Consciousness Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Consciousness - Essay ExampleThis is disturbing only if we assume that states of spirit argon mutually exclusive. Insofar as the same subject can experience incompatible forms of consciousness (dreams and open-eyed reality) they need not be mutually exclusive rather, the fear is that a totally different groundview, and hence a totally different trend of operating in the world, may be appropriate. For example, it would be unsettling if mortal managed to convince us that feudalism is the correct worldview and therefore the correct modus operandi. Our defence of the current worldview (industrial capitalism) would be do not only by apprehensions of the alteration in our individual condition (from factory-owner to serf) solely perhaps plane more by our belief in the props (e.g. belief in put down speech and free enterprise) of the current worldview. Our values and beliefs are ultimately find out by our social existence our knowledge of the world is based on our social relations and conditions.The thesis he posited in contradistinction to Rene Descartes Cogito ergo sum and which is important to Karl Marxs body of work is that It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness (Critique of semipolitical Economy 2). Existence itself does not depend on consciousness, much less on meta- consciousness uncomplete does life or productivity depend on consciousness. Rather, given a certain social social organization and an individuals relations to it, subjective consciousness arises from physical reality. Physical reality encompasses everyday material activity (Burke 3), which is determined by the configuration of the individual or socioeconomic class in the current relations of production. An too soon 21st century American farmers consciousness arises from the sum of all the activities and relationships he enters as a farmer (planting with a seed-drill, selling his grain to a cor porate miller, buying seeds from a transnational biotechnology giant) it is different from the consciousness of the miller or the biotech company, and also from that of a farmer in Soviet Russia. It is different and unmatched not only because of his position in a salient mode of production (industrial capitalism versus socialism), but also, and equally importantly, because of the non-economic institutions that reflect and propagate that mode of production. Thus the early 21st century American farmers consciousness is determined also by the media, the church, the system of education, the family - in short, by all that can be summed up as culture.Althusser calls these cultural institutions the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) - in contrast to the Repressive State Apparatuses (Althusser 3) which operate by direct force (law, police, army). The ISAs grow up on the base of the mode of production, reflect it, and reinforce it they move the ideology of the dominant mode of production . This is true of every human society under every mode or production it can be understood, not as a conspiracy (Burke 4), but as reflections in ideology of the mode of production. By reflecting the mode of production, ideology also propagates it every time the circumstance quo is mirrored in culture (e.g. in advertisements or