Abstract
(1) Aristotle, Dignāga, Descartes, Arnauld, Locke, Brentano, Sartre and many others are right about the nature of conscious awareness: all such awareness comports—somehow carries within itself—awareness of itself . (2) This is a necessary condition of awareness being awareness at all: no ‘higher-order’ account of what makes conscious states conscious can be correct. (3) But (2) is very paradoxical: it seems to require that awareness be somehow already present, in such a way as to be available to itself as object of awareness, in order to be constituted as awareness in the first place. (4) Can anything relate to itself in this way? Can there be a relation that is (i) necessarily one-term, (ii) reflexive, (iii) non-logical (non-trivial), (iv) concretely realizable, (v) dynamically real, (vi) such that its holding is a necessary condition of the existence of the thing it holds of? It helps to consider the thought this very thought is puzzling. (5) Many accept the reality of the kind of awareness of awareness posited in (1) and (2), and think it must be not only ‘pre-reflective’ and ‘non-positional’, but also irrelational or non-intentional. But perhaps such awareness of awareness can be fully relational and fully intentional, and can be legitimately said to be its own object or content, even while being pre-reflective and non-positional.
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Notes
I don't think there’s any other good reason for thinking that experience is always of something concrete. For any phenomenological-content-type F (yellow-experience, horse-like-experience, etc.), sentient beings can possibly have F-type experience without there being anything in their universe that either is F or (a) causes F-type experience in any creature by any normal sensory process, and is for that reason (b) said to be F.
It may be true to say of me when I’m dreamlessly asleep that I’m aware of the current financial crisis, but only conscious awareness has phenomenological character.
‘Considered specifically in its phenomenological being’ is redundant, given the opening definition of ‘experience’, but it does no harm.
For further discussion see e.g. Strawson 2014. I don't use the word ‘quale’, because it has become another obscure battleground, but real realists qualify as ‘qualia freaks’ on any sensible understanding of the word. Real realists about experience like myself are also physicalists, but they’re real physicalists, by which I mean realistic physicalists, where the fundamental qualifying condition for being a realistic physicalist is being a real realist about experience. (Many philosophers who call themselves ‘physicalists’ fail to meet this condition.)
I don't intend this claim about the essential ‘dative’ of manifestation in any sense that Buddhists would dispute (certainly the existence of an experience doesn’t entail the existence of an experiencer that lasts longer than the experience). I think, furthermore, that there’s a metaphysically primordial ‘thin’ way of taking the notion of an experiencer given which experience and experiencer are in the end the same thing—so that the seemingly irreducible ontological duality of experience and experiencer is not what it seems (see e.g. Strawson 2009: 345ff). I’m going to put this difficult idea aside here, however (it has distinguished supporters, including Kant, William James, Husserl, and also, I believe, Descartes).
And also, of course, of any account of what it consists in that is given in the languages of physics and neurophysiology.
(1) might also be said to be true if there were a necessarily existent omniscient entity—given the looseness of the word ‘involves’; for then an episode of awareness couldn’t possibly exist without awareness of it existing. But this is not what we’re after.
The restriction of attention to conscious awareness in §1 rules out all ‘higher-order’ theories of awareness or experience in which a conscious mental state is said to occur when one mental state S1 that is not intrinsically conscious becomes a conscious state by becoming the object of another mental state S2 that is also not intrinsically conscious. See, paradigmatically, Rosenthal 1986: there’s no infinite regress on Rosenthal’s theory, because the higher-order state S2 that is said to render the first-order state S1 conscious by taking S1 as its object is not itself conscious in a way that would require it to be itself the object of a further higher-order state. I’m not going to consider this view (although I fully agree with Rosenthal that ‘there is a strong intuitive sense that the consciousness of mental states is somehow reflexive or self-referential’ (1986: 345)), because I reject the idea that experience (real experience) could ever arise from one non-experiential state taking another non-experiential state as its object.
Note also the allegedly possible case—which seems to count as a same-order case—in which (1) is true because there are in any case of awareness two ontologically distinct episodes of awareness which involve awareness of each other.
Remember that by awareness I always mean conscious awareness. So the claim in full is that in the case of any episode of conscious awareness A on the part of any subject S, the existence of conscious awareness A entails conscious awareness, on the part of S, of conscious awareness A. It can make perfectly good sense to talk of unconscious awareness; the flexibility of the word ‘conscious’ seems to allow us to say that one can in fact be conscious of something of which one has no conscious awareness. One can also be said to be conscious of something x (subliminally) although one has no idea that this is so (so that one even might talk of unconscious consciousness of x). But none of these things are in question here.
