There was always a scandalous ambiguity in idealism because while it held consciousness to be the fundamental [radical] reality, it still had never managed to analyze completely and with the required precision just what consciousness was. [. . .] In the final years of the last century [I.e., the 19th Century] Husserl made the historic decision to endow idealism with what it lacked: rigor, neatness. In grand style he submitted the ledger of idealistic bookkeeping to a careful auditing and imposed a norm of exactness on it. The fruitfulness of this undertaking was immense [. . .]

For the first time, then, phenomenology stated with precision the nature of consciousness and its ingredients. [See Husserl's Logical Investigationspositing something. In view of this the philosopher searches for a brief against all subjective positings. This brief must consist of something that he does not posit, but which instead imposes itself on him, of something therefore that posits itself, something "positive" or "given."

Now then, Husserl thought he had found this primary reality, this positive or given, in pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is an "I" that is aware of everything else. But understand one thing: this "I" does not want, it is only aware of wanting and of what is wanted; it does not feel, but only sees its feeling and the values felt; in short, it does not think in the sense of believing what it thinks, but is reduced to noticing that it thinks and what it thinks. This "I" is, then, a pure and impassive mirror; it is contemplative and nothing more. What it contemplates is not reality, but only a spectacle. The true reality is the contemplation itself; that is, the "I" that contemplates only when contemplating, the act of contemplation itself, and the spectacle contemplated qua spectacle. Just as King Midas turned everything he touched to gold, so the absolute reality that is "pure consciousness" makes unreal all that is given to it and changes it into pure object, in pure aspect. Pure consciousness, "Bewusstsein von," makes a ghost of the world, transforms it into mere meaning. And since the consistency of meaning is exhausted when it is understood, this reduces reality to pure intelligibility.

This is clear enough, but now we must ask to what extent pure consciousness is really a positive value, a given, something "self-posited" that forces itself upon us. The answer leaves no room for doubt: this pure consciousness, this pure Erlebnis, has to be obtained by a manipulation, by what the philosopher called a "phenomenological reduction." And this is a serious matter, as serious as what happens to the physicist when he wants to see inside an atom: when the scientist observes the atom he enters it, intervenes and modifies it. Instead of finding a reality he manufactures it. So with the phenomenologist. What he really finds is "primary consciousness," "unreflective" and "ingenuous," wherein man believes what he thinks, wants things in fact, and feels his aching tooth without any possible "reduction" of pain other than aspirin or an extraction. [Ha, ha!] The essence of this "primary consciousness," then, is that nothing is only an object for it, but rather everything is reality. In it, being aware has no contemplative overtones, but is rather an encounter with things, with the world.

Now then, while an act of "primary consciousness" is taking place it is unaware of itself, it does not exist for itself. This means that this "primary consciousness" is not, in fact, consciousness. This concept is an incorrect name for what there is when I purely and simply live, that is, live without subsequent reflection. What exists then is myself and the things of various sorts around me-minerals, people, triangles, ideas; but there is not, in addition and together with this, any "consciousness." For there to be consciousness I must break off living my experience in the present and, turning back my attention, recall what has just previously happened to me. This memory is nothing more that the retention of what was there before, that is, a real man who happened really to be surrounded by real things. But all this is now a memory and nothing more. In other words, now I find myself in a new situation: now there is a man, the same as before, myself, involved with something that is as much a thing as those previously mentioned, but of a new kind, that is, a memory. This memory recalls a past reality. This past reality is not, of course, real now. The present reality is its recall and this is what we may properly term "consciousness." Because now there is "consciousness" in the world, just as before there are minerals, people, and triangles. Naturally, however, this new situation which consists in my encounter with the thing "consciousness," and which is memory or, more generally, "reflection," is not itself consciousness, but is instead just as ingenuous, primary, and unreflective as the first one. I continue to be a real man who discovers before him, and therefore in the world, the reality "consciousness."

Once I have this entity, so to speak, in hand, I am free to do all sorts of things: I can observe it, analyze it, describe its consistency. But there is one thing I cannot do: it preserves a previous reality, and I cannot now change the reality that has already been, correct it or "suspend" it. That reality as such is now irrevocable. The only thing that can happen is that, for this or that reason, I come to hold the opinion that the prior reality was a hallucination or some other class of mistake. But this, of course, in no wise undoes the prior reality, does not make it unreal or suspend it. How can we make something unreal that is no longer actual? How can we "suspend" the exercise of a reality that has already taken place, is no longer being performed, and of which there only remains the exercise of the memory that is was performed? That would be like suspending now, in the present, the beginning of the composition of the Edict of Nantes. The effect of this new opinion of mine is simply to really place me in a world where there are "mistaken" realities, that is, in a somewhat more complicated world that the previous one, but no less effective or real than it was. "Reflection"-I repeat-is just as ingenuous a real situation as the "primary" one and equally unreflective with respect to itself. How could this new situation ever claim for itself the ability to bestow a greater degree of reality on what it encounters-a "consciousness"-than on what was encountered in the primary situation: minerals, people, and triangles?

