Public consciousness and its structure.
Individual consciousness is a subjective image of the world, which is formed in an individual under the influence of the conditions of his life and mental characteristics, it has an intrapersonal being.
Social consciousness is a set of ideas, theories, views, feelings, moods, emotions that exist in society, reflecting the social life of people, the material conditions of their life. This is the spiritual life of society, which includes political and legal views, moral, artistic, philosophical, religious and other views, as well as social feelings, moods, public opinion. Public consciousness differs from individual consciousness, it is the consciousness of society, social groups, classes, historical era, and individual consciousness is the spiritual world of an individual. Social consciousness is not the sum of the "consciousnesses" of individuals, it is a qualitatively special spiritual system, which, being generated and ultimately conditioned by social being, lives its own relatively independent life and has a powerful effect on every person. But social consciousness does not exist apart from the individual and along with it, it can exist only in the individual. Outside the consciousness of individuals, only the materialized result of their spiritual activity can exist.
There are two levels in the structure of social consciousness: social psychology and ideology. Social psychology is the mass consciousness of people, which is formed in the process of their daily life. This is the area of social feelings, emotions, moods, empirical conclusions and assessments. Ideology is a system of views and ideas in which people's attitudes to reality and to each other are recognized and evaluated, and also contains the goals of social activity aimed at consolidating or changing these social relations. Ideology is already a theoretical level of consciousness, a system of ideas and theories that seek to comprehend the deeper essence of things. In a class society, ideology always has a class character.
Forms of social consciousness are political and legal consciousness, moral, aesthetic, religious and others. The diversity of forms of social consciousness is determined by the diversity and richness of the objective world itself - nature and society. Each form of social consciousness has its own subject of reflection and performs its own specific role in the life of society. Some authors believe that science is also a form of social consciousness. But science is not a form, but a theoretical layer of all forms of social consciousness with the exception of religion. In modern philosophical literature, economic consciousness and natural science are also singled out as independent forms of social consciousness.
Political consciousness occupies a central place among other forms of social consciousness. Politics is a field of activity connected with the relations between classes, nations and other social groups, the core of which is the problem of conquest, retention and use of state power. Politics is the concentrated expression of economics. The class which represents the dominant material force of society is at the same time its dominant spiritual force. “The dominating thoughts are nothing but the ideal expression of the dominating material relations,” wrote K. Marx and F. Engels. The fundamental economic interests of classes find direct expression in politics, in contrast to morality, art, philosophy and religion, in which these interests are expressed indirectly.
Politics is closely related to law. Law is a system of social norms and relations protected by the power of the state. If politics is the concentrated expression of economics, then law may well be called the concentrated expression of politics. Legal consciousness is a set of views, ideas that express people's attitude to law, legality, justice, their ideas about what is lawful and unlawful.
Legal consciousness is closely connected not only with the political, but also with the moral form of consciousness. Many legal norms are at the same time moral, but unlike law, which is backed by the power of the state, capable of forcing compliance with the rule of law, morality is based on personal conviction, on authority, on the power of public opinion. Morality is a system of social norms that people follow in their behavior. Moral consciousness, which reflects the relations that exist between people and the duties arising from these relations, is expressed primarily in a person's knowledge of the relevant norms of behavior. The system of this knowledge at the ideological level finds its expression in ethics and moral codes. But a person not only realizes his attitude to certain actions, phenomena in ethical terms, but also deeply experiences, expressing feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, admiration or indignation. These moral feelings, together with everyday morality, constitute the psychological level of social consciousness.
Morality performs regulatory, value-oriented and educational functions. The concept of good and evil, justice, happiness, moral ideal help the individual to navigate in life, better understand it, determine their place in society and build relationships with other people. Morality forms the moral culture of a person, which is important for his appearance as a whole. The norms of morality condemn murder, theft, violence, deceit, slander as the greatest evil. The elementary norms of morality also include the care of parents for the upbringing of children, the care of children for their parents, respect for elders, politeness, tact, etc.
Aesthetic consciousness is a necessary element of social consciousness, ensuring its integrity and mobility. It takes place in every act of human activity, whether it is scientific thinking or sensual contemplation, industrial activity or the sphere of everyday life. A person evaluates from aesthetic positions everything that is involved in the sphere of his experience.
The nature of aesthetic consciousness is determined by both the subject and the object of aesthetic contemplation. Aesthetic feeling is impossible without an external stimulus - be it a landscape, a human face or a work of art, always having a materially fixed form. The expressiveness of external form is thus a necessary source of aesthetic pleasure. But the aesthetic feeling also depends on the subject of contemplation, on his general culture and ability to perceive reality aesthetically.
The highest form of aesthetic consciousness is art. Art is a professional field of activity in which aesthetic consciousness turns from an accompanying element into the main goal. Art absorbs all the achievements of mankind, transforming and changing them in its own way. Historically significant personalities and their deeds are glorified in folklore, and any socially significant event finds its expression in painting or architecture, music or poetry. The subject of art is both the relation of a person to the world, and the person himself in all his dimensions and integrity. The specificity of the language of art since the time of Hegel, who defined art as “thinking in images”, is most often described through an artistic image, metaphor, symbol, and other similar artistic techniques.
Art implements cognitive, educational and aesthetic functions. It has an indelible impact on the ideological and moral development of a person, his self-improvement. But cognitive and educational functions are not specific to art: these functions are performed by all other forms of social consciousness. The specific function of art, which makes it art in the true sense of the word, is its aesthetic function. Perceiving and comprehending a work of art, we do not just assimilate its content, we pass this content through our emotions, we give an aesthetic assessment to sensually concrete images, while receiving aesthetic pleasure.
Religion is one of the most massive forms of social consciousness. Religion is a worldview and attitude, as well as appropriate behavior and specific actions, which are based on the belief in the existence of the supernatural. The essence of religious consciousness is the illusory doubling of the world, that is, the recognition, along with the real, natural and social being, of a second, otherworldly world in which all the problems of earthly existence find or will find their ideal solution. F. Engels said that religion is a fantastic reflection in the minds of people of those external forces that are opposed to them in their daily life, and such a reflection in which earthly forces take the form of unearthly ones. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, so faith is an attribute of religious consciousness.
However, only a scientific-rational refutation of religious views cannot fully resolve the problems of religious consciousness. The fact is that religion is able to satisfy very important socio-psychological needs of a person. If religion were just a temporary delusion of the human mind, it would not have been able to occupy a central place in the structure of social consciousness for two millennia and would have disappeared as soon as science and philosophy opposed it with their solutions to the basic questions of being. Religion has a number of functions. Its main function is defined as illusory-compensatory. Being unable to solve life's problems on earth, a person transfers their solution to the world of illusions. Problems that are not solved in this world, religion promises to compensate in the illusory other world. To do this, it is enough to fulfill the prescribed religious institutions. The ideological function of religion is of great importance. Specifically reflecting reality, it creates its own picture of the world order and, accordingly, motivates the behavior of the believer, his orientation in the world. Religion establishes certain norms of behavior, regulates relations in the family, everyday life, society on the basis of developed systems and prescriptions, which is its regulatory function.
Religious consciousness corresponds to the objective needs of the human spirit, and therefore, until these needs are fully satisfied by other forms of social consciousness, religion will remain for some sections of society a source of ethical values, psychological consolation and support, a guarantee of justice that will triumph in the future. At the same time, religion provides an illusory satisfaction of these needs and, in essence, removes the burden of conscious responsibility for the surrounding reality from a person, contributing in principle to a passive-contemplative attitude towards life.
The difference between individual and social consciousness does not mean that only social consciousness is social. Individual consciousness is an integral part of the consciousness of society. Each individual is a representative of his people, ethnic group, place of residence, and his consciousness is inextricably linked with society. At the same time, social consciousness develops only in constant contact with the individual, through its involvement in the really functioning consciousness of the individual.
Public consciousness has a complex structure. There are two levels - ordinary and theoretical consciousness.
Everyday consciousness includes the experience of labor activity accumulated by previous generations, moral norms, customs, prescriptions in the sphere of everyday life, observations of nature, some worldview ideas, folk art (folklore), etc. Ordinary consciousness is turned mainly to work, everyday life and related everyday living conditions and human relations. It is distinguished by detailed detail, emotional coloring, spontaneity and practical orientation, it is not able to penetrate into the essence of phenomena, to systematize facts.
Theoretical consciousness relies on the ordinary, but overcomes its limitations.
Social consciousness at the everyday practical level manifests itself as social psychology, at the scientific and theoretical level - as an ideology. It should be emphasized that ideology is not the whole scientific and theoretical consciousness, but only that part of it that has a class character.
Idealists absolutize the independence of social consciousness, tear it away from social existence. The other extreme - vulgar materialism - denies the relative independence of social consciousness, directly and directly deriving it from social existence. The political form of consciousness is a system of ideas that reflects the relations between classes, nations and states and the attitude towards power. These ideas underlie the political behavior of classes, social groups and individuals. The most important element of the political system is the state, which protects social order , regulates the economy, defends interests in the international arena. The state exercises its power with the help of a democratic or totalitarian regime. The functions of political consciousness are diverse: regulatory, cognitive-informational, evaluative, mobilizing. The legal form of consciousness is ideas and views that express people's attitude to the law in force, knowledge of the measure and people's behavior from the point of view of legality and illegality. There are two approaches to understanding the essence of law: traditional, or prohibitive, and liberal, based on the idea of natural rights and individual freedoms. The traditional approach actually identifies law with law, as a set of prohibitions and punitive sanctions for their violation. Until the 18th century it was a common concept. In the second half of the XVII century. a liberal concept of law arises, which is based on the human right to life, property, security, freedom of conscience, speech, etc. In the rule of law, the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual, the rule of law, and the separation of powers (legislative, executive and judicial) are observed. Legal awareness is heterogeneous, it can be ordinary, based on everyday experience, and theoretical, based on an understanding of the essence of law, its capabilities and boundaries. The moral form of consciousness is a historically established system of rules and norms that regulate people's behavior. It manifests itself in the attitude of a person to the family, team, people, homeland. The moral life of a person is based on a sense of responsibility to society and to oneself for one's actions. Characteristic features of morality are: a comprehensive nature, non-institutional and imperative. Subjective idealists derive morality from human consciousness, objective idealists believe that it is given from above and expresses the command of God. Materialists believe that it is historical and concrete and is a natural product of social development. Its origins go back to the customs that consolidated those actions that, according to the experience of generations, turned out to be useful for the preservation and development of society and man. So, the morality of primitive society did not condemn cannibalism, the murder of the elderly and the sick, at the same time, people did not know greed, greed, deceit. In a class society, morality has a class character, although it also contains universal human elements. Functions of morality: regulatory, evaluative-imperative, cognitive. Morality has a great influence on the economy of society, is in complex interaction with politics, law, art, religion. The main categories of morality are such concepts as evil, goodness, duty, conscience, honor, dignity, happiness. The aesthetic form of consciousness finds its fullest expression in art, when the reflection of social life takes place in the form of artistic images. The main subject of art is a person with all his experiences and views. Art reflects reality through artistic images. The latter are the unity of the general, typical and singular, specific. An artistic image always carries some general idea and expresses it through a single phenomenon. The artistic image is also a unity of the material and the ideal, the objective and the subjective. The social functions of art are manifold. They include aesthetic, cognitive, educational, entertaining, compensatory and other aspects. The main function is aesthetic, expressed in the assessment of social or natural phenomena as beautiful or ugly, heroic or base, tragic or comic, etc. Beauty in art is a generalized, typical image, an artistic reflection of reality. Neither cognitive nor educational moments in art can act independently, regardless of the aesthetic principle of art. The religious form of consciousness is a fantastic form of reflection of reality associated with belief in the supernatural, the Absolute. The emergence of religion is a natural phenomenon in the development of society. It has its social, epistemological and psychological roots. Belief in the supernatural is conditioned by the objective relations of people's dependence on nature and on the social forces dominating them; it is rooted in the limitations of social practice. Even the ancients said: "Fear created the gods." The epistemological roots of religion lie in the development of human consciousness, the possibility of creating abstract concepts. The psychological roots of religion lie in the fact that religion does not appeal to the human mind, but to feelings. Fear, uncertainty, grief, grief create the ground for religion. The main function of religion is defined as illusory-compensatory. Other functions of religion are ideological, regulatory, communicative, integrating.
individual consciousness.
