Word Finder - self-consciousness

definition

The awareness of the self as an entity.

definition

Shyness; a feeling of unease in social situations.

Her sense of self-consciousness grew as the physical contact made her appreciative of the size and heat of his body.

Now the most striking characteristic of man, that in fact which marks him specially, as contrasted with other animals, is self-consciousness.

Only by the existence of some "principle which renders all relations possible and is itself determined by none of them"; an eternal self-consciousness which knows in whole what we know in part.

So far, however, as it is possible to disengage one's self from this captivation, it may be said that the mingling of distinct and original vision with a singularly conscientious handling of the English language, in the sincere and wholesome self-consciousness of the strenuous artist, seems to be the central feature of Stevenson as a writer by profession.

He has, indeed, described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had " carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room " interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature "; how he served in willing captivity " the ` empirical ' and ` necessarian ' mode of thought," even though " shocked " by the dogmatism and acrid humours " of certain distinguished representatives "; 1 and how in a period of " second education " at Berlin, " mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg," he experienced " a new intellectual birth" which " was essentially the gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel."

For, religious as it is, it is entirely free from the very slightest touch of hypocrisy or indeed of self-consciousness of any kind.

Hilary, starting from the thought of Divine self-consciousness ' e.g.

In it the union between the finite self-consciousness and the infinite ego or God is handled in an almost mystical manner.

The infinite God is the all; the world of independent objects is the result of reflection or self-consciousness, by which the infinite unity is broken up. God is thus over and above the distinction of subject and object; our knowledge is but a reflex or picture of the infinite essence.

The fundamental features of knowledge, whether as activity or as sum of apprehended fact, and of conduct had been deduced as elements necessary in the attainment of self-consciousness.

Nature as the sum of that which is objective, intelligence as the complex of all the activities making up self-consciousness, appear thus as equally real, as alike exhibiting ideal structure, as parallel with one another.

Just as nature exhibits to us the series of dynamical stages of processes by which spirit struggles towards consciousness of itself, so the world of intelligence and practice, the world of mind, exhibits the series of stages through which self-consciousness with its inevitable oppositions and reconciliations develops in its ideal form.

It is impossible to overstep the limits of self-consciousness; whatever words I use, whatever notions I have, must refer to and find their meaning in facts of consciousness.

According to him, that which acts in all organisms, that which acts in all thinking, that which divides unitary experience into subject and object, the source of self-consciousness, the unity of our mental life, " the most proper being of the individual subject is will."

What makes his vindication of conscious personality all the more interesting is that he has so much in common with the Hegelians; agreeing as he does with Hegel that self-consciousness is the highest fact, the ultimate category of thought through which alone the universe is intelligible, and an adequate account of the great fact of existence.

It is difficult to see exactly where he begins to differ from Hegel; but at any rate he believes in different self-conscious persons; he does not accept the dialectical method, but believes in beginning from the personal experience of one's own self-consciousness; and, though he is not very clear on the subject, he would have to admit that a thing, such as the sun, is a different object in each person's consciousness.

There is none of the mannerism of a long tradition, but a nobility pervades them which has no self-consciousness.

He believed that behind the natural world lay a spiritual world, irruptions from which had disturbed the natural sequence of causation, certainly in the production of the higher emotional and mental qualities of man, probably in the appearance of self-consciousness, and possibly in the first origin of life.

It treats of the attitudes of consciousness towards reality under the six heads of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason (Vernunft), spirit (Geist), religion and absolute knowledge.

If consciousness cannot detect a permanent object outside it, so self-consciousness cannot find a permanent subject in itself.

But in this isolation from the world, self-consciousness has closed its gates against the stream of life.

In the Phenomenology consciousness, self-consciousness and reason are dealt with.

Granted that rationality taken in the sense of inner coherence and self-consistency is the ultimate standard of truth and reality, does self-consciousness itself answer to the demands of this criterion?

Categories are the forms according to which the combining unity of self-consciousness (synthetic unity of apperception) pluralizes itself through the various functions involved in the constitution of objectivity in different types of the one act of thought, viz.

