I first published this series of articles in the German-speaking area under #freie-gesellschaft. I started the attempt to translate this article series also for the English-speaking countries. I have only a limited command of English and have therefore used a translation program. However, many terms are very difficult to translate because there is no clear translation for some words. I hope, however, that at least the meaning of the content will be understandable.
for the English readers I will open the section #free-society
Does it have two sides to me? Is there a dualism in the ego? Let's see what can be understood by it. Let's see what it has to do with it.
What kind of existence does my self have in contrast to other kinds of existence in this world? How can this existence be conceptualized? Some readers could make the surprising discovery that their own being does not only take place on one level when they take note of the answers to these questions. However, the path to this discovery leads across a terrain that is impassable. Now that it is esoteric, one might think not to judge too hastily. Wait and see, it is far from that.
At first, the ego is completely unknown to growing people. When they talk about their activities at an early age, they say their name instead of "I": Erna plays, Egon runs, Maria cries, etc. At some point they begin to say: I play, I run, I cry. And above all they learn to say: "I want" and "I don't want"!
We observe: Now the child explicitly refers the events to himself as his very own spontaneous centre. Perhaps the child already experiences itself as a source of its vital activities. But with the I-saying the experience of self-spontaneity comes to speech and is thus symbolically (as a word) objectified.
It becomes visible as a word. The word I experience as a symbol of myself.
From now on the child has his ego, his own ego explicitly and becomes the - - ego- Ist.
Whoever wants to call something unreasonable or even malicious about human beings with the word "egoism" ("the ego, this dark despot") remains free to do so. He has to accept that he has thus departed badly from the original meaning of the word. The meaning of the word egoism is simply and value-free "egotism", "egocentricity", "To be with oneself" and not for instance cheating addiction, elbow use or the like.
The child experiences the ego as its own, but it also experiences that it has something that people in its immediate environment also have. Because it observes: the others also always say "I". Everyone obviously has this "I" in common. And yet they only mean themselves when they keep saying "I, I I...". With ego-saying, each ego means only itself, but at the same time it dives into the sphere of the we, a we, however, that has nothing to do with the group-we of the physical togetherness (more on this in the next and next but one article).
Through the observation of the development of our children we know: The childlike saying of "I" is completely unreflected. It happens in a way that has nothing to do with a conscious ego. It is based on a diffuse ego experience. It may be that this diffusity persists for many of us throughout our lives.
Man is the only being that can say "I". In this way he expresses that he experiences himself (more or less consciously) as the spontaneous centre of his activities.
As the mental development progresses, the individual becomes aware that his ego must probably be there twice: once as a perceptible thing (body, feelings, character, etc.) and on the other hand as something of which our unmistakable ego saying makes known, expresses, but which we cannot conceivably grasp.
This is an amazing and astonishing fact. Immanuel Kant, who can be regarded as our most helpful interlocutor in this respect, has brought this fact to the point. He makes a clear distinction between the two aspects of ego-consciousness for the first time. He was also the one who introduced the two terms "empirical" (experienceable) ego and "intelligible" (not experienceable, "pure") ego into the theoretical discussion. The "intelligible ego" is actually meant when we constantly say "I" (I do, I talk, I avoid) and firmly mean ourselves as ego, as ego-person, and not as ego-habitus (body). When I speak of I in the following, I always mean the "intelligible I", the ego.
How is the peculiar duality of the ego to be understood more precisely?
The ego as the spontaneous centre of our life is probably the content of a form of experience and consciousness, but not the object of a form of knowledge. According to Kant, it is "a completely empty concept...of which one cannot even say that it is a concept, but a mere consciousness that accompanies all concepts".
The ego is a physical nothing. It is (if at all, then) non-physical. In saying "I" a human being's mode of being is documented, which lies outside our sphere of knowledge but not outside our sphere of experience. The ego does not lack experiencability and truth. "I am as supersensually so supervised as I am", notes - probably following Kant - the freedom philosopher Max Stirner (reprint 1972). He also wrote the famous sentence "I put my stuff on nothing" ("I put my things on nothing"). He could have said just as well: I put my thing' on myself, because the I is nothing (the materially not tangible).
Both aspects of the ego, the physical (ego-body; habitus) and the non-physical (ego core; persona), belong inseparably together. They are almost one, only different ways of experiencing one and the same ego. The ego can be understood as something that, thinking of itself, i.e. its physical and non-physical side, can ascertain. In order to make the strange character of the pure ego experience digestible even for die-hard physicists, a gifted sophist writes: "The ego is a fantasy, but one of the toughest.
The person is therefore nothing strange, or not belonging to us, as some on the Internet want to make white. The claim that this is a legal trick to separate the individual from his or her humanity. The claims of submitting human declarations to public authorities. Or the version of the trustee man for his person, which are attached to him by the rulers. More nonsense and another word is simply not applicable for it, one can no longer give of oneself. The person, the spiritual being, belongs to man to his habitus and cannot be separated from him.
