Self-consciousness

“ Life was driving at brains—at its darling object: an organ by which it can attain not only self-consciousness but self-understanding. ”

“ What deeper human mystery is there than the Ego? On the other hand, if I have completely solved the problem of self-consciousness, and if I am aware at this instant of the solution, so as to verify all that, as a fact, I am, then, for the same reason as the one before cited, I have present to myself an infinity of contents of consciousness. The maintainer of our thesis does not intend to assert that the Ego of this instant, of whom he speaks, does at present consciously verify this infinity of facts. ”

“ So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling as immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness of ourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational,... only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection to our will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of all our mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our self-consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the same time. ”

“ In what sense, despite this complexity and variability of the individual self-consciousness as it comes to us empirically, have we still a right to say that there is in the universe a real, and, within the range of our individual experience, a permanent being, to be called this individual Ego? ”

“ From this point the consciousness, which has only recognized itself, its own pure being in its objects and their determinations, and for which therefore every other thing than itself has, as such, no significance, becomes the self-like Ego, and rises to the truth and certainty of itself to self-consciousness. ”

“ The idealist, looking first within, perceives that self-consciousness is the great fact of life, and that consciousness expresses itself in words or deeds; then he looks outward, and is aware of another Consciousness that expresses itself in the lowly grass or in the stars of heaven. ”

“ We distinguish also ourself from that consciousness which is memory, the awareness of past experience, from present feelings, desires, thoughts, and strivings—these, we say, belong to the self but are not it. The self must have qualities and dwell in the body, guiding, directing, and controlling it, yet this self we never perceive, nor can we conceive it, for our idea of it is of a reality that changes and is yet unchangeable. ”

“ We have seen how our empirical self-consciousness gets formed; namely, as what we have called a social contrast-effect, which arises within the circle of our actual and empirical consciousness. We are primarily conscious of the self as a very varying, unstable, and ill-defined mass of contents — thoughts, wishes, interests, memories, desires, sensations — which we find different from, and opposed to, or contrasted with, a largely ideal world of contents which we conceive as the minds, wishes, interests, etc., of others, namely, our fellows in society. ”

“ Not to be conscious of one's self is, mentally speaking, not to be. This complex entity, this little cosmos of a world, the 'I,' has for its very law of existence, self-consciousness, while personality is the effect it produces upon the consciousness of others. ”

“ Look here, now, I’ll tell you what you do. You forget all about your dear little self and get over being—being—gee, what’s the word I want? Being self-conscious! That’s it! That’s your trouble, self-consciousness. ”

“ We have spoken of acquaintance with the contents of our minds as self-consciousness, but it is not, of course, consciousness of our self: it is consciousness of particular thoughts and feelings. The question whether we are also acquainted with our bare selves, as opposed to particular thoughts and feelings, is a very difficult one, upon which it would be rash to speak positively. ”

“ Even when, as an introspective psychologist, I sit down to study the formation of resolutions or the peculiarities of emotional moods by reflection on my own experience, the state in which I study the formation of a resolution or the nature of a mood is not itself the state of resolving or of experiencing the mood in question. We cannot too strongly insist that, if by “self-consciousness” is meant a cognitive state which is its own object, there is no such thing, and it is a psychological impossibility that there should be any such thing, as self-consciousness. ”

“ This universal re-appearance of self-consciousness—the notion which is aware of itself in its objectivity as a subjectivity identical with itself and for that reason universal—is the form of consciousness which lies at the root of all true mental or spiritual life—in family, fatherland, state, and of all virtues, love, friendship, valour, honour, fame. ”

“ How, I may be asked, if self-consciousness is no more than you say, do we take one object as self and another as not-self? Why is the observed object perceived at all in the character of self? This is a question, I think, not difficult to answer, so far at least as is required for our purpose here. The all-important point is this, that the unity of feeling never disappears. ”

“ We may think "I am I" at the very dawn of consciousness under the pressure of a vague motive of clearing up a confused situation. We may use our reason at the very dawn of consciousness under the pressure of a vague motive of alleviating the distress of disorder with the comfort of order. But, on the other hand, self-consciousness may play its part, reason may play its part and the will may play its part in the complete absence of any definite motive. ”

“ Self-consciousness had again demonstrated its incompetence for superintending a task. Many of us, far from regarding self-consciousness as a ground of goodness, are disposed to look upon it as a curse. ”

“ If the reader will recall the discussions of the preceding chapter, he may, I think, convince himself on this point. Take the self, either at one time or throughout any duration, and its contents do not seem to arrange themselves as a harmony. Nor have we, so far, found a principle by the application of which we are enabled to arrange them without contradiction, (ii.) But self-consciousness, we may be told, is a special way of intuition, or perception, or what you will. ”

“ {xix} Reader!—You have been bred in a land abounding with men, able in arts, learning, and knowledges manifold, this man in one, this in another, few in many, none in all. But there is one art, of which every man should be master, the art of reflection. If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all? In like manner, there is one knowledge, which it is every man's interest and duty to acquire, namely, self-knowledge: or to what end was man alone, of all animals, endued by the Creator with the faculty of self-consciousness? ”

