Erste Philosophie

Beilage XXXII (on Lecture 54): Phenomenological

Reduction and Absolute Justification

...

Monadology

Therefore the totality of egos exist absolutely in their communicative relatedness to one another. In their community they are the absolute bearers of the world, whose being is a being-for-them and a being-constituted-for-them. As absolute ego's they are not parts of the world, they are not substances in the sense of empirical "realities" - i.e. precisely members of the world, substrates of "real" properties, which have their true being in the world. They are the absolute, <they are subjectivity,> without whose cogitative life, which is through and through a knowing constitution in the widest sense of the word, no real substances would exist.

However insofar as they are not only for themselves, but for one another, as alter egos, they are such and could only be such through a substantializing bestowal of sense, which they impose upon one another reciprocally and then, in this reciprocal relation, impose upon themselves - in the substantialization or realization of animality and humanity. They have therefore a double being: an absolute being and an appearing-for-themselves-and-for-one-another - on the basis of a self-achieved apperception - as animal and human subjects, animating living bodies in the world and belonging to the substantially real world as animals and human beings. And in this fashion then all socialities are ordered, whose absolute being however consists in the absolute being of each ego in itself and the absolute being of each I-Thou-relationship, the communal relationship that runs from one I to others and to yet others, whose index is called passive nature, which is active however as the actively determining efficacy which, through the medium of the nature-positing of one I, works itself into the other I, and reciprocally incorporates its acts, and so makes itself the bearer of functionally foreign spirituality.

Only phenomenological idealism gives the ego, and gives the absolute communicating subjectivity (which is the absolute [correlate] of humankind) true autonomy, and gives it the power and meaningful possibility of absolute self-formation and the formation of the world in accordance with its autonomous will. And only this absolute subjectivity is then the theme of further absolutely directed investigations, and so of all theological and teleological investigations, to which all absolute questions of development and of "meaning" - of transcendental-teleological [meaning] - all history belongs.

Absolutely regarded, each ego has its history, and it exists only as subject of one, of its history. And each communicative community of absolute egos, of absolute subjectivities - in full concretion, to which the constitution of the world belongs - has its "passive" and "active" history and exists only in this history. History is the great fact of absolute being; and the ultimate questions, the ultimate metaphysical and teleological questions, are one with the <questions> concerning the absolute meaning of history.