False consciousness

Written by atreestump

What are your thoughts on false consciousness?

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0 thoughts on “False consciousness”

  1. Maybe I should be clearer about this. The state of alienation implies essentialism – some thinkers like Marx speak of false consciousness, where as Foucault would say ‘who knows what’s real anyway?’.

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  3. where as Foucault would say ‘who knows what’s real anyway?’.

    Well that is a good point. We can talk about false consciousness but if we don’t what is real then how can we make that judgement that it is false. There is no basis to compare something to what is real and say it is false. I think the best we can do is say “This appears real” and therefore that is false. At the same time realizing we have no idea if what we are saying is true or not. Just the best we know in the moment.

  4. For sure. We can at least explore alienation, why some are more alienated than others etc. That is the role of philosophy and why it isn’t the same as empirical science as we only have reason to try and figure out what there is and how it works. We can also review erronous assumptions made by psychology and possible errorsof thinking from habitual thought we have inheritedfrom other discourses unconsciously, essentialism is a very religious concept when you break it down, like we are oblivious to it, it’s like a hang up from Christian thought that seems to stay under the radar.

  5. To make sure I am understanding it right. Essentialism is the idea that everything has some kind of form that is unalterable. That it can be seen as religious because something created that form.

  6. Yes, essences/essentialism is referring to a quality and attributes of things, be they mental or material, that is absolute and irreducible.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essence?wprov=sfsi1

    It can imply a creator, or it can be self-created, either way, the problem carries with it an undeniable quality of a thing. It’s religious because it pressuposes layer after layer of foundations, its religious because it can be another word for soul.

    It’s interesting because the way we explain things can lead to the creation of essences, when in fact, language can refer to itself.

    To sum up – an essence is the absolute quality or attributes of a thing, we have inherited this way of thinking from religion. It implies causes that may not actually be anywhere. This can lead us into infinite regress where we constantly have to justify one cause with another cause into infinity.

  7. Yeah, so on rejecting essentialism I don’t know how you feel about ontology. I’m not so sure that I am convinced about your earlier statement of constituent lineages and encounters of a  contingent mass. This is a big question I have right now, which is the question of how you approach the ontological, Ontical.

  8. Are you asking how do we know if we have an essence or not and how do we find out? I’m trying to formulate the question first and why it is important, before trying to figure out what there is.

    It’s important to know how our notion of essences influences our thinking and how they differ in certain philosophies and the implications for those differences.

  9. It can imply a creator, or it can be self-created, either way, the problem carries with it an undeniable quality of a thing. It’s religious because it pressuposes layer after layer of foundations, its religious because it can be another word for soul.

    It can be religious because if it is implied there is a creator it begs another question. Why did my creator create me? What is my purpose?

    That could be an interesting thread on its own. This whole notion of having a soul and why it came about.

    It’s interesting because the way we explain things can lead to the creation of essences, when in fact, language can refer to itself.

    Circular logic in other words. The way we explain some things leads to the idea of an essence. Then the essence is used to explain the things that explained it.

    This can lead us into infinite regress where we constantly have to justify one cause with another cause into infinity.

    Maybe not infinity but to our limit of our ability to explain it. From there its either magical or a sign of a creator or higher power. People’s way of saying “I give up” without saying that.

    Yeah, so on rejecting essentialism I don’t know how you feel about ontology.
    It’s important to know how our notion of essences influences our thinking and how they differ in certain philosophies and the implications for those differences.

    How we might be biased by our notion of essences. That in order to think of different ways of thinking we have to examine how one line of thinking is deeply rooted. Otherwise we might end up in the same spot again with essences because that is all we can conceive.

  10. It may not be possible to escape from notions of essences, or metaphysics altogether. We can only offer our due diligence toward the subject. Derrida sees this as a symptom of logos which is the inward rational principle of all things. I believe this is nothing but narcissism, we believe the universe will echo back to us, even if we see the universe as indifferent, we ourselves will be indifferent.

  11. Yeah, so on rejecting essentialism I don’t know how you feel about ontology.

    If there are essences, they come out of social constructs. As thetrizzard pointed out in the Foucault and Essences thread, it’s relational through power dynamics. Essences have to be, if they do indeed exist, after the fact BUT they are still a priori to each human in society as culture can pre-dominate the nature which preceeded it.

  12. A philosopher once stated, “Those who grasp Reality
    don’t know Fantasy and those that grasp Fantasy
    don’t know Reality.”
    But what exactly is Real that constitutes Reality,
    that is the crux.

  13. Essences have to be, if they do indeed exist, after the fact BUT they are still a priori to each human in society as culture can pre-dominate the nature which preceeded it.

    So if we can reject the nature that created the essences then we might be able to perceive something else other than essences. It would be hard but it would be possible.

    But what exactly is Real that constitutes Reality,
    that is the crux.

    Maybe that is our arrogance showing to think there is such a thing as reality. When reality is just how we explain the universe from what we gather from our experiences and senses.

    How many times have senseless arguments have risen because we think we know reality. That two people can sense and experience the same thing and come up with two different explanations for it. Who is right and who is wrong? Both are right, because both are providing an explanation that works for them. Works for them because of how their mind fits everything together to come up with that explanation. Since we are unique as individuals it would be natural that two people would come up with two different explanations. Sometimes there is general overlap because of shared experiences but more often than not their will be differences.

    So for each of us their is a reality that our minds conceive. But we need to realize that reality is just an perception fo our mind. That it is not real and will vary from person to person in small and big ways.

  14. So if we can reject the nature that created the essences then we might be able to perceive something else other than essences. It would be hard but it would be possible.

    Not so much reject, but to acknowledge that ‘going back to the source’ to find the ‘purest form’ is a habit of knowledge. We will find it very hard to delve under culture. Go to my Derrida and Writing as Language thread, it explains how we live on the outside, that the language of mathematics for example, is not most pure when we counted with sticks and stones, or whatever, it is supplementary – this means that something like the square root of minus one does not exist in real world terms at all- we have to invent rules for that to be, so mathematics as a language is in its ‘purest form’ in its most unnatural state. That’s the principle anyway.

    I like an old Bertrand Russell quote regarding the latter part of your post –

    Fanatics are always so certain and wiser people so full of doubts.


  15. Not so much reject, but to acknowledge that ‘going back to the source’ to find the ‘purest form’ is a habit of knowledge. We will find it very hard to delve under culture. Go to my Derrida and Writing as Language thread, it explains how we live on the outside, that the language of mathematics for example, is not most pure when we counted with sticks and stones, or whatever, it is supplementary – this means that something like the square root of minus one does not exist in real world terms at all- we have to invent rules for that to be, so mathematics as a language is in its ‘purest form’ in its most unnatural state. That’s the principle anyway.

    Your explanation for the language of mathematics makes it more clearer to me what you mean. We want something that explains without adding or supplementing concepts that are not part of pure form. Yes mathematics help explain what we where doing when counting with sticks. But eventually mathematics as it was developed as a language ran into that problem of the square root of negative numbers. So it add the concept of an imaginary number to define it which is not part of the pure form.

    That the same thing with essences. That it starts off fine explaining consciousness but as it is developed it runs into the same problem that mathematics did. That it invents things to make it itself work as language of consciousness. So to understand consciousness better we need acknowledge that and start over. Finding something that explains it without adding on things. That its language describes the pure form and nothing but the pure form.

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