Individual consciousness is the consciousness of a separate individual, reflecting ᴇᴦο individual being and, through ᴇᴦο, social being to some extent. Public consciousness is a set of individual consciousnesses. Along with the peculiarities of the consciousnesses of individual individuals, it carries the general content inherent in the entire mass of individual consciousnesses. As the total consciousness of individuals, developed by them in the process of their joint activity, communication, social consciousness should be decisive only in relation to the consciousness of a given individual. This does not exclude the possibility of individual consciousness going beyond the limits of the existing social consciousness.
Each individual consciousness is formed under the influence of individual being, lifestyle and social consciousness. At the same time, the most important role is played by individual image human life, through which the content of social life is refracted. Another factor in the formation of individual consciousness is the process of assimilation by the individual of social consciousness. This process is called internalization in psychology and sociology. In the mechanism of the formation of individual consciousness, it is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between two unequal sides: the subject's independent awareness of being and his assimilation of the existing system of views. The main thing in this process is not the internalization of society's views; but the individual's awareness of his own and society's material life.
Individual consciousness is determined by individual being, arises under the influence of the consciousness of all mankind. 2 main levels of individual consciousness˸
1. Initial (primary) - ʼʼpassiveʼʼ, ʼʼmirrorʼʼ. It is formed under the influence of the external environment, external consciousness on a person. Main forms˸ concepts and knowledge in general. The main factors in the formation of individual consciousness˸ educational activities environment, the educational activity of society, the cognitive activity of the person himself.
2. Secondary - ʼʼactiveʼʼ, ʼʼcreativeʼʼ. Man transforms and organizes the world.
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The concept of intelligence is associated with this level. The end product of this level and consciousness in general are ideal objects that appear in human heads. Basic forms˸ goals, ideals, faith. The main factors ˸ will, thinking are the core and system-forming element.
Between the first and second levels there is an intermediate ʼʼsemiactiveʼʼ level. The main forms of the phenomenon of consciousness are memory, which is selective, it is always in demand; opinions; doubts.
The category of consciousness is used in two senses: broad and narrow. In the broad sense of the word, consciousness is the highest form of reflection associated with the social existence of a person and is a rather complex multi-level formation. In the narrow sense of the word, consciousness is ... .
A person has a wonderful gift - the mind with its inquisitive flight, both to the distant past and to the future, the world of dreams and fantasies, creative solutions to practical and theoretical problems, and finally, the embodiment of the most daring ideas. Since ancient times....
The world of man begins with his immediate existence and extends to the boundaries of the universe. In this interval, an objective factor of human life is formed, the conditions for its self-realization, self-expression, self-affirmation are formed. The personal existence of a person ... .
As already mentioned, the central moment of the spiritual life of society (its core) is the public consciousness of people. So, for example, a spiritual need is nothing more than a certain state of consciousness and manifests itself as a conscious motivation of a person to ... .
Individual consciousness is the spiritual world of the individual, reflected social being through the prism of the specific conditions of the life of a given person. This is a set of ideas, views, feelings inherent in a particular person, in which his individual is manifested and ... [read more] .
1) The concept of “consciousness” is ambiguous. In the broad sense of the word, it means the mental reflection of reality, regardless of the level at which it is carried out - biological or social, sensual or rational. In a narrower and more special ... .
Moscow State University
Essay on philosophy on the topic
"Public and individual consciousness"
Moscow, 2007.
Plan
Introduction
Structure of consciousness
Consciousness and the brain
Consciousness and self-awareness
The public nature of consciousness
The structure of public consciousness and its levels
Public and individual consciousness
Conclusion
Introduction
Consciousness is one of the properties of matter, consisting in the ability to reflect the surrounding world; it is one of the most important characteristics of a person and society. Philosophy is primarily interested in the following questions:
Interrelation of consciousness and organ (brain)
Relations of consciousness and matter
The relationship between consciousness and the environment.
Analyzing the problem of consciousness, it makes sense to consider its history. As A.I. Herzen, "to understand the current state of thought, the surest way is to remember how humanity reached it." The problem of consciousness has always been of interest to philosophers, since the definition of the place and role of a person in the world, the specifics of his relationship with the surrounding reality make it possible to clarify the nature of human consciousness.
Consciousness is a human privilege. In ancient times, consciousness was perceived as an incorporeal soul that controls all the actions and actions of people. In ancient India, more than five thousand years ago, the teachings of Ayurveda arose, considering the nature of human consciousness (Ayurveda: ayu - life, veda - knowledge, science). Ancient Indian thinkers created a whole system of conscious, volitional control of the body. This teaching is included in a special program. The essence of consciousness and the possibility of its cognition are still being debated. Some philosophers recognize the knowability of consciousness, while others, on the contrary, categorically deny such a possibility.
The philosophy of modern times is characterized by an individualistic approach to man and his consciousness. Descartes extends the mechanistic principle to explain the life of an organism, for the first time introduces the concept of a reflex into science. He identified consciousness with thinking, avoiding the term "consciousness". The idealistic tendency of Descartes was developed by Leibniz, who used the concept of "apperception" Locke shared the point of view of Descartes, according to which consciousness is "the perception of what is happening in a person in his own mind."
Rationalism in the understanding of consciousness was manifested by the French materialists of the eighteenth century, who interpreted consciousness as a function of the brain. La Mettrie, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach believed that consciousness is the pattern of things. In their opinion, consciousness is conditioned by social life and depends on education. Only external circumstances and upbringing can mold a child into a genius or an idiot. This is due to the dualistic nature of man. Man is a biosocial being. Man came out of nature, but was formed in society. Therefore, in his mind, both the personal qualities of the individual and those formed under the influence of society are reflected. According to Aristotle, "man is a social animal."
I. Kant proceeded from the principle of the difference between consciousness and being, which represent a world alien to each other. According to Kant, “I think”, that is, I have consciousness, “I” is consciousness itself. Kant distinguishes between different types of consciousness.
Hegel came close to the socio-historical nature of consciousness, considering consciousness as a historically developing phenomenon. In Hegel's system, the true reality is the universal, presented in the form of an absolute idea, from which everything develops. For him, the material world is only a form of otherness of the idea. For Berkeley, the material world appears only as a complex of sensations. The identity of being and thinking was also proved by some materialists, who believed that consciousness is material, and thought itself is a material phenomenon.
Materialism has always considered consciousness as a reflection of the world in the human brain, as a function of matter organized in a special way. Some philosophical systems shared the opinion of religion, believing that there is a special power in the human body - the soul, which is the carrier and cause of his thoughts, feelings, desires. Consciousness is not reduced to a passive-contemplative reflection of the world, but relies on the socio-historical essence of man, on social practice. By changing the external nature, social relations, a person gradually changes his own nature, his consciousness.
Consciousness is a product, a property of nature. The objects of the external world that are reflected in consciousness, and the physiological processes in the brain that produce reflection, are material. But the nature of consciousness is extremely complex and diverse, and it is impossible to unambiguously single out one side in it, whether it be material or ideal.
Philosophers, standing on the position of dialectical materialism, believe that matter has a certain property, akin to sensation - the property of reflection. Reflection is considered as a universal property of matter to cognize the surrounding world, that is, such a property that exists at all levels of the structural organization of matter. But due to the fact that these are different levels, the general property of reflection on each of them manifests itself differently.
Structure of consciousness
Consciousness is the highest form of purposeful mental reflection of reality by a person. The concept of the psyche is broader than consciousness. It includes all conscious and unconscious structures and states of the personality. The psyche is present in one way or another in all animals, while consciousness characterizes a person, and even then not in all his states. For example, consciousness is not observed in newborns, in certain categories of the mentally ill.
Like any complex system, consciousness consists of interconnected spheres. In consciousness, there are intellectual, emotional and motivational-volitional spheres. Such an approach to the structure of consciousness is fully justified both logically and from the point of view of concrete practice. The way in which consciousness exists, and in which way the subject exists for consciousness, is knowledge. Outside of knowledge, outside of the objective relationship of man to the world around him and to himself, there is no consciousness. The content of consciousness is a system of historically established and constantly expanding knowledge. The stimulus for our awareness of reality is the socially conditioned needs and interests of people, their desire for self-affirmation in the external and internal world.
Gnoseologically, consciousness and knowledge constitute a unity. But this unity cannot be understood as absolute identity. Consciousness is broader in content than knowledge. Knowledge is a reflection of reality certified by practice, while consciousness does not necessarily imply a reliable reflection. Guesses, fictions may not be knowledge in the proper sense of the word, but their belonging to consciousness is undeniable. A person may be aware, for example, that he is unwell, but not know the source and causes of his ailment.
Every act of thinking is at the same time an act of consciousness. But this is not necessarily knowledge. The result of cognition is the comprehension of truth, focused on achieving a socially significant meaning. The effectiveness of conscious activity depends on many factors - on the knowledge and experience of a person, his mental abilities, on the degree of perfection of the forms of regulation of the vital functions of the body carried out by the brain, on the optimality and harmony of the interaction of all structures of the nervous system, and other factors. A smart and wise person is a well-thinking person with a high level of organization of mental activity. The measure of wisdom is not in knowledge. Much knowledge, as the ancients said, does not teach the mind.
Knowledge of the world, human searches for truth are not devoid of an emotional response. On the contrary, any knowledge is always emotionally colored. Emotions, as subjective reactions of a person to the impact of certain external stimuli, manifest themselves in the form of pleasure or displeasure, fear, joy, etc.
Accompanying almost any manifestation of human life, emotions reflect in the form of experience, emotional excitement, the significance of phenomena and situations, body states and external influences and thus serve as one of the main factors in the inner life of people, their behavior. Strong emotional experiences seriously affect the state of the body as a whole. For example, in fright, a person sometimes performs unpredictable actions, in anger - does not control behavior, jealousy sometimes weakens the mind. In extreme situations, when the subject cannot cope with the situation that has arisen, so-called affects develop - strong, relatively short-term emotional stress (despair, horror).
Feelings are the highest form of a person's emotional attitude to reality. Unlike affects and situational emotions, which reflect the temporary or conditional value of phenomena and encourage the solution of particular problems, feelings are directed to phenomena that have a constant motivational value and are responsible for the general direction of activity. They are aimed, first of all, at the highest social needs and express the attitude of a person to social phenomena, other people, and himself. In the process of formation and development of the personality, feelings are organized into a certain hierarchical system, where some of them acquire a leading position, while others remain unrealized. Feelings that have received exceptional strength, dominating in the psyche, are called passions.
Conscious human activity is of a motivational nature. It substantiates itself in its implementation. Encouraging people to act in accordance with their needs and interests, motives do not always have a sufficient practical basis for their existence, or even simply unrealizable. But they constantly stimulate a person's life, his activity. In this regard, will is of great importance. For the subject of will, the main principle of activity is not “I want”, but “I must” and “should”. The will connects the cognitive and emotional spheres, and, representing the ability to choose a goal and internal efforts, determines the active nature of the personality's actions in spite of external and internal obstacles.
Analyzing the structure of consciousness, one cannot imagine it as a simple sum of many constituent elements. All spheres of consciousness are organically interconnected. Conscious occupies a dominant position in the human psyche. In addition to the conscious, there is also the unconscious.
Consciousness was also called the ability to feel and think, often identified with cognition. Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious emerges. He singled out consciousness as the first sphere of the psyche, on which consciousness itself is controlled. The next sphere is preconsciousness, or hidden knowledge, and the third is unconsciousness (not realized, but affects behavior). In subsequent eras, the idealistic philosophical tradition adopted these ideas. Berkeley saw in the human mind a "thinking substance" independent of the human body. Hegel singled out "spirit" as an intangible principle. They argued that all material processes that occur in man, nature and society are determined by his activity and creative power. But there is another point of view, materialistic. It considers sensations, thoughts and feelings as certain changes that occur in some parts of our body under the influence of the surrounding world.
Consciousness is inextricably linked with other complex processes. The physiological (material) basis of all phenomena of consciousness are reflexes, that is, the body's responses to external stimuli. Reflexes begin with excitation of the sense organs by objects of the external world, continue with a certain mental act and end with the movements of the human organs, his actions and deeds. There are conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. Unconditioned reflexes are congenital, hereditarily fixed reactions of the nervous system to biologically significant influences of the external world or changes in the internal environment of the body. Complex chains of unconditioned reflexes form instincts. Their action is limited, not objectively ensuring our expedient behavior. This is achieved through the formation of conditioned reflexes. Conditioned reflexes are the connections of the body with the outside world, acquired during life. They arise when multiple coincidence in time of the action of certain stimuli.
