History of The Human Sciences: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and The Modern Self

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the Human Sciences
Consciousness, self-consciousness, and the modern self

Klaus Brinkmann
History of the Human Sciences 2005 18: 27
DOI: 10.1177/0952695105058469
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02_brinkmann_058469 (jk-s) 16/1/06 10:47 am Page 27
H I S T O RY O F T H E H U M A N S C I E N C E S Vol. 18 No. 4
© 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) pp. 27–48
[18:4; 27–48; DOI: 10.1177/0952695105058469]
Consciousness,
self-consciousness, and the
modern self
KLAUS BRINKMANN
ABSTRACT
The concept of the self is embedded in a web of relationships of other
concepts and phenomena such as consciousness, self-consciousness,
personal identity and the mind–body problem. The article follows
the ontological and epistemological roles of the concept of self-
consciousness and the structural co-implication of consciousness and
self-consciousness from Descartes and Locke to Kant and Sartre while
delineating its subject matter from related inquiries into the relation-
ship between the mind and the body, personal identity, and the question
whether consciousness is an irreducible reality sui generis or essentially
a neurobiological entity. Over the course of its history, the modern self
turns out to become an ever more elusive phenomenon, while its roles
as a bearer of individual responsibility and as a subject of reflective
endorsement of the truth become ever more pronounced.
Key words consciousness, mind–body problem, personal identity,
pre-reflective cogito, self-consciousness, transcendental apperception
Philosophical interest in the phenomena of consciousness and self-

consciousness is a characteristic of modernity. One would be hard-pressed to
find an equivalent word for consciousness in ancient Greek. Greek philos-
ophers such as Plato and Aristotle use the word psychê to refer to the integral
unity of appetites, desires, emotions, and intellect, including memory,

28 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)
perception, imagination, and discursive reasoning, among others. And yet,

psychê is neither mind, which is more narrow in meaning and already seems
to indicate something internal and perhaps inaccessible to others, nor con-
sciousness, which connotes awareness of the mind’s involvement with some-
thing, be it its own inner states or an object other than itself. Still, it has been
argued that philosophical awareness of the self as a special self-referential
entity goes back to the ancient Greeks, indeed that the idea of subjectivity is
not a discovery of modernity but already present in Plato and Aristotle.1 To
be sure, Aristotle describes the divine intellect as a thinking whose object is
the activity of thinking itself, and its very own activity of thinking at that.2
This seems to imply a kind of self-referentiality and self-awareness that is
typical of subjectivity and selfhood, even self-consciousness. Similarly, he
also characterizes the thinking of an object without matter, i.e. of a primary
substance or essence, as a thinking that while it attends to an object distinct
from the activity of thought at the same time attends to what is itself essen-
tially a thought.3 From this one might conclude that when thinking an object
that is essentially a thought, thinking is indirectly or obliquely also thinking
itself.4
Given these structural similarities between the self-referential nature of the
intellect in Aristotle and the modern notions of consciousness and self-
consciousness, how are we to distinguish between an Aristotelian and a
modern conception of subjectivity, consciousness, and self? Aristotle can be
said to have discussed in great subtlety and detail what we today might call
mental activities.5 Indeed, much of this discussion is still relevant today, as is
his interpretation of the mind–body relationship, and were it merely a
question of describing and analysing the life of the mind, there is sufficient
continuity between Aristotle’s De anima and modern philosophy of mind
despite the fundamental differences in the underlying conceptions of subjec-
tivity.6 In my view, it is this conception of subjectivity that undergoes a real
transformation in modernity. I suggest that it is possible to pinpoint two
characteristics that profoundly separate the modern from the ancient concept
of subjectivity. They are self-awareness as a condition of object-awareness and
the focus on the intentionality of consciousness, and they both have a number
of consequences and implications that are crucial for the definition of the
modern notion of subjectivity.
A CLUSTER OF ISSUES: MIND–BODY

RELATIONSHIP, PERSONAL IDENTITY, BRAIN
AND CONSCIOUSNESS
I will sketch what I perceive to be the salient innovations below. But before
I do so, I would like to indicate briefly the enormous interest and scope the

CONSCIOUSNESS, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS 29
topic of consciousness has taken on in recent decades. Traditionally, the

relationship between consciousness and body, or mind and body, had always
been a well-established issue in philosophy since the pre-Socratics, there
under the title of the soul–body relationship. This discussion reached an early
high point with Aristotle’s definition of the soul as a first actuality of a poten-
tially living body or organism (where the soul’s second actuality would be its
functioning as ‘mind’ in perception and thinking). With this formulation, the
soul was both unmistakably distinguished from the body in its material
aspect as well as inseparably linked to it as the very life of the organism. When
the life of the organism comes to an end, so does the soul, since the two are
the same thing, at least to the extent that the soul is dependent on bodily
organs for its functioning.7 Still, despite this dependence on a bodily sub-
stratum, the soul is anything but an epiphenomenon of the body. Instead, it
maintains a privileged position as the primary principle or source of life, as
its characterization as an activity or energeia and as the cause of the body’s
organic unity shows.8 With Descartes’s introduction, in Meditation Six of the
Meditations on First Philosophy, of a ‘real distinction’ between the mind and
the body, the issue of the mind–body relationship took on a new urgency.
Since a causal interaction between the two seemed on the face of it imposs-
ible, some explanation had to be found for the apparent influence of mind on
body through the will and of body on mind due to physiological changes in
the body that affect the mind. To this very day the question of whether this
Cartesian dualism is unavoidable or merely the result of Descartes’s
methodological approach is unresolved.9
The mind–body relationship is one of the major issues currently dis-
cussed.10 Soon after Descartes had accorded consciousness a privileged
position as the proper locus of indubitable cognition, the question of what
kind of entity consciousness might be became an issue. Descartes had already
raised the question: how to describe and characterize the ego with which he
was so intimately acquainted. His answer was roughly that the I of whose
existence I am certain is a single thing with a variety of activities (called
‘modes’), including those of perceiving, feeling, remembering, judging, etc.,
all of which seem to be intimately connected to the activity of thinking itself.
He gave no account, however, of the unity of this consciousness. The self for
him remains essentially a phenomenon whose self-referential nature is as yet
poorly understood and whose ontological characteristic is the relatively
uninformative one of a thinking thing (res cogitans). Nonetheless, as we will
see shortly, Descartes puts the modern concept of subjectivity squarely at the
center of philosophical attention, even if he cannot yet give a unified theory
of it over and above the methodological use he makes of it and in the process
of which he discovers its uniquely modern signature.
The question what kind of an entity consciousness is – or whether it is an
entity at all – can be approached from a number of different angles. To limit

