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In this article, Part II of Cultural Action for Freedom, Paulo Freire explains the process of conscientization as an intrinsic part of cultural action for freedom. He rejects the mechanistic and behaviorist understanding of consciousness as a passive copy of reality. Instead, he proposes the critical dimension of consciousness that recognizes human beings as active agents who transform their world. He makes specific reference to the political and social situation in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, discussing the need for cultural action in order to break the existing "culture of silence."
Existence in and with the World
It is appropriate at this point to make an explicit and systematic analysis of the concept of conscientization.'
The starting point for such an analysis must be a critical comprehension of man as a being who exists in and with the world. Since the basic condition for conscientization is that its agent must be a subject (that is, a conscious being), conscientization, like education, is specifically and exclusively a human process. It is as conscious beings that men are not only in the world, but with the world, together with other men. Only men, as "open" beings, are able to achieve the complex operation of simultaneously transforming the world by their action and grasping and expressing the world's reality in their creative language.
Men can fulfill the necessary condition of being with the world because they are able to gain objective distance from it. Without this objectification, whereby man also objectifies himself, man would be limited to being in the world, lacking both self-knowledge and knowledge of the world.
Unlike men, animals are simply in the world, incapable of objectifying either themselves or the world. They live a life without time, properly speaking, submerged in life with no possibility of emerging from it, adjusted and adhering to reality. Men, on the contrary, who can sever this adherence and transcend mere being in the world, add to the life that they have the existence that they make. To exist is thus a mode of life that is proper to the being who is capable of transforming, of producing, of deciding, of creating, and of communicating himself.
Whereas the being that merely lives is not capable of...