Pure consciousness

pp. 25-45

in: Gustav Špet, Appearance and sense, Deventer, Kluwer, 1991

Abstract

Man is conscious of the world around him, the world in all its variety. He is conscious of himself, of his aims and activities and of his own aspiration for knowledge. But it is not hard to see that as soon as he begins to realize all this what he actually and immediately sees, hears and so forth is tightly entangled in this thoughts and expressions with what he has heard from others and what he assumes on the basis of what is seen and heard, etc. The first task of the fundamental philosophical science should and must be merely to separate^a what man immediately finds in his given consciousness from what he himself dreams up and what he logically concludes, etc. There are no appraisals here, no judgments about the more or less usefulness or importance of either of these two constituent parts of what we are thinking and speaking. Here there is merely the demand to be aware of the "origin" of each concept, thought and word. Yet at the same time it is evident that with regard to the value of what we dream up, of the "theoretical," we can judge only after we know what we possess without this theoretization, that is before having made it.