Beilage XXV: <Interest and
Situation>
(
Unity of interests - actual current interests (of human beings in
community and in their situation).
Therefore the act of interest also has its own distinguished sense. I speak also of the current actual horizon of
interest.
The salesman
at every moment of his actual vocational life has his universal horizon of interest
awakened and therein a special horizon awakened in a distinguished way; e.g.
the season with which he is especially concerned. In the actual moments of his actual existence
as a salesman ("in business") the unity of his "vocational
interest" penetrates through this contemporary actuality and through all
actualities. The actual living interest
designates the situation with reference to the surrounding-world-ground of
praxis, and so for each waking human being as human being in his situation...
The I "in business" encompasses with his interest,
not his total past- and future-horizon, but the current horizon of interest
that rises out of these. This is in no
way intuitive, but precisely a horizon, however in a constant wakefulness during the current vocational orientation, as
such in a constant readiness for possible recollection, anticipation according
to practical possibilities and conditions.
The actuality
of the horizon of interest, I said, in changing bears within itself the unity
of a persisting interest. As a man of
vocation, I have my interest as a scientist.
But as a father I also have a unitary life-interest etc. That designates however at the same time
layers of the human personality. A human
being is understood first of all in a situation, and therefore with respect to
a life-interest. But apperceiving him as
a human being, that is from the beginning, in the normal context of
understanding - normally he is a German, a European like me -, is to ascribe to
him a certain sphere of interest (as father of the family, as citizen of the
community, of the state, and perhaps disjunctively in the inquiry: is he a
worker, is he a salesman, a peasant? etc.).
The unity of personality contains within itself a multiplicity of
special unities; in his particular habituality, he
has in general unknown, but generally formally anticipated directions of
interest; he has his multiplicity of purposes, more or less completely
organized into the unity of a single purpose, and each circle of interests
corresponds indeed to one such purposive manifold and unity. That however with pertinent capacities,
customs, acquisitions, "spiritual" or mundane acquisitions e.g. money
and goods), with corresponding actions and activities. The total personality is the scientific
personality, family personality, political personality etc. and thus at the
same time various. Of course here there
are various levels, and personality in the pregnant sense designates a solid
and consistent directedness (in one or all of these special unities); in this
pregnant sense, no one is a personality insofar as his type involves the
inconsistency [or contradiction] that he is always repeatedly losing himself and his goals, always repeatedly changing them etc.