[563] In contrast to this, the idea became predominant that the individual who did something against the laws^a 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^b 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^c. Now we go back to the state out of which this came, which one can call primitive collectivism, or original we-consciousness^d 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'^es 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^f'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^g 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