Thirdly, the Ego is a _living_, active individual, and its life consists in bringing home its individuality to itself no less than to others, in giving expression to itself and revealing itself among phenomena[125]. For every man during his life endeavours to realize himself and does realize himself. In relation to the beautiful and art this means that he lives the life of an artist, and shapes his life _artistically._ But, according to the principle now discussed, I live as artist when all my action and expression whatever, in so far as it has to do with a content, is for myself on the plane of mere _semblance_, and assumes a formal content which is wholly at my disposal. So I am not truly _serious_ either about this content or, speaking generally, about its expression and realization. Genuine seriousness only issues from a substantive interest, a subject-matter which itself possesses a rich content, such as truth, morality, and so on--in other words, from a content which as it stands I regard as essential, so that I only become essential on my own account, in so far as I have absorbed myself in such a content, and have come to conform myself to it in the entire range of my thought and action. At the standpoint at which the artist is the Ego, which both posits and resolves everything through its own essential fiat[126], for which no content of consciousness appears as absolute and essentially independent, but only as itself a semblance created and destroyable, such seriousness can find no place, nothing here receiving a right to be save the formalism of the Ego.