In other words, I mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of
thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality
of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a
stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an
object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore
incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that
is, as thought itself. For that reason we can never effectively think
it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought
of as natural. Who can say what the life of the plant is? To posit
nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and
therefore unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be a serious
drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. For would it not
be sufficient to live it? Why insist on _thinking_ its life? Why demand
a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback,
and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of
thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that
irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a
philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible
life of thought. In fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we
must first think it. But how could we think it, if the only possible
life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which
we think this irreflective life?
So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually
ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that
pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another
becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as I started
out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. As a result of more
careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's
spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. In
it the actors play to themselves. It is self-conscious activity. It is
activity perpetually watching over itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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