Awareness, consciousness, self-consciousness

Abstract

The article discusses awareness, consciousness and self-consciousness by examining the philosophical and methodological significance of Vytautas Kavolis’s “Trajectories of Awareness”, with the aim of delineating the field of research on cultural awareness. I maintain that Kavolis’s concept of awareness (sąmoningumas) points at a hidden dimension of culture that cannot be reduced either to consciousness or to self-consciousness. Here awareness is understood as a historically changing, collective, and largely unconscious network of fundamental attitudes and assumptions that, in a given period, appears to a community as “self-evident” and “natural.” The article singles out four features of awareness: it designates the least reflected connections between thinking and feeling; it does not describe accidental opinions, but deep structures; it is a collective rather than an individual phenomenon; and it is historically variable. In this way, awareness comes close to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of “prejudices” and can be conceived as a collective unconscious – the ground of consciousness and its point of reference. The article also highlights a methodological problem: how can consciousness reflect its own ground, which is, in principle, not directly accessible to it? The article shows that for Kavolis, literature, and especially poetry, is the royal road leading to Lithuanian consciousness. In the concluding paragraphs, the concept of consciousness is applied to an analysis of Lithuanian understandings of freedom and Europe. It is emphasized that freedom and European identity are not “natural” givens, but fragile, historically constituted achievements of awareness that can and must be reflected upon and consciously nurtured.