>>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 07/25/01 04:47PM >>>
Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
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> Would you agree that we can differentiate between an internal state of
> affairs (subjective), a social state of affairs (intersubjective) and an
> external state of affairs (objective)?
Tentatively, I would reject the first of these: no "internal state of affairs" exists independently of a social state of affairs. Chronologically, shared social states preceded self-consciousness by a million or more years. We _are_ our social relations, and those relations are prior to any internal state of affairs.
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CB: And we can go the other way or "to the other end " of this too. Self-consciousness preceded socialized consciousness in the prehuman species. Socialized consciousness is what founded human consciousness in the sense that relative to the consciousness of our animal ancestors, our consciousness is more socially ( i.e. socio-historically) constituted. Self-consciousness is characteristic of apes or dogs or other mammals. The leap to human was essentially to a qualitiatively higher social conscisousness away from a more selfcentered consciousness in ancestoral species.
The bourgeois emphasis on the private, the "internal state of affairs" and away from the public and social is a return to the prehuman, the generically animal, not an advance in the specifically human.