Culture and consciousness

This chapter explains the meanings of consciousness, distinguishing its practical from its discursive sense, a distinction that can be mapped onto that, just noted, between mind as movement and as container. In his Notes on the synthesis of form, Alexander expresses the difference in terms of a rough-and-ready contrast between 'unselfconscious' and 'selfconscious' cultures. The distinction between 'innate' and 'artificial' culture is shown to rest on the presence or absence of a prior conception of the object and is related to alternative modes of transmission, by observational learning and formal tuition respectively. In a nutshell, prior intention is to intention-in-action as culture is to social life; disregarding the intentional content of action is tantamount to the reduction of persons to individuals, and of social relations to material relations. Lotka's terms, however, were also adopted by White, who defines human culture as 'an extrasomatic tradition'.