Orders of Consciousness and Forms of Reflexivity in Descartes

Abstract

Descartes affords several notions of consciousness as he explains the characteristics of the diverse features of human thought from infancy to adulthood and from dreaming to attentive wakefulness. I will argue that Descartes provides the resources for a rich and coherent view of conscious mentality from rudimentary consciousness through reflexive consciousness to consciousness achieved by deliberate, attentive reflection. I shall begin by making two general yet important remarks concerning the conceptual starting points of my investigation. First, in interpreting early modern notions of consciousness, it is important to notice that conscious thought is often deemed as self-relational involving reflexivity understood as a more or less attentive relation to self. 1 I will deploy the terms 'conscious' and 'consciousness' in reference to a wider array of experiential phenomena than that of self-consciousness, 1 The self-relative aspect of consciousness is often emphasized in passages which are closest to being definitions of consciousness or in which the significance or larger theoretical role of it is addressed. Consider the following. Ralph Cudworth (True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 159) says that "Consciousness [.. .] makes a Being to be Present with it self, Attentive to its own Actions, or Animadversive of them, to perceive it self to Do or Suffer, and to have a Fruition or Enjoyment of it self ". John Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), II, 27, 9) maintains that "consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things". The author of An Essay on Consciousness (Two Dissertations Concerning Sense, and the Imagination with an Essay of Consciousness (London, 1728), 144-145) gives a definition according to

Descartes’s Anti-Transparency and the Need for Radical Doubt

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Can an Atheist Know that He Exists? Cogito, Mathematics, and God in Descartes’s Meditations

“…Only the latter involves awareness of (the fact) that one is thinking csmk 357). Furthermore, he differentiates reflective thought from attentive reflective thought (the conscious thought of a person deliberately attending to her conscious reflection) (Lähteenmäki 2007). However, regarding the meditator's and the atheist's existence, it can be said that Descartes makes a further separation between a sort of selfawareness (where one is aware of one's thoughts as had by one, i.e., by having an idea of self) and full self-reflection (where one attends to the fact that since one possesses these thoughts, one has to exist).…”