It lies in the essence of cognitive acts performed by man to investigate a thing, to objectivize it intentionally, and in this way to comprehend it. In this sense cognitive acts have an intentional character, since they are directed toward the cognitive object; for they find in it the reason for their existence as acts of comprehension and knowledge. The same does not seem to apply to consciousness. In opposition to the classic phenomenological view, we propose that the cognitive reason for the existence of consciousness and of the acts proper to it does not consist in the penetrative apprehension of the constitutive elements of the object, in its objectivation leading to the constitution of the object. Hence the intentionality that is characteristic for cognitive acts—to which we owe the formation, and an understanding, of the objective reality on any of its levels—does not seem to be derived from acts of consciousness. These are not essentially intentional by nature, even though all that is the object of our cognition, comprehension, and knowledge is also the object of our consciousness. But while comprehension and knowledge contribute in an intentional way to the formation of the object—it is in this that consists the inherent dynamism of cognizing—consciousness as such is restricted to mirroring what has already been cognized. Consciousness is, so to speak, the understanding of what has been constituted and comprehended. The purport of the preceding remarks is that the intrinsic cognitive dynamism, the very operation of cognition, does not belong to consciousness. If acts of cognition consist in constituting in a specific way the meanings referring to cognitive objects, then it is not consciousness that constitutes them, even if they are indubitably constituted also in consciousness.

It seems, therefore, impossible to deny the cognitive properties or even the cognitive function of consciousness, though the nature of the properties and the function is specific. What we may perhaps call the "consciousness trait" is peculiar to the particular acts of consciousness as well as to their current totality, which may be viewed as the sum or the "resultant" of those acts and which we usually simply refer to as consciousness. As "consciousness" we understand then "reflecting consciousness"—that is, consciousness in its mirroring function. If we see it as if it were the derivative of the whole actively cognitive process and of the cognitive attitude to the external reality, like the last "reflection" of the process in the cognizant subject, it means that we recognize this reflecting or mirroring as possible insofar as we attribute to consciousness the specific quality of penetrating and illuminating whatever becomes in any way man's cognitive possession. (But such penetrative illumination is not tantamount to the active understanding of objects and, subsequently, to the constituting of their meanings.) If we are to keep to this description, the penetrative illumination is rather like keeping objects and their cognitive meanings "in the light," or "in the actual field of consciousness."

Consciousness is not an autonomous subject

Obviously the aim of our present discussion is not to elaborate a complete and finished theory of consciousness. To deny the intentional nature of the acts of consciousness seems to be contrary to most contemporary opinions on that issue. Looking at consciousness, however, we see it not as a separate and self-contained reality but as the subjective content of the being and acting that is conscious, the being and acting proper to man. Disclosing consciousness in the totality of human dynamisms and showing it as the constitutive property of action we strive to understand it, but always in its relation to the action, to the dynamism and efficacy of the person. This manner of seeing and interpreting consciousness-consciousness in what we call the substantival and subjective sense—protects us from conceiving it as an independent, self-contained subject. Indeed, to recognize that consciousness is an independent subject could pave the way to a conception of it in absolute terms and consequently would lead to idealism, if it were taken as the sole subject of all the contents—which would then be nothing but an expression of its own doing (thus, esse = percipi). This line of reasoning, however, lies beyond the scope of the present considerations. Our concern here is solely with consciousness considered from the point of view of the person and his existential efficacy; it is this consciousness that we are striving to describe when we speak of the mirroring and illuminating function peculiar to both the particular acts of consciousness and to the resultant of those acts.

