The Becoming of Consciousness: 1 Pre-Reflective Awareness: Consciousness Before Concept

Consciousness, in its earliest manifestations, is not the reflective, articulated phenomenon often foregrounded in philosophy. It is instead pre-reflective, embodied, and relational, emerging within fields of interaction that both constrain and enable potential awareness. In this phase, perception, affect, and motor engagement are inseparable: the organism does not merely inhabit the world; it co-constitutes its relational horizon. Possibility is already structured through these interdependencies, even before language or symbolic systems render it explicit.

From an evolutionary perspective, pre-reflective consciousness arises as a dynamic adaptation, enabling organisms to navigate, anticipate, and respond to complex environments. The relational structuring of potential is evident in sensorimotor coupling: perception and action form a feedback loop, a continuous tuning of possibility to context. This relationality is not representational; it is ontologically active, shaping what can be experienced, learned, or actualised.

Cultural and cognitive anthropology further emphasises that early human experience was similarly relational. Communal practices, ritualised movement, and embodied attention create shared fields of proto-conscious construal, where what is perceivable and thinkable is contingent upon both social and ecological structures. Consciousness in this sense is historically and relationally conditioned from the outset.

The pre-reflective field is also affectively laden. Emotions are not mere responses but active modulations of the horizon of possibility. Fear, curiosity, and desire configure attention, bias perception, and guide action, demonstrating that even the earliest consciousness is a tuning of potentialities across relational axes.

In sum, pre-reflective awareness establishes the foundational architecture for later developments in cognition and symbolic thought. It demonstrates that possibility is never abstracted from the field in which it emerges: from the first interactions of organism and environment, consciousness is both enabled and constrained by relational, embodied, and affective structures. The horizon of what can be actualised is co-constituted with the organism’s capacity to perceive, move, and affect.

Modulatory voices: Evolutionary anthropology, phenomenology of embodiment, early cognitive theory.