Pre-reflective Self-awareness Research Articles

Pre-reflective Self-awareness and Polyperspectivity in Chinese Landscape Painting

Pre-reflective Self-awareness and Polyperspectivity in Chinese Landscape Painting

Minimal self-consciousness and the flying man argument.

The concept of minimal self-consciousness or "minimal self" is equivalent to a very basic form of first-person, pre-reflective self-awareness, which includes bodily self-awareness, and is related to phenomenal experience (qualia) and sentience. This phenomenological concept plays a role in characterizations of the senses of ownership and agency; in recent debates about Buddhist conceptions of the no-self; in explanations of illusions such as the Rubber Hand Illusion; as well as in characterizations of schizophrenia as a self-disorder. Despite its relevance to these complex investigations, a number of theorists have recently pointed out that the concept is not well defined. In order to provide some clarification about the notion of minimal self and how it relates to bodily and sensory processes this paper reaches back to the ideas expressed in a famous medieval thought experiment proposed in the 11th century: Avicenna's Flying Man argument. The paper then provides a review of some of the contemporary debates about the minimal self, pointing especially to questions about the role of bodily and social processes.

I am mine: From phenomenology of self-awareness to metaphysics of selfhood

I aim to show that, contrary to standard deflationary or eliminativist theories of the self, we can argue from the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness for the thesis that subjects of experience are substances. The phenomenological datum of subjectivity points to a specific metaphysical structure of our experience, that is, towards the substance view rather than the bundle or the minimal self view. Drawing on modern philosophical accounts of pre-reflective self-awareness, mineness and (self-) acquaintance, I will argue that a subject is aware of being the one individual who has many experiences and that it is revealed to the subject that it is the bearer of experiences and their unifier. The subject is present in pre-reflective awareness and known as the subject of experiences, and even this minimal self-awareness gives us reason to favour the substance view. Thus, one can demonstrate how the debates on the phenomenology of pre-reflective self-awareness and the metaphysics of selfhood intersect.

Emotionale Fähigkeiten in den (neo-)existenzialistischen Perspektiven von Sartre und Moran

Abstract The paper explores emotional abilities from the (neo-)existentialist perspectives of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Moran. First, it reconstructs Sartre’s understanding of emotions as active comportments achieving a magical transformation of the world. Second, it explores what existentialists mean by first-person authority: Regarding my own emotions, I cannot only explore what I feel, but I also need to ask myself what to feel. The claim is that my emotions depend on me committing to them. Third, I highlight a difference between a neo-existentialist account which focuses on reflective self-constitution, and a vintage existentialist approach which focuses on pre-reflective self-awareness. Forth, I point out that (neo-)existentialism helps to make explicit the normative claim which is implied when speaking of abilities regarding one’s emotions. The claim is that it is up to me to either endorse my emotions or to change who I am to feel differently. Finally, I indicate the limits of such an approach when it comes to social structures of inequality and domination.

The pre-reflective roots of the madeleine-memory: a phenomenological perspective

This paper investigates the madeleine-memory (so-called from Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time) as a case of pre-reflective experience, from the genesis of its sedimentation into the body. Indeed, I aim to address the question of the literary protagonist Marcel on the roots of his happiness and the genesis of his memories. Until now, the madeleine-memory has been described as bodily and involuntary. In phenomenology, a wide literature has confirmed the relationship between the sense of body ownership and pre-reflective self-awareness. I aim to build upon such a mutual link and show that the pre-reflective roots of the madeleine-memory have to be traced back to the genesis of the involuntary recollections. To this purpose, I will illustrate that the epistemological relationship between the object and the subject plays a relevant role in the way the subject remembers. First, I will present that madeleine-memory is a unique case of bodily memory, by analyzing the main features that characterize it. Secondly, I will analyze the original experience of the madeleine within the phenomenological logic of transcendence in immanence. For this aim, I will rely on the Husserlian notions of “epistemological inadequacy of perception” and “background experiences”. Through these notions, I will show that Proustian involuntary recollections are pre-reflective experiences because previously subjects have pre-reflectively experienced the content of recollections.

Is the "Minimally Conscious State" Patient Minimally Self-Aware?