In humans, neural connections arise not only on the basis of sensually perceived reality, but also under the influence of verbal stimuli - speech, words. The word acts as a generalizing signal that replaces a specific object.
Consciousness and the brain
Consciousness can be defined as the highest form of reflection of objective reality peculiar only to man. The unity of mental processes actively involved in man's comprehension of the objective world and his own existence. Moreover, the brain acts as a substrate for the emergence of consciousness, and a person is considered as a social being. The brain is the highest form of organized matter. Hippocrates wrote that our pleasures arose from the brain: laughter and jokes, as well as our sorrows, pain, sadness and tears. With the help of the brain, we think, see, hear, distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good. Human consciousness is formed in connection with the development of his brain. Scientists have created a map of the brain, which shows that certain parts of the brain coordinate the activities of various organs. So, the destruction of the frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere leads to the defeat of speech. With damage to the left temporal region of the brain, a person ceases to hear and perceive someone else's speech. The defeat of the posterior frontal parts of the left hemisphere leads to the loss of the ability to speak. Vision is associated with the occipital lobes of the hemispheres, and hearing with the temporal.
Thanks to research in the anatomy of the brain, neurology, psychology and other sciences, it was possible to show that the brain is a complex system that acts as a single whole. Information from the outside world affects our senses, passing through the nerve nodes to the complex areas of the brain. Separate sections receive, while others process, analyze and synthesize signals coming from the outside world. The brain thus acts as a whole, as a complex functional system. Until now, many processes occurring in the cerebral cortex remain a mystery to science.
As a control system of a high degree of complexity, the brain is designed not only to receive, store and process, but also to predict, develop an action plan, manage actions aimed at solving a specific problem. The human brain constantly receives information from the outside world through the senses. But only a small part of this information becomes a fact of consciousness. In the brain there is a careful selection of information.
Thus, the brain, which controls and regulates all our connections and relationships with the outside world, is not the source of consciousness, but its organ. It is not the brain that thinks, but a person with the help of the brain, that is, it acts as an instrument. Consciousness can also be defined as a subjective image of the objective world. The core of consciousness is a generalized and purposeful reflection of reality, the mental construction of schemes that anticipate actions and their results. The brain is the organ of consciousness, and consciousness is a function of the human brain. With a serious violation of the anatomical structure and physiological activity of some parts of the brain, mental activity becomes defective. For example, in case of alcohol poisoning, coordination of movement is disturbed, there is a "clouding" of rational activity. Congenital underdevelopment of the brain is accompanied by dementia, weakness of volitional efforts, etc.
Consciousness involves the ability to set goals, control one's feelings, thoughts, actions, give an account of one's actions, and foresee the consequences of one's actions. Consciousness is also the ability of an ideal reflection of reality, the transformation of the objective content of an object into the subjective content of a person. Due to the presence of consciousness, a person is able to evaluate a phenomenon, event, fact, knows how to plan his activities.
Consciousness is characterized by the ability of one part of matter to adequately reflect its other parts and realize the surrounding world and its relation to this world, to itself. There can be nothing in our thoughts and feelings that is absent in nature. Even any of our fantasy is a mental transformation of objects, processes of the external world. The brain, despite its enormous reflectivity, cannot create images that do not have a source in the outside world. Golden mountains, milky rivers and other fabulous inventions are just a combination of real-life natural phenomena. Since in nature there is both gold and mountains.
Consciousness, as already noted, is a function of the brain, the essence of which lies in an adequate, generalized, purposeful reflection and constructive and creative alteration of the external world, in linking new impressions with previous experience. Consciousness consists in an emotional assessment of reality, in a preliminary meaningful construction of reasonably motivated actions, in a person separating himself from the environment and opposing himself to it as a subject to an object.
Consciousness allows a person to give himself an account of what is happening both in the surrounding material world and in his own spiritual world. This is knowledge about the external and internal world, about oneself. The content of consciousness is a system of historically established and gradually replenished knowledge. Between consciousness and knowledge there is unity, but there is no identity. Knowledge is rather an epistemological category. Consciousness has a wide semantic scope, which is based on a deep philosophical meaning.
At the same time, matter and consciousness cannot be considered as something completely separate from each other. The line between them is relative within the limits of what to accept in its origin and content as primary, and what is secondary. Consciousness does not constitute an independent substance, in the end it is generated by material objects and phenomena, their interaction. But human consciousness is not only objective and, as such, objective. It can be turned on itself, taking on the character of self-consciousness.
Consciousness and self-awareness
Socrates proclaimed the basic principle of the philosophical worldview: "Know thyself" (Cognosce te ipsum). Heraclitus wrote that people tend to "know themselves and think." The problem of "I" in the history of philosophy was considered as the problem of the relationship between subject and object, man and the world, consciousness and being. Plato noted that the activity of the soul is not passive perception, but its own inner work, which is in the nature of a conversation with oneself.
Self-consciousness is a person's awareness of his personal "I" as opposed to the rest of reality. Self-consciousness is defined as the essence of a person, expressing his integrity. Whereas self-knowledge is a quality of human nature, which is formed and improved in everyone in the process of comprehensive practical activity, in the process of communication with other people. It is connected with the ability of the individual to look at himself as if from the outside, to critically evaluate his behavior. Evidence of this is the practice and the whole history of mankind. Thanks to self-consciousness, the continuity of the existence and development of the personality is preserved, life experience, the relative stability of a person is preserved in solving emerging problems, in overcoming difficulties. In self-consciousness, there is a kind of monologue of consciousness with itself, with the experience and knowledge gained.
Self-consciousness is distinguished by the difference in levels and forms. Its most elementary form is self-feeling, awareness of one's body and its "inscription" in the world of natural and social reality. Then, at a higher level, a person's self-consciousness is connected with the awareness of oneself as belonging to a particular community of people, to a particular culture. At the highest level of development of self-consciousness, there is an awareness of the “I” as a special formation, similar to other people and different from them, possessing uniqueness and originality, capable of being responsible for their actions. Of course, the image of oneself, which is created by a person in various forms of self-consciousness, is not an absolute copy of a real person and his consciousness. There can be, and always is, a discrepancy between them. Mistakes are also possible in the interpretation of various images.
In modern materialistic philosophy, the concept of "I" refers to a person endowed with self-consciousness. Interestingly, the "I" remains relatively stable throughout a person's life. Variability is manifested in its functional role. So, at work, as a leader, a person is different than, for example, in the role of a father in relation to his children or in a circle of close friends.
But, despite the plasticity of the human "I", it has an internal composure, integrity and relative stability. The human "I" changes significantly under the influence of social conditions, along with the acquisition of knowledge, experience, culture, feelings and education of the will. Self-awareness is the result of the development of activity and communication. Self-consciousness is nothing but a consequence of the development of consciousness. So, the child is not immediately aware of himself. In the first years of his life, he calls himself as others call him. Only in the process of development of consciousness does a child develop self-consciousness, that is, awareness of his actions, feelings, thoughts, motives of behavior, interests, actions. Self-awareness allows you to critically evaluate your activities, is a factor of self-control, self-improvement, self-education.
So, self-consciousness is a person's awareness and assessment of his actions and their results, thoughts, feelings, moral character, motives of behavior, a holistic assessment of himself and his place in life. Self-awareness is not only self-knowledge, but also self-assessment of one's qualities, physical and spiritual strengths. True self-esteem maintains the dignity of a person as a person and gives him moral satisfaction. Low self-esteem, on the contrary, prevents an objective perception of both oneself and others and creates a lot of problems in communication, in particular, often dependence on society and public opinion. Therefore, it is important to adequately perceive others and position yourself as an equal member of society, as an individual.
Public opinion plays a huge role in the formation of self-awareness and self-esteem. A person looks at himself through the eyes of society. The foundations of self-esteem are laid, first of all, in the family as a unit of society. Self-awareness and self-knowledge are associated with introspection, which is a means of self-control and reasonable organization of one's behavior, the ability to communicate with other people. The ability to introspection is not inherent in all individuals, and it should be developed throughout life.
Man did not come into the world with a ready-made self-consciousness. This is an acquired property. Since early historical times, man has sought to know his environment and himself. It is interesting that the knowledge of oneself occurs, most often, through the knowledge of the environment, which determines the colossal role of society in the development of human self-consciousness. Analyzing the actions of others, a person builds his behavior, focusing, as a rule, on given example. However, it is important to remember that for a person, not only the existing world outside of him, but also his own activity becomes an object. It is impossible to build your whole life according to the model, often during the course of life a person is faced with the need to build their own models of behavior, their own morals and foundations.
The social nature of consciousness.
Human consciousness, as already noted, is a socially conditioned reflection, which is distinguished by a special form of the human way of being and its interaction with the outside world. The dominant factor is the practical and educational attitude of a person to nature, to society, to himself and his own life. In the process of practical activity, a person creates, as it were, a “second nature”, tools and properties of production, a new habitat and family and moral institutions corresponding to it, builds expedient forms of communication and social organization. There is a release of time for the development of mental and physical strength, education, for active creative pursuits in all areas of life. Of course, "meanings", as well as knowledge about the properties of objects, their functioning, about the ways of using them, change as the methods of human interaction with the objective world develop, acquire personal meaning in the form of an assessment by the subject of the vital significance of certain things and phenomena. But at the same time, there is a reassessment of values, the motives for further actions change, and it is possible to improve interpersonal relations. Ways of activity and behavior, features of existence and life orientation are formed, which have a specifically human character, social nature.
The main quality of a person is community. Man is a “communal-communal”, collective, communicating being. The social-communal way of human existence led to the formation of a supra-individual mechanism for processing and storing collective experience, which has become a common property. The achieved knowledge, acquiring a relatively independent existence, is fixed, multiplied, alienated from its creator, acquires accessibility, is transferred to the social ladder. Thus, a person absorbs the experience of previous generations and applies it in the future on personal experience. Man cannot exist outside society. History gives examples when children, deprived of a social environment, brought up in an animal environment, did not have signs of consciousness, although they retained a physiologically normal brain. Moreover, this process was irreversible even when children were returned to society. This is understandable from the point of view of the development and evolution of society: “if people never began to live a social life, then their situation would hardly differ from that of other living beings. Their whole occupation was to satisfy elementary needs ”(Gray D. // Collected works - M., 1995. - P. 20).
The basis of the changes that made man a man was labor. Labor rallied people and accustomed them to joint actions, elevated a person and did not allow him to stop there, multilaterally developed his abilities and contributed to the formation of reasonable needs. Gradually there was a process of improvement and restructuring of the mental structures of man. Formed and developed and developed such properties as thinking, will, memory, emotions, the ability to control one's own behavior, the ability to see and evaluate the world through the eyes of society, certain social groups, using historically established concepts. Undoubtedly, “labor created man” and made a decisive contribution to the formation and development of his consciousness, spirituality and culture as a whole.
The formation and development of consciousness is inextricably linked with speech. Man is a thinking being. So that the results of his mental activity do not disappear without a trace, they need to be crystallized, consolidated, and most importantly, so that, if necessary, they can be freely evoked using any material signs - gestures, specialized signs, words and other symbols of various language systems.
The essence of a language is determined by its functions. Among them, the main ones are a means of communication and an instrument of thinking. The functional features of the language determine the unity of the latter with consciousness. Consciousness receives its adequate expression in language as a material carrier. Language is the immediate reality of thought, consciousness. Symbolizing in a special form all aspects of the inner spiritual life of people, from sensuality to rationality, language has a pronounced meaning in the context of words, introduces some order and logic to the knowledge and behavior of individuals, gives certainty to sound or writing. On the other hand, the lack of common subject characteristics, generally accepted codes of perception of the world, gives rise to semantic differentiation of speakers of different languages, which, in turn, causes meaningful gaps in the understanding and interpretation of the same phenomena among representatives of different linguistic communities. Reality appears as the language interprets it for perception. Consciousness is formed accordingly.
Consciousness is distinguished by exceptional complexity not only in terms of its origin and development, but also in terms of the principles of functioning, in particular, in the special nature of its ability to reflect. Already at the biological level, the so-called anticipatory reflection is manifested - the ability of organisms to "foresee" future changes in the environment and it is advisable to adapt to them. In humans, this ability multiplies many times and takes on a qualitatively new form, revealing itself in activity, in activity. Man not only reflects the world, but also creates it, expediently interacts with it.
