Abstract
I contend that the well-established phenomenological distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-awareness needs to be further supplemented with more refined distinctions between different modes of pre-reflective self-awareness. Here I distinguish between five modes, which we come across in perception, lucid dreams, non-lucid dreams, daydreams, and episodic memory. Building on the basis of a phenomenological description, I argue that perception entails the pre-reflective self-awareness of the perceiving ego; non-lucid dreams implicate the pre-reflective self-awareness of the dreamed (and not the dreaming) ego; in the case of lucid dreams and daydreams, we are faced with a split pre-reflective self-awareness, which entails the self-awareness of the (day)dreaming and the (day)dreamed ego. Lastly, in the case of episodic recollection, we are confronted with a threefold pre-reflective self-awareness: the self-awareness of the remembered ego, the remembering ego, and of the temporal unity of experience. The phenomenological analysis here offered leads to the conclusion that pre-reflective self-awareness need not be spoken of in the singular, but in the plural, and that while some modes of pre-reflective self-awareness constitute the foundations of selfhood, others enable the subject of experience to flee its facticity and become someone other than it is.
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Notes
What is the minimal self? An answer can be offered along the following lines: what distinguishes my own experiences from those of everyone else is that my own experiences are given to me as mine. Yet clearly—so runs the argument—the sense of mineness must refer to some kind of a self. To make sense of this dimension of mineness, which is an irreducible dimension of all experience, one must devise a minimal conception of the self, that is, that kind of self without which experience as such would not be possible. The phenomenological discussions of the minimal self are guided by such a task. Methodologically, they are guided by the intuition that the first-personal givenness that characterizes experiential life provides the experiential sense of the self, understood as the minimal self. Juxtaposing the minimal self to other established conceptions of selfhood, phenomenologists maintain that the minimal self is neither the Cartesian subject, nor a transcendental precondition of experience, nor, finally, a social construct, but an irreducible dimension of experience. As Zahavi puts it, it is “possible to identify this prereflective sense of mineness with a minimal, or core, sense of self… it is this first-personal givenness that constitutes the mineness or ipseity of experience” (Zahavi, 2005, 125).
Consider, for instance, the following claim: “the ego… is the center of radiating or receiving rays with regard to all conscious life, the center of affection and action, of all attention, grasping, relating, connecting… (Husserl, 1989, 112). This concept plays an especially prominent role in the C manuscripts (see Husserl, 2006).
Presentation is “the act that places something before our eyes as the thing itself, the act that originally constitutes the object. Its opposite is presentification, or re-presentation (Vergegenwärtigung, Re-Präsentation), understood as the act that does not place an object itself before our eyes but just presentifies it” (Husserl, 1991, 43; translation modified).
Admittedly, there is some controversy in the literature whether dreams should be qualified as presentifications. Some scholars suggest that dreams are neither presentations nor presentifications and that they form a third category of experiences, the so-called “third life of subjectivity” (see in this regard de Warren, 2012). For reasons that will become apparent in the next section, here I will rely on the Husserlian perspective, which invites us to conceptualize dreams as a specific type of presentifications.
Lucid dreams are those unusual dreams that the dreamer recognizes as dreams. One is absorbed in the dreamworld, while one nonetheless keeps a safe distance from this world, a distance that relies upon the dreamer’s inner awareness that they are dreaming. By contrast, non-lucid dreams, which are much more common, are those dreams which the dreamer does not recognize as dreams while dreaming.
Husserl’s reflections on dreams are to be found in four frameworks: in a number of manuscripts on phantasy and image consciousness that are collected in Husserliana XXIII (see Husserl, 2005), in a manuscript written in October 1923 that was published as Appendix XVII in Husserliana XXXIX (see Husserl, 2008, 219–224), in an exchange of letters with Jean Hering in the early 1930s (see Husserl 1993, 118–121), and in a manuscript from 1933, E III 6, which was published in Husserliana XLII in two separate segments (see Husserl, 2014, 495–501 and 520–523). The reflections that we come across in these frameworks do not constitute a coherent conception of dreams, which is understandable, given that Husserl’s earliest reflections on dreams date back to 1905, while the latest were composed in the 1930s.
