Questions and Tasks for Self-Control

1. What antique philosopher was the first to draw attention to the problem of human comprehension? What are the specific features of his approach to man?

2. Is man a purely social creature? What place is occupied by the biological factor?

3. What is the difference among man, personality and individuality?

4. Is it any interconnection between the sense of life and the main question of philosophy?

5. What is the essence of freedom as a human’s characteristic?

6. Read the following passage by J.P. Sartre and explain his understanding of the freedom of man. "Freedom of Man precedes his essence, it is a condition whereby the latter is possible; the essence of human existence is suspended in his freedom. So, what we call "freedom" is inseparable of being "human reality."

7. Explain modern understanding of man’s essential forces.

8. Give your account for the problem of man’s immortality.

Literature

Basic:

Alexander Spirkin. Fundamentals of Philosophy / Alexander Spirkin. — M. : Progress Publishers, 1990. — 423 p.

Supplementary:

Martin Heidegger. Being and Time / Martin Heidegger : [transl. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson]. — New York : Harper and Row, 1962. — 589 p.

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy / Donald M. Borchert. — New York : Macmillan Reference USA, Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996. — 775 p.

Primary sources:

Albert Camus. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt / Albert Camus : [transl. by Anthony Bower]. — New York : Vintage Books, 1991. — 306 p.

Erich Fromm. Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics / Erich Fromm. — New York : H. Holt, 1990. — 254 p.

Friedrich Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State / Friedrich Engels. — New York : Pathfinder Press, 1972. — 187 p.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man / Pierre Teilhard de Chardin : [transl. by Bernard Wall]. — New York: Harper and Row, 1959. — 318 p.

Unit 12

Philosophical problem of consciousness

The aim of the theme is: to study the essence of consciousness, its origins and structural components; to show the periods in development of the notion “consciousness”; to characterize individual and historical aspects of consciousness; to represent self-consciousness, reasoning and language as forms of consciousness.

The key words of the theme are: conscious, unconscious, consciousness, ideal, reflection, thinking, reason, mind, language, self-consciousness, social practice.

12.1. Problem of Consciousness in Different Philosophical Teachings

Consciousness is the most general category in philosophy, one of the most interesting, important and difficult ones. The widely used term “consciousness” is also one of the most poly-defined and at the same time so undefined. They often identify consciousness with spiritual life stating that any spiritual phenomena are those of consciousness. But doing this means to simplify the above-mentioned one. It would be also wrong to assume that consciousness is knowledge since it greatly narrows the parameters of it.

Such variety of definitions can be explained by the fact that consciousness is an extremely specific and nonobjective object of study. We cannot see it, measure it and record it in the way of some objective data. Moreover consciousness is always present in every image of perception. It immediately connects, identifies our feelings, notions, thoughts and emotions without our agreement and control.

Since the earliest antiquity philosophers have striven to find the solution to the riddle of consciousness. Heated debate on this subject has raged for centuries. Each epoch formed its own idea about consciousness, the meaning of which depends on its dominating worldview.

What is the nature of consciousness? What is the origin of it? These questions are as old as philosophy itself.

According to the ancient notions there is a supernatural force called soul active in the human organism; it is believed to be the vehicle and cause of our thoughts, emotions, and desires. It was Heraclitus who mentioned the difficulties of cognition and advanced an opinion of its dark and light sides and of a sensuous and mental cognition.

In the ancient Greek philosophy consciousness was interpreted as a non-material phenomenon and that was mostly through morality. But such philosophers as Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, the representatives of the natural philosophy and later Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius thought that soul was formed by some material elements.

Democritus like Heraclitus spoke of two kinds of cognition. He was the first who made an attempt to establish scientific conceptions as a form of thinking and that was logic.

According to Plato, knowledge was a recollection.

Aristotle was the first who made logic the correct thinking science, the study about categories as a mental reflection of the reality.

Then soul was given some characteristics of intelligence. Socrates raised question about the necessity of conceptual thinking formation, which, as he proved, was cognition of contradictions. In addition, Socrates stressed the functionality of consciousness as a source of virtuous acts when it revealed truth.

Plato interpreted soul as the one which revealed objective truth, and the latter had an eternal and unchangeable character and dictated a certain policy to a man. In Aristotle’s philosophy soul could not be considered independently from the body. It is “the inner form of a living body” which reflects its essence. Aristotle analyzed soul’s ability to feel, imagine and think.