Patients in a Minimally Conscious State (MCS) constitute a subgroup of awareness impaired patients who show minimal signs of awareness as opposed to patients in a Vegetative State who do not exhibit any such signs. While the empirical literature is rich in studies investigating either overt or covert signs of awareness in such patients the question of self-awareness has only scarcely been addressed. Even in the occasion where self-awareness is concerned, it is only higher-order or reflective self-awareness that is the target of such investigations. In the first part of this paper, I briefly review the relevant clinical neuroscience literature to demonstrate that the conception of self-awareness at play in such studies is indeed that of reflective self-awareness. In the second part, I present the philosophical notion of pre-reflective (or minimal) self-awareness. This is shown to primarily refer to the implicit awareness of our embodied subjectivity which essentially permeates all our experiences. As discussed, this minimal self-awareness is not specifically addressed when clinically or experimentally assessing patients in MCS. My suggestion is that neuroimaging studies targeting minimal self-awareness as in First-Person Perspective-taking paradigms could be used with MCS patients to shed light on the question of whether those individuals are minimally self-aware even in the case where they lack self-reflective abilities. Empirical evidence of this kind could have important theoretical implications for the discussion about the notion of self-awareness but also potential medical and social/legal implications for awareness impaired patients’ management.

Husserl, the active self, and commitment

In “On what matters: Personal identity as a phenomenological problem” (2020), Steven Crowell engages a number of contemporary interpretations of Husserl’s account of the person and personal identity by noting that they lack a phenomenological elucidation of the self as commitment. In this article, in response to Crowell, I aim to show that such an account of the self as commitment can be drawn from Husserl’s work by looking more closely at his descriptions from the time of Ideas and after of the self as ego or I and egoic experience as attentive experience. I specifically aim to sketch the beginning of a response to three questions I take Crowell to be posing to a Husserlian account of the person and personal identity: (1) What more than pre-reflective self-awareness can be attributed to the self on phenomenological grounds so that we can understand, phenomenologically speaking, how selves become persons? (2) How can what characterizes the self in addition to pre-reflective self-awareness be discerned in both our commitment to truth and our feeling bound by love and other emotive commitments that cannot be fully rationally justified, which Husserl acknowledges are both sources of personal self-constitution? And (3), do all selves become persons? In the paper I elaborate how my answers to the first two questions turn on the self not just being self-aware but active in a particular sense. And to begin to address the third question, I suggest that while any form of wakeful conscious experience is both self-aware and active, this activity of the self makes a difference for those who are socio-historically embedded in the way we are. Specifically, on the proposed Husserlian account, selves that are socio-historically embedded become persons in and through their active relating to what they attentively experience. In concluding, I indicate how this Husserlian account might compare to Crowell’s claim that “self-identity (ipseity) is not mere logical identity (A=A) but a normative achievement […] which makes a ‘personal’ kind of identity possible” (2020).

Embodiment and personal identity in dementia

Theories of personal identity in the tradition of John Locke and Derek Parfit emphasize the importance of psychological continuity and the abilities to think, to remember and to make rational choices as a basic criterion for personhood. As a consequence, persons with severe dementia are threatened to lose the status of persons. Such concepts, however, are situated within a dualistic framework, in which the body is regarded as a mere vehicle of the person, or a carrier of the brain as the organ of mental faculties. Based on the phenomenology of embodiment, this paper elaborates a different approach to personal identity in dementia. In this perspective, selfhood is primarily constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness and the body memory of an individual, which consists in the embodiment and enactment of familiar habits, practices and preferences. After describing the different types of body memory, the paper develops a phenomenology of dementia as a loss of reflexivity and meta-perspective. This is contrasted with the preservation of individual forms of body memory even in the later stages of the illness. The ethical consequences of an embodied approach to dementia are outlined. A final look is given to narrativistic and constructionist concepts of the self in dementia.

'The schizophrenic basic mood (self-disorder)', by Hans W Gruhle (1929).