Our relationship to the ego, no matter how unconscious or pre-conscious it may be (as with children), is documented in our saying of the ego. The ego-saying develops relatively early in humans. However, this does not mean that the relationship to our ego is immediately present to us in full consciousness. As a rule, a person needs a long time to fully understand himself as the spontaneous centre of his life and as the cause (and thus also as the responsible person! More on this in later articles) of his life activities. Many die without ever having clearly acquired the knowledge about themselves. However, no one, not even the ego-saying child, is completely unaware of this.
The dualism of the ego is alien to many because of its difficult ascertainability. But the analysis of the observable reveals it. The latest medical research, especially neurological research, is paying more attention to him again (SPIEGEL, 21/2013), where he seemed to have already been forgotten. For jurisprudence and the human sciences, knowledge about it is indispensable (person concept!). In order to clearly emphasize this dualism, our entire cognitive faculty must be illuminated up to its limits. Kant has done this in an exemplary manner.
Reflection on the "intelligible" ego is a life achievement that is probably reserved for the developed human being. The conscious having of the ego presupposes a step that only certain people can take and that only these people do, at least when they have outgrown their childhood shoes. They are not, if they consider the sentence "I am a fairy tale" (David Eagleman, "I am a fairy tale" Spiegel 7/2012) to be a useful thesis.
The sensually comprehensible is only a part of what we can experience as a whole. In the observation of our mental processes, our experience goes beyond the sensually comprehensible, the purely physical. The I is indeed - as the source of action of our life - experiencable in self-reflection, but not recognizable as concretely imaginable. It is only there as it manifests itself in idioms such as "I will", "I do", "I discover", "I experience" and in individual courses of action and material needs. In all these speeches and activities I experience myself as the source of my own activities.
Some researchers claim that there is no ego. It is not surprising that a brain researcher cannot discover an I in his object of investigation (a you!). He can only experience the ego in himself - as a researching ego, as that which an ego will never discover in the other due to the limitation of his cognitive faculty. The sentence "I claim that there is no I" contains the most blatant contradiction one can imagine. For it is obviously an ego that asserts this. Immanuel Kant calls such statements "impudent" because they presume to override the most elementary principles of human knowledge.
The thesis, recently often read by neurologists, that the ego is an "illusion," can only ever express, write down, defend an ego, thereby proving that it exists outside its appearance, writing down, defending. The thesis is in contradiction with itself. So for logical reasons alone (principle of inadmissible contradiction) we cannot avoid dualism in the ego. Those who deny it go far below the level of the critical approaches of the 17th and 18th centuries.
It is one of the basic epistemological truths that the exploring ego cannot explore itself. Nevertheless, it can gain an awareness of itself, which is documented in ego-saying. I experience the dualism of the ego as truly existing. This dualism must therefore not only be adhered to for logical reasons, but also for ontological reasons.
The main representatives of the newer brain research don't want to know anything about it. The German psychologist and brain researcher Hans Markowitsch says (2009 "Tatort-Gehirn auf der Suche nach dem Ursprung des Verbrechens"): "Dualism [in the self; the author] is passé". The American neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, who summarises the results of past brain research in his book "Who's in charge" (2011), says: a certain module in our brain creates the "illusion of an ego" (Gazzaniga also says: "We have seen that we function like automatons"). This is where total ego-distance is documented.
Felix Tretter shows "why it is worth switching on the brain before you want to explore it," and asks, "Could it be that the theory of neuroscience is based on insufficiently thought-out assumptions and concepts? He answers the question in the affirmative and concludes that brain researchers could only provide one-dimensional results from their one-dimensional experiments (SPIEGEL, No. 9/2014).
One should already move with one's statements within the limits that are defined for us by our cognitive faculties. - Of course, there is always a lot to advise and to think about when one has to leave the ground of sensory data, as in the case of the subject who experiences himself as I.
It is only a question of my personal stage of development, when and how I learn to make the distinction from myself as physical and at the same time as beyond all physis standing I in full consciousness. In doing so, the indifferent, pre-conscious ego-experience, which becomes noticeable in humans as ego-saying at a very early stage, is transformed into a conscious one. At the same time, the difference between the two ego aspects is brought to light. This difference is not just a theoretical invention. It can certainly be experienced. It is an indispensable prerequisite for the comprehensive understanding of freedom and above all for the understanding of the connection between freedom and responsibility.
Everyone who can say "I" experiences and has his ego is Ego-Actual. It is something else whether he stands by his egoism or whether he veils it. The childlike egoism is unveiled. But this open egoism is lost in most adolescents at some point. Egoism is kept hidden because it becomes a truth problem in view of today's usual ethics: as unstable egoism.
"There are two kinds of egoists: those who admit their egoism - and the rest of us" (Walter Mathau ). This bon mot aptly says what is the matter: The ego is not a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of confessing. The fully conscious I-have is a confession, namely the confession of man to himself.
A confession documents a will. . The disclosure of our ego is not a question of intellect. It is a question of will. The profession of the ego is above all the profession of wanting to be not only a means for others or for others, but a means only for oneself, a means for an end in itself.
And now I have come to the end again with this contribution. Until the next contribution, all contributions there is under #free-society
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