AUTOCOSCIENZA. – Consciousness, awareness of oneself. Whereas consciousness (v.) indicates rather the awareness of the subject’s acts in their objective presence, and of the content of the various psychic states, a. instead designates the awareness that the subject has of himself insofar as he is a subject; that noetic moment, that is, in which the I, setting itself in opposition to the objects and the very acts of its experience, apprehends itself as I; even though a principle of a. is often not lacking in ordinary consciousness accompanying psychic states, perceived as one’s own, as ours.
The concept of a., I (v.), to which it is intimately linked, has held and continues to hold a very important place in the history of philosophy, especially because of the complexity it has come to assume in modern philosophy. Aristotle already conceives Pure Act as absolute a., Thought of thought (ἡ νόησις νόησως, Met., XII, 9, 1074 b, 34); and he further asserts in general the identity of thinker and thought in every knower devoid of matter (De Anima, III, 4, 430 a, 3-4). The concept of absolute a. reappears in Plotinus through the fundamental identity of the Intellect (νόος) 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. The soul too attains this supreme a. through mystical-contemplative identification with the Intellect and with the One (cf. Enneads, IV, 4, 2). While affirming in the soul the intuitive cognition of itself, “mens semetipsam per seipsam novit” (De Trin., IX, 3, 2), S. Agostino seeks in a. the critical foundation of truth and certainty against every sceptical objection (De Civ. Dei, XI, 46). S. Tommaso, besides taking up again the Aristotelian 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 a., which is realized in the knowledge that the soul has of itself through its own acts (cf. De Ver., 10, 8; C. Gent., III, 46). The gnoseological value of a. becomes, as is well known, central in Cartesio, who places in the “cogito ergo sum” the principle of the whole of 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, a. is the pure or original application of the “I think that accompanies every other representation and is in every consciousness one and identical” (cf. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in I. Kant's Werke, ed. E. Cassirer, II, Berlin 1922-23; Italian trans., part 1ᵃ, Bari 1920, p. 130 ff.). Thus begins the transfer of a. to the transcendental plane: a position that idealism will take up, developing it to its ultimate logical consequences. From Fichtean idealism, in which a. is the conscious activity of the subject which, while unfolding in objective contents, is reflected in itself, one arrives at Gentilian actualism, in which a., understood “not as consciousness that presupposes the Self, its object, but rather as consciousness that posits it” (G. Gentile, Teoria gen. d. Spirito come Atto puro, Florence 1938, p. 98), acquires the very positivity and extension of being, resolving itself into the whole of reality in its eternal constitution and becoming (cf. op. cit., pp. 230-31).
The position of Christian philosophy with regard to a. remains dualist and substantialist: dualist, insofar as, against every form of transcendental idealism, it affirms the transcendence of absolute a. in relation to human, relative, and manifold a.; substantialist, moreover—as regards the metaphysical interpretation of human a.—insofar as, in the face of the various empiricist-phenomenalist positions (Hume, Taine, Ribot, Wundt), which dissolve the I into acts and states of consciousness, of which it would be an illusory superstructure or epiphenomenon, it instead affirms it as a substantial and dynamic principle that produces the acts themselves and binds them together in the immanent unity of consciousness. As for the gnoseological function of a. in a critical system of knowledge, V. CONOSCENZA.