One of the categories characterizing the life of society is the category of public consciousness. At the same time, there is no unity among scientists about this category. The problem is connected with different understandings of the initial concept - consciousness.
The majority of representatives of classical philosophy shared the idea of consciousness as an identical concept of "knowledge". All we know is consciousness, and all we realize is knowledge.
At the same time, modern psychology has faced the fact that not everything that relates to knowledge is realized. Knowledge is not only what I know, but what I don't think about at the moment and therefore don't realize, but also what I can easily make available to my consciousness, for example, to remember my knowledge of Pythagoras' theorem, facts of my biography, etc.
Several philosophers as the main sign of consciousness distinguish not knowledge, but orientation to a certain object. The essence of this is the following: a person may not know anything about any object, but if he singles it out, directs his interest to it, this object becomes an object of consciousness.
The understanding of consciousness as self-consciousness and self-report is most widely spread in philosophy and psychology. It is connected with the theory of the English philosopher J. Locke about two sources of knowledge: feelings connected with the outside world and reflection as observation of the mind over one's activity. The latter, according to Locke, is consciousness. In such an understanding, consciousness acts as a specific reality, a special inner world, which the subject learns. The way of cognition is self-perception, which can be manifested in the form of self-observation.
Another point of view on the essence of consciousness was understanding it as a set of ideas - individual or collective. It is in this sense that the term "consciousness" was used by H. Hegel and K. Marx to refer to public consciousness, class consciousness. The concept of public consciousness is widely used in the philosophy of Marxism.
The development of philosophical knowledge has helped to expand the understanding of public consciousness as a holistic and complex spiritual phenomenon. In the process of the spiritual life of the society, various knowledge is formed, as well as the attitude to nature, objective reality, to everything that happens in society. Also, moods, habits, mores, traditions of peoples, as well as the peculiarities of the mental warehouse of different social groups take root in society. Thus, it is customary to talk about the business acumen of Americans or the accuracy and pedantry of Germans. Thus far not all representatives of the given group necessarily differ the named qualities. Nevertheless, for all social communities, the characteristic of certain qualities was fixed.
The formation of public consciousness is a complex process in which two factors are strongly influenced.
On the one hand, in the public consciousness, the spiritual life of the society has reflected the interests and activities of people aimed at meeting their needs for new ideas, scientific knowledge, moral improvement of the members of society, the satisfaction of the feeling of beauty, sublime. On the other hand, ideas, theories, views, moral norms, and scientific knowledge must be widely disseminated and influence the whole society. This function is performed by schools, universities, mass media, political parties, and social movements and organizations.
It should be noted that although public ideas and other elements of public consciousness are non-material, they function in society, they influence the consciousness of individuals, groups, associations with the help of various symbolic systems.
Scientists recognize the relative nature of public consciousness. The fact is that many ideas, views of people, their moral beliefs have significant stability, vitality and long enough are preserved in the minds of people, their actions. They can be preserved even when there are no more objective conditions, those social relations based on which they arose. It happens because the change in people's views and beliefs does not occur as soon as, for example, economic existence or political relations change. People's consciousness, their ideas, views lag behind the social being and may not correspond to it for a certain period. In the case of such a lag, we are talking about the so-called "remnants" of the past in the minds of people, or about the preservation of traditions. So, as you know, quite a long time after the abolition of serfdom, part of the peasantry hardly got used to the new economic and social realities. Remember at least the hero of Chekhov's play "The Cherry Orchard" by Firs, who simply calls this event a misfortune or misfortune. Ideas and views of people can be ahead of real conditions, then they say that such ideas express social dreams, forecasts, and predictions. Such forecasts of socialist utopians are known to you from the history course.