## 1. Prereflective self-consciousness



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



In contrast, prereflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the
sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting
on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness
rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness.
Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only
because there is a prereflective self-awareness that is an on-going
and more primary kind of self-consciousness. Although phenomenologists
do not always agree on important questions about method, focus, or
even whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimous
agreement about the idea that the experiential dimension always
involves such an implicit prereflective self-consciousness. In line
with Edmund Husserl (1959, 189, 412), who maintains that consciousness
always involves a self-appearance
(*Fur-sich-selbst-erscheinens*), and in agreement with
Michel Henry (1963, 1965), who notes that experience is always
self-manifesting, and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states that
consciousness is always given to itself and that the word
'consciousness' has no meaning independently of this
self-givenness (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 488), Jean-Paul Sartre writes that
prereflective self-consciousness is not simply a quality added to the
experience, an accessory; rather, it constitutes the very mode of
being of the experience:



> 
> This self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new
> consciousness, but as *the only mode of existence which is possible
> for a consciousness of something* (Sartre 1943, 20 [1956, liv]).
> 



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



As just noted, the notion of prereflective self-consciousness is
related 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 to
have them. As it is usually expressed outside of phenomenological
texts, to undergo a conscious experience necessarily means that there
is something it is like for the subject to have that experience (Nagel
1974; Searle 1992). This is obviously true of bodily sensations like
pain. But it is also the case for perceptual experiences, experiences
of desiring, feeling, and thinking. There is something it is like to
taste chocolate, and this is different from what it is like to
remember or imagine what it is like to taste chocolate, or to smell
vanilla, to run, to stand still, to feel envious, nervous, depressed
or happy, or to entertain an abstract belief.



All of these different experiences are, moreover, also characterized
by their distinct first-personal character. The what-it-is-likeness of
phenomenal episodes is properly speaking a
what-it-is-like-*for-me*-ness. This for-me-ness doesn't
refer to a specific experiential quality like sour or soft, rather it
refers to the distinct first-personal givenness of experience. It
refers to the fact that the experiences I am living through are given
differently (but not necessarily better) to me than to anybody else. I
may see that you are sad, but my seeing your sadness is qualitatively
different from my living through my sadness. It could consequently be
claimed that anybody who denies the for-me-ness of experience simply
fails to recognize an essential constitutive aspect of experience.
Such a denial would be tantamount to a denial of the first-person
perspective. It would entail the view that my own mind is either not
given to me at all--I would be mind- or self-blind--or is
presented to me in exactly the same way as the minds of others.



We can distinguish two uses of the term 'conscious', a
transitive and an intransitive use. On the one hand, we can speak of
our being conscious of something, be it *x*, *y*, or
*z*. On the other, we can speak of our being conscious
*simpliciter* (rather than non-conscious). For some time a
widespread way to account for intransitive consciousness in cognitive
science and analytic philosophy of mind has been by means of some kind
of higher-order theory. The distinction between conscious and
non-conscious mental states has been taken to rest upon the presence
or 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 mind
directing its intentional aim at its own states and operations. As
Peter Carruthers puts it, the subjective feel of experience
presupposes a capacity for higher-order awareness: "such
self-awareness is a conceptually necessary condition for an organism
to be a subject of phenomenal feelings, or for there to be anything
that its experiences are like" (1996, 152). But for Carruthers,
the self-awareness in question is a type of reflection. In his view, a
creature must be capable of reflecting upon, thinking about, and hence
conceptualizing its own mental states if those mental states are to be
states of which the creature is aware (1996, 155, 157).



One might share the view that there is a close link between
consciousness and self-consciousness and still disagree about the
nature of the link. And although the phenomenological view might
superficially resemble the view of the higher-order theories, we are
ultimately confronted with two quite different accounts. The
phenomenologists explicitly deny that the self-consciousness that is
present the moment I consciously experience something is to be
understood in terms of some kind of higher-order monitoring. Rather
than involving an additional mental state, it should rather to be
understood as an intrinsic feature of the primary experience. That is,
in contrast to higher-order accounts of consciousness that claim that
consciousness is an extrinsic or relational property of those mental
states that have it, a property bestowed upon them from without by
some further state, the phenomenologists would typically argue that
the feature in virtue of which a mental state is conscious is an
intrinsic property of those mental states that have it. Moreover, the
phenomenologists also reject the attempt to construe intransitive
consciousness in terms of transitive consciousness, that is, they
reject the view that a conscious state is a state we are conscious of
as object. To put it differently, not only do they reject the view
that a mental state becomes conscious by being taken as an object by a
higher-order state, they also reject the view (generally associated
with Brentano) according to which a mental state becomes conscious by
taking itself as an object (cf. Zahavi 2004; 2014).