Human activity is connected, one way or another, with the setting of goals and objectives, with the search for original solutions. Man does not simply adapt to nature like an animal, he remakes it in accordance with the objective logic of things and his own understanding of the developing being. Purposeful and goal-forming activity contains the main meaning of consciousness, its strength.
The structure of public consciousness and its levels
Public consciousness is the spiritual side of the historical process. This is not a collection of individual consciousnesses of members of society, but a holistic spiritual phenomenon that has an internal structure, including various levels (theoretical and everyday consciousness, ideology and social psychology), as well as forms of consciousness (political, legal, ethical, conceptual, aesthetic, economic, religious and etc.).
Social being is the material relationship of people to nature and to each other, which arises along with the formation of human society and exists independently of social consciousness. There is a dialectical relationship between social being and social consciousness. Just as being influences consciousness, defining it, so consciousness determines social being to some extent. The way people exist in society is socio-historical practice, understood as the material, production and spiritual activity of people.
All forms of social consciousness at the theoretical level represent a social ideology. Public consciousness is structurally subdivided into public ideology and public psychology.
Social ideology is a set of ideas, views in a logically coherent, systematized form reflecting the social life of people. This is the theoretical level of social consciousness. It includes proper ideological forms (political and legal ideas, morality, art, philosophy) and scientific knowledge.
Social psychology is a product of the daily activities of the broad masses, it includes empirical work experience, mores, traditions, feelings, mindsets. Social psychology is a set of feelings, aspirations, ideas, habits, thoughts, moods that arise in people in the course of their daily lives and reflect their social existence.
Social psychology manifests itself in all forms of social consciousness. It is a link through which there is an interaction between social being and forms of social consciousness. The lowest level of social consciousness forms the ordinary consciousness, which is formed in everyday life, in the daily life of a person. At the level of everyday consciousness, the rules of everyday behavior and communication of people are developed.
Legal awareness and law play an important role in the life of society. In public life, people adhere to certain norms and rules of behavior. Law is a system of laws approved by the state and binding on all members of a given society. Another form of social consciousness is connected with law and legal consciousness - morality, or morality. The norms of people's behavior in society, their evaluative representations are determined by morality.
Morality is a system of rules, norms, assessments of people's behavior in personal and public life. If the law is formed and supported by the state, then the norms of morality are based on the authority of public opinion.
As a result of the historically conditioned division of labor, there is a separation of the production of useful things from beautiful things. At this stage, a new form of social consciousness is formed - aesthetic consciousness, reflecting the feelings, experiences of people, the level of their spiritual culture. Aesthetic consciousness reflects the surrounding reality in the system of artistic images.
Art reflects reality at all levels of social consciousness, including social psychology and everyday consciousness. Philosophy can also be singled out as a special form of social consciousness. In the spiritual life of society, a certain place is occupied by religious beliefs, which are a religious form of social consciousness.
The forms of social consciousness reflect various aspects of the material life of society, as well as features of social psychology. Each of these elements interacts with others.
Social psychology is diverse. Different groups, communities, associations of people have their own, in many respects different from others, psychology. That is why we can talk about specific habits, customs, traditions, tastes that are characteristic of a particular class, nation, professional group, educational or production team. Each person is a bearer of the psychology of all those groups to which he belongs: family, national, industrial, territorial, professional, etc. Therefore, the psychology of each individual is, as it were, “woven” from various attitudes, inclinations, and skills of those groups of which they are members.
consciousness society intellectual motivational
Public and individual consciousness
Depending on the specific socio-historical circumstances of the material-production sphere of public life of people, their social relations are also formed. People, depending on the place they occupy in the system of social production, acquire correspondingly different status and social position. In every society there is a differentiation of social functions - the division of activities carried out by various individuals, groups of people. People with the same type of social position form a certain social group. A variety of forms of relations and interaction can arise between these groups - struggle, cooperation, etc.
All socio-psychological phenomena, both feelings and moods, are contagious. They can unconsciously be transmitted from one person to another, constantly capturing, captivating the mind, feelings and behavior. Often people themselves often cannot explain to themselves why, sometimes they are overcome by a feeling of hopelessness, indifference or unbridled joy, enthusiasm, some kind of inner impulse to do something immediately. Coinciding living conditions, joint activities in these conditions form common interests, goals, needs in people, and on the basis of them, depending on whether they are realized in given conditions or not, similar emotional and sensory reactions: experiences and behavior, which are both would be a response to the natural and social environment of the environment.
Social psychology reflects all the phenomena of life: individual, general, essential, non-essential, everyday, global, etc. For her, all the little things are significant, she reacts to everything in a special way. Social psychology is essentially a significant, general, emotional-sensory reaction typical for given specific conditions of people's life, expressed in the form of a certain experience and behavior.
This is clearly seen in the example of such a socio-psychological phenomenon as public opinion. Public opinion is a judgment of a group of people, in which their attitude to reality is expressed in the form of approval or censure. This implicit or explicit judgment is always emotionally colored, and in this sense it is a genuine experience of people's attitude to reality.
Everything can be the subject of public opinion, but, first of all, what is of public interest. These are, as a rule, all those questions that require their practical solution. Being a universally valid judgment, public opinion is able not only to reflect and evaluate reality, but also to influence it with interest through the specific actions of people who share this opinion.
Public consciousness (or mentality) - a characteristic of socially significant theories and views of people, is one of the most important philosophical concepts that designate the spiritual side of the existence of society. Social consciousness more or less correctly reflects the real process of people's life, their being.
Just as society is not the sum of individuals, so social consciousness is not the sum of individual consciousnesses. Public consciousness is always something typical, general, socially significant. Social activity is a cooperation that forms a common consciousness.
Social consciousness is always in constant interaction with the consciousness of the individual. Public and individual consciousness are interconnected and sometimes it is extremely difficult to distinguish one from the other. And although individual consciousness at the same time always expresses the properties of a given person, and the special features of his personal development, and attitude to the world, it is formed under the influence of social consciousness.
People are, as it were, programmed by society in a certain way to perceive the events taking place. With the help of a specific historical method of socialization, the entry of an individual into society (such as systems of upbringing, education, etc.), he develops a predisposition in a certain way (positively, negatively, neutrally or contradictoryly) to evaluate events, to experience them appropriately, to experience certain feelings.
A person with a developed system of social attitudes often acts without hesitation, instantly reacting to events and making decisions. Hence mass heroism, self-sacrifice, mercy. A person, acting under the influence of a certain attitude, does not treat it critically. In the mind of a person, a certain stereotype is formed - this is a formed attitude of the personality. The totality of stereotypes creates a value orientation of the individual, allows you to build your behavior in accordance with them.
Public consciousness can contain both elements of an adequate, correct reflection of consciousness, and elements of a false, illusory reflection of it. Social consciousness, possessing relative independence, can not only strengthen social existence, but also destroy it.
Society is made up of individuals. In everyday life, we constantly encounter manifestations of individual consciousness, and all these manifestations are different. Each person has his own worries, his own views on life, his own understanding of various problems, etc.
There may be an idea that individual consciousness is a completely independent manifestation of the will of the individual, independent of the consciousness of society. F. Nietzsche argued that no social consciousness exists at all, but there is only thinking and consciousness of an individual. But the individual consciousness of each person is formed under the influence of many factors. These include individual personality traits, gender, age, financial situation, working conditions, spiritual communication, etc. Therefore, individual consciousness is dialectically connected with the public. Social consciousness is that general that arises in the consciousness of individuals in a given society, because they live in a certain social existence that has a direct impact on a person. In their practical activities in the process of communication, people exchange opinions and public experience. Public and individual consciousnesses are in constant complex interaction, mutually influencing and complementing each other.
Conclusion
Consciousness is one of the properties of matter, consisting in the ability to reflect the surrounding world; it is one of the most important characteristics of a person and society. Consciousness is a human privilege. Some philosophers recognize the knowability of consciousness, others, on the contrary, categorically deny such a possibility, but the problem of consciousness has always interested philosophers. In the Middle Ages, the idea of the divine spiritual beginning of the mind and thinking of people was widespread. Since the middle of the 17th century, the ability to feel and think has been called consciousness, often identified with cognition.
At present, there are two understandings of consciousness in philosophy: materialistic and idealistic. Idealists defend the idea of the primacy of consciousness in relation to matter, considering consciousness as something of divine origin or arising in the recesses of the human soul. Idealists claim that consciousness has nothing to do with the brain. In their opinion, the spirit is completely freed from the outside world and its own body. The spirit is not born, does not arise, does not become: it lives its own life and in its development gives rise to natural phenomena and guides the movement of world history.
Consciousness is the highest function of the brain, peculiar only to man and associated with speech, which consists in a generalized, evaluative and purposeful reflection and constructive and creative transformation of reality, in a preliminary mental construction of actions and anticipation of their results, in reasonable regulation and self-control of human behavior. Conscious occupies a dominant position in the human psyche.
Public and individual consciousness are two aspects of the life of society, which are interconnected and interact in a certain way. Public consciousness is political, legal, economic, aesthetic, ethical ideas, views, ideas, etc. This is philosophy, and morality, and religion, and other forms of consciousness. There is an idea that social consciousness plays a decisive role of consciousness in the life of society. In fact, social consciousness is nothing but a reflection in the spiritual life of people of their social existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness. The relationship between social and individual consciousnesses is not simple, mobile and developing.
All spheres of consciousness are organically interconnected. It is impossible to give a definite answer to the question of what is leading in this struggle between the individual and the public. Both types of consciousness are significant in their own way and largely determine the life of each individual. In various situations, depending on the sphere of life, a person relies either on his own cultural and historical experience, or is guided by the ideas of social consciousness. The latter occurs most often in situations where an individual lacks personal experience, knowledge, or even self-confidence, which is associated with inadequate self-awareness. An individual with a more developed and true self-consciousness is less likely and to a lesser extent influenced by social pressure, it is easier for him to separate the personal from the mass.
But it is also impossible to unequivocally assess the influence of social consciousness on the individual as negative and overwhelming. Often it has a very favorable effect on a person, laying the foundations of morality, which a person is often unable to do on his own, especially when it comes to a child.
At the same time, the interaction between social and individual consciousness occurs in the opposite direction. A person as a person brings a lot, changes a lot in his own life, as well as in the life of society as a whole. Public consciousness is made up of ideas, opinions, moods that do not immediately appear in society, but are initially born in the mind of a very specific person.
Thus, we see a dialectical relationship between individual and social consciousness, which manifests itself in the unity and struggle between them. They cannot be considered separately from each other, without taking into account their mutual influence. And since we are talking about a person, all of the above emphasizes the dualistic biosocial nature of a person.
Listused literature
Frolov I. T. Introduction to Philosophy (Part 2). - M.: Publishing house of political literature, 1989, pp. 288-358.
public consciousness. So leading in interaction public And individual consciousness speaks public, because...
PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS is formed on the basis of the consciousnesses of individual people, but is not their simple sum. Each individual consciousness is unique, and each individual differs fundamentally from another individual precisely in the content of his individual consciousness. Therefore, social consciousness cannot be just a mechanical union of individual consciousnesses, it is always a qualitatively new phenomenon, since it is a synthesis of those ideas, views and feelings that it has absorbed from individual consciousnesses.
INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS a person is always more diverse and brighter than social consciousness, but at the same time, it is always narrower in terms of its view of the world and much less comprehensive in terms of the scale of the problems under consideration.
The individual consciousness of an individual person does not reach the depth that is inherent in the social consciousness, covering all aspects of the spiritual life of society. But social consciousness acquires its comprehensiveness and depth from the content and experience of individual individual consciousnesses of members of society.
Thus,
social consciousness is always a product of individual consciousness.
But in other way, any individual is a carrier, both modern and originating from the depths of centuries, public ideas, public views and public traditions. Thus, the elements of social consciousness always penetrate into the individual consciousness of individual people, transforming there into elements of individual consciousness, and, consequently, social consciousness is not only formed by individual consciousness, but also forms individual consciousness itself. . Thus ,
individual consciousness is always in many respects a product of social consciousness.
Thus, the dialectic of the relationship between individual and social consciousness is characterized by the fact that both these types of consciousness are inextricably linked, but remain separate phenomena of being, mutually influencing each other.
Public consciousness has a complex internal structure, in which levels and forms are distinguished.
