Thoughtful reflection never grows lonesome nor is lost to the infinite; rather, sooner or later it returns along the same path on which it embarked—that is, to the human being. In him, reflections link up without interruption, only to yield, after all seeking and discovery, the human being once more—the “thinker,” in the most proper sense of the word.
Should human consciousness of the outside world enter into a relation of ceaseless comparison with the world within, then the human ascends to self-consciousness, knowing that his thinking his own being guarantees his difference from other beings.
Nature should not stand above the human being, as it did for the ancients, nor should the human being think too highly of himself, think that he stands above nature, as he did the Middle Ages. Rather, the human being should be aware that he is both the substance and truth of nature, that he cannot accomplish his task by treating it with contempt or hostility, but only by striving to infiltrate and to understand it.
To the same extent that the human being is capable of comprehending the phenomena of natural life, his consciousness of his own nature will increase; in this way, he will realize that the development taking place “inside of us” follows the same laws that govern everything taking place “outside of us.”
At this point, the objective, gradual differentiation of organic nature terminates and the human being begins the subjective, essential differentiation of himself, as the apex and closure of the series of stages that led to him.
In the state prior to the awakening of consciousness, there is no distinction at all between an inwardly perceiving being and an outwardly perceived thing. By contrast, at the self-conscious stage, the perceived object is situated within the subject, is itself something interior, something constituting the I. This I, without further immediate communication from the senses, is itself the perceiving and perceived thing.
Self-consciousness proves to be the result of a process in which knowledge of an exterior is transformed into knowledge of an interior.
It is not as easy as is often presumed, not even for sense perception, to clearly demarcate what is “inside of us” from what is “outside of us.” We are dealing here with a contentious border zone.
The entire body belongs to the inner world. Even if we regard the brain as the exclusive seat of thought, as the intellectual interior, we cannot therefore disregard the heart and the spinal cord, for instance, for the brain is incapable of thinking for itself; the entire organism unconsciously thinks with it.
The outside world comprises myriad things that, though nature did supply the material, are less the work of nature than the work of the human hand. As artifacts, by contrast with natural products, these make up the content of the world of culture. The “outside world” for the human being is therefore composed of both natural and man-made objects.
The human being overcomes this antithesis precisely because his original disposition affords him the competence to productively and receptively expand ad infinitum the sensory ability he shares with the animal by means of mechanical supports—in other words, through the works of his own hand.
Every tool—understood in the broadest sense of the word as a means of enhancing sensory activity—presents the unique possibility of moving beyond the immediate, superficial perception of things.
The tool is so fundamentally and intimately affiliated with the human being that he finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter, a mirror- or after-image of his interior, a part of himself.
The mechanism, which is unconsciously formed on the model of an organic prototypal image, serves retroactively in its turn as the prototypal image through which the organism—to which the mechanism absolutely owes its existence—is later explained and understood.
All cultural means, no matter how crude or refined their construction, are absolutely nothing other than organ projections.
The craftsman’s tool, the instruments of art, the apparatuses employed by the sciences to measure and weigh the smallest particles and velocities, even the sound waves formed and set in motion by the human voice: all logically belong to the category of projections formed of matter that I believe to have properly designated as organ projections.
From each emerges only what already lies within it.
One and the same cache of letters, after all, may be rearranged in endless combination to produce any text, from the elementary school primer to the scientific compendium—and certainly this is not the result of having shaken them up in a mechanical manner but results instead from their having been conjugated according to an organically articulated rule.
Language is fundamentally distinct from all other formations of organ projection, in that it is not the image of an isolated group of organs, understood independently in its own right; rather, it is the image of a totality of functional organic relations.
The development of language through technological means and the reverse, the development of technology by means of language, appear as the two sides of a single organic unity.
In every human commonwealth, the one thing that all individuals have in common is the bodily human organism. And so the state too is an evolving organism—it evolves, in other words, from the res interna of human nature and its total projection outward to become the res externa, the res publica.