That prereflective self-consciousness is implicit, then, means that I
am not confronted with a thematic or explicit awareness of the
experience as belonging to myself. Rather we are dealing with a
non-observational self-acquaintance. Here is how Heidegger and Sartre
put the point:



Dasein [human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even when
the ego does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner of
its own peculiar turning around and turning back, which in
phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. The
self is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without
inner perception, *before* all reflection. Reflection, in the
sense 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 the
same time a non-positional consciousness of itself. If I count the
cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing
an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: *they are a
dozen*. This property appears to my consciousness as a property
existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional
consciousness 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 anyone
questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, "What are you doing
there?" 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 correct
phenomenological description but provide additional, more theoretical,
arguments. One line of reasoning found in virtually all of the
phenomenologists is the view that the attempt to let (intransitive)
consciousness be a result of a higher-order monitoring will generate
an infinite regress. On the face of it, this is a rather old idea.
Typically, the regress argument has been understood in the following
manner. If all occurrent mental states are conscious in the sense of
being taken as objects by occurrent second-order mental states, then
these second-order mental states must themselves be taken as objects
by occurrent third-order mental states, and so forth *ad
infinitum*. The standard response to this objection is that the
regress can easily be avoided by accepting the existence of
non-conscious mental states. This is precisely the position adopted by
the defenders of higher-order theory. For them a second-order
perception or thought does not have to be conscious. It would be
conscious only if accompanied by a (non-conscious) third-order thought
or perception (Rosenthal 1997, 745). The phenomenological reply to
this solution is rather straightforward, however. The phenomenologists
would concede that it is possible to halt the regress by postulating
the existence of non-conscious mental states, but they would maintain
that such an appeal to the non-conscious leaves us with a case of
explanatory vacuity. That is, they would find it quite unclear why the
relation between two otherwise non-conscious mental processes should
make one of them conscious. Or to put it differently, they would be
quite unconvinced by the claim that a state without subjective or
phenomenal qualities can be transformed into one with such qualities,
i.e., into an experience with first-personal character, by the mere
addition of a non-conscious meta-state having the first-state as its
intentional object.



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



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



> 
> [Consider] the case of thinking about *x* or attending to
> *x*. In the process of thinking about *x* there is
> already an implicit awareness that one is thinking about *x*.
> There is no need for reflection here, for taking a step back from
> thinking about *x* in order to examine it...When we are
> thinking about *x*, the mind is focused on *x*, not on
> our thinking of *x*. Nevertheless, the process of thinking
> about *x* carries with it a non-reflective self-awareness
> (Goldman 1970, 96).
> 



> 
> 
> An instance of exclusively primary and unreflexive consciousness would
> not be an instance of what we ordinarily think of as consciousness at
> all. For what would it be like to be conscious of something without
> being aware of this consciousness? It would mean having an experience
> with no awareness whatever of its occurrence. This would be,
> precisely, a case of unconscious experience. It appears, then, that
> being conscious is identical with being self-conscious. Consciousness
> *is* self-consciousness. The claim that waking consciousness is
> self-consciousness does not mean that consciousness is invariably dual
> in the sense that every instance of it involves both a primary
> awareness and another instance of consciousness which is somehow
> distinct and separable from the first and which has the first as its
> object. That would threaten an intolerably infinite proliferation of
> instances of consciousness. Rather, the self-consciousness in question
> is a sort of *immanent reflexivity* by virtue of which every
> instance of being conscious grasps not only that of which it is an
> awareness but also the awareness of it. It is like a source of light
> which, in addition to illuminating whatever other things fall within
> its scope, renders itself visible as well (Frankfurt 1988,
> 161-162).
> 
> 
> 



A related view has been defended by Owen Flanagan, who not only argues
that consciousness involves self-consciousness in the weak sense that
there is something it is like for the subject to have the experience,
but also speaks of the low-level self-consciousness involved in
experiencing my experiences as mine (Flanagan 1992, 194). As Flanagan
quite correctly points out, this primary type of self-consciousness
should not be confused with the much stronger notion of
self-consciousness that is in play when we are thinking about our own
narrative self. The latter form of reflective self-consciousness
presupposes both conceptual knowledge and narrative competence. It
requires maturation and socialization, and the ability to access and
issue reports about the states, traits, dispositions that make one the
person one is. Other philosophers who have defended comparable views,
include Jose Luis Bermudez (1998), who has argued that
that there are a variety of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness
that are "logically and ontogenetically more primitive than the
higher forms of self-consciousness that are usually the focus of
philosophical debate" (1998, 274), and Uriah Kriegel (2009) who
has argued that there is a type of self-consciousness that is
intrinsic to and inherent in phenomenal consciousness. We will return
to Kriegel's self-representationalism in a section 2. Across a
variety of philosophical studies, then, one finds support for the
phenomenological conception of prereflective self-consciousness.


