Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, and Sigmund Freud develop definitions of consciousness which posit different assumptions about the relationship of individuals and society. The project here is three-fold: to trace these definitions, to locate the assumptions which inform them in historical and social movement, and to analyze the relationship between human freedom, consciousness, and knowledge.
For Marx, consciousness is determined by the material conditions of daily life. Marx states that the production "of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven" with the material relations of "daily life" (Tucker 154). The way in which we think about the world and the process by which we form opinion result from our interaction with the world via work, schooling and social interaction. Marx is attacking the earlier German philosophers--Hegel, for example, who imagines a "spirit" which "descends from heaven to earth" and which directs the actions, and ultimately the history, of human beings (Tucker 154). But Marx turns Hegel's equation on its head, arguing that "we ascend from earth to heaven" (Tucker 154). Thus consciousness, that is, knowledge, proceeds from human interaction with "real existence," and not the other way around.
Marx attempts to inscribe reality as the driving force in history. This position opposes the notion that "morality, religion, [and] metaphysics" propel history; in Marxist thought these forces tend to distort, as a camera obscura, humankind's true material situation. Such distortion leads to social and political inertia. Consciousness, believes Marx, is "a social product" which devolves from our working relation to nature and to one another; it is the very force that necessitates human collective existence (Tucker 158). What Marx is concerned with is the way in which men and women understand their roles and function in society. Unlike Durkheim, Marx critiqu...