‘For every substance, including even a simple element of matter, must after all have some kind of inner activity as the ground of its producing an external effect, and that in spite of the fact that I cannot specify in what that inner activity consists…. Leibniz said that this inner ground of all its external relations and their changes was a power of representation [consciousness, experience]. This thought, which was not developed by Leibniz, was greeted with laughter by later philosophers. They would, however, have been better advised to have first considered the question whether a substance, such as a simple part of matter, would be possible in the complete absence of any inner state. And if they had, perhaps, been unwilling to rule out such an inner state, then it would have been incumbent on them to invent some other possible inner state as an alternative to that of representations and the activities dependent on representations. Anybody can see for himself that if a faculty of obscure representations is attributed even to the simple, elementary particles of matter, it does not follow that matter itself has a faculty of representation, for many substances of this kind, connected together into a whole, can after all never constitute a unified thinking entity’ (Kant 1766: 315).
NE 9.9.1170a29-b1. One shouldn't make too much of the explicitly propositional formulation ‘perceive that we perceive’ in Aristotle. (The same goes for Locke—see section 12 “Witnesses”.)
Including those who follow Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in the Islamic tradition. Among the Indian philosophers Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and Śāntarakṣita are Buddhists (Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s exposition of the view is closely tied in with their representationalism), Śaṅkara and Citsukha are Advaitins. Among more recent exponents let me mention Frank, Frankfurt, Henrich, Kriegel and Williford, D. W. Smith, and Zahavi (Kriegel and Williford are unusual in this company in that they seem to wish (in Kriegel and Williford 2006) to give a reductive account of consciousness, i.e. an account of phenomenal consciousness in non-phenomenal terms, whereas all the other thinkers are—I take it—real realists about experience). For some striking further examples, see Heller-Roazen 2007.
In Strawson 2010 I argue that one can in certain very special conditions be immediately aware of one’s own present awareness in a fully express, fully thetic manner, without time-lag.
Here I follow many who use reflexive for the same-order relation and reflective for the explicit higher-order relation.
This use of ‘comport’—to carry with(in)—is inspired by the French comporter.
See §13 below. According to Citsukha, ‘self-luminosity’ is ‘the fitness to be immediately known without being an object of any cognition’ (Tattvapradīpika, 13th century, quoted in Gupta 2003: 101). One difficulty with assessing Dignāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s view about self-intimation is that it’s entangled with their representationalism (‘representationalism’ in the standard but recently obscured Lockean—essentially indirect-realist—sense of the term), and their tendency towards some form of idealism, in ways that threaten to confuse the issue. See Thompson 2010 for an explicit separation of these issues. Note that the Nyāya school vigorously opposes the same-order view, insisting that a conscious act becomes becomes conscious only by becoming an object of another act of consciousness.
1874: 98. I’ve inserted ‘latter’ and ‘former’ to clarify Brentano’s phrasing, which is as it stands ambiguous (thanks to Peter Simons for advice). I assume that Brentano takes this to be Aristotle’s view, according to which ‘perceiving that we perceive is integral to the original perceiving’ (Caston 2002: 769).
OED; meanings for the adjective include ‘inmost, most inward, intrinsic’.
There’s also a respect in which all awareness involves the subject of that awareness’s being aware of itself, but I won’t develop this familiar point here (see e.g. Smith 1989: 70–107).
‘Indian philosophers generally accept a principle of irreflexivity, to the effect that an entity cannot operate on itself. Even the most skilled acrobat, it is said, cannot stand on their own shoulders’ (Siderits 2010: 321).
Here I draw on Strawson 1986.
This is not true in law, in fact.
This can be true even if such radical free will is impossible—even if there are no sufficient conditions of radical freedom.
There are, in sum, cases of belief that seem to contravene what one might call the principle of independence according to which belief that p is true is justified only if sufficient conditions of the truth of p exist independently of the fact that one believes that p.
I’m assuming that an experience of a particular shade of colour can be said to be phenomenologically simple in spite of the complexity it involves in having (necessarily) a particular brightness, saturation, and hue.
Frankfurt intends this to be a contradiction in terms.
