It’s certainly an unfortunate time to be living in, when the very notion of consciousness appears to be completely foreign to many people, revealing itself to be the very reflection of their dispossession, their absence from the world. Awareness is, after all, what determines the quality of the relationship we are able to have with everything that surrounds us. The greater our awareness, the wider the range of possibilities, the greater the value of our very existence, our presence in the world, our freedom and the use we can make of our rather brief existences. It’s certainly no coincidence that in contemporary society, as constructed under the yoke of the Political Economy, awareness has become something of an embarrassment. There are so many things that conscience prefers to ignore that it has ended up forgetting itself and relegating itself to oblivion.
The extent of its loss can be measured by the ease with which the mind satisfies itself.
It has to be said that capitalist religion, with its ever-increasing nuisance and endless extension, could only work towards the very movement of this obliteration, doing everything in its power to devitalize and despiritualize consciousness, and see its skin worn by lifeless, vanity-laden knowledge. It was necessary, therefore, for each individual’s own conscience and its natural movement to be withdrawn to make way for the voice of its master, manifested in the words of experts of all kinds telling us not only what we should think and want, but also how we should feel. Politicians, legal experts and economists, scientists and strategists, publicists and lobbyists of all kinds jostle each other daily to guide us in our servitude through the media, so richly endowed by those who subsidize it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that consciousness disappears altogether, but rather that it becomes anaesthetized and repressed in more or less distant parts of our minds, manifesting itself in the form of more or less persistent itches that signal its presence. However, our benevolent system has many ointments and clever ingredients claiming to remedy this inconvenience. However, consciousness is hardly satisfied with this new enclosure that the ideology of capital is trying to impose with all its might, because it is not only conscious of itself, but also of the object that is presented to it. This object (the present society) is less and less attractive and, to put it bluntly, more and more unpleasant to most people.
It is therefore once again conceivable that, by pushing itself towards its true existence, consciousness will reach a point where it will free itself from appearance and its temporary relegation.
Common definitions of philosophical knowledge:
Traditionally, consciousness is defined as a living being’s knowledge of its own existence and of the world around it. To access this knowledge, consciousness synthesizes and analyzes information perceived by the senses. It is therefore a particular kind of information processing, through which new mental objects are created, between perception and action. When we speak of consciousness, we are most often referring to the reflexive awareness specific to the human species: man is conscious, and better still, he knows he is conscious.
To be conscious is to feel, act, think and know that I feel, think and act. Man is not set in the world, he relates to it. Through awareness, the world becomes an object of knowledge and reflection.
Awareness is a project, a vision of the world; it is intentionality. Consciousness is not like an interiority closed in on itself; it is an aim, a projection. Before being reflexive, looking back on itself, awareness is initially related to the world. Because it anticipates itself, consciousness is always already beyond itself; it is aimed at an elsewhere to orient its action in the world.
To sum up, awareness is the means by which we can grasp our own reality and give it meaning. It is the key to that which can enable us to become once again the subject of history itself, and of its reopening in a time that has pretended to close the door on it.
Translated by TerKo with the help of a free translation tool.
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