## 2. Philosophical issues and objections



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



It seems clear that the objects of my visual perception are
intersubjectively accessible in the sense that they can in principle
be the objects of another's perception. A subject's
perceptual experience itself, however, is given in a unique way to the
subject herself. Although two people, *A* and *B*, can
perceive a numerically identical object, they each have their own
distinct perceptual experience of it; just as they cannot share each
other's pain, they cannot literally share these perceptual
experiences. Their experiences are epistemically asymmetrical in this
regard. *B* might realize that *A* is in pain; he might
sympathize with *A*, he might even have the same kind of pain
(same qualitative aspects, same intensity, same proprioceptive
location), but he cannot literally feel *A*'s pain the
same way *A* does. The subject's epistemic access to her
own experience, whether it is a pain or a perceptual experience, is
primarily a matter of prereflective self-consciousness. If
secondarily, in an act of introspective reflection I begin to examine
my perceptual experience, I will recognize it as my perceptual
experience only because I have been prereflectively aware of it, as I
have been living through it. Thus, phenomenology maintains, the access
that reflective self-consciousness has to first-order phenomenal
experience is routed through prereflective consciousness, for if we
were not prereflectively aware of our experience, our reflection on it
would never be motivated. When I do reflect, I reflect on something
with which I am already experientially familiar.



The ease with which we self-ascribe experiences is partially to be
explained by appeal to prereflective self-consciousness. It is
important to emphasize, however, that prereflective self-consciousness
is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for reflective
self-ascription and first-person knowledge. Many animals who possess
prereflective self-consciousness obviously lack the cognitive
resources needed for reflective self-ascriptions (see, e.g., Bekoff
2003).



When I experience an occurrent pain, perception, or thought, the
experience in question is given immediately and noninferentially. I do
not have to judge or appeal to some criterion in order to identify it
as *my* experience. There are no free-floating experiences;
even the experience of freely-floating belongs to someone. As William
James (1890) put it, all experience is "personal." Even in
pathological cases, as in depersonalization or schizophrenic symptoms
of delusions of control or thought insertion, a feeling or experience
that the subject claims not to be his is nonetheless experienced by
him as being part of his stream of consciousness. The complaint of
thought insertion, for example, necessarily acknowledges that the
inserted thoughts are thoughts that belong to the subject's
experience, even as the agency for such thoughts are attributed to
others. This first-person character entails an implicit experiential
self-reference. If I feel hungry or see my friend, I cannot be
mistaken about who the subject of that experience is, even if I can be
mistaken about it being hunger (perhaps it's really thirst), or
about it being my friend (perhaps it's his twin), or even about
whether I am actually seeing him (I may be hallucinating). As
Wittgenstein (1958), Shoemaker (1968), and others have pointed out, it
is nonsensical to ask whether I am sure that *I* am the one who
feels hungry. This is the phenomenon known as "immunity to error
through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun."
To this idea of immunity to error through misidentification, the
phenomenologist adds that whether a certain experience is experienced
as mine, or not, does not depend upon something apart from the
experience, but depends precisely upon the prereflective givenness
that 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 be
intrinsically linked to the issue of self-reference would argue that
the latter depends on a first-person *concept*. One attains
self-consciousness only when one can *conceive* of oneself
*as* oneself, and has the linguistic ability to use the
first-person pronoun to refer to oneself (Baker 2000, 68; cf. Lowe
2000, 264). On this view, self-consciousness is something that emerges
in the course of a developmental process, and depends on the
acquisition of concepts and language. Accordingly, some philosophers
deny that young children are capable of self-consciousness (Carruthers
1996; Dennett 1976; Wilkes 1988; also see Flavell 1993). Evidence from
developmental psychology and ecological psychology, however, suggests
that there is a primitive, proprioceptive form of self-consciousness
already in place from
 birth.[1]
 This primitive self-awareness precedes the mastery of language and
the ability to form conceptually informed judgments, and it may serve
as a basis for more advanced types of self-consciousness (see, e.g.,
Butterworth 1995, 1999; Gibson 1986; Meltzoff 1990a, 1990b; Neisser
1988; and Stern 1985). The phenomenological view is consistent with
such findings.



Does prereflective self-consciousness contain a reference to self? As
already mentioned, our experiential life isn't distinguished
merely by its *qualitative* *features* but also by its
*subjective character*. Intentional experiences are
Janus-faced. They are *of* something other than the subject and
they are like something *for* the subject. When feeling a
stomach-ache, I am not faced with a two-step process in which the
presence of an unpleasant experience is first detected, and I then
wonder whose experience it might be. To put it differently, in virtue
of their self-presentational character experiences are neither
anonymous nor impersonal, they are precisely
*first-personal*.



