[lbo-talk] Self-Consciousness (was Re: Shakespeare)

farmelantj at juno.com farmelantj at juno.com
Tue Dec 11 05:55:12 PST 2007


The understanding of self-consciousness that Andie provided us, comes as he pointed out from Hegel, but was reiterated by later philosophers like Feuerbach and Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, it was taken up by many of the best psychologists including George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky, and B.F. Skinner, to name just a few.

Jim F.

-- "Charles Brown" <charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> wrote:
>>> andie nachgeborenen
Seems like it was about 30,000 years ago. That's about the date that people started to bury their dead and do cave art. But what you regally want to know is HOW they acquired the first person POV. Hey, I thought you were the Heideggerian. Me, the best story I know about this, although it doesn't mention neurotransmitters, is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. We know ourselves through knowing others who know themselves through knowing us. That's a paraphrase of a famous sentence in the chapter on Self-Consciousness.

^^^^^ CB: Didn't Bobbie Burns get to this first ? Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us. Anyway, yea, we need an other to know ourselves, to look at ourselves from the outside, as if through an other's eyes. That's the dialectic of the self. The self needs an other, a non-self, to be a self.

So,the first person point of view is inextriably linked to the second person point of view; and really the third.

What arises in swivilization is the illusion of the independent self, the first person point of view as primary and solitary in origin and existence , as non-social, independent of second and third persons. There are no first persons independent of second and third persons in reality. Human beings are highly social even when, ( especially when) swivilization arises. This illusion probably occurs conveniently to people who live off of surpluses, the work of others. They conveniently develop the illusion that they live without work supporting them , since they obviously aren't working, and they can't admit that they are living off of others' work. Voila ! The Big I.

I'd say the big Self , the Individual, gets teased out by the alienation of swivilization, at its height in bourgeois alienation.

Take it away , Ted.

As to neurotransmitters, the key thing with humans is that the first person, individual brain's neurotransmitters are in communication with all these second, third, fourth...brains' neurotransmitters. Thus, my postition is that the communication function of language _is_ selected for in evolution. That is culture is selected for in the emergence of the species _homo sapiens_ . Language and culture are not spandrels , in the Gould sense. Language and culture are _the_ most adaptive characteristic of our species in our emergence, the complete opposite of a spandrel. ^^^^^

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