Beilage XVII: Reflection on the Relationship Between the Second, Psychological, and the Third, Socio-Cultural Scientific Way <To Pure Consciousness. The Understanding of Spiritual Motivation and of Motivational Nexuses of Individual Spirits.>

(approximately 1910)

[Excerpts]

...[92]

"I now posit human beings, and naturally through interpretation. Other I's are I's like I myself and subjects of their cogitationes and they have over and against them a world (the same world) and they have their living body as field of location of their sensations and sensuous feelings or drives as well as organ of their will. To this I as subject of their cogitationes, I am myself directed in my cogitationes, and indeed in acts of my position-taking, of love, of suffering along etc. in acts of communication and acts made possible by communication (presupposing such), of command etc. In the same way there belong to the other I-subjects (I am motivated in interpretation in such a way that I precisely must interpret them) a condition similar to their socii and cogitationes related to me. The relations - life-relations - which are produced between all spiritual subjects by these acts, are expressed by the fact that every I, every `spirit' knows itself as member of a `spiritual' world and at the same time knows itself as subject of a thing-world standing over and against him. The other spirits are thereby to me completely different than things. The things are over and against me as affairs, the spirits are over and against me as spoken to or as speaking, as beloved or as loving me etc. I do not live in isolation, with them a live a common life , a unitary life in spite of everything that is special about subjectivities. The things are unliving and they achieve spirituality only as valued, worked etc., and they achieve in this respect further common-spiritual meaning as commonly valued or to be valued, to be worked in common, as serviceable for common action etc. Thus I can take the things as affairs, but I can also take them as substrates of spiritual acts, as that which they signify for spirits, as that which the spirits endow with significance. I can take them exclusively in such a way that I am conscious of them as correlates of social consciousness, with the socially positive and negative position-takings (perhaps also abstinence from position-taking), affections. All such belongs to the spirit world. The spirit-world is a world of spirits, that is a unitary, common-spiritual life of single spirits. But the I is only possible as an I related to something, and all egoity or spirituality is related to the not-I, to the nonspiritual, but in the manner that it is a correlate of the spirit, in the way in which it is something posited and valued etc. by the I as not-I, [and] has itself a spirituality-character: the nonspiritual is a modus that essentially belongs to spirituality, precisely as a correlate.

...

"In what sense does `nature' belong in the spirit-sphere? Apparently at first as the nature of which we speak when we take a walk in nature, of which we speak when we refer to a joy in nature etc., with respect to which no one will think of nature in the sense of natural science."