As I suggested in my last post, the fact that we can isolate ‘pure consciousness’ or awareness in the way that we do now is in fact a function of the changes brought about by the German Idealists two centuries ago.

             What I have not said, hitherto, is that German Idealism – and therefore my philosophy of reflection – begins with the realization that our present mode of experience is already the consequence of a radically comprehensive process of self-awareness. Time, space, language,objects, ideas or concepts – in other words, the very structures of our present perceptions as well as the apparently formally reflective intellectual responses are grounded in self-awareness. My sense of self is not something that floats, adventitiously, on top of the field of experience. The field itself is a function of the same turning-about activity of consciousness that produces the self.
            The infant is only immediate. That is, we were not born self-aware. As aconsequence, we were not born with the necessary structural apparatus of memory that would allow us to store memories of time, space and objects. ‘Time’, ‘space’ and ‘object’ may represent ‘things’ which actually exist ‘out there’, but the way we experience them, the essentially subtending structure which allows us to experience them as we do is ultimately a function of the activity of consciousness,specifically, the activity of consciousness that produces self-awareness.
            Kant characterizes the empirical or experiential cue which authorizes these statements by saying that all our present experience is accompanied by the implicit ‘I think’ or ‘I experience’. The fact that I can abstract my experience formally as a contained concept is based on the reality that the experience of the object is already essentially a formalized abstraction. Consciousness keys on value. The infant recognizes value, apparently without any conceptualization or reflexive construct of formalized objects in space and time. (This is why we ‘do not remember’ our infancy.) But apparently the reflective moment can be ‘stacked up’ on this immediacy of value. So we can assign a reflexive constructive element to the value, such as its isolation as ‘an object’, with the same apparent immediacy as the appearance of the value in consciousness.
            Now, of course, we do not create this whole construct individually. We are socialized into it by all our mentors, all the self-aware beings who surround us in our infancy. So the context of self – of time, space and objects – extends back through human prehistory, perhaps tens of thousands of years. We humans have evolved this reflective field through human aeons of creative activity. But if we inherit it, we also have to make it our own. We have to engage a personal creative act that opens us up to the structural nature of reflective awareness, giving us the basic tools to render the whole field in terms of the reflective construct.
            The reason we do not remember this pre-reflective state of awareness is two-fold. First of all, of course, is because the reflective construct essentially covers the whole range of experience. But, secondly, reflection is addictive. Since we identify self with existence, we assume that the loss of self is death.

            Because the witnessing awareness is essentially 'empty', self first appears as the tacit corollary of the perceptual world. Hence we proceed by a sequence of reversals, exfoliating non-self from self. Self is not the external world, the object or our tangible possessions. But even body and mind are potentially questionable, even as arbiters of self.

            This is where we tend to end up, when we start from the recognition of an entirely separable witness, but lack the knowledge of the history of philosophy that would connect us with the nature of reflection. And this is the condition of the present society, since the guardians of philosophy, themselves, have failed to recognize the importance of this contribution on the part of the Idealists. Modern scholastic philosophy traces its origins to a wholesale rejection of Idealism in favor of a narrow analysis based on strictly formal logic. The trail leads to a cul-de-sac.
            But if we understand that the question revolves around the fact that we are already self-aware, and that what we are looking at is a reflective construct, then the question is not whether ‘our perceptions and visual conceptions are accurate or even useful’, but how to break through the reflective construct to grasp the pure values at the core of our experience. Because it is in such direct perceptions of value that legitimate creativity and the ‘revaluation of value’ reside.
            But,of course, the issue is not as simple as the statement would suggest.Because, once we are self-aware, we can never lose our self-awareness.The artist or teacher – as a true master – can hover in a space of absorption which is tantamount to the pre-reflective immediacy of value, but their expression, and to some extent their perceptions and intellect, continue to function within the frames of the reflective.

           So this is the function of art.

            To state it another way – and this was what I was pointing to in my last post – it is not enough to refer to pure awareness. It cannot explain our experience. We have to posit the equally radical necessity of value, of the specific quality and immediate presentation of value.This is what saves us from pure solipsism. But the immediacy of value is necessarily the function of individual awareness, and the dance between value and the nature of reflection is the very core of the self. So the moment always expresses a pure, unique value. And since this ‘moment’ is always the moment of an individual consciousness,value and self are one.
            But, of course, reflective awareness is a field of habituated responses. And this field of habituated responses is addictive. So, as reflective beings, we have to find the personal key to reconnect with that immediacy of value. This, for example, explains some of the paradoxes of later, pragmatic Buddhism. We already manifest the value of the moment as our moment of existence. But how do we ‘actualize’ it? Howcan we enter into the immediacy of the value as a function of our consciousness that breaks through the habituation and addiction and grasps the core value immediately in awareness?
            This is the importance of traditionary media and practices. They allow us to bring the immediate forces of history, as essentially an ‘external’ function, to bear on the closed circle of habituated self-awareness.
            But it also depends on the particular nature of the thread of value that is manifesting as ‘self’ – as this sequence of values which is the essence of the ‘I’ – in other words, on my ‘vocation’.

             As Da Hui said to Hui Neng, ‘It is not that there is no enlightenment and no practice. It is just that they cannot be defiled.’