This paper argues against Dan Zahavi's claim that every conscious experience includes a minimal sense of self. Zahavi asserts that even pre-reflective experience has a qualitative aspect—a sense of "for-meness" or "mineness"—indicating it is for me. The author contends that on the pre-reflective level, experience is transparent and involves only one phenomenon, not two. While conscious experience may be reflexive in relation to the self, it does not additionally require a sense of what it is like for me to have that experience. The author further argues that Zahavi misinterprets Edmund Husserl, who held that consciousness is a form of self-consciousness without necessarily implying a sense of ownership or an abiding self.
The self, for Husserl, is both an unchanging pole of identity and a developing unity that unfolds through time. Time is the universal form of all ego genesis, and the ego constitutes itself in the unity of a history. This paper examines how Husserl understands the temporalization of the ego and its essential historicity within the life-world. It builds on Dan Zahavi's concept of the "minimal self"—the immediate, non-objectifying self-acquaintance of experience—to analyze the sensory basis of self-experience and to argue for understanding the self in its habitual, developmental character as a form of "ownship."