Part 4 (2/2)

This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however their root in us Not in ”us” as we are represented ordinarily in the s; not in the empirical and abstract ”us” which feeds the vanity of the eoist, of him who has not the faintest notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of hiht husk of his own flesh and of his particular passions No! they are rooted in that true ”us” by which we think, and agree in one sa ourselves as opposed to things And he who fails to reach this profound source, this root froet a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism, but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism He cannot upon further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it appears in se real, for it reveals itself to him as so absurd as to become unthinkable The world then is in us; it is our world, and it lives in the spirit It lives the very life of that person which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but oftener unsatisfied and restless And there is the life of culture

It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality This is our conclusion We shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the problems of education

FOOTNOTES:

[2] _I Promessi Sposi_ (”The Betrothed”)

CHAPTER VI

THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE

From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the funday But in as much as this conception of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the spirit are also derived froy from the philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience To determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour to define its attributes This e h comprehension of the principles of the several theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the life of education itself in its effective development

The assertion that ”culture is the hu unless we first define this spirit and understand its attributes We cannot possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a concept are the constituent attributes of the reality which we strive to conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these attributes The following exa clearer Physical bodies cannot be conceived without also conceiving gravity Gravity is then an attribute of the physical body, and as such it determines the concept of it In the saht the concepts which are absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit

This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seeround on account of the ever-increasing difficulties that beset its advance It is true, no doubt, that huht, driven by the irresistible desire to know itself, hasthe concept of itself Philosophy has indeed progressed, and the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers of antiquity But the assiduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and in need of further elaboration, and has been pushi+ng its investigations to such depths as toastray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness at the roadside

Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date They have stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed and temporarily halted, but frooal For while this long history of the endeavours by whichof his own nature is the basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit, yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate ia ed aspra e forte”[3]

from which it is difficult ever to issue And therefore it is much easier, as Dante once renorant than those who have a s of philosophy But to-day culture is so intireater part of educatedaware of it And when such er possess the enuousness, the speculative candour, which would enable therasp the obvious, evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical proposition

This inquiry then is difficult It de, methodic, laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the n of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundaorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all convictions forh extremely plausible, if they contradict his Truth For he trusts that these perplexities, these difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be reht to which he has confidently coe of the philosopher, who has never feared to brave coainst the ly absurd assertions, which however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have subsequently contributed to redeem this very multitude from error,--from that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic, political, and moral destitution Because of this inflexible firmness the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin atht, and where at first he has the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air

We e and relinquish all the ideas which we once accepted, even though they still tes of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in contradiction with experience For I too hold experience to be the touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded But I insist that we be careful lest we confound the enuine experience; that in as much as every man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance hatever concept he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our conception of it is Now I say that no concept of experience can be validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions

Such fundamental truth we have previously attained e established that ”We” are not e seem to be in the di things Our ”Self” is the deeper one by s 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 sahs are not possible without the root frorasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of experience For once we have securely mastered it, ill be convinced that it is iht 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 i 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 relationshi+p between things and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our ”self” We ain 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 relationshi+ps just ain have iloom of their apparent independent existence, of their ever self-defeating ainst this reality of the profound ”us” which is the genuine spiritual reality, there are innu difficulties They are difficulties that so violently oppress our ive 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] Alone, because in it all opposites ood and the evil, what is true and what is false, life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and ed to sunder and distinguish in order to take our bearings and encies of life Formidable difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy It would be childish and senseless to dispose of the that concept from which they derive It is the philosopher's task, it is the strict duty of huht to face the problems as they rise out of the positions which it has captured in its onward round, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be indispensable, that is impossible

Those ish to orient the to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites us all in one 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 anshether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality to which the answer is referred We uish it frowith them a multiplicity; and this is the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think

Or, in other words, e 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 ainst radical idealisle defect; which is such, however, as tounderstood by those that resort to this kind of arguh,of the terms hich they claim to be familiar They fail to see that when the idealist says ”subject,” he cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationshi+p _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 relationshi+p; 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, einatively 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 ht 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 relationshi+p by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side of this relationshi+p, 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 worshi+p himself in a fixed se, he , looks away from his true spiritual life, ht fro This self-conversion fro takes place, not e think of ourselves, but rather e 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 exaation has carried us, without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry itself For e considered as an eleo_, which is not so in unrelated immediacy, but which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultined to the spirit, or to man himself, that is, to what in man is essentially human If we exaned or could be found by which the spirit is distinguishable fros, we shall find, after due reflection, that they all cease to have a real lect the most profound characteristic 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 seeht (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as conditioning this very consciousness And e say of the spiritual being that it does not knohat it is, that it is not acquainted with itself, that it therefore remains concealed fro in a ous to that by which we conceive ,--externally visible, but internally unknown And we say that the individual fails to grasp his owninto so natural, sis 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 , 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 freedoel 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 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 _beco ani of his deeds, who corows, lives, and dies, unaware Man from the time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers hih 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 fros (such as our phantasy represents theh his own deterative offers merely an external view, has a very hazy consistency, and appears as so illusory, only because we do not define it exclusively as autono” is ordinarily understood in a hich does not adative Does not every living being _becoetates only because it too has an inborn potency by which it is forced froe of development to the next, fro which is peculiarly its ohich it did not have before, which no other being could from the outside have conferred 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 endoith a definite nature and moved by a definite lahich is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to the spirit