12.3. Structure of Consciousness. Consciousness and Unconsciousness

The concept of consciousness is not an unambiguous one. In the broad sense of the word, conscious­ness signifies psychical reflection of reality regardless of the level at which it is realized – biological or social, sensuous or rational.

In a more narrow and special sense, consciousness is taken to mean not just a psychical state but the highest, properly human form of psychical reflection of reality. Consciousness is structurally organized, being an integral system consisting of various elements linked by law-governed relations. Such elements as the realization of things and the emotional experiencing, i.e. a definite attitude to the content of that, which is reflected, stand out most clearly in the structure of consciousness. The development of con­sciousness assumes above all enrichment of it through addition of new knowledge about the surrounding world and about man him­self. Knowledge, realization of things, has different levels, depth of penetration into the object, and degree of clarity of understanding.

Hence there are differences between everyday, scientific, philosophical, aesthetic and religious conceptions of the world and also between the sensuous and rational levels of consciousness. Sensations, per­ceptions, representations, concepts, and thought form the core of con­sciousness, but they do not exhaust its full structure: the latter also includes the act of attention as a necessary component. It is precise­ly due to concentration of attention that a definite range of objects is brought within the compass of consciousness.

The objects and events acting on us produce not only cognitive images, thoughts and ideas, but also emotional storms which make us tremble, feel excited or fearful, cry, admire, love or hate. Cogni­tion and creativity is a fervent search for the truth, rather than a coldly intellectual one. The rich sphere of emotional life comprises feelings proper, which are the attitude to external influences (plea­sure, joy, grief, etc.), moods, or emotional states (cheerful, de­pressed, etc.), and affects (fury, horror, desperation, etc.). Depend­ing on a particular attitude to the object of cognition, knowledge ac­quires a varying degree of significance for the individual, which is most strikingly expressed in convictions: the latter are permeated by profound and stable emotions. And this is an indication of the par­ticular value of knowledge that becomes a vital reference frame. Emotions are elements of the structure of consciousness. The pro­cess of cognition involves all aspects of our inner world – needs, in­terests, feelings, and will. Man's true knowledge of the world con­tains both imagined reflections and feelings.

The colourful fabric of psy­chical processes and their manifestations in the form of human ac­tions and relations is woven out of various threads ranging from the highest degrees of the clarity of consciousness to the depths of the unconscious, which figures so prominently in man's mental life. For instance, we do not realize all the consequences of our actions – very far from it. Not all the external impressions reach the focus of consciousness. Many actions are automatic or habitual. But, despite the great significance and place of the unconscious forms of the "psyche, man is above all a conscious being.

Consciousness forms a complex relationship with various kinds of unconscious and irrational mental phenomena. They have a structure of their own, whose elements are connected both with one another and with consciousness and actions which influence them and in their turn experience their influence on themselves. We sense everything that acts on us, but it is by no means all sensations that reach our consciousness. A great many of them remain on the pe­riphery of consciousness or even beyond its limits. Two types of un­conscious actions should be distinguished. The first comprises ac­tions that were never realized, the second, those that were previously realized. Thus many of our actions controlled by consciousness in the process of formation, become automatic and then performed unconsciously. Man's conscious activity itself is only possible on condition that a maximal number of the elements of that activity are performed automatically.

As a child develops, many functions gradually become auto­matic, and the mind is freed from any concern about them. But when the unconscious or already automatic elements violently in­vade our consciousness, the latter fights against this stream of un­bidden guests and often proves unable to cope with them. This is manifested in various mental disorders – obsessive or maniacal ideas, anxiety states, overpowering unmotivated fear. Habit as something mechanical encompasses all kinds of activity, including thinking, where we often say: “I didn't mean to think of it, it just oc­curred to me”. The paradox lies in the fact that consciousness is present in the unconscious forms of spiritual activity, too, observing the overall picture, so to speak, without close attention to all the de­tails of what occurs in the depth of the mind. In most cases, con­sciousness can control familiar actions and speed them up, slow them down, or even stop them altogether.

However, not all the unconscious elements, as we have already said, were previously conscious and then became automatic: a cer­tain portion of the unconscious never reaches the illumined area of consciousness. It is these psychical phenomena, uncontrolled by consciousness, that expand the whole field of the psyche beyond consciousness as such.

Human activity is only conscious in relation to those results which originally exist in the design and the intention as their goals. But it is by far not all the consequences of actions that are adequate realizations of the objective. The results of our actions and deeds are often entirely different and even contrary to what we aspired for in performing these actions.

There is a great deal that is both rational and irrational in the life of a separate individual and in the whirlwind of history. The unconscious is manifested in extremely varied forms including information which is accumulated as unconscious experiences and settles in the memory of man forming, e.g., the rich sphere of illusions, the dreams, the powerful instincts, etc. But I would like to repeat that man is above all a conscious being. Both his thinking and emotions are imbued with consciousness.

Consciousness is not restricted to cognitive processes, to directedness at an object (referred to as attention), and the emotional sphere. Our intentions are realized through an effort of will. But consciousness is not a sum total of its constituent elements: it is an integral, complex structured whole.

Consciousness has a complex structure. We should distinguish sensual-emotional, emotional-volitional, and abstract-logical structural components of consciousness.

