Dewart’s Assertive Speech and Self-Presence

Leslie Dewart proposes that specifically human consciousness arose not directly through genetic evolution but through a novel evolutionary process initiated by speech: prehuman organisms already possessed experience, but assertive communication enabled an experiencer to become present to its own experiencing and thereby become conscious in the distinctively human sense. Consciousness for Dewart is thus neither a separate substance nor reducible simply to neural activity; it is a naturally emergent form of self-present experience made possible by embodied biological capacities but historically generated and continuously transformed through speech, thought, and culture (Dewart, 1989; Pikkarainen, 2021). Interpreted in contemporary terms, however, Dewart explains most directly the emergence of self-present or pre-reflectively self-aware phenomenal experience, rather than the more basic fact that experience feels like anything at all.

In other words, Dewart argues that consciousness is generated by speech, and that it is a historically emergent human achievement rather than a biological endowment: all animals experience, but only humans experience consciously. Conscious experience on his account is self-present, meaning the subject experiences not only the object but simultaneously the act of experiencing and herself as the experiencer, in a single act that is explicitly not self-observation or reflection. The mechanism is the assertiveness peculiar to human speech, whereby a speaker intends to communicate her experience and undergoes that communicating as her own causal doing; speech in this sense precedes consciousness, which in turn precedes the structured languages. Dewart holds consciousness to be fully natural and caused by the same biochemical processes humans share with animals, while denying that it reduces to them (Dewart, 1989).

Experience Without Consciousness

Dewart’s foundational distinction is between experience and conscious experience. Experience is widely distributed across animal life and requires no special explanation; what does is the human capacity to experience consciously. Dewart describes the emergence of consciousness not as a new biological structure but as a new way of using biochemical processes already present in animals. This places him at an unusual angle to the field. If phenomenal consciousness is there being something it is like to undergo a state, Dewart appears to grant that to animals under the heading of experience, reserving "consciousness" for a reflexively structured human variant. The denial of animal consciousness in the 1989 book is stark; Pikkarainen (2021) notes that Dewart softened it in his posthumous work, and reads it as an interest in the human form rather than a considered exclusion of others.

Assertive Speech as Generator

Consciousness, on Dewart's account, is not a product of genetic natural selection but of a new mode of human action, namely speaking. What differentiates human speech from animal signaling is assertiveness: the speaker intends to communicate her experience, and experiences the communicating itself as a causal process of which she is the author. The ability to speak thematically, asserting a thesis in relation to a theme, is central to the sequence (Dewart, 1991), and that order of emergence is deliberately counterintuitive. Speech comes first, consciousness second, and structured languages third, a sequence Dewart holds must be recapitulated in every child. He is explicit that this is not linguistic relativity: grammatical structure does not condition thought; rather, the manner of speaking formats consciousness, which then shapes languages. Because consciousness arises from a mode of action rather than from selection, its development is cultural and historical, an evolutionary domain of its own that remains open.

Self-Presence Without Reflection

The claim bearing most directly on phenomenal consciousness is that in conscious experience the act of experience is present to itself. Dewart is careful to distinguish this from self-observation or self-reflection, and the distinction is axial. Theories construing self-consciousness as the subject taking itself as object face the circularity objection pressed by Henrich (1971), since the subject must already be given to itself to do so. Dewart's self-presence is meant to be prior to and constitutive of any such reflective act. This aligns him structurally with pre-reflective accounts in phenomenology, though he arrives from evolutionary and linguistic premises, and the resemblance appears to be convergence rather than influence.

