Self-consciousness. — Consciousness, awareness of oneself. While consciousness (q.v.) rather indicates awareness of the subject’s acts in their objective presence and of the content of various psychic states, self-consciousness instead designates the awareness that the subject has of itself as subject; that is, the noetic moment in which the ego, by opposing itself to the objects and even to the acts of its experience, grasps itself as the “I,” even though a principle of self-consciousness is often present in ordinary consciousness that accompanies psychic states felt as one’s own.
The concept of self-consciousness, like that of the ego (q.v.) to which it is intimately linked, has held and continues to hold an important place in the history of philosophy, especially because of the complexity it has assumed in modern philosophy. Already Aristotle conceives of the Pure Act as absolute self-consciousness, “thought thinking itself” (ἡ νόησις νοήσεως, Met., XII, 9, 1074 b, 34); and he further affirms in general the identity of the thinker and the thought in every knower devoid of matter (De Anima, III, 4, 430 a, 3-4). The concept of absolute self-consciousness reappears in Plotinus through the fundamental identity of the Intellect (νοῦς) with things: “The I is all things, and things and the I are but one.” The intellect, therefore, by contemplating itself contemplates things, and by contemplating things contemplates itself. To this supreme self-consciousness the soul also attains through mystical-contemplative identification with the Intellect and the One (cf. Enneads, IV, 4, 2). St. Augustine, while affirming in the soul an intuitive knowledge of itself, “mens semetipsam per seipsam novit” (De Trin., IX, 3, 2), seeks in self-consciousness the critical foundation of truth and certainty against every skeptical challenge (De Civ. Dei, XI, 26). St. Thomas, besides adopting Aristotle’s concept of God as Pure Act, in whom there is absolute identity of being and thought, “in Deo enim idem est esse et intelligere” (De Pot., 8, 1 in c.), does not neglect the reality of human self-consciousness, which is realized in the soul’s knowledge of itself through its own acts (cf. De Ver., 10, 8; C. Gent., III, 46). The epistemological value of self-consciousness becomes, as is well known, central in Descartes, who places in the “cogito ergo sum” the principle of all philosophy (cf. Medit., II, in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, VII, Paris 1897-1913; Italian trans., I, Bari 1928, p. 95).
In Kant, self-consciousness is the pure or original apperception of the “I think” that accompanies every other representation and is one and identical in every consciousness (cf. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in I. Kant’s Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, II, Berlin 1922-23; Italian trans., part 1°, Bari 1920, p. 130 ff.). Thus begins the transfer of self-consciousness to the transcendental plane—a position that idealism will resume and develop to its ultimate logical consequences. From Fichtean idealism, in which self-consciousness is the conscious activity of the subject that, while unfolding into objective contents, is reflected in itself, one arrives at Gentile’s actualism, in which self-consciousness, understood “not as consciousness that presupposes the Self as its object, but as consciousness that posits it” (G. Gentile, Teoria gen. d. Spirito come Atto puro, Florence 1938, p. 98), acquires the positivity and extension of being itself, resolving into its eternal constitution and becoming all reality (cf. op. cit., pp. 230-31).
The position of Christian philosophy regarding self-consciousness remains dualist and substantialist: dualist, inasmuch as against every form of transcendental idealism it affirms the transcendence of absolute self-consciousness with respect to human self-consciousness, which is relative and manifold; and substantialist—with regard to the metaphysical interpretation of human self-consciousness—inasmuch as, in contrast to various empirico-phenomenistic positions (Hume, Taine, Ribot, Wundt), which resolve the ego into acts and states of consciousness of which it would be an illusory product or epiphenomenon, it affirms the ego instead as a substantial and dynamic principle that produces and unites those very acts and states in the immanent unity of consciousness. As for the epistemological function of self-consciousness in a critical system of knowledge, see KNOWLEDGE.