Does being determine consciousness or vice versa?
3 Answers
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It depends on the philosophical position on which you stand:
- Materialism: Social existence determines social consciousness.
- Objective idealism: Consciousness (god in the philosophical sense) determines being.
- Subjective idealism: My consciousness determines being. I hope you don't need to explain what the problem is?
- Dualism: Being and consciousness mutually define each other. But here the trouble is that the consciousness of being does not exist, and being without consciousness is easy.
- Pluralism: Being does not determine consciousness, and consciousness does not determine their being determines something else. But the question is what? The answer to which will lead us back to one of the above variations.
Important: we can only talk about social consciousness, the consciousness of an individual is defined quite differently, its basis is experience, and it consists of the individual's being and the social consciousness with which the individual interacts.
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You pose the question as if axiomatically there are these two distinct realities: being and consciousness. But this is not a fact. This is only an assumption of the mind, or rather, one of the ways of thinking.
Being contains consciousness in its entirety, and consciousness contains all of being. Just the mind picked up words where the actual unity turned out to be-just for the mind! – divided into two mismatched parts.
This unity is called, for example, in Sanskrit Sat-Chit-Ananda-Being-Consciousness-Bliss.
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In the USSR, of course, everything was determined by being… you stand for the third hour in line for 300 grams of sausage in a stuffy store and your consciousness realized that it was powerless…
Being and consciousness-this pair reflects the dualism of philosophy. What is primary in life-the mind or life itself, which is perceived by the mind? We are called a “reasonable person”, which implies that the primary Reason for us is the Mind that helps us go through life.
If you don't think deeply, then being.
Through the senses, information about the external world is “digitized” and loaded into consciousness, formed into images, and we think with these images.
And, if we think more deeply, it is the consciousness of the Creator of our reality that creates the formula of our world, which is being for those who are part of this world, that is, for us.
Just as the programmer creates the laws of the virtual world with his consciousness, within which the existence created by the programmer determines the consciousness of the inhabitants of this virtual world.
Neither way. In Marx's original version, social existence determines social consciousness, i.e., the prevailing consciousness in society is determined by the social structure. Here, in Russia, there is now a bourgeois order. What is the consciousness of most citizens? Bourgeois.
But to say that being determines consciousness… Here, there's a bed. This is being. How does it define consciousness? Yes, nothing.
The case when the question itself may contain an error. Consciousness cannot be contrasted with being, because consciousness is a part of being.
On the other hand, if we speak of determination not as a constant process, but as a cause, then we can say that the existence that was before us determined us (became the cause of our birth). That is, in the chain of causal relationships, a person occupies a very specific intermediate position. I am not the cause of everything, but the being that was before me is the cause of me. Each person, in turn, is the cause of a particular local part of being.