Primacy of the Social Consciousness

This form of the primacy of consciousness is primarily a secularisation of the primacy of the supernatural consciousness, developed most prominently by Immanuel Kant, and made explicit by the Hegelian development from Kant. On Kant’s view, the human mind–the innate cognitive structures common to all men, their innate forms of perception and conception–is what creates existence (the so-called “phenomenal” world).

Implicit in this is the social form of the primacy of consciousness, which states that no one individual is capable of warping or changing the laws of reality, but as a collective–mankind as a whole, a particular society, a nation, a state, a race, a sex, an economic class–is able to dictate the laws of the universe. This is the source of polylogism.

In popular terms: one Frenchman alone can’t bend reality to his desires, but fifty million of them are irresistible. Epistemologically, this variant leads to collective surveys–a kind of group introspection–as the means to truth; knowledge is said to rest on a consensus among thinkers, a consensus that results not from each individual’s perception of external reality, but from subjective mental structures or contents that happen to be shared by the group’s members.

Today, the social variant is at the height of its popularity. We hear on all sides that there are no objective facts, but only “human” truth, truth “for man”—and lately that even this is unattainable, since there is only national, racial, sexual, or homosexual truth. In this view, the group acquires the omnipotence once ascribed to God. Thus, to cite a political example, when the government enacts some policy (such as runaway spending) that must in logic have disastrous consequences (such as national bankruptcy), the policy’s defenders typically deal with the problem by fudging all figures, then asking for “optimism” and faith. “If people believe in the policy,” we hear, “if they want the system to work, then it will.” The implicit premise is: “A group can override facts; men’s mental contents can coerce reality.”¹