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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2020

Defining Human Consciousness through the Concept of “Oneself as Another”: From the History of Christian Thought to the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind

Résumé

The subject of this paper is motivated by recent major debates in different epistemological domains – such as Christian philosophy, philosophy of mind, social anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, psychology and neurosciences – which all are convergent on the problem of defining specific nature of human consciousness. Starting from 1970s, the application of new technologies and research paradigms in sciences resulted in unexpected empirical findings and brought revolutionary changes to the existing picture of the world. In particular, the development of cognitive sciences and robotics inspired the scholars, philosophers and thinkers of various specializations to profoundly reconsider centuries-old cultural stereotypes and rationalistic convictions. One of the mostly affected and criticized representations was the uniqueness of human mode of experiencing the existence, compared to those of humans with severe mental disorders, non-human animals and artificially created humanoid robots. Coupled with the great XXth century social, political and economic upheavals (world wars, local conflicts and revolutions, genocides and humanitarian crises of unprecedented scope), the above listed shifts in scientific and philosophical views on what means to be a human being put focus on the categories of “identity” and “alterity”: One will readily grant that there is no place for a straightforward concept of otherness in Aristotle. Will Christian agapē be sufficient to do justice to it? Or will we have to wait until the idea of struggle spills over from the field of politics to the field of interpersonal relations, transforming, as in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the contemporary conflict of the splitting of consciousness into two self-consciousnesses? Or is it only in our own day that a thinker like Lévinas dares to reverse the statement “no other-than-self without a self,” substituting for it the inverse statement “no self without another who summons it to responsibility”? (P.Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 1992, p. 187) In a curious way, the concept of “oneself as another”, coined by Paul Ricoeur, opens an extremely rich perspective in multidisciplinary questioning about specifically human way of being in the world, and in particular, about the distinctive features of specifically human forms of consciousness. In our paper, we argue that the Christianity as an anthropological paradigm had prepared a philosophical ground for elaborating a vision of the human nature which contributes today to defining an ultimate criterion for distinguishing the core element of specifically human mind traditionally assimilated with “spirituality”. Paradoxically, this criterion is neither the human ability of abstraction, categorical thinking, extrapolation, mental modeling and intentional transformation of the reality, nor even self-awareness or interpersonal empathy. According to recent scientific discoveries, none of this can be considered as a reliable differential criterion. In a certain sense, on the contrary, the only feature of specifically human mind seems to be our ability to integrate the subjective realities of others into our own worldview. The paper is devoted to the discussion of the hypothesis why the phenomenon of “internal alter ego” is absent in young children, in animals, in patients with schizophrenia and could be hardly implemented within the artificial intelligence project.
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hal-03092821, version 1 (03-01-2021)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03092821 , version 1

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Evelina Deyneka. Defining Human Consciousness through the Concept of “Oneself as Another”: From the History of Christian Thought to the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. The Hybrid Onsite&Online International Conference “Christian Philosophy: Its Past, Present and Future”, Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow, Institute of Philosophy, Sep 2020, Krakow, Poland. ⟨hal-03092821⟩
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