# Self-consciousness
**Self-consciousness** is a form of consciousness in which a subject is aware of themselves as themselves, rather than merely aware of something that happens to be themselves; it is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words "I", "me", and "my"[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/). In philosophy and cognitive science the term is reserved for a form of awareness of one's self, distinct from the ordinary-language use describing a state of hypersensitivity about one's character or appearance[2](https://alameed.edu.iq/DocumentPdf/Library/eBook/3643.pdf). The topic raises questions about the relation between self-consciousness and consciousness generally, its semantic and epistemic features, its realization in conceptual and non-conceptual representation, and its connection to the conception of an objective world containing others like oneself[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Definition | Awareness of oneself *as* oneself, not merely of something that happens to be oneself; expressed by "I", "me", "my"[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/) |
| Historical reach | Ancient and medieval debates prefigure modern concerns; central to philosophy increasingly since the seventeenth century[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/) |
| Kantian formulation | "The 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations" (Critique of Pure Reason, B132)[3](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries/self-consciousness/) |
| Higher-order theories | A mental state is conscious in virtue of a higher-order representation of it, either perception-like (HOP) or thought-like (HOT)[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/) |
| Phenomenological claim | Every conscious experience involves a pre-reflective, implicit, first-order self-awareness[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/) |
| Two senses of self | The minimal self (immediate first-personal givenness of experience) versus the narrative self (constructed life-story)[6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-019-09471-y) |
| Distinctive epistemic features | Alleged infallibility, self-intimation, immunity to error through misidentification, and irreducibly de se (self-regarding) thought[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/) |
## Definition and basic distinctions
A self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as when someone sees an old photograph without realizing it depicts them; rather, it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/). Philosophical work has mostly focused on the epistemic and semantic peculiarities that distinguish self-consciousness from consciousness of things other than oneself[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/).
Several distinctions organize the field. One distinguishes creature consciousness from mental-state consciousness, and within creature consciousness the intransitive sense (being awake) from the transitive sense (being conscious of something)[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/). Uriah Kriegel, a philosopher of mind, distinguishes "intransitive self-consciousness", picked out by phrases of the form "I am self-consciously thinking that P", from "transitive self-consciousness", picked out by "I am self-conscious of my thought that P"[8](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries////////////self-consciousness/). A further distinction separates reflective self-consciousness, which takes one's own experience as an object of attention, from pre-reflective self-consciousness, which does not[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/).
## Historical development
The topic is ancient. A familiar feature of Greek philosophy and culture is the Delphic maxim "Know Thyself"; in [Sophocles](https://www.edgepedia.org/sophocles)' *Oedipus*, the title character knows facts about himself, such as that he was prophesied to kill Laius, but only later comes to know that *he himself* is the one of whom this is true, and this latter knowledge is what the maxim targets[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/). Aristotle claims in *De Sensu* (7.448a) that a person must, while perceiving anything, also perceive their own existence, a claim suggestive of the view that consciousness entails self-consciousness[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/).
Although it is occasionally suggested that concern with self-consciousness is peculiarly modern, originating with Descartes, ancient and medieval debates in fact prefigure early modern and contemporary concerns[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/). In the early modern era, self-consciousness took on a pivotal role in many philosophical debates, and from Kant and his successors onward it was regarded as a leading concern of both epistemology and the philosophy of mind.[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/) Kant's formulation, that "the 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations" (B132), set the agenda for a great deal of post-Kantian philosophy[3](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries/self-consciousness/). Manfred Frank, a philosopher at the [University of Tübingen](https://www.edgepedia.org/university-of-tubingen), records that Fichte was the first to show conclusively that from Descartes through Kant, self-consciousness had been misconceived as the result of a second-order act of reflection bending back upon a first-order act; Fichte instead treated pre-reflective self-awareness as a philosophical principle, while the Romantics and Kierkegaard abandoned the idea of self-consciousness as a foundational starting point of philosophy[9](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1163/1568516042653567).
## Higher-order theories
According to one family of views, a mental state counts as conscious exactly when some higher-order state represents it in the appropriate manner[8](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries////////////self-consciousness/). On these theories, what makes an otherwise unconscious mental state M conscious is a higher-order representation directed at M[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/).
Higher-order theorists divide along two main dimensions. One concerns whether the higher-order state is perception-like or thought-like: higher-order perception (HOP) theorists, often called "inner-sense" theorists, take the former option, while higher-order thought (HOT) theorists take the latter[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/). The other disagreement, internal to HOT approaches, concerns whether a state is conscious by being disposed to give rise to a higher-order thought (dispositionalist HOT) or by actually being the target of one (actualist HOT)[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/). The main proponent of actualist HOT theory has been David Rosenthal, a philosopher at the CUNY Graduate Center; on his account, a conscious mental state is one that is actually causing, non-inferentially, an activated (generally non-conscious) thought that one is in that state, typically of the form "I am in mental state M"[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/).
All higher-order theorists agree that one must normally become aware of the lower-order state non-inferentially, since a state can become the target of a higher-order representation via conscious inference without being phenomenally conscious; for example, inferring an unconscious desire from a session with a psychiatrist does not give that desire a phenomenal feel[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/). A related family of self-representational theories holds that a phenomenally conscious state in some sense represents itself to its subject, with the constitutive relation between first-order and higher-order content being either identity or part-whole[4](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/).
