Reflecting on the self, all that can be grasped is the "mighty whirlwind of the world-constituting self as it rushes by."
— Peters, John Durham
Author
Date
1997
Metaphor
Reflecting on the self, all that can be grasped is the "mighty whirlwind of the world-constituting self as it rushes by."
Metaphor in Context
Hegel referred to self-consciousness as the terra firma of modern philosophy, the principle that made it distinctly modern. The trouble is that self-consciousness is also the quicksand of modern thought, at least of German idealism. J. G. Fichte made a discovery about the self that Manfred Frank calls the experience of a whole generation. It was that the attempt of the self to know itself must fail, since the self is not an object to be known but rather the active subject that in fact does the knowing. When in thought I go looking for my self and seek to know it, I am not merely looking for how it appears as an object, but what it really is as a subject. When I reflect on my inner self, all I can grasp is an energy of positing, the mighty whirlwind of the world-constituting self as it rushes by. Yet I do not recognize it as myself, not as something of someone else, which suggests that I must have made the acquaintance of myself before I started to philosophize about it. Otherwise I'd not recognize as me what I find. Hence, the self is an undivided activity that turns back on itself, a unity of two parts. As Fichte said in an 1802 note added to his Wissenschaftslehre: "The self is a necessary identity of subject and object: a subject-object; and is so absolutely, without further mediation." (p. 229)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Peters, J. D. "'The Root of Humanity': Hegel on Communication and Language." Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy. Ed. David E. Klemm and Günter Zöller. Suny Series in Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 227-44.
Date of Entry
10/16/2003
