Becoming Aware: A dialogical approach to consciousness

Abstract

The limits of the possibility of dialogue are the limits of awareness. - Martin Buber, Between Man and Man A world of consciousness mutually illuminating one another. - Mikhail Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky's Poetics Consciousness is not the sum total of reality, Jung to the contrary; nor is Freud's goal of making the unconscious conscious an adequate aim for either therapy or personal or social fulfillment. The world in which we live is more than consciousness, and our existence itself is more than consciousness. An alteration of consciousness, even in the form of an intercourse between the archetypal depths and the personal unconscious and conscious, can never be the sum and substance of concrete existence. - Maurice Friedman, Touchstones of Reality So far as I know, no one, including Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin has ever attempted to write an essay on consciousness from a dialogical point of view. I do not feel myself equipped to do the fresh anthropological investigation that the subject calls for. What I shall try to do here instead is, first, to set down some reflections on our ordinary approach to consciousness, including even that heightened awareness that people think of as mystical consciousness. Second, I shall examine several aspects of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and philosophical anthropology to see if it is possible to distill from them implications for consciousness that he himself did not make fully explicit. Third, I shall conclude with some phenomenological reflections of my own. This too, to the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.