Consciousness

Consciousness is awareness an individual or group has about its reality and circumstances. There exist two primary forms of consciousness — personal and social (by a group in society). Among materialists, consciousness is regarded as a property of highly organized matter, consisting in the psychological reflection of reality. Materialist philosophy also views consciousness as conscious being, the subjective image of the objective world; as subjective reality, in contrast to objective reality; and as the ideal, in contrast to and in the unity with the material.

In a narrower sense, consciousness means the higher form of psychological reflection inherent in the socially developed human being, the ideal side of purposeful labor activity. Marxism understands human conscious to be a product of social and otherwise material circumstances.

See also

• Class consciousness