Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification - ResearchGate

146 PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS AND CLASSIFICATION
perception, or thought from the first-person perspective, the experience
in question is given immediately, non-inferentially as mine, i.e. I do not
first scrutinize a specific perception or feeling of pain, and subsequently
identify it as mine. Phenomenologically speaking, we are never conscious
of an object as such, but always of the object as appearing in a certain way as
judged, seen, feared, remembered, smelled, anticipated, tasted, etc.). The
object is given through the experience, and if there is no awareness of
the experience, the object does not appear at all. This dimension of selfawareness,
its first-personal givenness, is therefore a medium in which
specific modes of experience are articulated. Following these analyses, selfawareness
cannot be equated with reflective thematic, conceptual, mediated)
self-awareness. On the contrary, reflective self-awareness presupposes
a prereflective unthematic, tacit, non-conceptual, immediate) self-awareness.
Self-awareness is not something that only comes about the moment I
realize that I am perceiving the Empire State Building, or realize that I am the
bearer of private mental states, or refer to myself using the first person
pronoun. On the contrary, it is legitimate to speak of a more primitive type
of self-awareness whenever I am conscious of my feeling of joy, or my
burning thirst, or my perception of the Empire State Building. If the experience
is given in a first-personal mode of presentation to me, it is at least
tacitly) given as my experience, and therefore counts as a case of self-awareness.
The first-personal givenness of an experience, its very self-manifestation,
is the most basic form of selfhood, usually called ipseity [30±32]. To be
aware of oneself is not to apprehend a pure self apart from the experience,
but to be acquainted with an experience in its first-personal mode of presentation,
that is, from ``within''. That is, the subject or self referred to is not
something standing opposed to, or apart from or beyond experience, but
rather a feature or function of its givenness.
Given these considerations, it is obvious that all phenomenal consciousness
is a basic form of self-awareness. Whenever I am acquainted with an
experience in its first-personal mode of givenness, whenever I live it
through, that is whenever there is a ``what it is like'' involved with its
inherent ``quality'' of myness, we are dealing with a form of self-awareness:
`` . . . all subjective experience is self-conscious in the weak sense that there is
something it is like for the subject to have that experience. This involves
a sense that the experience is the subject's experience, that it happens to
her, occurs in her stream'' [33]. More recently, Antonio Damasio has also
defended a comparable thesis: ``If `self-consciousness' is taken to mean
`consciousness with a sense of self', then all human consciousness is necessarily
covered by the termÐthere is just no other kind of consciousness as
far as I can see'' [34].
This primitive and fundamental notion of self must be contrasted to what
might be called explicit ``I-consciousness''; an awareness of oneself as a