Much has been said about philosophical darkness. The theme often remains in the background and frequently acquires a demonic, almost operatic flavor. Instead of mystery and the work of thought, darkness is often presented in an exalted manner.
Heidegger noted: “Every genuine thinker easily and often acquires a reputation for being ‘unclear’ and ‘obscure.’”
In this article, I would like to examine the essence of philosophical darkness somewhat more broadly. To begin with, we must define and isolate the concept of consciousness.
By consciousness, I do not mean every kind of psychic experience or the mere presence of sensations, thoughts, or images. I mean a reflexive act in which the flow of life is interrupted, fixed, and made an object for itself.
Within the Cartesian subject–object model, consciousness is something given and stable. It is a fixed self, separated from the surrounding world by a solid wall. The self seems to look through the narrow slit of sensory perception and, later, through the a priori forms of cognition refined by Kant.
Descartes writes: “I am, I exist”; he then defines himself as “a thinking thing.” Kant writes: “Space is the form of all appearances of outer sense,” while time is “the form of inner intuition.”
I propose a different model. In Heidegger, the human being is already involved in and “thrown” into the world, already connected through processes, relations, and interactions. For the most part, a person does not act as a sovereign subject who possesses complete command of the body and carefully directs it. For the most part, human beings exist and act within already established biological and social automatisms.
Heidegger writes: “Being-in-the-world is a necessary a priori constitution of Dasein.” Thrownness expresses the facticity of Dasein’s being delivered over to its own “there.” “The self of everyday Dasein is the they-self”: individual Dasein is “dispersed into the ‘they.’”
Proceeding from Heidegger’s critique of the isolated subject, but moving beyond it, consciousness may be understood as a local interruption of biological, social, and cultural automatisms.
Consciousness is more like a rare, perhaps even extremely rare, flash in which automatism is broken—a rupture of biological vitality. Consciousness is, in essence, a rupture within already existing biological, social, cultural, and other schemas.
Bergson expresses a similar thought: “Consciousness is asleep when life is condemned to automatism; it awakens when the possibility of choice returns.” In the human being, “consciousness breaks the chain.”
Consciousness therefore already contains an attack, a rupture, a kind of micro-death—as something that changes the existing order of things. The abstract is not a direct continuation of life and vitality but rather a hidden opposition to them.
It is here that philosophical darkness first appears. Its essence lies neither in a lack of clarity nor in the deliberate obscurity of expression, but in dread and rupture. Consciousness disturbs the immediate coincidence of the human being with life, separates the person from habitual automatisms, and places them before what had previously remained concealed by the uninterrupted operation of those automatisms.
Dread should not be understood here merely as the psychological feeling of fear. It is the experience of a rupture in which the familiar world, one’s own self, and the previous foundations of understanding cease to be unconditional. Darkness appears where the former obviousness has already been destroyed, while a new one has not yet emerged.
Hegel writes: “The life of spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself within it.”
Consciousness is not absolute. It is not an exceptionally stable Cartesian self serving as the foundation of existence. Consciousness is instead something fluid, indistinct, and relative—something that temporarily surfaces from a literal or everyday sleep.
A stream of thoughts cannot by itself be called consciousness. Nor is a stream of images consciousness. More precisely, streams of thoughts and images are not in themselves reflexive consciousness. Consciousness is rather that which interrupts and fixes such streams.
According to Bergson, when an action becomes completely automatic, “consciousness is reduced to zero,” but it may flare up again when an obstacle is encountered.
This is precisely why lucid dreaming is so difficult to achieve: consciousness must simultaneously observe the stream of images and exist within it. A lucid dream is a special case in which a reflexive position emerges inside the stream of images and partially disrupts its immediate persuasiveness.
In research, lucidity in dreams is defined through “metacognitive reflective thought.” At the same time, researchers emphasize that the relationship between dissociation, lucid dreaming, and psychosis “still remains unresolved.” Another study found that “nightmares were the only significant predictor” of anxiety, stress, and impaired sleep, which means that lucidity itself is not necessarily the cause of psychological distress.
Further support for the idea that consciousness is a kind of rupture with vitality—a micro-death—can be found in the common childhood experience of the first flashes of consciousness. Reflexive self-consciousness, autobiographical memory, and the ability to perceive oneself as a separate and enduring being develop gradually and are not given to the child in a finished form.
The child’s psyche is not yet fully separated from the surrounding world, and the child may experience the world as if it were the result of an impulse of desire.
Research into the development of autobiographical memory confirms the gradual formation of a separate self: “Between eighteen and twenty-four months, children first begin to relate past events to themselves.”
At the same time, the first awareness of death and the dread associated with it emerge during the formation of the earliest attempts at abstract thought. In my own experience, the realization and understanding of my mortality approximately coincided with my introduction to arithmetic and with questions about the existence of infinity and of “the largest number.”
A study of children aged five and six found that “the concept of death is already present,” although its individual components develop unevenly and in a particular sequence.
This experience is significant not merely as a stage of psychological development. Within it, we can discern the original structure of philosophical darkness: thought first ruptures the immediate involvement in life and reveals to the human being the possibility of their own absence. Dread arises not simply in response to an external threat, but from the fact that consciousness is capable of imagining a world from which consciousness itself is absent.
The foregoing can be related to Heideggerian Angst, or dread, as an integral part of the phenomenological experience of Dasein. It is precisely in dread that the rupture of consciousness reaches its most extreme form. Familiar relations lose their self-evidence, the world ceases to be a reliable totality of things, and one’s own self can no longer regard itself as a stable foundation.
Philosophy is thought at the limit, consciousness in concentrated form. It is that which analyzes and deconstructs the human being, creates the greatest possible rupture with human vitality, and deprives one’s own self of its former self-evidence.
Heidegger writes: “Anxiety reveals the Nothing.” In anxiety, beings as a whole slip away, and “we ourselves slip away from ourselves.” Anxiety “individualizes Dasein” and returns it to its own possibility of being.
The essence of philosophical darkness therefore consists in the union of dread and rupture. Rupture draws thought out of automatism and destroys the previous foundations of obviousness. Dread is the experience of this destruction—the experience of losing the world, one’s own self, and the familiar system of meanings as unconditional supports.
Thought at the limit is an almost complete rupture and deconstruction of one’s own self. It is a merciless attitude toward one’s own personality, thought conducted almost beyond the boundary of life.
This is the source of the painful character of philosophical thought as a process that reaches the limit and calls the stability of one’s own subjectivity into question.
This is not, however, a cult of destruction or a romanticization of madness. Rupture has a definite philosophical function: it deprives the familiar order of the status of unconditional necessity and thereby opens the possibility of thought. But darkness itself does not guarantee truth. It merely means that the previous modes of understanding are no longer sufficient.
In Hegel’s formulation, spirit attains truth not by preserving itself intact, but by finding itself “in absolute rupture.” In Heidegger, existence is defined as “being held out into the Nothing.”
Philosophical darkness, therefore, is neither an aesthetic effect nor an encounter with abstract evil. It is a moment of existential tension—a moment of separation from one’s own subjectivity. It is a state in which thought has already ruptured the former obviousness but has not yet acquired a new one. Its content is rupture, and the mode in which it is experienced is dread.