Chapter 8
The Person as Bearer of Life
What actually prompted us to review the Eleatic problem in prior lectures? The refutation of the common prejudice that it is the world of appearances itself, including its medium of time and space, that we can directly grasp.
If it is true that only relational points are graspable, then the question arises even more urgently: how can the being-point relate to a flowing event? In other words, where do we get the knowledge of a reality that we consider ungraspable?
Consider the situation again through the Eleatic problem. The perceptible movement, as the Eleatics proved, is incapable of being. Consequently, they concluded, it has absolutely no reality, but is only a "false appearance."
But how do we come to have such exceedingly certain knowledge of such "appearance"? How is it possible that we think we perceive movements when the act of grasping, which is also inherent in every perception, can never in itself capture them?
We do see the movement, and only because we see it, we had to establish the definition of continuity in spatial change. Thus, we see the continuity of space and again the continuity of spatial processes and inseparably possess the continuity of time as well.
What is this power within us that makes us aware of continuity, if it cannot be the mind under any circumstances?
When one considers that the external world constantly shows us changes—movement of bodies, drifting of clouds, flowing of waters, swelling and fading of sounds, gradual brightening and darkening of the atmosphere—and that each time our senses are like messengers that bring us the news, it is understood why the discovery of the metaphysical opposition of the phenomena and noumena had to go hand in hand with the erroneous attempt to explain that "sensuality" served the intellect as an auxiliary faculty.
However, before one might agree with this interpretation, one should note that the meaning of what was considered sensuality by the Greeks is fundamentally different from the meaning of what is today called sensuality.
For us, the essence of "sensuality" is exhausted in an "immediately given," from which the mind gains the impetus to develop its ideas of being. According to the Greek's deeper sensory life, it was and remained primarily a reality of unsupported events.
We believe that the most secure knowledge is achieved precisely through the most comprehensive exploration of the sensual, and indeed in truth because we have long since replaced it with the factual, without yet realizing the loss of "phenomenality." The Greek had to turn away from the sensory world to reach the recognizable world because he saw not things, but images—not existences, but impermanence, change, events.
The evaluative division of the world into a "higher" and a "lower" circle was originally not based on the merely imagined difference between the logically abstract and the logically concrete, but rather on the real existing difference between being and becoming, the identically persisting from the incessantly fluctuating, the ever-present "essence" from the temporal bearer of life.
The aisthesis of the Platonic psyche means much less a perception than the source of the instinctual entanglement in the spatiotemporal variability of appearances. The "soul," inseparable from the images, is, according to the content of the role attributed to it by both Plato and Aristotle, the principle of life.
Following this historical prelude, we discuss our question directly. Instead of the phenomena, focusing on their most general property of time and space, the question takes the extremely simple form: How is it that we constantly perceive the continuous when we can only comprehend the discrete?
The sought-after faculty must be as irreducibly different in essence from the mind as the event is irreducibly different in essence from being. Anyone who even considered the possibility of an intermediate concept would make it entirely in vain for us to try to make ourselves understood.
The answer is: we become aware of the continuous by experiencing it.
Just as outside of us, "in reality," there are only events which we are forced to view, due to the activity of our own inherent spirit, as if they were illusions and shadow plays concealing a singular and always self-identical being—thus it is now our participation in events which, as we continually experience them, compels the mind to an unlimited multiplication of the points of being.
Already the primal act of perception relates not so much to being in general as rather always to particularized being, which—independent of perception—has a place in the spatial-temporal external reality.
The personal self is the bearer of both spirit and life, two powers whose relationship to each other we now preliminarily determine from the relationship of being to reality.
Spirit and object are the halves of being. Life and image are the poles of reality.
**The spirit "is." Life passes.
The spirit judges. Life experiences.
Judgment is an action. Experiencing is a passion.
The mind grasps being. Life experiences events.**
Pure being is beyond space and time, and so is the mind. Events are spatial-temporal, and so is life.
Being is fundamentally conceivable, but never directly experienceable. Event is fundamentally experienceable, but never directly comprehensible.
The act of judgment requires the experiencing life on which it relies. Life does not need the mind to experience.
The mind, inherent in life, signifies a force directed against it. Life, insofar as it became a bearer of the mind, resists it with an instinct of defense.
The essence of the "historical" process of humanity, also called "progress," is the victorious ongoing struggle of the mind against life with the—albeit only logically—foreseeable end of the latter's annihilation.
These formulas, in need of extensive interpretation, should serve to give the concepts relief and later expositions a guideline.
When it has been said that true poetry is always "romantic" to a certain degree, it was meant that it must, to deserve its name, somehow be an expression of the soul. It becomes an expression of the soul by announcing an event—the character of events witnessed by the experiencing soul itself.
As we are experiencers and thus always bearers of the soul, what do we experience? Farewell and reunion, coming and going, birth and death, day and night, waking and falling asleep again, the change of seasons, youth and age, not to mention the thousands of events that, comparable to unexpected gusts of wind, delightfully or crushingly alter the rhythm of the ever-restless surges.