During the first half of the twentieth century, German psychiatry came to consider 'Ich-Störungen', best translated as self-disorders, to be important features of schizophrenia. The present text is a translation of a chapter by the German psychiatrist Hans Gruhle, which is extraordinarily clear and emblematic for this research line. Published in 1929, it was part of a book co-written with Josef Berze, The Psychology of Schizophrenia (concerning its subjectivity). Gruhle claims that the essential core of schizophrenia is of an affective nature, a 'mood' manifesting itself as self-disorder, an unstable, incomplete pre-reflective self-awareness. His impact on contemporary psychiatry was probably limited due to his confrontational style, but this text has great significance for the modern revival of phenomenological research in schizophrenia.

The Embodied Self and the Paradox of Subjectivity

While it seems obvious that the embodied self is both a subject of experience and an object in the world, it is not clear how, or even whether, both of these senses of self can refer to the same self. According to Husserl, the relation between these two senses of self is beset by the “paradox of human subjectivity.” Following Husserl’s lead, scholars have attempted to resolve the paradox of subjectivity. This paper categorizes the different formulations of the paradox according to the dimension each pertains to and considers the prospects of each proposed resolution. It will be shown that, contrary to the claims of the respective authors, their attempted resolutions do not really resolve the paradox, but instead rephrase it or push it to the next dimension. This suggests that there is something deeper at work than a mere misunderstanding. This paper does not aim to resolve the paradox but instead initiates a new approach to it. Instead of seeing the paradox as a misapprehension that needs to be removed, I dig deeper to reveal its roots in ordinary consciousness. Investigating the proposed resolutions will reveal the fundamental role of the natural attitude, and I will argue that already the general thesis of the natural attitude makes the decisive cut that leads to what Sartre calls a “fissure” in pre-reflective self-awareness. The phenomenological reduction deepens the cut into what Husserl calls the “split of the self,” which in turn engenders the paradox of subjectivity. The paradox’s roots in the structure of ordinary consciousness not only constitute a reason for its persistence, but also suggest a new way to further investigate the embodied self.

Varieties of Self-Apprehension

The Brentanian idea that every state of consciousness involves a consciousness or awareness of itself (Brentano 1874), which has been a central tenet of the phenomenological school, is a current topic in contemporary philosophical debates about consciousness and subjectivity, both in the continental and the analytic tradition. Typically, the self-awareness that accompanies every state of consciousness is char­acterized as pre-reflective. Most theorists of pre-reflective self-awareness seem to converge on a negative characterization: pre-reflective self-awareness is not a kind of reflective awareness. Whereas reflective self-awareness is attentive and descriptive, pre-reflective self-awareness is non-attentive and non-descriptive.This paper aims to show that the reflective/pre-reflective dichotomy overlooks a finer-grained distinction. The first part is devoted to arguing that the typical use of the adjective ‘pre-reflective’ conflates two properties (non-attentiveness and non-descriptiveness), which are in fact separable. Accordingly, not only can there be non-descriptive and non-attentive self-consciousness (i.e. pre-reflective self-awareness), but also non-descriptive but attentive self-consciousness. I call the latter primitive introspection. The second part of the paper is devoted to arguing that, whereas both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection enable the subject to apprehend the phenomenology of their experience, the kind of apprehension each allows for is different. By analyzing the notion of apprehension in terms of information acquisition and personal-level availability of information, it is proposed that, although both pre-reflective self-awareness and primitive introspection allow for acquisition of the maximal amount of information about the experience, only primitive introspection makes all such information personal-level available.

Pre-Reflective vs. Reflexive Self-Awareness

In this paper I propose an account pre-reflective self-awareness, both vis-à-vis onself and vis-à-vis one’s own phenomenally conscious mental states and processes. I argue that pre-reflective self-awareness is a form of acquaintance with oneself and with one’s phenomenal states that is distinctively direct in this sense: it is not mediated by mental representations of those states or of oneself. I also argue that there is an important kind of reflective self-awareness that is reflexive, in this sense: it involves mental representations of one’s phenomenally conscious states, and of oneself, in which pre-reflective self-awareness plays a distinctive contributory role—a role I call ‘direct self-presentation’.

