2. Addition to the Revised Edition (1918).
The argumentation of this book is built up on the fact of intuitive thinking, which may be experienced in a purely spiritual way, and which every perception inserts into reality so that reality comes thereby to be known. All that this book aimed at presenting was the result of a survey from the basis of our experience of intuitive thinking. However, the intention also was to emphasise the systematic interpretation which this thinking, as experienced by us, demands. It demands that we shall not deny its presence in cognition as a self-sustaining experience. It demands that we acknowledge its capacity for experiencing reality in co-operation with perception, and that we do not make it seek reality in a world outside experience and accessible only to inference, in the face of which human thinking would be only a subjective activity.
This view characterises thinking as that factor in man through which he inserts himself spiritually into reality. (And, strictly, no one should confuse this kind of world-view, which is based on thinking as directly experienced, with mere Rationalism.) But, on the other hand, the whole tenor of the preceding argumentation shows that perception yields a determination of reality for human knowledge only when it is taken hold of in thinking. Outside of thinking there is nothing to characterise reality for what it is. Hence we have no right to imagine that sense-perception is the only witness to reality. Whatever comes to us by way of perception on our journey through life, we cannot but expect. The only point open to question would be whether, from the exclusive point of view of thinking as we intuitively experience it, we have a right to expect that over and above sensuous perception there is also spiritual perception. This expectation is justified. For, though intuitive thinking is, on the one hand, an active process taking place in the human mind, it is, on the other hand, also a spiritual perception mediated by no sense-organ. It is a perception in which the percipient is himself active, and a self-activity which is at the same time perceived. In intuitive thinking man enters a spiritual world also as a percipient. Whatever within this world presents itself to him as percept in the same way in which the spiritual world of his own thinking so presents itself, that is recognised by him as constituting a world of spiritual perception. This world of spiritual perception we may suppose to be standing in the same relation to thinking as does, on the sensuous side, the world of sense-perception. Man does not experience the world of spiritual perception as an alien something, because he is already familiar in his intuitive thinking with an experience of purely spiritual character. With such a world of spiritual perception a number of the writings are concerned which I have published since this present book appeared. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity lays the philosophical foundation for these later writings. For it attempts to show that in the very experience of thinking, rightly understood, we experience Spirit. This is the reason why it appears to the author that no one will stop short of entering the world of spiritual perception who has been able to adopt, in all seriousness, the point of view of the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. True, logical deduction—by syllogisms—will not extract out of the contents of this book the contents of the author’s later books. But a living understanding of what is meant in this book by “intuitive thinking” will naturally prepare the way for living entry into the world of spiritual perception.
TRUTH AND SCIENCE[1]
[1] The Preface and Introduction to the original edition of “Truth and Science” are printed as [Appendix III] and [Appendix IV] at the end of this volume. [↑]
I
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS
Theory of Knowledge aims at being a scientific investigation of the very fact which all other sciences take for granted without examination, viz., knowing or knowledge-getting itself. To say this is to attribute to it, from the very start, the character of being the fundamental philosophical discipline. For, it is only this discipline which can tell us what value and significance belong to the insight gained by the other sciences. In this respect it is the foundation for all scientific endeavour. But, it is clear that the Theory of Knowledge can fulfil its task only if it works without any presuppositions of its own, so far as that is possible in view of the nature of human knowledge. This is probably conceded on all sides. And yet, a more detailed examination of the better-known epistemological systems reveals that, at the very starting-point of the inquiry, there is made a whole series of assumptions which detract considerably from the plausibility of the rest of the argument. In particular, it is noticeable how frequently certain hidden assumptions are made in the very formulation of the fundamental problems of epistemology. But, if a science begins by misstating its problems, we must despair from the start of finding the right solution. The history of the sciences teaches us that countless errors, from which whole epochs have suffered, are to be traced wholly and solely to the fact that certain problems were wrongly formulated. For illustrations there is no need to go back to Aristotle or to the Ars Magna Lulliana. There are plenty of examples in more recent times. The numerous questions concerning the purposes of the rudimentary organs of certain organisms could be correctly formulated only after the discovery of the fundamental law of biogenesis had created the necessary conditions. As long as Biology was under the influence of teleological concepts, it was impossible to put these problems in a form permitting a satisfactory answer. What fantastic ideas, for example, were current concerning the purpose of the so-called pineal gland, so long as it was fashionable to frame biological questions in terms of “purpose.” An answer was not achieved until the solution of the problem was sought by the method of Comparative Anatomy, and scientists asked whether this organ might not be merely a residual survival in man from a lower evolutionary level. Or, to mention yet another example, consider the modifications in certain physical problems after the discovery of the laws of the mechanical equivalents of heat and of the conservation of energy! In short, the success of scientific investigations depends essentially upon the investigator’s ability to formulate his problems correctly. Even though the Theory of Knowledge, as the presupposition of all other sciences, occupies a position very different from theirs, we may yet expect that for it, too, successful progress in its investigations will become possible only when the fundamental questions have been put in the correct form.