In the Medieval epoch consciousness was interpreted as soul where faith should be combined with the arguments of mind but understanding of God was mystic and irrational. Thomas Aquinas grounded the possibility for soul to exceed the limits of the body and with that there was also proved the possibility for it to come back to the body. Therefore the idea of resurrection was grounded too. In Christian theology, conscience stands for the moral conscience in which our actions and intentions are registered and which is only fully known to God. Medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas described the consciousness as the act by which we apply practical and moral knowledge to our own actions.

In the epoch of the Renaissance, when the heliocentric understanding of the world dominated, Giordano Bruno interpreted soul as the property of the world, which goes up to the Thinking Spirit. And the World Soul, according to Bruno, is not out of the world’s limits, but it is within the world as its own inner form. Man’s soul differs from that one of an animal by its structure that depends on the physical structure of the body organs. The purpose of mind is to penetrate into the depth of phenomena; this is its divinity.

And only in the Modern Ages with their anthropocentric worldview consciousness ceases to be the secondary notion and acquires a qualitatively new dimension. René Descartes has been said to be the first philosopher to use "conscientia" in the way that does not seem to fit this traditional meaning. René Descartes, who arrived at the famous dictum 'cogito ergo sum', wrote Meditations on First Philosophy in the seventeenth century. He described, extensively, what it is to be conscious. Conscious experience, according to Descartes, included such ideas as imaginings and perceptions laid out in space and time and are viewed from a point, and appearing as a result of some quality (qualia) such as colour, smell, and so on. Like Aristotle, Descartes defined ideas as extended things.

In any event, John Locke had much influence on the 18th century view of consciousness: in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755), Johnson gave a definition of "conscious" as "endowed with the power of knowing one's own thoughts and actions," and took Locke's own definition of "consciousness" as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind."

Locke offered a definition of consciousness in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that remained closely intertwined with moral conscience.

In Classical German philosophy philosophers-idealists proved consciousness and thinking through the universal laws and categories. Friedrich Hegel considered consciousness as the state of self-development of the Absolute Idea. He grounded the individual consciousness (the subjective spirit) as being necessarily connected with the object and determined by the historical forms of social life.

Ludwig Feuerbach interpreted consciousness (psyche) as a manifestation of a specific energy of sense organs and mind, which gives rise to religion that is love between people.

Marxist interpretation of consciousness is a scientific view of the socio-historical role of social practice, the view of man as a product of his own labour and social relations. By changing external nature and social relations, man sim­ultaneously shaped and developed his own nature. There is no, and neither can there be, consciousness outside society, outside knowl­edge accumulated in the course of mankind's history and outside the specifically human modes of activity worked out by mankind.

The contemporary philosophy made its own contribution to the development of the concept of consciousness. Nietzsche took a decisive step in overcoming the cognitive interpretation of consciousness. He replaced the Cartesian cogito with I will. Although the philosopher did not deal with the problem of consciousness purposefully, his ideas influenced on other thinkers who studied that phenomenon. Within the philosophy of life an original conception with a turn to biologism was created by Sigmund Freud. There he examined mechanisms of interaction of conscious and unconscious.

In XX century that was E. Husserl who most fruitfully studied the problem of consciousness. He tended to a cognitive interpretation of consciousness and analyzed all its acts including non-cognitive as well.

So, Idealism digs an abyss between reason and the world, whereas materialism searches for community and unity between them, de­ducing the spiritual from the material. Idealists in­sist on the primacy of consciousness over matter:

Materialist philosophy and psychology proceed from the two cardinal principles in the solution of this problem: they see consciousness as a function of the brain and as a reflection of the external world.

But it is impossible to oppose consciousness to matter. The biological form of life is only a precondition of the appearance of consciousness. Consciousness exists in reality but this is only a subjective reality. Thus, the nature of consciousness is ideal but its source is material.

Matter is objective reality while consciousness is sub­jective reality.

Consciousness is a subjective image of the objective world. The subjective images as knowledge, as spiritual reality, and the physiological processes are qualitatively different phenomena. The reason is that the ideal, or consciousness, is not a sub­stance, but a function of matter organized in a definite manner.

Now, how can we define consciousness? Consciousness is the highest function of the brain characteristic only of man and connected with speech, a function whose essence is to provide a generalized and purposeful re­flection of reality, anticipatory mental construction of actions and rational regulation and self-control of be­haviour and foreseeing their results.