The word conscience comes from the Latin conscientĭa, which means “with knowledge”. It is about the psychic act that allows a person to perceive himself in the world. Consciousness is the reflective knowledge of things.
The psychology says that awareness is the cognitive state through which a subject can interact with external stimuli that form the reality and from that interaction, interpret them.
The social consciousness, meanwhile, can be defined as the knowledge that a person has on the state of the other members of their community. The individual with a social conscience is, precisely, aware of how the environment can favor or harm the development of people.
According to DigoPaul, social conscience assumes that man understands the needs of others and intends to cooperate through different social mechanisms. The social action to help can be developed through financial donations, contributions of food or clothing, volunteer activities and other assistance.
In this sense, it is important to emphasize that within the field of Psychology, in addition to that state of social awareness, there are three more. Thus, for example, there is the individual conscience that comes to be defined as the conscience that a person has of himself and of how the environment can harm or affect him.
In the same way, there is also the emotional conscience, which is one that, based on the emotions as well as the environment and the relationship with it, establishes what is good and what is bad that one can do and that can affect one’s life. community. We could say, therefore, that it is a moral conscience to a certain extent.
And finally we would find the so-called temporal consciousness, which is one that is based on the establishment of how the environment can affect both the future of oneself and that of the entire aforementioned community.
At present we can say that there are several issues on which there is more and more social awareness. In this case, we would have to highlight those issues that refer to what the environment is.
Thus, for example, there is more and more social awareness about the importance of protecting our environment, which translates into actions to reduce what is pollution, to lower what is the consumption of electricity and to bet on renewable energy sources. In this sense, the use of home automation in buildings and homes should be highlighted to achieve the aforementioned energy savings.
For Marxism, social consciousness or class consciousness is the ability of a subject to recognize himself as a member of a social class that maintains antagonistic relationships with the rest of the classes. This concept is based on the notion of class struggle and on the conception of a stratified society.
Marxists claim that social conscience manifests itself through political ideology, religion, art, philosophy, science, and even the legal structure of a society. According to this current, the subject who cannot understand this is alienated.