The following discussions aim, in the first place, at such a formulation of the problem of knowledge as will do justice to the character of the Theory of Knowledge as a discipline which is without any presuppositions whatever. Their secondary aim is to throw light on the relation of J. G. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre to such a fundamental philosophical discipline. The reason why precisely Fichte’s attempt to provide an absolutely certain basis for the sciences will be brought into closer relation with our own philosophical programme, will become clear of itself in the course of our investigation.
II
THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF KANT’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
It is usual to designate Kant as the founder of the Theory of Knowledge in the modern sense. Against this view it might plausibly be argued that the history of philosophy records prior to Kant numerous investigations which deserve to be regarded as something more than mere beginnings of such a science. Thus Volkelt, in his fundamental work on the Theory of Knowledge,[1] remarks that the critical treatment of this discipline took its origin already with Locke. But in the writings of even older philosophers, yes, even in the philosophy of Ancient Greece, discussions are to be found which at the present day are usually undertaken under the heading of Theory of Knowledge. However, Kant has revolutionised all problems under this head from their very depths up, and, following him, numerous thinkers have worked them through so thoroughly that all the older attempts at solutions may be found over again either in Kant himself or else in his successors. Hence, for the purposes of a purely systematic, as distinct from a historical, study of the Theory of Knowledge, there is not much danger of omitting any important phenomenon by taking account only of the period since Kant burst upon the world with his Critique of Pure Reason. All previous epistemological achievements are recapitulated during this period.
The fundamental question of Kant’s Theory of Knowledge is, How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Let us consider this question for a moment in respect of its freedom from presuppositions. Kant asks the question precisely because he believes that we can attain unconditionally certain knowledge only if we are able to prove the validity of synthetic judgments a priori. He says: “Should this question be answered in a satisfactory way, we shall at the same time learn what part reason plays in the foundation and completion of those sciences which contain a theoretical a priori knowledge of objects;”[2] and, further, “Metaphysics stands and falls with the solution of this problem, on which, therefore, the very existence of Metaphysics absolutely depends.”[3]
Are there any presuppositions in this question, as formulated by Kant? Yes, there are. For the possibility of a system of absolutely certain knowledge is made dependent on its being built up exclusively out of judgments which are synthetic and acquired independently of all experience. “Synthetic” is Kant’s term for judgments in which the concept of the predicate adds to the concept of the subject something which lies wholly outside the subject, “although it stands in some connection with the subject,”[4] whereas in “analytic” judgments the predicate affirms only what is already (implicitly) contained in the subject. This is not the place for considering the acute objections which Johannes Rehmke[5] brings forward against this classification of judgments. For our present purpose, it is enough to understand that we can attain to genuine knowledge only through judgments which add to one concept another the content of which was not, for us at least, contained in that of the former. If we choose to call this class of judgments, with Kant, “synthetic,” we may agree that knowledge in judgment form is obtainable only where the connection of predicate and subject is of this synthetic sort. But, the case is very different with the second half of Kant’s question, which demands that these judgments are to be formed a priori, i.e., independently of all experience. For one thing, it is altogether possible[6] that such judgments do not occur at all. At the start of the Theory of Knowledge we must hold entirely open the question, whether we arrive at any judgments otherwise than by experience, or only by experience. Indeed, to unprejudiced reflection the alleged independence of experience seems from the first to be impossible. For, let the object of our knowledge be what it may—it must, surely, always present itself to us at some time in an immediate and unique way; in short, it must become for us an experience. Mathematical judgments, too, are known by us in no other way than by our experiencing them in particular concrete cases. Even if, with Otto Liebmann,[7] for example, we treat them as founded upon a certain organisation of our consciousness, this empirical character is none the less manifest. We shall then say that this or that proposition is necessarily valid, because the denial of its truth would imply the denial of our consciousness, but the content of a proposition can enter our knowledge only by its becoming an experience for us in exactly the same way in which a process in the outer world of nature does so. Let the content of such a proposition include factors which guarantee its absolute validity, or let its validity be based on other grounds—in either case, I can possess myself of it only in one way and in no other: it must be presented to me in experience. This is the first objection to Kant’s view.
