[p. 205]
|205| impression on me. This is theoretical consciousness. Whether it behaves as perceiving or as imagination or as thinking, its content is always one already given and present, and in thinking what is in itself is its content. 2. On the other hand, the I appears as practical consciousness when the determinations of the I are to be not only determinations of its representing and thinking, but are to enter into external existence. Here I determine things or am the cause of alterations of the given objects.
§ 4
The practical faculty determines itself in general inwardly, from itself. The content of its determinations belongs to it, and it cognizes them as its own. – These determinations are, however, at first only inward and therefore separated from the reality of externality, but they are to become external and to realise themselves. This happens through acting, through which the inward practical determinations receive an externality, i.e. an external existence. – Conversely, this can also be considered in such a way that an existing externality is sublated and made to accord with the inward determination.
§ 5
The inward determination of practical consciousness is now itself either drive or will proper. The drive is a natural self-determining which rests on restricted feelings and has a restricted purpose beyond which it does not go, or it is the unfree, immediately determined, lower faculty of desire, according to which the human being behaves as a natural being. – Through reflection he also goes beyond the drive and its limits. Through it he compares it not only with the means of its satisfaction, but also these means as well as the drives themselves with one another and with the purposes of his essence, and with the conclusion of reflection he either abandons himself to the
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