Sensual-emotional is often connected with unconscious, which is illegally identified with subconscious. More over, “unconscious” is usually interpreted in that way as Freud did. In his work “The Ego and the Id” Freud structured consciousness (and more precisely – psyche) through singling out Id, Ego and Super-Ego. ‘The mental apparatus’, he wrote in “The Ego and the Id”, is composed of an id which is the repository of the instinctual impulses, of an ego which is the most superficial portion of the id and one which has been modified by the influence of the external world, and of a superego which develops out of the id, dominates the ego, and represents the inhibitions of instinct that are characteristic of man’.

Intuition could be referred to subconscious since sensual consciousness of perception stipulates an empirical level of it, where objects are perceived as independent, separate and beyond the internal connections.

Sensual consciousness is first of all a realization of the closest natural surroundings and at the same time understanding of a limited connection with other people and other objects. During this process first notions appear as a subconscious form of a subject integrity generalization. It comes to a sensory-visible image of an object, has a certain symbolic load and can have a claim on subconscious generalization as a thinking operation, which, in its turn, acquires many meanings: 1) the immediate identification of an object, phenomenon or a symbol; 2) clear understanding of the meanings and connections in a spontaneity of signs; 3) certain easiness in the definition of the content of the object of perception. Intuition as imagination means: 1) the ability to represent the perceived objects in another form (so-called geometrical intuition); 2) the ability to form metaphors, that is to show the identity of a single object with the features of the sort to which it belongs; 3) intuition as a creative imagination (inspiration).

Emotional-volitional component of consciousness is connected with its role in the active construction of the reality, because will is a conscious and purposeful control of man’s practical activity. In this process will appear to be historical in matter and orientation. “All regular kinds of animals’ activity could not put seal of their will on the nature. Only man could do that.” (F. Engels). Content is conditioned by the character of man’s needs and modes of their realization. That is why the emotional-volitional component of consciousness depends both on the level of development of those needs, and on the level of their adequate understanding.

Abstract-logical component of consciousness is characterized by the ability of a man to realize the nature of things through their comprehension without direct sensory observation. That is why there are no consciousness beyond thinking and language. Thus, speaking about the peculiarities of consciousness, thinking and language, we must admit that they appear to be the phenomena of one and the same order, so far as they do not exist independently from one another. At the same time they differ from one another with their form of manifestation. If consciousness states the availability of social reflection, then thinking appears to be a processing reflection that is of such kind, which follows the logic of emergence, development and solution of contradictions of the objective things. That was the reason why Socrates tried to urge the participants of his dialogues upon understanding of some contradictions of objects and phenomena, which was cognition directed on. Kant formulated the essence of thinking as man’s ability to judge. The high aim of thinking is the dialectical understanding of the world. That is why the question “what is thinking?” is the question “what is intelligence?” – everyone can think, but the lack of dialectical thinking preserves his consciousness in the frames of folly.

Language is a practical consciousness. It appears at a certain stage of the mankind’s development of the practical activity when primitive people got a necessity to say something to each other.

But language is not something purely ideal. It is only the form of a self-manifestation of the ideal, its verbal being. So an object turns out to be ideal only on condition that the ability of its active modeling through labour is formed, relying on “the language of words and schemes”, where an ability of a social subject to transform actively words into things is formed, and through things – into another object. The assurance of true origination of a language from man’s practical activity can be easily proved by the fact that animals do not need a verbal communication to pass things to each other. In the natural environment no animal suffers from the disability to speak or understand human speech. This is because of the fact that the experience of animals is restricted by their natural programming for a certain form of existence. Moreover, animals are unable to acquire other forms of existence.

Abstract-logical level of consciousness comes into being in consequence of the formation of the very first abstractions at the level of sensual consciousness. It has two sublevels: mind and intelligence.

Mind is the human faculty to which are ascribed thought, feeling, etc.; often regarded as an immaterial part of a person. In Cartesian philosophy – one of two basic modes of existence, the other being matter.

Intelligence as an abstract and theoretical cognition is based on the dialectical mode of thinking. Thus dialectics comes out to be the major method of intelligence. Hence it is clear that only that man can think at the level of intelligence who is able to turn the universal laws and categories of development into his subjective property, the ability of his own thinking. So, to understand the world at the level of intelligence means to think of it fundamentally, according to its laws, which become the laws of social practice, man’s practical activity and then the laws of thinking and cognition. It means that intelligence is thinking at the level of categories and fundamental laws of the objective reality, when the very essence of things and phenomena is understood.

The most important detailed theory of mind in the early modern period was developed by Immanuel Kant. His main work Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is as equally dense as it is important, and cannot easily be summarized in this context. Kant basically thought that an adequate account of phenomenal consciousness involved far more than any of his predecessors had considered. There are important mental structures which are “presupposed” in conscious experience, and Kant presented an elaborate theory as to what those structures are, which, in turn, had other important implications. He, like Leibniz, also saw the need to postulate the existence of unconscious mental states and mechanisms in order to provide an adequate theory of mind.

In his Phenomenology of Mind G. Hegel discusses three distinct types of mind: the subjective mind, the mind of an individual; the objective mind, the mind of society and of the State; and the Absolute mind, a unity of all concepts. See also Hegel's Philosophy of Mind from his Encyclopedia.

The development of consciousness assumes above all enrichment of it through addition of new knowledge about the surrounding world and about man himself. But consciousness is not a sum total of its constituent elements: it is an integral, complex structured whole.