Reflexive Awareness and Other Awareness

Reflexive awareness enables us to be aware of ourselves. We are also aware of others as subjects of consciousness, that is, beings who are aware. The question of this post is how the two capacities are related.

Object-awareness suffices for being aware of others as beings. It may, however, present others as mere objects. Something further, or a special kind of object-awareness, is needed to be aware of the fact that someone has a mental life of some sort.

There are five ways in which these two capacities might be related. Reflexive awareness might depend on other awareness, other awareness might depend on reflexive awareness, both might depend on a third thing, the two capacities might be interdependent, or they might be independent. In addition, in the first three cases, the dependence may also be such that what is depended on is also sufficient for what is dependent on it, and, since it seems quite implausible that one might find one of these two capacities without the other, these are the varieties of the first three hypotheses which I will be interested in. For the same reason, I reject the final possibility.

Let us take these possibilities in order, then. If reflexive awareness only depends on other awareness, then reflexive awareness should be able to be explained in terms of other awareness. There are at least two varieties of this idea. One is the idea that we are aware of our own awareness by the same means as we are aware of others' awareness. The idea is that we turn our capacity to understand others on ourselves. Another is the idea that we first recognize awareness as distinct from the contents of awareness in virtue of recognizing that others also possess awareness. The idea here is that, in order to recognize our own awareness, we must recognize it as one instance among others.

If the dependency is switched, so that other awareness depends on reflexive awareness, then the idea is that we generalize from our own case of awareness to others' cases of awareness. This need not be the claim that we actually go through an argument for other minds by analogy. It may be that we directly recognize others as like us, and presume that they are like us in their experiences as well as their behaviors.

Next, there may be third capacity, or other feature, on which both capacities depend and which is sufficient for both. Clearly, both capacities need a perceiving subject if there is to be awareness at all, but the idea here is that something more in the subject would produce both reflexive awareness and other awareness. This, it seems to me, is roughly Merleau-Ponty's view, since he holds that the distinction between self and other arises out of an original undifferentiated subjectivity from which we abstract ourselves and others. On his account, as I understand it, we understand our own and others' bodies, originally, simply as bodies, and gradually learn to distinguish ourselves from others. This is, incidentally, compatible with the next option, and Merleau-Ponty's articulation of it involves the next option.

Finally, the two capacities may be interdependent. The question here is whether we wind up with the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. We can easily see that the distinction between self and other requires both terms if it is to make sense. I am a self only as distinct from some other, and others are other only to me. This is an idea taken from the idea that reflexive awareness might be dependent on other awareness. We can also take the idea that we use roughly the same capacity to recognize our own and others' awareness. We can also recognize the fact that my own experience of the world through my body affects how I interpret others. We tend to project ourselves onto others, and this makes some sense if we use ourselves as models of subjectivity (this idea comes from Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds). This may be understood as a neutral process, however: it is not as though I am solid and project my solid self on others, rather, I and others are fluid, and pass into and understand one another via projecting ourselves onto others and accepting others into ourselves. I hope that metaphor makes some kind of sense. It is roughly how I understand Merleau-Ponty's view. The idea is that we learn to be selves by using ourselves to model others' selfhood, and at the same time learn about others through how we have learned to be selves. The same body both models others and mimics others via the same mechanism. It becomes less porous over time, as one learns to be a self more, but it retains some degree of porosity.