Vygotsky and Consciousness as Con-scientia,as Witnessable Knowing Along with Others

Abstract

All our higher mental functions are mediated processes, says Vygotsky, and signs are the basic means used to master and direct them. But how can this be if our words and other signs work only in a purely representational, ‘picturing’ fashion? For they still need interpreting as to their meaning. The ‘inner observation’ problem remains unsolved. Our significant expressions must also work on us in another way: by the living expressions of others producing spontaneous bodily reactions from us. The approach taken, then, in this article is that consciousness is a socially responsive elaboration of our animal sensitivities to, and awareness of, events occurring in our relations to the others and othernesses in our surroundings. Thus, far from it being a special, private, inner theater or workshop of the mind, its emergence depends completely on the intertwining or intermingling of our ‘inner lives’ with the ‘inner’ lives of those around us. In this view, our consciousness then becomes no more strange to us than the fact of our ‘livingness’—a fact that is at once both ordinary in the sense of being very familiar to us in our daily practical lives, as well as being quite extraordinary to us in our intellectual lives. This article is thus just as much an exploration of the move from mechanical modes of thought to those appropriate to living processes as it is about consciousness.