myself to two of them, one is its internal structure as either an epistemic prin-
ciple or an ontological phenomenon, another its status as a referentially
accessible and scientifically identifiable entity or as a thing in the world among
other things, even if a special kind of thing. It is the internal structure of this
essentially Cartesian consciousness that becomes the focus of the later
theories of self-consciousness as a fundamental epistemic and ontological
principle in German idealism from Kant and Reinhold to Fichte and Hegel.11
And even in 20th-century Husserlian phenomenology self-consciousness,
under the title of a transcendental ego, retains the function of serving as the
foundation of all cognitive and emotional acts and experiences or Erlebnisse,
as Husserl called them. While distancing himself from Descartes’s ‘psychol-
ogistic’ understanding of the ego, Husserl nonetheless acknowledges the
quasi-transcendental function of grounding all knowledge that the Cartesian
ego was meant to fulfill.12 For Husserl, the world of consciousness becomes
a ‘pure field’ available to phenomenological description (after the appropri-
ate transcendental or phenomenological reduction has been carried out). This
field calls for an explanation of the activities and rules through which
meaning (Sinn) in general is constituted by the interpretive acts of the tran-
scendental ego. This pure, transcendental ego – which for that reason is not
a particular or personal self, but a universal a-priori principle – ‘creates’ the
world as a universe of noematic meaning in accordance with rule-governed
noetic acts of constitution and interpretation (Auffassung). Sartre’s critical
appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology in The Transcendence of the Ego
leads to a novel theory of consciousness and self-consciousness which then
serves as the foundation of Sartre’s entire phenomenological ontology in
Being and Nothingness. With Sartre, the long classical tradition of the exam-
ination of the internal structure of consciousness and self-consciousness
draws to a close. With the early 20th-century positivism and later with behav-
iorism, the reality of an introspectively available self came under serious
attack, until the reality sui generis of consciousness was fundamentally ques-
tioned in contemporary philosophy of mind.13 Today’s neurophysiology and
neurobiology investigate consciousness and its activities in their physical
manifestations. Attempts were and are made to explain consciousness as
either the same as or an epiphenomenon of neuronal brain activity. The
debate between those who defend the reality of consciousness and elimina-
tivists is still ongoing.
The reality, if not of consciousness, then of self-consciousness or the self
had come into question early on, however. Thus Hobbes, in the Third Set of
Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, had raised a skeptical query and,
anticipating contemporary eliminative materialists, had asked how Descartes
could be so sure that that which does the thinking in him is his own thinking
self. Might thinking not be a function of the body, i.e. of matter?14 In a less
radical fashion, Hume denied that there was such a thing as an identifiable,

enduring self to be found in introspection, although he was far from denying

the reality of mental experience – indeed, his explanation of how the idea of
causality arises in us is predicated on a specific psychological mechanism or
habit of the mind to anticipate a necessary connection among events where
only a constant conjunction can in fact be observed. Famously, the self for
Hume was just a series of mental episodes held together by certain laws of
association, since a particular impression called ‘I’ could not be made out
among our sensations or feelings.
The philosopher who laid the foundation for the more specific exploration
of consciousness and the self (and to whom Hume is already responding) was
John Locke. During the course of an investigation into how we determine
the identity of things in the world such as physical objects and biological
organisms he finally arrives at the question how persons, who are undoubt-
edly entities of some kind, may be reliably identified. Interestingly, he rejects
the idea that persons may be identified via their bodies, since the relevant
criterion of the continuity of life in a body specifically identifies organisms,
and persons are not properly speaking organisms, although they apparently
do not exist without them. Persons are selves, and so the question arises what
makes a self a self. To quote Locke’s famous definition:
. . . to find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what
Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has
reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking
thing in different times and places; which it does only by that con-
sciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me
essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without per-
ceiving, that he does perceive. (Essay II, xxvii §9)
This definition is remarkable for two reasons: first for the rejection, already
mentioned, of any physical criterion with which to identify personhood;
second for the intrinsic connection it establishes between self-consciousness
(a self that is able to ‘consider itself as itself’) and consciousness which, in
being conscious of some object, cannot help but be conscious also of being
conscious of itself (‘that he does perceive’). I will return to this shortly, but
first I would like to conclude this little overview by pointing out that Locke’s
definition lends itself to two lines of inquiry. First, it calls for a clarification
of the connection between self-consciousness and consciousness. Second, in
his rejection of any bodily criterion of the identity of the self and his provoca-
tive statement that if consciousness were to move into one’s little finger, then
that would be the body with which the self would have to be associated, he
creates the need for a closer look at the dependence, not of mind on body,
but of identity of self on identity of body. An entire field of philosophical
research has since arisen around the theme of personal identity and questions
such as whether the identity of a person can be defined independently of

bodily criteria or not, or whether it can only be determined with reference to

the person’s body (and if so, whether their brain or their whole body func-
tions as the physical substratum of the mind).15 In sum, then, we have roughly
four areas of philosophical research dealing with the phenomenon of con-
sciousness and the self, focusing on (1) the mind–body problem, (2) the
question of what constitutes personal identity, (3) consciousness or mental
life as object of the philosophy of neuroscience and neurobiology, (4) the
internal structure of consciousness and self-consciousness, in particular their
interdependence. To this we may add (5) consciousness or mind as an
epistemological principle, as the indispensable foundation and starting point
of cognition and knowledge.16 In the remainder of this article, I will focus on
the fourth and fifth aspects. I must ignore the many other approaches to con-
sciousness and self in psychology and sociology, although it should be men-
tioned that the status of consciousness as a reality sui generis and of the self
as an independent reality with a solid ontological status has come under
attack not only in philosophy but also in psychology and sociology where
the self is sometimes regarded as a social construct made up of several roles
(which raises the question of personal identity in a very different context).
Indeed, a whole tradition of two rivaling trends, one affirming the unity of
the self, the other its disunity and fragmentation, can be made out in the
history of ideas over the millennia, and the reflections of these views can be
seen in major works of Western literature.17
FROM THE PRE-MODERN TO THE MODERN

