theattitude of self-consciousness. Within this attitude, judgments that Imake about myself are constrained by social expectations and culturalvalues. This kind of social self-consciousness is alwayscontextualized, as I try to understand how I appear to others, both inthe way I look, and in the meaning of my actions. I find myself inparticular contexts, with specific capabilities and dispositions,habits and convictions, and I express myself in a way that isreflected off of others, in relevant (socially defined) roles throughmy language and my actions.

The role of the other in this mode of self-consciousness is notunessential. According to Husserl, I become aware of myselfspecifically as a human person only in such intersubjective relations(Husserl 1973b, 175; 1952, 204–05; see Hart 1992, 71; Zahavi1999, 157ff. Also see Taylor 1989, 34–36 for a similar idea).Thus Husserl distinguishes the subject taken in its bare formalityfrom the personalized subject and claims that the origin and status ofbeing a person must be located in the social dimension. I am a person,socially contextualized, with abilities, dispositions, habits,interests, character traits, and convictions, all of which have beendeveloped through my interactions with others. When considering thefullness of human selfhood, the idea of an isolated, pure and formalsubject of experience is an abstraction (Husserl 1968, 210). Given theright conditions and circumstances, the self acquires a personalizingself-apprehension, i.e., it develops into a person and as a person(cf. Husserl 1952, 265). And this development depends heavily uponsocial interaction (Husserl 1973b, 170–171).

This kind of self-consciousness also opens up the possibility ofself-alienation, famously explicated by Sartre in terms of theother’s gaze. For Sartre, because “our being, along withits being-for-itself, is also for-others; the being which is revealedto the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others” (1956,282). On this view, the primary experience of the other is not that Iperceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, butI perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object. Myexperience of the other is at the same time an experience thatinvolves my own self-consciousness, a self-consciousness in which I amprereflectively aware that I am an object for another. This experiencecan further motivate a reflective self-consciousness as I consider howI must appear to the other.

Merleau-Ponty (1945, 415) suggests that the other’s gaze canmotivate this kind of self-consciousness only if I already have asense of my own visibility to the other. This sense of my ownvisibility, however, is immediately linked with the prereflective,proprioceptive-kinaesthetic sense of my body, an insight that goesback to Husserl’s analysis (mentioned above). Merleau-Pontynotes its connection to the infant’s capability for imitation,and this is carried forward to more recent advances in developmentalpsychology (see Merleau-Ponty, 1945, 165, 404–405; 2010;Gallagher and Zahavi 2021; Zahavi 1999, 171–72). Indeed,although much emphasis has fallen on vision and the gaze of the otherin phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness, proprioceptive andtactile experiences have a developmental primacy and emerge in thepre-natal environment in ways that allow for very basic relationalexperiences of self-movement versus movement of the mother’sbody (Lymer 2010; 2014; Ciaunica & Crucianelli 2019; Ciaunica& Fotopoulou 2016), and continue to play a significant role inembodied interactions with caregivers during early infancy. In thisrespect, the claim is that intersubjective/intercorporeal experiencescan affect prereflective self-consciousness Kyselo 2016; Ratcliffe2017). This complicates any claim that the prereflective experience ofbody ownership is primarily for self-preservation (Ciaunica &Crucianelli 2019; de Vignemont 2018).

This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of theserich and complex issues, issues that extend to analyses of phenomenasuch as empathy, shame, guilt, and so on (see Zahavi 2010, 2014). Butit is important to realize that self-consciousness is a multifacetedconcept. It is not something that can be exhaustively analyzed simplyby examining the inner workings of the mind.

6. Conclusion

The notion of self-consciousness has been the subject of a rich andcomplex analysis in the phenomenological tradition. Aspects of thephenomenological analysis also show up in other areas of research,including feminism (Stawarska 2006; Young 2005; Heinämaa 2003),ecological psychology (Gibson 1966), and recent analyses of enactiveperception (Gallagher 2017b; Noë 2004; Thompson 2008). Therecognition of the existence of a primitive form of prereflectiveself-consciousness is an important starting point for an understandingof more elaborate forms of self-consciousness that are concept- andlanguage-dependent. Phenomenological analyses show these processes tobe more than purely mental or cognitive events since they integrallyinvolve embodiment and intersubjective dimensions.

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ARHB Project on Consciousness and Self Consciousness, Warwick Mind and Action Research Centre, Naomi Eilan (WarwickUniversity).
Center for Subjectivity Research, Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen).

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