Philosophy of Mind

Consciousness is.  But we must reflect and become aware first of all that there is consciousness. Make consciousness itself an object for consciousness.  But in this awareness of consciousness itself we must make sure that we see consciousness in its purity and totality. That all experience, past, present, future, in whatever mode, the world itself, is immanent in consciousness.  Thus does consciousness stand outside itself and perceive itself in itself by itself - the primordial stream which has sometimes been called the stream of thought, although to be accurate we must include all modalities of consciousness experience under the heading of cogitata.  Temporality is unveiled in its primordial role. This shift of awareness* can have a sobering and even liberating effect, like an exit from Plato's cavern.  We are left with an agent-self standing both inside and outside consciousness, the universal sphere of consciousness as an object, and the relation between the agent-self and the universal sphere.

But here we take a practical turn which will hopefully lead us to truth and allow us to avoid many errors. 

There is the primordial transcendental knowledge that there is something seriously wrong with our consciousness that needs to be corrected, there is something that needs to be overcome.  The agent-self must somehow act on consciousness and hence ultimately act on itself to remedy this situation.  Part of such primordial wrong is the powerlessness and passivity of the self-agent, specially in its naive unreflected self in which it inhabits naturalistically and in oblivion  a world unknowingly constituted by consciousness. And no, we are not confusing merely 'psychological' problems with philosophical ones. The divorce of psychology and philosophy is itself philosophically questionable.

The transcendental ego in the Husserlian sense is merely passive, shallow and theoretical (in the sense of being talk about knowledge rather than knowledge, the menu rather the the actual dish).  Because it lacks power and it cannot act, it cannot attain to knowledge, indeed despite some rupture it does not leave the western conceit that genuine knowledge can be divorced from a vital transformation of the subject.

How can the transcendental ego gain a grasp or foot-holding on consciousness itself so that it does not remain a vain chimera ? The answer involves the theory of embodiment, but in a way radically different from any naturalism or existentialism. To us the theory of embodiment is the theory of the body from a first-person perspective, the phenomenology of the body as experienced exclusively from the inside (the external theory being developed from and based on the internal theory). We claim that the phenomenology of  inner-body consciousness is necessary and of immense importance to any correct philosophy of consciousness.  The transcendental ego must first of all focus, concentrate and investigate inner-body consciousness.

Focus on the inner-body consciousness is the solution, the vital foot-holding, for  the transcendental ego becoming active and gaining power over the total immanent sphere of consciousness and thus to at last access the long sought-for clarity in knowledge.  Inner-body consciousness is a kind of organic crystallization of consciousness which reveals itself to be very deep with roots in manifold aspects of ordinary human psychological  experience - even neurological ones fall within the scope of a strictly internal point of view. It is the necessary path to pass through in order to be able to  grasp and bring order to other spheres of more subtle conscious modalities. That is: we must bring to the light of consciousness what we are in fact deeply identified with without knowing in order to achieve dis-identification from it (we will not go into here the philosophy of self and its modalities of unification, synthesis, negativity and subsumption).

The body is thus the initial and essential tool and means by which the transcendental ego attains the correct relationship to its own total immanent sphere of consciousness. It is also, as we shall see in a future essay, the key to a Kantian-Schopenhauerian ethics of universal compassion, which involves the overcoming of solipsism. It is also the basis for  a new philosophical top-down organicist architectonic of the sciences which is not without strong connections to Goethe's,  Schopenhauer's and von Uexküll's theories of natural science.

Our use of  'body' is perhaps misleading as it is used in a very technical sense: that (Kant's noumenal X) which enters into a particular kind of relationship to consciousness which characterizes inner, first-person body-experience and body-consciousness. Consider the section dedicated to the so-called 'refutation of idealism' in Kant's CPR. Our goal is to show in an analogous (or transposed) way that the certainty of our own consciousness and its reflected embodied experience - in particular the reflected embodied experience of pain - necessarily presupposes the existence of other similarly embodied consciousnesses external to us, when we consider ourselves as particular embodied consciousnesses. The moral law we wish to establish and develop (which has both Kantian and Schopenhauerian foundations) has two inseparable and necessary components: compassion for self and compassion for others, the duty to alleviate one's own suffering and to alleviate the sufferings of others, or, in the words of the Gospels, to 'love thy neighbor as thyself', supposing, of course, that by 'neighbor' is meant every human (or in general sentient) being.

*The path to  transcendental consciousness involves the detachment-inducing awareness of temporality (including past and futurity), of the transience, change, frailty and compositeness of all domains of our embodiment and experience (psycho-physicality) as well as scrutiny of the now, the actual, what in fact is really there in the midst and in light of this transience. This should become ever more subtle, anchoring in the realm of pure thought.

We can also say that transcendental consciousness is attained by a decision to examine what is really present before us, what is positively pristinely there rather than a projection, anticipation, interpretation and extension conditioned by volition, etc. This leads to a conversion inward, a unification which is also an inversion and shift of the entire domain of consciousness. 

Transcendental consciousness involves the process by which we come face to face - but in a detached way - with the current of our own thoughts (possibly entwined with empirical-sensual content). This is what Husserl describes in the first chapters of the Cartesian Meditations.

Or rather transcendental consciousness is a freely flowing unified state beyond the stopping (or self-limitation) of consciousness in intentional acts.

See also:  Scarfe, A. (2006). Hegelian “Absolute Idealism” with Yogācāra Buddhism on Consciousness, Concept (Begriff), and Co-dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda). Contemporary Buddhism, 7(1), 47–73. doi:10.1080/14639940600877994

Serious philosophy might be said to be simply studying Kant and finding  ways or reconciling Fichte and Schelling, Schopenhauer, Frege and Husserl...except that i) modern mathematics has opened the way to the development of the genuine philosophical logic which few bother to learn and understand: categorical logic and type theory and ii) we now have access to immense Sanskrit libraries of Buddhist philosophy which few bother to learn and understand.