CONCEPTION OF SUBJECTIVITY:
SELF-AWARENESS AS A NECESSARY CONDITION
OF OBJECT-AWARENESS
Above I singled out self-awareness and intentionality as the hallmarks of the

modern concept of subjectivity. Let me take these two characteristics in order.
It sounds trivial to say that one is aware of seeing or sensing an object when
one does so. But Locke’s point in the quotation above is far from being a
trivial one. For it claims that one could not be perceiving an object unless one
were also aware of doing so. Instead of a contingent coexistence of two kinds
of awareness, there exists an implication. More specifically, the second aware-
ness is a necessary condition of the first. When Locke says that there exists a
‘consciousness’ that is inseparable from and essential to thinking, he actually
means that self-consciousness is essential to thinking, and indeed that
thinking is in a sense synonymous with self-consciousness. This self-
consciousness is the awareness of being aware of an object, the consciousness
of being conscious of something. Now obviously, object-awareness and
being aware of one’s object-awareness are not the same, since they aim at two

different things. Object-awareness is awareness of an object, while awareness

of this awareness is the awareness of the relationship of a consciousness to an
object. For one thing, this means that consciousness has the peculiar charac-
teristic of being aware of two different things at the same time, and necess-
arily so. Especially since the converse situation must hold as well, namely that
there cannot be awareness of the relationship to an object without the aware-
ness of the object itself. I suggest that we call the awareness of the relation-
ship to an object self-awareness, for the simple reason that the relationship to
an object can directly be known to exist or be experienced (in Locke’s words:
can be perceived) only by the consciousness that entertains the relationship.
We can then say that object-awareness presupposes self-awareness and
that self-awareness presupposes object-awareness, or that object- and self-
awareness mutually imply one another. As stated above, the reason why this
is not something trivial to say is that the two forms of awareness do not have
the same object or focus. It is thus non-trivially true that I cannot be aware
of an object without also being aware of myself, nor aware of myself without
being aware of an object which is not myself.18 Part of what this means,
however, is that self-referentiality is a necessary condition of intentionality or
object-directedness. This is why a cognitive relation to an object is not just a
relation between an object (self) and another object (thing).19
It could be said with some justification that the ancient Greek philoso-
phers, in particular Aristotle, treated the fact that object-awareness presup-
poses self-awareness as negligible. The self-referentiality of thinking for him
is not so much a condition as it is a goal or telos of thinking whose attainment
is a culmination and an achievement.20 I suspect that there may be a couple
of reasons for this. First, because of the intentionality structure of con-
sciousness, i.e. the fact that consciousness is typically focused on objects that
are not itself, its self-awareness is absorbed by the attention it pays to its
objects. Self-awareness disappears behind object-awareness. (Cases in which
objects affect our senses with an extraordinary intensity such as a blinding
light or a deafening noise constitute the exception to this rule.) It is even a
basic psychological phenomenon that we are mostly focused on what we do,
not on the fact that we are doing it – we tend to be oblivious of ourselves
when something ‘grabs’ our attention, even though our feelings may then be
particularly intense (as in a movie when we begin to develop feelings on
behalf of the characters on the screen).21 But there needs to be an explanation
for why the ancient Greek philosophers did not make more of the fact that
self-consciousness is a condition for object-awareness. I suggest that this is
due to the objective outlook or objective orientation of Greek philosophical
thought. The organic body, the soul, the self, and thinking are beings among
others, even though they have different potentialities and capabilities.
Nonetheless, thinking exhibits the same structure as the design of things in
nature or due to nature. Both thinking and a natural organism obey the same

teleological blueprint. The fundamental telos is the same everywhere, only the
levels of achievement and the nature of the fulfillment, the type of telos, is
different. To be sure, the intellect (nous) is the most precious thing in the
universe, but it is not radically divorced from the natural realm.22
The situation changes dramatically, however, when Descartes is led to the
inevitable conclusion – inevitable given the initial assumptions of his enter-
prise as laid out in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy – that
there is a real distinction between mind and world, thinking and extended
substance (cf. Meditation Six, AT VII 78). Not only does this mean the
opening up of a radical dualism between body and mind. A profound shift
in our understanding of ourselves occurs with Descartes as well. The point
may be put in the following way. No spectacular consequences ensue
from the proposition ‘No self-consciousness, no object-consciousness’.
However, with Descartes the implications of the denial of self-
consciousness are more far-reaching. For now it would in a sense be correct
to conclude: ‘No self-consciousness, no objects’. Self-consciousness
becomes a condition not just of object-consciousness, but of objects. This
does not mean that, trivially, without consciousness there could be no
objects of consciousness. It means, rather, that literally without self-con-
sciousness there would be no objects (albeit in a somewhat qualified sense
of ‘objects’). As is well known, after Descartes has bracketed the existence
of the external world through the method of doubt in Meditation One, he
finds that he is left with an inner world of ideas, almost all of which, he con-
vinces himself in Meditation Three, he might conceivably have generated
by the power of his own mind. He has put himself (deliberately, to be sure)
into the curious position that he has an object-awareness without objects in
the sense of mind-independent entities. Instead, he is aware of ideas, some
of which seem to have the appearance of objects, although he cannot tell at
this point whether they possess an objective correlate beyond the limits and
the activity of his own thinking. In this sense, while he is aware of the ideas
in his mind he is also aware of the difference between these ideas and the
real objects they supposedly refer to. Only if he can secure mind-indepen-
dence for the objective correlates of his ideas can he legitimately speak of
referring to or ‘intending’ objects. Without mind-independence, objects
lose their externality and thus their status as objects that transcend con-
sciousness and are not reducible to its acts or activity. This explicit identifi-
cation of objectivity and mind-independence is, of course, all part of the
critical reflection of modern thought which has become self-conscious of
its potential ‘subjective’ admixture to what supposedly exists objectively.23
Mind-independence, then, becomes an essential characteristic of being an
object, and in this sense it is true to say: No mind, no mind-independence,
no ‘objective’ object. One way to characterize the development from
Descartes to Kant in this respect would be to say that Kant will complement