FORMS OF PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS – This various ways intellectual and spiritual exploration of reality: politics, law, morality, philosophy, art, science, etc. Thus, we can talk about the following forms of social consciousness:
1.political consciousness. It is a system of knowledge and assessments through which the society is aware of the sphere of politics. Political consciousness is a kind of core of all forms of social consciousness, since it reflects the economic interests of classes, social strata and groups. Political consciousness has a significant influence on the grouping political forces society in the struggle for power and, accordingly, on all other spheres of social life.
2.Legal consciousness. This is a system of knowledge and assessments through which the society is aware of the sphere of law. Legal consciousness is most closely connected with political consciousness, because both political and economic interests of classes, social strata and groups are directly manifested in it. Legal awareness has a significant impact on the economy, on politics and on all aspects of social life, since it performs an organizational and regulatory function in society.
3.moral consciousness. These are the historically developing principles of morality in relations between people, between people and society, between people and law, and so on. Moral consciousness, therefore, is a serious regulator of the entire organization of society at all its levels.
4. Aesthetic consciousness. This is a reflection of the surrounding world in the form of special complex experiences associated with feelings of the sublime, beautiful, tragic and comic. A feature of aesthetic consciousness is that it forms the ideals, tastes and needs of society associated with the phenomena of creativity and art.
5.religious consciousness expresses in itself the inner experience of a person associated with the feeling of his connection with something higher for himself and for this world. Religious consciousness is in interaction with other forms of social consciousness, and, above all, with such as moral. Religious consciousness has an ideological character and, accordingly, has a significant impact on all forms of social consciousness through the ideological principles of its bearers.
6.Atheistic consciousness reflects the ideological view of those members of society who do not recognize the existence of the Higher for man and world existence, and deny the existence of any reality other than material. As a worldview consciousness, it also has a significant impact on all forms of social consciousness through the life positions of its bearers.
7. Natural science consciousness. This is a system of experimentally confirmed and statistically regular knowledge about nature, society and man. This consciousness is one of the most defining for the characteristics of a particular civilization, since it affects and determines most of the social processes of society.
8.economic consciousness. This is a form of social consciousness, which reflects economic knowledge and the socio-economic needs of society. Economic consciousness is formed under the influence of a concretely existing economic reality and is determined by the objective need to comprehend it.
9.Ecological consciousness. This is a system of information about the relationship between man and nature in the process of his social activity. The formation and development of environmental consciousness occurs purposefully, under the influence of political organizations, social institutions, means mass media, special social institutions, arts, etc.
The forms of social consciousness are as diverse as the social processes that a person comprehends.
Public consciousness is formed ON TWO LEVELS:
1. Ordinary or empirical consciousness. This consciousness stems from the direct experience of everyday life, and is, on the one hand, the continuous socialization of a person, that is, his adaptation to social life, and, on the other hand, the comprehension of social life and attempts to optimize it at the everyday level.
Ordinary consciousness is the lowest level of social consciousness, which allows you to establish separate cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena, build simple conclusions, discover simple truths, but does not allow deep penetration into the essence of things and phenomena, or rise to deep theoretical generalizations.
2. Scientific-theoretical consciousness. This is a more complex form of social consciousness, not subordinated to everyday tasks and standing above them.
It includes the results of intellectual and spiritual creativity of a high order - worldview, natural science concepts, ideas, foundations, global views on the nature of the world, the essence of being, etc.
Arising on the basis of everyday consciousness, scientific and theoretical consciousness makes people's lives more conscious and contributes to a deeper development of social consciousness, since it reveals the essence and patterns of material and spiritual processes.
Basic terms
ATHEISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS- a worldview that does not recognize the presence of the Higher for man and world existence, and denies any reality other than material.
NATURAL SCIENCE CONSCIOUSNESS- a system of experimentally confirmed and statistically regular knowledge about nature, society and man.
INDIVIDUAL- an individual.
INDIVIDUAL– something separate, peculiarly unique.
INDIVIDUAL CONSCIOUSNESS - a set of ideas, attitudes and feelings inherent in a particular person.
MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS- a system of moral principles in relations between people, in relations between people and society, in relations between people and the law, etc.
PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS- the process and results of a person's awareness of his social existence.
POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS- a system of knowledge, beliefs and assessments, in line with which there is a comprehension of politics by members of society.
RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS- the inner experience of a person associated with the feeling of his connection with something higher for himself and for this world.
LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS- a system of knowledge and assessments through which society is aware of the sphere of law.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSCIOUSNESS- a system of information about the relationship between man and nature in the process of his social activity.
ECONOMIC CONSCIOUSNESS- a form of public consciousness, which reflects economic knowledge, theories and socio-economic needs of society.
AESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS- a reflection of the surrounding world in the form of special complex experiences associated with feelings of the sublime, beautiful, tragic and comic.
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Philosophy of the French Enlightenment of the XVIII century and its representatives
ENLIGHTENMENT is a socio-political movement in Western Europe of the 17th-18th centuries, which wanted to correct the shortcomings of the social order by
PREJUDICE is a prejudice that is not rationally substantiated and has not been tested by experience, which forms a negative attitude towards any phenomenon. ENLIGHTENED ABSOLUTISM
Space is a material or logically conceivable environment for the coexistence of material or conceivable objects.
MIND is the ability of thinking to transform intellectual material into various systems of knowledge about reality. REASON - the ability to think about
Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. Fundamentals of "scientific teaching" in Fichte's philosophy. The concept of "absolute identity" in Schelling's philosophy
The irritant of FICHTE's philosophy and the impetus for it was his dissatisfaction with certain provisions of Kant's philosophy: 1. Kant himself proceeds from the fact that any being is characterized by
Hegel's absolute idealism. System and method of Hegel's philosophy. History as a process of self-development of the "absolute spirit"
Georg Hegel completed the logical unfolding of the concepts of Kant-Fichte-Schelling and, based on the idea of the Absolute Identity of Schelling, created the philosophical system of the Absolute Id
The principle of dialectics is the principle of the constant formation of the Being of Everything as a result of the collision and transition of opposites into each other.
4. If, therefore, the Being of Everything, the Being of the Absolute Idea, is constantly in the process of becoming, then this becoming, with all evidence, must begin somewhere. And the formation of the Being of All will begin
The principle of consistency, that is, the strict and rigorous logicism of the theoretical constructions of the mind
5. Since such a systemic phenomenon as the Absolute Idea, in its formation will always continue to act systematically, in accordance with the laws of logic, the development of the Absolute Idea, according to
SPIRIT is an unnatural sphere of being. IDEA (in thinking) - a mental representation of something. LOGIC is the science of the forms of correct thinking.
Anthropological principle of Feuerbach's philosophy. Feuerbach on religion as alienation of the generic essence of man
Ludwig Feuerbach in his worldview proceeded from criticism of Hegel's philosophical system: 1. First of all, the spiritual principle cannot be true being, since the only
Thus the world can be fully known through anthropology.
8. But for the knowledge of the world, it is still necessary to involve theoretical thinking, despite the fact that the source of knowledge is nature, and the organs of knowledge are sensations. Because
DIALECTICS is a method of philosophical knowledge based on the idea of self-development of the processes of reality
INDUCTION - the process of cognition by the method of moving from private data to a generalizing conclusion
MACHISM is a philosophical system that puts forward the principle of economy of thought as the basis of positive knowledge by excluding from philosophy the tasks of theoretical explanation of the phenomena of experience.
FEELING - a reflection of the properties of reality by the human senses
PSYCHOLOGY is the science of the mental life of a person. POSITIVISM is a direction in philosophy, limited in knowledge only to ready-made scientific facts and only
Therefore, existence should be understood and described as being inseparable from consciousness.
3. However, speaking of consciousness, one cannot say that it is something definite in itself, since there is no such given in the world that one could say that this is consciousness. Consciousness
Consciousness is a choice, it is self-determination, it is the freedom to be what you design yourself to be.
But we should not forget that consciousness, as human freedom, is self-determined in the conditions of an unfree world, which can influence consciousness and limit the freedom of choice of a person. One
Consequently, the world without human consciousness is random (as one or another type of unreasonably existing situation), and, therefore, is not reasonable.
6. On this basis, one should renounce the illusions of orderliness and laws of the world, and, following this, renounce the necessity of the existence of God.
Thus, the best practical means of realizing catholicity, as a metaphysical principle of being, is Orthodoxy and the catholic Church.
The guarantor of this is the monarchy, in which the supreme task of the monarch is to keep the true Orthodox faith pure. Therefore, the historical path
Philosophy of Russian radical democracy 50-60s. (N.G. Chernyshevsky, D. Pisarev). Populism in Russia, its socio-philosophical positions
In the 50-60s of the 19th century, “revolutionary democracy” developed in Russia - a direction of socio-political thought that combined the idea of a peasant revolution with ut
Russian idea" as the main problem of the national philosophy of history (V.S. Solovyov, N.A. Berdyaev, I.A. Ilyin)
Domestic philosophy of history in the XIX-XX centuries. was built on the concept of Russia's identity and its special role in the fate of mankind. Within the framework of this concept, the so-called
Will, purposeful thought, organization
Therefore, in the character of the Russian people there are no prerequisites for eternal doom to thoughtlessness, lack of will, contemplation and enjoyment of passivity in relation to external, non-spiritual life. Primary
In a Russian person, it is necessary to form and educate a spiritually independent, free personality with a strong character and objective will.
5. For the formation and education of a new Russian character, a new political system is needed. If we want to see a spiritually free Russian person, actively striving for
Cosmism in Russian philosophy (N.F. Fedorov, K.E. Tsiolkovsky, A.O. Chizhevsky, V.I. Vernadsky). Its main points
In Russian philosophy of the 19th century, the so-called "Russian cosmism" was formed - a direction of thought that tries to harmonize the world in a global sense by connecting man with the cosmos.
Literally all cosmic objects influence the events of earthly life and the general principle of astrology is absolutely true
And, in this case, astrology can become a generator of ideas about the organic connection of man with the cosmos and the basis for deploying theories about the influence of the cosmos on human life. 4. However, being
Marxist philosophy in Russia, legal and revolutionary trends (P.B. Struve, M.I. Tugan-Baranovsky, G.V. Plekhanov, V.I. Lenin)
In the confrontation between the ideas of the Slavophiles and the Westernizers in Russia, the Western orientation ultimately won, which gravitated towards the ideas of the Mar
Being, matter, nature as defining ontological categories. Their relationship and difference
Being (existing, existing) is reality, as such, it is all that really exists. The ontology section of philosophy deals with the study of Genesis, therefore Being, as an ontological
Identical to Itself in each of Its parts, that is, it is homogeneous
6. Perfection. – As having no reason for its occurrence, Being is absolutely self-sufficient and needs absolutely nothing for its existence
Absolutely whole at any moment of its existence
Thus, if all the basic qualities of Being are absolute and, therefore, do not contain a resource for any of its development, then Being is perfect.
Movement. Movement as a way of existence of matter. Formation, change, development. Basic forms of movement
Movement in philosophy is any change in general. This concept includes: 1. Processes and results of interactions of any kind (mechanical, quantum
Etc. etc., that is, movement is any deviation from the initial state of any object, system or phenomenon
Thus, movement is nothing but a manifestation of the variability of an object, system or phenomenon. In this case, the very concept of movement (change, variability) can only be understood from
Spiritual forms of movement. They represent the processes of the human psyche and consciousness
Types of this form of movement: emotions, feelings, ideas, the formation of political, religious and ethical beliefs, the formation of intellectual preferences and scientific ideas, mental desires,
Space is a certain material or logically conceivable environment for the coexistence of material or conceivable objects.
A logically conceivable space does not have a material existence and does not contain the properties of any really existing space, but formally reflects them in its structural organization.
Time is a kind of conceivable integrity that absorbs the duration of a certain movement and marks its stages.
Time, like space, also has many different philosophical interpretations, the most significant of which are as follows: 1 Time, as a form of manifestation in the world of de
The unity of the modes of existence of matter with matter itself
From the unity of the modes of existence of matter, both among themselves and with matter itself, in dialectical materialism, the principle of the unity of the world is derived: the world, as a single material substance,
FEELING - a reflection of the properties of reality by the human senses
A CONCEPT is a terminologically formulated representation by means of a language that captures in itself the most essential features of an object or phenomenon. PACKAGE
The essence of the cognitive process. Subject and object of knowledge. Sensory experience and rational thinking: their main forms and the nature of correlation
Cognition is the process of obtaining knowledge and forming a theoretical explanation of reality. In the cognitive process, thinking replaces real objects with reality.
