In meditation and through it, there necessarily occurs the "always still other," to prepare for which is the genuine task, but which would not find a site for the event if there were not a clearing for what is hidden. Philosophy as meditation on the self, in the way just indicated, can be carried out only as inceptual thinking of the other beginning.
This meditation on the self has put all "subjectivism" behind itself, even the one that most dangerously lies concealed in the cult of "personality." Where this latter is postulated and "genius" is correspondingly postulated in art, everything moves-despite assurances to the contrary-on the path of the modern conception of the "I" and of consciousness. Whether personality is understood as the unity of "spirit-soul-body," or whether this hodge-podge is reversed and, merely assertorically, the body is placed first, nothing changes with regard to the confused thinking which rules here and which evades t;'very question. The "spirit" is thereby always taken as "reason," as the faculty that makes possible the saying of "I." Here even Kant was further advanced than this biological liberalism. Kant saw that the person is more than the "I"; the person is grounded in self-lawgiving. Admittedly, even this remained Platonism.
Would one perhaps attempt to provide a biological foundation for the saying of "I"? If not, then the reversal just mentioned is mere trifling, which this way of thinking is, even without the reversal, because the concealed metaphysics of "body" and "sensibility," "soul" and "spirit," remains here presupposed and unquestioned.
Meditation on the self, as the grounding of selfhood, stands outside the theories just mentioned. Meditation on the self certainly knows that something essential is decided if the question of who we are is asked or if it is not only held off but is altogether denied as a question.
Unwillingness to ask this question signifies either a shrinking back from the questionable truth about the human being or a propagating of the conviction that who we are has been decided for all eternity.
If it has been so decided, then all experiences and accomplishments are carried out merely as an expression of a "self-certain life" and are therefore held to be organizable. In principle, there is no experience that could ever set humans beyond themselves into an untrodden domain from which the human being as hitherto understood could become questionable. This (namely, such self-certainty) is the innermost essence of "liberalism," which precisely for that reason can apparently unfold freely and can prescribe itself for the sake of achieving eternal progress. Accordingly, "worldview," "personality," "genius," and "culture" are endowments and "values" which are to be made actual in this or that way.