## Pre-reflective self-consciousness and the minimal self
The phenomenological tradition holds that in the most basic sense, self-consciousness is not something that arrives only when one reflectively introspects, recognizes one's mirror image, uses the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Instead, every experience of perceiving, remembering, imagining, thinking, or feeling involves a pre-reflective self-consciousness: an awareness we have before any reflecting on experience, implicit and first-order rather than explicit or higher-order[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/). Phenomenologists are in close to unanimous agreement on this idea, even when they disagree on method or on whether there is an ego[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/).
This view has analytic allies. According to Owen Flanagan, consciousness entails self-consciousness in the minimal sense that the subject's experience has a subjective character, and he describes a low-level self-consciousness whereby one's experiences are experienced as one's own; he stresses that this must not be mistaken for the richer, narrative kind of self-consciousness, which requires conceptual understanding, narrative ability, maturation, and socialization[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/). José Luis Bermúdez has argued for nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness that are logically and ontogenetically more primitive than the higher forms usually debated[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/).
The associated notion of the minimal self is equivalent to a very basic form of first-person, pre-reflective self-consciousness that includes bodily self-awareness[10](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10760637/). On Dan Zahavi's account, when one is aware of an occurrent pain, perception, or thought from the first-person perspective, the experience is given immediately, non-inferentially, and non-criterially as mine; it is nonsensical to ask whether one is sure that one is the one who feels the hunger[6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-019-09471-y). This "sense of mineness", or for-me-ness, contrasts with the narrative self, the self constructed through memory, language, and life-story[6](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-019-09471-y). [Antonio Damasio](https://www.edgepedia.org/antonio-damasio) has drawn a parallel dichotomy between core self and autobiographical self on neurobiological grounds[11](https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1577067).
The phenomenological view also contrasts with Brentano's, on which listening to a melody and being aware of listening to it constitute one single psychical phenomenon rather than two mental states; on this point Brentano and the phenomenologists agree, in opposition to higher-order representation theories[5](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/).
## Epistemic and semantic peculiarities
Philosophical work has identified several features said to distinguish self-consciousness from other consciousness. Epistemically, it has sometimes been thought that consciousness of oneself may be infallible under certain conditions, and that some forms of consciousness are self-intimating, meaning that if a certain fact about us obtains, we are necessarily conscious that it does; both claims have come under heavy attack, though it remains unclear whether restricted forms survive[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/). Semantically, two features stand out: the immunity to error through misidentification of our consciousness of ourselves, and the special character of de se (self-regarding) consciousness that cannot be assimilated to other kinds[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/). Philosophers disagree over whether these features are genuine, and, if genuine, whether they are peculiar to self-consciousness[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/).
[William James](https://www.edgepedia.org/william-james), influential in early experimental psychology, captured the everyday phenomenology: "whatever I may be thinking of, I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence"[7](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/).
## Relation to consciousness, development, and animals
Whether consciousness entails self-consciousness, and whether self-consciousness requires awareness of the self as an object, are standing questions[12](https://philpapers.org/browse/self-consciousness). One suggestion is that subjects possess pre-reflective self-awareness as a necessary condition of consciousness, a view associated with Sartre and developed by Zahavi and others[8](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries////////////self-consciousness/). Critics of higher-order approaches note that the HOT theory does not vindicate the claim that consciousness constitutively involves conscious de se thought or phenomenal self-consciousness[13](https://philpapers.org/archive/MILSIM-4.pdf).
Empirical markers of self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals include mirror recognition, episodic memory, and metacognition, the topics the Stanford Encyclopedia groups under self-consciousness in infants and animals[1](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/). In psychopathology, the minimal-self concept is used to characterize schizophrenia as a self-disorder, and it also structures explanations of illusions such as the Rubber Hand Illusion[10](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10760637/).
## References
1. [Self-Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision June 14, 2024)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness/)
2. [Self-consciousness (e-book chapter on the term's ordinary and technical uses)](https://alameed.edu.iq/DocumentPdf/Library/eBook/3643.pdf)
3. [Self-Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (mirror, quoting Kant B132)](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries/self-consciousness/)
4. [Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision January 9, 2026)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-higher/)
5. [Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision December 19, 2023)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/)
6. [Affectivity and the distinction between minimal and narrative self, Continental Philosophy Review](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-019-09471-y)
7. [Self-Consciousness, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy](https://iep.utm.edu/self-con/)
8. [Self-Consciousness, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Sydney mirror, sections on higher-order theories and Kriegel)](https://plato.sydney.edu.au/entries////////////self-consciousness/)
9. [Manfred Frank, Fragments of a History of the Theory of Self-Consciousness from Kant to Kierkegaard, Critical Horizons 5(1)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1163/1568516042653567)
10. [Minimal self-consciousness and the flying man argument, PMC](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10760637/)
11. [Between Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Husserlian Analysis of Person, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 50(4)](https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2019.1577067)
12. [Self-Consciousness bibliography, PhilPapers](https://philpapers.org/browse/self-consciousness)
13. [Cognitive Self-Consciousness, PhilPapers archive](https://philpapers.org/archive/MILSIM-4.pdf)
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