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824
Presidential Address
"Am I then the creator of the universe ? Is each of us the creator not merely of his world but of the universe ? To answer this question we must discriminate between the mere subject, the empirical ego or self, which if just the ordinary individual with a body, clothes, names, friends, social relations, the man that is distinct from other men and begins and ends in time, on the one hand and Spirit or the Subject or the Transcendental Ego on the other. Obviously the mere individual (myself as a mere ego among many others) is just only an object, a part of nature. But in so far as I know myself as an individual among many others, I am already something deeper than the self I know myself to be. My deeper ego is not the one I can describe and define, but it is my very describing and defining activity, the subject which never can be object just because it is the very condition of my thinking of objects at all; it is just this my thinking of objects. I can distinguish myself from others only by transcending myself and others, thus embracing within my unity all the differentiating particularities, which consequently appear to be mere objects like all other things and events. Similarly I can only be aware of changes in myself and in others if I am already something outside such changes, beyond time and space, above all distinctions of here and there, before and after. Our empirical personalities are real only as rooted in and unified by the Transcendental Ego, the Spirit, the Person that knows no plural.”
The distinction here drawn between Empirical ego and Transcendental ego has been long known
