The never-ending journey: consciousness, awareness, and humanism

Every human being is born immersed in a sea of ​​perceptions. Consciousness is the first shore we touch: a fragile landing place that allows us to say "I" before the world. But consciousness is not a fixed point: it is a movement, a flow that renews itself every moment. It is the ability to recognize that we are alive and that life, despite its precariousness, flows through us like an unceasing river. Consciousness is therefore the first act of freedom: the recognition that we exist and that we can choose how to inhabit this existence.

Awareness as a path

If consciousness is awakening, awareness is the journey. It is the slow process of refining one's gaze, of learning to distinguish between what is essential and what is superfluous. Awareness is never immediate: it requires listening, memory, openness. Being aware means accepting fragility as an integral part of life. It means understanding that every gesture, every word, every relationship carries with it the weight and grace of responsibility. Awareness is the ability to transform pain into knowledge, loss into metamorphosis, finiteness into dignity.

Humanism as a horizon

Humanism is not an abstract concept, but a concrete invitation: to place human beings at the center, not as masters of the world, but as guardians of their fragility and beauty. Humanism is the choice to believe that every life has value, that every voice deserves to be heard, that every wound can become a seed of rebirth. In an age dominated by technology and speed, humanism is resistance: it is the act of slowing down, of looking others in the eye, of recognizing that dignity is not a privilege but a universal right.

The never-ending journey

Consciousness awakens us, awareness guides us, humanism orients us. But the journey is never-ending. Every day we are called to begin again, to renew our pact with ourselves and with others. There is no definitive end point: there is only continuous metamorphosis, the ability to transform every failure into an opportunity for growth. The never-ending journey is therefore an act of faith: faith in the possibility of rebirth, of rebuilding, of creating meaning even in the midst of crisis. It is a path that promises no certainties, but offers the dignity of an ever-open horizon.

Epilogue: The Blossoming of Consciousness

In the end, what remains is not the victory over pain, but its transfiguration. Consciousness becomes awareness, awareness becomes humanism, and humanism becomes flourishing.

Every human being carries within them the possibility of this endless journey. It's not about reaching a destination, but about learning to walk with dignity, with fragility, with love.

✨ Final teaching : Consciousness is awakening, awareness is the path, humanism is the horizon. Together, they form the endless journey that makes us truly human.

IN OTHER WORDS

Fundamental works on consciousness and awareness

• Daniel C. Dennett – Consciousness. What It Is : a philosophical and scientific text that explores the nature of consciousness and its paradoxes. Is consciousness really what distinguishes us from other living beings? Is it reducible to chemical and mechanical processes? If so, what role do pain and love, dreams and joy play in these processes? These are some of the great questions that have puzzled philosophers and scientists since Descartes. But in this volume, now considered a classic, Dennett has argued that theories of consciousness are all wrong, even if their intuitive simplicity leads us to believe them true. "I will explain the various phenomena that make up what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical effects of the brain's activities. I will propose analogies, thought experiments, and other devices to break down old habits of thought and help organize the facts into a single, coherent vision that is strikingly different from the traditional view of consciousness."

• Anil Seth – How the Brain Creates Our Consciousness : Neuroscience and philosophy intertwine to explain how the mind constructs reality. What does it mean to be a self, that is, to have a conscious experience of the world around us and our inner world? Historically, humanity has considered the nature of consciousness a primarily philosophical object of inquiry. Today, however, scientific research is developing extremely fascinating and compelling theories and biological explanations of consciousness and the self. Anil Seth, a renowned neuroscientist and author, helps us understand how the brain creates our conscious experience.

• Federico Faggin – Irreducible. Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Our Nature : A visionary reflection on consciousness as an irreducible dimension of the human being. Federico Faggin, the father of the microprocessor and beyond, once again upends our view of computers, life, and ourselves. After years of study and advanced research, he has concluded that there is something irreducible in the human being, something for which no machine can ever completely replace us. "Irreducible" is a captivating essay, combining scientific rigor, technological vision, and spiritual inspiration, suggesting an essential and unprecedented physics of the inner world.

