1. Social Consciousness: Essence and Levels

Social consciousness is_realized in two hypostases —in the reflective and_actively creative abilities._The essence of conscious­ness consists precisely in the fact that it may reflect social being only on condition of its simultaneous_creative transformation. The function of anticipatory reflection characteristic of consciousness is most clearly realized in relation to social being, which is essen­tially linked with orientation towards the future. Society is a material-ideal reality.The ensemble of gener­alized notions, theories, emotions, mores and traditions —of all that forms the content of social consciousness, the intellectual and spiritual reality—is part of social being, since it is given to the consciousness of the separate individual.

Consciousness as reflection and as active creativity is a unity \ of two inseparable aspects of a single process: it evaluates being revealing its secret meaning, it predicts being and transforms it 1 through people's practical activity. This expresses the historically established function of social consciousness, which makes it an objectively necessary and actually existing element of any social structure.

The fact that social consciousness includes different levels (everyday consciousness, theoretical consciousness, social psycho­logy, ideology, etc.). with social being reflected at each of these levels in different ways, presents a real difficulty in understanding the phenomenon of social consciousness.

Social and individual consciousness. Some believe that the real sphere of social consciousness, and its only car­rier, is the concrete individual. Others think, on the contrary, that social consciousness is something suprapersonal, so that a conception of it need not take the individual into account at all. Social consciousness is a socially conditioned phenomenon — not only in terms of the mech­anism of its inception and realization but also in the nature of its being and historic mission. It is an attribute of society and is com­parable, as a special type of reality, with society's being.

The space in which social consciousness exists must be desig­nated like this: it is the man-activity-communication-history-language-culture system. This system is in a state of constant dynamics of functioning and development, continually introducing countless individuals coming into this world to the cultural treasures of man­kind. Outside world history, the individual's brain would not have been able to think in the human way. Social consciousness, which is ultimately generated by the brain¹ of the individual as an element of social being, is now making a powerful impact on the individual during his entire lifetime.

At this point it is very important to note that consciousness, both social and individual, cannot be derived just from the process of re­flection of the natural world: the subject-object relation does not generate consciousness. For this process to take place, the subject must be included in the intricate network of social practice. As we come into this world, each of us inherits a multifaceted culture which has to be absorbed so that we might acquire a truly human es­sence and be able to think. We start a dialogue with social con­sciousness, and this opposing consciousness is a reality, just as much as, say, the state or law (a reality, of course, that has specifics of its own). We can rebel against it, but our rebellion may prove to be not only meaningless but also tragic, unless we take into account the forms and methods of the historically established intellectual-spiri­tual system. In order to transform this system, it is necessary first to master it.

This does not mean, of course, that social consciousness is viewed as a sort of impersonal kingdom of abstract ideas free from man and oppressing him with their global historical weight. Social consciousness is suprapersonal, but that does not mean that it is extrapersonal. It is inherently of the same nature as man: everything in it has been created and crystallized precisely by man and not by some extrahistorical force.

Social consciousness is not, however, a quantitative sum of indi­vidual minds —it is a qualitatively novel hypostasis of these minds, an ideal-objective reality organized within itself in a special manner, a reality whose demands and will the individual must take into ac­count in the same way as he takes into account natural phenomena. However, social consciousness does not exist for individuals as an external mechanical force. Each of us equally confronts this con­sciousness, but each absorbs this force, reacts to it, and acts on it in his own way, depending on the personality-related, individual speci­fics. Each individual consciousness also has its own sources of development, so that every individual is unique despite the unity of the human culture embracing all individuals.

The carriers of social consciousness are not only individuals but also social groups and society as a whole. If the individual alone were the carrier of social consciousness, all differences between in­dividual and social consciousness would actually disappear: the problem cannot be solved by separating social consciousness as something averaged and typical from individual consciousness as the nuances and liberties determined by the individual's specifics.

Failure to distinguish between individual and social consciousness is fraught with such dangerous diseases as dogmatism and voluntarism. Indeed, dogmatism deifies a system of ideas accepted at one time, regarding it as given once and for all, as the ultimate and immutable truth. A dogmatic person gives up his personal view in favor of the generally accepted one. As for the voluntarist, he will, on the contrary, ignore social consciousness in favor of the individ­ual one; his reasoning runs along these fines: if my actions are moti­vated by the best of intentions, these intentions coincide with the objective imperatives of history. The possibility of a subjective error is disregarded, and all his initiatives are no more than dreamy Utopi­as. Voluntarism holds back historical progress just as much as dog­matism, nurturing countless illusions in social consciousness.