It is necessary nevertheless to note that the sum or resultant of the acts of consciousness determines the actual state of consciousness. The subject of this state, however, is not consciousness itself but the human being, of whom we rightly may say that he is or is not "conscious," that he has full or limited consciousness, and so on. Consciousness itself does not exist as the "substantive" subject of the acts of consciousness; it exists neither as an independent factor nor as a faculty. A full discussion of the arguments in support of this thesis is the task of philosophical psychology or anthropology and lies beyond the scope of the present enquiry. Nevertheless, from what was already said of the nature of the consciousness it is clear that it is entirely dissolved in its own acts and in their specific character of "being aware"; and though this specific character is connected with the mirroring function it is a different thing from cognitive objectivation. Indeed, it is not only cognitively that man enters into the world of other men and objects and even discovers himself there as one of them: he has also as his possession all this world in the image mirrored by consciousness, which is a factor in his innermost, most personal life. For consciousness not only reflects but also interiorizes in its own specific manner what it mirrors, thus encapsulating or capturing it in the person's ego. Here, however, we come to another and supposedly a deeper function of consciousness, which we shall have to discuss separately. We shall then have to answer the question how this interiorization may be accomplished by the mirroring and illuminating functions of consciousness, which we have identified in the preceding analysis. At any rate, our investigation brought us closer to the conscious aspect of action and at the same time of the conscious aspect of the person. We have found that consciousness of action differs from an action conceived as consisting in acting consciously. The consciousness of an action is a reflection, one of the many mirrorings, which make up the consciousness of the person. This reflection belongs by its very nature to consciousness and does not consist in the objectivation of either the action or the person, even though it carries within itself a faithful image of the action as well as of the person.

Consciousness and Self-Knowledge

Consciousness conditioned by its reflecting function

From what we have said so far we gather that consciousness mirrors human actions in its own peculiar manner—the reflection intrinsically belongs to it—but does not cognitively objectivize either the actions or the person who performs them, or even the whole "universe of the person," which in one way or another is connected with man's being and acting. Nevertheless, the acts of consciousness as well as their resultant are obviously related to everything that lies beyond them, and especially to the actions performed by the personal ego. This relation is established by means of the consciousness, which is constituted by the meanings of the particular items of reality and of their interrelationships. When we speak of the aspect of consciousness that refers to meanings, and at the same time state that consciousness as such has no power of cognitive objectivation, we come to the conclusion that the whole of human cognition-the power and the efficacy of active comprehension-closely cooperates with consciousness. Consciousness itself is thus conditioned by this power and efficacy-it is conditioned, so to speak, by the cognitive potentiality, which conformably with the whole Western philosophical tradition appears as a fundamental property of the human person.

The power and the efficacy of active understanding allows us to ascertain the meaning of particular things and to intellectually incorporate them, as well as the relations between them, "into" our consciousness. For to "understand" means the same as to "grasp" the meaning of things and their interrelations. Insofar as all this is alien to consciousness the whole process of active comprehending neither proceeds in it nor is owing to it. The meanings of things and of their relations are given to consciousness, as it were, from outside as the product of knowledge, which in turn results from the active constitution and comprehension of the objective reality and is accumulated by man and possessed by him by various means and to different degrees. Hence the various degrees of knowledge determine the different levels of consciousness.

All the forms and kinds of knowledge which man acquires and possesses and which shape his consciousness with respect to its content, that is from the side of objective meanings, have to be distinguished from what we call "self-knowledge." There is no need to explain that self-knowledge consists in the understanding of one's own self and is concerned with a kind of cognitive insight into the object that I am for myself. We may add that such an insight introduces a specific continuity to the diverse moments or states in the being of the ego," because it reaches what constitutes their primary unity, which comes from their being rooted in the ego. Hence it is not surprising that self-knowledge more than any other form of knowledge must be consistent with consciousness; for its subject matter is the ego, with which-as will be fully demonstrated in the course of further analysis—consciousness remains in an intimate subjective union. At this point self-knowledge and consciousness come closest together, but, at the same time, they deviate from each other, since consciousness, for all the intimacy of its subjective union with the ego, does not objectivize the ego or anything else with regard to its existence and its acting. This function is performed by acts of self-knowledge themselves. It is to them that every man owes the objectivizing contact with himself and with his actions. Because of self-knowledge consciousness can mirror actions and their relations to the ego. Without it consciousness would be deprived of its immanent meanings so far as man's self is concerned—when it presents itself as the object—and would then exist as if it were suspended in the void. This situation is postulated by the idealists, because it is only then that consciousness may be viewed as the subject producing its own subject matter regardless of any factors outside of it. Had we pursued this line of thought we might be led to ask whether consciousness should not be regarded as a real subject or even whether it, so to speak, does create itself. As already noted, however, such questions are of only peripheral interest in the present study.

