Self-Awareness and Knowing That One Knows

For medieval philosophers, particularly those in the Aristotelian tradition, the nature of self-knowledge plays only an ancillary role in psychology and epistemology. This is a natural consequence of Aristotle’s characterization of the intellect as a pure capacity that has no nature of its own: “Thus that in the soul which is called mind ... is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.” Until the intellect has been actualized by some object, there is nothing for it to reflect upon; hence self-knowledge for Aristotle—at least in the case of human knowers—is derivative upon knowledge of other things: “Thought is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are.”

Like all historical generalizations, of course, this truism admits of striking individual exceptions. The most obvious and well-known exception in the medieval Islamic tradition is Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, 980-1037), whose famous thought experiment known as the “Flying Man” centres on the human soul’s awareness of itself. But Avicenna’s reflections on the problems of awareness and consciousness are by no means confined to the various versions of the Flying Man. In particular, two of Avicenna’s latest works, the Investigations and the Notes—both of which are in the form of remarks compiled by Avicenna’s students—contain a wealth of tantalizing and often problematic reflections on the soul’s awareness of itself (shu‘ūr bi-al-dhāt). The purpose of the present study is to consider the account of self-awareness that emerges from these works against the backdrop of Avicenna’s Flying Man. I will show that Avicenna recognizes two distinct levels of self-knowledge, the most basic of which is exemplified in the experience of the Flying Man, which I will label “primitive self-awareness.”

Primitive self-awareness violates many of the strictures placed on self-knowledge by the Aristotelian principles rehearsed above, and Avicenna differentiates it from the reflexive awareness of oneself via one’s awareness of an object that is characteristic of Aristotelianism. He also distinguishes primitive self-awareness from our knowledge of our bodies and psychological faculties and from our scientific understanding of our essential natures as humans; and he explicitly recognizes the capacity for “knowing that we know” as a distinctive form of self-knowledge. Primitive self-awareness plays a central role in ensuring the unity of the soul’s operations, especially its cognitive ones, and Avicenna appears to have seen the absence of such a unifying centre of awareness as a major lacuna within Aristotelian psychology. But in the end it remains unclear whether Avicenna is able to provide a coherent account of the relations among primitive self-awareness and the other varieties of self-knowledge that he inherits from the Aristotelian tradition.

Source: Section from the article 'Avicenna On Self-Awareness and Knowing That One Knows' - Available for download once logged in