Human Consciousness, Desire, Reason, and Work: Key Concepts

Consciousness

Consciousness is one of the specific traits of being human. It allows us to realize something and makes it possible to maintain a special relationship with the outside world and with ourselves. Consciousness has a physiological basis in the brain and develops along the evolutionary course of life. Consciousness is a mental activity that allows for reflection. To have consciousness implies returning to oneself. It supposes realizing, that is, giving yourself a reason to explain something, or consider that explanation.

Types of Consciousness

• Immediate consciousness: It allows us to know and realize our own presence. It appears without any intermediary.
• Mediate consciousness: It requires intermediaries, among others, the outer reality and activity of other human beings. Through mediated consciousness, we can think and judge the outside world.

Desire

Desire is a movement of our psychic activity that drives us to reach an object considered a source of satisfaction.

Traits of Desire

1. It is a lack: The desire to want something that is not had.
2. It lives in the world of excess: Desire is beyond need, it goes to a world of possibilities, a world of excess.
3. It is based on conflict and causes unrest: A desire dies when it reaches its objective. When a wish is fulfilled, new desires arise.

Philosophical Positions on Desire

1. Desire is an essential reality.
   • Spinoza: Recognizes the value of desire, stating that it is the impetus to maintain being itself. To desire is a necessity of every real being, who always wants to be there.
   • Hegel: Thinks that desire is a fundamental component of the individual and society. All desire is fulfilled by annihilating its object.
   • Deleuze: Expanded on Freud's thesis. He thinks that desire, apart from causing ghosts and hallucinations, is born of the forbidden and produces reality: humans are desiring machines.
2. The need to dominate desire as a negative element.
   • Stoicism: It is necessary to subject desire to reason, to follow the course of nature. True wisdom is to dominate desire.
   • Epicureanism: The most important thing is to promote pleasure to achieve serenity. It is admitted that desire comes from the need to eliminate artificial desires. This means eliminating unnatural desires.

Practical Reason

To know and to act are inextricably united. Kant distinguishes between several uses of reason: theoretical reason, practical reason, and aesthetic reason. These distinctions were already present in Aristotle, who differentiated between the technical production of objects and moral and political action: instrumental reason, morality and politics, and aesthetic reason. The human being is a symbolic animal. Their thought and action are the result of their ability to represent realities in the absence of them and recreate them.

Work in Industrial Society

Consequences of Industrialization

1. A new field of work emerges, the factory, with the invention of the steam engine.
2. Time distribution is organized in a different way.
3. Production is located in cities, causing urbanism.
4. A new type of property appears, based on capital, other than traditional land ownership. With it emerges the bourgeois capitalist.
5. The harsh working and living conditions in urban areas result in the birth of the proletariat.
6. Women begin to be linked to the production process, and thus begins the long march to their liberation.
7. The worker loses their being in the strength of their labor. When labor is considered a commodity, it loses its value as an active subject.

Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926)

Antoni Gaudí was a Spanish architect, a leader of Catalan Modernism. He possessed an innate sense of geometry and volume. Gaudí's work has achieved wide international diffusion over time. Some of his most notable works include La Pedrera (Casa Milà), Casa Batlló, the benches of Park Güell, the Sagrada Família, and El Capricho in Comillas. His works are marked by his passions in life: architecture, nature, religion, and love for Catalonia.

Julio Romero de Torres (1874-1930)

Julio Romero de Torres was born on November 9, 1874, and died on May 10, 1930. His father was Rafael Romero Barros. He studied at the School of Fine Arts. In 1890, he created his first known work, Huerta de Morales. The bulk of his work is in Córdoba at the Julio Romero de Torres Museum, where you can admire the wide range of paintings that were donated by his family, by private collectors, or purchased by the city. Among the most outstanding works of this master are Amor Místico y Amor Profano, El Poema de Córdoba, Marta y María, La Saeta, Cante Hondo, La Consagración de la Copla, Carmen, and of course, La Chiquita Piconera or El Retablo del Amor.