USC – Senior High School

Philo 01: Introduction to Philosophy of the Human Person

A. Y. 2023 - 2024
MODULE 5
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
I. What will you learn from this module?
After studying this module, you will be able to:

1. Realize that intersubjectivity requires accepting differences and not imposing on

others.
2. Explain that authentic dialogue means accepting others even if they are different from
themselves
3. Perform activities that demonstrate the talents of persons with disabilities and those
from the underprivileged sectors of society

II. Lesson Introduction

Humans have the natural inclination to relate, to establish attachments, and seek
close relationships with other people. Different thinkers have discussed the nature of
intersubjective relationships and have provided varied perspectives on how the self, the “I”,
relates to the other, the “Thou”.

III. Let’s Check What You Already Know

CLASSIFYING CONCEPTS
Classify the following concepts in their appropriate boxes.
subject being alongside being-for-itself object being with
means being-in-itself You End It
The Other Person as a Person
The Other Person as Non-Person

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 IV. Let’s Explore
A. What is INTERSUBJECTIVITY
1. Existentialism and phenomenology are the major philosophical disciplines that
stress discussing the concept of relationships. They correlate the concept of
relationship to self-awareness and transcendence. The individual is primarily aware
of himself or herself, and it is this egocentric perspective that defines how one
perceives and relates to reality. This awareness of individuality is called the self.
The affirmation of self is exemplified in the proper usage of the pronoun “I”.
Meanwhile as the “I” makes himself aware of his own individuality, he is also aware
that he is not alone in the world, and that there are other entities or individuals
that are outside of him and co-exist with him. These other individuals outside of
himself are collectively known as the other. When the “I” recognizes others that they
are also individuals or subjects in the world as himself, the other takes its own
identity as a subject which is exemplified in the pronoun “Thou” or “You”. The
encounter of the “I” and the “You” is properly known in phenomenology as
Intersubjectivity.
2. Intersubjectivity is the interchange of thoughts and feelings between two persons
or “subjects” as facilitated by intentionality. It is the shared awareness and
understanding among persons that is evident in social interactions, the ability of
humans to agree and to be involved in the existence of the other. Our daily
encounters manifest that the self (the “I”) interacts with the other (the “You”). In a
deeper analysis of the self and the other is the awareness of each individual as
being experienced by the other. In addition, it is because of intersubjectivity that
persons engage in relationships. In this regard, varied thinkers provided their ideas
on the dynamics of personal relationships and exemplified the image of
interpersonal relationships. Take note, that not all relationships are personal
relationships. Phenomenological existentialists engage in an analysis of what
relationships are. To name a few of them are Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel.
B. Gabriel Marcel’s Philosophy of Communion
3. There is this “dissatisfaction” - we go against oppressive objectification or ideologies
that suppress the true identity of human persons.
4. What is Marcel's meaning of transcendence? For Marcel, transcendence means
that we have to live our lives worthy enough to be called human persons.

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5. The need to move inwardly into the core of our being. Inwardly where we come face
to face with ourselves and realize that we are not just selves who have bodies who
have our own bodies.
6. Having a body is looking at oneself like any other thing around. To say “I am my
body” is to look at oneself as somebody whose existence is a mystery.
7. Subjectivity is Intersubjectivity (Esse est co-esse.) For Marcel, the thing in the world
is the existence or being in itself, the ground on which all beings, especially us and
everything in the universe, are anchored.
8. Authentic intersubjectivity does not only mean that we continue to exist with others
in this world but that we also feel our presence with each other, to be always there
for others, and be always willing to sacrifice so that others may live.
9. Intersubjectivity is a way of life lived in unconditional love for others. We are each
other’s keeper. We cannot do away with the obligation to help each other because
we are ethical beings by virtue of our intersubjective relationship with one another.

