The Unconditioned Condition of Consciousness: Avicenna on the Nature of “Self-Awareness”

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

10.22059/jitp.2025.394421.523605

Abstract

This article examines Avicenna’s doctrine of shuʿūr bi-dhāt, or “self-awareness,” and argues that, because it is unmediated by forms or cognitive faculties, this awareness is not of the order of conceptual or representational knowledge. Consequently, shuʿūr bi-dhāt must be distinguished from various forms of self-knowledge that rely on conceptual cognition. According to Avicenna, this awareness possesses three essential features: actuality, permanence, and immediacy. He regards shuʿūr bi-dhāt as the condition for the possibility of every other act of cognition and awareness, since in every judgment—even those whose subject is “I”—the agent is already and pre-reflectively aware that it is he himself who makes the judgment. For this reason, self-awareness, for Avicenna, is axiomatic, a priori, and independent of any other form of cognition: while it constitutes the necessary ground of all awareness, it is itself grounded in nothing beyond itself. Thus, shuʿūr bi-dhāt can be understood as a kind of non-conceptual, a priori awareness that is the unconditioned condition of every other consciousness. This doctrine of self-awareness, though partially resonant with certain analytic-philosophical accounts, is identical with none of them.

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