Re: Poetic Consciousness vs. Sociological Consciousness
Posted by:
Dale Nelson (IP Logged)
Date: 5 September, 2021 11:11PM
For all my words below, I'm still groping. For what they may be worth, here are some relfections.
Poetic consciousness vs. sociological consciousness
5 Sept. 2021
Herewith an attempt to clarify how I understand these terms since I introduced them at Eldritch Dark some weeks ago.
“Consciousness†is not the same thing as “ideas.†Consciousness is the awareness that we experience.* “Ideas†are our notions about things of which we are aware. To be sure, absorbing from others, forming and holding ideas about things may affect our consciousness; if we habitually occupy our minds with certain ideas, we become more attuned to corresponding things.
For example, a young person might grow up with a spontaneous enjoyment of the beauty of certain plants. Then he goes to college and learns that these plants are not native to a region but were introduced by settlers who dispossessed earlier inhabitants. He might come to perceive the plants with distaste, losing his sense of their genuine beauty and forgetting that he used to enjoy them and also forgetting what changed his view of them (their association with unsavory history).
We are in a “participatory†relationship to that of which we are conscious, such as nature. We produce ideas when we think about nature, etc.
POETIC CONSCIOUSNESS has been the natural state of human beings throughout history, till very recently, when sociological consciousness developed. However hard life was for most people, they lived their lives rather than “performing†them.
While poetic consciousness pervades life, people typically tell stories about their own lives and other peoples’ lives – mostly people who are known to them, such as family members, neighbors, etc. People expect life to make some kind of sense, though it may be funny or painful, and even though people might feel that life is unfair. Whether one is happy or dissatisfied, one feels that much of life is out of one’s hands and in the hands of fate, the gods, God, the progressive onward push of nature, or the like -- but life is interesting and one has some freedom of action, and with it responsibility. Poetic consciousness typically deals with shame and honor, or iniquity and righteousness.
The discipline of sociology is not ruled out by poetic consciousness, but needs to be kept in its place.
SOCIOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS (which might not be a good choice of term) is the characteristic type of awareness learned by people living in modern or so-called postmodern society. Anyone reading this little essay, including me the author, will tend to perceive things and to think about them in terms of numbers and abstractions. The typical procedure of dealing with difficulties of life is to look for social “root causes.†The typical mental procedure is reductive, to say something is really “nothing but†something else.
In sociological consciousness, one is to discover, or fashion, who one is according to some category or other proposed by current thought: for example, identify what your gender is using this menu of possibilities, etc. The weird preoccupation with numbers shows itself again and again, as when someone says “I’m 90% sure that….â€
Under sociological consciousness, people often interpret life, including their own lives, in terms of popular psychology. They feel that they have gained understanding of themselves and others when they can apply terms such as manic, anal, ADHD, phobic, etc. They understand life largely in terms of therapies that help people to cope, adjust, etc. Thinking thus about their lives, they “recognize†the profiles that fit them, and then perform their lives rather than living them.
Oddly, though sociological consciousness refers, often inappropriately, to numbers, it is often in error about the numerical facts. Thus governments and journalism manufacture endless statistics, statements about trillions of dollars to be spent, and so on, and yet these numbers are often misunderstood or are phantasmal.
This often bogus “numericism†shows, for example, in diatribes about “inequity.â€
Digression: To help you keep poetic consciousness and sociological consciousness distinct, you could use this mnemonic: iniquity vs. inequity.
Poetic consciousness typically recognizes the moral dimension of your life and my life, in which I am called to use my freedom rightly or lest I commit morally faulty behavior, which, to take an intense word, could be called iniquity.
Sociological consciousness is hardly concerned with, or aware of, objective right and wrong. It typically holds “morality†to be a nothing but “code†by which a social group exerts control over another group, i.e. maintains inequity.
But where poetic consciousness usually allows forgiveness or “payment†for wrongdoing, sociological consciousness often simply relegates offenders to a category of the condemned. End of digression.
Sociological consciousness tends to be anxious and irritable.
Where sociological consciousness prevails, people will tend not so much to exercise the freedom that they feel they have but may fret about restrictions due to “society†or some hated group that is to blame. It’s often not that they personally feel themselves to be un-free, but that, as they think, “people†or some category of people need greater freedom.
Sociological consciousness uses works of imagination -- poetry, art, music, etc. – to reinforce its ideas. For it, Heart of Darkness is not so much about the mystery of evil in the human heart as about colonialism, the ideology of regarding indigenous people as “savages†and “Other,†etc.
Sociological consciousness tends to a kind of totalitarianism, that is, the politicization of more or more of life till it is all absorbed thereby, as in Ibram Kendi’s idea that Christianity should be focused on (his) ideas of “social justice,†etc.
A personal note: I’m obvious more sympathetic to “poetic consciousness†than “sociological consciousness,†but the former is not “salvation.â€
*“Ideas†as I am using the word here doesn’t refer to Plato’s concept of permanent higher realities that a human being might try to contemplate, but that exist on their own; Plato’s ideas belong to the realm of Being, but may be manifest in some degree in our experiential world of Becoming.