Activity and Passivity are Momentous

A woman acts and something happens to her – she is an actor and a patient. That is, something happens in and to her. It is the coincidence of activity and passivity that determines her course of action. The person is the subject both of the action within the person and without or external to the person; on the one hand the subject acts, and on the other hand the subject is subjected to external forces - something happens to the subject. Since there is no freedom without some related order or context of action; since there is no freedom without freedom from something; since there no freedom without resistance to that freedom; - the willing or free subject is in part objectively determined. Activeness and passiveness, then, are conceptually the so-called two moments or directions of human dynamism. In dialectical terms, we say that the thesis of the subject is subjected to its antithesis, and in this greeting the dynamic subjective synthesis of the two-in-one activity persists. Of course the human subject has her particular unity by virtue of her will, as an individual in confrontation with her surround. The individual as such by virtue of its very existence would blindly persist forever, but since the willing individual is not absolute and has its finite existence only in context of timespace, it persistence can only be had temporarily and by compromise with the general surround. A society is bound by individuals in mutual promise. Together, in common, human society has its being. The coincidence of that general being and the existing individual is a person. Although the person has identity in compromise with other persons, she is unique as the unique coincidence of universals – that is, although she shares certain qualitative universals with others, she is peculiar in the unique combination of those qualities; furthermore, irrespective of those qualities and despite her unique perspective on the surround, she is virtually identical to other individuals as an individual per se if not in the blind tendency of individuals to definitely persist – in that sense the individual is a so-called category of one, but is not as such a human being