Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

What is Mythopoetics?

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...

What do we marry?

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...