Consciousness as the Point of Opposition between Being and Nothing
The paper gives a dialectical definition of the essence of consciousness as radically different from nature and having its own ideal being independent of it. In the history of philosophy, there have been two main approaches to solving this problem: religious-idealistic and scientific-materialistic, which, being restricted to the metaphysical definition of consciousness, fail to finally reveal its ideal essence, and fail to answer the question of its ontological meaning and the meaning of being. Based on the definition of the primary being as an abstract identity which denies all actual forms, it is concluded that the spirit and consciousness are a concrete identity, or a dialectical, mediated unity. As a result of the opposition between the two extremes of being and nothing, consciousness mediates the whole process of becoming that aims for the ideal being. The process of becoming consists of three stages and ends with a concrete identity of all its moments: being and thinking, subject and object, spirit and nature. The full concretization of being, the attainment of an ideal form by it are mediated by consciousness which arises as the world’s first concrete identity at the second stage of becoming. Coming into conflict with the abstract being of nature and denying its uncertainty, consciousness generates the entire cultural and historical process. This approach to solving the problem of consciousness goes back to Hegel’s philosophy of spirit but is not limited to it because it finds out the reason for the becoming of being beyond it: it is absolutely transcendent to all forms of being and the stages of its concretization.