The Primacy of Consciousness
Consciousness is not a thing, but it is clearly not nothing either. As we saw in the last video, consciousness could actually be everything. It is not something you have but it is something you are, something you live. In this way it is absolutely vital for knowing existence and as such it is existentially primary. It stands before and behind all forms of knowing such that we cannot separate ourselves from it. It is absolutely necessary for meaningful existence or for anything to known at all. It is also a fact that nothing can be conceived of outside of consciousness. In this, consciousness has a primacy unlike any other object, thing, or process that it itself illuminates and comes to know of.
Awareness is ontologically subjective. The way one knows about and experiences the world is personal—private to them. Being conscious is a private affair. As a subject of experience, you have a particular, irreducible, irreproducible, perspective on the universal drama. You see the show from your seat, a seat you carry it around with you. Kind of. You live the world in the first person. It is in this way that it is existential.
Conscious awareness is presupposed in all human affairs. A point so deep and basic it goes completely without saying. A never-spoken presupposition that points to its transcendental primacy and understands its actuality as a meta-principle and requirement for any and all knowing.
Being in touch with reality and the seeing how things hang together is an underlying assumption and cognitive necessity required for human activity. The fact that awareness is assumed in every human engagement is so basic and pervasive that we should steal from the physicist’s and call the transcendental primacy of consciousness: the minus-first, or zeroth law, of meaningful existence. For it is only by its light that reality attains meaning at all.
Every living creature is a window unto the world and if we equate “awareness” as identically shared between all humans we reach Schopenhauer’s “one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures.”
We all exist as subjects of knowledge that experience all things—the world, facts, and feelings—as objects. We must note here we mean, a separation between the subject and even their own subjective feelings. We still stand apart from them.
This kind of relative dividing line between ourselves and the world polarizes the standard state of consciousness and marks the subject/object divide.
What else can we say of consciousness?
What it’s “like-ness”
Consciousness has qualia, or “what it’s like-ness.” There is always something “it feels like” when we are aware. There’s always something it feels like to be conscious. Any and every thing that reveals itself — in and for consciousness — is an object in and of itself. Not just concepts and precepts but emotions and convictions too, i.e., emotions as “objects” could be a subtle and somber sadness or the salient pain of a suture. This is somewhat like saying a subject of experience always has an object to experience
This “aboutness” quality of consciousness is called intentionality. A somewhat misleading term because it just means consciousness is object orientated or is about something. This directedness also means we miss out on other things.
But consciousness doesn’t always have an object. There exist states of consciousness where the object and subject fuse or coalesce into a single experience. This is another definition for the enlightenment experience.
And although consciousness is always experienced as a unified field we can isolate three sorts of glosses or modalities. Cognition, affection, and conation. Put differently, thinking, feeling and doing. Yet these are always blended together, and ebb and flow into one another.
As for cognition, our thoughts are our own. These are subjective but we still, as subjects, stand in relation to them, so thoughts can, in a snese, be considered objects for a subject. Further, they can be as boundless as a kaleidoscopic dream or as rigid and logical as formal mathematics. And we can will them.
As for feeling, we live meaning. Love, joy, happiness, sadness, depression and misery are only experienced by us because things and events mean something to us. And remember, meaning is untouchable by science for it isn’t touchable at all. Meaning is only an experience in and for consciousness. Feeling is also bound to perception. A world flows into us and we bring it to life. We feel it. Our sense organs literally define membranes of informative metamorphosis.
And finally, conation. The undeniable feeling of a free will. Of volition. Of doing what I want to do when I want to. It would seem that no matter our circumstance we are always left with a choice.
Casey Mitchell is an avid reader and incurable thinker who finally thought to pick up the pen to share his thoughts on life and love and the meaning of existence. A lover of philosophy, he is consistently perplexed and amazed by the ever-unfolding universe. He is the creative pulse behind SophiasIchor.com and writes to share his curiosity concerning this mystery we live. Consider purchasing his self-published book The Baseless Fabric of this Vision.
This article (The Transcendental and Existential Primacy of Consciousness) was originally created and published by Sophias Ichor and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Casey Mitchell and sophiasichor.com It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.