On a standard metaphysical conception of the self, the self is viewed
as an enduring substance (say a physical brain or an immaterial soul)
distinct from its changing experiences but capable of retaining its
identity across those experiences. In contrast, some phenomenologists
have argued that one can define a (minimal) form of selfhood in
processual and experiential terms as the very first-personal mode of
experiencing (Zahavi 2005, 2014). The French phenomenologist Michel
Henry argued that the most basic form of selfhood is the one
constituted by the very self-manifestation of experience (Henry 1963:
581; 1965: 53), i.e., self-consciousness is not something that the
self has, but what the self is. It is not a thing that has experiences
but is the very subject(ivity) of experience, which is something no
experience can lack, neither metaphysically nor
phenomenologically.



On this construal, the self is something that is necessarily present
in each experience. It is present, not as a separately existing
entity, i.e., as something that exists independently of, in separation
from or in opposition to the stream of consciousness. Nor is it given
as an additional experiential object or as an extra experiential
ingredient, as if there were a distinct self-quale, next to and in
addition to the quale of the smell of burnt hay or roasted almonds.
No, the claim is that all experiences regardless of their object and
regardless of their attitudinal character are necessarily subjective
or self-involving in the sense that they feel like something for
someone, they necessarily involve a point of view.



To be self-aware, on this account, is not to capture a pure self or
self-object that exists separately from the stream of experience,
rather it is to be conscious of one's experience in its
intrinsic first-person mode of givenness. Accordingly, we should not
think of the self, in this most basic sense, as a substance, or as
some kind of ineffable transcendental precondition, or as a social
construct that gets generated through time; rather it is an integral
aspect of conscious life and involves this immediate experiential
character.



At this point it will be clarifying to compare the phenomenological
notion of prereflective self-consciousness with the one defended by
Brentano. According to Brentano as I listen to a melody I am aware
that I am listening to it. He acknowledges that I do not have two
different mental states: my consciousness of the melody is one and the
same as my awareness of perceiving it; they constitute one single
psychical phenomenon. On this point, and in opposition to higher-order
representation theories, Brentano and the phenomenologists are in
general agreement. But for Brentano, by means of this unified mental
state, I have an awareness of two objects: the melody and my
perceptual experience.



In the same mental phenomenon in which the sound is present to our
minds we simultaneously apprehend the mental phenomenon itself. What
is more, we apprehend it in accordance with its dual nature insofar as
it has the sound as content within it, and insofar as it has itself as
content at the same time. 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* (Brentano 1874,
179-180 [1973, 127-128]).



Husserl disagrees on just this point, as do Sartre and Heidegger: my
awareness 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 occupy
the position or perspective of a spectator or in(tro)spector who
attends to this experience in a thematic way. That a psychological
state is experienced, "and is in this sense conscious, does not
and cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in
the sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgment is directed
upon it" (Husserl 1984a, 165 [2001, I, 273]). In prereflective
self-awareness, experience is given, not as an object, but precisely
as subjective experience. For phenomenologists, intentional experience
is lived through (*erlebt*), but does not appear in an
objectified manner. Experience is conscious of itself without being
the intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre
1936, 28-29). The more general claim that has been made is that
object-consciousness necessarily entails an epistemic divide between
that which appears and that to whom it appears, between the object and
the subject of experience, and that this is why object-consciousness
might be singularly unsuited as a model for basic self-consciousness
(Zahavi 1999; Legrand 2011, 207). Again, this is not meant to suggest
that we cannot direct our attention towards our experiences, and
thereby take them as objects of reflection (Husserl 1984b, 424), but
this mode of objectifying self-consciousness has a non-objectifying
prereflective self-consciousness as its condition of possibility.



The notion of prereflective self-consciousness is much more accepted
today than it was 20 years ago and has become part of the standard
repertoire in philosophy of mind. The notion's increasing
popularity not surprisingly has also led to an increasing amount of
criticism. One criticism that has been directed against the
phenomenological proposal precisely turns on the alleged
non-objectifying character of the awareness. Uriah Kriegel has for the
past twenty years done much to revitalize Brentano's account and
has defended a form of self-representationalism that can be described
as neo-Brentanian. For Kriegel, a conscious perception of a tone is a
mental state with a twofold representational content, it has an
outward-directed content (the tone) and an inward-directed content
(the perception). For that reason, prereflective self-consciousness
must be viewed as a species of object-consciousness, and Kriegel
explicitly argues that the non-objectifying alternative, or as he
labels it, the reference to a *sui generis* intrinsic glow
(Kriegel 2009: 102), should only be considered as a last resort, since
it remains too mysterious. It is noticeable, however, that Kriegel
himself eventually admits that the relationship between the inner
awareness and what it is aware of is far more intimate that the
standard relationship between a representation and what it represents
(Kriegel 2009: 107-8), and that self-representation consequently
constitutes a very unusual form of object-awareness. At that point,
one might wonder whether the difference between a highly unusual form
of object-awareness and a non-objectifying form of awareness is all
that
 substantial.[3]