Another reason concerns the fact that all forms of presentification imply the possibility of multiple iterations. I can have a memory in a memory, an anticipation in an anticipation, a phantasy in a phantasy, as well as a dream in a dream. By contrast, I cannot have a perception in a perception.
The German reads as follows: “das Traumweltlich träumt nicht, es nimmt wahr” (Husserl 1993, 119).
Can we say that while dreaming relies on some kind of activity on the part of the sleeper, dreamless sleep is characterized by pure passivity in the sense that it marks the disappearance of any kind of phenomenal consciousness? Such a conclusion would be premature. Some recent research suggests that consciousness does not disappear even in dreamless sleep (see Windt et al., 2016). While arguing that some kind of phenomenal consciousness is preserved in dreamless sleep, these authors contend that this form of self-awareness could be understood either as the awareness of temporal experience (of the now and of duration), or as the feeling of being alive. They further suggest that alongside the distinction between lucid and non-lucid dreams, we could also draw a further distinction between lucid and non-lucid dreamless sleep.
We come across the same insight in a recent study by Evan Thompson, who also stresses that the dreaming relies upon the ego splitting into the dreaming and the dreamed ego. Yet as Thompson remarks, the I as dreamer and the I as dreamed “are not two entities or things; they’re two kinds of self-awareness, two modes of self-experience” (Thompson, 2015, 140).
As Husserl remarks in his letter to Hering, “the dreamworld is a pseudo-world, the dream-ego is a pseudo-ego. ‘Pseudo’ here has the sense of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung)” (Husserl, 1994, 120).
This is, in fact, what distinguishes both perception and dreaming from the hypnagogic state, which marks the loss of any kind of world, be it the actual or the dream world. For a classical phenomenological analysis of the hypnagogic state, see Sartre (2006). For a more recent phenomenological analysis, see Thompson (2015).
As far as the second point is concerned, consider Evan Thompson’s account of the “afternoon naps when I’m in a state of sleep paralysis and know I’m dreaming. On several occasions, I’ve managed to produce the feeling of a second body by imagining my body moving. Instead of fighting the paralysis and trying to move my real body [an action, which would result in awakening—SG], I try to visualize my body getting up and looking back at my body in the bed” (Thompson, 2015, 228). We can take this to mean that, if consciousness is to remain in the dream, it must either suppress any movement on the part of the actual body, or it must apperceive the actual movements as the movements of the dreamed body.
In a recent case study, Bhat speaks of a video showing a patient jumping up in bed during deep sleep and raising his arm (see Bhat, 2012, 445–446). Does this provide proof that a person in deep sleep can be aware of his actual embodied self? Not really, for as the case study demonstrates, the patient subsequently reported that in his dream, he was trying to support a collapsing roof.
“And then I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation of lying on my chest would change into the sensation of lying on my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition—which I have since undergone many times—is most wonderful. It is like the feeling of slipping from one body into another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two bodies… This observation of a double memory I have had many times since.” (van Eeden, 1969, 153).
In the present context, I will employ the terms “memory,” “recollection,” and “remembrance” interchangeably. For the most important phenomenological studies of recollection, see Husserl (2005), Fink (1966), Conrad (1968), Merleau-Ponty (2010), Brough (1975), Casey (2000), Mishara (1990), Stawarska (2002), Ricoeur (2006), Rowlands (2017).
For a comprehensive overview of contemporary classifications of memory, see the articles collected in the Oxford handbook of memory, especially Endel Tulving’s “Concepts of Memory” (Tulving, 2000, 33–43) and Roger Ratcliff’s and Gail McCoon’s “Memory Models” (571–581).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by General Research Fund (GRF) Grant. Project Title: Phenomenology of Absorption: A Study of Displaced Self-Awareness. Granting Agency: Research Grants Council (RGC) from the Research Grants Council University Grants Committee [grant number 14603820] in Hong Kong. I would also like to thank Nicolas de Warren and the anonymous reviewer at Husserl Studies for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.
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Geniusas, S. Modes of Self-Awareness: Perception, Dreams, Memory. Husserl Stud 38, 151–170 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09301-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09301-9