Four Stages of Consciousness

A Guide for the Perplexed

When we first become aware in the womb and for a short time after we are born, we continue to think of ourselves as a single organism with our mothers. It is perhaps for this reason that the Torah attributes life to first breath (Gen 2:7, 19) and rabbinic and Islamic jurisprudence do too; perhaps also this is why even after the legal acknowledgment of a life occurs, the acknowledgment of that life as a self-aware moral agent, much less an adult, is pushed off by many years. Before we become verbal, and after, we are not burdened by much in the way of categorical, discursive reasoning. There is nothing to tell me that “this” is a “dog” and “that” is a “tree,” that you are you and I am myself, that something is alive or dead, good or bad, etc. other than the adults in my life that tell me so and the material they share with me that imparts such categorical thinking gradually over time. Sure, the brain is ordinarily endowed with a faculty for this kind of binary thinking, but it is massively conditioned by the education it receives in the family, society, school, and culture for how it learns to distinguish between different types of phenomena. Even if our pedagogical curriculum is designed to blur or deconstruct categories we have inherited or learned, to do so implies that we have first learned to think in such taxonomized ways, acknowledging genera and species, methods of inquiry, canons of critical thinking, and explicit rules of linguistic grammar, logic, and rhetoric that demonstrate our capacities in the body of knowledge the culture seems important for us to know (rightly or wrongly). Some of us make it to the end of our education still uncertain what all the fuss is about, and happy with a precritical, blissfully unconscious experience of the phenomenal in its sheer fact, the serendipity of its outline as it is perceptible to our ipseity. I have learned with and taught students like this, and I have to say I cannot fault them for making it to the end of years of rigorous drilling in history and mathematics and science and English only to still be bewildered by what the point of it all may have been. Plato contended that all learning was anamnesis, “remembering” the form of the Good as we knew it before this life; the point of paideia from his perspective was that (elite, male) children might come to know and love the Good, realizing of course that this would mean an asymptotal assimilation to the divine Goodness, the content of which one could only ever arrive at aporia concerning. Such students as I describe simply want to cut out the middle man: why bother with all this time spent trying to gesture towards the Good (hopefully), when no one knows what the Good really is, anyway?