Sensory cognition is the process of forming knowledge by direct experience of human sensory sensations.
Sensory sensations are a reflection of the properties of reality by the human senses. Sensations are thus not only the simplest, but also the most approximate
FEELING - a reflection of the properties of reality by the human senses
PASSIVITY - inability to act. KNOWLEDGE is the process of obtaining knowledge and forming a theoretical explanation of reality. PREV
Problems of true knowledge in philosophy. Truth, delusion, lies. Criteria of true knowledge. Characteristics of practice and its role in cognition
The goal of any philosophical knowledge is the achievement of truth. Truth is the correspondence of knowledge to what is. Therefore, the problems of true knowledge in philosophy are how
Empirical and theoretical level of scientific knowledge. Their main forms and methods
Scientific knowledge has two levels: empirical and theoretical. THE EMPIRICAL LEVEL OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE is a direct sensory study of real
The theoretical level of scientific knowledge is the processing of empirical data by thinking with the help of the abstract work of thought.
Thus, the theoretical level of scientific knowledge is characterized by the predominance of the rational moment - concepts, conclusions, ideas, theories, laws, categories, principles, premises, conclusions
Deduction is a process of cognition in which each subsequent statement logically follows from the previous one.
The above methods of scientific knowledge allow us to reveal the deepest and most significant connections, patterns and characteristics of objects of knowledge, on the basis of which there are FORMS OF SCIENTIFIC
Categories of identity, difference, opposition and contradiction. The law of unity and struggle of opposites
Identity is the equality of an object, the sameness of an object with itself, or the equality of several objects. A and B are said to be identical, one
Any independent object stably exists in being
2. Now consider what follows from the relative nature of the identity of an object to itself. It should be said at once that this relativity of the identity of an object to itself reflects
Basic contradictions - contradictions within the subject, phenomena that are decisive for development
DEVELOPMENT is a purposeful, natural, progressive and irreversible transition of something to a new quality. DIFFERENCE - the dissimilarity of the self-identity of two
Categories of negation and negation of negation. Metaphysical and dialectical understanding of negation. Law of negation of negation
Negation in logic is an act of refutation of a statement that does not correspond to reality, which unfolds into a new statement. In philosophy, negation
If the first negation is the discovery of a contradiction, then the second negation is the resolution of the contradiction.
4. Consequently, the denial of denial is the process of the emergence of a new state of Mind, which is characterized by an aggravation of internal contradictions (the first denial), р
DIALECTICS is a method of philosophical knowledge based on the idea of self-development of the processes of reality
METAPHYSICS is a method of philosophical knowledge, proceeding from the assumption of the beginnings of everything that exists, inaccessible to sensory perception and determining the processes of development of reality.
General characteristics of philosophical categories. Metaphysical and dialectical understanding of their relationship
Categories are philosophical concepts which fixes in itself certain essential and universal properties of reality. The categories themselves are not
Metaphysics
-existence exists, but non-existence does not exist; - being is filled with a variety of concrete quality, and non-being is abstract and qualityless; - being is reality
Dialectics
- being is a reality in its development, in its constant change, in its constant transition to a different state of itself, therefore, in the process of development, some characteristics of being, passing into another
Metaphysics
Metaphysics understands the relationship between the general and the individual in different ways, but at the root of its approach, these phenomena are isolated, although inseparable. For example, here is one of the short metaphor examples
Dialectics
The individual and the general are internally inextricably linked, because each object or phenomenon has both those and other qualities at the same time: - something common can always be understood
But after that this effect itself becomes the cause for another effect and determines it by itself, and so on. endlessly
Thus, a non-stop chain of cause-and-effect interactions of the world arises, where its current state is a consequence, which is determined by the Complete cause - the totality of all circumstances.
Dialectics
Cause and effect are in constant interaction not only as phenomena that precede each other in time, but also as factors of development mutually influencing each other. Although the reason is in time
Metaphysics
Metaphysics understands the role of chance or the essence of necessity in different ways, but for the most part it divides them among themselves, and understands them as categories expressing not only opposite concepts,
Dialectics
Dialectics understands any process of reality as the result of existing contradictions, and according to the law of unity and struggle of opposites, when contradictions arise in any process,
Metaphysics
Essence is hidden in a thing, it: - or is inseparable from a thing and is not detected by cognition during sensory perception of this thing in any of its external manifestations; - And
Dialectics
Since the possible is not yet reality, the possible is nothing more than an abstraction. Thus, possibility is only an abstract moment in the development of action.
DIALECTICS is a method of philosophical knowledge based on the idea of self-development of the processes of reality
SINGLE - something qualitatively unique in the individual properties and characteristics of a separate object or phenomenon. CATEGORY - a philosophical concept
The concept of society. The main ideas of the formational and civilizational understanding of social life and history
Society is a system of relationships and living conditions and activities of people, uniting them into a stable coexistence. Thus, society is what unites
The state is a system of power that spreads over a certain territory its own way of organizing the life of the people.
Thus, society, as a stable form of human interaction, includes the nation, the people and the state. Society is understood more broadly than the concepts of nation, people and state, because including
Civilization is the state of society in its specific historical period in terms of its achievements in the material and spiritual fields.
In the civilizational approach, civilization is considered as the main element of history, through the features and characteristics of which the very history of society is understood as the history of human
Material production and its structure: productive forces and production relations. The nature of their correlation
Material production is the process of creating a material product to meet the needs of society. Thus, material production
communist mode of production
Speaking about the mode of production, it should be borne in mind that production includes not only the process of creating material wealth, but also the process of its own reproduction, that is,
The structure of productive forces and production relations. Basis and superstructure. The role of productive forces and technology in the development of society
In accordance with Marxist teaching, material production has two sides: 1. Productive forces. 2.Productions
Relations of production
Production relations have a complex structural organization, manifested in a hierarchically subordinate system of interaction between participants in production activities. This system includes
The basis is a set of conditions that make up the economic basis of the structure of society and the production relations that have developed in it.
The superstructure is: 1. The totality of the spiritual culture of society: the nature of the worldview, philosophical concepts, religion, political culture, legal norms,
BASIS - a set of production relations that make up the economic basis of society
SUPERSTRUCTURE (Marxism) is a combination of spiritual culture, social relations and social institutions of society. SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION
Territorial isolation can generate in the composition of the ethnic group
SUBETNOSE - ethnic groups within the same ethnos, whose members have dual self-awareness: - on the one hand, they realize and accept their belonging to a common
ETHNIC DIASPORA - individual members of an ethnic group scattered over territories occupied by other ethnic communities. ETHNIC PERIPHERY - compact gr
The social practice of social life is the consolidation of certain types of social relations as mandatory for each individual. without under
The essence of the state consists in the natural reasonableness of its formation, similar to the reasonableness of the formation of any natural organism in general.
2. The state as God's institution for earthly life (the idea was formed religious thinkers ancient times, entrenched as the dominant in the medieval philosopher
The essence of the state lies in the supremacy of its rights over the rights of all other elements of its structure or individual individuals, and
the origin of the state can in itself, as such, be called the social law of the organization of social life, because, based on the ontological fact of the obligatory and
Social revolution and its role in social development. Revolutionary situation and political crisis in society
The theory of social revolution plays a central role in the Marxist philosophy of historical materialism. The theory of social revolution in Marxism is based on the dialectical law
Communism
Despite all the dissimilarity and specificity of social revolutions for different countries and for different historical epochs, they always have recurring essential features and processes. This repeat
BASIS (Marxism) - a set of conditions that make up the economic basis of the structure of society
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM - a Marxist doctrine of the laws of the historical development of society. CAPITALISM is a society in which property, defined
Political and legal forms of public consciousness. Their role in modern society. Political and legal culture and democracy
Political consciousness is a system of knowledge, beliefs and assessments, in line with which the members of society comprehend politics, and on the basis of which they occupy one or another political position.
Theoretical level, ideology. IDEOLOGY is a set of ideas, theories and views that forms a system of human spiritual values
The ideological level is characterized by scale, completeness, integrity and depth of reflection of political reality. On it, the forecasting of political processes is already taking place and is observed by
Legal awareness is a system of knowledge and assessments through which members of society are aware of the sphere of law
Despite close interaction with political consciousness, legal consciousness, unlike it, is formed not only on the basis of political and economic interests, but is also built in a significant way.
Political consciousness and legal consciousness together form the political and legal culture of society
A society is democratic if its political and legal culture provides a fair and humane law, since it is precisely this nature of law that opposes inequality, arbitrariness and lack of
Morality is a concept that is synonymous with morality. Morality is a set of norms and rules of human behavior developed by society.
The rules of morality are not formulated and not regulated by legal norms, but they are obligatory for all members of society without exception and are controlled by society itself in life practice. Bl
Or on spontaneously formed public opinion (autonomous morality)
Moral consciousness, and, as a result, the moral development of people, is of particular importance in modern society, because modern society is becoming more and more global, about
ART - artistic creativity in general, in all its forms
MORAL - a set of ideal norms and rules of human behavior developed by society. MORAL AUTONOMOUS - an ethical system based on spontaneously formed
Scientific consciousness is a system of experimentally established and statistically regular knowledge about nature, society and man
The main content of scientific consciousness is nature, man and society as a whole in their materially recognizable characteristics of being and in the patterns of development. Contents
Culture and spiritual life of society. Culture as a determining condition for the formation and development of personality
Culture is the sum of the material, creative and spiritual achievements of a people or group of peoples. The concept of culture is multifaceted and includes both global phenomena of being and individual
The inner world of a person is a single spiritual experience of the interaction of his personality both with the external facts of being and with his own "I"
Thus, the inner world of a person is given to him directly in direct contemplation by his own consciousness of his own processes of consciousness. Therefore, for a person in his inner world is the same
From what is predetermined for him by external conditions, that is, depends only on the external circumstances of his being.
HAPPINESS is a concept that expresses the highest satisfaction of a person from his being. Thus, happiness is a kind of bodily and spiritual state of a person, delivering
CREATIVITY is a human activity that creates qualitatively new material and spiritual values that never existed before.
Almost all types of human activity include elements of creativity. However, they are most clearly manifested in science, philosophy, art and technology. Explores the nature of creativity
Social progress is the gradual cultural and social development of mankind
The idea of the progress of human society began to take shape in philosophy from ancient times and was based on the facts of the mental movement of a person forward, which was expressed in the constant acquisition and accumulation
The main meaning of culture and the main criterion of progress is the humanism of the processes and results of social development.
Basic terms HUMANISM is a system of views that expresses the principle of recognizing the personality of a person as the main value of being. CULT
Alphabetical Index of Terms
1st SIDE OF THE MAIN QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY – what is primary: matter or consciousness? 2nd SIDE OF THE MAIN QUESTION OF PHILOSOPHY - the question of
APEIRON - qualitatively indefinite, eternal beginning of the world
ARCHEUS - the spiritual primordial essence of nature (according to Paracelsus). ARCHE is the original element of the world, its origin, primary substance, primary element. ASCETIC
DIALECTICS is a method of philosophical knowledge based on the idea of self-development of the processes of reality
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM is a Marxist doctrine of the laws of the development of the world, based on the principle of the primacy of matter and the secondary nature of consciousness. DICTATORY PROLE
INDUCTION - the process of cognition by the method of moving from private data to a generalizing conclusion
INSTITUTIONALIZATION - the process of formation of a social institution. INTEGRATION - the process of bringing elements together, leading them to unite in a system
Political consciousness is a system of knowledge, beliefs and assessments, in line with which the members of society comprehend politics
POLITICAL STRUGGLE - clashes of political forces. POLITICAL POWER - the ability of certain political forces to exercise leadership
Space (general concept) is a material or logically conceivable environment for the coexistence of material or conceivable objects
LOGICALLY IMAGINABLE SPACE - a mental image of an environment that does not have a material existence and does not contain the properties of any real-life space, but reflects
Contradictions are not antagonistic - contradictions in which the main interests of the participants in the interaction coincide
CONTRADICTIONS BASIC - decisive for the development of contradictions within the subject, phenomenon. PROMINENTS are giant plasma bulges on the surface of the Sun.
JUDGMENT - a thought expressed by a sentence, and containing a false or true statement
ESSENCE - the internal semantic content of the object. Scholasticism is the dominant type of religious philosophy in the Middle Ages, the task of which was to reason
ENDOGAMIA - the principle of marriage only between members of the tribe
ENERGY (physical) - the ability of a body to do work. AESTHETICS is a system of knowledge about forms and about the laws of artistic perception of the world.
