Class Societies by Social Structure
Each type of consciousness, until a certain point, of course, corresponded to society and satisfied its needs.
Therefore, it is not appropriate to interpret each previous stage as primitive or elementary. “Primitive,” “archaic,” “barbaric,” “mythological” consciousness is by no means primitive and is called so due to its antiquity and originality. It is important to emphasize that all three types of consciousness do not exist in a “pure” form. Each of them is a scientific abstraction. In each, there are elements, fragments of other types of consciousness.
The reason that consciousness at any given moment represents a kind of “layered cake,” containing fragments of all historical types of consciousness, lies in the dialectical nature of its development. In the course of the evolution of consciousness, each previous type already contains, in a hidden form, elements of the subsequent types, and each subsequent type does not completely abolish the previous one. The disappearance of the preceding type occurs while preserving everything valuable and purposeful that it contained.
In any era, the consciousness of an individual or a group, society as a whole is mosaic, as several levels coexist in it in parallel, the most important of which are mythological, traditional, and rational. However, in each historical epoch, the mosaic will be significantly different, as the combination of these levels varies. The dominant level will determine the historical type of consciousness. The mosaic nature of consciousness, however, does not violate its integrity and unity, as in solving any task, consciousness acts as a holistic functional system, all levels of which work in a coordinated and harmonious manner. It should be noted that consciousness does not form at the moment of a child's birth. It is shaped during the individual's development and is largely dependent on the person's social experience, education, living conditions, etc.
The distinction of three types of consciousness does not exhaust the actual diversity of levels of psychological development of individuals and society. It is quite possible that there are more types, and within the proposed types, various subtypes of consciousness may exist. What is most important is that any typology can be useful for solving specific scientific tasks.
Class societies are heterogeneous in their social structure. As a result, the dominant class and the masses, possessing essentially one type of consciousness, have significant features within its framework, generated, in particular, by different levels of education. For example, in medieval society, the consciousness of the social elite, especially its educated part, was less pagan, more rational, and less traditional than the consciousness of the masses. To almost the same extent, the consciousness of urban dwellers differs from that of peasants, as they retained fewer traits of the mythological type than in the consciousness of the peasantry.
When discussing individual consciousness, one must also take into account the individual differences among people belonging to the same group or class. These differences in intelligence and education (the latter is of colossal importance), in character and living conditions had a significant impact on the level of individual consciousness. Plato and an ordinary Greek, Cicero and a Roman craftsman, Kant and the bourgeois of his era differed from each other so strikingly, even though they lived at the same time. Therefore, when speaking of a “traditional,” “archaic,” or modern person, one refers to the typical, i.e., the most statistically common, individual of a certain epoch.
How does the transition from one historical type of consciousness to another occur? It undoubtedly happens dialectically, i.e., through the slow accumulation of quantitative changes that then lead to the emergence of a new quality, a new type of consciousness. Such abrupt transitions from one type of consciousness to another, regardless of their duration, are logically considered psychological revolutions. These revolutions occurred alongside political, cultural, and scientific-technical revolutions and were conditioned by them. In this sense, they reflected changes in social practice. Moreover, psychological revolutions, radically altering the structure and nature of human consciousness, simultaneously changed the behavior of individuals and entire groups in society.
The Word in the Traditional Type of Consciousness of the Kyrgyz