THE SELF AND
TH
E 0 THE R
396
The animal is pure
alteraci6n.
It cannot take a stand within
itself. Hence when things cease to threaten it or caress it; when
they give it a holiday; in short, when the
other
ceases to move it
and manage it, the poor animal has virtually to cease to exist, that
is: it goes to sleep. Hence the enormous capacity for somnolence
which the animal exhibits, the infrahuman torpor which primitive
man continues in part; and, on the other hand, the increasing in–
somnia of civilized man, the almost permanent wakefulness, at times
terrible and uncontrollable, which afflicts men of an intense inner
life. Not many years ago, my great friend Scheler---one of the
most fertile minds of our time, a man whose life was an incessant
radiating of ideas-died from inability to sleep.
But of course-and with this we touch for the first time upon
something which will become apparent to us again and again at
almost every tum and winding of this course, if each time on a
deeper level and in virtue of more precise and effectual reasons
(those which I now give are neither )- of course these two things,
man's power of withdrawing himself from the world and his power
of taking his stand within himself are not gifts conferred upon man.
I must emphasize this for those of you who are concerned with
philosophy: they are not gifts conferred upon man.
Nothing that
is substantive has been conferred upon man.
He has to do it all
for himself.
Hence, if man enjoys this privilege of temporarily freeing him–
self from things and the power to enter into himself and there
rest, it is because by his effort, his toil, and his ideas he has suc–
ceeded in retrieving something from things, in transforming them,
and creating around himself a margin of security which is always
limited but always or almost always increasing. This specifically
human creation is technics. Thanks to it, and in proportion to its
progress, man can take his stand within himself. But, conversely,
man as a technician is able to modify his environment to his own
convenience, because, seizing every moment of rest which things
allow him, he uses it to enter into himself and form ideas about
this world, about these things and his relation to them, to form
a plan of attack against his circumstances, in short, to create an
inner world for himself. From this inner world he emerges and
returns to the outer, but he returns as protagonist, he returns with