We will not dwell on the definitions of individual and social consciousness and will focus on the nature of their relationship, especially in terms of understanding the mode of existence and functioning of social consciousness.
Social consciousness is a necessary and specific side of social life, it is not only a reflection of the changing social life, but at the same time it performs organizing, regulatory and transforming functions. Like social being, social consciousness has a concrete historical character. This is a certain set of ideas, ideas, values, norms of thinking and practical activity.
without going into analysis complex structure social consciousness and its forms, we note that the phenomena of social consciousness are characterized primarily by their specific content and specific social subject. What exactly are these ideas, teachings, attitudes, what is their social meaning, what is affirmed and denied in them, what social goals do they set, against what and in the name of what are they called to fight, whose interests and worldview express, who is their bearer: what kind of social group, class, nation, what kind of society - these are approximately the main questions, the answers to which characterize certain phenomena of social consciousness, reveal their role in public life, their social functions.
However, the above questions still determine only one, although, perhaps, the main plan for the analysis of the phenomena of social consciousness. Another theoretical plan for the analysis of social consciousness, which is especially important for developing the problem of the ideal, is asked by the following questions: how and where do these phenomena of social consciousness exist; what are the features of their ontological status in comparison with other social phenomena; what are the ways of their "life", social effectiveness; what are the specific "mechanisms" of their formation, development and death?
The two theoretical planes of description and analysis of the phenomena of social consciousness outlined above are, of course, closely related. Nevertheless, they form different logical "valences" of the concept of "public consciousness", which must be taken into account when studying the problem of interest to us. Let us call them, for brevity, a description of the content and a description of the mode of existence of the phenomena of social consciousness.
The distinction between these planes of description is justified by the fact that logically they appear as relatively autonomous. Thus, public ideas, norms, views, etc., which are opposite in their content. can have one and the same specific "mechanism" of their formation as phenomena of social consciousness and one and the same mode of existence and transformation. Therefore, in the study of the content and social meaning of certain social ideas, it is permissible, to one degree or another, to abstract from the "mechanism" of their formation and the mode of their existence, as well as vice versa. In addition, the distinction between these planes of description is very important when considering the relationship between individual and social consciousness.
Individual consciousness is the consciousness of an individual, which, of course, is unthinkable outside of society. Therefore, his consciousness is primordially social. All abstractions used to describe individual consciousness, one way or another, directly or indirectly fix it. social entity. This means that it arises and develops only in the process of communication with other people and in joint practical activities. The consciousness of each person necessarily includes as its main content ideas, norms, attitudes, views, etc., which have the status of phenomena of social consciousness. But even that peculiar, original, that is in the content of individual consciousness, is also, of course, a social, and not any other property. “Individual consciousness,” note V. Zh. Kelle and M. Ya. individual traits due to upbringing, abilities and circumstances of the individual's personal life.
The general and particular in individual consciousness are basically nothing but internalized phenomena of social consciousness that "live" in the consciousness of a given individual in the form of his subjective reality. We observe here a deep dialectical interrelation and interdependence of socially significant and personally significant, expressed in the fact that social ideas, norms, value attitudes are included in the structure of individual consciousness. As special studies show, the ontogeny of a personality is a process of socialization, the appropriation of socially significant spiritual values. At the same time, it is a process of individualization - the formation of immanent value structures that determine the internal positions of the individual, the system of her beliefs and the direction of her social activity.
Thus, any individual consciousness is social in the sense that it is permeated, organized, "saturated" with social consciousness - otherwise it does not exist. The main content of individual consciousness is the content of a certain complex of phenomena of social consciousness. This, of course, does not mean that the content of a given individual consciousness contains the entire content of social consciousness and, conversely, that the content of social consciousness contains the entire content of a given individual consciousness. The content of social consciousness is extremely diverse, and it includes both universal human components (logical, linguistic, mathematical rules, the so-called simple norms of morality and justice, generally recognized artistic values, etc.), as well as class, national, professional, etc. Naturally, not a single individual consciousness can accommodate all this content diversity, a significant part of which, moreover, represents mutually exclusive ideas, views, concepts, and value attitudes.
At the same time, a given individual consciousness can be richer in a number of respects than social consciousness. It is capable of containing such new ideas, representations, assessments that are absent in the content of social consciousness and only with time can enter into it, or may never enter. But it is especially important to note that individual consciousness is characterized by many mental states and properties that cannot be attributed to the public consciousness.
In the latter, of course, there are some analogues of these states, which are expressed in certain social concepts, ideological forms, in the social psychology of certain classes and social strata. However, for example, the state of anxiety of an individual is quite different from what is described as the "state of anxiety" of a wide social stratum.
The properties of social consciousness are not isomorphic to the properties of individual consciousness. Nevertheless, there is an undoubted connection between the description of the properties of individual consciousness and the description of the properties of social consciousness, because there is no social consciousness that would exist outside and in addition to the multitude of individual consciousnesses. The complexity of correlating the properties of individual and social consciousness gives rise to two extremes. One of them represents a tendency towards the personification of the collective subject, i.e. to the transfer to it of the properties of an individual subject, personality. The inconsistency of this was shown by K. Marx on the example of Proudhon's criticism: “Mr. Proudhon personifies society; he makes of it a society-person, a society that is far from the same as a society consisting of persons, because it has its own special laws that have nothing to do with the persons that make up the society, and its own "own mind" - not an ordinary human mind, but a mind devoid of common sense. M. Proudhon reproaches economists for failing to understand the personal character of this collective being.
As we can see, K. Marx opposes such a description of society, which has "no relation to the persons that make up society." He shows that Proudhon's personification of society leads to its complete depersonalization, to ignoring the personal composition of society. It turns out that the “reason” of society is a kind of special entity that has “no relation” to the minds of the individuals that form the society.
The other extreme is expressed in an attitude that is formally opposed to the personification of social consciousness. She begins where the personification of the Proudhon type ends. Here, the public consciousness appears in the form of some abstracts that live their own special lives, outside the individual consciousnesses of members of society and fully manipulating them.
We deliberately depicted the second extreme in a pointed form, since, in our opinion, it expresses a common train of thought that has its roots in the philosophical systems of Plato and Hegel. Like the first extreme, it leads to a similar mystification of the social subject and public consciousness (the extremes converge!), but unlike the first, it is based on a number of very real premises that reflect the specifics of spiritual culture. We have in mind the important circumstance that the categorial-normative framework of spiritual culture and, consequently, spiritual activity (taken in any of its forms: scientific-theoretical, moral, artistic, etc.) is a transpersonal formation. Transpersonal in the sense that it is given to each new personality entering social life and forms its basic properties precisely as a personality. Transpersonal in the sense that it is objectified and continues to be constantly objectified in the very organization of social life, the system of activities of social individuals, and therefore an individual cannot arbitrarily change or cancel historically established categorical structures, norms of spiritual and practical activity.
However, this real circumstance cannot be absolutized, turned into a dead, non-historical abstract. The transpersonal cannot be interpreted as. absolutely impersonal, as completely independent of real personalities (now existing and living). The existing structures of spiritual activity, standards, etc. act for me and my contemporaries as transpersonal formations that form individual consciousness. But these formations themselves were formed, of course, not by a superpersonal being, but by living people who created before us.
Further, these transpersonal formations do not represent some kind of rigid, uniquely ordered and closed structure, i.e. such a structure that tightly closes the individual consciousness in itself and keeps it in captivity of its once and for all predetermined paths of movement and schemes of connections. In fact, it is a flexible, in a number of respects, multi-valued and open structure. It presents the individual consciousness with a wide field of choice, the possibility of creative new formations and transformations. It is historical in nature. But this historical (and therefore creative) essence is not visible when it is taken in a “reified” form, as a kind of “finished” structure. It reveals itself only in active existence, i.e. in the living consciousness of many real people, and here it is already impossible not to take into account the dialectical connection of the transpersonal with the personal. Otherwise, we fall into the fetishism of “ready-made”, “reified” knowledge, which makes a person a slave to the available algorithms of thinking and activity, killing his creative spirit. Knowledge cannot be reduced only to the results of cognition. As S. B. Krymsky emphasizes, it also implies “a certain form of possession of these results”. “Such a form can only be consciousness of the results of cognition.” Consequently, there is no knowledge outside the consciousness of real people, and this immediately eliminates the “claim for abstract, superhuman objectivism”, indicates the paramount importance of the socio-cultural and personal aspects of epistemological research.
We fully agree with G.S. Batishchev’s criticism of the fetishization of “reified” knowledge and simplified models of spiritual culture. “Only by returning objectified forms from their isolation from the world of the subject back to the active process, only by restoring all the multidimensionality of this living process, can one create that cognitive atmosphere in which the subject acquires the ability to see true knowledge in its dynamics.” Otherwise, the statics of “ready-made” knowledge (and, let us add, “ready-made” values) is no longer a “removed, subordinate moment of the dynamic process, but itself dominates it, suppresses it, leaving its creative rhythm and multidimensionality outside the limits of its frozen structures, their forms."
These words correctly capture the premises of that way of thinking that leads to the separation of the structures of social consciousness from the structures of individual consciousness and its activity, as a result of which the former turn out to be nothing more than external coercive forces in relation to the latter.
When considering social norms, an inseparable connection between social and individual consciousness, transpersonal and personal, objectified and subjectivized, objectified and de-objectified is clearly revealed. The normative system as a "structural form" of social consciousness "becomes really normative" only insofar as it is assimilated by a multitude of individual consciousnesses. Without this, it cannot be "really normative." If it exists only in an objectified, objectified form and does not exist as a value structure of individual consciousness, if it is only “external” for him, then this is no longer a social norm, but a dead text, not a normative system, but simply a sign system containing some information. But in this way it is no longer a "structural form" of social consciousness, but something completely "external" to it. It is possible that this is a former "structural form" of social consciousness, long dead, the mummified content of which is found only in historical sources.
What can be called a social norm by content is not a “structural form” of social consciousness, and if this content is known to people, it appears in individual consciousness as “just knowledge”, which does not have a value-effective quality, motivational status, deprived, according to O.G. Drobnitsky, "the moment of binding willpower".
Here we want to turn to a short but very informative article by V. S. Barulin, which reveals the dialectics of social and individual consciousness from the point of view of the problem of the ideal. He believes that "raising the question of social consciousness as external to individual consciousness is in principle erroneous", "the phenomenon of consciousness - both social and individual - is fixed only where there is an ideal." “The objective being of spiritual culture is, as it were, an untrue being, it is only its external form, other being, nothing more. These objects acquire their essence, their true social meaning only when they are reproduced ideally in the perception of the social individual or individuals. Therefore, everything that is not "present", is not reproduced in the individual consciousness, is not social consciousness either.
It only remains to add that an important aspect of the problem of the ideal opens up here. We are talking about the time of "life" of an idea in the public consciousness and the intensity of this "life" (some ideas are extremely "influential", they embrace millions, in whose minds they are constantly updated and function; other ideas barely "smolder", less and less are actualized in the minds of an ever smaller number of people, etc.), about how ideas “die” (when they no longer function in the individual consciousness for a long time, drop out of the public consciousness), about how they sometimes “resurrect” or are born again (remember the history of the idea steam engine), and, finally, about the appearance of such new ideas, which in fact turn out to be very old, have long existed, but forgotten. These and many other similar questions are of considerable interest in terms of analyzing the dynamics of the “content” of social consciousness, the historical changes taking place in its composition, its variability and the content invariance that has persisted over many centuries and even throughout its history.
Thus, social consciousness exists only in dialectical connection with individual consciousness. Accounting for the necessary representation of social consciousness in the multitude of individual consciousnesses is a prerequisite for explaining the mode of existence and functioning of social consciousness. In addition, it is extremely important to remember the existence of contradictions between individual consciousness and the public, not to lose sight of the "activity" of the relationship of individual consciousness to the public. A. K. Uledov correctly notes this, emphasizing at the same time the need to study such a factor as “individual characteristics of the assimilation of the content of social consciousness”.
The connection of social consciousness with the individual clearly expresses the dialectic of the general and the individual, which warns against the mystification of the "general" and "public" (resulting from their break with the "separate" and "individual"). If “the true social connection ... of people is their human essence,” wrote K. Marx, “then people in the process of actively implementing their essence create, produce a human social connection, a social essence that is not some kind of abstract universal force that opposes an individual individual, but is the essence of each individual, his own activity, his own life ... ".
