Such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established that “We” are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation of our personality, a thing among things. Our “Self” is the deeper one by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is discernible. The reality of this, our deeper “self” which cannot be conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it the source of all other possible truths, including the 115 concept of experience. For once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of as constituting this world otherwise than as this world which we see, which we touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of our experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this experience without referring it to us who have it not as an object of possession but as an activity which we exercise. So that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our “self.” We may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity.
Against this reality of the profound “us” which is the genuine spiritual reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. They are difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and infinite, and really universal.[4] 116 Alone, because in it all opposites must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false, life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,—all things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy. It would be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept from which they derive. It is the philosopher’s task, it is the strict duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the positions which it has captured in its onward march. For to yield ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be indispensable, that is impossible.
Those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,—the reality which unites us all in one 117 sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they constitute a real school.
What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is this question truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past been declared to be? For, it has been argued, in order to give an answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality to which the answer is referred. We must think it and therefore distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think. Or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must, somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the opposite of the subject. Or again: the subject cannot think itself, because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is thought. But all these objections together with many others of the same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort to this kind of argument. These opponents, strangely enough, miss the most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be familiar. They fail to see that when the idealist says “subject,” 118 he cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship subject-object, which, because of this very abstractness, is devoid of all consistency. The ego is called “subject,” because it contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical with it. As a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself, and thus originatively realises itself. In order to be I, I must know myself, I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus I am I, a personality, and “subject,” the centre of my world or of my thought. For if I should not objectify myself to myself, if in the endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, I were to retreat into the first term,—a purely abstract one,—of this relationship by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which I am to realise myself. So then by this inner objectification the subject does not at all depart from itself. It rather enters into its own subjectivity, and constitutes it. Surely man may, Narcissus-like, make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed semblance already determined and crystallised. But in so doing, he materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought from his 119 own intimate being. This self-conversion from person into thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we fail to do so.
Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its absolute subjectivity, is the Spirit’s own life. For the spirit lives by constituting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by acquiring consciousness of itself. And while philosophising then, we cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our Self and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense with this inquiry into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry into the attributes of culture.
The examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us, without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry itself. For what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word “spirit,” the ego, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,—this is also the ultimate characteristic which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself, that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we examine all the other differences that have been assigned or could be found by which the spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we neglect the most profound characteristic 120 of spiritual reality, viz., that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. Every form of reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as conditioning this very consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive then its spiritual being in a manner analogous to that by which we conceive material or bodily being,—externally visible, but internally unknown. And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural, similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the spirit sets in opposition to itself.
But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can never trespass. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants to,—angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false, or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not 121 to be man,—the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did not become.
Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He becomes man. By man I do not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds, who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself such, becomes through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says “I,”—the “I” which never would have been uttered, had he not been aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and through his own determination.
This freedom which is man’s prerogative offers merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or self-making. For in fact “becoming” is ordinarily understood in a way which does not admit of being considered as man’s prerogative. Does not every living being become? The plant vegetates only because it too has an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other being could from the outside have conferred 122 upon it. And yet the plant is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to the spirit.
I might without further thought say that this conception of becoming, referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant does not become for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. But I shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this reality. When so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can be taken in two ways, which for brevity’s sake we shall call the autonomous and the heteronomous. That is, the being which becomes may have the law of its becoming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming covers such cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is poured. But this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is, as the result of that act which is being performed by man. An heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation 123 is a development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun, the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still when it was in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak, within a given plant. Whether we call it nature or name it God, this law transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. But the becoming of man is autonomous. If he becomes intelligent, that is, if he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of goodness.