Phenomenal Priority and Reflexive Self-Awareness: Watzl meets Yogācāra

Abstract

This paper seeks to reconstruct the Yogācāra Buddhist dual-aspect (dvairūpya) theory of awareness, specifically by using Sebastian Watzl's recent account of attention as the structuring of consciousness into center and periphery. Attention is acknowledged by Yogācāra thinkers as a ubiquitous causal condition for every conscious perceptual awareness. I argue that there is an under-explored link between the activity of attentional structuring and another supposedly ubiquitous aspect of experience, namely self-luminosity (svaprakāśatva). Watzl's theory of attention can give us a new understanding of what these thinkers were trying to capture with the notion of an awareness’s “subjective appearance” (svābhāsa or grāhakākāra). Their notion seems to be referring to some intrinsic aspect of a conscious state's phenomenal appearance that goes beyond what the state phenomenally represents as an intentional object. But, little has been said in either classical or contemporary scholarship about what is the distinct contribution of a svābhāsa or grāhakākāra to a state’s overall phenomenal character. One option is that the svābhāsa is a subjective mode of presentation for the objective content. Others have suggested that the grāhakākāra captures the minimal “mineness” or “for-me-ness” inherent in awareness, that is, a non-thematic awareness of mental states as being my own. Another possibility which is less emphasized by scholars in discussions about mineness or reflexive phenomenality is one suggested by Dharmottara, who caches out the subjective aspect of awareness in terms of felt affective qualities that accompany every conscious cognition of an object. I argue that each of these features of subjective phenomenal character can be grounded upon the activity of attention as theorized by Watzl. In order to characterize “what it is like” for a state to have a svā bhā sa that is distinct from the phenomenal appearance of a state’s intentional content (viṣayābhāsa), we could look to the phenomenal priority structure that attention contributes to consciousness. The appearance of objects as central or peripheral in awareness cannot be exhausted by the properties they are represented as having themselves, and hence will outstrip any attempt by nirākāravādins/intentionalists to reduce all phenomenal content to intentional content. The subjective sense of “mineness” intrinsic to awareness might also be enacted through the activity of attentional structuring, in that shifts of attention may ground a minimal agency which is also responsible for the sense that I have a viewpoint which stands apart from the objective world. Finally, the intrinsically affective qualities of a conscious state’s subjective character can be productively linked with Watzl’s notion of phenomenal salience. For an awareness of an object to also have affective qualities of pleasurableness etc., is for that awareness to be additionally felt as commanding one’s attention to be structured in a certain way.