[563] In contrast to this, the idea became predominant that the individual who did something against the laws of his own being and the being of the group, is responsible for it and therefore must expiate his own guilt. And you remember the other development to which I referred was the development of questioning. Asking the question means separating oneself from the unity with the universe. The universal we-consciousness^a is dissolved by the human act of asking a question about that with which one felt identical before. Now this identity is cut off. We have considered, then, the consequences of this development in terms of the

ideal [idea?] of personality^b. Now we go back to the state out of which this came, which one can call primitive collectivism, or original we-consciousness^c preceding the ego-consciousness. Collectivism is in the beginning, and there is a tendency towards returning to collectivism as long as the human race has a historical memory. It is just as in Freud'^ds analysis of living beings of a higher degree who have a tendency to return to the lower degrees out of which they come, because in these lower degrees the problems of the higher degrees do not

yet exist. Freud^e's doctrine of death-instinct in man is nothing but an expression of this tendency to go down again to the non-responsible situation of animal existence, or even to the non-conscious existence of vegetative or inorganic existence. In the same way, Kierkegaard^f describes the desire of man to get rid of himself as the phenomenon of despair, because the problem of man, his being a combination of finitude and