It has been widely credited to Aristotle as the originator of the idea that man by nature desires to know. That which man desires to know is not a mere accumulation of data but an insatiable desire towards knowing the ultimate cause of things . It is in doing so that man even comes to a deeper knowledge of the self. This is so because, while constantly inquiring into the dialectics of cause and effects, man engages in a deep contemplation and relation. Through contemplation, man comes to a realization that the possibility of an infinite regress in the chain of causation is not realizable which means that there is the prime cause, who himself is not the effect of any other cause. Man equally finds out that since all effects have the same prime cause, it logically follows that he exists for a relation with everything, first and ultimately with the prime cause and then with every other thing that proceeded from that same prime cause. This is the essence of self-awareness which is a major characteristic of being a person. Suffice it to say that a person through self-awareness, recognizes the ontological inclination towards relation, which enables for a better expression of the totality of a person.
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- Evarist Okpala (Autor), 2025, Self-awareness and the person. The contributions of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Buber, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1660507