the above inference by stipulating: No mind, no mind-dependence, no

a-priori structures of objectivity.
To the claim I made above, namely that self-consciousness now becomes a
condition of objects, not just of object-awareness, one might object that even
in Descartes’s case self-consciousness is still only a condition of awareness of
ideas, not of objects. This is correct in one sense. It is correct in that for
Descartes self-consciousness does not literally generate, let alone create,
objects, although it does construct them to a certain extent due to the un-
reliability of the senses which offer mostly encoded information and do not
straightforwardly resemble objects.24 On the other hand, however, without
the reasoning of the thinking self based on its ‘natural light’ the existence of
objects independent of the self could not be established. Even if it is God who
creates the world of finite substances, the self could not know with certainty
that such a world exists, unless it first rigorously proved the existence of God
to itself. The self thus does have a role in ascertaining the existence of objects
as the objective correlates of its ideas, and in this sense there are no objects
without self-consciousness. Furthermore, since Descartes has made the
thinking self (even the individual thinking self) the sole arbiter of truth, it is
now incumbent upon the self to satisfy itself of the legitimacy of every truth-
claim it is going to advance, even to create the foundation for making truth-
claims in the first place. This foundation consists in the true belief in the
existence of an ‘objective’ world which may serve as a referent for its ideas
and propositions. Without objects to relate to, all ideas would be fictitious
and the basis for truth-claims would fall away. The self is responsible for
establishing the truth of its belief in this independent, objective world
(including the world of mathematics) that truth-claims are about. There thus
is an objectively existing world only because the self has bestowed objectiv-
ity upon it or has accorded the hypothesis of an objective correlate of its ideas
the status of an indubitable truth.
The role of the self and self-consciousness not only for object-conscious-
ness but also for there being objects to be conscious of becomes a sine qua
non with Kant in an even stronger sense. According to Kant, there are indeed
no ordinary objects at all, i.e. no empirical objects, without self-conscious-
ness. This is different from Descartes. For the latter, the mind-independent
existence of sensible objects can in principle be established on the basis of the
Third Meditation’s proof of the existence of God (who is not a deceiver and
hence will not mislead us, if we seem to have such strong sensible evidence
for the mind-independent existence of a world). More specific plausibility
arguments for the mind-independent existence of sensible objects are
developed in Meditation Six. For Kant, however, the situation is more radical.
For him it is true to say, no self-consciousness, no empirical, i.e. sensible,
objects. Whatever there may exist without self-consciousness, it is not the
familiar sensible objects as we know them. The answer to the question

whether there is a world (or nature) without self-consciousness is not just

hypothetical, as with Descartes. Rather, it is meaningless. Kant has radical-
ized the Cartesian problem of accounting for the mind-independent existence
of objects due to his idealistic approach. The basis for accounting for the
existence of a world of objects and their rule-governed behavior is the repre-
sentations of which the thinking self is aware. These representations actually
have an ambiguous status in Kant’s First Critique. Technically speaking, they
may either be undetermined objects of an empirical intuition called ‘appear-
ances’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 20/B 34), i.e. nothing intelligible at
all, or they may be intelligible but ‘subjective’, i.e. without objective refer-
ence or objective validity (such as Cartesian ideas without an objective cor-
relate). Ignoring the second alternative, the first option enables Kant to argue
that unless space and time as the pure forms of intuition and the categories as
the pure concepts of the understanding jointly structure and determine those
representations, there are no objects to be conscious of, i.e. no sensible,
empirical things and no nature or world. The world of sense and of science,
as well as the familiar world of our everyday experience, must be construed
as the product of acts of synthesis carried out by the thinking and sensing
self.25 Kant does insist on a material input ‘from outside’, namely the unde-
termined appearances mentioned above or an undetermined sensible
manifold of intuition, as something ‘given’, i.e. not contributed by the
subject. To this extent, his idealism accepts a realistic element as ‘the real in
the appearances’.26 But it is exclusively through the structuring of this
material by the human sensibility and understanding that this ‘real in the
appearances’ becomes knowable. Kant thus advocates a transcendental
idealism that goes together with an ‘empirical realism’, but it is important to
note that his empirical realism is already the result of a combination of the
a-priori structures of subjectivity and the undetermined manifold of intuition
(i.e. the real in the appearances). Only this undetermined manifold is entirely
non-subjective or ‘objective’, but as such also featureless – a fact that
prompted Kant in the first edition of the Critique to invite the identification
of the undetermined sensible manifold with the ‘thing-in-itself’, a connection
which he severed in the Critique’s second edition.27
But Kant’s point goes further. Not only must the self project certain struc-
tures upon the undetermined manifold of empirical intuition for there to
emerge an object-world. In a way, this was already so for Descartes, as
mentioned above. Kant, however, posits the more radical question as to the
epistemic conditions of the possibility of such a world-producing self
(whereas Descartes was concerned only with its existence). He notices that
any intelligible representation, no matter how abstract or simple, is already a
combination of other representations (for instance, ‘table’ is a simple repre-
sentation, but as its definition shows, it contains other representations implic-
itly within itself; likewise ‘red’ is a simple universal, but as such is an

abstraction covering indefinitely many shades of red, and we understand that

implicitly when we understand the word ‘red’, as we also implicitly under-
stand that ‘red’ means a property rather than a thing). Moreover, representa-
tions can be combined with each other to form sentences or propositions,
only if they are already part of a unified consciousness. Thus a self-unifying
self-consciousness must be presupposed to make possible our object-
consciousness and even our (empirical) self-consciousness which is just a
consciousness of ourselves as an object of (self-)reflection. The evidence for
such a ‘transcendental unity of self-consciousness’ (B 132) (or ‘transcenden-
tal unity of apperception’, A 118; B 139) consists in the fact that we are able
to add the thought ‘I think [sc. x]’ (or ‘I am aware of x’) to any and all of our
representations. In Kant’s famous words:
It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representa-
tions; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could
not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the represen-
tation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. (B
131–2)
The fact that the thinking I am aware of is perceived as my own thinking
points to the identity of this thinking with the thinker who reflects on it.
However, the thinking I reflect on could never be perceived as my own by
me, unless it had already been my own prior to the act of reflecting upon it.
In other words, my reflection is not even needed in order to make represen-
tations or thoughts my own, they are mine independently of being perceived
as mine. This in turn points to a unity of self-consciousness that precedes the
unity of self-consciousness of which I am conscious in reflecting on it.28 Self-
consciousness must have unified itself, before I can become aware of this
unity by reflecting on it. In the end, then, the curious co-implication of
object-awareness and self-awareness (of which Locke noted one leg) has
found an explanation. There could be no object-awareness (a representation
would be ‘nothing to me’), if it did not already form part of the unity of self-
consciousness such that I may at any time become aware of a representation
as mine, even if I am not explicitly aware of that fact now. To become aware
of it as mine, however, just means to be aware of myself as a unified self-
consciousness, a self-consciousness that knows itself as the same I in all its
representations. Consciousness of something other than myself is predicated
on a self-referential relationship of self-consciousness. But the converse also
holds. I can represent the unity of myself to myself only because I can know
different representations as being all mine, and since such a reflection comes
always after the fact, so to speak, there needs to exist a prior original unity
of self-consciousness.
I would like to come back to this mysterious ‘original synthetic unity of
self-consciousness’, in particular to the question whether we understand how