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



Finally, some critics have also claimed that the sense of ownership is
an inflationary by-product of reflective or introspective processes
(e.g., Bermudez 2011; 2018; Dainton 2007). They insist that
there 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 so
on" (Dainton 2007, 240; emphasis added). But as should already
be clear, phenomenologists do not claim that prereflective
self-consciousness or the sense of ownership is something "over
and above" experience, something extra that is added as a second
experience. Rather, the claim is that it is an intrinsic feature of
experience itself. In this respect, the phenomenological claim is as
deflationary 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 of
accounting for some degree of diachronic unity, without having to
posit the self as a separate entity over and above the stream of
consciousness. Although we live through a number of different
experiences, the experiencing itself remains a constant in regard to
whose experience it is. This is not accounted for by a substantial
self or a mental theater. On this point Hume was right. There is no
pure or empty field of consciousness upon which the concrete
experiences subsequently make their entry. The field of experiencing
is nothing apart from the specific experiences. Yet we are naturally
inclined to distinguish the strict singularity of an experience from
the continuous stream of changing experiences. What remains constant
and consistent across these changes is the sense of for-me-ness (or
perspectival ownership) constituted by prereflective
self-consciousness. Only a being with this sense of ownership could go
on to form concepts about herself, consider her own aims, ideals, and
aspirations as her own, construct stories about herself, and plan and
execute actions for which she will take responsibility.



According to Husserl's analysis, experience of any sort
(perception, memory, imagination, etc.) has a common temporal
structure such that any moment of experience contains a retentional
reference to past moments of experience, a current openness (primal
impression) to what is present, and a protentional anticipation of the
moments of experience that are just about to happen (Husserl 1966; see
Gallagher 1998). The retentional structure of experience, that is, the
fact that when I am experiencing something, each passing moment of
consciousness does not simply disappear at the next moment but is kept
in intentional currency, constitutes a coherency that stretches over
an experienced temporal duration. Husserl's favorite example is
a melody. When I experience a melody, I don't simply experience
a knife-edge presentation (primal impression) of one note, which is
then completely washed away and replaced with the next discrete
knife-edge presentation of the next note. Rather, consciousness
retains the sense of the first note as just past, as I hear the second
note, 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, a
sense that there will be a next note, or some next auditory event).
Husserl claims that we actually do perceive melodies--in
opposition to an earlier view propounded by Brentano, viz., that with
the help of our imagination or recollection we construct or
reconstruct such unities out of a synthesis of mental acts. That we
actually perceive melodies (without first constructing them using
memory and imagination) is possible only because consciousness is so
structured to allow for this temporal presentation.



Importantly, the temporal (retentional-impressional-protentional)
structure of consciousness not only allows for the experience of
temporally extended objects or intentional contents, but also entails
the self-manifestation of consciousness, that is, its prereflective
self-consciousness. The retention of past notes of the melody is
accomplished, not by a "real" or literal re-presentation
of the notes (as if I were hearing them a second time and
simultaneously with the current note), but by an intentional retaining
of my just past *experience* of the melody as just past. This
means that this retentional structure gives me an immediate awareness
of my ongoing experience in the ongoing flow of experience, a
self-awareness that is implicit in my experience of the object. At the
same time that I am aware of a melody, for example, I am co-aware of
my ongoing experience of the melody through the retentional structure
of that very experience--and this just is the prereflective
self-consciousness of experience (see Zahavi 1999, 2003).



The temporal structure that accounts for prereflective
self-consciousness is also the structural feature that accounts for
the limitations imposed on reflective self-consciousness. Reflective
self-consciousness yields knowledge of prereflective subjectivity that
is always after the fact. Reflective self-consciousness, which takes
prereflective experience as its object, is itself (like any conscious
experience) characterized by the same temporal structure. In
principle, however, the retentional-impressional-protentional
structure of reflection cannot overlay the
retentional-impressional-protentional structure of prereflective
experience in complete simultaneity. There is always a slight delay
between reflection and the prereflective object of reflection. One
might say that the prereflective experience must first be there if I
am to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object of
reflection. Husserl writes: "When I say *I*, I grasp
myself in a simple reflection. But this self-experience
[*Selbsterfahrung*] is like every experience
[*Erfahrung*], and in particular every perception, a mere
directing myself towards something that was already there for me, that
was already conscious, but not thematically experienced, not
noticed" (Husserl 1973b, 492-493). This delay is one of
the reasons why there remains a difference or distance between the
reflecting subject and the reflected object, even though the reflected
object is my own experience. As a reflecting subject, I never fully
coincide with myself.



