"An object is not first imagined or thought about and then expected or willed, but in being actively expected it is imagined as future and in being willed it is thought"
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Alexander flips the usual mental timeline on its head: we dont picture a thing, then decide we want it. Wanting is already a way of picturing. Expectation is not a passive waiting room where images show up; its an activity that manufactures the future as something mentally present. When you actively expect, you are not retrieving a ready-made idea of tomorrow. You are staging tomorrow in the mind, giving it shape, direction, and a kind of provisional reality. The future, in this view, is less a destination than a cognitive posture.
The same inversion hits the will. Alexander refuses the comforting story that thought comes first and will merely executes. In being willed, an object is thought: volition is not downstream from cognition, it is one of its engines. That is a quietly radical claim for a philosopher writing in the early 20th century, when psychology and philosophy were renegotiating the boundary between mind as spectator and mind as maker. His broader project (emergent realism) treats mind as something that arises in nature and does real work in it, not an airy inner theater sealed off from the world.
Subtext: if you want to understand human action, stop treating imagination as harmless daydreaming and will as brute impulse. They are forms of world-building. Expectation is already commitment; willing is already interpretation. Alexander is describing the intimacy between agency and temporality: we dont merely move through time, we actively construct the future we claim to be responding to.
The same inversion hits the will. Alexander refuses the comforting story that thought comes first and will merely executes. In being willed, an object is thought: volition is not downstream from cognition, it is one of its engines. That is a quietly radical claim for a philosopher writing in the early 20th century, when psychology and philosophy were renegotiating the boundary between mind as spectator and mind as maker. His broader project (emergent realism) treats mind as something that arises in nature and does real work in it, not an airy inner theater sealed off from the world.
Subtext: if you want to understand human action, stop treating imagination as harmless daydreaming and will as brute impulse. They are forms of world-building. Expectation is already commitment; willing is already interpretation. Alexander is describing the intimacy between agency and temporality: we dont merely move through time, we actively construct the future we claim to be responding to.
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| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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