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Consciousness and Self-Consciousness

What is the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness? In recent philosophy of mind, we are accustomed to underlining their independence. It is often emphasized that a person can be conscious of a host of objects, features, and states of affairs unrelated to her. When a person is conscious of the sky, or consciously experiences the blueness of the sky, she is not attending to herself in the least. That is, she is not self-conscious. Yet she is very clearly conscious. Therefore, consciousness can occur in the absence of self-consciousness. I think there is something amiss in this picture. I will argue that consciousness essentially involves self-consciousness, in the sense that the former cannot occur in the absence of the latter. The argument will proceed as follows. In §1, I will discuss a familiar distinction between transitive consciousness and intransitive consciousness, and argue that the former depends upon the latter. In §2, I will introduce a parallel distinction between two modes of self-consciousness, which I will call transitive selfconsciousness and intransitive self-consciousness. In §3, I will argue that the common reasons for claiming that consciousness is independent of self-consciousness apply only to transitive self-consciousness. And in §4, I will argue that when it comes to intransitive self-consciousness, it appears that no consciousness can occur in its absence. In that sense, consciousness is dependent upon intransitive selfconsciousness.