Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Partial Consciousness and Individual Consciousness

That Individual Consciousness is a special case of Partial Consciousness, i. e. that the awareness that one is an 'individual' is a special case of the awareness that one is a member of a part of a collective, conforms to traditional Logic, in which the quantifier Individual is derived from the quantifier Particular, each a subset of some general class.  Thus exposed is what is often suppressed in Descartes' concept of Individual Consciousness--a sequence of withdrawals from a larger context that includes not only a fire, but all the residents of the building that he inhabits, etc.  Likewise, concepts such as the political Individual, Individual Freedom, Individual Rights, etc., also presuppose some larger social context, as does Selfishness.  So, since a Partial Consciousness entails a division from the remainder of the Collective of which it is a part, each of these cases of Individual Consciousness is inherently antagonistic, a characteristic that is suppressed by the premise that it is self-sufficient, e. g. the concept of Individual Right entails the possibility of interference by any of the rest of a Collective.

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