it relates to our ordinary consciousness and if we can know anything about

it other than that it must be inferred as an epistemic condition of both self-
and object-awareness. Before I do so, however, I propose to take a look at
the broader implications of the modern concept of subjectivity introduced
by Descartes and developed further by Kant. If Kant is right, then any object-
awareness, and a fortiori any knowledge of objects, presupposes not only
self-awareness but also, and more fundamentally, the self-referential unity of
self-consciousness. But this is equivalent to saying that knowledge is in some
non-trivial sense dependent on the knowing subject.29 Knowledge comes
about at least in part as a result of the way in which the knower organizes his
or her representations. This is very different from saying that knowledge
comes about through the intellectual intuition of essences or a simple process
of observation and inference. It suggests that to acquire knowledge is to be
involved in the constitution and determination of what counts as true. Truth
seems to be made dependent, at least in part, on subjectivity. For Kant, this
did not entail the relativization of the truth and an embrace of subjectivism,
since he believed that the structures of subjectivity responsible for organiz-
ing representations hold good universally and necessarily for all rational
beings. The framework within which empirical truths were to be established
was universally the same for all. No subjective element was involved in the
determination of the moral law anyway, and the danger of subjectivism and
relativity with respect to theoretical or practical truths was therefore non-
existent. However, once the belief in a-priori principles of the self-
organization of the epistemic and the moral subject was challenged by
Nietzschean naturalism or the psychological and philosophical dissolution of
the unity of the subject, new methods of maintaining the possibility of uni-
versally valid norms, especially in ethics, law, and politics, had to be found.
First and foremost among those methods today seems to be the rule-
governed process of generating consensus in intersubjective and intercultural
discourse – in itself an acknowledgement of the irreducible element of sub-
jectivity in truth.30
There is another aspect of the modern conception of subjectivity deriving
even more directly from Descartes that is worth mentioning. The point may
be illustrated by Descartes’s explanation, in the Replies to Objections, that the
proposition ‘I think, therefore I am’ is not to be construed as an enthymeme,
i.e. as a syllogism which leaves the major premise ‘Everything that thinks,
exists’ unstated. The reason is that general statements such as this are derived
inductively from individual cases, and that one needs to learn that there exists
a direct connection between thinking and existing from one’s own individual
case first. This comment is highly illuminating for several reasons. First, it
implies that knowledge of the meaning of ‘thinking’ and ‘existing’ which
Descartes admits he must presuppose, does not yet contain an interesting
truth. It is the connection that exists between the two, i.e. the fact that

thinking and existing are intrinsically and essentially related ontologically

that leads to an interesting truth, whatever their semantic information may
convey independently. Second, this connection must be experienced existen-
tially, so to speak, in order to be known to be true. One must satisfy oneself
of its truth in one’s own case, before one may begin to generalize. There is
no doubt that Descartes understood this maxim to be a general rule. Conse-
quently, third, it is not enough to take over a belief that is widely thought to
be true or universally assented to, one must reflectively endorse one’s beliefs.
The modern subject thus faces the demand that it is itself responsible for
having satisfied itself of the truth of its beliefs. Reliance on the say-so of
others is not sufficient for the endorsement of beliefs as true. Understand-
ably, this places a burden on each individual to be able to justify rationally
the beliefs he or she holds, a burden that may well force us either to remain
agnostic in large areas of human knowledge or to trust the authority of others
after all.
Finally, in laying bare the interiority of the mind as the primary locus of
cognition and truth Descartes makes visible the structure of intentionality of
consciousness mentioned earlier. This in itself has important implications. It
emphasizes the first-person perspective in the acquisition and justification of
knowledge quite generally. But it also has the peculiar effect of making the
individual a witness of his or her own thoughts. I suggest that the witness
aspect adds a typically modern nuance to the concept of self-consciousness.
As a witness of my thoughts, I am not just aware of them as my own. I am
also viewing them like a critical observer. As a witness, I am not just aware
of what goes on in my mind, rather, I am reflectively aware of my thoughts
as a judge. Together with the requirement of the reflective endorsement of
our beliefs the fact that we are also witnesses of our thoughts and beliefs
conveys the idea of ourselves as morally responsible for those beliefs. It could
therefore be said that Descartes’s emphasis on the ego ushers in the modern
conception of the subject as an individual that is accountable not just for his
or her actions, but also for his or her theoretical beliefs, opinions, and con-
victions. While this may represent a revival of the Socratic ethos not to accept
a belief that one cannot give good reasons for, it also takes on a new sig-
nificance in an age that gives priority to the autonomous individual over the
role of custom and community. The individual becomes not only the arbiter
of the truth but also the primary judge of his or her own beliefs and actions.
The ideas of individual responsibility and the conscientious agent become
democratized. The modern subject is a subject that relates reflectively to the
world and to itself.

FROM EPISTEMIC CONDITION TO

ONTOLOGICAL GROUND: KANT’S
TRANSCENDENTAL APPERCEPTION AND
SARTRE’S PRE-REFLECTIVE COGITO
To conclude, I would like to revisit the idea of the original unity of self-
consciousness which we met with in Kant. From a Kantian perspective, we
can see that Locke’s concept of the self as the unity of the self-ascribed
memories of its actions represents a subjective and empirical unity, one that
is contingent on which actions I happen to remember given the psychologi-
cal mechanisms of selective memory and repression. Still, this is already a step
beyond Descartes who regarded the unity of the self as intuitively given.
According to Kant, the (Lockean) empirical or ‘subjectively valid’ unity of
consciousness presupposes an original synthetic unity of self-consciousness
which alone is ‘objectively valid’ (B 140). Roughly speaking, this original
unity is equivalent to a fundamental unity of self and objectivity in general.
The two are strictly speaking synonymous, since the original unified self-
consciousness is nothing but a conceptual synthesis (‘combination’, B 130) of
all possible representations which supplies the abstract concept of a world as
object of consciousness in general but which, as a synthesis, must be some-
thing generated spontaneously by a subject.31 Self and world are one and the
same at this level. They become distinct at the empirical level, where the self
as an empirical unity of consciousness is aware of an object-world opposed
to it due to the objectifying function of the categories of the understanding.
The empirical or subjective unity of consciousness is Locke’s contingent
unity, whereas the unity Kant calls nature or (the sum total of all possible
objects of) experience constitutes a specification or determination of the
objective unity of consciousness. This determinate objectivity emerges
through the cooperation of the manifold of sensible intuition and the
categories of the understanding (more precisely the ‘principles of pure under-
standing’), a cooperation that is itself parasitic upon the original synthetic
unity of self-consciousness. However, this object-world is not yet the same
as the scientifically established view of the world. The Newtonian picture of
nature with its specific assumptions about space, time, and gravity, further
enriched by the Galilean and Keplerian laws of motion, by our knowledge of
the chemical structure of the elements, the subatomic particles, and so on and
so forth, represents a specification of the basic a-priori objectivity made
possible through the additional input of empirical data. It is thus an empiri-
cal objective unity. It would therefore be correct to distinguish three objec-
tive worlds in Kant the original unity of self and world, the primary: but
empirically undetermined objective world which is determined a-priori, and
a secondary objective world which is the result of scientific research and
determined a-posteriori.

