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| | and the formal merely serves to remind one anew of the relationship | | and the formal merely serves to remind one anew of the relationship |
| | between the infinite and the finite. | | between the infinite and the finite. |
| − | </pre>
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| − |
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| − | =====1.3.5.1. The Will to Form=====
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| − |
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| − | <pre>
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| − | | The power of form, the will to give form to oneself. "Happiness"
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| − | | admitted as a goal. Much strength and energy behind the emphasis
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| − | | on forms. The delight in looking at a life that seems so easy. --
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| − | | To the French, the Greeks looked like children.
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| − | |
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| − | | (Nietzsche, 'The Will to Power', S 94, 58).
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| − |
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| − | Let me see if I can summarize as quickly as possible the problem that I see before me.
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| − | On each occasion that I try to express my experience, to lend it a form that others
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| − | can recognize, to put it in a shape that I myself can later recall, or to store it
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| − | in a state that allows me the chance of its re-experience, I generate an image of
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| − | the way things are, or at least a description of how things seem to me. I call
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| − | this process "reflection", since it fabricates an image in a medium of signs
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| − | that reflects an aspect of experience. Very often this experience is said
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| − | to be "of" -- what? -- something that exists or persists at least partly
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| − | outside the immediate experience, some action, event, or object that is
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| − | imagined to inform the present experience, or perhaps some conduct of
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| − | one's own doing that obtrudes for a moment into the world of others
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| − | and meets with a reaction there. In all of these cases, where the
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| − | experience is everted to refer to an object and thus becomes the
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| − | attribute of something with an external aspect, something that
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| − | is thus supposed to be a prior cause of the experience, the
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| − | reflection on experience doubles as a reflection on that
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| − | conduct, performance, or transaction that the experience
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| − | is an experience "of". In short, if the experience has
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| − | an eversion that makes it an experience of an object,
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| − | then its reflection is again a reflection that is
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| − | also of this object.
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| − |
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| − | Just at the point where one threatens to become lost in the morass of
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| − | words for describing experience and the nuances of their interpretation,
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| − | one can adopt a formal perspective, and realize that the relation among
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| − | objects, experiences, and reflective images is formally analogous to the
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| − | relation among objects, signs, and interpretant signs that is covered by
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| − | the pragmatic theory of signs. One still has the problem: How are the
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| − | expressions of experience everted to form the exterior faces of extended
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| − | objects and exploited to embed them in their external circumstances, and
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| − | no matter whether this object with an outer face is oneself or another?
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| − | Here, one needs to understand that expressions of experience include
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| − | the original experiences themselves, at least, to the extent that
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| − | they permit themselves to be recognized and reflected in ongoing
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| − | experience. But now, from the formal point of view, "how" means
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| − | only: To describe the formal conditions of a formal possibility.
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| | </pre> | | </pre> |
