Page 134 - Eclipse of God

God and the Spirit of Man 107

or rapture which occasionally became His first name— as a
Something, a thing among things, a being among beings, an It.
The beginning of philosophizing means that this Some-
thing changes from an object of imagination, wishes, and feel-
ings to one that is conceptually comprehensible, to an object
of thought. It does not matter whether this object of thought
is called “Speech” (Logos), because in all and each one hears
it speak, answer, and directly address one, or “the Unlimited”
(Apeiron), because it has already leapt over every limit that one
may try to set for it, or simply “Being,” or whatever. If the liv-
ing quality of the conception of God refuses to enter into this
conceptual image, it is tolerated alongside of it, usually in an
unprecise form, as in the end identical with it or at least essen-
tially dependent on it. Or it is depreciated as an unsatisfactory
surrogate for the help of men incapable of thought.
In the progress of its philosophizing the human spirit is
ever more inclined to fuse characteristically this conception,
of the Absolute as object of an adequate thought, with itself,
the human spirit. In the course of this process, the idea which
was at first noetically contemplated finally becomes the po-
tentiality of the spirit itself that thinks it, and it attains on the
way of the spirit its actuality. The subject, which appeared to be
attached to being in order to perform for it the service of con-
templation, asserts that it itself produced and produces being.
Until, finally, all that is over against us, everything that accosts
us and takes possession of us, all partnership of existence, is
dissolved in free- floating subjectivity.
The next step already takes us to the stage familiar to us, the
stage that understands itself as the final one and plays with its
finality: the human spirit, which adjudges to itself mastery over
its work, annihilates conceptually the absoluteness of the ab-
solute. It may yet imagine that it, the spirit, still remains there
as bearer of all things and coiner of all values; in truth, it has