Consciousness opened to the ego by self-knowledge

Owing to self-knowledge the acting subject's ego is cognitively grasped as an object. In this way the person and his action have an objective significance in consciousness. The reflection or mirroring by consciousness, which is not only subjective but also constitutes the basis for subjectivation (about which more will be said later), does not abolish the objective meaningful constituents of the ego or of its actions; rather, it derives them continuously from self-knowledge. The coherence of self-knowledge and consciousness has to be recognized as the basic factor of the equilibrium in the inner life of a person, especially so far as the intellectual structure of the person is concerned. The "subject" man is also the "object"; he is the object for the subject, and he does not lose his objective significance when mirrored by consciousness. In this respect self-knowledge seems prior to consciousness, and cognitively relates it to the ego and its actions, even if consciousness in itself were not intentionally directed toward them. At the same time, self-knowledge sets, so to speak, a limit to consciousness, the limit beyond which the process of subjectivation cannot proceed.

What is more, the objectivizing turn of self-knowledge toward the ego and toward the actions related to the ego is also a turn to consciousness as such, so far as consciousness also becomes the object of self-knowledge. This explains why, when man is conscious of his acting, he also knows he is acting; indeed, he knows he is acting consciously. He is aware of being conscious and of acting consciously. Self-knowledge has as its object not only the person and the action, but also the person as being aware of himself and aware of his action. This awareness is objectivized by self-knowledge. Thus the objective meaning in what consciousness reflects appertains not to any being or any acting of the person who is my own self, but solely to the being and the acting that involves consciousness and of which I am aware. Man has the self-knowledge of his being conscious and because of it he is aware of the consciousness of his being and acting. But the process does not extend indefinitely; the limit to the reflecting of consciousness is set by self-knowledge. If, on the one hand, it provides the basis for this mirroring-because it forms the content of consciousness-then on the other hand, it marks out the boundary circumscribing its own sphere owing to which consciousness is established in the existence of man, and ascertains itself as immanent in the being instead of spiraling away in an unending sequence of "self-subjectivations."

Earlier in this discussion we emphasized the point that consciousness itself was to be seen neither as an individual subject nor as an independent faculty. The subsequent analysis has shown even more clearly that what we understand by "consciousness" has at its roots the same cognitive potentiality as that to which man owes all the processes of comprehension and objectivizing functions. It springs from the common stock of this potentiality, emerging, as it were, from the background of the processes of comprehension and objectivizing cognition; but at the same time, it appears to be seated more deeply inside the personal subject. It is precisely the reason why, as it seems, all interiorization and subjectivation is the work of consciousness—of which more will be said later.

Self-knowledge as the basis of self-consciousness

That man can be aware not only of his own self and of the actions related to it but also of the consciousness of his actions in relation to the ego appears as the work of self-knowledge. In such phrases as "It is how I became conscious of my action" or "I became conscious of . . . this or that," we speak of an actualization of a conscious process, though in fact we mean an actualization of a self-knowing process; for consciousness itself cannot make us aware of anything, because this can be achieved only intentionally, that is, by an act of cognition. Nevertheless, since consciousness is intimately united with cognition, we have expressed ourselves correctly.

It is highly symptomatic and not without reason that we have these two terms in our vocabulary. They bring order into many problems of a noetic as well as of an ontological nature and clarify, on the one hand, the objective aspect of the subject and, on the other, that composite and complex structure of the subject's nucleus, which is the ego. It is this subjectiveness of the object that we shall now have to analyze. But before we begin we must stress once again that what is meant when speaking of "being conscious of an action" is not just the reflection itself in consciousness of a conscious act but intentional self-knowledge. By this phrase we mean that by an act of self-knowledge I objectivize my action in relation to my person. I objectivize the given essential constituent of my action in the actual acting of my person and not of what would only happen in my person; furthermore, my acting is a conscious event (thus indirectly equivalent to the exercise of the free will), and thus, by being performed according to the will, may have a moral value, positive or negative, and so is either good or evil. All this which is constitutive of the action and objectivized by an act of self-knowledge becomes the "content" of consciousness. This objectivation allows us to see the objective sense of consciousness, that is, the relation of consciousness to the "objective" world. We may thus speak of consciousness from an "objective point of view" by virtue of the meanings of the different objects through which it manifests itself. But we may speak of consciousness from the objective point of view also in a more specific manner with respect to the meaningful structure appertaining in consciousness to the ego, to its mode of being and operations spreading through a radius of interconnectedness. This sense, or more strictly speaking, this set of senses, consciousness owes to self-knowledge. Because of its various senses consciousness appears also in a special modality of "self-consciousness." It is self-knowledge that contributes to the formation of self-consciousness.