It is obviously an important and intriguing question how we are to under-

stand the nature of the original unity of self-consciousness, and what we can
know about it, given that it is not identical either with the subjective unity of
consciousness which is the unity of all the mental states I am aware of and
remember, or the primary a-priori and the secondary a-posteriori objective
unities of consciousness (which latter is the ensemble of all physical events
under the laws of physics). Is the original synthetic unity of self-
consciousness a real subject, albeit indirectly inferred, or merely a theoreti-
cal posit, a pure epistemic condition? This is a difficult question, but if Kant
believed that original synthetic acts really do occur, even if they cannot be
witnessed by any consciousness, then these acts and the agent producing
them must certainly have some ontological status beyond being mere
explanatory principles required by theory. There is indeed evidence that Kant
assumed the real existence of these acts and of an originally self-unifying self-
consciousness. Thus when introducing this original synthetic unity or
‘original apperception’ in the famous §16 of the second edition of the First
Critique, he characterizes it as ‘generating’ the representation ‘I think’ (B
132). The word ‘generate’ (hervorbringen) clearly points to an activity
attributable to an agent rather than to a purely epistemic condition. Further-
more, when Kant explores the nature of the ‘synthetic original unity of apper-
ception’ more closely in §25 of the Transcendental Deduction, he wants to
make it clear that I am conscious of this original self not just as an empirical
self (or as an ‘appearance’), but as this original self (B 157 and footnote a). He
speaks of the ‘existence’ (Dasein) of this original self in this context. The mys-
terious nature of this transcendental self comes to the fore, when Kant
explains that we cannot have a sensible intuition of this our own self. The self
we intuit or are aware of in our mental experience is always the empirical, not
the transcendental self. And yet, the transcendental self is something ‘in us’,
so to speak. So while we have a representation of this self in the thought ‘I’,
this representation lacks an intuitable object (B 157). This means, however,
that we cannot know our transcendental self:
Accordingly, I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I
appear to myself. The consciousness of self is thus very far from being
a knowledge of the self. (B 158)
Later in the Critique, in the chapter on the Paralogisms, Kant takes the
occasion to discuss Descartes’s cogito (cf. B 422, footnote a). Descartes’s ‘I
think’ is not Kant’s ‘I think’. The former is ‘an empirical proposition’, while
the latter, even though expressed by words that also have an empirical refer-
ence, ‘denotes’ but does not present the transcendental ‘I’ of the ‘I think’.
Unlike the Cartesian ‘cogito, ergo sum’, the Kantian proposition ‘I think’ does
not refer to the empirical act of thinking or the empirical self. Instead it
expresses ‘an indeterminate perception [that] signifies only something real

that is given’, albeit not in its self-givenness or as it is in itself, nor as an

appearance. This transcendental self which is here referred to as ‘something
which actually exists’ is given ‘to thought in general’, i.e. as a merely con-
ceptual or ‘intellectual’ representation, i.e. a concept without a proper object.
The transcendental self, then, is a real subject of which we are conscious
through having a ‘perception’ of it, but which is experienced as being present
through its absence, in the sense that despite our being in direct contact with
it, it eludes our grasp. We are aware of this transcendental self, but we only
have an idea of it as an unknown entity which although it is our own self is
yet separated from the self we are empirically conscious of.
There is an interesting analogy here between Kant’s transcendental self and
what Sartre later came to call the pre-reflective cogito. Sartre’s point was that
self-consciousness or self-awareness does not require having a determinate
concept of oneself as oneself. We do not need a concept of our self as distinct
from our object-consciousness in order to be aware of ourselves. We
only need the awareness of ourselves in the object-awareness. Object-
consciousness, Sartre argued, is both the necessary and the sufficient con-
dition of self-consciousness.32 The self exists as mere object-awareness, a
‘reflection-reflecting’ (reflet-reflétant, BN 122), reflecting itself off of the
object, so to speak, without, however, returning into a self distinct from its
object. Instead, it returns into its own object-consciousness. It is the light that
illuminates the object without our being able to view the source of this
illumination directly (much as we see the moonlight, but then cannot see the
sun which is the true source of this illumination). The relationship between
object-awareness and self-awareness represents, Sartre says, ‘not a unity
which contains a duality’ but ‘a duality which is unity’ (BN 123). To put it
paradoxically, it is a duality without a distinction. Nonetheless, according to
Sartre this non-reflective reflection may, in an act of reflexivity, reflect on its
self-awareness as being distinguishable from its object-awareness, it may
tease object-awareness and self-awareness apart from one another. However,
Sartre believes that in so reflecting upon itself as a subject-self it no longer is
the very same cogito that becomes aware of itself while still being focused on
its first object. It becomes in fact another object, an object of contemplation,
a self-as-object which is essentially on a par with other objects that are not
itself, or even selves. This is why somewhat counter-intuitively Sartre can say
in The Transcendence of the Ego that the self as an object of contemplation
and reflection is a public object like any other – or almost.33 In any case, it is
my self, for instance, in so far as it is available to others as well as to myself
to judge, speculate about, criticize, describe. This object-self is my personal-
ity in so far as it expresses my public persona to which I may still have priv-
ileged access, but which is in principle communicable to others, the self others
know me to be. By contrast, my pre-reflective self is as hidden from myself
as it is hidden from others. No amount of reflection can illuminate it. Just as