“ This self-consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and bringing its truth to consciousness, has in its faith and in its conscience only what it has consciously secured in its spiritual actuality. ”

“ By the time, however, that a clear concept of self has been attained the exigencies of life make it a frequent object of contemplation, and as the abstract of a series of instances of such definite self-consciousness we reach the purely formal notion of a subject or pure ego. ”

“ Thus consciousness in sensation is keenest when impressions are strongest; but this consciousness is a bar to intellectual self-consciousness, as was pointed out by Professor Ferrier in his general Law of consciousness.20-1 When emotion and sensation are at their minimum, one is most conscious of the solidarity of one’s thoughts; and just in proportion to the vividness of self-consciousness is thought lucid and strong. In an ideal intelligence, self-consciousness would be infinite, sensation infinitesimal. ”

“ This revelation of self-consciousness, working in isolation, has as its result the conception of one universal "I am I" or cosmic self, which is nothing more or less than the whole universe, contemplating itself as its own object. To this conception are we driven, when in isolation from the soul's other attributes our self-consciousness gives itself up to its own activity. ”

“ The consciousness of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. ”

“ After the foregoing general analysis of the function of self-consciousness, nothing, at first sight, could seem more incongruous than to speak of our Absolute, in its wholeness, as possessing, in any essential sense, an absolute self-consciousness. For the category of Self-Consciousness appears in our account as primarily one of limitation, of contrast, of relative separation between Self and Other. ”

“ The essential basis he finds in the real consciousness, of self as an active striving power, and the stages of its development, corresponding to what one may call the relative importance of the external conditions and the reflective clearness of self-consciousness he designates as the affective, the perceptive and the reflective. ”

“ Self-consciousness, therefore, is the essence of the mind, because it is in virtue of self-consciousness that the mind is the mind—that a man is himself. Deprive him of this characteristic, this fundamental attribute, and he ceases to be an intelligence. He loses his essence. Restore this, and his intelligent character returns. Perhaps these remarks may assist in restoring to the word "essence" its right signification, and in dissipating the psychological hallucination, that the essence of the mind is inconceivable.
This proposition reduces the ego per se to a contradiction.13. ”

“ This life, in order to attain to complete self-consciousness, requires not only the subjective element manifested in these points of concentration; it needs, also, an objective element. It must manifest itself to itself. ”

“ The self-consciousness become universal, or as reason, now traverses also a series of development-steps, until it manifests itself as spirit, as the reason which, in accord with all rationality, and satisfied with the rational world without, extends itself over the natural and intellectual universe as its kingdom, in which it finds itself at home. ”

“ But as I have hinted before, the complex vision's attribute of self-consciousness projects a second abstraction, which takes its place between this ultimate monad which is pure "subject" and our real personal self which is so much more than subject and object together. ”

“ That science begins with the simplest and most characteristic determination of self-consciousness, namely, its self-contemplation or Egohood, and proceeds, on the presupposition that the completely determined self-consciousness will be the final result of all other determinations of consciousness, until this result has been reached ”

“ In the first place, by consciousness we mean the notion of self—that notion of self, and that self-reference, which in man generally, though by no means invariably, accompanies his sensations, passions, emotions, play of reason, or states of mind whatsoever. ”

“ In that case, completed self-consciousness would mean, not simply the abstract moment of self-identity, but the consciousness to which the individual may arrive, that he occupies a place in an ideal system of conscious beings, in an ideal order ”

“ If we consider the appearance of a claim like this in its more general setting, and look at the level which the self-conscious mind at present occupies, we shall find that self-consciousness has got beyond the substantial fullness of life, which it used to carry on in the element of thought—beyond the state of immediacy of belief, beyond the satisfaction and security arising from the assurance which consciousness possessed of being reconciled with ultimate reality and with its all-pervading presence, within as well as without. ”

“ And it would be puerile to dispute the rightness of this impression so long as the standpoint of the individual human being is adopted. The individual man is a centre of self-consciousness in a peculiar sense. ”

“ No infant begins by being self-conscious. One has to learn to be self-conscious. My ordinary self-consciousness (or, as the psychologists technically call it, my empirical self-consciousness) is a product of experience, slowly woven together according to the laws of the association of ideas. ”

“ Between consciousness and self-consciousness the dividing line seems to be as difficult to define as it is difficult to define the line between sub-consciousness and consciousness. My existence as a self-conscious entity capable of thinking "I am I" is the basic assumption of all thought. ”

“ The times called for life, for spirit. Now since mind has thus retreated within self-consciousness, but within self-consciousness as a barren ego, which merely gives itself a content or a realization through finitenesses and individualities which in and for themselves are nothing, the [506] next stage is found in knowing this realization of self-consciousness in itself, in knowing the content in itself as a content which, penetrated throughout by spirit, is self-conscious and spiritual, or a spirit full of content. ”

“ True, and with this increase of self-consciousness have increased the binding force of the subjective feelings upon which right and wrong depend; we expect more of ourselves, and we expect more of our fellow-men. ”