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which has a power-of-being^a independently of the act of creation, which has an impact on other people which can be acknowledged, at least sometimes, by the community^b of those who are under its impact. That is what I meant when I spoke of the power-of independent- being. Take another example from the practical realm, e.g., a political movement^c. Many political movements are going on in [our] time--the witness to this is my wastepaper basket! -- These political movements, which are immediately thrown into this most important tool of existence [laughter], have no independent power-of-being^d, they don’t reach the state of independent cultural realities. But sometimes it happens that out of such a movement, something comes out which changes the surface of the earth, as for instance the Nazi ^emovement, the Communist ^fmovement, and, in earlier periods, the democratic ^gmovement. Now this is, then, a cultural reality which has the power of independent existence, born out of the chaotic social situation on the one hand, and a creative^h political subject on the other hand. Out of this kind of encountersⁱ, all culture ^jis created. That is what I meant and I hope this answered the question. I said that the first and most important and all-permeating cultural creation is language^k, because language has the power of liberating man from the bondage to the given in time and space. He can transcend it, he can produce abstractions, universals^l, and language lives in universals and their connections. Nothing is more astonishing than this power of the human mind^m to see and to create universals. This power is language. And therefore I said the first section of our lectures, with which we shall start next week, will be the problem: "Religion and Language." I come now to the activity of man towards reality in his encounter with it, which we can call the transformation of reality, the transforming or technical functionⁿ of the human mind. Language ^omakes it possible that man produces tools. There are very interesting experiments about the way in which animals, especially higher apes, use tools. If you take their food away from them, and give them a stick, they use the stick to get the food. But they don’t produce a tool as a tool, and here the most important word is the word "as." Man produces tools as tools, and therefore he has been defined, rightly--at least in ONE of his functions--as homo faber, "he who fabricates," the man who is able to fabricate tools, and