As Merleau-Ponty puts it, our temporal existence is both a condition
for and an obstacle to our self-comprehension. Temporality contains an
internal fracture that permits us to return to our past experiences in
order to investigate them reflectively, but this very fracture also
prevents us from fully coinciding with ourselves. There will always
remain a difference between the lived and the understood
(Merleau-Ponty 1945, 76, 397, 399, 460). Self-consciousness provides
us with the sense that we are always already in play. This leads some
phenomenologists to note that we are born (or "thrown"
into the world) and not self-generated. We are caught up in a life
that is in excess of our full comprehension (Heidegger 1986). There is
always something about ourselves that we cannot fully capture in the
moment of self-conscious reflection.



Pervasive prereflective self-consciousness is consequently not to be
understood as complete self-comprehension. One can accept the notion
of a pervasive self-consciousness and still accept the existence of
the unconscious in the sense of subjective components which remain
ambiguous, obscure, and resistant to comprehension. Thus, one should
distinguish between the claim that consciousness is characterized by
an immediate first-person character and the claim that consciousness
is characterized by total self-transparency. One can easily accept the
first and reject the latter (Ricoeur 1950, 354-355).



If reflective self-consciousness is limited in this way, this should
not prevent us from exercising it in an adequate way for attaining
moral self-responsibility, as Husserl points out. Reflection is a
precondition for self-critical deliberation. If we are to subject our
different beliefs and desires to a critical, normative evaluation, it
is not sufficient simply to have immediate first-personal access to
the states in question.



> 
> We take as our point of departure the essential ability for
> self-consciousness in the full sense of personal self-inspection
> (*inspectio sui*), and the ability that is based on this for
> taking up positions that are reflectively directed back on oneself and
> one'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 to
make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and desires also
allows us to modify them.



One might see the position of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as
being situated between two extremes. On the one hand, we have the view
that reflection merely copies or mirrors prereflective experience
faithfully, and on the other hand we have the view that reflection
distorts lived experience. The middle course is to recognize that
reflection involves a gain and a loss. For Husserl, Sartre, and
Merleau-Ponty, reflection is constrained by what is prereflectively
lived through. It is answerable to experiential facts and is not
constitutively self-fulfilling. At the same time, however, they
recognized that reflection qua thematic self-experience does not
simply reproduce the lived experiences unaltered and that this is
precisely what makes reflection cognitively valuable. The experiences
reflected upon are transformed in the process, to various degrees and
manners depending upon the type of reflection at work. Subjectivity
consequently seems to be constituted in such a fashion that it can
and, at times, must relate to itself in an "othering"
manner. This self-alteration is something inherent to reflection; it
is not something that reflection can overcome.


## 4. Bodily self-awareness



Much of what we have said about self-consciousness may still seem
overly mentalistic. It is important to note that for phenomenologists
like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, pre-reflective self-awareness is both
embodied and embedded in the world. The first-person point of view on
the world is never a view from nowhere; it is always defined by the
situation of the perceiver's body, which concerns not simply
location and posture, but action in pragmatic contexts and interaction
with other people. Prereflective self-consciousness includes aspects
that are both bodily and intersubjective.



The claim is not simply that the perceiver/actor is objectively
embodied, but that the body is in some fashion experientially present
in the perception or action. Phenomenologists distinguish the
prereflective body-awareness that accompanies and shapes every spatial
experience, from a reflective consciousness of the body. To capture
this difference, Husserl introduced a terminological distinction
between *Leib* and *Korper*, that is, between the
prereflectively lived body, i.e., the body as an embodied first-person
perspective, and the subsequent thematic experience *of* the
body as an object (Husserl 1973a, 57). Prereflective body-
(*Leib*-) awareness is not a type of object-perception, but it
is an essential element of every such perception. If I reach for a
tool, I don't first have to find my hands; I know where to reach
because I have a sense of where the tool is in relation to myself. I
also sense that I will be able to reach it, or that I will have to
take two steps towards it. My perception of the tool must involve
proprioceptive and kinaesthetic information about my bodily situation
and the position of my limbs, otherwise I would not be able to reach
for it or use it. If in such cases, we want to say that I have an
awareness of my body, such bodily awareness is quite different from
the perception that I have of the tool. I may have to look or feel
around in order to find where the tool is; but, under normal
circumstances, I never have to do that in regard to my body. I am
tacitly aware, not only of where my hands and feet are, but also of
what I can do with them. This tacit awareness of my body always
registers as an "I can" (or "I can't,"
as the case may be). Primarily, my body is experienced, not as an
object, but as a field of activity and affectivity, as a potentiality
of mobility and volition, as an "I do" and "I
can."