Ryle writes that ‘the metaphor of “light” seemed peculiarly appropriate, since Galilean science dealt so largely with the optically discovered world. “Consciousness” was imported to play in the mental world the part played by light in the mechanical world. In this metaphorical sense, the contents of the mental world were thought of as being self-luminous or refulgent’ (ibid. p. 159). This is completely off beam: the metaphor of light is natural quite independently of Galileo, and ancient, as the Indian literature shows.
‘Light, which is the discoverer of all visible objects, discovers itself at the same time’ (Reid 1785: 1.481 (§6.5)).
How does the ancient luminosity metaphor fit with Williamson’s use of ‘luminous’, according to which a condition is luminous if and only if ‘whenever it obtains (and one is in a position to wonder whether it does), one is in a position to know that it obtains’ (2002: 13). Self-Intimation draws on the fundamental respect in which knowledge doesn’t essentially involve any discursive or conceptual articulation of anything, and marks the respect in which all conscious states are ‘luminous’ by Williamson’s definition. Williamson, operating with a restricted, intellectualist understanding of ‘know’, reaches the conclusion that ‘for virtually no mental state S is the condition that one is in S luminous’ (ibid: 14).
Thiel has an excellent discussion of this (2011: 43–48). Descartes also writes that ‘the initial episode of awareness [cogitatio] by means of which we become aware of something does not differ from the second episode of awareness by means of which we become aware that we were aware of it, any more than this second episode of awareness differs from the third episode of awareness by means of which we become aware that we were aware that we were aware’ (1641: 2.382), but this, placed in context, doesn’t itself support the view that Descartes is a same-order theorist (see Thiel 2011: 47; I wrongly cite it as support in Strawson 2009: 346).
1666: 54–5; my emphasis, translating ‘pensée’ by ‘experience’. A more literal translation of the end of the passage is ‘so that you would not think that when the mind is not acting any more—that is, when its experience has changed—it has to remember having acted, and having been aware of doing so’. Here La Forge may have Burman in mind.
1683: 71; again, this is the broad Cartesian use of ‘thought’ and ‘perception’ to mean experience in general, all conscious goings on.
It seems pretty clear that Hume is also a same-order theorist. He distinguishes between reflection and consciousness, using ‘reflexion’ to denote an intentionally directed higher-order operation of taking one’s perceptions as objects of attention in a way that contrasts strongly with his use of ‘consciousness’ when he writes that our ‘perceptions … are immediately present to us by consciousness’ (Treatise 212/1.4.2.47). He also says that ‘all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness’ (Treatise 190/1.4.2.7), a claim which immediately triggers the fatal infinite-regress objection—which was well-known then as now—if understood in a higher-order manner. Again, he holds that ‘consciousness never deceives’ (Enquiry: 66/7.13), whereas ‘it is remarkable concerning the operations of the mind, that, though most intimately present to us [by consciousness], yet, whenever they become the object of reflexion, they seem involved in obscurity’ (Enquiry 13/1.13). It may be said that this last quotation doesn’t settle the matter, because Hume may be distinguishing ‘reflexion’, as an intentionally undertaken higher-order inspection of one’s perceptions, from consciousness as a completely automatic but nevertheless still higher-order awareness of one’s perceptions. Once again, though, the obviousness of the infinite-regress objection to the higher-order interpretation of ‘all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness’ favours attributing to Hume the same-order view that is found also in Locke. Garrett agrees, proposing that by ‘consciousness’ Hume ‘generally means an immediate awareness involved in having a perception, not some further idea of that perception’ (2009: 440); but some uncertainty remains. For a helpful discussion, see Thiel 2011: 403–6.
Brentano 1874: 98. In saying that we apprehend it ‘in accordance with its dual nature’ I take it that he doesn’t mean that we apprehend that it has a dual nature in any cognitive fashion. The passage continues: ‘We can say that the sound is the primary object of the act of hearing, and that the act of hearing itself is the secondary object’, and some, following Husserl, have objected to Brentano’s use of the word ‘object’ on the ground that to say that something x is an ‘object’ (whether primary or secondary) of a mental episode or operation is to commit oneself to the view that the subject takes up an intentional attitude to x of a sort that requires some sort of express or explicit focusing on x (for a good summary account of this position, see Zahavi 2006). There is, however, no compelling reason to think that the word ‘object’ has this implication for Brentano (who sometimes uses the word ‘object’ as equivalent to ‘content’, Inhalt), or that his use of the phrase ‘secondary object’ is designed to do anything more than make the point Aristotle makes in the Metaphysics, quoted on section 6 “Aristotle and others”.
