V
IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION AND EVENT
Volition and action: intuition and expression.
Such are the relations between the practical activity and the theoretical, which precedes and conditions it.
Asking ourselves now, what are the relations of this same activity with that which seems to follow it and to be outside the spirit, in company with corporeality, naturality, physic and matter (or however else it may be called)? we find ourselves face to face with a problem which we have already treated and solved in another part of the system of the spirit, and which we shall solve here in an analogous manner. What we may now designate as the problem of the relation between volition and action, formerly appeared in the theoretical philosophy as the problem of the relation between intuition and expression.—Are then volitions and actions two distinct terms that may appear now together, now separate? Can volition remain for its part isolated from action, whereas action is not able to separate itself from volition, or is the opposite true?—We reply, as we did on the former occasion, by denying the problem itself and by identifying intuition with expression, in such a manner that effective intuition became at the same time expression, and it was declared that a so-called expression, which was not at the same time intuition, was declared to be non-existent.—We reply in like manner on this occasion, that volition and action are one, and that volition without action or action without volition is inconceivable.
Spirit and nature.
Indeed, the relation between spirit and nature (which is a general relation, including the other particulars between intuition and expression, or between volition and action), understood in the way that it is here, is a relation, not between two entities, but only between two different methods of elaborating one unique reality, which is spiritual reality: thus it is not truly a relation. Nor are the two modes of elaboration two co-ordinated modes of knowledge, for that would lead back to a duplicity of objects, but the first is cognoscitive elaboration and true science, or philosophy, in which reality is revealed as activity and spirituality, while the other is an abstract elaboration for practical convenience, without cognoscitive character. When this has been posited, the spiritual act of volition has not another reality face to face with it, with which it must join or combine, in order to become concrete, but is itself full reality. That which is called matter, movement, and material modification from the naturalistic point of view, is already included in the volitional spiritual act, of which it might be said without difficulty (as was once said amid much scandal of the Ego) that it is heavy, round, square, white, red, sonorous, and, therefore, physically determinable. The volition is not followed by a movement of the legs or arms; it is those movements themselves that are material for the physical, spiritual for the philosopher, extrinsic for the former, at once intrinsic and extrinsic for the latter, or better, neither extrinsic nor intrinsic (an arbitrary division). As poetry lives in speech and painting in colours, so the will lives in actions, not because the one is in the other as in an envelope, but because the one is the other and without the other would be mutilated and indeed inconceivable.
Inexistence of volitions without actions and vice versa.