Original scientific paper
The Relationship of Values and Individual Forms of Social Consciousness
Mladen Čaldarović
; Zagreb
Abstract
The fundamental categories of the Marxist conception of history, the social base and superstructure are still today the subject of discussion by Marxist-oriented authors. The effort is emphasized to reject the rigid and schematic application of the assumptions of Marx and Engels on the basis of the results of modern sociological and other research and to affirm authentic dialectical thinking about relations within the elements of the total social structure.
One of the questions in the theory of culture which has not received sufficient attention is the Marxist approach to the phenomenon of values as models of thinking, experiencing and behavior. In the articulation of structural elements of the social superstructure, of forms of social consciousness, values cannot be understood as one of the forms of social consciousness, but as a standard of thinking and cultural formation which is at the bases of all forms of social consciousness-morality.
It is possible to establish three groups of forms of social consciousness with respect to the creativity of individuals and separate social groups, and with respect to the form of collective creativity and creativity of social psychology in general. These are: differentiated forms of social consciousness (morality, rules of behavior, customs, religion); philosophy, science, art; and non-differentiated forms of social consciousness (mentality, social psychology).
The primacy of material-production relations in a dialectical linkage with forms of social consciousness is apparent only in the realm of the politico-legal superstructure, while in other realms of spiritual activity and cultural formation other forms of relations are observed: the dialectical interdependence of equal factors which leads to specifically complex phenomena of spiritual »production« in which social values appear rather varied. For modern society, the conflict of traditional and new values originating under the influence of revolutionary workers movements of the 19th and 20th centuries is not so characteristic as the destruction of the one and the other.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
156093
URI
Publication date:
30.6.1978.
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