(9) “The self, as subject of intuition, must be opposed to the object thereof, and so distinguished ab initio from the not-self. In this inquiry we clearly have no fixed point, and are revolving endlessly in a circle, unless intuition, in itself and as such, is first stabilized. Only then can we determine how both self and not-self are related to it.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 206.
(10) “Intuition as such is to be stabilized, so that we can conceive it as one and the same. But intuition as such is in no way stable, consisting, rather, in a wavering of the imagination between conflicting directions. That it should be stabilized, is to say that imagination should waver no longer, with the result that intuition would be utterly abolished and destroyed. Yet this must not happen; so that in intuition there must at least remain the product of this state, a trace of the opposed directions, consisting of neither but containing something of both.” Ibid., 206–207.
The Self
The only fixed constant in this continuous stream is the perspective upon these processes, which is always anchored in the position of the “self”. The self is a crutch that supports our perception, a construction in permanent transformation but not perceived as such.(9)
We see ourselves rather as a unity, a constant being with a certain stability. The continuous change of our world and therewith ourselves is widely ignored through mechanisms of exclusion and biases in perception. We are “here”, stable, and (almost) immutable, while everything changes out there. But exactly this ignorance, this demarcation between us and the world enables us to think of something like “material” in the first place. Material emerges in the moment when the “self” conceives itself as something separate, when a break is made and suddenly there is an opposite, an “other”. Even when—following the definition of “emergence through usage”—the self is itself also material and thereby cannot be differentiated, the illusion of an outside position is needed, at least for a moment, to make usage and therewith material as such recognizable.(10)