The body provides not only the egocentric spatial framework for
orientation towards the world, but also the constitutive contribution
of its mobility. Perception does not involve a passive reception, but
an active exploration of the environment. Husserl calls attention to
the importance of bodily movements (the movements of the eye,
manipulations by the hand, the locomotion of the body, etc.) for the
experience of space and spatial objects. He further claims that
perception is correlated to and accompanied by
proprioceptive-kinaesthetic self-sensation or self-affection (Husserl
1973c). Every visual or tactile appearance is given in correlation to
a kinaesthetic experience. When I touch a shaped surface, it is given
in conjunction with a sensation of finger movements. When I watch the
flight of a bird, the moving bird is given in conjunction with the
kinaesthetic sensations of eye movement and perhaps neck movement.
Such kinaesthetic activation during perception produces an implicit
and pervasive reference to one's own body. The implicit
self-awareness of the actual and possible movements of my body helps
shape the experience that I have of the world. To be clear, however,
bodily self-awareness is not an awareness of the body in isolation
from the world; it is embedded in action and perception. We do not
first become aware of the body and subsequently use it to engage with
the world. We experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed to
us in our exploration of the world. Primarily, the body attains
self-awareness in action (or in our dispositions to action, or in our
action possibilities) when it relates to something, uses something, or
moves through the
 world.[5]



Bodily self-awareness, like self-consciousness more generally, has
limitations. I am never fully aware of everything that is going on
with my body. Indeed, my body tends to efface itself as I perceive and
act in the world. When I jump to catch a ball that is thrown over my
head, I certainly have a sense of what I can do, but I am not aware of
my precise movements or postures--for example, that my right leg
bends at a certain angle as I reach with my left hand. I can execute
movements without being explicitly conscious of them, and even what I
am tacitly aware of is somewhat limited--for example, I am not
aware of the shape of my grasp as I reach to grab the ball. Although I
may not be aware of certain details about my bodily performance, this
does not mean however that I am unconscious of my body. Rather it
means that the way that I am aware of my body is fully integrated with
the intentional action that I am performing. I know that I am jumping
to catch the ball, and implicit in that, as an immediate sense rather
than an inference, I experience my body jumping to catch the ball.



Furthermore, experiential aspects of my embodiment permeate my
prereflective self-consciousness. There is something it is like to
jump to catch a ball, and part of what it is like is that I am in fact
jumping. There is something different about what it is like to sit and
imagine (or remember) myself jumping to catch the ball, and at least
part of that difference has to do with the fact that I am sitting
rather than jumping, although none of this may be explicit in my
experience.



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



Hubert Dreyfus has famously argued that in the case of expert
performance we are not self-conscious, but rather "usually
involved in coping in a mindless way" (Dreyfus 2007a, 356). On
his account, our immersed bodily life is so completely and totally
world-engaged that it is entirely oblivious to itself. Indeed, in
total absorption, one ceases being a subject altogether (Dreyfus
2007b, 373). It is only when this bodily absorption is interrupted
that something like self-consciousness emerges. Dreyfus consequently
doesn't deny the existence of self-consciousness, but he
definitely wants to see it as a capacity that is only exercised or
actualized on special occasions. Moreover, when this capacity is
exercised it necessarily disrupts our coping and radically transform
the kind of affordances that are given to it (Dreyfus 2005, 61; 2007,
354). A number of theorists, however, have taken issue with this
characterization of expert performance and have argued that in the
performing arts (e.g., in dance, musical performance) and in athletics
(e.g., baseball, cricket) expert performers may employ an enhanced but
still prereflective awareness (Legrand 2007), a heedful consciousness
of the situation (e.g., Sutton et al. 2011), or even a skillful
reflective monitoring (Montero 2010; 2014), or some variable
combination of these (Hoffding 2018), and that such
consciousness does not impede performance but improves it.



Bodily self-awareness is not influenced only by action-oriented
movement or motor control processes; it is also modulated by various
affective (emotional), autonomic and interoceptive processes that are
contingent on current bodily states and closely related to
environmental variations. What Dainton (2007) calls background
sensations, as well as what Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) calls existential
feelings, are part of a mix of sensory processes that can provide what
William James (1890) terms the "warmth and intimacy" of
bodily sensations, or what Thomas Fuchs (2013) calls "the
feeling of being alive."


