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
We cannot agree with an object. We agree directly with a will, which
does not come to us as a foreign phenomenon, but as a proposition which
we accept or decline. In our immediate experience will thus reaches
will, and we are aware of the difference between our will-attitude as
merely individual and our will-attitude as act of agreement with the
will-attitude of other individuals. We can go still further. The circle
of other individuals whose will we express in our own will-act may be
narrow or wide, may be our friends or the nation, and this relation
clearly constitutes the historical significance of our attitude. In the
one case our act is a merely personal choice for personal purposes
without any general meaning; in the other case it is the expression of
general tendencies and historical movements. Yet our will-decisions can
have connections still wider than those with our social community or our
nation, or even with all living men of to-day. It can seek a relation to
the totality of those whom we aim to acknowledge as real subjects. It
thus becomes independent of the chance experience of this or that man,
or this or that movement, which appeals to us, but involves in an
independent way the reference to every one who is to be acknowledged as
a subject at all. Such reference, which is no longer bound to any
special group of historical individuals, thus becomes strictly
over-individual. We can then discriminate three stages: our merely
individual will; secondly, our will as bound by other historical
individuals; and thirdly, our over-individual will, which is not
influenced by any special individual, but by the general demands for the
idea of a personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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