cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

about the unity of Italy, and--in Europe's opposite corner we are eagerly occupied with the
Scandinavian Idea. Yes, such great power and significance lies in this idea of national
unity, this tendency towards unification of related national elements for the development
of common freedom and civilization, that it has even brought forth its grandiose
caricature--in Pan-Slavism!
Accordingly the historical process--like mechanical motion--allows itself to be
broken into two opposing equal powers, one repulsive and one attractive. Separately
these powers are simply abstractions; the one without the other would lead to absurdities,
atomistic dismemberment or characterless amalgamation. Therefore, since in reality they
are inseparably bound together, they limit each other mutually, and therefore could
actually only create concrete units. Even though it is difficult to say where the actual
border stands for the firmest and most concrete political unity, which we call a state, it is
still certain that there is such a border. Yet with this the process of organization does not
stop, but continues inwards to create municipalities, outward associations of peoples or
confederations. Since outwardly also wider and wider circles exist, which are defined by
a continually more abstract sense of community. Indeed, this as been expressed already
in the French historians' aforementioned discovery of the German-Scandinavian tribal
unity in opposition to the romantic, just as both these tribes, like historical peoples
especially, let themselves be construed as a unity in opposition to the Slavs.
Now it is a general law in history, that everything which is in a thought, that is to
say not in a loose, subjective thought, which can occur once to someone or other, but in a
real thought, given by history itself, strives also to realize itself, to assume gradually a
firmer outline. This is basically only a definition of freedom's striving, which aims at
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