The pecific position of self-knowledge in the totality of human cognition

Having outlined the interrelation existing between consciousness and self-knowledge we shall now—before carrying on our analysis of consciousness and in particular of self-consciousness-briefly consider self-knowledge as such. In our approach to the problem we will for the moment ignore the functions of consciousness, as if the concrete ego were nothing else but the object of its own cognition, that is, of self-knowledge.

The preceding analysis has shown that every man's ego constitutes, in a way, a meeting point where all the intentional acts of self-knowledge concentrate. This is the knowledge that at the very point constituted by the objectified ego meets everything in any way connected with or in any way referring to the ego. Hence we have, for instance, moral self-knowledge, which precedes fundamentally the science of morals, not to mention ethics; we have also religious self-knowledge prior to anything we know of religion and theology; or again, there is the social self-knowledge independent from what we know about society, and so on. Self-knowledge is concentrated on the ego as its own proper object and accompanies it to all the domains to which the ego itself extends. Nevertheless, self-knowledge never objectivizes any component of these domains for its own sake but solely and exclusively because of and in relation to the ego.

From the preceding remarks we now see more or less clearly that the function of self-knowledge is opposed to any "egotistic" approach to consciousness, to any approach that would tend to present consciousness (even if only vicariously) in the guise of the "pure ego" the subject. Nor has self-knowledge anything in common with an objectivizing cognition that would be concerned with an abstracted and generalized ego, with any sort of egology. To self-knowledge the object is the concrete ego itself, the self as such. Indeed, there may be even some question whether "knowledge," which strictly speaking has a general object, is the right term in relation to self-knowledge; for self-knowledge not only has as its object the unique, individual ego, the self, but is also permanently and inextricably entangled in the details referring to the ego. In our analysis we have in focus "self-cognition" rather than "self-knowledge." It consists in the acts of objectivizing penetration of the ego with all its concreteness and its concomitant detailedness, which yields to no generalization whatever. But even so, it is still the real knowledge of oneself as an integral whole; for it is not restricted only to the recording of details that have a bearing upon the ego but continuously strives after generalizations. Such generalizations are, for instance, all the opinions one has of oneself or judgments of oneself, which belong to self-knowledge, and it alone can form them. It is to be noted, however, that these opinions-any overall view of the ego-are mirrored in consciousness; thus, not only are the singular data which have a bearing upon the ego mirrored in consciousness but, in addition, the continuously developing overall complex that the ego keeps on unfolding. In the opinions about this complex there is never just one self-knowing theory of one's own ego, for they also have an axiological character, which varies with respect to different moral points of view, the aspect of value being of no less importance for self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge is not just a specific instance of the knowledge of the human being in general, even though the ego, which it strives to objectivize as comprehensively as possible, is, both from the ontological and intentional points of view—as the object of self-knowledge—a human being. Nevertheless, all the cognitive work it performs proceeds solely from self-experience to self-understanding but does not go as far as to include any generalizations about man as such. There is in our cognition a subtle but precisely marked out boundary between the knowledge of man in general and self-knowledge, the knowledge of the ego. The knowledge of the ego, however, might in its concreteness come prior to the knowledge of man. Yet it draws upon it, because self-knowledge of my very self makes use of all I know about man in general, that is to say, of different opinions about the human being I might hold or only know about, as well as of the cognition of concrete men, in order to gain a better understanding of my own ego and the ego as such. But it does not resort to the knowledge of its own self for a better understanding of other men or of the human being in general. The knowledge of man, in general, turns to the resources of self-knowledge to obtain a deeper insight into its own object. Self-knowledge, on the contrary, as we have mentioned takes the knowledge of man into consideration, but in its direct orientation stops at the ego and keeps to its singular specific cognitive intention; for it is in the ego that man always finds fresh material for cognizing himself. The old adage says, individuum est ineffabile.