• Italo Svevo – Zeno's Conscience : a novel that, while literary, is a philosophical journey into self-awareness and the ambiguity of life. The story begins with Dr. S., psychoanalyst of Zeno Cosini, a fifty-year-old man from Trieste who decides to free himself from his smoking habit and his many complexities by entrusting himself to the doctor's care. The patient, by stopping treatment after realizing that there is no cure, arouses S.'s vengeance, and he publishes all of Zeno's confidences and memories in a book. This is how we delve into Cosini's ineptitude and failures. He is a man who never feels at ease, and when he acts to achieve a goal, he always achieves the opposite result; throughout the novel, in fact, the enormous contradiction between his concretely analyzed intentions and his actual behavior becomes evident. His memory of his marriage is illustrative: Zeno falls in love with the beautiful Ada Malfenti, but when he is rejected, he eventually marries Augusta, her sister, for whom he has no feelings. As time passes, however, reluctantly accepting his situation, he realizes that Augusta would be his only possible life partner, a fact that doesn't, however, prevent him from pursuing another woman. Closely tied to his incompetence is Zeno's relationship with smoking: realizing he can't quit, he constantly lies to himself, taking pleasure in the thought that each cigarette could be his last.

Humanistic and philosophical texts

• Michel Foucault – Words and Things : explores how man was placed at the center of knowledge, redefining humanism. First published in France in 1966, Words and Things represents a decisive watershed moment in twentieth-century culture and philosophy, one of the works that has most influenced our understanding of humanity and society. Tracing a path from the Renaissance to the disarticulation of knowledge brought about by the human sciences in the twentieth century, Michel Foucault questions the fundamental codes that define our conception of reality: what criteria govern our interpretative schemes, our values, and our actions? What is possible or impossible to think in a given historical period? How do forms of knowledge transform as we move from one era to the next? Through investigations of multiple disciplines—art, natural history, grammar, economics, biology, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and psychoanalysis—Foucault explores the mechanisms that, over time, determine the structure and boundaries of different societies' ways of thinking. And it highlights the practical and philosophical implications connected to the inevitable transitoriness of our systems of framing the world: "By attempting to bring to light this profound gap in Western culture, we do nothing but restore to our silent and deceptively immobile soil its fractures, its instability, its imperfections."

• Erich Fromm – To Have or to Be?: A humanistic manifesto that contrasts possession with the fullness of being. The prevalence of the having mode of existence has determined the plight of contemporary man: reduced to a cog in the bureaucratic machine; manipulated in his tastes, opinions, and feelings by governments, industry, and the mass media; forced to live in a degraded environment. Against this dominant model, Fromm outlines the characteristics of an existence centered on the being mode, as a truly productive and creative activity, capable of offering the individual and society the possibility of realizing a new and deeper humanism.

• Martha Nussbaum – The Fragility of Good : Reflections on Human Vulnerability and the Ethical Value of Awareness. This volume transcends the confines of antiquity to forcefully engage with today's debate on ethical and political action. The Greeks were aware that values ​​and ideals must come to terms with "fortune," that is, with that which is not independent of us. It is this interplay between virtuous ambition and vulnerability to fate that Nussbaum examines, rereading the tragic and philosophical tradition. Following Aristotle, the author suggests that what risks contaminating the purity of virtue and reason—unconscious impulses, uncontrollable passions—is also what constitutes the specificity of the human sphere: the important thing is to limit the risks and curb the power of fortune.

• Edgar Morin – The Well-Made Head : a call for a complex humanism, capable of integrating knowledge and life. Morin invites teachers and students to reflect on the current state of knowledge and the challenges that characterize our era: what is at stake are the new problems posed to human coexistence by an irreversible global interdependence between economies, politics, religions, and the ills of all human societies. To address these challenges, a reform of education is essential. But to achieve it, a reform of the organization of knowledge is necessary. It is from this perspective that Morin places at the foundation of school reform the type of thinking whose development has made him famous throughout the world: complex thinking.

Powerful texts to read and make your own. ✨ Why are they "powerful"?

These texts are powerful because they do not limit themselves to describing consciousness , but question it as an existential, ethical, and political experience . Some, like Dennett and Seth , seek to define it scientifically; others, like Svevo or Fromm , narrate or interpret it as a human condition. All converge on one point: consciousness and awareness are not just mental phenomena, but gateways to humanism , dignity, and rebirth .

Happy learning!

CULTURAL PROMOTION