. Temporality and the limits of reflective self-consciousness

Although, as pre-reflectively self-aware of my experience I am not unconscious of it, I do not attend to it; rather I tend to overlook it in favor of the object that I am perceiving, the thing I am remembering, etc. In my everyday life, I am absorbed by and preoccupied with projects and objects in the world, and as such I do not attend to my experiential life. Therefore, this pervasive pre-reflective self-consciousness is not to be understood as complete self-comprehension. One can accept the notion of a pervasive self-consciousness and still accept the existence of the unconscious in the sense of subjective components which remain ambiguous, obscure, and resistant to comprehension. Thus, one should distinguish between the claim that consciousness is characterized by an immediate first-person character and the claim that consciousness is characterized by total self-transparency. One can easily accept the first and reject the latter (Ricoeur 1950, 354–355).
In contrast to pre-reflective self-consciousness, which delivers an implicit sense of self at an experiential or phenomenal level, reflective self-consciousness is an explicit, conceptual, and objectifying awareness that takes a lower-order consciousness as its attentional theme. I am able at any time to attend directly to the cognitive experience itself, turning my experience itself into the object of my consideration.
Phenomenologists do not claim the infallible authority of reflection over subjective experience. There are no epistemic guarantees connected with self-consciousness other than immunity to error through misidentification. If I cannot be wrong about who is living through my experiences, I can be wrong about all kinds of other things about my experiences. A brief consideration of the phenomenology of temporality will help to explain this, namely, why reflective self-consciousness is characterized by certain limitations. It will also help to clarify how pre-reflective self-consciousness, as a mode of existence, is possible in the first place, as well as elucidate the phenomenological account of diachronic unity, an account that does not posit something called the “self” as a separate entity over and above the stream of consciousness (cf. Zahavi 2014).
According to Husserl's analysis, experience of any sort (perception, memory, imagination, etc.) has a common temporal structure such that any moment of experience contains a retentional reference to past moments of experience, a current openness (primal impression) to what is present, and a protentional anticipation of the moments of experience that are just about to happen (see Gallagher 1998). The retentional structure of experience, that is, the fact that when I am experiencing something, each passing moment of consciousness does not simply disappear at the next moment but is kept in intentional currency, constitutes a coherency that stretches over an experienced temporal duration. Husserl's favorite example is a melody. When I experience a melody, I don't simply experience a knife-edge presentation (primal impression) of one note, which is then completely washed away and replaced with the next discrete knife-edge presentation of the next note. Rather, consciousness retains the sense of the first note as just past, as I hear the second note, a hearing that is also enriched by an anticipation (protention) of the next note (or at least, in case I do not know the melody, of the fact that there will be a next note, or some next auditory event). Husserl claims that we actually do perceive melodies—in opposition to an earlier view of Brentano, viz., that we with the help of our imagination or recollection construct or reconstruct such unities out of a synthesis of mental acts. This is possible only because consciousness is so structured to allow for this temporal presentation.
Importantly, the temporal (retentional-impressional-protentional) structure of consciousness not only allows for the experience of temporally extended objects or intentional contents, but also entails the self-manifestation of consciousness, that is, its pre-reflective self-awareness. The retention of past notes of the melody is accomplished, not by a “real” or literal re-presentation of the notes (as if I were hearing them a second time and simultaneously with the current note), but by an intentional retaining of my just past experience of the melody as just past. This means that there is a primary and simultaneous self-awareness (an awareness of my ongoing experience in the ongoing flow of experience) that is implicit in my experience of the object. At the same time that I am aware of a melody, for example, I am co-aware of my ongoing experience of the melody through the retentional structure of that very experience—and this just is the pre-reflective self-awareness of experience (cf. Zahavi 2003).
The temporal structure that accounts for pre-reflective self-awareness is also the structural feature that accounts for the limitations imposed on reflective self-consciousness. Reflective self-consciousness yields knowledge of pre-reflective subjectivity that is always after the fact. Reflective self-consciousness, which takes pre-reflective experience as its object, is itself (like any conscious experience) characterized by the same temporal structure. In principle, however, the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of reflection cannot overlay the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of pre-reflective experience in complete simultaneity. There is always a slight delay between reflection and the pre-reflective object of reflection. One might say that the pre-reflective experience must first be there if I am to turn my reflective attention to it and make it an object of reflection. Husserl writes: “When I say I, I grasp myself in a simple reflection. But this self-experience [Selbsterfahrung] is like every experience [Erfahrung], and in particular every perception, a mere directing myself towards something that was already there for me, that was already conscious, but not thematically experienced, not noticed” (Husserl 1973b, 492–493). This delay is one of the reasons why there remains a difference or distance between the reflecting subject and the reflected object, even though the reflected object is my own experience. As a reflecting subject, I never fully coincide with myself. When I reflect, there is always something about my experience which will evade my reflective grasp: the very reflective moment itself.
As Merleau-Ponty puts it, our temporal existence is both a condition for and an obstacle to our self-comprehension. Temporality contains an internal fracture that permits us to return to our past experiences in order to investigate them reflectively, but this very fracture also prevents us from fully coinciding with ourselves. There will always remain a difference between the lived and the understood (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 76, 397, 399, 460). Self-consciousness provides us with the sense that we are always already in play. This leads some phenomenologists to note that we are born (or “thrown” into the world) and not self-generated. We are caught up in a life that is in excess of our full comprehension (Heidegger 1986). There is always something about ourselves that we cannot fully capture in self-conscious reflection.
If reflective self-consciousness is limited in this way, this should not prevent us from exercising it. Indeed, reflective self-consciousness is a necessary condition for moral self-responsibility, as Husserl points out. Reflection is a precondition for self-critical deliberation. If we are to subject our different beliefs and desires to a critical, normative evaluation, it is not sufficient simply to have immediate first-personal access to the states in question.

اقتباس :: We take as our point of departure the essential ability for self-consciousness in the full sense of personal self-inspection (inspectio sui), and the ability that is based on this for taking up positions that are reflectively directed back on oneself and one's own life, on personal acts of self-knowledge, self-evaluation, and practical acts of self-determination, self-willing, and self-formation. (Husserl 1988, 23).

Self-consciousness is, therefore, not epiphenomenal. Our ability to make reflective judgments about our own beliefs and desires also allows us to modify them.
One might see the position of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty as being situated between two extremes. On the one hand, we have the view that reflection merely copies or mirrors pre-reflective experience faithfully, and on the other hand we have the view that reflection distorts lived experience. The middle course is to recognize that reflection involves a gain and a loss. For Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, reflection is constrained by what is pre-reflectively lived through. It is answerable to experiential facts and is not constitutively self-fulfilling. At the same time, however, they recognized that reflection qua thematic self-experience does not simply reproduce the lived experiences unaltered and that this is precisely what makes reflection cognitively valuable. The experiences reflected upon are transformed in the process, to various degrees and manners depending upon the type of reflection at work. Subjectivity consequently seems to be constituted in such a fashion that it can and, at times, must relate to itself in an “othering” manner. This self-alteration is something inherent to reflection; it is not something that reflection can overcome.

. Temporality and the limits of reflective self-consciousness

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. Temporality and the limits of reflective self-consciousness