The Cryptomorphic Self: A Reappraisal of Gustav Teichmüller’s Concept of “Selbstheit”
In the silent catacombs of neglected thought lies the prodigious corpus of Gustav Teichmüller (1832–1888), a thinker whose resonance with the deep organ-tones of metaphysical inquiry far exceeded the echo-chambers of his contemporaries. Though oft remembered for his ambitious vision of an ‘individualistic idealism,’ it is within a seemingly minor conceptual cornerstone—his notion of “Selbstheit”—that one finds a labyrinthine subtlety worthy of rigorous reevaluation. The significance of this term, frequently glossed as mere selfhood, transcends its conventional usage and unearths a forgotten fissure between the metaphysical and psychological substrata of personhood.
It is therefore imperative to approach Teichmüller not as a mere footnote to Kant or Fichte, but as a thinker who dared to reconfigure the architecture of phenomenological selfhood into a dynamic, morphogenetic operation—one in which the self, or Selbstheit, is not a given, but a cultivated ontology. It is the aim of this article to exhume the cryptomorphic subtleties of this term, and to show that, far from employing it as a linguistic convenience, Teichmüller places Selbstheit at the very fulcrum of his metaphysical edifice.
Teichmüller’s use of the term emerges most pointedly in his magnum opus, _Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt_ (The Real and the Apparent World), wherein he contends that true reality (_Wirklichkeit_) must repose in independent centres of consciousness—what he terms the “Selbstheiten.” Critics have oft mistaken this for a psychic atomism or proto-Leibnizian monadology, yet to collapse Selbstheit into the monadic betrays a deep misreading of its construction. Unlike the self-enclosed, windowless monad, the Selbstheit in Teichmüller is not inert or pre-given, but oscillatory—a locus of dynamic becoming that both constitutes and is constituted by its epistemic horizon.
It is in this recursive function between noumenon and phenomenon that Teichmüller’s genius emerges: the Selbstheit is not a vessel into which contents are poured, but a crucible that performs a transformative function. In short, to be is to enact; Selbstheit is thus not _selfhood_, but _selfing_, an act of ontic interrogation and construction. He writes:
> “Nicht aus einem gegebenen Ich, sondern aus dem Akte der Selbstbeobachtung konstituiert sich das Selbst. Jedes wirkliche Selbst ist Schöpfer seiner eigenen Form.” — Teichmüller, _Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt_, p. 173.
[Translation: “Not from a given I, but from the act of self-observation does the self constitute itself. Every real self is creator of its own form.”]
This passage, oft cited and poorly interpreted, carries philosophical dynamite beneath its grammatical placidity. The particularity of the term “Schöpfer” (creator) ties Selbstheit not to theological analogy but to a phenomenological artisanry: the self emerges through grotesque agency, cast as subject and sculptor simultaneously. There is resonance here with Schelling’s notion of identity as a dynamic product of oppositional logic, but Teichmüller’s turn is more radical: he expels any grounding in the Absolute and instead grounds the ground in the processual sovereignty of the Selbstheit itself.
To fully appreciate this maneuver, we must contrast Teichmüller’s Selbstheit with the Cartesian cogito. Whereas Descartes begins with doubt and arrives at certainty—“I think, therefore I am”—Teichmüller inverts this sequence. The Selbstheit is not epistemologically primary, but ontologically emergent through the act of observation of itself. What emerges is not the security of existence, but the groundlessness of becoming. The “therefore I am” becomes an ongoing performance, an ecstatic unfolding.^1
Several implications unravel from this reconception. Firstly, identity is not stable nor even desirable; it is metastable, operating in a kind of epistemic fluid dynamically recalibrated with each act of introspective cognition. In Teichmüller’s schema, human agency thus becomes an exegesis of oneself, the hermeneutical labor of bringing forth a coherent life-world from a background of diffuse potentiality.
Secondly, it challenges the strict dualities of subject and object. Teichmüller denies the clean partition of the Kantian system, wherein the noumenal lies behind an untraversable veil. Rather, the Selbstheit draws the real into itself through a teleological aspiration. “Our reality is constructed from appearances,” he remarks, “but it is a construction that points to a deeper substratum—a kind of metaphysical echo concealed within phenomena.”^2 Thus, the self interprets not appearances per se, but the resonances they trigger within the ontic depths of Selbstheit.
One cannot help but hear premonitory chords of Bergson’s _durée_ or even Heidegger’s _Dasein_ in these explorations, though Teichmüller arrives at such positions with neither their vocabulary nor methodology. His is a 19th-century vocabulary rife with the moralistic timbre of Protestant metaphysics, yet within this tongue he sings a proto-processualism far more agile and less beholden to scholastic constraints.
Indeed, the tragic beauty of Teichmüller’s Selbstheit lies precisely in its isolation. Each self is irreducibly individual—not through possessive uniqueness, but through structural solitude. There is no participation in a divine nous nor surrender to an impersonal Absolute; each Selbstheit is a world unto itself, and the task of life is to harmonize that world with the chorus of existence. It is no coincidence that Teichmüller viewed ethics and metaphysics as inseparable: the construction of self is not merely ontological, but moral. To live authentically is to sculpt one’s Selbstheit in accordance with its highest potential.
That this conception fell into obscurity perhaps says less about its merit than about the inertia of academic canons content with the reproduction of Cartesian, Kantian, and Hegelian formulas. Yet in an age where questions of selfhood are threatened by their reduction to neurological ciphers or digital simulations, Teichmüller’s ontogenic vision offers a defiant salve. It does not ask “what is the self?” but insists we ask “how is the self crafted?”
Teichmüller’s cryptomorphic vision of selfhood—a vision buried in older modes of expression, yet radically contemporary in implication—compels us to reconsider the operative architectures of identity. The Selbstheit stands not as patron saint of egotism, but as the haunted cathedral through which personhood must pass, always under construction, always arriving, never fully revealed.
As modernity accelerates the erosion of inner life into the sediment of algorithmic identity, the thought of Gustav Teichmüller demands remembrance—not as antiquary, but as prophet. Amid the deluge of soothe-sayers and mechanists, he stands alone beneath the stars, chisel in hand, etching the contours of a self not yet born.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
identity, metaphysics, German idealism, proto-existentialism, introspection, Teichmüller, selfhood
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^1 For a nuanced comparison between Teichmüller and Cartesian foundationalism, see Kerslake, Damian, _The Self and Modern Metaphysics_, Routledge, 2010. Particularly Chapter 3, “Reversals of the Cogito.”
^2 Teichmüller, Gustav. _Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt_, Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag, 1882. p. 221.
^3 On the ethical ramifications of Teichmüller’s metaphysical individualism, see von Richter, Adelheid. _Ethik und Selbstheit bei Gustav Teichmüller_, Heidelberg, 1923.