1907–9: 291. Husserl also holds that all experience always involves a self-appearance, a ‘Für-sich-selbst-erscheinens‘(1923–4: (189; cf. 412).
Again: ‘every conscious existence exists as consciousness of existing. We understand now why the first consciousness of consciousness is not positional [i.e. doesn’t involve any sort of cognitive operation of taking something—itself—as object of consciousness]; it is because it is one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness. At one stroke it determines itself as consciousness of perception and as perception. The necessity of syntax has compelled us hitherto to speak of the ‘non-positional consciousness of self’. But we can no longer use this expression in which the ‘of itself’ still evokes the idea of [positional] knowledge. (Henceforth we shall put the ‘of’ inside parentheses to show that it merely satisfies a grammatical requirement.) (1943: liv; my emphasis).
It has always been a central topic in the Phenomenological tradition in philosophy, although hardly visible in the recent analytic tradition. For good surveys, see e.g. Zahavi 1999, 2005. In the Indian tradition, much of the discussion centres round the ‘Memory Argument’ (one can't remember what one didn’t experience, so one can't remember a past experience unless one is at the time one has the experience not only aware of the object but also of the experiencing of the object; so all experiences must be reflexively self-aware). For a helpful recent discussion which defends the argument against the charge of begging the question, see Thompson 2010, also Siderits 2010: 321–3.
See e.g. Ram-Prasad 2010. As I understand him, Sartre agrees (see e.g. Sartre 1943). So also, it seems, does G. E. Moore, when he claims that the ‘consciousness’ that is a constitutive ‘element’ of ‘sensation’ is, although fully real, entirely ‘diaphanous’ (Moore 1903: 450; the passage is often misread). Berkeley may also agree when he says that ‘the Substance of Spirit we do not know it not being knowable. it being purus Actus’, having in itself no positive qualitative content (1707–10: §701).
Fasching speaks suggestively of the ‘self-presence of presence’, the ‘self-presence of experiencing itself’ (Fasching 2008: 474, 464).
Although Sartre holds that consciousness in itself has no content, he also holds that it can’t exist without being of something, and, in particular, something that is transcendent with respect to it—the ‘transcendent object’: ‘consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence [being about something other than itself] is a constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness arises [necessarily] bearing on a being which is not itself’ (1943: lxi; my emphasis; the standard translation by Hazel Barnes translates ‘portée sur’—bearing on—incorrectly as ‘supported by’).
See e.g. Albahari 2009, who calls pure consciousness experience ‘witness-consciousness’. If experiential what-it-is-likeness ceases entirely, then consciousness ceases, on the present view.
Phrases like ‘pure consciousness experience’ used to make my heart sink. I doubted people’s claim to have experienced such a thing, and tended to lose confidence in their claims even if I found them sympathetic. I now think that a form of pure consciousness experience is relatively easy to attain, if only fleetingly, quite independently of any spiritual benefit (see e.g. Strawson 2010), so now my heart sinks when I think of those whose hearts sink when they read something like this because they think it’s not intellectually respectable. It seems hard to deny that philosophers who are seriously interested in the nature of mind ought to try meditation (e.g. Carrington’s Clinically Standardized Meditation 1998). It’s arguable that it ought to be part of undergraduate philosophy of mind courses. This may seem burdensome, but no one who claims to take an empirical approach to the mind can dismiss it, for it’s a piece of wholly empirical research that can only be undertaken by each person individually. Rosch puts the point well: ‘Some years ago I was questioned by a visiting Tibetan monk about how psychology was studied in the West. Carefully I tried to delineate our fields of psychology—cognition with its subareas such as attention and memory, personality psychology, developmental, and so on. He looked puzzled. I attempted to explain what we meant by empirical method. He seemed even more puzzled. I talked about operational definitions and described some psychological experiments. Suddenly his look of intensely interested bewilderment turned to one of insight: “Aha! So you are saying that in America people teach and write about psychology who have no meditation practice?” “Yes, of course”, I answered. “But then how can they know anything!” and then, giving me a piercing look, he asked, “Do you think that’s ethical?” (Rosch 1997: 185).
