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The "I-Thou"

 

When I look at another human being, I make an object of him/her, and I only know him/her as the object that I make, a representation on which I project my psychological self. However, there is a form of cognition that occurs outside the purely mental, psychological, and transcendental dimensions: there is an identity-based recognition of the Atman, of "I am." Regardless of the social person that I can share with that person (the fact of being parents, or citizens, or any other social character), there is a connection in the here and now that leads me to understand that there is a continuity of my Atman in his/her Atman. I understand that just as I am not one of the social persons that I act, that other individual is not one of the social objectifications that act, but that "I am" applies to both my psychophysiological identity and his/her. "I am" is then also "Thou are", and I understand that I-Thou is a single pronoun and that it is different from we because I-Thou is subjective while "we" is an objectification of "I-Thou". "I-Thou" is a single focus of consciousness in presence, "we" is an aggregate that comes from a mental construction. In the "I-Thou", the Atman is recognized as Atman and is the ontological term of the subject-object polarization.

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