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Philosophical criticisms
From the eighteenth to twentieth centuries many philosophers concentrated on relations, processes and thought[
citation needed] as the most important aspects of consciousness. These aspects would later become known as "access consciousness"[
citation needed] and this focus on relations allowed philosophers such as
Marx,
Nietzsche and
Foucault to claim that individual consciousness was dependent on such factors as social relations, political relations and ideology.
Locke's "
forensic" notion of personal identity founded on an individual conscious
subject would be criticized in the 19th century by
Marx,
Nietzsche, and
Freud following different angles.
Martin Heidegger's concept of the
Dasein ("
Being-there") would also be an attempt to think beyond the conscious subject.
Marx considered that social relations
ontologically preceded individual consciousness, and criticized the conception of a conscious subject as an
ideological conception on which
liberal political thought was founded. Marx in particular criticized the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, considering that the so-called individual
natural rights were ideological fictions camouflaging
social inequality in the attribution of those rights. Later,
Louis Althusser would criticize the "bourgeois ideology of the subject" through the concept of
interpellation ("Hey, you!").
Nietzsche, for his part, once wrote that "they give you
free will only to later blame yourself", thus reversing the classical
liberal conception of free will in a critical account of the genealogy of consciousness as the effect of guilt and
ressentiment, which he described in
On the Genealogy of Morals. Hence, Nietzsche was the first one to make the claim that the modern notion of consciousness was indebted to the modern system of penalty, which judged a man according to his "
responsibility", that is by the consciousness through which acts can be attributed to an individual subject: "I did this! this is me!". Consciousness is thus related by Nietzsche to the classic philosopheme of
recognition which, according to him, defines
knowledge.
[9]
According to
Pierre Klossowski (1969), Nietzsche considered consciousness to be a
hypostatization of the
body, composed of multiple forces (the "
Will to Power"). According to him, the subject was only a "grammatical fiction": we believed in the existence of an individual subject, and therefore of a specific author of each act, insofar as we speak. Therefore, the conscious subject is dependent on the existence of
language, a claim which would be generalized by
critical discourse analysis (see for example
Judith Butler).
Michel Foucault's analysis of the creation of the individual subject through
disciplines, in
Discipline and Punish (1975), would extend Nietzsche's genealogy of consciousness and personal identity - i.e.
individualism - to the change in the juridico-penal system: the emergence of
penology and the disciplinization of the individual subject through the creation of a penal system which judged not the acts as it alleged to, but the personal identity of the wrong-doer. In other words, Foucault maintained that, by judging not the acts (the crime), but the person behind those acts (the criminal), the modern penal system was not only following the philosophical definition of consciousness, once again demonstrating the imbrications between
ideas and social institutions ("material ideology" as
Althusser would call it); it was by itself creating the individual person, categorizing and dividing the masses into a category of poor but honest and law-abiding citizens and another category of "professional criminals" or
recidivists.
Gilbert Ryle has argued that traditional understandings of consciousness depend on a Cartesian outlook that divides into mind and body, mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by saying 'consciousness,' we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.
The failure to produce a workable definition of consciousness also raises formidable philosophical questions. It has been argued that when
Antonio Damasio[10] defines consciousness as "an organism's awareness of its own self and its surroundings", the definition has not escaped circularity, because awareness in that context can be considered a synonym for consciousness.
The notion of consciousness as passive awareness can be contrasted with the notion of the active construction of
mental representations. Maturana and Varela
[11] showed that the brain is massively involved with creating worlds of experience for us with meager input from the senses. Evolutionary biologist
Richard Dawkins[12] sums up the interactive view of experience: "In a way, what sense organs do is assist our brains to construct a useful model and it is this model that we move around in. It is a kind of virtual reality simulation of the world."