ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that consciousness exists regardless of how it is related to the brain and attempts a definition of the term 'consciousness'. For the phenomenologists and for many analytic philosophers, for a being to be conscious involves being in a state of 'intentionality'. Consciousness without the self takes on the guise of pure spontaneity, and the self without consciousness take on the appearance of a static entity. Mitchell Aboulafia has done the service of comparing both Mead's and Sartre's work on consciousness and self. Consciousness on the pre-reflective level retains both freedom and a sense of self. Aboulafia believes that Mead's development of the self as coming through role-playing should be supplemented by the negations that Sartre sees employed by consciousness in its contact with the other. Aboulafia is well aware of the reason why Sartre treated consciousness as nothingness, viz., as such it is the source of the radical freedom espoused by the early Sartre.
