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A Modern Understanding of...
distinguished or not, consciousness has been understood throughout as an object, though otherwise qualitatively different. The question of linking consciousness to complications of body disappears altogether as soon as it is realized that it is subjectivity, i.e. freedom either from all that is object or in itself. As object, consciousness can at the most be understood as an adjectival fringe of a highly complicated set of matter, called body; but as soon as these fringes are found to have specific behaviours of their own, irrespective of body, they, howsoever manipulable cybernetically, appear to have attained a dignity of their own which is none other than their realiza: tion of freedom, to whatever extent, from what they are said to have originated from. Dialectical Materialists themselves have admitted this freedom. Indeed, their whole objective is to curb this freedom, to keep it confined to the interest of the matter it has originated from, to utilize it only for the well-being of matter (the material side of man), not to destroy it and degenerate into a lower level of evolution. From the point of view of genesis the concept of evolution may even connect these behaviours, through lower stages of evolution, with even microcosmic matter, but the old problem of emergent vs mechanical evolution remains unsolved. The inevitable logic of the theory of emergent evolution is that what emerges in a distinc., and so far free, form had been at the lower stage undistinguishedly fused, being distinguished out only at the higher stage. Emergence of X cannot be understood except as X realizing itself in freedom. Unless this is admitted there is no getting away from hiatus after hiatus, and the unity of matter, which these Dialectical Materialists so much bank upon, disappears.
The only claim of the Dialectical Materialists that is reasonable to a large extent is that the movements of the newly emergent consciousness, which, if left to themselves, would build novel idealistic superstructure very likely to run counter to the interest of the genuine material base, should be constantly braked and put into the service of that base. This re
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