Santayana in doubts about self-consciousness
Santayana sees self-consciousness as 'animal experience'
- 'the product of two factors...body and environment....
These two natural conditions normally come together like
flint and steel, before the spark of experience will fly'
he then argues against transcendentalism - the view that
'the spark itself is my point of departure'
he goes on
'But the delusion becomes troublesome to the serious critic
of knowledge when it perhaps inclines him to imagine that,
in asserting that experience is a product and has two terms,
he is describing the inner nature of experience, and not
merely its externalconditions as natural history reports them'
just another point here -
external - objective conditions - relations between body
and environment will - have - existed - with or without a
conscious observer
now you might also want to call knowledge an objective
feature of the world
but knowledge requires a knower -
and between the knower and the known
is a relation
knowledge is only known - because of a knower
a knower is - only because - knowledge is known
the relationship is reflexive
hence - consciousness
and to understand this you do not have to posit
a transcendental ego
(no great drama if you do though)
