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Consciousness: Ideas
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The ideals of Black Consciousness put forth by Steve Biko, and supported by his fellow colleagues in the South African Students’ Organization (SASO) was a black response to Afrikaner Nationalist Party white power. Unlike the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) that came before the birth of SASO in 1969, SASO and their view of Black Consciousness sought to make black Africans – students and the majority of the population of Africans have a say in the matters that concerned their living conditions, and the treatment that they received under the apartheid system of government. According to Clive Nettleton, a former NUSAS leader “the formation of SASO [had] disrupted the traditional alignment of the South African student world. / While it is still possible for white and black students to hold joint congresses and seminars, and to meet occasionally at social events, they live in different worlds.” The world that is mentioned here is a world where Steve Biko observed that the black African seemed to be a defeated person, is the “kind of black man who is man only in form”, and has been “reduced to an obliging shell”. Therefore, the idea of Black Consciousness was not to institute black racism, or return some aspect of vengeance upon white society, but rather to enforce a sense of solidarity amongst blacks in South Africa where they developed a new-found pride in themselves, their culture, their religion, and their values, and believed that they weren’t an aberration in God’s plan, but had aspects of their way of life to offer, just as much as the South African white society had in terms of science and other technological advances.
Brook and Raymont's interesting article in Psyche: The Representational Base of Consciousness [link] raises some interesting issues. The idea of a self representing representation is particularly interesting, as Brook and Raymont put it: "Representations can represent themselves as well as whatever else they may represent."... more »
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Historically, great movements in any area emerge from a collective consciousness. It is not surprising that in any given field of activity, great ideas do not occur in isolation. Despite an idea germinating in an individual mind, it is interesting to note that the same idea strikes two or more thinkers, geographically far apart, around the same time. Collective consciousness results from consensus. At any given time, collective consciousness is actively operational in a group as small as the family and as large as half the global population. The power of collective consciousness has not been fully explored or appreciated, except perhaps in times of great distress when 'prayers' are offered by a group of individuals for a particular reason and the prayers are answered.
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Some philosophers suggest that consciousness resists or even defies definition. Others believe it can be usefully distinguished between phenomenal consciousness and access or psychological consciousness, while still others disagree. There are many philosophical stances on consciousness, including: behaviorism, dualism, idealism, functionalism, phenomenalism, physicalism, emergentism, and mysticism. John Locke's chapter XXVII "On Identity and Diversity" in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) has been said to be one of the first modern conceptualization of consciousness as the repeated self-identification of one-self, through which moral responsibility could be attributed to the subject.
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In the past the origin of consciousness was looked for in a soul separate of the body. This idea developed in many cultures. Some of these conceptions were first developed in ancient Greece, and later adapted to Christian ideas.
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As elsewhere in philosophy, Descartes’s writings mark a major shift in philosophical preoccupation with consciousness. Pre-Cartesian philosophers of mind rarely emphasize the terms ‘conscious’ or ‘consciousness’ (or clear equivalents). Post-Cartesian philosophers of mind rarely avoid such emphasis. This section compares Descartes’s usage with earlier usage, and the next section discusses subsequent ideas.
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