Knowing and Remembering

Abstract

So far we have seen that the fundamental characteristic of consciousness is that it must, by nature, be consciousness of something. We have thus formed a dyad: on the one hand there is consciousness, on the other there is that something - object, thing, phenomenon - of which consciousness is conscious. But we have also seen that consciousness, when considered in isolation, is nothing but an abstraction, as is the phenomenon - the object, the thing - since it cannot exist as such without appearing to a consciousness. Concrete existence manifests itself as a synthetic whole in which consciousness and phenomenon, in taking shape, acquire that concreteness they were lacking when considered in isolation. The relationship between the two is thus constitutive of the elements themselves as they relate to one another. However this does not mean that the origin of this relationship can be indistinctly sought in either consciousness or in the phenomenon. It is only in consciousness that it can be found; it is only in consciousness that that particular relationship known as knowledge is defined. Consciousness is responsible for this relationship in that it originally comes into being through its relationship with an object. It is now time to further clarify the relationship between consciousness and object and, more generally, to pose the problem of the origin of knowledge.