Lecture II

The sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” is actually an absurdity similar to the first sentence, yet this sentence also points to something that must be recognized, that must be penetrated. Just as the sentence, “To know nature means to create nature,” points us to the first age of childhood, and actually to life before birth—if we extend it in the right way—so the sentence, “To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit,” leads us to the end of a person's life, to what kills the human being. You need only hold to this sentence in a paradoxical way—“To know the spirit means to destroy the spirit”—and you will find how one must not follow it but how it nevertheless exists in life as something continually being approached asymptotically.