The other objection lies in this, that we have no right, at the outset of our epistemological investigations, to affirm that no absolutely certain knowledge can have its source in experience. Without doubt, it is easily conceivable that experience itself might contain a criterion guaranteeing the certainty of all knowledge which has an empirical source.
Thus, Kant’s formulation of the problem implies two presuppositions. The first is that we need, over and above experience, another source of cognitions. The second is that all knowledge from experience has only conditional validity. Kant entirely fails to realise that these two propositions are open to doubt, that they stand in need of critical examination. He takes them over as unquestioned assumptions from the dogmatic philosophy of his predecessors and makes them the basis of his own critical inquiries. The dogmatic thinkers assume the validity of these two propositions and simply apply them in order to get from each the kind of knowledge which it guarantees. Kant assumed their validity and only asks, What are the conditions of their validity? But, what if they are not valid at all? In that case, the edifice of Kantian doctrine lacks all foundation whatever.
The whole argumentation of the five sections which precede Kant’s formulation of the problem, amounts to an attempt to prove that the propositions of Mathematics are synthetic.[8] But, precisely the two presuppositions which we have pointed out are retained as mere assumptions in his discussions. In the Introduction to the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason we read, “experience can tell us that a thing is so and so, but not that it cannot be otherwise,” and, “experience never bestows on its judgments true or strict universality, but only the assumed and relative universality of induction.”[9] In Prologomena,[10] we find it said, “First, as regards the sources of metaphysics, the very concept of Metaphysics implies that they cannot be empirical. The principles of Metaphysics (where the term ‘principles’ includes, not merely its fundamental propositions, but also its fundamental concepts), can never be gained from experience, for the knowledge of the metaphysician has precisely to be, not physical, but ‘metaphysical,’ i.e., lying beyond the reach of experience.” Lastly Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason: “The first thing to notice is, that no truly mathematical judgments are empirical, but always a priori. They carry necessity on their very face, and therefore cannot be derived from experience. Should anyone demur to this, I am willing to limit my assertion to the propositions of Pure Mathematics, which, as everybody will admit, are not empirical judgments, but perfectly pure a priori knowledge.”[11]
We may open the Critique of Pure Reason wherever we please, we shall always find that in all its discussions these two dogmatic propositions are taken for granted. Cohen[12] and Stadler[13] attempt to prove that Kant has established the a priori character of the propositions of Mathematics and Pure Natural Science. But all that Kant tries to do in the Critique may be summed up as follows. The fact that Mathematics and Pure Natural Science are a priori sciences implies that the “form” of all experience has its ground in the subject. Hence, all that is given by experience is the “matter” of sensations. This matter is synthesised by the forms, inherent in the mind, into the system of empirical science. It is only as principles of order for the matter of sense that the formal principles of the a priori theories have function and significance. They make empirical science possible, but they cannot transcend it. These formal principles are nothing but the synthetic judgments a priori, which therefore extend, as conditions of all possible empirical knowledge, as far as that knowledge but no further. Thus, the Critique of Pure Reason, so far from proving the a priori character of Mathematics and Pure Natural Science, does but delimit the sphere of their applicability on the assumption that their principles must become known independently of experience. Indeed, Kant is so far from attempting a proof of the a priori character of these principles, that he simply excludes that part of Mathematics (see the quotation above) in which, even according to his view, that character might be called in question, and confines himself to the part in which he thinks he can infer the a priori character from the bare concepts involved. Johannes Volkelt, too, comes to the conclusion that “Kant starts from the explicit presupposition” that “there actually does exist knowledge which is universal and necessary.” He goes on to remark, “This presupposition which Kant has never explicitly questioned, is so profoundly contradictory to the character of a truly critical Theory of Knowledge, that the question must be seriously put whether the Critique is to be accepted as critical Theory of Knowledge at all.” Volkelt does, indeed, decide that there are good grounds for answering this question in the affirmative, but still, as he says, “this dogmatic assumption does disturb the critical attitude of Kant’s epistemology in the most far-reaching way.”[14] In short, Volkelt, too, finds that the Critique of Pure Reason is not a Theory of Knowledge free from all assumptions.
