The interactive Now: On time-consciousness

What is it about?

Philosophers have grappled for ages with the question of how the self can be aware of itself. Mustn't there be a separation between what is aware and what it is aware of? In the case of the self, how can these be the same? Edmund Husserl gave an elegant answer in terms of time-consciousness, but there are several problems he did not solve, and here I attempt to do so. With the help of infancy research, I propose a solution to the enigma of self-awareness: When an infant is engaged by a caregiver, the infant perceives her as attending, and he first becomes aware of himself as the implicit target of that attending. In other words, the self is the caregiver's focal center. The event of becoming self-aware in this way is termed a You-I event. I claim that the You-I event persists in various modes throughout life and that its dynamic forms the original experience of time.

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Why is it important?

The essay solves, in one stroke, two problems that have bedeviled philosophers: the enigma of self-awareness and the nature of our consciousness of time. In the course of doing this, it casts light on a number of other issues: the duration of the Now; the illusion of a mental interior; the origin of what appears to be unmediated self-awareness; and the origin of the apparent separation between subject and object.