But the I that steps out of the relational event into separation and consciousness of separation, does not lose its reality. Its sharing is preserved in it in a living way. In other words, as is said of the supreme relation and may be used of all, “the seed remains in it”. This is the province of subjectivity in which the I is aware with a single awareness of its solidarity of connexion and of its separation. Genuine subjectivity can only be dynamically understood, as the swinging of the I in its lonely truth. Here, too, is the place where the desire is formed and heightened for ever higher, more unconditioned relation, for the full sharing in being. In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures.
The person becomes conscious of himself as sharing in being, as co-existing, and thus as being. Individuality becomes conscious of itself as being such-and-such and nothing else. The person says, “I am”, the individual says, “I am such-and-such”. “Know thyself”, means for the person “know thyself to have being”, for the individual it means “know thy particular kind of being”. Individuality in differentiating itself from others is rendered remote from true being.
We do not mean by this that the person in any way “gives up” his special being, his being different—obly that this being is not his observation-point, but simply there, the necessary and significant conception of being. Individuality, on the other hand, revels in its special being or, rather, mostly in the fiction of its special being which it has made up for itself. For to know itself means basically for it (for the most part) to establish an authoritative apparent self, capable of deceiving it ever more and more fundamentally, and to procure for itself, in looking to and honouring this apparent self, the semblance of knowledge of its own being as it really is. Real knowledge of its being would lead it to self-destruction-—or to rebirth.
The person looks on his Self, individuality is concerned with its My—my kind, my race, my creation, my genius.
Individuality neither shares in nor obtains any reality. It differentiates itself from the other, and seeks through experiencing and using to appropriate as much of it as it can. This is is dynamic, self-differentiation and appropriation, each exercised on the It within the unreal. The subject, as it thinks itself to be, may make as much as it likes into its own; in virtue of this it acquires no substance, but remains a functional point, experiencing and using, no more. None of its extensive and manifold defined being and none of its zealous “individuality” can help it to win substance.
There are not two kinds of man, but two poles of humanity.
No man is pure person and no man pure individuality. None is wholly real, and none wholly unreal. Every man lives in the twofold I. But there are men so defined by person that they may be called persons, and men so defined by individuality that they may be called individuals. True history is decided in the field between these two poles.
The more a man, humanity, is mastered by individuality, the deeper does the I sink into unreality. In such times the person in man and in humanity leads a hidden subterranean and as it were cancelled existence—till it is recalled.