International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
What are these purposes? One thing is clear from the first: There cannot
be a purpose where there is not a will. If we come from pure experience
to knowledge by a purposive transformation, we must acknowledge the
reality of will in ourselves, or rather, we must find ourselves as will
in the midst of pure experience before we reach any knowledge. And so it
is indeed. We can abstract from all those reconstructions which the
sciences suggest to us and go back to the most immediate naïve
experience; but we can never reach an experience which does not contain
the doubleness of subject and object, of will and world. That doubleness
has nothing whatever to do with the difference of physical and
psychical; both the physical thing and the psychical idea are objects.
The antithesis is not that between two kinds of objects, since we have
seen that in the immediate experience the objects are not at all split
up into the two groups of material and mental things; it is rather the
antithesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one
side and the subject in its will-attitude on the other side. Yes, even
if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the
will-attitudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the
interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we
have the will-attitudes themselves, and not a subject which wills them.
If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference between
those two elements of our pure experience, between the object and the
will-attitude, we stand before the ultimate data: we call that element
which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the object, and
we call that element of our experience which is complete in itself, the
attitude of the will. If we experienced liking or disliking, affirming
or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way in which we
experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, the rock and
the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. But we do experience
them in quite a different way. The rock and the tree do not point to
anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to
its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is
not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary
experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic attitudes must be
acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object
without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state;
object and attitude form a unity which we resolve by the different way
in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the
object and we live through the attitude. It is a different kind of
awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the attitude. In
real life our will is never an object which we simply perceive. The
psychologist may treat the will as such, but in the immediate experience
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