The Factors of Life 127PART II : PRACTICE
The Reality of FreedomCHAPTER 8
THE FACTORS OF LIFE
Let us recapitulate what we have gained through the pre-
vious chapters. The world comes to meet me as a multi-
plicity, a sum of separate details. As a human being, I am
myself one of these details, an entity among other entities.
We call this form of the world simplythe given and—in-
sofar as we do not develop it through conscious activity
but find it ready-made—we call itpercept. Within the
world of percepts, we perceive ourselves. But if something
did not emerge out of this self-percept that proved capable
of linking both percepts in general and also the sum of all
other percepts with the percept of our self, our self-percept
would remain simply one among many. This emerging
something, however, is no longer a mere percept; nor is it,
like percepts, simply present. It is produced through activ-
ity and initially appears linked to what we perceive as our
self, but its inner meaning reaches beyond the self. It adds
conceptual determinates to individual percepts, but these
conceptual determinates relate to one another and are
grounded in a whole. It determines conceptually what is