The Two-fold Function of Consciousness and the Experience of Subjectiveness

Mirroring and experience

The analysis of self-knowledge gives us a better understanding of that function of consciousness which we have assigned to it previously, namely, the function of mirroring; in this respect consciousness is not restricted to a simple mirroring of everything that constitutes the object of cognition and knowledge—and specially the object of self-understanding and self-knowledge-but it also in its own peculiar manner permeates and illuminates all it mirrors. We do not mean by that to deprive consciousness of its specifically characteristic cognitive vitality. In point of fact, all that has been said here about self-knowledge may lead to the false impression that the reflecting or mirroring function of consciousness may appear lost in self-knowledge, in the objectivizing processes of self-comprehension, which concentrates on the ego as the object. The question may then well be asked whether in view of the prominent role assigned to self-knowledge there are any reasons for the distinctive existence of consciousness at all. This question leads to another, of a methodological nature: how has the conception of consciousness here outlined been reached, and, particularly, how did we come to the conception of the relation of consciousness to self-knowledge? Obviously, these questions are of paramount significance in view of both the foregoing remarks and the forthcoming analyses.

To answer them it is necessary to recall that in this study the approach to consciousness is founded on experience, which allows for the objectivation of the full human dynamism, in particular the dynamism already referred to in the title of The Acting Person. Thus the interpretation of consciousness in its relation to self-knowledge already assumes, albeit antecedently, the total, overall conception of the man-person, which we intend to develop in the course of this study. In that approach the decisive factor for unraveling the problem of the consciousness-self-knowledge relation seems to be the question of the objectiveness and the simultaneous subjectiveness of man. Consciousness is the "ground" on which the ego manifests itself in all its peculiar objectiveness (being the object of self-knowledge) and at the same time fully experiences its own subjectiveness. We thus have emerging into view the other function of consciousness, as if another trait of it, which in the living structure of the person complements the permeative and illuminative function of mirroring, and in a way endows consciousness with the ultimate reason for its presence in the specific structure of the acting person.

Attention was already drawn on more than one occasion to the fact that the tasks of consciousness do not end with its illuminative and reflecting function. In some respects this function might appear primary but not unique. In fact, the essential function of consciousness is to form man's experience and thus to allow him to experience in a special way his own subjectiveness. This is precisely why, if we are also to understand the "acting person" and the "action" issuing from the person so far as this constitutes an experience—hence in the experiential dimension of the person's subjectiveness—we cannot restrict our analysis of consciousness solely to its mirroring. The task of consciousness does not end with the reflecting of an action in its relation to the ego—this takes place as if on the outside but proceeds into the inner dimension. The mirror of consciousness gives us a yet deeper insight into the interior of actions and of their relation to the ego, and it is only there that the role of consciousness comes into full view. Consciousness allows us not only to have an inner view of our actions (immanent perception) and of their dynamic dependence on the ego, but also to experience these actions as actions and as our own.

It is in this sense that we say man owes to consciousness the subjectivation of the objective. Subjectivation is to some extent identifiable with experiencing; at least, it is in experience that we become aware of it. While constituting a definite reality which as the object of self-knowledge reveals itself in its own peculiar objectiveness, the acting person, owing to his consciousness, also becomes "subjectified" to the extent to which consciousness conditions his experience of the action being performed by him as the person, and thereby secures the experience had of the person in its dynamically efficacious relation to action. But then, everything that constitutes the intentional, objective "world" of the person also becomes subjectified in the same way. This "world," with its objective content, may be analyzed also in its image mirrored in consciousness. But it is then, if it becomes the material of experience, definitely incorporated into the sphere of the individual subjectiveness of every human ego. Thus, for instance, a mountain landscape cognitively reflected in my consciousness and the same landscape in my experience based on this reflection become superimposed on each other, albeit they also subtly differ from each other.

