ABSTRACT
All human beings as active, living beings are conscious. They are, as Husserl says (1960; 1964; Muralt 1974), orientated within a life-world of other beings. They are present to the world and the world is present to them. Consciousness, in this regard, is not a thing in itself but a process, constituted through the motion of human being-in-the-world. Moreover, human consciousness takes its particular form-one which is in constant flux-from the integration of the human organism with its life-world. Consciousness, while always embodied and constituted and expressed through the action of the body, is formed, I stress, through its engagement with other human beings in the world. Human consciousness is not something that simply begins within the individual organism and then, in its awakening, moves out towards others. Consciousness takes form in the foundational fact of a unity of individual conscious human beings in a world already shared with others. To put it another way, individual consciousness emerges in a field of consciousness. It arises in a world of other conscious human beings who participate in the process of consciousness of any particular human being.
