I think that's right in the sense that a fish doesn't actively experience water. It's too fundamental. On the other hand, water is an essential part of its lived experience, and if you take it out of the water, it definitely knows the difference. — Baden

Ah, but the analogy doesn't work. We can't take ourselves out of consciousness or perception and know the difference. Our vantage point is a given. We will not be able to position ourselves other than where we are in terms of awareness.

Good. I like Sartre as an "in" to this approach to consciousness and I'm not particularly bothered by the critique in this context (also, my relative lack of knowledge of Husserl means I can't effectively argue the point anyway). — Baden

Same for me.

I now wish I had more patience for Husserl -- but I do need to recognize him as a giant that could provide interesting input if @Joshs is willing to give his take.

I'm trying to fill out above a context (more to come) that I'll try to loop back into a fuller application to body image disorders (including body dysmorphic disorder and eating disorders). — Baden

Cool :)

One thing that comes to mind for myself is something less intense: even the idea of "I need to lose weight" is a (mild)* form of wanting your body to be elsewise, and in a literal sense it's something that goes on in the mirror -- not just the mind's eye of the self, but the reflection one sees and judges of oneself.

I don't know Husserl well enough to say, but what I want to say is that this relates to the pluperfect tense of consciousness -- this is something I only recently picked up from Sartre so I could just be throwing it out there as the thing I've been thinking about -- but his notion of time seems to require a pluperfect tense in language which seems to indicate a structure of consciousness.

To use the mild example above: One cannot say "I need to lose weight" without being able to refer to a before-during-after that is not the current before-during-after -- more specifically the "pluperfect" tense is the tense one takes after having referenced either a past or future point of time and then, with that reference assumed, refers to another point of time relative to that reference.

In terms of "wanting to lose weight" it seems to me that right now I have to think about what my body once looked like and imagine what it could look like which requires a double pluperfect scenario to make sense of the desire.

Which kind of goes into the slogan, at least, of "consciousness is what it is not" -- not strictly in terms of being-in-itself/being-for-itself, but at the level of meaningful sentences.



*Started to think and realized that this isn't quite true -- it could be mild or intense, depending on the person, but it's mild in the sense that is relatable to lots of people and possible to conceive as a mild disappointment.