THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF PERSONAL BECOMING

I Personal development has two broad phases: first is that of infancy, childhood, and adolescence; second is that of our continuing development as adults. Without excluding former, I wish to concentrate upon latter in order to describe what I will argue is a spiritual form of life in individual human being. Becoming in order of human personhood arises out of a dynamic source that is not easy to name with accuracy. It has been called psyche, or subjectivity, or personality, and sometimes the human though latter term often remains rather too vague for philosophical purposes. Aristotle has said that fruits of understanding come with getting name right. What, then, is proper name with which to designate dynamic principle at center of movement of life that is appropriate to human person? Hegel insisted that answer to such a question required an adequate concept of (Geist), though he extended notion of to what he called Absolute. Under rubric of he sought to integrate what he took to be restriction of ancient philosophy with what he took to be contribution of modern philosophy. He thought that ancient philosophy had understood being as objectivity, while modern philosophy had given primacy to consciousness as subjectivity. My aim is more modest and more traditional, but not less difficult: Is it possible that contemporary philosophies stand in need of a more or less traditional metaphysical concept of spirit? Is it possible that a closer look at such a notion might contribute to what I sense is a growing tendency to understand human reality less mechanistically and less materialistically? When we speak of spirit, however, a certain ambiguity comes to fore, an ambiguity that needs to be clarified before my present project can get off ground. There is first memory of long Latin metaphysical tradition of spiritus, and second, newer German postmetaphysical tradition of Geist. The terms are by no means identical, even though translators think themselves forced to treat them as equivalent. In fact, however, two terms draw about themselves curtains of differing connotation, including different resonances of meaning and assonances of sound. For that reason they function in semantically different ways. To be sure, both indicate an internal dynamic and both secure a certain unity, but terminus of their efficacy is not same, nor is context within which they operate. At present, Germanic sense of spirit dominates those discussions in which notion of plays a role. It will serve a purpose, then, to compare Germanic with Latin sense, and even to see whether Latin notion has any relevance to a contemporary discussion of personal becoming. At center of technical use of spiritus in Latin philosophical traditions there is Greek heritage proclaimed by term eidos. The Greek is not incorrectly translated by, and thereby converted into, Latin term forma. Forma functions in traditional metaphysics as an immanent specifying principle; it is constituent factor within a complex entity that gives to entity a unity of a certain kind.(1) Geist, on other hand, tends to perform as a totality principle: it brings unity to an even wider context, to a system, horizon, or world. It is a kind of organizing form that brings diverse factors into a complex and more or less internally related arrangement; in a word, Geist provides systemic configuration (Gestalt). To clarify ambiguity in use of two terms, it is fair enough to reduce consideration of Latin spiritus to principle of specificity, and to reduce German Geist to principle of totality.(2) In contrast to specific unity of a metaphysical composite, unity that results from dynamism of Geist is an organized totality. …