Forms emerge to shape contents when the undifferentiated unity of immediate experience is ruptured by some sort of stress. The experiencing self divides into a self-conscious subject and a confronted object, defined in some mode—cognitive, aesthetic, evaluative—according to the nature of the originating situation.

DEFINE: This defines the origin of self-consciousness and subject-object distinction as arising from stress rather than being innate.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 22