 Just as we are never directly aware of the original act of self-positing with which the system commences, so are we also unaware—except, of course, from the artificial standpoint of philosophical reflection—of each of these additional “necessary but unconscious” acts that are derived as conditions necessary for the possibility of the originally posited act of self-positing. Furthermore, though we must, due to the discursive character of reflection itself, distinguish each of these acts from the others that it is conditioned by and that are, in turn, conditioned by it, none of these individual acts actually occurs in isolation from all of the others. Transcendental philosophy is thus an effort to analyze what is in fact the single, synthetic act through which the I posits for itself both itself and its world, thereby becoming aware in a single moment of both its freedom and its limitations, its infinity and its finitude. The result of such an analysis is the recognition that, although “the I simply posits itself,” its freedom is never “absolute” or “unlimited”; instead, freedom proves to be conceivable—and hence the I itself proves to be possible—only as limited and finite. Despite widespread misunderstanding of this point, the Wissenschaftslehre is not a theory of the absolute I. Instead, the conclusion of both the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre and of the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo is that the “absolute I” is a mere abstraction and that the only sort of I that can actually exist or act is a finite, empirical, embodied, individual self.