My abstract I
My Original Problem
An individual unity of universal and particular may be called the concrete universal. The personal concrete universal, i.e. the unity of the perspectival "I" and its circumstantial world, which includes the social world, may be denominated the phenomenal self. I speak of my "I" habitually, as if "I" were a powerful, active unity of apperception psychologically constituting “my” relation to the world. That whole self is "my" mind-and-body-world. My self-conscious "I" really has nothing to be conscious of without a world hence in itself it is not really an objective unity, but is nothing but pure being, or, rather, nothing self-perceptible. It is a convenient fiction, when defined, fabricated from a longing-to-be, the particular will-to-endure which sets "me," as a concrete universal, apart from, and in relation to, the multiplicity of the world that is, for example, inadequately represented by me. My "I" as a subject is a universal derived from the particulars of perception while standing against them, whereby the "self" partially perceived is the whole self.
Art Credit: Darwin Leon
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