R. If I consider it carefully, I do not know. True, just at present I am convinced that I actively produced it, because you asked me to do so; but since it often happens that images crowd through my brain, and come and go without any cooperation of my own, just as the hand of the clock moves, I cannot decidedly say whether that representation might not have come into my head without any activity of my own, and without your request.
A. With all the respect which an author owes his reader, and which I really entertain towards you, let me tell you that this confusion of yours is of bad augury for the continuation of our conversation. I hold that men should dream only in their sleep, but should not when waking allow images to crowd of themselves into their brain. The absolute freedom arbitrarily to give a determined direction to your mind, and keep it in that direction, is an essential condition, not only of philosophical, but even of healthy common thinking. But in the hope that you will, at least during our present investigation, keep these foreign images away from your mind, and resist that blind operation of an association of ideas, I will drop this doubtful point of sensuous representation, and solely make use of your confession concerning the freedom of argument.
It seems, then, that there are two kinds of actuality, which are both equally actual, but of which the one makes itself, while the other must be made by him for whom it is to be, and is not unless he so makes it?
R. So it appears.
A. Let us consider the matter a little. You say the hand of the clock has actually moved during your argumentation. Would you be able to say this, would you know this, unless you had looked again at the hand after your argument, and had now drawn your conclusion from the actual perception that it occupied another place?
R. Certainly not.
A. Do not forget this; it is very important to me. All reality of the first kind—however much it may proceed in its course without your knowledge and co-operation, or may exist in itself, i.e. unrelated to any possible consciousness, a point which we shall not discuss here—all such reality is at least for you, and as an event of your life, only in so far as you at some time direct your attention to it, throw yourself into it, and take hold of that reality with your consciousness. When we consider this well, your assertion that the hand of the clock has moved from one place to another, from the time of one of your perceptions to that of a second perception—without which latter perception the hand would never have come into your consciousness again—and during this intermediate time while you did not observe it, can only signify: you would have perceived the hand moving if you had directed your attention to it.
Hence, by this assertion of an event outside of your life, you only assert a possible event within your life, a possible continuous flow of this life from the first perception of the hand to the second perception. You supply and add a series of possible observations between the end points of your two actual observations. Now, if I pledge you my word that I shall always speak only of a reality for you, and never replace it by a reality unrelated to you, nor speak or assert anything of this latter sort of reality, will you then allow me to consider the continuation of an external reality, without any act of your own, as merely the continuation of your own possible consciousness and life, since you have seen that it becomes reality for you, after all, only in this manner?
A Reader (who, perhaps, may even be a celebrated philosopher). I will hear nothing more of such stuff. Have I not sufficiently hinted to you that this is pure insanity? I always proceed from a reality in and for itself, from an absolute being. I cannot go higher, and will not. The distinction which you make between a reality in itself and a reality for us, and the abstraction in the former which you undertake, and which, as I now apprehend, is the corner-stone of your system, you must first demonstrate to me!
A. Indeed? You are able to speak of a reality without knowing of it, without seizing it, at least dimly, in your consciousness, and relating it to your consciousness? You can do more than I can. Put down the book; it is not written for you.
A second and fairer Reader. I will accept your limitation to speak only of a reality for us, on condition that you remain true to it, and speak of reality in itself neither good nor evil. But as soon as you transcend your limits and draw a conclusion to the disadvantage of the latter, I also shall leave you.
A. Not more than fair. If we then presuppose this view, that only our relation to reality and actuality is to be considered, our consciousness would appear about as follows: All reality, whatever name it may have, becomes reality for us only through our immersing and forgetting ourself in certain determinations of our life, and this forgetting of ourself is precisely that which gives to these determinations wherein we forget ourselves the character of reality, and which gives us life at all.
Thus there result certain fundamental and primary determinations (the next following opposite will make clear these expressions, which I entreat you to consider maturely,) of our life, as its true roots, which make and continue themselves, and to which we only need to surrender ourselves and allow them to take hold of our being, in order to appropriate them and make them our actual life; and the continuous chain whereof, no matter if they are dropped at certain links, can always be arbitrarily taken hold of again, and be supplied backward or forward from every point.
I say we only need to surrender ourselves to them, for even these fundamental determinations cannot pull us irresistibly towards them; we having, moreover, the faculty to pull ourselves (a fact which was forgotten in those determinations) loose again from them, and to create freely out of ourselves a higher series of life and actuality for ourselves. We can, for instance, think and seize ourselves as the knowing in that fundamental consciousness, or as the living in that fundamental life; or we can rise to the second degree of life, if we call the remaining within the fundamental determinations the first degree of life; or we may again seize ourselves as the thinking in that thinking of original knowledge, as the contemplating of our own life in that positing of it, which would result in a third degree of life; and so on ad infinitum.
The whole distinction between that first degree and the higher degrees, between the previously given life—which was presented to us, and which we need only to accept in order to make it our actual life—and that life which is not given to us, but which must be produced by our self-activity, is probably this: that from each of the higher degrees you can look down and descend into a lower one; whereas from the lowest one you cannot look down, because it is itself the deepest, and cannot go lower except into the realm of nothingness; that hence we are conditioned in regard to the descent by the lowest one, but not in regard to the ascent through reflection; and that this lowest one is, therefore, the real foot and root of all other life. Hence, I called it the primary and fundamental determination of all life.
For us, let it be here sufficient, conformably to our agreement, to consider this sphere of the first degree as the sphere of such fundamental determinations of our life, but on no account as the sphere of things in and for themselves, a view which we here discard. Be they ever so much the latter, in and for themselves, for us they exist only as determinations of our life, or by our living and experiencing them, and we are content here to speak of them only in relation to us. The content of this sphere is often more specially called reality, fact of consciousness, or experience.
Know, reader, that hereafter we shall reflect solely upon this system of the first degree. Do not forget this for a single moment, but separate whatsoever belongs to the higher degrees from it.
I include in this system of the first degree all that which we perceive through our external senses in space, or through our internal sense in our soul. In regard to the latter, this sphere includes also what I have termed higher degrees, not as regards their content, but as regards their form, namely: the laws which it observes, for these laws belong to the facts of the internal sense, and are perceived when we carefully observe ourselves in those proceedings of the soul.
The chief object of the present conversation, my reader, was this: that you should (but