Contextual consciousness

According to existentialism (Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre) individual consciousness has always the context of choices among a plurality of personally perceived "probable" realities. Consciousness is always delimited by man's presence in particular contexts, by being there (dasein). The context, that is [existence]

, expresses itself as possibilities from which the consciousness must select, thus committing the perceiver to an orientation and to specific tendencies toward, as well as to real courses of action in his engagement with the world. These viewpoints, the statement of Heidegger that "dasein is always its own possibility", and Sartre's remark that "the possible can come into the world only through a being which is its own possibility...human reality being its being in the form of an option on its being", show that where many traditional religious and idealist philosophies had situated freedom in the cosmic and psychic mind-stuffs (which by a process akin to imagination could create the variables of the universe), the existentialist conception, denying "mind", situates freedom in that aspect of consciousness called will or volition. The context of dasein allows for conscious free-choice of action in the existent world and denies any single, essential reality, or sets of inherent mental constructs, that predestine human behaviour.