The Relationship Between Consciousness and Self-Awareness

What is the relation between having an experience and being self- aware? This question has played an important role in the phenomenological tradition before it resurfaced in the recent debate between higher-order and first-order representational theories of consciousness. In addressing this question it will be useful to distinguish two different concerns here: One concern is the extensional relation between the two terms: Does consciousness occur with and without self-awareness, or is self-awareness involved in every conscious experience? A second concern is the explanatory relation between these terms: Does an explanation of consciousness have to proceed via an explanation of self-awareness, or can we explain self-awareness via an explanation of consciousness? My thesis will be that it is not the task of a theory of self-awareness to explain what conscious experience is, but we can (and in fact must) use a theory of consciousness to explain in which sense one is minimally self-aware whenever one has a conscious experience.