In substantial agreement with our view are also the views of O. Liebmann,[15] Holder,[16] Windelband,[17] Ueberweg,[18] Eduard von Hartmann,[19] and Kuno Fischer,[20] all of whom acknowledge that Kant makes the a priori character of Pure Mathematics and Physics the basis of his whole argumentation.
The propositions that we really have knowledge which is independent of all experience, and that experience can furnish knowledge of only relative universality, could be accepted by us as valid only if they were conclusions deduced from other propositions. It would be absolutely necessary for these propositions to be preceded by an inquiry into the essential nature of experience, as well as by another inquiry into the essential nature of knowing. The former might justify the first, the latter the second, of the above two propositions.
It would be possible to reply to the objections which we have urged against the Critique of Pure Reason, as follows. It might be said that every Theory of Knowledge must first lead the reader to the place where the starting-point, free from all presuppositions, is to be found. For, the knowledge which we have at any given moment of our lives is far removed from this starting-point, so that we must first be artificially led back to it. Now, it is true that some such mutual understanding between author and reader concerning the starting-point of the science is necessary in all Theory of Knowledge. But such an understanding ought on no account to go beyond showing how far the alleged starting-point of knowing is truly such. It ought to consist of purely self-evident, analytic propositions. It ought not to lay down any positive, substantial affirmations which influence, as in Kant, the content of the subsequent argumentation. Moreover, it is the duty of the epistemologist to show that the starting-point which he alleges is really free from all presuppositions. But all this has nothing to do with the essential nature of that starting-point. It lies wholly outside the starting-point and makes no affirmations about it. At the beginning of mathematical instruction, too, the teacher must exert himself to convince the pupil of the axiomatic character of certain principles. But no one will maintain that the content of the axioms is in any way made dependent on these prior discussions of their axiomatic character.[21] In exactly the same way, the epistemologist, in his introductory remarks, ought to show the method by which we can reach a starting-point free from all presuppositions. But the real content of the starting-point ought to be independent of the reflections by which it is discovered. There is, most certainly, a wide difference between such an introduction to the Theory of Knowledge and Kant’s way of beginning with affirmations of quite definite, dogmatic character.
