Basic intentionality, primitive awareness and awareness of oneself

Abstract

A number of philosophers use the technical term ‘subjective character’ with the intention to refer to what makes an experience something like for someone. Three different insights about experience can be taken to intuitively and implicitly motivate the introduction of that technical term: (1) The insight that all experiences involve an experiencing individual to whom something is phenomenally given (basic intentionality), (2) the insight that in every experience the experiencing subject is nonreflectively and nonconceptually aware of having the experience in the simple sense that having the experience partially constitutes the subject’s overall phenomenology (primitive awareness) and (3) the insight that experiencing involves some nonconceptual and nonreflexive awareness of the experience’s basic intentionality (and thereby some sort of pre-reflexive self-consciousness). Considering the resulting three interpretations of subjective character more closely, a number of widespread assumptions about ‘subjective character’ turn out to be untenable. It is argued that the technical term ‘subjective character’ is in several ways seriously misleading and should rather be abandoned.