It is the achievement of phenomenology to have shown how subtly and variedly our consciousness in fact works, and how primitive and crude are the concepts by which consciousness endeavours to “become conscious” of its own operation. As a rule, it is the scheme in which a subjective internal space is confronted with an objective outer space, and when it is asked how these artificially separated spheres can be brought together again, how the world gets into the subject and the subject gets to the world. Phenomenology shows that our perceptions and thoughts operate differently from what we commonly think. It shows that consciousness is a phenomenon of the “in between” as the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called it – neither subject nor object in the traditional sense.

Rüdiger safranski

Safranski, R. (1998). Martin Heidegger – Between Good and Evil. Harvard University Press.