It seems almost impossible to imagine an appearing without someone to whom something appears. If I see a tree, there is the tree and there is me seeing it. If I hear music, there is the sound and there is the consciousness in which the sound is heard. From this apparently simple experience, a much deeper assumption easily follows: perhaps nothing can appear unless there is first a subject to whom it appears.
But what if the subject is not the foundation of appearing?
This question takes us into one of the most difficult aspects of the structure of Being, and into one of the decisive insights of Emanuele Severino. The difficulty is not simply to determine what consciousness is made of, or even where it comes from. It is to understand whether consciousness itself can occupy the privileged position we instinctively give it, as though it were the condition that makes all appearing possible.
The Subject Within Appearing
The modern philosophical tradition has often placed the subject at the centre of the problem of knowledge. Descartes begins from the thinking subject, Kant makes the conditions of experience depend upon the subject’s structures, and Husserl investigates the intentional consciousness to which things are given. In very different ways, these approaches preserve an intuition that seems almost unavoidable: something appears, and therefore it must appear to someone.
Yet the subject itself is something that appears. I can say “I am conscious,” but this “I” is already present within my experience. I can think about my consciousness, observe my thoughts, remember my past, or become aware of my own awareness. In each case, the subject I might be tempted to regard as the foundation is already something that appears.
This does not mean that the subject is unreal or unimportant. It means something more precise: the subject cannot be the ultimate foundation of appearing if the subject itself belongs to what appears. The apparent foundation is already within the horizon it was supposed to explain.
The point is subtle because we ordinarily experience ourselves precisely as the ones to whom things appear. Yet this does not establish that the subject stands outside appearing or that it somehow produces the horizon in which things become manifest. The subject is itself included within that horizon.
Who Is Conscious of Consciousness?
This immediately raises a familiar problem. If consciousness is what makes appearing possible, what makes consciousness itself appear?
One possible answer would be another consciousness. But then that consciousness would itself require another consciousness in which it could appear, and the same question would arise again. We would have an apparently endless succession of observers observing observers, with no point at which appearing could actually take place.
The difficulty is not simply that such a regress would be inconvenient or practically impossible. If every appearing required a further appearing in which it was contained, nothing would ever actually appear. There would always have to be another horizon behind the one we are considering, another consciousness behind the consciousness we have just invoked.
The alternative is not to search for one more subject behind the subject. It is to question the assumption that appearing needs such an external foundation in the first place.
Appearing cannot be explained by endlessly referring to something else that makes it appear. If what appears required an infinite series of further appearances before it could actually appear, the very phenomenon we are trying to explain would never occur.
The regress therefore points to a different possibility: appearing is not something that needs to be produced by another appearing. It is the horizon within which beings are manifest, including the beings we call subject and consciousness.
What About the Origin of Consciousness?
This distinction also changes the way we can approach one of the great questions of contemporary thought: where does consciousness come from?
Neuroscience can investigate the extraordinary relationship between conscious experience and the brain. It can identify neural correlates, describe changes in conscious states, and investigate the physical conditions associated with particular experiences. These are legitimate and indispensable empirical questions.
But they are not automatically answers to the ontological question.
To discover the physical conditions under which consciousness appears is not necessarily to demonstrate that consciousness, in the ontological sense, has been produced by those conditions. We need to distinguish between explaining the conditions under which something appears and explaining how Being itself could come from what is not.
The distinction is similar to the one we encounter when considering the origin of the universe. Cosmology can describe the conditions under which the universe appears in our physical models without thereby demonstrating that Being itself came from nothing. In the same way, neuroscience can describe the conditions under which consciousness appears without thereby establishing that Being, or consciousness itself, has been produced from non-being.
The question “What causes this experience to appear?” may therefore have a perfectly legitimate scientific answer. The question “What causes appearing itself?” is different. It cannot simply be answered by adding another being to the chain of causes, because that being would itself belong to what appears.
Neither Matter Nor Consciousness as the Final Foundation
This also helps us avoid two opposite temptations.
The first is to regard consciousness as an accidental product of matter and then conclude that consciousness is ultimately destined for nothingness when its physical conditions disappear. The second is to reverse the hierarchy and declare consciousness itself to be the fundamental reality from which everything else derives.
These positions appear radically opposed, but they share an important assumption. Both are looking for something that can stand behind appearing as its ultimate foundation. In one case, matter is given this role; in the other, consciousness is. But matter itself appears, just as consciousness, thought, the body, and even the distinction between subject and object appear. None of these can therefore simply be installed as the ultimate ground of appearing.
The question has to be moved elsewhere, beyond the search for some particular being that could serve as the foundation of all the others.
This does not require us to deny the reality of matter or consciousness. It requires us to recognize that whatever appears cannot simultaneously be treated as the ultimate explanation of the horizon in which it itself appears.
Appearing Without a Separate Observer
This is perhaps the most difficult step because our ordinary experience seems to tell us otherwise. We are accustomed to thinking that appearing is an event that happens to a subject: something appears, and consciousness receives it.
But perhaps this already divides what does not need to be divided in this way.
There is the appearing of the tree, the appearing of the seeing, and the appearing of the subject who sees. We ordinarily separate these into an external object and an internal observer, as though the two belonged to fundamentally different orders of reality. Yet both the object and the observer are themselves beings within the same horizon of appearing.
This does not erase their distinction. The tree is not the same as the person who sees it, and consciousness is not identical to the object of which it is conscious. But distinction does not require separation into two independently founded realms. The subject does not need to stand outside appearing in order for appearing to occur. It is itself included within the appearing that makes the distinction between subject and object possible.
The question therefore changes. Instead of asking what observer stands behind appearing, we can ask how the observer itself belongs to what appears.
The End of the Search for a Foundation
Once this is seen, the question of consciousness takes on a different character. We no longer have to discover a hidden entity that makes appearing possible, nor do we need to construct an infinite chain of consciousnesses observing consciousnesses. The subject is not the foundation of appearing, but one of the beings that appear within it.
Far from reducing consciousness, this removes from it a burden that it was never necessary to impose. Consciousness does not have to create the world by making it appear, nor does it have to stand outside Being in order to know Being. It is itself part of what is given in the appearing of Being.
This also gives a different meaning to the question of the origin of consciousness. We can continue to investigate the biological, neurological, psychological and social conditions under which particular forms of conscious experience appear. But none of these explanations needs to be confused with an account of the origin of Being itself.
The deeper issue is not whether consciousness has a history within the appearing of the world. Clearly, our forms of consciousness have conditions, relations and histories. The issue is whether such conditions can be taken to mean that consciousness, or Being itself, has emerged from what is not.
Here the same question returns that we encountered when considering the origin of the universe. A beginning in appearance does not necessarily mean a beginning in Being.
Perhaps this is why the question “Who is conscious?” eventually leads somewhere different from where we expected. We begin by looking for the observer behind experience, only to discover that the observer is itself something that appears.
The subject is therefore not the source of appearing. It is one of the ways in which Being appears.
And if Being cannot come from nothing or return to nothing, then the appearing of consciousness cannot be understood simply as an escape from non-being followed by an eventual return to it. Whatever its empirical conditions, consciousness belongs to the same horizon of Being as everything else that appears.
The deepest question is therefore no longer, “What makes reality appear to me?”
It may be something more fundamental:
How could anything appear at all if Being were not already what it is?
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