Dan Zahavi argues that self-awareness cannot be adequately understood as an anonymous or subjectless occurrence, because every conscious experience is given in a first-personal mode that already entails a minimal form of selfhood. His central claim is that the “self” involved in consciousness is not necessarily a substantial ego, reflective object, or personal identity, but the basic “myness” of experience itself. Zahavi examines non-egological theories in Gurwitsch, Sartre, Henrich, and Pothast, which claim that consciousness is originally impersonal and that the ego appears only through reflection. Against this, he draws on Husserl to argue that experiences are never simply ownerless events: a perception, pain, memory, or emotion is lived immediately as mine, not through inference or later identification, but through its first-personal givenness. This minimal ipseity also explains why I do not confuse my own experience with another person’s experience. Zahavi further distinguishes this basic self-awareness from more complex forms in which I recognise myself as the enduring subject across different experiences. The conclusion is that selfhood and self-awareness are internally connected: wherever there is phenomenal consciousness, there is already a primitive self-presence, even before explicit reflection, narrative identity, or personal self-interpretation.
URBANISM MEETS ART