Communion of saints

THE PRIMAL STATE AND COMMUNITY
links must in a certain sense be answered affirmatively, if the idea
of the I-Thou relation is not to be abandoned. On the other
hand there is a danger that in trying to save the idea of an a-
social core of personal being we might be thinking atomistically.
A basic change of this kind would matter a great deal for our view
of the church.
The tragedy of all idealist philosophy was that it failed to
break through to personal spirit. But its tremendous merit (and
that of Hegel in particular) was its recognition that the principle
of spirit was something objective, reaching beyond everything
individual, and that there was an objective spirit, the spirit of
sociality, which was something in itself as opposed to all individual
spirit.
It is our task to affirm the one without denying the
other, to keep the insight without joining in the error.
That the personal unity is closed is attested by self-consciousness
and self-determination :
in both there is complete separation
from everything social, and both consist of introversive acts.
The
structural unity of the I is established as an experience in the
experience of the Thou ; it cannot be constituted by acts ; acts
rather presuppose it, and are directed towards it. We recall the
distinction of principle we have made between structure and
intention. 11 Here the basic synthesis between social and individual
being comes to light. The individual personal spirit lives
solely by virtue of sociality, and the 'social spirit' becomes real
only in individual embodiment. Thus genuine sociality leads to
personal unity. One cannot speak of the priority either of personal
or of social being. We must hold firmly to the fact that
alongside those acts which are real only in sociality there are also
purely introversive acts. It is clear that the latter are also
possible only in a person living in full sociality—than which there
is indeed no other kind of person. So far as experience is concerned
these acts isolate the I from the Thou completely; 12 but
on the other hand it is not the intimate act which constitutes the
person as structurally closed. Rather, no social intention is conceivable
without this structural closedness, just as no intimate act
is conceivable without the corresponding openness. On the other
hand, the social intention is directed towards openness of the
49