United States or Vatican City ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They have an end in view sometimes their own maintenance, sometimes the perpetuation of their kind, sometimes something else and they employ means to achieve that end. They are, that is to say, purposive in their nature. Evidence of purposiveness is also furnished by the wonderful organs of adaptation, root-tips, leaves, eyes, lungs, etc.
A different source of attraction for the wider circle of readers was supplied by the piquant spice of pessimism. If the purposiveness of the phenomena of nature points to the unity of the primal will, the unspeakable misery of life, which Schopenhauer sets forth with no less of eloquence, proves the blindness and irrationality of the world-ground.
The organs we see, therefore, are outward and visible signs of the existence within of a definite striving towards an end that is, of a purpose. The forest shows an abundant, varied, and intense life in which individuals are for ever battling with one another. But all is not happening by chance. Everywhere we see signs of purposiveness.
In ascribing all sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad, presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for crediting animals.
This God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ.
If the sublime marks the point where the aesthetic touches on the boundary of the moral, the beautiful is also not without some relation to the good. This is not the case if the purposiveness is external, relative to its utility for something else. The fact that the sand of the sea-shore furnishes a good soil for the pine neither furthers nor prevents a causal knowledge of it.
Purposiveness the striving towards an end stands out as a dominating feature in forest life. Selections and adaptations are made, but they are made with some purpose in view. Purpose governs the adaptations and selections. What that purpose is we shall try and discover as we get to know still more of Nature. So far we have been observing individuals as separate individuals.
The two important factors, then, of Kant's aesthetics are its reconciliation of sense and reason in beauty, and its reference of the "purposiveness" of beauty to the cognitive faculty. Schiller has been given the credit of transcending Kant's "subjective" aesthetic through his emphasis on the significance of the beautiful object.
Only inner purposiveness, as it is manifested in the products of organic nature, brings the mechanical explanation to a halt. This latter fact, that the whole is the determining ground for the parts, is perfectly obvious in the products of human art. But where is the subject to construct organisms according to its representations of ends?
Coriat says, "all stammering, with its hesitation, its fear, its disturbing emotions, is a kind of an association test in everyday life and not a phonetic disturbance. It is a situation phobia, the same as phobias of open or closed places." Consequently, according to this view, stammering is purposeful and intentional and not accidental. This purposiveness is psychological and individualistic.
Word Of The Day