The "structural form" of social consciousness "is not some kind of abstract universal force that opposes the individual." We consider it necessary to emphasize this again, since in our literature there is a fetishization of the transpersonal status of social consciousness, as a result of which the role of the individual in the spiritual life of society is belittled. In such constructions, a living person, the only creator of ideas, cultural values, the only bearer of reason, conscience, creative spirit and conscious responsibility, “evaporates”, his abilities and “authorities” are alienated in favor of one or another “abstract-universal force”.
Conceptual attitudes, in which public consciousness is excessively opposed to the individual, “depersonalize” the processes and forms of the spiritual life of society, reveal inconsistency both in worldview and in methodological terms. Such conceptual attitudes impede the study of social consciousness precisely as a “historically established and historically developing system”, because they eliminate specific factors and “mechanisms” for changing social consciousness (at best, they leave them in the shadows).
We think that such a way of theoretical thinking is the result of an excessive tribute to Hegel's Logic, in which it is the “abstract-universal force” that reigns supreme over a living, real person: the Absolute Idea at every step demonstrates to an individual person his absolute insignificance. Hence the arrogantly condescending tone of Hegel when he speaks of the individual soul: “Individual souls differ from each other by an infinite number of random modifications. But this infinity is a kind of bad infinity. The originality of a person should not, therefore, be given excessive importance.
In this regard, T. I. Oizerman rightly writes: “In Hegel, the individual is very often dissolved in the social. And the degree of this dissolution is interpreted by Hegel as a measure of the greatness of the individual. The Marxist understanding of this problem should not be interpreted by analogy with the Hegelian one. The Marxist understanding of the problem lies in the recognition of the unity of the individual and the social. The individual cannot be considered a secondary phenomenon, a value of the second rank, because this leads to a distortion of the Marxist concept of personality.
Changes in social consciousness are determined, as is known, by changes in social life. But one repetition of this key point is not enough. It is necessary to specify it, to show how qualitative changes take place in the process of the spiritual life of society, what is the “mechanism” for the emergence of new ideas, new moral norms, etc. And here we see that the only source of new formations in the social consciousness is precisely the individual consciousness. The only one in the sense that in the public consciousness there is not a single idea that would not have been the idea of individual consciousness in the beginning. "Social consciousness is created, developed and enriched by individuals". This provision is of fundamental importance for the analysis of a specific "mechanism" for changing the content of social consciousness.
If this or that idea correctly reflects the emerging changes in social life, the trends in its development, economic, political, etc. interests of a social group, class, society, if it embodies socially significant values, then in this case its initially narrow communicative contour is rapidly expanding, it acquires new forms of interpersonal objectification, is intensively reproduced, constantly broadcast in social communication systems and gradually “wins minds and people's souls." Thus, it enters into the value-content-activity structures of many individual consciousnesses, becomes an internal, “subjective” principle of thinking, a guide to action, a normative regulator for many people who form one or another social community.
Of course, both in the process of the formation of an idea as a phenomenon of social consciousness, and in its subsequent functioning at this level, the sanctioning social mechanisms, various social organizations, institutions, institutions that carry out mass communications and control the content of social information. Depending on the type of ideas, more precisely, the system of ideas (political, moral, artistic, scientific, etc.), their content is objectified in different ways in the systems of interpersonal communications, broadcast, sanctioned, "approved", institutionalized through the activities of special public bodies.
The activity of these bodies is also not something abstract and impersonal, it consists of a certain way regulated activity of professional personalities, whose duties include (depending on the social function they perform) the reproduction of ideas in various objectified forms, control of their circulation in communicative circuits. , adjustment and development of their content, development of means to increase their effectiveness, etc. In other words, in the sphere of purely institutionalized activities, in the activities of special government agencies the phenomena of social consciousness "pass" through the filters of individual consciousnesses, leaving their mark on them. The immediate source of changes in the social consciousness lies in the individual consciousness.
Substantial changes or new formations in the public consciousness always have authorship. Their initiators are specific persons or a number of persons. History does not always preserve their names, so we understand authorship in a general sense - as a personal creation of an idea, theory, cultural value. In a number of cases, we can accurately identify the author of a new spiritual value that has entered the fund of public consciousness. Most often this applies to the field of art and scientific creativity. Personality of authorship is especially indicative for works of artistic creativity. A socially significant artistic value has a special integrity, it is unique, any violation of it in the processes of reproduction worsens or even spoils it. Collaboration is rare in this area. The author of a great work of art, whether he is known or not, is, as a rule, "lonely", unique.
The situation is different in science. The products of scientific creativity are not as discrete and isolated in a number of cultural phenomena as works of art. They are not unique (because they can be produced independently by several persons), they are not as holistically original as works of art, because they have very strong and numerous external logical and theoretical connections (with other scientific ideas, theories, metascientific principles). ).
When the objective prerequisites for a discovery mature in a society, a number of people come close to it (let us recall, for example, the history of the creation of the theory of relativity, the results of Lorentz, Poincaré, Minkowski). Most often, authorship is (not quite fairly) assigned to someone who has expressed new ideas somewhat more fully or more distinctly than others. However, the absence of the uniqueness of authorship does not cancel the position about its necessarily personal character. The same should be said about those cases when a new spiritual value is the fruit of the joint activity of a number of people.
Finally, the creators of many scientific, technical, artistic and other ideas, which are often of fundamental importance for social consciousness and, consequently, for social practice, remain unknown and, perhaps, will never become known. But this does not mean that the corresponding ideas arose not in individual consciousness, but in some other, supernatural way (if we exclude the transfer of knowledge to our civilization from outside!).
The situation with authorship in the field of moral creativity and the changes it causes in the public consciousness is especially difficult. But here, too, researchers discover basically the same specific “mechanism” for the formation of moral principles, norms, and rules. History shows that the emergence of new moral values and their establishment in the public consciousness begins with the rejection by individuals of the prevailing moral norms as not meeting, in their opinion, the changed conditions of social life, class interests, etc. This process, according to A. I. Titarenko, is realized "through the violation of already established norms and customs, through actions that, especially at the beginning, looked like immoral in history."
History can point to many such examples. “The role of the individual in changing the prescriptive (commanding) content of morality is performed primarily through the approval of a new behavioral practice by a person, the commission of actions of a new type, the adoption of a previously unknown mode of action.” This requires, as a rule, from the individual not only a deep conviction that he is right, but also courage, courage, great fortitude, and often a readiness to give his life in the name of new ideals.
"Doing a new type of deed" causes a public outcry. New moral attitudes are first assimilated by the avant-garde strata and only with time become the property of public consciousness as a whole. Moreover, in the field of morality, as G. D. Bandzeladze notes, creative acts are “the most massive”.
Analyzing the processes of moral creativity, O. N. Krutova notes that although the process of the formation of new moral norms is the result of individual creativity, the traces of individual people’s participation in it are gradually erased, the content of morality takes on an “impersonal form”. This process expresses the typical features of the formation of the phenomena of social consciousness as transpersonal formations.
We have emphasized above only one aspect of spiritual production, which nevertheless expresses its necessary creative component - the movement of new content from individual consciousness to social consciousness, from the personal form of its existence to the transpersonal one. But at the same time, it is important not to lose sight of the dialectical interpenetration of the general and the individual. After all, creative new formations taking place in the bosom of individual consciousness cannot be “free” from logical and value structures immanent to individual consciousness, certain principles, ideas, attitudes, etc., which form the level of social consciousness. The latter, in each specific case, can perform not only a heuristic, but also a paraphrasing (fettering) function. Fundamental new formations in the individual consciousness (both having a high social significance and completely devoid of it, for example, all kinds of naive-projector or mystical innovations, etc.) will certainly violate, reconstruct these structures.
But here it is important to keep in mind the complexity of the logical-categorical and value-semantic structures of social consciousness. They are alien to linear order, include relationships of both hierarchical dependence and coordination and competition, and in a number of points they are clearly antinomic in nature. This is manifested in the correlation of universal, class, national, group structures of social consciousness, which are “combined” in individual consciousness. In addition, structural differences are not presented in it as rigidly as in the socially objectified and codified ways of expressing the actual content of social consciousness.
Here we find a historically determined measure of freedom of individual consciousness and its inescapable problematic nature, and at the same time, its creative intention, for which any objectification, any “finished” result is only an intermediate product, because it knows only the implementation and does not know the realized, absolutely completed .
This creative intention is the most important feature of the ideal. It means unstoppable striving beyond the limits of cash. objective reality, into the realm of the possible, desired, better, blessed - striving for the ideal.
Reconstruction of the complex, multi-stage process of the formation of new phenomena of social consciousness (ideological, scientific-theoretical, etc.) requires painstaking historical research, the results of which often remain problematic. E. V. Tarle wrote: “It is unlikely that anything could be more difficult for the historian of a well-known ideological movement than to search for and determine the beginning of this movement. How thought was born in the individual consciousness, how it understood itself, how it passed to other people, to the first neophytes, how it gradually changed ... ”. Reliable answers to these questions presuppose, in his words, "the path of following the primary sources." And here it is of considerable interest to identify those factors (socio-economic, ideological, psychological, etc.) that contributed to or hindered this process, those collisions, clashes of opposing views, interests with which it is so often marked. In this regard, another facet of the problem is usually revealed - finding out the true goals, motives, intentions of a historical figure, regardless of what he himself wrote and said about himself.
The dialectic of the individual and the general, the personal and the transpersonal forms the most important problem node in the dynamic structure of cognitive activity. These issues have been widely developed in our literature devoted to the study of scientific knowledge (the works of B. S. Gryaznov, A. F. Zotov, V. N. Kostyuk, S. B. Krymsky, V. A. Lektorsky, A. I. Rakitov , G. I. Ruzavin, V. S. Stepin, V. S. Shvyrev, V. A. Shtoff, M. G. Yaroshevsky, etc.). Critical analysis of post-positivist concepts of development was essential in this regard. scientific knowledge. Especially instructive is the experience of critical analysis of K. Popper's concept of "three worlds", which has already been discussed.
Without dwelling on the theoretical contradictions in the views of K. Popper, revealed not only by Soviet, but also by a number of Western philosophers, we emphasize only one fundamental circumstance. K. Popper absolutizes the moments of the general, transpersonal, “become” in human cognition. He, according to the fair remark of N. S. Yulina, actually denies the "creative self-active essence of human consciousness." “It turns out that it is not specific historical people endowed with individual characteristics who create new ideas that make up the total content of culture, but only culture creates individual consciousness.”
The inconsistency of Popper's operation of "splitting off" logical norms and forms "from the real activity of people in the real world" was convincingly shown by M. G. Yaroshevsky, whose studies are of particular importance for our purpose. This refers to the development by him of a conceptual image of science, in which the subject-logical, socio-communicative and personal-psychological coordinates of the analysis of its development are organically combined. It is in this conceptual context that M. G. Yaroshevsky explores the dialectics of the personal and the transpersonal, the role of categorical structures of thinking in the creative activity of a scientist. These categorical structures (components essential element social consciousness) he denotes in the course of analysis by the term “supraconscious”, since the scientist often does not reflect them and because they are given to him by the available culture. But their predestination is not their inviolability. An individual scientist in the process of creative activity is able to modify these structures to one degree or another, not always being aware of the categorical transformation that has been carried out. “The deeper the changes that this scientist made in the categorical system, the greater his personal contribution.”
“It would be a profound error to think of the supraconscious as something outside of consciousness. On the contrary, it is included in his inner fabric and is inseparable from it. The supraconscious is not the transpersonal. In it, the personality realizes itself with the greatest fullness, and only thanks to it does it ensure - with the disappearance of individual consciousness - its creative immortality. By changing categorical structures, a person contributes to the fund of social consciousness, which will “live” and develop after his death (this, by the way, is one of the meanings of “transpersonal”). But social consciousness continues to "live" and develop after the death of any particular individual, not only in the objectified forms of culture, but certainly in the individual consciousnesses of living individuals.
We tried to show the inextricable connection between social consciousness and individual consciousness, focusing on a critical assessment of those conceptual attitudes that lead to their excessive opposition, to the absolutization of the “public” and “transpersonal”, to the annihilation of a living, creative subject, or to such a truncation of the “personal”, when it turns into a function of "transformed forms", into a miserable puppet of the "material world", into a kind of "instrumentation" that has nothing to do with the originality, creative activity and self-worth of the individual.