B.1 Broken World

8. The world is broken because there is no more human touch in almost everything
that we do now. We have been too technical about how we run the world.
9. Marcel: “We live today in a world at war with itself, and this state of world war is
being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in something that could properly
be described as world suicide. This is something one cannot be over-emphatic
about. Suicide, until our own times, was an individual possibility, it seemed to
apply only to the individual case. It seems now to apply to the case of the whole
human world. Of course, one may be tempted to say that this new possibility is only
part of the price we pay for the amazing progress of our times. The world today is,
in a sense, at once whole and single in a way which, even quite recently, it was not.
It is from this very unity and totality that it draws its sinister new power of
self-destruction.”
10. Not knowing who we are makes our world broken. Strange reduction” of things -
The more broken we become, the more confused we are about our true identity.
(Just as we dissect a frog into its atomic parts, we lose the frog.)

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 B.2 The Urgent Need for Transcendence
11. What is being ‘urgent’? The need to respond immediately. This exigence of
transcendence is not the exigence to go beyond all experience whatsoever, but to
substitute one mode of experience for another, or, more accurately still, to strive
towards an increasingly pure mode of experience.
12. One has to be extra careful because there are actually two types of transcendence
inasmuch as there are two types of dissatisfactions: “This exigence is existentially
experienced as a non-satisfaction, but all non-satisfaction does not entail an
aspiring towards transcendence, for there are non-satisfactions which crave the
possession of a given power, and which disappear, once this power is attained.
Another dissatisfaction occurs, or can occur, within possession; another call comes
from my innermost being, a call directed not outwards but inwards. (This may be a
call to create, and to create
means to create something higher than one’s self.)”
13. Marcel abhors the kind of transcendence that is rooted in the physical. This is
because when the physical desire is gone or met, one goes out looking for more.
Going after material things does not really satisfy the dissatisfied.
14. When transcending experiences or when evaluating certain experiences, the
movement should not be horizontal, but vertical.
15. What is this urgency for transcendence? This urgency for transcendence is simply
the longing, our longing, to be what we truly are; the longing to be true to our
identity as human persons. “Let us notice in the first place that the need for
transcendence presents itself above all, is deeply experienced above all, as a kind of
dissatisfaction.”

C.3 I Am My Body
16. “The very first moment of my experience is an exclamatory awareness of myself not
as curled up tight, but as ex-sisting, as standing out, as manifest to a world which
is also indubitably existent. It is my body which sets me down in a world of real
beings.”
17. The most primitive existential experience of any person therefore is that of the body
and not the thinking self. In saying that I have a body I distinguish myself and the
body that I have.

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18. The inevitable manner in which we construe the relationship between self and body
is to consider the body as an instrument, something which we use, and therefore
something which we have. Just as every tool we use is an extension of the power of
the body, so the body itself seems to be a utensil of the self, or of the soul. However,
this way of looking at things leads to insoluble problems.
19. It is not that I have a body but “I am my body.” “I cannot quite treat myself as a
term distinct from my body, a term which would be in a definable connection with
it. As I have said elsewhere, the moment I treat my body as an object of scientific
knowledge, I banish myself to infinity.”
20. We will banish ourselves into ‘infinity’ if we refuse to be who we are and what we are
capable of doing; if we refuse to accept the identity that Marcel untiringly shares
with us. In other words, we will all perish if we allow others and even ourselves to
thingify ourselves.
21. The self as an ‘embodied spirit’ means that our conscious life, our spiritual life, and
our bodily life are equally important to our enjoyment of being or existence. The
body needs the spirit because the latter is the faculty that tells us what is right
from wrong or what is best for us; it guides the impulses of the body. Likewise, the
spirit needs the body because “[t]he body is the mode of presence of the self to the
actual world.”

