Here is the first ‘moment’, literally, the first conscious ‘instant’ of time, the grounding reflex for concept, on which all concepts ultimately take their form. But it is a moment of itself essentially without concept.

            This is what determines our first states of self-awareness.

            Since the Romantic era, most reasonably sophisticated adults have assumed that the myth of the garden represents the ‘Edenic’ state of infancy prior to self-awareness. But, in fact, we do not have a sense of timelessness until we have a sense of time. The immediacy of pre-reflective infancy is without any extraneous formative understanding or feeling.

            The Wordsworthian ‘trailing clouds of glory’ is inapt, except in terms of the developments subsequent to this first self-awakening. From the first moment of self-awareness, with its splendid and all-embracing immediacy within its frameless instance of self-aware consciousness, we gradually frame in the conceptual structures by which we define self-consciousness, the habitual responses which become engrafted into the immediacies of our value responses and thus appear as essentially ‘immediate’ in themselves, the proto-conceptual forms that first define ‘object’ in awareness, and so forth.

            But that means that this first instance of self-awareness is the dialectical key to self-consciousness. ‘Ideal’ and ‘real’ not only begin together in this instant, they are essentially and necessarily mutually defining.

            Dialectic, then, is not simply something that occurs ‘within’ awareness. It is the key act of awareness.

            Without self-awareness, we not only have neither self nor concept, we have neither self nor object. My study of the incremental development of self-awareness shows that object as much as concept is a developmental consequence of this first awakening to awareness. ‘Concept’ largely derives from the experience of object. Object, as such, does not exist in the pre-reflective immediacy of value response. The assignment of ‘bodies’ to values is a tacit mirror of the mirror, so to speak. That is, it involves assigning the structural act of reflection to an immediate value point or value response in consciousness.

            Hence I have described it as a ‘proto-conceptual’ act.

            ‘Conceptualization’ involves a tertiary reflective act with respect to the formalized object. And, of course, all of these processes are ultimately dependent on emergent language, whether viewed in terms of the individual development of the child or the cultural development of pre-history. Language supplies the necessary symbolic sustaining structure by which this developing reflective interpretation is held in place.

            But this means that we first jump out into self-awareness with a completeness that we have not rivaled since.

            Suddenly, and for that instant, we are a complete consciousness entirely separated from all else.

            Both body and world appear entirely alien from this pure consciousness.

            At the same time, we have our first ‘intuitive’ grasp of solipsism, that, while body and world are entirely alien to pure awareness, awareness is equally all of body and awareness – that body and world as we experience them are necessarily not only conditioned by awareness, but are essentially expressed as the ‘substance’ of awareness.

            Here is the primary paradox on which dialectic is grounded.