The basic problem of Shankara's philosophy is how such pure consciousness appears, in ordinary experience, to be individualized ("my consciousness") and to be of an object ("consciousness of blue").
Yet this definition involves two contestable assumptions: first, that "consciousness" is susceptible to experiment (rejected by Kant); second, that psychology, even if conceived as experimental, has for its object consciousness or "the mental" (later rejected by the Behaviorists).[23] Let us focus on the first assumption, since it is one Wundt addresses.
Unlike other scientific research objects, consciousness has a property not present in other areas of study such as physics, chemistry, or biology.
Unlike sensation and apperception, which apprehend the specific characteristics of objects, consciousness acts as an integrating and discerning factor of experience.
For example, in The Psychology of Imagination (1940), Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence (the object of consciousness lies within consciousness), despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind.
(c) Therefore, it should be possible for a mystic who endures a PCE to recall immediately afterward the very awareness that was present in the PCE, even though that awareness was not an object of consciousness at the time of the PCE.
However, one evening he confronts the gaming tables and is overcome with anguish at the recognition that his resolve, while still "there," retains none of its power: it is an object for consciousness but is not (and never could have been) something in consciousness that was determining his actions.
Ethics thus considers the object of consciousness not as something given or even as something constructed by necessary laws of consciousness, but rather as something to be produced by a freely acting subject, consciously striving to establish and to accomplish its own goals and guided only by its own self-legislated laws.
It is an object of consciousness.
How, though, does one gain access by thought to what cannot be an object of consciousness?
Experience is conscious of itself without being the intentional object of consciousness (Husserl 1984b, 399; Sartre 1936, 28 29).
