In all phenomena of this kind, what I have is such an intimate possession of mine that in a sense coincides with what I am. Or vice versa, my own being is nothing but my belonging to the soil of the common being; And although this belonging is not my dissolution and disappearance in this soil, but, on the contrary, is the source of all the positivity of my own being as an individual being, yet by virtue of it my individuality is not isolation and isolation, but precisely participation in the common soil. Distinguishing "myself" from what I "have" (or what "has" me), I here at the same time possess everything that is beyond me in the way that it is in me or that I am in it.

5. REALITY AS AN ALL-EMBRACING FULLNESS AND AS THE BASIS OF OBJECTIVE REALITY

In order to understand the primacy and fundamentality of this moment of transcending, of being beyond oneself, it is also useful to note how deeply it lies at the very root of what I call my self—in other words, to what extent going beyond my self and being within it or possessing it are ultimately of the same nature.

The popular view sees in what we call the "I" the sphere of pure immanence, a reality which is actually actual in its entirety immediately present in experience, and sees precisely in this its fundamental difference from everything else, from the "not-I," which is already something transcendental, only somehow indirectly attained by me or accessible to me. Descartes's thought, expressed in the formula "cogito ergo sum," is based on this view, as is the conviction in general of the immediate evidence of the attitude of subjective idealism and of the difficulty of overcoming it and substantiating realism. But however paradoxical it may seem at first glance, this view is a pure illusion. The fact is that what we call "I" – the self-existence of the subject – in the strict sense of the word is not pure immanence at all, i.e., it is not actually present in experience in its fullness. For by "I" we mean the time-encompassing unity of the person, a kind of carrier of reality, who resides throughout the entire temporal course of our life, embracing the past, present, and future; Without a unity that encompasses the flow of time from the past through the present to the future, the "I" is inconceivable. But of all this stream, only the moment of the present is a truly immanent, actually present reality; The past and the future are equally absent, non-given, actual, transcendental. If we want to confine ourselves only to the truly immanent, self-given being, we must recognize as such only the moment of the present. We should not profess subjective idealism or "solipsism," but only "momentanism." But this is a manifest reductio ad absurdum[11] of this whole train of thought; for the moment of the present, being nothing but the ideal boundary between the past and the future, is inconceivable except in connection with the latter. The moment of the present, being the boundary between that which is no longer there and that which is not yet, could not be itself, since we want to exclude the past and the future entirely from thought and ascribe to this "no" an absolute meaning; By this we would be reduced to the obviously absurd proposition: "there is nothing." From this it is evident that the ostensibly immanent being of the "I" itself is constituted by the moment of transcending, namely, transcending into the past and the future, by the moment of direct possession of transcendental pure experience. My "I am" itself is nothing but a transcendence of the actual, in fact immediately present being: I "am" only because I have something remote from the actual being of the present moment—I cannot even say "my actual being," for without having something else, I would not be myself, and therefore could not call anything "mine."

But if this is so, if the very moment of "I" and "mine" is first constituted by transcendence, then it has no priority over the moment of "not-I"; "subjective idealism" can in no way justify its claim to a greater evidence than that inherent in realism. Let us return once more to the train of thought that has just been developed. What we have in this ultimate minimum of truly immanent being, in the moment of the present, can no longer be defined as "my representation," "my idea," for, as has just been pointed out, with the negation of the past and the future, the "I" disappears, and with it all sense of the concept of "mine." This minimum would henceforth have an entirely different quality from the being of the subject; it would be a neutral "something," and instead of the cogito ergo sum, the starting point, the truly immanent point would be only "aliquid (hic et nunc) est":12 This "aliquid" would be neither subjective nor objective, but a completely neutral being in general, devoid of any definition of its specific sphere. But since, as we have seen, the moment is inconceivable except in the form of a boundary between the past and the future, i.e., in an indissoluble connection with them, this past and future could not be "mine" either, but would be the past and the future in general, i.e., the entire boundless all-embracing fullness of time. This means that with the very immediacy described by the immediacy of transcending, of possessing the beyond, with which, in the person of my past and future, I have my "I," my own being, I also have the all-embracing fullness of being in general. In both cases, in both dimensions of being, the beyond, which is absent in immanent experience, is in our immediate possession, is no less self-evident than the "immanent." (This was first pointed out by one of the most ancient thinkers, Parmenides: "See how the absent is still firmly present for the mind.")

Transcending, the constitutive "I" or "self-consciousness," is by its very nature limitless, knows no limit or barrier. The very transcendence on which the being of my "I" rests at the same time gives in another dimension an indissoluble connection between my "I" and "not-I". To have self-consciousness – to have oneself as "I" – means to be aware of oneself as a participant in infinite, all-embracing being, and thus one's connection with a being beyond my "I." To be is to belong to the composition of an all-embracing being, to be rooted in it. "I am" and "something else is," sum and est, the being of the subject and the being of the object, are inseparably linked, for both flow at once from the primordial reality of pure esse or ens; [13] And this primordial reality itself is no longer "in me" or "outside of me" – or is at once both in me and outside of me – because I myself am in it. It is that all-embracing and all-pervading unity of being in general, participation in which constitutes all particular beings, both in the form of sum (being-for-itself, the being of the subject) and in the form of est (objective being-for-me).

This, by the way, solves the fundamental riddle of the theory of knowledge, which has tormented human thought at least since the time of Descartes and Locke (and, in fact, since the time of ancient skepticism). Its essence does not consist in what it is usually seen in. Its usual formulation: "How can the objectivity of our knowledge be proved, i.e., how do I know that my ideas catch some reality outside of me?" is based simply on the preconceived idea of consciousness as a closed sphere and expresses bewilderment as to how this sphere can still catch what is outside of it. As soon as we abandon this preconceived and false conception and realize that consciousness is rather like a source of light emitting rays outwards and illuminating what is outside it (as established in the "intuitionism" of Lossky and in the English "critical realism" of Hobhouse, Moore, and Alexander), the riddle is solved by simply being removed: the knower has the knowable not within himself, but in front of himself. and what he sees is not himself, but a reality external to him.

