Self-Consciousness and Affective Evaluation. The Kantian Precursor of an Insight into Philosophical Biology

Abstract

Certain arguments developed by Kant point in the direction of the novel insight that our epistemic and agential powers are grounded in a pre-reflexive self-awareness constituted by evaluative affects appraising the embodied process of life. For the explicit elaborations of this insight, we need to turn to later theories that do without the Kantian distinction between empirical knowledge and transcendental inquiry: namely, to Hans Jonas’s phenomenological interpretation of animal life and contemporary accounts of the evolution and function of animal affects in theoretical biology. Animal affectivity, as construed in these theories, accounts for the fact that properly human reflexive self-consciousness involves an awareness of our identity to ourselves. Yet the correlative other moment of reflexive self-consciousness, that of distinction between the reflecting subject and the self being reflected upon, can only be accounted for in terms of the sociality that is distinctive to humans. The reflexivity and sociality of our form of life also shapes the evaluative affects constituting the pre-reflexive foundation of our self-consciousness.