The supposed "reflexive consciousness," designed to find that the true and absolute reality is consciousness and pure experience, is, on the contrary, less basic that the "primary consciousness," and for two reasons: (1) because it implies the existence of primary consciousness as its own "object" and (2) because, ultimately, it too is an ingenuous and unreflecting "primary consciousness." Every attempt to dislodge ingenuousness from the universe is in vain. Because, in a word there truly is nothing other than sublime ingenuousness, that is to say, reality. Reality supports and is the world and man. In order for idealism to make sense an "act of consciousness" would have to be able to reflect on itself and not solely on another "act of consciousness."

The enormous advantage of phenomenology was to have worked out the question in such detail that it became possible to grasp the moment and place where idealism committed its crime of making reality disappear by transforming it into consciousness. It does indeed begin with an "act of primary and ingenuous consciousness." This is not of itself consciousness, however, but very reality, the toothache hurting, man in truth in the real world. The idealist presupposes reality, starts from it, but then from the vantage point of another reality he classifies the first as mere consciousness. But this is of course no more than an opinion about that unyielding reality, one that leaves it untouched and one which, by the same token, could it but be redirected against the situation of the opining idealist, would paradoxically destroy it. In fact the man convinced that what there is is pure ideality, "pure Erlebnis," is a real man who must deal with a world beyond himself, one made up, independently, of an enormous thing called "consciousness," or else of many smaller things called "noemas," "meanings," etc. And these are no more and no less things, inter-subjectivities, things to be dealt with, willingly or not, than the stones against which his body stumbles.

If the "consciousness" of which idealism spoke were really something, it would be precisely weltsetzend (that which posits the world), the immediate encounter with reality. This is why it is a self-contradictory concept, since for idealism consciousness means precisely the unreality of the world it posits and encounters.

By suspending the executant powers of "consciousness," its weltsetzung, the reality of its "content," phenomenology destroys its fundamental character. "Consciousness" is precisely what cannot be suspended; it is irrevocable. That is why it is reality and not consciousness.

The term "consciousness" ought to be discarded. It was meant to stand for the positive, the given, that which posited itself and was not put there by thought, but it has turned out to mean just the opposite: it is merely a hypothesis, a fortuitous explanation, a construct of our divine fantasy. What there truly and authentically is is not "consciousness" and in it "ideas" of things, but rather a man existing in a landscape of things, in a set of circumstances that also exists. Naturally, we cannot do without man's existence, for then things would disappear, but, equally, we need the existence of things, for without them man would disappear. But this unseparability of both elements is falsified if we interpret it unilaterally as things depending on man for their existence-that would be "consciousness." What there in fact is, what is given, is my coexistence with things, that absolute event-a self in its circumstances. The world and I, set before each other, without any chance of fusion or separation, are like the Cabiri and Dioscuri, like all those divine pairs who according to the Greeks and Romans were always born and always died together, and to whom they gave the lovely name of Dii consentes, the "unanimous gods."["Preface for Germans," in Phenomenology and Art (Norton, 1075), pp. 60-67]

Thanks, Longknowledge. My goodness, I had trouble following through all those subtle various meanings of consciousness. As I'm not familiar with the intricacies of Husserl's phenomenology, I simply defined consciousness as that-which-experiences since I believe that our immediate experiences are the source of all our knowledge of our shared experiences of the world and our private experiences of the self.

Would you say that Ortega believed in the material basis of reality?

Samm

This reminds me that experience is a universal phenomenon by which all realities of the universe are inter-related. The concept of location in the universe is established by the finite set of realities with which each finite conscious being is able to interact.

So I see Ortega talking about the person within the body, the body itself, and the extended set of other bodies with which that body is bonded by its experiences of them and their experiences of it. That is to say, our identity is not wrapped within our skin; it goes far beyond our bodies to our relationships with everything in our world (within the confines of our finite range of experience). And as you say, our experiences include thinking, feeling, perceiving, deciding, and I'll add desiring, imagining, remembering, etc.

I wonder what he means by "saving"? How is it that we are to save ourselves and our circumstances? And why?

man who is always "I"-that I that each of us is-is the only being that does not exist, but lives or is alive. Precisely all the other things that are not man, not "I," are the things that exist, because they appear, arise, spring up, resist me, assert themselves in the ambit that is my life.
　

The Transcendental Ego (or its equivalent under various other formulations) refers to the self that must underlie all human thought and perception, even though nothing more can be said about it than the fact that it must be there. Source.