in the case of Kant’s transcendental self, we can have no knowledge of it, only
an awareness. The reflexivity of which this pre-reflective cogito is capable
confronts it with itself as an object-self, rather than with itself as subject.
Now reflexivity paradoxically reinforces and makes explicit the cleavage
between the pre-reflective cogito and the self as a product of reflection. The
unity or disunity of subject-self and object-self so conceived results in a
structural failure to identify itself with itself, which is just the result Sartre
needs to ground the ‘existential’ interpretation of the self according to which
it is the perpetual failure to unite with itself, an ‘unhappy consciousness’ (BN
140), a ‘detotalized totality’ (BN 250). The self that I most intimately am is
not accessible to myself. I am it, and yet I cannot know it, nor can I ever
become it, although all my striving aims at the coincidence of the subject-self
and the object-self. Accordingly, Sartre points out that Descartes was
mistaken about the true identity of the subject-self. What Descartes referred
to as his ego or consciousness was in truth the object of a thetic conscious-
ness and hence an object-self. The latter presupposes a non-positional
subject-self, namely the pre-reflective cogito. Consequently, instead of for-
mulating the cogito as ‘I think, therefore I am’, Descartes should have said ‘I
think, therefore I was’ (BN 173). As a condition of object-awareness, the pre-
reflective cogito logically precedes the act of object-awareness even while it
is contemporaneous with it.
OUTLOOK
At the end of our reflections on the modern self we seem to have come up
against a puzzling result. Descartes conferred an enormous responsibility
on the individual self-consciousness as the final arbiter of truth and the
primary judge of its own actions. Kant reinforced this responsibility not
only in his theoretical, but also and even more so in his practical phil-
osophy. His moral theory argues that each individual is under the categor-
ical obligation to have all morally relevant decisions conform to the moral
law independently of any prudential considerations or future rewards. The
individual would thus achieve autonomy or self-determination, but it
would at the same time have to admit its inability to become truly moral.
The burden on the self thus seems to have reached a breaking point. Some
two hundred years later, the self has become more and more elusive. And
it is not only the transcendental self that seems to have disappeared. The
empirical self, too, has been analysed into various components and roles in
psychology and sociology to such an extent that the innocent indexical ‘I’
is more and more an umbrella word with no unified meaning. A classical
tradition seems to have been exhausted as the modern self gives way to its
postmodern signifiers.

NOTES
I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of History of the Human Sciences
for their excellent and very helpful suggestions.
1 See, for instance, Oehler (1997: 11–36 and 37–61).

2 Cf. Metaph. XII 9, 1074b 34–5.
3 Cf. De an. III 4, 430a 2–5. On the surface of them, the two passages in Metaph.
XII 9 and De an. III 4 seem to be making essentially the same claim. Nonethe-
less, as long as the object of thinking is a thought and not the thinking of the
thought as is the case with the divine intellect, there ought to be a difference
between them which is essentially the difference between human and divine
thinking.
4 Aristotle says as much at Metaph. XII 9, 1074b 35–6.
5 As far as the qualification of these activities as ‘mental’ is concerned, Aristotle in
De int. 1 seems to distinguish between the mental and the non-mental when he
says that meanings are affections (pathê) of the soul and likenesses of the actual
things.
6 For an example of how to use contemporary approaches in philosophy of mind
for an interpretation of Aristotle’s psychology in De anima, see D. K. W.
Modrack (1987: 15–19).
7 Unlike we moderns, Aristotle believed that thinking was the activity of no bodily
organ (such as the brain, for instance), and hence it could not be destroyed when
the body was (as the faculty of sight would be annihilated when the eye was
destroyed). This may well be the reason why Aristotle needed to distinguish
between a so-called active and a passive intellect. For with the death of the body,
the intellect would have to cease functioning (since it is dependent on phantasia
for the activity of thinking, which is in turn dependent on the sensory organs and
on memory), while on the other hand the intellect as pure energeia cannot
possibly perish.
8 Aristotle’s conception of the soul should therefore not be likened to what today
is called a functionalist account of mental phenomena.
9 Descartes himself was embarrassed by the mind–body dualism he had created.
Not only did he famously try to connect the unthinking extended substance
called body with the unextended thinking substance called mind through the
notorious pineal gland, he also insisted in his correspondence with Regius that
the mind and the body form a per se unity, i.e. a non-accidental, substantial unity,
without, however, being able to provide an account of it. The problem of the per
se unity of mind and body is still very much in evidence in Leibniz’s attempt to
link the monadic entelechy with the mass of corporeal monads in a convincing
fashion. More radical solutions such as Spinoza’s mind–body parallelism which
makes causal interaction redundant may be more attractive from a contempor-
ary perspective. Contemporary literature on the issue is vast and explores all
kinds of sophisiticated avenues: see, for instance, Block, Flanagan and Güzeldere
(1997); Crane and Patterson (2001).
10 For an original attempt to avoid Cartesian dualism without committing to any
of the current materialist, or functionalist, positions, see Dennett (1991).

11 In Hegel, however, self-consciousness becomes a ‘moment’ of a larger, all-

encompassing self-referential and self-determining structure called ‘spirit’
(Geist).
12 Not only does he show his respect for Descartes by calling his investigations
about the nature of the transcendental ego Cartesian Meditations, he also
discusses Descartes’s method there at length.
13 For a defense of consciousness as a phenomenon sui generis and a critique of
eliminativist positions see, for instance, Searle (1992). See also Chalmers (1996).
14 See Descartes (1984, 1985), II, 122.
15 For a discussion and survey of these issues, from Locke to Parfit and other
contemporary philosophers, see, for instance, Noonan (2003). See also Perry
(2001).
16 Recently, the representational or content theory of consciousness has emerged as
an interesting field of debate. I am unable to engage the literature here and refer
the reader instead to Tye (1995), Dretske (1995) and Hofmann (2002).
17 See the study by Fietz (1994). Fietz follows the history of the two polar opposites
of a unified vs. a fragmented self in philosophy, theology, psychology, and
sociology from Plato through Sartre and Mead, and then describes and analyses
the parallel phenomenon in major works of English literature, from Shakespeare
and Sterne to Huxley, Lawrence, and John Fowles, among others.
18 The latter is true, even if the object I am aware of is myself. In that case, I am an
object for myself, and this, as we will see, has some interesting consequences for
the question ‘Who am I?’
19 This argument may go some way towards defending the reality sui generis of
consciousness.
20 This is not to say that Aristotle is not aware of the intentionality structure of
consciousness and of the co-occurrence of object-consciousness and self-
consciousness. Thus he says, at Metaph. XII 9, 1074b 35–6, that knowledge,
perception, belief and reasoning ‘have always something else as their object, and
themselves only by the way’. By contrast, he claims, when thinking grasps the
definition or essence of something, then ‘thought and the object of thought are
not different’ (1075a 1–5).
21 The fact that we are to a certain extent regularly unaware of ourselves becomes
evident when we see ourselves in a video for the first time or even merely listen to
our own voice on a tape recorder. It is then that we become ‘self-conscious’ and
are surprised by how we look, sound, etc. There seems to be a ‘blind spot’ in us
due to which part of ourselves escapes us. Another way of putting this is to say
that we are not in the habit of viewing ourselves from a third-person perspective.
This phenomenon has been exploited to great effect by Sartre in the famous chapter
‘The Look’ in Being and Nothingness. Sartre, however, turned what may well be a
mere contingent limitation into an ontological impossibility with profound – and
not very happy – consequences for our interpersonal relationships.
22 Defending the assumption of final causes Aristotle, at Metaph. II 2, 994b 8–16,
argues as follows: ‘those who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good
without knowing it . . . ; nor would there be reason in the world; the reasonable
man, at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for the end is a limit.’ But
then all things in nature act for a purpose, at least for the most part: see Phys. II 8.

