Self-Awareness

When one is aware, one are aware of something. To be self-aware is to be aware of oneself. One can be aware without being aware of oneself if, for instance, one is aware of a ball in front of oneself instead. But is this right? If one is aware of a ball in front of oneself, isn't one implicitly aware of oneself? This turns on what we mean by awareness.

There are, potentially, at least two ways in which one can be aware of something. One can have the object of awareness before one, or one may have the object of awareness as an understood correlate of one's experience. When one is aware of a tree, for instance, one is aware of the part of the tree facing one, but one is also aware of the whole tree. The back and insides of the tree are merely understood as the correlate of the front of the tree. Likewise, then, one may be aware of oneself as one examines oneself or as one recognizes oneself as a correlate of one's experience as centered on a body.

When one views a tree, the existence of a front and behind, of a left and right, involves a relation to the point of view from which it is viewed, and thus the experience entails a perceiving being. This may be noted more or less. It is possible that animals might have experiences which imply their particular beings without noticing this implication. They would thus be self-aware in a very weak sense. We are able to direct our awareness to the implied particular being, ourselves, and thus shift from being aware of ourselves as an understood correlate to the direct object of awareness.

If one means by awareness only direct awareness, then one can be aware of things without being aware of oneself. If one means both varieties of awareness, then any being with awareness at all is aware of itself. I suspect that, when we are discussing self-awareness, we mean awareness of the direct kind.

We may be peculiar in being able to reflect on the perspectival nature of our engagement with the world. One can notice that One is seeing things only from one's own point of view, and one can reflect on how one's point of view may alter what one sees. One can do this at several levels, not only with perception of objects, where one can consider the possible effects of optical illusions, obstructions, and deception, but also with our thoughts. One can thus consider how ideas appear to one perspectivally, and hence how one's considerations may be being altered. One can ask, for instance, what would make one's argument stronger or weaker.

We might structure kinds of self-awareness by what elements of the self the awareness takes in. Some creatures might be self-aware in recognizing that their perceptions are perspectivally bound and might therefore engage in a particular kind of exploratory or group behavior. One might suppose that the use of lookouts hints at this degree of self-awareness in many creatures. Others may be aware that their thoughts are perspectivally bound in that they are restricted by the ideas they are aware of and their cognitive capacities. Others may recognize that their emotions are perspectivally bound, and this in one of two ways. Their emotions are perspectivally bound in being elicited by what they are aware of from their perspectival vantage point, but their emotions are also perspectivally bound by being an expression of their particular values. The former kind of self-awareness, I would suspect, would be more common, or stronger, than the latter. As humans, we are capable of all of these varieties of self-awareness. Some of these come more naturally than others. The perceptual and the first emotional kinds are likely the most straightforward, whereas those relating to thoughts and the latter emotional kind take more effort or reflection. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to genuinely wonder whether one's conclusions are accurate and whether one's emotional reactions are fitting.