Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

by Hiram Miner Stanley

The condition of an ego being sensed or known is, of course, that there is an ego to be sensed. All experience is an individual’s experience, is personal, but this does not constitute egoism as an experience. The experiencer must have experience before he can know himself as experience centre, that is, there must be experience before there can be experience of experience. But the amount of consciousness and integration thereof which is required for self-cognizance is probably very small. The dynamic organic whole of psychic life, which we denominate ego, has almost from the start self-consciousness, and grows by self-integration. By the conjoint interaction of subject and object cognition with feeling and will elements egohood or personality is gradually developed to the largeness which we see in the human mind. Experience which does not self-integrate is scarce worthy the name, and it is noticeable that we usually associate self-consciousness with the term. “Having an experience” signifies a self-related psychic fact. Given the first germ and experience constantly returns upon itself and self-develops. It anticipates itself, experiences the experienceable, and so serves life. A psychic individual without sense of his own individuality is practically undiscoverable and impossible. It is perhaps not too much to say that psychically egohood really begins when experience cognizes and organizes itself; the self is made by the sense of self. At first only an occasional achievement upon a very meagre basis of psychosis, the self-sense rose only through intense pain and effort, but has now become so built into experience that, with human minds at least, it seems constant and spontaneous factor. Just what this means we have to note when we come to analyze the self-sense.

While the ego-sense is to be regarded as a reflection of experience upon itself, this reflection is far from being abstract, or general, or spontaneous. The self-sense is wrought out in the direct commerce with objects demanded by the exigencies of existence, a particular and concrete apprehension is produced. That is, mind is no purely internal development nor yet a mechanical impression. Development is forced upon it in a world of competition and danger, but yet this development is always active response. The self-sense then by which the individual becomes aware of its own activities and feelings as its own, originates, like all other new modes, by stress and strain as a most valuable psychosis in the struggle of existence.

The primitive self-consciousness is evidently naïve, that is, there is no consciousness of the self-consciousness. The low psychism is conscious of itself, knows what is to its own advantage, and is absorbingly selfish, but it is wholly unconscious of its self regard; so also with very young children we see an egoism which is perfectly unconscious and naïve, often humorously so to the observant adult who perceives the utter simplicity of its selfishness. The embarrassing self-consciousness of the boy and girl in their teens, a conscious self-consciousness, is not yet achieved. The immediate consciousness of self cannot by itself embarrass, it must be complicated with reflection and with cognizance of other ego's; but later forms we do not need to discuss here.

In the simplest form of self-consciousness what are the necessary elements? and what is the essential nature of self-consciousness as psychic fact?

In the first place, then, what is the nature of self-consciousness as cognition? If cognition be awareness of object, what is self or subject cognition? Is subject merely a kind of object? Is self-consciousness a peculiar conscious mode, or is it merely of the same type as the general cognition of object? Of course we wish to consider such questions here simply in the light of psychic fact.

It is often considered that self-cognitions are really in no way unique, that the subject sensed is merely the individual’s body or his mental powers. And it is undoubtedly true that subject is always some object, the subject cognition is apprehension of some object either corporeal or mental; yet self-cognition is never merely an object seen as object. The psychic act of self-cognition is a peculiar qualifying of the object cognition; the individual who merely knows body or mind has not self-sense, he must be aware of body and mind as his own. The essence of self-sense is not in the object as so perceived, but in the subjectifying reference. While the ego then is always constituted as object, ego sense as psychic fact is more than mere object cognition. The psychic self as object, as some mode or modes of consciousness, has naturally been emphasized. Thus the self may be defined as that which is subject to will. Yet the least reflection shows us that for self-sense this must imply my will, and so assume what it would explain. A consciousness of will act as effective psychic fact is not ego sense. A cognition of effort or nisus is not the sense of self save so far as the effort is known or felt as mine. And so in any other objectivist definition of self as psychic object, the self in its real nature as psychic act vanishes. Thus the consciousness of pleasure-pain capacity, while closely related to self-sense, does not make it, for we have to add that the capacity must be known as one’s own. In every endeavour then to define or analyze the self as psychic fact we must either eliminate it or presuppose it, and this must be taken as very significant. It means at least that this stating it—being merely objectifying act—destroys the subjectifying which is its essence. The radical distinction and polar opposition of subjectifying and objectifying is therein suggested, and the difficulty of all fruitful discussion and scientific investigation, which is objectifying, is made apparent.

The objective cognition of a self can only mean cognition of an object capable of experience. Objects are thus discriminated into two classes—experiencers and non-experiencers, subject-objects and bare objects; but this is not self-sense whereby the experiencer directly knows his own experience as such, but merely sense of a self as any individual object experiencing. This objective definition of a self is simple enough. It merely asserts that any object which at any moment of its persistence or existence has a consciousness or experience of any kind is thereby a self. But this is obviously not a definition of the self and self-sense as psychic act, nor does it explain it. The scientific statement that individual objects exist as experiencers, and so are personalities, or ego's, does not clear up the self-sense whereby the individual is aware of his own individuality as such. Egohood as selfishness in this objective sense, and ego-hood as self-experience, as a feeling and knowing myself, are quite distinct. To the question, What makes an object—this particular object, body with limbs and various organs capable of feeling pain-pleasure—what makes this myself? the only answer is relation not, be it noted, to experience, but to my experience felt as such. And what makes an experience mine is that I consciously experience it; not merely that I experience—that experience occurs to me, or in me, as objective fact—but that I consciously experience, subjectively realize the experience as mine; not merely as realizing experience as experience, but as mine own. This ceaseless circle into which we fall in trying to define ego is hinted at in various common expressions. A child even will often remark, “I did not do it, my hand did it”; “you did not touch me, you touched my foot,” etc. That is, even the most cursory observation asserts that object in itself is not subject, that the me is not mine.

While, then, we must regard self-cognition as a genus by itself and as unanalyzable simple psychic fact, arising early upon a very slight basis of experience, and continually developing as most important psychosis for life, we may yet distinguish what is involved with it, what modes of consciousness it presupposes, and from which it yet is distinct.

We might speak of ego-sense as an experience knowing itself. But since cognition implies always a knowing and the known, an experience cannot, and does not, know itself. The consciousness knowing is never the consciousness known; and to speak of a consciousness as aware of itself is misleading and inaccurate. To speak of the cognizance of a pain as pain self-cognizant is an erroneous expression, for the pain does not know itself; but it is known by a cognition which is not it. To be aware of pain as such is awareness of consciousness, but is, interpreted strictly, in no wise self-consciousness. I may even speak of a self-conscious self-consciousness. This does not really mean what it directly implies, but can only mean a self-consciousness plus a consciousness of it as one’s own; that is, the self-consciousness is not actually conscious of itself. Even if a consciousness could both be and know its being as an absolute, simple act, yet this would not be self-sense, an individual realizing its own individuality, but merely a single psychic act existing, and at the same time conscious of its existence. Self-consciousness is more and other than any consciousness which is self-conscious, if that were possible.

Consciousness of consciousness is not, then, self-consciousness. It is, indeed, conceivable that an ego, in objective sense, might know his own consciousness not as his own—the act of self-consciousness—but merely as consciousness, and he would thus exist as an individual, yet without subjective individuality. Yet, as matter of fact, consciousness of consciousness always carries self-consciousness with it. If I become conscious of a consciousness which is my own, I know it, not merely as a consciousness, but as my own consciousness; if I am conscious of anger, I am conscious of being angry.