Mindful Releasing

Your personality is just a psycho-biological program

Ego: The Waking Dream

One has power and authority over these irrational animals because they are things. One can use them and lord over them as one pleases. The force of this power over the irrational animals, the free authority of this walten und schalten, is not posited by Kant as an attribute or consequence—one among others—of the person’s power to say ‘‘I.’’ Power over the animal is the essence of the ‘‘I’’ or the ‘‘person,’’ the essence of the human (this conforms, moreover, to the divine injunction that, from Genesis on, assigned to man such a destination, that of marking his authority over living creatures, which can be effected only through the infinitely elevated power of presenting himself as an ‘‘I,’’ of presenting himself and just that, of presenting himself to himself, by means of a form of presence to himself that accompanies every presentation and representation. This presence to oneself, this self of the presence to itself, this universal and singular ‘‘I’’ that is the condition for the response and thus for the responsibility of the subject—whether theoretical, practical, ethical, juridical, or political—is a power, a faculty that Kant is prudent or bold enough not to identify with the power to speak, the literal power of uttering ‘‘I.’’ This personal subject is capable of its selfness, is capable of doing it without saying it, if I can say so; it can affirm itself in its selfness and in its dignity, which is to say its responsibility, its power to respond, to answer for itself, before others and before the law, ‘‘even when he cannot yet say ‘I’.’’ He has this ‘‘I’’ in his thinking, and that defines thinking itself as what gathers itself, there where it remains the same, gathered and present to itself through this power of the I, through the I can of this I, this I can I as an ‘‘I think’’ that accompanies every representation. Even where the ipseity of the I cannot speak itself and utter itself as such in the word je, Ich, I, ego, it effects itself in every language, provided it is human.