Experience of the ego conditioned by the reflexive function of consciousness

In connection with all that has been said so far we have now to mention a new trait of consciousness, one with a new, distinctly separate function, which differs from the illuminative, reflecting function already described, and thus having a constitutive significance. We call it reflexive and assume it appertains to consciousness itself as well as to what the so-called actual state of consciousness is composed of, to that specific resultant of acts of consciousness. This state of consciousness points not only to the mirroring and all that is reflected or mirrored at any given moment, but also to experience, in which the subjectiveness of man, as the subject having the experience, gains a special (because experiential) prominence. It is in this sense that the reflexive trait or reflexiveness of consciousness denotes that consciousness, so to speak, turns back naturally upon the subject, if thereby the subjectiveness of the subject is brought into prominence in experience.

The reflexiveness of consciousness has to be distinguished from reflection proper to the human mind in its cognitive acts. Reflection presupposes the intentionality of these acts, their cognitive direction upon the object. If we consider the activity of the mind at the level of abstract "thinking," then we might say that "thought" becomes reflective when we turn toward a previously performed act in order to grasp more fully its objective content and possibly also its character, course, or structure. Thus reflective "thought" becomes an important element in the development of all understanding, of all knowledge, including the knowledge of the ego. Hence reflection accompanies and serves consciousness. But reflection and reflectiveness are of themselves insufficient when it comes to constituting an experience. This necessitates a special turning back upon the subject, and it is to this turn that we owe, along with experience, the emphasized subjectiveness of the experiencing ego. It is this particular mode of the constitutive function as proper to consciousness that we define as "reflexive," whereby we mean that it directs everything back upon the subject. In this perspective we speak of the reflexiveness and not the reflectiveness of consciousness.

The function of consciousness, in which it turns back upon the subject, differs from the mirroring and reflecting when the self-knowledge of man, who is the subject and the ego, is present as the object. The consequence of the reflexive turn of consciousness is that this object—just because it is from the ontological point of view, the subject—while having the experience of his own ego also has the experience of himself as the subject. In this interpretation we also understand by "reflexiveness" an essential as well as very specific moment of consciousness. It is, however, necessary to add at once that this specific moment becomes apparent only when we observe and trace consciousness in its intrinsic, organic relation to the human being, in particular, the human being in action. We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one's self as the subject of one's own acts and experiences. (The last distinction we owe to the reflexive function of consciousness.) This discrimination is of tremendous import for all our further analyses, which we shall have to make in our efforts to grasp the whole dynamic reality of the acting person and to account for the subjectiveness that is given us in experience.

Indubitably, man is more than just the subject of his being and his acting; he is the subject insofar as he is a being of determinate nature, which leads to consequences particularly in the acting. Man approached as a type of being, that is, from the ontological point of view, appears—in contradistinction to processes, events, and ideas—as an autonomous, self-centered individual being. In this fundamental notion, abstraction is made from that aspect of consciousness owing to which the concrete man—the object being the subject—experiences himself as the distinctive subject. It is this experience that allows him to designate himself by means of the pronoun I. We know I to be a personal pronoun, always designating a concrete person. However, the denotation of this personal pronoun, thus also of the ego, appears more comprehensive than that of the autonomous individual being, because the first combines the moment of experienced subjectiveness with that of ontic subjectiveness, while the second speaks only of the latter, of the individual being as the ground of existence and action.20 Obviously, the present interpretation of the ego relies upon the conception of consciousness being unfolded here, as does its relation to man as the real subject. We may even say that it implies the reflexiveness of consciousness; for if we detach that experience of our subjectiveness, which is the ground for my saying, "I am the ego," from the real subject that this particular ego is, then this experiential ego would represent nothing but a content of consciousness. Hence the fundamental significance of the reflexive turn of consciousness upon the real subject, whereby consciousness co-constitutes it in its own dimension. It is thus that the ego is the real subject having the experience of its subjectiveness or, in other words, constituting itself in consciousness.

