Reading Notes: August 20th, 2024

“And Russell’s objection to absolutism is met by the appeal to experience. His dilemma (either the relation is independent of the subject, which it qualifies, or it is nothing) vanishes before the discovery that I am a self relating my different experiences (e.g., two conflicting desires). For this ‘relating’ and the terms which it relates are alike within me—they are ‘something’ and they qualify me—and yet they are not ‘logically prior’ to me.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 420)

“The monist…reasons the ultimate reality must consist in absolute self. To this doctrine the pluralist [argues] that the conception of a self as including selves involves an impossibility….In defense of his first objection, the pluralist insists: The monist conceives what is directly contrary to human experience. Misled by a spatial metaphor, he talks of minds as if they were ‘Chinese boxes which can be put inside of each other,’ whereas one self simply cannot include another self. Now it is open to the monist to retort: Pluralism involves the reality of an experience at least equally inconceivable, in that it conceives of essentially distinct selves as aware of each other. The reality of my experience of other selves involves, the monist well may insist, the only sort of ‘inclusion’ of selves within an absolute self which monism claims. But to meet charge with counter charge is an unsatisfying argument, even when, as here, one believes that one’s opponent’s inconsistency implies the truth that he criticizes. The monist has, in fact, a reply far better than a tu quoque to the pluralist’s charge. For he can show that the private experience of each one of us furnishes the example of a self inclusive of selves. How sharply, for example, I distinguish my childhood self, the self of one jubilant year of youth, the self of a period of philosophical vagaries, from what I know as my whole self, myself par excellence. Even without the distinction by temporal periods, I am conscious of well-differentiated partial selves within myself—of a radical and a conservative self, a frivolous and a strenuous self, for example. Such self-differentiation of the finite self makes it impossible to deny a priori the inclusion of partial selves within the absolute self.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 435-436)

“Ultimate reality is absolute self, not a totality of related conscious selves, but a Self, inclusive of the many selves, yet characterized by a single personality. The absolute self is conscious of himself, as I am conscious of myself; but whereas I may distinguish myself from selves in some sense beyond me, he distinguishes himself only from selves in some sense within him. Thus he at once shares in the experience of each of these selves, for it is his experience, and yet transcends this experience, since his consciousness is more than a sum of different consciousnesses—since, in other words, he is conscious of himself as unique, as individual. The lesser selves, of whom I am one, are thus expressions, objects, of the emotion and the will of the absolute self; they exist because he has a nature such that it must express itself in these unique ways. My consciousness is, then, “identically a part” of the experience of the absolute self, “not similar…but identically the same as such portion,” and this explains why I know the objects, though not all the objects, which the absolute self knows. My distinction from the absolute self is, in part, a purely quantitative difference, shown in the fact that I do not know so much as he. In part, however, it is the difference of the Absolute, as self, as utterly unique personality, from any one of the totality of included selves. From this difference, it follows that the lesser self does not, necessarily, feel and will with the Absolute; whereas the absolute self, besides possessing his own, the ultimate, personality, must feel and will with every partial self.” (Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, 439-440)

“We saw that it is characteristic of the spiritual life that it is conducted from the whole; the elements are moulded by a comprehensive unity; the different complexes and tendencies which arise with this life strive ultimately towards a single realm….The unity essential to this purpose cannot arise out of the many as an ultimate result; it must be original and be operative from the beginning. We may postulate such a unity only if the spiritual life is itself a universal life transcending that of the isolated individuals; if it bears in itself a unity which takes the multiplicity up into itself….Further, the taking up of the object into the life process, the transcendence of the antithesis of subject and object, is characteristic of the spiritual life. But this remained an inner contradiction, a complete impossibility so long as the spiritual life was regarded as an occurrence in a being who, with a closed nature, stands over against things, as though they were alien; and who can take up nothing into himself without accommodating it to his own particular nature. The contradiction is removed only when the spiritual becomes independent; for then both sides of the antithesis come to belong to each other and are related to each other in a single life; and a life transcending the division may develop, a life that produces the antithesis from within lives in the different sides and seeks in them its own perfection. The life-process is now seen to be a movement that is neither from object to subject, nor from subject to object; neither the subject’s attainment of content from the object, nor the object’s becoming controlled by the subject, but as an advance of a self-conscious life in and through the antithesis. Life, by this movement, ceases to be a single, thin thread; it wins breadth; it expands to an inner universality. At the same time a depth is manifested in that a persistent and comprehensive activity emerges which lives in the antithesis. In this manner life first becomes a life in a spiritual sense, a self-conscious and self-determining life, a self-consciousness….The spiritual life is not directed to a reality adjacent to it, but evolves a reality out of itself; or rather, it develops into a reality, a kingdom, a world; and so it advances from vague outline to more complete development; it struggles for itself, for its own perfection, nor for anything external….The inward must necessarily present itself as the fundamental and the comprehensive; as that which in its invisibility sustains, dominates, and unifies the visible world. Nature, which there was a tendency to regard as the whole, is now of the essence of a wider reality and a stage in its development; it is impossible now for the conception formed from it to be regulative of the whole. Ultimately, therefore, reality cannot be regarded as something dead, detached, and given: it signifies to us something living, something experienced in itself, something sustained by incessant activity.” (Eucken, Life’s Basis and Life’s Ideal, 145-149)

“The soul of life is self-conquest through struggle.” (Eucken, Grundlinien einer neuen Lebensanschauung, 128)

“The larger consciousness does not lose the conscious incompleteness of the lesser, but gives that, just as it is, its place in the completed whole.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II, 300)

“The presence in this sense of all time at once to the Absolute constitutes the Eternal order of the world—eternal, since it is inclusive of all distinctions of temporal past and temporal future—eternal, since, for this very reason, the totality of temporal events thus present at once to the Absolute, has no events that precede it or that follow it, but contains all sequences within it—eternal, finally, because this view of the world does not, like our partial glimpses of this or of that relative whole of sequence, pass away and give place to some other view, but includes an observation of every passing away, of every sequence…and includes all the views that are taken by various finite Selves.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II, 141)

“To conceive in what sense the temporal order of the world is also an eternal order, we have, therefore, but to remember the sense in which the melody, or other sequence, is known at once to our own consciousness, despite the fact that its elements when viewed merely in their temporal succession are in so far not at once….The brief span of our consciousness, the small range of succession, that we can grasp at once, constitutes a perfectly arbitrary limitation of our own special type of consciousness. But in principle a time-sequence, however brief, is already viewed in a way that is not merely temporal, when…it is grasped at once….A consciousness related to the whole of the world’s events…precisely as our human consciousness is related to a single melody or rhythm…is an Eternal Consciousness.” (Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II, 141-142)

“The highest, extremest summit is pure Personality, which alone—through that absolute dialectic which is its nature—encloses and holds all within itself.” (Hegel, Logic, Bk. V, 339)

“The mind is not a ‘substance,’ but a ‘subject.’ In this rather tersely-put formula Hegel emphasizes his opposition to the ordinary metaphysics. The constituents of mind do not lie side-by-side tranquilly co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses. Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity….The mind is not an immediate datum, with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediate unity, i.e., a unity which has grown up through a complex interchange of forces, and which lives in differences.” (Wallace, Prolegomena to The Logic of Hegel, lv-lvi)