For Ravaisson there can be no identity without difference. Identity itself (as the being of the individual) is always a process of differentiation. A becoming-other occurs within the self. A continual juxtaposition, contrast or imbalance is always in operation. Subjectivity arises from and is produced from this intermediary play between self and other, between past and future, its previous way of being and its future potential becoming which always work through habit, the guarantor of this concept of subjectivity. The self or the individual is formed from and acts from this middle ground of neutrality, of identity. Ravaisson describes it as a milieu, a place of balance, non-opposition or betweenness and it is within this gap, this fluctuating movement between the desire for presence, the desire to be, from what has passed and gone that the individual exists. The subject constantly works and operates around this gap, this gap of what is lost, absent, past, and remembered and habitual and what is to come, what is new and unknown. The subject strives for as a fully actualised, complete self analogous to Absolute Identity's own ground but it's attainment is never really possible. True presence, balance and stillness can never fully occur for the self. Habit works through and as this primordial milieu or gap, between receptivity and spontaneity, passivity and activity, presence and absence and binds them together. Habit is the true relation of the subject as a mediated and mediational being. Habit is the work of the individual or self upon itself. For Ravaisson there can never be a subject without desire. Desire always works from lack, limit, and absence. The self feels this and strives to fill their lives, exist without imbalance or tension and attain full actualisation and presence. But this can never be achieved for the subject always functions between what is, or what was and what could be. Desire along with habit, always operates as a disequilibrium.
Schelling's individual also is struck by an inability to find 'the reconciling and mediating basis' of itself, of its original ground. In order to find it's true self and the place where it originated from as a natural product it turns towards that which is not itself. In doing so it takes a flight from the centre of Being, and it's being. It steps outside of itself and dies to a centre, an orginiary centre or primordial centrum that such particularity can never truly know. This centre of abyss that resists thought even as it is being thought is never fully present. It is a space that always slips away as thought tries to catch it. It remains a lost or masked concealed point, an indivisible remainder. This 'proteus of nature' (WS, 78) or the prototype of existence is formless. But it has to be conveyed by a symbol which for us can be nothing other than a circle, a silent centre, or zero-point which betrays pure space by determining it as something with form, shape and time. The subject intuits this originary point, this undifferentiated, formless, balanced milieu, or non-ground of it's own self, existence and world. Therefore negation is the process by which this formless no-thing, non-ground, is transformed into an external limit, into a spatial concept and into difference. This symbol encapsulates the contradictory presence of absence, it hints at the infinite depths of a boundless indeterminate origin yet cannot escape its ties to finitude, limitation and representation - it is the circle.
The individual rests on desire. Schelling's individual experiences the infinite lack of being that it is, which at the same time is not a sheer absence but rather an inability and impotence at laying claim and fully appropriating this other, which stands beyond it grasped intuitively as the indeterminacy of its own origin. We could argue that the subject is an inversion of the One, the other, the origin of nature and of us. What the individual lacks is a lack of desire for not accepting its own nothingness. Instead the individual wants to be something real and actual and fully present to itself, not composed of mediating relations between things, not in constant disequilibrium and tension. This is why 'our highest endevour is the destruction of our personality and crossing into the sphere of Being' (M, 127). We only fully gain ourselves when we recognize the emptiness, gap or void that lies between and beneath ourselves as ground for our very being. Only when one becomes nothing can one love, can one begin again. The elimination of ourselves as a discrete entity, vernichtigen, the return to our primordial essence brings us back full circle to our own being of nothing, our own nihility. Yet we can never completely be or return to nothing, it would end in our own annihilation through the stoppage of our own process of becoming. This sphere, circle or centrum is the evocation of a primordial site, an indeterminate open space that eternally and spontaneously disperses everything. These infinite folds cannot contain themselves, complicating, expanding and contracting outwards into the conceptual and known universe.
The process of the subject, its own constitution, can never be present-ed. It is always a self-othering between binary oppositions. The underlying nothing present in and through all things as the middle ground, milieu or gap is never fully transparent or realised as we are subject to the constant oscillatory movement or wavering fluctuation between self and other. In trying to name the void, whether it be zero, a circle, a centrum, milieu or indifference we change it and make it other than what it really is. But in ignoring it, glossing over it we mask, ignore and gloss over our very selves, our inner essence. Indifference only manifests itself in the process of differentiation. Indifference is our condition, our basis.