Social consciousness has an objective nature and immanent laws of development, and it can either lag behind or anticipate being in the framework of an evolutionary process that is natural to a given society, acting either as a powerful stimulant or as a mechanism of retardation. The powerful transforming force of social conscious­ness can affect being as a whole, revealing the meaning of the on­going evolution and predicting its future. It differs in this respect from subjective individual consciousness, which is finite and limited to a single individual. The power of the social whole over the indi­vidual is expressed in the obligatory acceptance by the individual of historically established forms of cultural assimilation of reality, of those means and ways with which spiritual and intellectual values are produced, of the semantic content which humanity has accumulated over the ages and without which the formation of the individ­ual is impossible.

Social consciousness is generally divided into different levels on the verti­cal plane and/omzj on the horizontal one.

The everyday practical and the theoretical level of social conscious- ness. The division into the everyday practical and the theoretical level is based, as is clear from the terms themselves, on the antith­ esis of an integral understanding of life that is practical and unsyste- matized (although not entirely spontaneous) on the one hand, and/ ideas that have been subjected to creative elaboration and rational! systematization (in the special sciences, in art, philosophy, socio-poli itical, ethical and other doctrines), on the other.

This division is usual in all the forms of social consciousness. As distinct from the systematic, rational, and clearly intelligible quality of the theoretical level, everyday con­sciousness has a fullness and integrity of life perception that is un­characteristic of the theoretical forms of consciousness. That is one of the main indications of its viability.

Everyday consciousness is closer to the immediate realities of life than its theoretical forms, and it therefore more fully reflects the specifics of a situation with all its concrete details and semantic nuances. The experiences of everyday consciousness are the treas­ure-trove from which the special sciences, philosophy and art draw their content. Everyday consciousness is thus the primary form of society's understanding of the social and the natural, a form that is objectively conditioned by the very nature of man. Its qualities are historically variable. If, for instance, everyday consciousness of the Middle Ages was virtually free from scientific notions, society's present-day practical consciousness is no longer a naive religious-mythological reflection of the world: on the contrary, it is per­meated with scientific knowledge —yet at the same time it gener­alizes this knowledge in a kind of unity with its own means irreduc­ible to scientific ones.

Social psychology and ideology. The relationship between the everyday and theoretical levels of consciousness is transformed in a specific manner in the relation between social psychology and ideo­logy. Social psychology is a partial analogue of the everyday level of consciousness; it embraces various scientific and nonscientific views and assessments, aesthetic tastes and ideas, mores and traditions, inclinations and interests, images of fantasy and the logic of com­mon sense. Ideology is a partial analogue of the theoretical level of consciousness; it systematically evaluates social reality from the po­sitions of a definite class or party. Ideology accumulates the histori­cal experiences of definite groups or classes, formulates their socio­political tasks and goals, and builds a system of authoritative ideals. A significant feature of ideology as a specific form of consciousness is that it reflects reality in a mediated form, and not integrally and directly as social psychology does; ideology develops its own categorial tools which, being fairly abstract, are more remote from re­ality; this holds the danger of ideology becoming self-contained and inclined towards scholastic theorizing.

Because of this, social psychology and ideology can reflect identi­cal realities in different ways. The very fact of their antithesis leads not only to ideology lagging behind everyday consciousness but to a destabilization and undermining of social psychology itself. When the structure of social consciousness is undermined by disharmony reaching the point of an acute conflict, social consciousness gradually loses its stability and unity. A great role in the resolution of this contradiction is played by the study of public opinion, which is interpreted as the statistically averaged evaluative attitude of vari­ous social strata to current events.

Such are the most general features of the principal levels of so­cial consciousness on which all of its forms function. The forms in question are as follows: philosophy, politics, law, morality, aesthe­tics, religion, and science. All forms of social consciousness with the exception of philosophy can be divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into two cycles. The first cycle includes politics, law and ethics; underlying all of them there are various modifications of the primary rela­tions between subjects (relationships among people, in ethics; the relationship between individual and society in law; and relationships between social groups, including states, in politics). The second cycle includes aesthetics, religion (or atheism), and science. The focus here is the basic relation between subject and object, i.e. the various forms of the reflection in human consciousness of man's complex relations with the world.