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Problems of World Order in the Light of Recent Philosophical Discussion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 September 2013
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Political problems, domestic or international, always involve us in psychological and philosophical issues; but they tend to develop whatever psychology or philosophy they need for their own purposes rather than to borrow from the formidable and not always luminous stock pile of professional literature in these subjects. This tendency to be one's own philosopher is entirely justified, for the simple reason that philosophy is always arising from experience, showing an inductive as well as a deductive side—and that the political experience of mankind is prolific in comment on the nature of man and of the world man lives in. Thomas Hobbes, for example, is a political writer whose contributions to psychology have not yet been fully appreciated.
At the same time, there are recent advances in both psychology and philosophy of which political science ought to enjoy the consequences. If any light is thrown on the nature of the human individual, that light is directly pertinent to political science. Enquiries into the nature of human association are similarly relevant.
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- Copyright © American Political Science Association 1952
References
1 239 U. S. 394.
2 Theodore Schroeder in Vol. 6, p. 89 (1918). The writer continues by saying that in order to grasp the real meaning of the opinion we must see it as “a revelation of the emotions, the phantasies, the desires, the persistent pastlife, and the present intellectual status of the judge”—ra vision, he insists, which only the qualified analyst can achieve. Quoted by Hall, Jerome, Readings in Jurisprudence (Indianapolis, 1938), pp. 1129–1130Google Scholar.
3 See the author's “Note on the Subconscious” in The Meaning of God in Human Experience (New Haven, 1912), pp. 527–538Google Scholar.
4 See, for example, Masefield's, So Long to Learn (New York, 1952)Google Scholar.
5 Cf. the author's Human Nature and Its Remaking, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1923), Ch. 11 and pp. 474–477Google Scholar.
Our psychologist-philosophers—James, Royce, Dewey—agree with our cosmologist-philosophers—Peiroe, Whitehead—that the individual is internally a multitude. Royce calls him a society of selves, Whitehead a “society of occasions.” But they also agree that the individual is not the multitude but the unity of the multitude; and it is Royce who most clearly and simply expresses this view of the individual: “the self is a purpose,” a purpose such that no other individual could fulfill it (The World and the Individual, New York, 1901, Vol. 2, p. 276Google Scholar). William James, much occupied with the instincts and the latent “energies of men,” also identified the individual with a unique function or task—and saw here the basis for a democratic individualism—but he more directly expressed the conviction that it is the function of subconscious energies to support, not to distract, the conscious course of life: they may enable us “to tap deeper levels of will-power than are habitually used.” See Perry, R. B., The Thought and Character of William James (Boston, 1935), Vol. 2, pp. 217, 266Google Scholar.
6 See the author's Man and the State (New Haven, 1926), pp. 321, 325Google Scholar.
7 There is still something for political theory in Plato's anticipation of the theory of subconscious motivation. When Plato puts into the mouth of Diotima the proposal that all desires are forms of love and that all love is an impulse to create, he is asserting a subconscious element of identity in the impulsive life, which anticipates—with better proportion—the early doctrines of Freud. It is perhaps the first assertion of a psychological unity of impulse underlying conscious will. Cf. Human Nature and its Remaking, pp. 96, 97, 99.
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