Absent-Mindedness and the Genesis of the Sacred

Dewart's account of consciousness is inseparable from an assessment of its pathology and from the account of religion that follows. Because consciousness develops rather than simply appears, it can develop defectively, and he argues that populations prior to Western culture realized it only partially: the subject's own asserting activity was not properly grasped. He calls this absent-mindedness. The experiencer then feels that reality is asserting itself to her rather than that she is asserting, which projects her own causal agency outward and generates the sense of a Power speaking through the world. The genesis of consciousness thus entails the rise of existential questions and of the sacred. This continues Dewart’s earlier theology: The Future of Belief (Dewart, 1966) held that Christian doctrine had been distorted by its Hellenistic inheritance and required dehellenization, and Sawa and Tarver (2018) read the later work as the naturalized terminus of that program. Dewart supports the diagnosis with a contested linguistic claim: that Indo-European and Sumerian uniquely employ a copula in sentences of the form "X is Y," where other languages say "X Y," and that the copular form encodes an external reality insisting on itself rather than a speaker joining thesis to theme. He carried the analysis into a critique of representationism, the doctrine that cognitions exist in the mind as copies of their objects, which he traced to Hellenistic sources and blamed for modern philosophy's stagnation (Dewart, 2016).

Influence and AI

Dewart’s theory received comparatively little attention in mainstream consciousness research, despite appearing just before the rapid expansion of consciousness studies in the 1990s; later scholars have explicitly described his work as poorly known (Armour, 1991; Pikkarainen, 2021). Its affinities with Jaynes, culturally mediated theories of mind, language-dependent accounts of self-consciousness, and contemporary work on pre-reflective self-awareness are nevertheless substantial, although conceptual convergence should not be mistaken for demonstrated historical influence.

Dewart also rejected genuine artificial intelligence in a strong sense. A computer might simulate speech, reasoning, and communication with extraordinary effectiveness, but he argued that genuine thought and speech require a self-oriented purposive causal process—the system must in some sense communicate its contents to itself as well as externally (Dewart, 1989). This sharply contrasts with Turing-style reliance on publicly manifested intelligent capacities. For contemporary AI-consciousness debates, Dewart thus poses a still-relevant question: whether linguistic performance can constitute evidence of consciousness without intrinsic self-presence. His further assumption that such purposiveness is possible only in living organisms, however, is simply asserted.

Assessment

Dewart’s distinctive contribution is therefore not that language enriches an already conscious mind, but that assertive speech transforms experience into self-present human consciousness and inaugurates a new, cultural mode of conscious evolution. Its strength is the integration of phenomenology, language, development, and cultural evolution; its limitation is that explaining how experience becomes self-present does not yet explain why experience exists phenomenally at all.

In other words, Dewart's project is a theory of the origin and structure of human self-presence, not an account of qualitative character. He explains why experience should become present to itself and what happens culturally when that process miscarries, but not why any state should feel like anything, and his framework places that question on the animal side of a boundary he did not explore. The work is little cited: commentaries appeared on publication (Khan et al., 1991; Armour, 1991), and interest has since been sustained by a small circle (Nixon, 2010; Savage, 2020; Pikkarainen, 2021). Its interest for Landscape is as a fully worked instance of a position rarely developed at length, that consciousness is neither innate nor neural in origin but generated by a mode of action and therefore capable of being done badly.

Note: Dewart’s theory was suggested by Richard Sawa.

References

Armour, L. (1991). Review of Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature, by Leslie Dewart. Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie, 30(1–2), 195–198.

Dewart, L. (1966). The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age. New York: Herder and Herder.

Dewart, L. (1989). Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature. University of Toronto Press.

Dewart, L. (1991). "Synopsis of Evolution and Consciousness." Unpublished author's synopsis.

Dewart, L. (2016). Hume's Challenge and the Renewal of Modern Philosophy. Ed. D. Dewart. BookBaby.

Henrich, D. (1971). "Self-Consciousness: A Critical Introduction to a Theory." Man and World 4(1): 3–28.

Khan, A. H., Alton, B., Meynell, H., Wiebe, D., & Dewart, L. (1991). Leslie Dewart’s Evolution and Consciousness: Three commentaries. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, 20(1), 75–102.

Nixon, G. M. (2010). "Hollows of Memory." Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research 1(3): 213–401.

Pikkarainen, E. (2021). Education, consciousness and negative feedback: Towards the renewal of modern philosophy of education. Philosophies, 6(2), 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies6020025

Savage, A. M. (2020). Leslie Dewart (1922–2009): Canada's Forgotten Theological Philosopher. D.I.M. Publishing.

Sawa, R., and Tarver, W. T. S. (2018). "Leslie Dewart." In C. D. Rodkey and J. E. Miller (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 171–185.