Consciousness

From Geography

Consciousness is a term, used by many philosophers in Human Geography describing the agents' 'knowledge' about the world and the domain of their actions, or 'knowledgeability' (Lippuner & Werlen, 2009, p. 42). In general consciousness is being used to describe the quality or ability of being aware of the external world around the actor or to be able to self-Awareness.

Alfred Schütz

In the approach of Alfred Schütz, was mainly adopted from the approach of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. He wanted to analyze the inner life of the individual, so how the world appears to the individual.

Experience is not simply given, but it is intentional. We see an object only if we are conscious about what it means to us.

Schütz wants to look at why we see things as they are and how does this phenomenology reduction takes place.

Antony Giddens

Differing from the classic action theory, Giddens refers to conciousness in a three-stage model (Lippuner & Werlen, 2009, p. 42). Whitin this model, he differentiates between:

- the unconscious: certain structures we are not aware of, relevant for motivating oneself for an action. Separated from practical and discursive conciousness;

- practical cousciousness: structured knowledge of routinized actions. In contrast to structuralist thinkers, actors possess 'knowledgeability', giving them the opportunity to 'know' things. (So institutions cannot operate behind their backs as structuralists claim).

- discursive consiousness: in this stage, actors are able to conciously think about what they do and how they do it. As concious beings, actors can think about structures, and monitor what they reproduce: reflexive monitoring (H. Ernste, hoorcollege Giddens, Nijmegen, 18 september 2012).

References

• Campbell, J. (1991). Alfred Schütz. New York: Penguin

• Lippuner, R., Werlen, B. (2009) Structuration Theory. Elsevier Ltd.

• Consciousness. (2012). Find date october 23rd 2012, on Wikipedia, via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

Published by Fenki Evers & Anton de Hoogh

--AnneStrien 09:51, 24 September 2012 (CEST)

Enhanced by Marjolein Kouwenhoven, october 23rd 2012