TAKING BODILY SELF-AWARENESS IN ANIMALS SERIOUSLY

The current debates on embodiment, consciousness, and bodily (self-) awareness are partly characterized by insightful convergences of analytically and phenomenologically influenced approaches, allowing for an increased understanding of the phenomena themselves. Since bodily awareness is essential to any sentient being, these analyses should also be of high relevance to studies of animal cognition in general, and animal consciousness in particular. Far too often only higher forms of (self-)awareness have been the focus of philosophical debate. The aim of this paper is to strengthen the case for the role of bodily self-awareness in animals by bringing David DeGrazia's account of self-awareness in animals into dialogue with contemporary phenomenology, thereby emphasizing significant overlaps. First, I discuss DeGrazia's account of bodily self-awareness. DeGrazia argues that higher forms of self-awareness such as social and reflective/introspective self-awareness (e.g. demonstrated in mirror self-recognition tasks) presuppose bodily self-awareness. Drawing on various empirical data and conceptual considerations, his arguments are illuminating in their own right. But his conception of self-awareness remains somewhat underdetermined. Therefore, second, I argue that DeGrazia's case for bodily self-awareness in animals faces a serious challenge: It has been claimed that the most basic types of self-awareness in question are instances of mere consciousness and not selfawareness (Lynne R. Baker). Third, I shall argue, this challenge can be met by complementing DeGrazia's account with Dan Zahavi's and Shaun Gallagher's phenomenological analysis of pre-reflective self-awareness. Emphasizing the subjective aspect of for-meness of any first-personal given experience is precisely what it means to take bodily self-awareness seriously.