## 5. Intersubjective and social forms of self-consciousness



A focus on embodied self-experience inevitably leads to a decisive
widening of the discussion. The externality of embodiment puts me, and
my actions, in the public sphere. Self-consciousness, which involves
an ability to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and
desires, is always shaped by others and what we have learned from
others. This intersubjective or social influence can also affect
prereflective self-consciousness, including my sense of embodied
agency.



I can become aware of myself through the eyes of other people, and
this can happen in several different ways. Thus, embodiment brings
intersubjectivity and sociality into the picture, and draws attention
to the question of how certain forms of self-consciousness are
intersubjectively mediated or how they may depend on one's
social relations to others. My awareness of myself as one person among
others, an awareness that I may frame from the perspective of others,
attempting to see myself as they see me, involves a change in the
attitude of self-consciousness. Within this attitude, judgments that I
make about myself are constrained by social expectations and cultural
values. This kind of social self-consciousness is always
contextualized, as I try to understand how I appear to others, both in
the way I look, and in the meaning of my actions. I find myself in
particular contexts, with specific capabilities and dispositions,
habits and convictions, and I express myself in a way that is
reflected off of others, in relevant (socially defined) roles through
my language and my actions.



The role of the other in this mode of self-consciousness is not
unessential. According to Husserl, I become aware of myself
specifically as a human person only in such intersubjective relations
(Husserl 1973b, 175; 1952, 204-05; see Hart 1992, 71; Zahavi
1999, 157ff. Also see Taylor 1989, 34-36 for a similar idea).
Thus Husserl distinguishes the subject taken in its bare formality
from the personalized subject and claims that the origin and status of
being 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 been
developed through my interactions with others. When considering the
fullness of human selfhood, the idea of an isolated, pure and formal
subject of experience is an abstraction (Husserl 1968, 210). Given the
right conditions and circumstances, the self acquires a personalizing
self-apprehension, i.e., it develops into a person and as a person
(cf. Husserl 1952, 265). And this development depends heavily upon
social interaction (Husserl 1973b, 170-171).



This kind of self-consciousness also opens up the possibility of
self-alienation, famously explicated by Sartre in terms of the
other's gaze. For Sartre, because "our being, along with
its being-for-itself, is also for-others; the being which is revealed
to the reflective consciousness is for-itself-for-others" (1956,
282). On this view, the primary experience of the other is not that I
perceive her as some kind of object in which I must find a person, but
I perceive the other as a subject who perceives me as an object. My
experience of the other is at the same time an experience that
involves my own self-consciousness, a self-consciousness in which I am
prereflectively aware that I am an object for another. This experience
can further motivate a reflective self-consciousness as I consider how
I must appear to the other.



Merleau-Ponty (1945, 415) suggests that the other's gaze can
motivate this kind of self-consciousness only if I already have a
sense of my own visibility to the other. This sense of my own
visibility, however, is immediately linked with the prereflective,
proprioceptive-kinaesthetic sense of my body, an insight that goes
back to Husserl's analysis (mentioned above). Merleau-Ponty
notes its connection to the infant's capability for imitation,
and this is carried forward to more recent advances in developmental
psychology (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 other
in phenomenological accounts of self-consciousness, proprioceptive and
tactile experiences have a developmental primacy and emerge in the
pre-natal environment in ways that allow for very basic relational
experiences of self-movement versus movement of the mother's
body (Lymer 2010; 2014; Ciaunica & Crucianelli 2019; Ciaunica
& Fotopoulou 2016), and continue to play a significant role in
embodied interactions with caregivers during early infancy. In this
respect, the claim is that intersubjective/intercorporeal experiences
can affect prereflective self-consciousness Kyselo 2016; Ratcliffe
2017). This complicates any claim that the prereflective experience of
body ownership is primarily for self-preservation (Ciaunica &
Crucianelli 2019; de Vignemont 2018).



This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of these
rich and complex issues, issues that extend to analyses of phenomena
such as empathy, shame, guilt, and so on (see Zahavi 2010, 2014). But
it is important to realize that self-consciousness is a multifaceted
concept. It is not something that can be exhaustively analyzed simply
by examining the inner workings of the mind.


## 6. Conclusion



The notion of self-consciousness has been the subject of a rich and
complex analysis in the phenomenological tradition. Aspects of the
phenomenological analysis also show up in other areas of research,
including feminism (Stawarska 2006; Young 2005; Heinamaa 2003),
ecological psychology (Gibson 1966), and recent analyses of enactive
perception (Gallagher 2017b; Noe 2004; Thompson 2008). The
recognition of the existence of a primitive form of prereflective
self-consciousness is an important starting point for an understanding
of more elaborate forms of self-consciousness that are concept- and
language-dependent. Phenomenological analyses show these processes to
be more than purely mental or cognitive events since they integrally
involve embodiment and intersubjective dimensions.