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
Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced object
and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions to the world
of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social will-acts
which approach us in our immediate experience, and again seek to find
what we are really submitting to if we accept the suggestions of our
social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has most dissimilar
consequences. We submit to an object and want to find out what we are
really submitting to. That cannot mean anything else, as we have seen,
than to seek the effects of the object and thus to look forward to what
we have to expect from the object. On the other hand, if we want to find
out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of
our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our
neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and
as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act
of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to
us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it
takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects
of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects
whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the
present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these relations, we
come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one individual will
always points back in its decisions to another individual will with
which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or overcomes by a new
attitude of will; and the whole network of these will-relations is the
political or religious or artistic or social history of mankind. This
system of history as a system of teleologically connected will-attitudes
is elaborated from the will-propositions which reach us in immediate
experience, with the same necessity with which the mechanical universe
of natural science is worked out from the objects of our immediate
experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account