Our thinking about our Human Nature has an uninterrupted continuity of more than 50,000 years in the memory of the Australian tribes. The very fact of this continuity of memory shows us the depth and complexity of the problem of Human consciousness.
It is interesting to note that for classical Greek philosophers the concept of consciousness, as we understand it today in psychological and philosophical circles, does not exist. Instead, we find in the Platonic and Aristotelic discussions that of Psyche, an entity which in its highest form is immortal, expresses intelligence and is driven by self-knowledge. It is necessary to wait until Hellenism to find, already in a more Eastern sphere, the first reflections on consciousness, although the terminology is not yet equivalent to what we will find in the world of European philosophy in the modern world. It is during the Hellenism, in the Roman Egypt, during the second and third centuries of our current era, that we find the works of Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, whose intellectual genealogy has been traced by some schollars to the Indian tradition of Vedanta. For Plotinus, we need to talk about different degrees of the human self. The first degree is the physical self or self of affections. The second one is the dianoetic self, or discursive self, the subject of reasoning and practical action. Finally, humans have a noetic self, which is the subject of contemplation. In the term contemplation is implied self-awareness, actually, the division -which follows the tripartite division of the soul made by Plato (and it is present in the Indoeuropean traditions) -implies a fuzzy map of consciousness. Plotinus -without using the same term (consciousness) -refers to the same activity of self-inquiry, but entering a different terrain to the one that we observe in Plato and Aristotle, closer to stoicism in its tone of intimacy, but not limited to the ethical dimension of the individual self-inquiry.
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