A retrospective reflection on our Philosophical Happy Hour on Consciousness.
Our Philosophical Happy Hour conversation concerning “consciousness” (held 10 June 2026) and spanning more than two hours covered a great many particular topics: the distinction between “being conscious” and “having consciousness”, whether being conscious and having consciousness are binary or rather on a spectrum, the diverse modalities and degrees of attentiveness in our experience, the relationship to intelligence, the question of consciousness’ unity or multiplicity, the relationship to the “self”, the question of whether it is supervenient upon our actions or prior to them, the notions of desire, embodiment, language, temporality, narrative, and death. Were it the outline of a book, we would have many great chapters to write. But the principal purpose of this retrospective is simply to draw out the key points which allow our thinking on the topic to continue unfolding.
Being Conscious and Having Consciousness
Commonly, imprecision between these two terms seems to result in confusion. The term “conscious” (and its opposite, “unconscious”) is typically used attributively, and most often in modification of the term “acting”. At times, it may be used as a subject complement: “He is conscious”, specifically to mean “not asleep”. Generally, this word is used to signify an “awareness”. When we use it attributively, we identify awareness of that which it modifies. When we use it in contraindication of sleeping, we identify the possibility of that attributive awareness. Someone who is “not unconscious”, that is, is capable of being conscious of what he does or of what is happening to him. He experiences not only the presence or absence of objects cognitively, but also appetitively (i.e., desires).
Notably, this awareness does not seem to be a binary phenomenon. In other words, it occurs in degrees or on a spectrum. We can see this in the states between waking and dreaming, in lucid dreaming, and in the “cocktail party effect”—the ability to selectively attend to a singular voice amidst a noisy environment where the many voices form a singular indiscriminate “drone” (or to have one’s attention suddenly elicited by a particular stimulus—such as one’s own name—amidst such an environment). We diversely attend to the perceptual world, that is, not only by its physical presence to us but, indeed much more, by our own dispositions relative to it. A sleepy person is “less conscious” of his surroundings than one in “high alert”. A gourmand is “more aware” of food than someone who eats only to fuel his day.
But this is not the same as “having consciousness”. Indeed, this “being conscious” seems to occur in varying degrees in (nearly) all animals. There may be borderline cases: but certainly it is signified in the behavior of chimpanzees, dolphins, cats, dogs, and clever birds like ravens. Most animals, in fact, seem “more conscious” of their physical surroundings than do we human beings—attentive as we are to other objects which are not strictly present to us physically.
Rather, the expression “having consciousness” seemingly entails a reflective “being conscious of being conscious”. We are, in other words, aware of our own being conscious—and this appears distinctively human. That is not to say other animals may not be “self-aware” in some sense, in that they can become objects of their own consideration. Human beings appear uniquely capable of distinguishing themselves from themselves. Putting this otherwise, we are able to distinguish the object signified from the signifier of it. Thus, we are not only “aware of…” but able to differentiate ourselves as being the ones who are aware.
It is from these activities of self-reflective awareness that there comes to be the phenomenon we identify as “consciousness”. Or, to offer a definition: consciousness is the experiential unity by which an intelligent being becomes present to itself, as a self, in and through its intentional acts.
Elaborating the Definition
There are five core elements to this definition which deserve elaboration: 1) experiential unity; 2) intelligence; 3) presence; 4) self; and 5) intentional acts.
To begin with intentional acts, as these should be clarified immediately: “intentionality” in this sense does not mean “deliberate”. Rather, it relates to the sense found partially in phenomenology and more fully in Scholasticism: that is, of acts which are fundamentally constituted by “being-towards”. We experience such acts most commonly and obviously in cognition and desire. When I think of the last filet mignon I ate, for instance, my thinking is towards that particular cut, its odor, taste, texture, accoutrements—as well as the setting in which it was consumed, and so on. Simultaneously, thinking of a delicious piece of steak may elicit a desire for another one, or to have a similar experience of enjoying such a meal. Such being-towards characterizes our being-conscious—even when we are reflecting on ourselves, our pasts, and so on.
An interesting but difficult nuance here, however, is that even acts of which we are not conscious have a way of being implicitly intentional. That is, not only the acts of knowing or desiring, but so too the acts of being-known or desired have a certain intentionality to them. For that matter, other aspects in our own unconscious being have a characteristic towardsness, by which towardsness can they become known. Many habits, for instance, we form and experience unconsciously. This topic was not raised in the conversation, however, and so we will leave it for future considerations.
What was raised in the conversation was the notion of the “self”. This term, even more so than consciousness, suffers imprecise use. We will not dive into here: but suffice it to say that what we mean in saying it reflexively is something of our irreducible subjective being. It is the locus of experience. Invariably, that which has experience does so as a self. The presence of the self to itself seems to occur to all animals but, again, in varying degrees. The constitution of that presence appears to be determined by the cognitive awareness of the environment. The more sophisticated the evaluative capacity of the animal, the more developed its self-presence.
Yet even the most highly-developed self-awareness of non-human animals does not seem to have “intelligence” in the proper sense. This term is where the greatest elaboration is demanded: “intelligence” is a term which has suffered various equivocations over the past several centuries. Today, commonly, it is used to mean the gathering and evaluating of information so as to solve problems. Many presuppositions—ironically, many of them unconscious—stand behind this conception. Contrariwise, here we employ the notion of “intelligence” to mean principally the kind of intellectual cognition by which a human being grasps objects of an irreducible universality. In other words, we become cognitively aware of objects which cannot be reduced to any collection of particulars, but the meaning of which is potentially infinite. Put otherwise, we are conscious of objects not simply in what they particularly are relative to ourselves, but in what they intelligibly are in themselves.
