Word Finder - ego

definition

The self, especially with a sense of self-importance.

definition

(Freudian) The most central part of the mind, which mediates with one's surroundings.

There is no reality beyond the ego itself.

The ego then posits itself as real.

What the ego posits is real.

It served no purpose to smash his magnificent ego.

How is this absolute ego to be conceived ?

If the ego be a striving power, then of necessity a limit must be set by which its striving is manifest.

Hence it is common nowadays to hold that there is indeed a difference between knower and known, ego and non-ego, subject and object, but that they are inseparable; or that all known things are objects and subjects inseparably connected in 239 experience.

Why crush his ego?

You're seventy-five percent testosterone and the other half is ego.

On only one point, the position assigned in the Wissenschaftslehre to the absolute ego, is there any obscurity; but the relative passages are far from decisive, and from the early work, Neue Darstellung der Wissenchaftslehre, unquestionably to be ins uded in the Jena period, one can see that from the outset the doctrine of the absolute ego was held in a form differing only in statement from the later theory.

As determined the ego is theoretical, as determining it is practical; ultimately the opposed principles must be united by showing how the ego is both determining and determined.

The contradiction can only be suppressed if the ego itself opposes to itself the non-ego, places it as an Anstoss or plane on which its own activity breaks and from which it is reflected.

But all this is the work of the ego.

The individual ego is only possible as opposed to a non-ego, to a world of the senses; thus God, the infinite will, manifests himself in the individual, and the individual has over against him the non-ego or thing.

Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will.

Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all.

Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant's Kritik, is the theor y on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego.

If things different but similar have the same attributes, and are thereby the same, then in the first place the Kantian categories, though thoughts of mental origin and therefore confined to mind, are nevertheless applicable to things, because things, though different from, are the same as, thoughts, and have the categories of thoughts; in the second place, the Fichtian Ego of mankind is not the Absolute Reason of God, and yet is the same Absolute Reason; in the third place, the Schellingian Nature is the "other " of Spirit, and yet, being a mere reflex of the Idea of Nature, is identical with Spirit; and as this Spirit is everywhere the same in God and men, Nature is also identical with our Spirit, or rather with the Infinite Spirit, or Absolute Reason, which alone exists.

He tells us how from his youth he pursued physical and psychological studies, how at the age of fifteen he read Kant's Prolegomena, and later rejected the thing in itself, and came to the conclusion that the world with his ego is one mass of sensations.

Avenarius (q.v.) is the hypothesis of the inseparability of subject and object, or, to use his own phraseology, of ego and environment, in purely empirical, or a posteriori form.

The consequence is that all the world admitted into his philosophy is what he called the " empirio-critical essential co-ordination " (empirio-kritische Prinzipialkoordination), an inseparable correlation of central part and counterpart, of ego and environment.

He concluded therefore that, having disposed of this fallacy of introjection, we ought to return to the view of reality as an essential co-ordination of ego and environment, of central part and counterpart, with R-values, C-values and E-values.

Its rejection of the whole relation of physical and psychical makes it almost too indefinite to classify among philosophical systems. But its main point is the essential co-ordination of ego and environment, as central part and counterpart, in experience.

As a human person, I am body and soul; and the idealistic identification of the Ego with soul or mind, involving the corollary that my body belongs to the non-Ego and is no part of myself, is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism.

We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes.

The ego posits itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it posits also the non-ego.

The two positions are to be conciliated in the thought of reciprocal limitation of the posited ego and non-ego.

As Fichte's Ego finds that its non-ego springs from and has its home within its very self, so with Hegel thought finds itself in its " other," both subsisting in the Idea which is both and neither.

In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (ThatHandlung) of the absolute ego.

The innermost character of that ego is an infinitude in act and effort.

Both these ideas derive from the original meaning of ego, myself, as opposed to everything which is outside myself.

In the true philosophical sense, however, the conception of the ego is still further narrowed down to the individual consciousness as opposed to all that is outside it, i.e.

A similar idea is prominent in many philosophico-religious systems wherein the idea of God or the Infinite is, as it were, the union of the ego and the non-ego, of subject and object.

In (1) apperception is almost equivalent to self-consciousness; the existence of the ego may be more or less prominent, but it is always involved.

In us this living power constitutes the ego, which is truly immaterial and immortal.

I have champed up all that chaff about the ego and the non-ego, noumena and phenomena, and all the rest of it, too often not to know that in attempting even to think of these questions, the human intellect flounders at once out of its depth."

Schleiermacher's psychology takes as its basis the phenomenal dualism of the ego and the non-ego, and regards the life of man as the interaction of these elements with their interpenetration as its infinite destination.

The ego is itself both body and soul - the conjunction of both constitutes it; our "organization" or sense nature has its intellectual element, and our "intellect" its organic element.

The one general function of the ego, thought, becomes in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies co-operate; and in relation to man, nature and the universe the ego gradually finds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, "every extension of consciousness being higher life."

The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect.

It is in those two functions that the real life of the ego is manifested, but behind them is self-consciousness permanently present, which is always both subjective and objective - consciousness of ourselves and of the non-ego.

And, therefore, finding on reflection any particular concrete factor contingent, we abstract the position from that which occupies it, and so reach the speculative notion of the pure Ego.

By her be was made hajiblord chamberlain, prime minister, great domestic, alter ego, in short, of the puppet caliphfor Hishgm II.

The consequences of the abstract separation which Kant so draws between the ego and the world of experience are apparent throughout his whole system.

To the end, the ego remains, partly the pure logical ego, partly the concrete individual spirit, and no explanation is afforded of the relation between them.

No attempt is made to show how or why the difference supplied for the pure logical ego should present itself necessarily under these forms. They are regarded rather as portions of the subjective mechanism of the individual consciousness.

The unity of the ego, which has been already noted as an element entering into the synthesis of cognition, is a unity of a quite distinct and peculiar kind.

That the ego to which different parts of experience are presented must be the same ego, if there is to be cognition at all, is analytically evident; but the peculiarity is that the ego must be conscious of its own unity and identity, and this unity of self-consciousness is only possible in relation to difference not contained in the ego but given to it.

The categories are restricted in their application to elements of possible experience to that which is presented in intuition, and all intuition is for the ego contingent.

Experience has presented itself as the complex result of relation between the ego or subject and the world of phenomena.