The ego constituted as the subject

What has been said so far clearly shows that conformably with the epistemological assumptions made in the introduction it is impossible to detach the experiential ego from its ontological foundations. The present analysis of consciousness ought even to have grounded the ego on a more secure ontic basis of its own. Every human being is given in a total or simple experience as an autonomous, individual real being, as existing and acting. But every man is also given to himself as the concrete ego, and this is achieved by means of both self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Self-knowledge ascertains that the being, who objectively is I, subjectively constitutes my ego, if it is in it that I have the experience of my subjectiveness. Hence not only am I conscious of my ego (on the ground of self-knowledge) but owing to my consciousness in its reflexive function I also experience my ego, I have the experience of myself as the concrete subject of the ego's very subjectiveness. Consciousness is not just an aspect but also an essential dimension or an actual moment of the reality of the being that I am, since it constitutes its subjectiveness in the experiential sense. This being, which in its ontic structure is basically a real individual object, would never without consciousness constitute itself as the ego. It seems that this is how we have to interpret the manner in which consciousness is incorporated into the ontological structure of the being that is man if we are to bring out in the correct proportions his subjectiveness, that is, the subjectiveness that makes of every concrete human being the unique, individual ego.

It is perhaps worth considering still another aspect of the way that our discussion of consciousness leads from its mirroring function to experience, and not inversely, as is current in present-day philosophy. Consciousness, as we view it here, is a specific dimension of that unique real being which is the concrete man. That being is neither overshadowed by nor absorbed in consciousness, albeit this would be the case according to the fundamental tenet of idealistic thought that esse equals percipi; for idealists maintain that "to be" is the same as to be constituted by consciousness, and do not recognize any mode of being apart from consciousness and consciousness alone.2' Our approach to the matter however is the opposite: consciousness in intimate union with the ontologically founded being and acting of the concrete man-person does not absorb in itself or overshadow this being, its dynamic reality, but, on the contrary, discloses it "inwardly" and thereby reveals it in its specific distinctness and unique concreteness. This disclosing is precisely what the reflexive function of consciousness consists in. We may even say that owing to the reflexive function of consciousness man's being is directed, as it were, "inward," but still maintains the full dimensions of his rational essence. Being directed "inward" is accompanied by experiencing, and is, to some extent, identical with experience. In this interpretation an experience is seen as manifesting more than a reflex that appears as though on the surface of man's being and acting. Indeed, experience is that specific form of the actualization of the human subject which man owes to consciousness. Because of it the actual "energies" which we discover through action in man as a type of being—the energies, which, when taken together, constitute the multifarious and differentiated wealth of his virtualities—are actualized according to the pattern of subjectiveness proper to man as a person (more will be said of this in further chapters). Moreover, while so actualized they receive in experience their final, so to say, subjective shape. Later we shall see that this is not equally true of all human energies.

The experiential manifestation of human spirituality

Consciousness, as long as it only mirrors and is but a reflected image, remains objectively aloof from the ego; when, however, it becomes the basis of experience, when experience is constituted by its reflexiveness, the objective aloofness disappears and consciousness penetrates the subject shaping it experientially every time an experience occurs. Naturally, the mirroring and the shaping of the subject are accomplished in different ways: to mirror consciousness one retains the objective meaning of the subject—its so to speak objective status—but one shapes the ego in the pure subjectiveness of experience. This is very important. On the one hand, the functional duality in consciousness allows us to remain within the limits of our subjectiveness without losing the actual objectiveness in the awareness of our being. On the other hand, the fact that our experience is formed because of consciousness, that without consciousness there is no human experience-though there may be different manifestations of life, different actualizations of human virtualities—is in its own way explained by the attribute rationale from the Aristotelian conception and definition of man, or by the Boethian conception and definition of man as rationalis naturae individua substantia. Furthermore, consciousness opens the way to the emergence of the spiritual enactment of the human being and gives us an insight into it. The spiritual aspect of man's acts and action manifests itself in consciousness, which allows us to undergo the experiential innerness of our being and acting. Although it seems that the foundations, or rather the roots of human spirituality, lie beyond the direct scope of experience—we only reach them by inference—spirituality itself has its distinctive experiential expression shaping itself through the complete sequence of its manifestations. This is brought to light in the intimate and in a way constitutive relation between experience proper to man and the reflexive function of consciousness. Indeed, man's experience of himself and of everything making him up, of all his "world," is necessarily occurring in a rational framework of reference, for such is the nature of consciousness, and it determines the nature of experience as well as man as an experiencing being.

