soul = consciousness
"Philosophical criticisms of the concept of consciousness
From the eighteenth to twentieth centuries many philosophers
concentrated on relations, processes and thought as the most important
aspects of consciousness. These aspects would later become known as
"access consciousness" 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. When Antonio Dimasio[10]
defines consciousness as "an organism's awareness of its own self and
its surroundings," he hasn't said anything. The words "consciousness,"
"awareness," and "perception" convey a very passive sense, bringing up
images of the homunculus observer. The idea of consciousness also
implies a gratuitous distinction between awareness and sensation, as
if sensation or thought is something we have to be aware of.
The neurological data shows, however, that experience is a very
interactive thing. Our brain massages vast libraries of experience
that it draws upon to create a coherent body and a coherent world for
us. As in the act of reading a text, our reading of our bodies and the
world around us is a very active thing. 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.""
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conciousness
