Wednesday, February 01, 2012

The World as Alter Ego

A very interesting passage in Feuerbach (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, section 32):

An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself. The concept of the object is originally nothing else but the concept of another I – everything appears to man in childhood as a freely and arbitrarily acting being – which means that in principle the concept of the object is mediated through the, concept of You, the objective ego. To use the language of Fichte, an object or an alter ego is given not to the ego, but to the non-ego in me; for only where I am transformed from an ego into a You – that is, where I am passive – does the idea of an activity existing outside myself, the idea of objectivity, really originate. But it is only through the senses that the ego is also non-ego.