Q&A: Reflective Consciousness
Reflective Consciousness
Question
In your column on what philosophy is, you discussed the question of our capacity for circular self-acquaintance, and I’d be glad to hear what you think about the arguments that present self-awareness as a necessary product of social relations:
According to the argument from language, first-person statements display a privilege of a special kind. If I am in pain, I do not need to determine whether I am indeed in pain; I know that I am in pain without any supporting evidence. Any other use of the words “I am in pain” means a misunderstanding of their meaning, and especially a misunderstanding of the word I. This word gets its meaning from the rule that truthfulness and truth coincide. A speaker who does not obey this rule will use the term I to mean he or she, and thereby show that he has not grasped the grammar of the first-person pronoun. First-person awareness arises with mastery of a public language, and therefore also with the recognition that others use the word I as I use it: to express directly what they think and feel. Hegel’s argument is similar, though it is presented in a completely different style. In the state of nature, when I am driven only by my desires and needs, I have consciousness, but not a sense of self. Through the encounter with the other, which begins as a life-and-death struggle for survival, I am forced to recognize that I too am an “other” to the one who is an “other” for me. Hegel explains, in poetic steps, the gradual emergence, following this encounter, of the moment of mutual recognition, in which a person becomes aware of himself as possessing free self-consciousness by recognizing the free self-consciousness standing opposite him, and self and other gain awareness in a single act of recognition, which grants me the ability to know myself in the first person and at the same time requires that I recognize your own being in the first person.
Answer
This is the kind of verbiage that says nothing to me. I doubt it says anything to anyone else either.
Discussion on Answer
A question for the person asking: we assume that animals do not have self-consciousness, certainly not like human beings, but it’s obvious that some of them live in societies, meaning they have an “other.” According to your proposal, it’s hard to explain how over millions of years of evolution that same self-consciousness did not emerge in them. So even if what you say is correct (roughly the later Wittgenstein), we still have to assume that there is some fixed essence out of which it emerges—something animals do not have.
Doron, it’s been a long time since you posted something I would sign every word of.
I haven’t been at my best lately. Maybe that’s why 😉
But not at your worst either 🙂
Okay, but do you still agree with the argument? After all, in principle the absolute I is the absolute identity of subject and object, and there is no room in it for a distinction between this and that. Therefore self-consciousness of the absolute I cannot exist; it becomes possible only through differentiation between subject and object. The I will be a real I, conscious of itself, only when it can distinguish itself from itself in reflection. But this reflection is possible only when something is added to the absolute I, something “foreign” that disrupts the absolute identity and thereby makes possible the distinction between subject and object, and thus also reflection.
What? Who…? What is this “absolute I”? Is that something related to human beings?
He wants to say that a person or an animal recognizes its own existence and the existence of the other at one and the same time (or maybe recognition of the other comes a differential of time before recognition of itself). I wouldn’t say that an animal has consciousness in the full sense. And certainly not self-consciousness. In my opinion that requires free choice—the ability to act with judgment, to stop for a moment and reflect. It’s a good question what they do have and how they experience the world, since they act solely according to drives and instincts. The fact is that a dog sees its human master as the head of the wolf pack it belongs to (a dog is a domesticated wolf). How does it not notice that he looks completely different from it? And the fact is that we don’t remember infancy (when the baby still does not separate itself from the rest of reality). I think that only from the moment that this separation is formed in him and he becomes self-aware do memories begin to form.
And…? The central question is whether self-consciousness is an essential state or reality—even if only in potential—for human beings as subjects distinct from one another. If so, and that’s what I think, then the encounter with the other is only a trigger, even if a necessary one, for the realization of self-consciousness. If that’s right, one could say that even a newborn baby (and maybe even a fetus) has the first buds of self-consciousness. Those buds apparently do not exist in any other creature in the animal kingdom.
To Doron,
I wasn’t replying to you. I was replying to Rabbi Michi, who didn’t understand what the questioner wanted from him (I also didn’t entirely understand. But I did understand what Hegel said). I also think that consciousness is certainly essential only to human beings (including when they are infants), as I wrote in the previous comment.
Okay. Tonight I’ll beat my breast harder than ever.
Well, at least now we know what your columns on what philosophy is are worth: nothing. You don’t recognize it when it’s right under your nose.