To become present to oneself, as a self in possession of this kind of intelligence, is of no little consequence for the constitution of our experience. The word “experience” suggests in its etymology, “from what has been gone through, tried, or tested”; the “per” includes a sense of “through to the end”. In what sense is our experience “united”? We go through many things, we attempt many things. What makes them one? Often, we find our experiences put us into internal conflicts—most especially of desire. For instance, I may desire to be thinner, but also to enjoy my food, and the food I most enjoy may not help me become thinner (to the contrary). On a merely animal level, such experience occurs only in bodily feeling. For a human being, it becomes a part of not only our intellectual awareness, but something that may inform our consciousness—our awareness of being aware, that is.
Towards Resolution
This leads me to three other anchor points: language, temporality, and narrative. These are enormous topics, of course—language being one of the principal educational concerns of the Lyceum Institute. Temporality will form the basis of two seminars, one to be taught this Fall and the second in the fall of 2027. Narrative has been an on-going topic of discussion, commonly at the Lyceum but even broader in the various concerns which today one finds about the reading of classics and their interpretation or translation.
But let us begin with language. Oftentimes, “language” is misunderstood to be nothing other than the external system of communication which we share alike with animals and, it seems increasingly, with “artificial intelligences”. Against this, we oppose what the semiotician Thomas Sebeok termed “language in the root sense”, a faculty of cognitive awareness which antecedes any specific linguistic expressions. The natural consequence of this “root sense” of language, of course, is the production of some concrete system of language—a kind of natural complement to the root faculty. But it is this root sense that allows us to grasp the general or universal objects of intelligence, and to bring them before our awareness. This can be helpfully expressed by a distinction between speech and language. Speech may be a vocal or expressive behavior or even a signifier of interior states; language, in the fuller semiotic sense, is the capacity to enter into general, triadic sign-relations.
For our consciousness, this means that we are not only conscious, but able to signify our being conscious. We can say, “I was angry”, “I misunderstood”, “I was not myself”, “I now see that differently”, and so on and on. Our experiences become articulated. We can stand in relation to our own experiences as meaningful. This articulation informs our understanding of both narrative and temporality, which two aspects of our experience become intertwined through language.
Narrative, that is, constitutes a higher development of our linguistic articulation of experience. Through narrative we turn a report of what happened (whether really or in imagination) into a kind of intelligible continuity. The conversation brought this out through discussion of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Joyce. In each case, we can see that narrative enables a human person to inhabit an experience, even if he has not personally undergone it precisely, while nevertheless recognizing it as both generally intelligible and as somehow illuminating of his own strictly personal experience. Or to put this in another way, through narratives we are able to expand our experience by resolving the general intelligibilities presented therein to our own personal lives.
The example of Achilles is particularly useful to see this. No one needs to be Achilles to understand rage, wounded honor, greatness, pride, and ruin. Narrative expands consciousness because it allows one person’s experience to become available to another, not by direct transfer of feeling, but by a unity affected through symbolic sign-relations.
Narratives have a great philosophical importance, that is, because they allow the concrete particular to disclose the universal. Achilles is not merely one man filled with rage; he becomes a symbol through whom not only rage but also the feelings of indomitability, glory, and regret are signified beyond the individual. In narratives we discover a mediation between individual experience and universal meaning—they help us to resolve the diversity of experiences in a singular unified consciousness. This resolution is not limited to fictional narratives, however, but even how we interpret our own experienced pasts. Our memories, interpreted in the light of narrativized intelligibility, do not remain as fixed images. They can be (and in fact often are) reinterpreted. An action once desired can later be re-evaluated as foolish, perhaps shameful. In some cases we might realize what seemed at the time to be a grave error turned out to be providential.
But narrative is impossible without the linguistic articulation of temporality which is distinctively human. Non-human animals remember, anticipate, and learn, but only from within what we grammatically identify as the continuous present. Their “past” is reactivated only by present stimuli and their future is pursued through learned reaction to what is currently before them. Human beings, contrariwise, through naming the past as past and the future as future separate these times out from the present. Correspondingly, they can place themselves in time and compare the “past self” to the present self, and think about how the “future self” will differ from one’s current self.
To say “when I was twelve”, “after my father died”, “next year”, “when I am old”, or “when I die” is not simply performing an act of recollection or of anticipation. Rather, it is situating oneself—as presently being—within a temporally structured and intelligible life. Our temporally-articulated possession of consciousness does not consist in amalgamating one after another present, but rather in narrativizing the self as changing from past, present, and future into an intelligible unity.
A remark made in the conversation, concerning the importance of prudence, signifies this clearly: action in the present proceeds from the past for the sake of the future self. Prudence presupposes that the self not only can but must be addressed across time: the present self can attempt to form the future self, through reflection on the past self. This corresponds with the provocative idea advanced by C.S. Peirce’s, also raised in the discussion, that direct control over the present self is, in fact, impossible. What can be controlled is the future self: by forming habits that change one’s future disposition.
To conclude, we highlight consciousness of mortality. To know that one must die means being conscious that there is an end to life; a truth from which we not infrequently attempt to escape. Yet, the inevitability (and unpredictability) of death demands inclusion in the unity of our consciousness. That is, what we are as selves cannot be formed only from the past and acting toward the future, but also aware that its earthly future is individually finite. Our consciousness, that is, should not be restricted to the existence of the individual entity.
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