We do well, I think, to conceive of the phenomenological being of experience as (quite literally) a kind of stuff, a concrete stuff in the world; but we don’t need this idea in order to experience the conflict between the simple and non-simple views.
It’s a feature of all awareness whatever, and is therefore found in the simplest creatures that have experience.
To the challenge that Self-Intimation posits or gives rise to a vicious circle, Sartre nicely replies that ‘there is no circle, or if you like, it is the very nature of consciousness to exist “in a circle”’ (1943: 20/liii)
All phenomenological content, sensory or cognitive, is intentional for the reason given in §1: whatever its phenomenological-content-type—and it must in being phenomenological content be of some phenomenological-content-type or other—it is automatically and necessarily experience of that phenomenological-content type. Note that this simple point, coupled with a robust grasp of the notion of cognitive phenomenological content as opposed to sense-feeling phenomenological content, is all one needs in order to deal with all cases of thought and experience that have led people to talk so alarmingly and unnecessarily (if sometimes delightfully) of ‘non-existent objects’.
One shouldn’t think there’s any conflict between the Self-intimation thesis and the fact that experience can be dim, peripheral, and so on.
Some will say that conscious thoughts aren’t or needn’t be experiential phenomena. For the point that this can’t be so, see Montague 2014. Could Puzzling be a non-conscious but none the less occurrent thought? I think not, because non-conscious phenomena can’t strictly speaking be said to have determinate content. But this point needs argument (see Strawson 2008), and isn’t important here.
Sam Coleman put this point to me.
If experience is sui generis in being self-looped or self-sprung in this way, an argument for panpsychism begins here.
Serious cosmologists sometimes say things that sound as if they think that being can somehow lever itself into existence, but they usually turn out to mean something far less dramatic. See e.g. Krauss 2012.
See Strawson 2010.
Williford 2006 attempts to model the self-representational structure of consciousness mathematically.
There is a fine exposition of Aristotle’s position in Caston 2002 (see especially §5, pp. 768–73).
Sartre denies that consciousness is its own object in order to reserve the word ‘object’ for things other than consciousness of which consciousness is conscious (things ‘transcendent’ with respect to or essentially over and above consciousness—see note 47). Accordingly, he brackets the word ‘of’ in the statement that consciousness is consciousness of itself, in order to reserve it for the relation in which consciousness stands to such transcendent objects. But these choices, however understandable (they’re deeply embedded in Sartre’s account of consciousness as nothingness; see e.g. Rowlands 2011), are ultimately terminological. So long as we’re clear about what is at issue I believe we can retain the full-blown ‘of’, and (with Brentano) the heavy seeming word ‘object’, in the statement of Self-Intimation.
Here I assume that ‘representation’, as standardly used in philosophy of mind, is best taken to be synonymous with ‘presentation’ (the ‘re-‘of ‘representation’ shouldn’t be thought to imply any repetition of presentation).
‘Whatever else a conscious state represents, it always also represents itself’; the subjective character of an episode of experience or awareness ‘consists in its representing itself in a certain suitable way’ (Kriegel 2009: 13, 2).
One may reasonably speak of unconscious perception, but all experience or awareness is conscious by definition, hence phenomenological by definition (there is cognitive phenomenology as well as sense-feeling phenomenology).
Note that the suggestion that the self-intimation of experience or awareness is a form of perception appears to raise the possibility that perception of something isn’t necessarily a causal matter, even if it’s necessarily a matter of representation. This, though, adds nothing new to the difficulty already posed by self-intimation. It may not be any more paradoxical than the fact that we can convey the nature of our direct acquaintance with the experiential ‘what-it’s-like’ of our experience by saying that ‘the having is the knowing’.
Zahavi thinks this account ‘glosses over the difference between one-level representationalism [of the kind expounded in e.g. Kriegel 2009] and a truly pre-reflective account of self-consciousness’ (private communication), but I take myself to agree with Zahavi, although we disagree in our terminology. The present claim is precisely that relationality, intentionality, and representation (self-relationality, self-intentionality, self-representation) are all there in fully pre-reflective self-intimation. They don't require cognitive articulation or distancing.
Thanks to François Récanati, Dan Zahavi, and the anonymous referees of the paper for some very useful comments.
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Strawson, G. ‘Self-intimation’. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 1–31 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9339-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9339-6