C.4 Intersubjectivity
22. To understand Gabriel Marcel’s idea of intersubjectivity, that is, how in the world
we are connected to one another, and its implications, one needs to explore and
understand his key concepts of being, sensation, presence, availability, and fidelity
first.
- What is being?
- What is sensation?
- What is presence?
- What is availability?
- What is fidelity?
23.BEING. Being is what makes everything possible in this world; Being is existence;
The giver of givens; God Himself
24.SENSATION. Our ability to feel our bodies and the objects outside us; “My body,
precisely as mine, is present to me primarily as something felt. I am a being of
feelings and, as such, my body has absolute relational priority to all I can feel

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 outside my body, i.e., to the external world of being.” The faculty that allows me to
experience. Sensation seen from this perspective is an activity of the body; “…to be
experiencing sensation is
quite simply to be living in union with things.”
25.PRESENCE. “…to be experiencing sensation is quite simply to be living in union
with things; “If we go beyond the givenness of our metaphysical existence, we
realize that not only are created beings not autonomous in their existence, but they
are not even autonomous in many circumstances of their existence.”; the
experience of presences is our primary experience of intersubjectivity; “When
somebody’s presence really does make itself felt, it can refresh my inner being; it
reveals me to myself, it makes me more” fully myself than I should be if I were not
exposed to its impact”.
26.AVAILABILITY. “Reciprocal openness between individuals…the clue to the
foundation of Marcel’s philosophy, a philosophy which, because it is founded on the
datum of the exigence for intersubjective communion, is willing to enter into the
defense and the love of the created and Absolute Thou’s”. To be really present
therefore with others is to be available to them. Availability involves our decision or
choice to really be available.
27.FIDELITY. To be always there for others, especially for those who need us the most;
Fidelity is simply being responsible for others. That is, we cannot stand idly by
doing nothing when we see a friend who badly needs us; Me making a response…
not just cultivating an ideal.
28.SO, WHAT IS IT? Intersubjectivity means that if we see a hungry person we do not
hesitate to come to his aid, to give him food if we have, and if in case we do not
have what he needs, we look for ways and means to feed him. “I establish myself as
a person in so far as I really believe in the existence of others and allow this belief to
influence my conduct.” We only become who we truly are when we are with others;
when we take care of the other.

C. Martin Buber’s I-Thou Vs I-It Relationships

29. Martin Buber (1878-1965) offers a distinction between the social and the
interhuman: the former refers to the life of a group bound together by common
experiences and reactions (communal existence) while the latter refers to the life
between and among persons, who are interchangeable and non-objectifiable (a life
of dialogue or the I-Thou).

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30.Human life is a mixture of both I-It relationship (monologue) and I-Thou
relationship (dialogue); their distinction lies in which of the two predominate any
relation.
31.The first obstacle to dialogue is the way of seeming (level of impression) and it can
be contrasted to the way of being, the duality of which is the essential problem of
the interhuman.
32.The way of being proceeds not from an image, but from what one really is; it is
spontaneous, without reserve, and natural.
33.The second obstacle to dialogue is speechifying (one’s talking past another) and it is
contrasted to the act of personal making present, i.e., persons make present the
other as the one that he is (recognition).
34.The third obstacle to dialogue is imposition (imposing one’s self on others, telling
them what to do, how he or she should act) as contrasted to unfolding, i.e., the
finding in the other the disposition toward what I myself recognize as true, good,
and beautiful.
35.Buber’s I-Thou relationship is dialogical; it is turning to the partner in all truth …
to confirm the other does not mean approval of the other, but recognition of the
other as other.
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QUESTIONS TO PONDER:
1. How does one engage in an authentic dialogue with others?
2. Do you agree that there is an urgent need for transcendence?
3. What are the elements of intersubjectivity? Relate each to your
personal experiences.
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F. SUMMARY
29. “In the context of the human being’s power to act, the sixth chapter aptly
elaborates on intersubjectivity. Any human being with different desires, wishes,
preferences, needs, values, beliefs, and so on would act differently than others. It is
thus inevitable that human-to-human relations would encounter some
crises—these perhaps produced a “broken world.” One way of mending such a
world, a world of impaired human relations, is through a philosophy of communion,
one that is developed by, again, Marcel.” Mandane, Ph.D.