But both this formulation and this solution of the riddle presuppose the very concept of "objective reality"; The composition of this concept includes not only the attribute of being outside of me, but also the much more essential attribute of being independent of me: "objectively" is that which is there and when I do not perceive it, and my consciousness is not at all directed towards it. But how do I know this, and how is such an idea possible at all? If to know is to perceive, to see, to have through the medium of consciousness directed towards an object, or, in other words, to be objectively is to open oneself to the cognitive eye, then this idea presupposes something impossible: to know that there is something there and when where and when I do not perceive it, one would have to have some magical faculty of seeing without looking.

How and how do I know, for example, that what is behind me, behind the back of my head, continues to exist when I do not see it? Where does our certainty come from in the first place that objective reality is that coherent, lawful, stable whole, which we never see as such, because what we really see are only fragmentary shapeless parts of it, changing with every turn of the eye or head? It would be easy to show, and Hume did, that we cannot arrive at this idea of an objective reality independent of us by any indirect inferences, for they all presuppose it and rely on it. If "objective reality" were a primary, irreducible self-affirmed being, if we had no other connection with it than the cognitive gaze directed at it, then it would be an idea not only unprovable, but simply inaccessible to us.

But we have just such a connection. This is not an indirect connection through the medium of knowing, outwardly directed consciousness, but a completely direct connection through participation in primary being, in the all-embracing and all-pervading unity of primary reality outlined above. Since I have my own inner being from the very beginning as a part and element of all-embracing being in general, I know with primary evidence of the existence of that which I do not perceive, that which is beyond the (spatial and temporal) limits of what I perceive. I do not know what exactly is there and when, where and when I do not see it, but I know with certainty that there and then there is something at all, something unknown to me. I have with absolute certainty what is not given to me, what is not revealed to me in perceiving experience. The very possibility of "objective reality" as something existing independent of me (i.e., of my cognitive eye) is constituted by its belonging to that all-embracing primary reality which permeates my own being and constitutes its being. We are united with this objective reality through the subterranean layer of this primary reality. And only through the medium of this primordial ontological connection does our derivative cognitive relation to the objective reality external to us become possible. [15]

We can easily grasp the source of this unifying, binding function of primary reality, by virtue of which the knowing subject can reach his object at all (or know that what he has achieved and perceived has a truly objective being independent of the subject). This source is the supertemporal unity of reality. If being in time were the only form of being available to us at all, then we could have no guarantee that something exists at the moment when we do not perceive it, i.e., that the being of an object can last beyond its perception, which means that we would not have the very concept of objective being. We have it only because we know that every temporal being, both ours and what is external to us, takes place against the background of the all-embracing super-temporal unity of being. By virtue of the self-evident existence of this super-temporal unity of being, the concept of "emptiness" and "non-being" in the absolute sense becomes impossible; beyond everything that our cognitive gaze reaches at any given moment, there is an unshakably eternal fullness of positive content; Therefore, if any particular content has disappeared in time, it is possible only in the form that it has been replaced by some other positive content.

But what is before us as objective reality is in itself subject to time, takes place in time, and consists of temporal processes. If, as we have just seen, we are conscious of it against the background of a super-temporal unity, outside of which the very concept of objective being in general would be inaccessible and unrealizable to us, then this super-temporality, so to speak, is granted to it by the primary reality from which it grows. This coincides with the correlation explained above (1) that beyond objective reality, that which exists, i.e., exists in time, there is also ideal being, that which is super-temporal, once and for all, regardless of whether it occurs in objective reality and when and where it occurs in it. This ideal being is, at the same time, as has been pointed out, a being in which thought and thought coincide. In other words, it is precisely the unity of reality that unites the subject with the object. Ideal being is not simply a self-sufficient being of abstract, timeless contents, it is not a separate "world of ideas"; As has already been pointed out, it is conceivable only as if it were as part of an all-embracing consciousness or thought. This super-temporal unity is not an abstraction or an impersonal, dead storehouse of contents that enter into the composition of objective reality; it is the concrete fullness of living reality, the unity of the subject and the object of thought – the living source from which our "I" and everything that confronts it and surrounds it as "not-I", as objective reality, is drawn. And it is in this capacity that reality forms an indissoluble link between my "I" and reality. As such a unity between subject and object, knower and known, a unity that transcends both, reality is that which reveals to us the very concept of being in its primary sense. Reality is that primary general atmosphere, immersion in which and belonging to which makes any content existing, gives it the character of objectivity (in the broad sense of the word). Objectivity is nothing but rootedness in reality. And on the other hand, the "I" as the subject of cognition is itself only a particular manifestation of that moment of all-embracing reality by virtue of which it knows itself—a particular revelation of a certain all-embracing universal spiritual "eye."

From what has been said, it is clear how wrong is the basic idea of any individualism (represented, for example, in Heidegger's existentialism) –

As for the first attitude, it is comparable in its absurdity to the statement that "to stand on your own feet" means to have ground for your feet "on which" you stand. Just as to stand on one's own feet means to lean with them on the ground that is outside of them, so to have an "inner being" means to have through it the support of one's being in that primordial reality which transcends only the inner being and connects me from within with all that exists. To be conscious of oneself as a reality distinct from the world of external, objective reality is nothing else than to be aware of one's immediate, inner rootedness in the all-embracing primary reality.