Only through this self-consciousness can we explain his mission and the career of his disciples.

The first was in answer to the question "Whether man's free will can be proved from self-consciousness," proposed by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences at Drontheim.

The ordinary idea of the self as a physical entity, obviously separate from others, takes no account of the problem as to how and in what sense the individual is conscious of himself; what is the relation between subject and object in the phenomenon of self-consciousness, in which the mind reflects upon itself both past and present ?

By bringing the men of his own generation into sympathetic contact with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse to that European movement which restored freedom, self-consciousness, and the faculty of progress to the human intellect.

In (1) apperception is almost equivalent to self-consciousness; the existence of the ego may be more or less prominent, but it is always involved.

Subject-object, knowledge, or, more widely, self-consciousness with its implicates - this unity in duality is the ultimate aspect which reality presents.

These conditions are the conditions of knowledge as such, or, as it may be put, of objective consciousness - of a self-consciousness of a world of objects and through them conscious of itself.

But if so, then self-consciousness must be treated as itself real, and as organically related to the rest of existence.

If self-consciousness be treated in this objective fashion, then we pass naturally from epistemology to metaphysics or ontology.

Consciousness and especially self-consciousness, can never be explained upon hypotheses adequate only to explain the blind working of the unconscious world.

Self-consciousness, if it be conceived as distinguishing itself from its past history or from the natural world, must be conceived also as in some sense related to the empirical self which has a history in time and to the natural organism in which it finds a home.

We are ourselves proofs of the unity of the real and the ideal, of thought and being, for we are both, our self-consciousness supplying the expression of the fact.

In self-consciousness God is present as the basis of the unity of our nature in every transition from an act of knowledge to an act of will, and vice versa.

It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective - consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego.

This self-consciousness is the third special form or function of thought - which is also called feeling and immediate knowledge.

The ego, the person, is an individualization of universal reason; and the primary act of self-consciousness is the first conjunction of universal and individual life, the immediate union or marriage of the universe with incarnated reason.

While therefore we cannot, as we have seen, attain the idea of the supreme unity of thought and being by either cognition or volition, we can find it in our own personality, in immediate self-consciousness or (which is the same in Schleiermacher's terminology) feeling.

Having its seat in this central point of our being, or indeed consisting in the essential fact of self-consciousness, religion lies at the basis of all thought and action.

With reference to this last, he says we cannot know God from himself, but only after the analogy of his creatures; and the special analogy used is the self-consciousness of man, its peculiar double nature, with the necessary elements, memory and intelligence, representing the relation of the Father to the Son.

This immanent process of self-consciousness, wherein indeed a trinity of persons is not given but only rendered possible, is mirrored in, and takes place through, the eternal and impersonal idea or wisdom of God, which exists beside, though not distinct from, the primitive will.

This self-consciousness of pure reason is the highest object of human activity, and is to be attained by the speculative method.

Self-consciousness is the result of an interaction essentially the same in kind as that which takes place when a comparatively simple presentation finds the field of consciousness occupied by a longformed and well-consolidated "mass" of presentations - as, e.g.

The central ideas are thus self-consciousness, as the supreme condition under which experience is subjectively possible, and the manifold details of experience as a varied and complex whole.

He selects definitely for his starting point neither the idea of self-consciousness nor the details of experience, but in his actual procedure passes from one to the other, rarely, if ever, taking into full consideration the weighty question of their relation to one another.

That the ego to which different parts of experience are presented must be the same ego, if there is to be cognition at all, is analytically evident; but the peculiarity is that the ego must be conscious of its own unity and identity, and this unity of self-consciousness is only possible in relation to difference not contained in the ego but given to it.

The unity of apperception, then, as Kant calls it, is only possible in relation to synthetic unity of experience itself, and the forms of this synthetic unity, the categories, are, therefore, on the one hand, necessary as forms in which self-consciousness is realized, and, on the other hand, restricted in their application and validity to the data of given sense, or the particular element of experience.