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This means that what is commonly recognized to be true of human beings (as well as any other beings having distinctively moral freedom) – -- namely, that they can become themselves only through themselves and that, therefore, the most that God can do is to present them with the real possibility, in fact as well as in principle, of authentic existence – -- is just as true, in a generalized sense, of all (concretely real) beings. Distinctively moral freedom, in other words, is a special case of the metaphysical freedom to make what is up to then only more or less indeterminately possible into something determinately actual. It is that special case, namely, in which self-creation is mediated by understanding, and thus is, in the first instance, self-understanding.

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