Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant-state — i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defence, attack — one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is a definite will to receive impression; this we call orientation. But, besides, there exists from the beginning a will to produce impression in the other — what we call expression — and with that, at once, we have speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness. Since then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.
But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one's first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious connexion with him. The "thou" is deliverance from the fear of the being-alone. The discovery of the Thou, the sense of another self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals are. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and with it that of the I has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness, and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression-speech.
It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one's own feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech, art, depends.[1] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other's feeling of significances is the same as one's own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all
- ↑ Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get at it by way of analogy, it consists for them in rhythmic movement ("dance") and sound-formation ("song"). But this is by no means the limit of artistic impression on the animal itself.
