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
The system of knowledge is thus the system of experience with all that
is involved in it in so far as it demands submission from our
over-individual will, and the classification which we are seeking must
be thus a division and subdivision of our over-individual submissions.
But the submission itself can be of very different characters and these
various types must give the deepest logical principles of scientific
classification. To point at once to the fundamental differences: our
will acknowledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We cannot
live our life--and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, first
of all, in a teleological sense--our life becomes meaningless, if our
will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of
will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may be
either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual
will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any
individuality. We can say at once that in the same way we are led to
acknowledge that the object has partly an over-individual character,
that is, necessarily belongs to the world of objects of every possible
subject, and partly an individual character, as our personal object. We
have thus four large groups of experiences to which we submit ourselves:
over-individual will-acts, individual will-acts, over-individual
objects, individual objects. They constitute the first four large
divisions of our system.
The over-individual will-acts, which are as such teleologically binding
for every subject and therefore norms for his will, give us the
Normative Sciences. The individual will-acts in the world of historical
manifoldness give us the Historical Sciences. The objects, in so far as
they belong to every individual, make up the physical world, and thus
give us the Physical Sciences; and finally the objects, in so far as
they belong to the individual, are the contents of consciousness, and
thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarcation lines of
our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Historical, the
Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and method and
difference must be characterized more fully. We must understand why we
have here to deal with four absolutely different types of scientific
systems, why the over-individual objects lead us to general laws and to
the determination of the future, while the study of the individual
will-acts, for instance, gives us the system of history, which turns
merely to the past and does not seek natural laws; and why the study of
the norms gives us another kind of system in which neither a causal nor
an historical, but a purely logical connection prevails. Yet all these
methodological differences result necessarily from the material with
which these four different groups of sciences are working.
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