Solely thanks to its capacity for experience, the soul, whatever else it may be, is a being of impermanence. Or, as pointedly as possible: the soul is the body's transience.
"The man," says Plutarch, "dies when he becomes an old man; the youth dies in the man, the boy in the youth, the child in the boy. The yesterday has died in the today, and the today dies in the tomorrow."
As souls inextricably woven into a fleeting reality, we stand as spirits literally outside of it, unable to merge with it even for the briefest moment. No moment of experience in our life can ever repeat itself in us or in another being. But the meaning of any judgment we have made is always thought by countless people as the same—from which it becomes clear that in the moment of being thought and through the act of thinking, it was wrested from the reality of change.
And so all "philosophy," all "science," indeed everything supposedly or actually comprehended stands before us in unalterable rigidity as something that may vanish from humanity's memory over centuries or millennia, to make room for new "systems," but that never grows and withers and thus could never renew itself, as true poetry does in every subsequent generation.
The personal life bearer is thus traversed by a fissure that cannot be glued together. This immediately reveals a sharper view of the essential difference between the two "faculties," one of which enables us to experience, the other to comprehend.
If the ability to experience is indeed one side of reality itself, then we can experience without comprehending the slightest thing, but we cannot comprehend anything without the aid of experience. The predisposition for experience, which we call the soul in regard to deeply significant waves of experience, inevitably consists in something happening, occurring, or encountering the soul.
In relation to the mental event, the act of comprehension bears the character of an assertion, and the existential power that enables comprehension bears the character of a compulsion for self-assertion.
As a mental being, the person is a driven or enraptured or self-abandoning being. As a spiritual being, it is a willing being and thus always a being that wants to hold on to something, which absolutely resists the mental surge and is compelled to evaluate any surrender to it first as weakness and lack of resistance, then as distractibility, instability, seducibility.
Every judgment "asserts" something, even the self-refuting skeptical one that no assertion has a claim to truth. Conversely, every "assertion" announces an already made judgment.
According to linguistic evidence, the original meaning of the word "assert" was "to defend something victoriously against an attack" and evolved into the later meaning of "to hold an opinion" through the mediation of the idea that every opinion, once expressed, must be secured against anything threatening it.
Consider also the phrase "establishing a claim" as well as the word "statement," which already bridges the semantic division. The Greek "thesis" once referred to a position in space, then the establishment of a law, and in philosophical language refers to an assertion.
Unmistakably, language reveals to us not only that with every judgment an establishment of being occurs, but also that there is no establishment of being that must not be "asserted" and "maintained" against something threatening its existence.
That against which every judgment content is "established" and "asserted" is practically usually only a counter-judgment, but metaphysically, it is the being-opposing element of the ever-flowing reality.
Goethe's wisdom rhyme: "You must not confuse me with contradiction! As soon as one speaks, one begins to err"—says unfolded approximately: Allow me to give my words the content determination that they would have to assume in the dispute with counter-claims; for thereby they become false, measured against reality, which, strictly speaking, does not tolerate the form of assertion at all.
If now the judgment-capable spirit has realized itself in us through connection with an experiencing soul, then it is also an asserting reality, and the statement that the person, insofar as they are a spiritual being, is under the compulsion to self-assertion, contains not the slightest admixture of hypothesis. It necessarily follows from the nature of being of the spirit and its realization in the personal self through coupling with the soul.
The self, insofar as it has a tendency to assert, can also simply be called "the will." But it must not be equated without restriction with so-called egoism and certainly not with the animal instincts for self-preservation.
The compulsion to self-assertion forms the basis of judging behavior as such, which is always also an acting attitude, and divides into special areas of action into as many motives or "interests," which thus stand in opposition both to the drives of the body and to the excesses of the soul.
If the character of the soul is sometimes driven, sometimes given to enthusiasm, the character of the spirit appears in the light of a resistance that realizes itself in every psychic impulse as intentional inhibition.
Accordingly, a reconciliation between spirit and soul is impossible, and what sometimes seems to us in outstanding personalities proves upon closer examination always to be a mere compromise, an artificial "style," never acquired without loss of psychic immediacy.
As long as there is still a remnant of soul in the personality—and with its complete disappearance it would no longer be a "personality"—it is something inherently contradictory and therefore already by nature endangered by that disruption commonly called "mental disorder," rather a disturbance of the soul.
In the sensory experience, the image of the world captivates, entices, seduces, overwhelms. In judgment, it takes possession of it, objectifies it, and locks it into the "treasure" of "experience" for the perceiving mind.
The sensory experience, the more it grows in strength and depth, the more it resembles an irresistible whirlwind that suddenly and mightily tears down all walls and dams erected from systematically mortared concepts and resolutions of decades of "prudent" thinking.
In the divided dual nature of the personal ego, a self-preserving self-sense thus resists the dissolving and constricting tendency of the elemental Eros.
This is the fundamental situation of the person: torn between spirit and soul, between the compulsion to assert timeless being and the capacity to experience temporal reality, between the will to hold fast and the surrender to the flow of life.