23 An early and striking formulation of the new critical attitude towards potentially
illegitimate subjective admixtures to what we believe to be objective knowledge
is to be found in Francis Bacon: ‘the human understanding is like a false mirror,
which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by
mingling its own nature with it’ (1960: Aphorism I 41). An almost direct line can
be drawn from this statement to Kant’s method of ‘isolating’ the form of
cognition from its matter in order to demarcate exactly the ‘subjective’ contri-
bution to cognition (cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A 22/B36).
24 According to Descartes, our senses give us only an indirect picture of the world,
much like the picture of the wood inferred by a blind man using his stick to
identify the trees along his way (this is Descartes’s own analogy in the Optics).
In Meditation Six, he cautions against a premature inference from representation
to resemblance of idea and object referred to by it.
25 There is a debate in the literature here whether Kant needs to invoke actual
mental operations in the construction of an object-world (and thus commit
himself to a dubious ‘transcendental psychology’), or whether he can be inter-
preted as reconstructing ‘epistemic conditions’ which have merely explanatory
or theoretical value. For a discussion see Allison (2004).
26 See also Kant’s ‘Refutation of Idealism’ which tries to establish ‘that we have
experience and not merely imagination of outer things, which cannot be
accomplished unless one can prove that even our inner experience, undoubted by
Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience’
(Critique of Pure Reason, B 275).
27 Another way of marking the difference between Descartes’s pre-transcendental
and Kant’s transcendental position would be to say that for Descartes there is
only one kind of extended world, namely the world of objects, whether physical
or geometrical. The unknowable for him is not a thing-in-itself but rather the
side of the ordinary object that cannot be sensibly represented, whose essential
properties, extension in particular, can, however, be known with evidence or else
inferred on the basis of the laws of physics and of motion.
28 Kant therefore distinguishes between an original synthetic unity of self-
consciousness and a derivative analytic unity: cf. B 133.
29 See the famous statement at B 134 footnote: ‘the synthetic unity of apperception
is the highest point to which one must affix all use of the understanding, even the
whole of logic and, after it, transcendental philosophy; indeed this faculty is the
understanding itself.’
30 In my estimation, the primary theoretician today of the universal validity of
norms based on intersubjectively generated consensus would be Jürgen
Habermas. See his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action (1985),
which first appeared in German in 1981, and Moral Consciousness and Communi-
cative Action (1992), first in German in 1983. The work of John Rawls has had a
similar importance in the English-speaking world. Both philosophers acknowl-
edge a significant influence on their position of Kantian ideas.
31 Cf. B 139: ‘The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which
all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object.’
32 Cf. Sartre (1993: 10–17).
33 Sartre (1960: 94–6).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allison, H. (2004) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense,

2nd revised edn. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Bacon, F. (1960) The New Organon, ed. F. H. Anderson. New York: Macmillan/
Library of Liberal Arts.
Block, N. J., Flanagan, O. and Güzeldere, G., eds (1997) The Nature of Conscious-
ness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crane, T. and Patterson, S., eds (2001) History of the Mind–Body Problem. London
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Dennett, D. C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Boston, MA, New York, Toronto and
London: Little, Brown.
Descartes, R. (1984, 1985) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols, trans. J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch. Cambridge, New York, New
Rochelle, Melbourne and Sydney: Cambridge University Press.
Dretske, F. (1995) Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fietz, L. (1994) Fragmentarisches Existieren. Wandlungen des Mythos von der verlore-
nen Ganzheit in der Geschichte philosophischer, theologischer und literarischer
Menschenbilder. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Habermas, J. (1985) The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. Boston, MA:
Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1992) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Hofmann, F. (2002) Natur und Begriff des Bewußtseins. Eine repräsentationalistische
Theorie des Bewußtseins. Paderborn: Mentis.
Kant, I. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason, from The Cambridge Edition of the Works
of Immanuel Kant, ed. and trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge, New
York, Melbourne and Madrid: Cambridge University Press.
Modrack, D. K. W. (1987) Aristotle: The Power of Perception. Chicago, IL and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Noonan, H. W. (2003) Personal Identity, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge.
Oehler, K. (1997) Subjektivität und Selbstbewußtsein in der Antike. Würzburg:
Königshausen & Neumann.
Perry, J. (2001) Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Sartre, J.-P. (1960) The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness, trans. with intro. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill
& Wang.
Sartre, J.-P. (1993) Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes. New York: Washington
Square Press.
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Tye, M. (1995) Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
KLAUS BRINKMANN is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston Uni-

versity. His publications include books on Aristotle and the history of politi-
cal philosophy as well as articles on Aristotle, Hegel, Fichte and Jaspers. A
major study of the philosophy of Hegel titled ‘Idealism Without Limits:
Hegel and the Objectivity Problem’ is currently under review for publica-
tion.
Address: Klaus Brinkmann, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department

of Philosophy, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA
02215, USA. [email: brinkman@bu.edu]

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History of The Human Sciences: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and The Modern Self

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Consciousness, self-consciousness, and the modern self

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Philosophical interest in the phenomena of consciousness and self-

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28 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

perception, imagination, and discursive reasoning, among others. And yet,

A CLUSTER OF ISSUES: MIND–BODY

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topic of consciousness has taken on in recent decades. Traditionally, the

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30 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

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enduring self to be found in introspection, although he was far from denying

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32 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

bodily criteria or not, or whether it can only be determined with reference to

FROM THE PRE-MODERN TO THE MODERN

Above I singled out self-awareness and intentionality as the hallmarks of the

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different things. Object-awareness is awareness of an object, while awareness

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34 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

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the above inference by stipulating: No mind, no mind-dependence, no

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36 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

whether there is a world (or nature) without self-consciousness is not just

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abstraction covering indefinitely many shades of red, and we understand that

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38 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

it relates to our ordinary consciousness and if we can know anything about

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thinking and existing are intrinsically and essentially related ontologically

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40 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

FROM EPISTEMIC CONDITION TO

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It is obviously an important and intriguing question how we are to under-

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42 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

that is given’, albeit not in its self-givenness or as it is in itself, nor as an

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1 See, for instance, Oehler (1997: 11–36 and 37–61).

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11 In Hegel, however, self-consciousness becomes a ‘moment’ of a larger, all-

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46 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)

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Allison, H. (2004) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense,

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48 HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES 18(4)