From Non-Self-Representationalism to the Social Structure of Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

Why should we think that there is such a thing as pre-reflective self-awareness? And how is this kind of self-awareness to be characterized? This paper traces a theoretical and a phenomenological line of argument in favor of the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness and explores how this notion can be further illuminated by appealing to recent work in the analytical philosophy of language and mind. In particular, it argues that the self is not represented in the (nonconceptual) content of experience, but is rather implicit in the mode. Further, it argues that pre-reflective self-consciousness is best understood as a form of knowledge-how. Finally, it will be argued that our sense of self is thoroughly social, even at the basic, pre-reflective level.

Subjective Character, the Ego and De Se Representation

There is a substantive disagreement with regard to the characterization of pre-reflective self-awareness despite the key role that is supposed to play for the distinction between conscious and unconscious states. One of the most prominent ones—between egological and non-egological views—is about the role that the subject of experience plays.I show that this disagreement falls short to capture the details of the debate, as it does not distinguish phenomenological and metaphysical disputes. Regarding the former, the contenders disagree on whether pre-reflective self-awareness concerns the subject of experience or the experience itself. I first argue that such an awareness has to be indexical—de se or de mentis respectively—, and then show that de se awareness can straightforwardly address classical objec­tions against egological views, whereas de mentis awareness fails to support epistemological arguments in favor of non-egological ones. The metaphysical commitments of a phenomenologically egological view depend on what the corresponding de se awareness demands from reality. I consider two alternatives, the structural and the representational approach and offer some consid­erations in favor of the later and its prima facie neutrality with regard to the metaphysical dispute.

Reflexivity, Transparency, and Illusionism

The notion of pre-reflective self-awareness is much more accepted today than 20 years ago and has become part of the standard repertoire in philosophy of mind. The notion’s increasing popularity has not surprisingly also led to an increasing amount of criticism. My focus in the present contribution will be on a particular radical objection that can be found in Jay Garfield’s book Engaging Buddhism. It seeks to undercut the appeal to pre-reflective self-awareness by arguing that there ultimately is no such thing as phenomenal consciousness.

The Pre-reflective Situational Self

It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role of mineness. We argue that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. To this end, we develop such a notion: the Pre-Reflective Situational Self. To do so, we will first show how alternative conceptions of pre-reflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. We claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, we argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within, at least within psychopathology. This leads us to believe that a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. We, therefore, develop the notion of the pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world.

Bodily and temporal pre-reflective self-awareness

Bodily and temporal pre-reflective self-awareness

For-Me-Ness, For-Us-Ness, and the We-Relationship

This article investigates the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality. I start by pointing out some ambiguities in claims pursued by critics that have recently pressed on the relationship between the two notions. I next articulate a question concerning for-me-ness and sociality that builds on the idea that, occasionally at least, there is something it is like ‘for us’ to have an experience. This idea has been explored in recent literature on shared experiences and collective intentionality, and it gestures towards the question of the extent to which some social interactions make a difference in the phenomenal character of their participants’ experiences. Finally, I present a construal of for-us-ness that complements the received understanding of for-me-ness, by drawing on Alfred Schutz’ concept of the we-relationship, and on the idea of second-personal awareness, i.e. awareness of a ‘you’ (as distinguished from awareness of a ‘she’ or ‘he’). The current proposal provides a suitable account of some basic forms of phenomenally manifest social connectedness, in a way that is cognitively undemanding and without incurring the costs of a sui generis plural pre-reflective self-awareness.

Leiblichkeit und personale Identität in der Demenz

AbstractTheories of personal identity in the tradition of John Locke and Derek Parfit emphasize the importance of psychological continuity and the abilities to think, to remember and to make rational choices as a basic criterion for personhood. These concepts, however, are situated within a dualistic framework, in which the body is regarded as a mere vehicle of the person, or a carrier of the brain as the organ of mental faculties. Based on the phenomenology of embodiment, this paper elaborates a different approach to personal identity. In this perspective, selfhood is primarily constituted by pre-reflective self-awareness and the body memory of an individual, which consists in the embodiment and enactment of familiar habits, practices and preferences. As can be shown, this understanding of personhood still applies to dementia patients even in the later stages of the disease.

Plural Pre‐Reflective Self‐Awareness and the Problem of the Body

Plural Pre‐Reflective Self‐Awareness and the Problem of the Body