Consciousness and the experience of action in the dimension of moral values

How does man have the experience of himself in action? We already know he is conscious of himself as the one who acts, as the subjective agent of action. A separate question concerns how we are to understand the mirroring of the action in consciousness when it extends beyond the subjective sphere of man and is, so to speak, enacted in the external world. But even then man has the experience of his actions within the limits of his own subjectiveness and this experience, like any other, he owes to the reflexive function of consciousness. He experiences an action as acting, as doing, of which he is the subjective agent and which is also a profound image and manifestation of what his ego is composed of, what it actually is. He draws a strict distinction between his acting and everything that only takes place or happens in his ego. Here the difference between actio and passio has its first experiential basis. The distinction itself cannot be but the deed of self-knowledge; it belongs to the significative aspect of the mirroring function of consciousness. But it is also present in experience: the human being experiences his acting as something thoroughly different from anything that only happens, anything only occurring in him.

It is also only in connection with his acting (that is, action) that man experiences as his own the moral value of good and bad (or as is sometimes wrongly said, of the moral and immoral). He experiences them in the attitude he assumes toward them, an attitude that is at once emotional and appreciative. At any rate, he is not only conscious of the morality of his actions but he actually experiences it, often very deeply.

Objectively, both action and moral values belong to a real subject, that is, to man as their agent, from a point of view equally formal as existential; simply, they exhibit in their being the derivative type of reality that is in a specific manner related to and dependent on the subject. Simultaneously, both the action and its corresponding moral value—goodness or badness—function, if we may say so, in a thoroughly subjective manner in experience—which consciousness conditions by its reflexive function rather than only mirroring it because of self-knowledge, for this would still give but an objectified awareness of the action and its moral value. As is to be seen, both functions of consciousness participate in this remarkable drama of human innerness, the drama of good and evil enacted on the inner stage of the human person by and among his actions. Thus consciousness, owing to its mirroring function closely related to self-knowledge, allows us, on the one hand, to gain an objective awareness of the good or evil that we are the agents of in any particular action—while, on the other hand, it enables us to experience the good or evil in which its reflexiveness is manifested. As already noted, this experience is by no means merely an added or superficial reflexing of an action or of its moral qualification as good or evil. On the contrary, what we are considering here has a reflexively inward direction that makes of the action itself as well as of the moral good or bad the fully subjective reality of man. In the human subjectiveness they get their, so to speak, finishing touches. It is then that man has the experience of good or evil simply in himself, in his ego; he thereby experiences himself as the one who is either good or evil. So we come to see the full dimension of morality in the subjective and personal reality.

How does the ego help in understanding man?

The "full dimension" is also the dimension of that experience in which the good and the evil, as the moral values of a person, as well as the acting person himself become the object of comprehension or exfoliation; indeed, this exfoliation is always becoming more and more profound, a point already asserted in the introductory remarks to this study. Mention was there made that the experience of the human being and of morality served as the ground for an unraveling of the nature of both one and the other. This experience and this exfoliation were unquestionably broader than either the self-experience or the simultaneously developing self-comprehending contained in experiencing one's ego. The question we then asked was whether this self-experience (that is, experiencing of one's self) and the self-comprehending that developed with it (that is, the awareness of the self based on self-knowledge) were at all transferable to that ever expanding sphere of man's experience of things external to the ego. This of course is a significant question. We took it up again in our discussion of self-knowledge, and now we have to consider it once more. For there is no denying that the sphere of self-experience and self-comprehending serves as a privileged vantage point, a point specially productive of meanings in experience and in the understanding of man. That is why, while retaining all the specific uniqueness of self-knowledge (see the preceding section) as well as of the experience had of the ego, we strive in one way or another to draw our knowledge of man from the source of self-experience and self-knowledge. This happens presumably because from the very start we take, as it were, a double stance: beginning "inside" ourselves we go out of our ego toward "man" and at the same time we proceed from "man" back to the ego. Thus our knowledge of man proceeds as if in cycles. This course of the cognitive process is obviously valid, if the object of our cognition is not to be our ego alone but also the human being—all the more so if the human being is among others "myself," when he is also my ego.

—From “The Acting Person,” by Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), published in 1969, pages 32-50

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