Investigations Into The Origin Of Language And Consciousness (boston Studies In The Philosophy And History Of Science)
by Trân Duc Thao /
1984 / English / PDF
6.4 MB Download
Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist
philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and
consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties
of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact
determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the
line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the
conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he
cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect'
from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every
labor process, we get a result that already existed in the
imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I,
p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a
second question: "But is this the most elementary form of
consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of
consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre
supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental
awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness
emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if
the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that
is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the
producer - then the conditions for the origins of human
Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist
philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and
consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties
of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact
determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the
line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the
conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he
cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect'
from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the
best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in
the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every
labor process, we get a result that already existed in the
imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I,
p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a
second question: "But is this the most elementary form of
consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of
consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre
supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental
awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness
emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if
the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that
is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the
producer - then the conditions for the origins of human
