In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger points to the blind spots of consciousness-privileged philosophies: they do not inspect the lived experience of being – their perspective is only a single, cross-sectional, theoretical angle of Being. Consciousness, says Heidegger, is an auxiliary feature of our understanding of ourselves, rather than the bedrock of that understanding. I agree with his conclusion that consciousness is not fundamental to our understanding of self because consciousness is the animating force of humans as a movement of the universe, from the perspective of here and now. Consciousness is the process, the method, and the vehicle that brings phenomenal experience to the Being. It is a quality of being in spacetime, just as being brittle is quality of sedimentary rock. Consciousness is not itself phenomenal experience. And since we are fundamentally Beings experiencing phenomenologically, we cannot be consciousness (the means of being aware) – “we” must be awareness.
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