Some Remarks about Awakeness

Zusammenfassung

All work done by man is accomplished in a state of awakeness. Growth and metabolism, respiration and circulation, go on even during sleep; but in order to eat and drink, to find food and shelter no less than to write papers and to read them, we have to be awake. Awakeness is taken as a matter of course; the phenomenon accordingly appears selfevident. It seems unnecessary — even superfluous — to speak about awakeness. In court, judge and jury, defendants and attorneys, are expected to be awake. A witness reports while awake what he has once seen with eyes open, wide awake and watchful. Yet legal codes, although they frequently refer to conditions of clouded consciousness, of dreamlike and amnesic states, do not bother to define awakeness. Psychological and philosophical dictionaries are noncontributive. The literature dealing with dreams and dreaming is immense. The number of references in the bibliography of a recent monograph on dreams exceeds one thousand, but there is hardly any word on awakeness. Even language appears biased; for the nouns “sleep” and “dream”, for the verbs “sleeping” and “dreaming” there are no direct antonyms. Obviously, in practical life no need is felt for a special word to describe a mode of being that, in any case, is the indispensable condition for all description and conversation. Freud, who had so much to say about dreams and the unconscious, states that consciousness, as such, is familiar to everybody and that nothing more can be said about it². True, awakeness is not synonymous with consciousness, for we are also conscious of dreams; they also are experienced. Nevertheless, in the effort to define, wakefulness does not fare much better than consciousness. The distinction is simply taken for granted, at least in the practice of everyday life.

Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 18e Jaargang, Nr. 3, 1956.