Witness, Judge, World

Consciousness enters the world and the stones remain stones and the sun the sun. Still existence becomes completely different when consciousness arises, Bakhtin argues in Speech Genres. This happens become the coming of consciousness is the coming of “the witness and the judge” (137).

“A stone is still stony and the sun still sunny, but the even of existence as a whole (unfinalized) becomes completely different because a new and major character in this even appears for the first time on the scene of earthly existence – the witness and the judge. And the sun, while remaining physically the same, has changed because it has begun to be cognized by the witness and the judge, It has stopped simply being and has started being in itself and for itself . . . as well as for the other, because it has been reflected in the consciousness of the other . . . . this has caused it to change radically, to be enriched and transformed” (137).

With human consciousness, “something absolutely new has appeared, a supra-existence has emerged. And there is no longer just a kernel of existence in this supra-existence; all existence exists in it and for it.”

Bakhtin argues that the problem is analogous to the issue of human self-awareness. When another appears, “something absolutely new appears,” the “supraperson, the supra-I . . the witness and the judge of the whole human being, of the whole I, and consequently someone who is no longer the person, no longer the I, but the other” (137). The other doesn’t change the material of existence, but it radically changes the sense of existence. This is the freedom of the witness and judge, expressed in words, as one person is witness and judge of another (138).

This is finally rooted in the fact that “everything that pertains to me enters my consciousness, beginning with my name, from the external world through the mouths of others . . . with their intonation, in their emotional and value-assigning tonality.” This we realize ourselves “through others” as we “receive words, forms, and tonalities for the formation of my initial idea of myself.” Our physical origin points to the pattern of the emergence of our self-awareness: “Just as the body is formed initially in the mother’s womb (body), a person’s consciousness awakens wrapped in another’s consciousness” (138).