[2] cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Intr. to 2nd edit., Section vi. [↑]
[3] Prolegomena, Section v. [↑]
[4] Critique of Pure Reason, Intr., Section iv. [↑]
[5] cf. his Analyse der Wirklichkeit, Gedanken und Tatsachen. [↑]
[6] “Possible” here means merely conceivable. [↑]
[7] cf. Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, pp. 161 ff. [↑]
[8] This attempt, by the way, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Über Kant’s mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen) show to be, if not wholly mistaken, at least highly questionable. [↑]
[9] Critique of Pure Reason, Intr. to 2nd edit., Section ii. [↑]
[10] cf. Kant’s Theorie der Erfahrung, pp. 90 ff. [↑]
[12] cf. Kant’s Theorie der Erfahrung, pp. 90 ff. [↑]
[13] cf. Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantischen Philosophie, p. 76. [↑]
[15] Zur Analyse der Wirklichkeit, pp. 211 ff. [↑]
[16] Darstellung der Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, p. 14. [↑]
[17] Vierteljahrsschrift für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1877, p. 239. [↑]
[18] System der Logik, 3rd edit., pp. 380 ff. [↑]
[19] Kritische Grundlagen des Transcendentalen Realismus, pp. 142–172. [↑]
[20] Geschichte der Neueren Philosophie, Vol. v., p. 60. Volkelt is mistaken about Fischer when he says (Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, p. 198, n.) that “it is not clear from Fischer’s account whether, in his opinion, Kant takes for granted only the psychological fact of the occurrence of universal and necessary judgments, but also their objective validity and truth.” For, in the passage referred to above, Fischer says that the chief difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be found in the fact that “its fundamental positions rest on certain presuppositions” which “have to be granted if the rest is to be valid.” These presuppositions consist for Fischer, too, in this, that “first the fact of knowledge is affirmed,” and then analysis reveals the cognitive faculties “by means of which that fact itself is explained.” [↑]
[21] How far our own epistemological discussions conform to this method, will be shown in Section iv, “The Starting-points of the Theory of Knowledge.” [↑]
III
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE SINCE KANT
Kant’s mistaken formulation of the problem has had a greater or lesser influence on all subsequent students of the Theory of Knowledge. For Kant, the view that all objects which are given to us in experience are ideas in our minds is a consequence of his theory of the a priori. For nearly all his successors, it has become the first principle and starting-point of their epistemological systems. It is said that the first and most immediate truth is, simply and solely, the proposition that we know our own ideas. This has come to be a well-nigh universal conviction among philosophers. G. E. Schulze maintains in his Ænesidemus, as early as 1792, that all our cognitions are mere ideas and that we can never transcend our ideas. Schopenhauer puts forward, with all the philosophical pathos which distinguishes him, the view that the permanent achievement of Kant’s philosophy is the thesis that “the world is my idea.” To Eduard von Hartmann this thesis is so incontestable, that he addresses his treatise, Kritische Grundlegung des Transcendentalen Realismus, exclusively to readers who have achieved critical emancipation from the naïve identification of the world of perception with the thing-in-itself. He demands of them that they shall have made clear to themselves the absolute heterogeneity of the object of perception which through the act of representation has been given as a subjective and ideal content of consciousness, and of the thing-in-itself which is independent of the act of representation and of the form of consciousness and which exists in its own right. His readers are required to be thoroughly convinced that the whole of what is immediately given to us consists of ideas.[1] In his latest work on Theory of Knowledge, Hartmann does, indeed, attempt to give reasons for this view. What value should be attached to these reasons by an unprejudiced Theory of Knowledge will appear in the further course of our discussions. Otto Liebmann posits as the sacrosanct first principle of the Theory of Knowledge the proposition, “Consciousness cannot transcend itself.”[2] Volkelt has called the proposition that the first and most immediate truth is the limitation of all our knowledge, in the first instance, to our own ideas exclusively, the positivistic principle of knowledge. He regards only those theories of knowledge as “in the fullest sense critical” which “place this principle, as the only fixed starting-point of philosophy, at the head of their discussions and then consistently think out its consequences.”[3] Other philosophers place other propositions at the head of the Theory of Knowledge, e.g., the proposition that its real problem concerns the relation between Thought and Being, and the possibility of a mediation between them;[4] or that it concerns the way in which Being becomes an object of Consciousness;[5] and many others. Kirchmann starts from two epistemological axioms, “Whatever is perceived is,” and, “Whatever is self-contradictory, is not.”[6] According to E. L. Fischer, knowledge is the science of something actual, something real,[7] and he criticises this dogma as little as does Goering who asserts similarly, “To know means always to know something which is. This is a fact which cannot be denied either by scepticism or by Kant’s critical philosophy.”[8] These two latter thinkers simply lay down the law: This is what knowledge is. They do not trouble to ask themselves with what right they do it.
But, even if these various propositions were correct, or led to correct formulations of the problem, it would still be impossible to discuss them at the outset of the Theory of Knowledge. For, they all belong, as positive and definite cognitions, within the realm of knowledge. To say that my knowledge extends, in the first instance, only to my ideas, is to express in a perfectly definite judgment something which I know. In this judgment I qualify the world which is given to me by the predicate “existing in the form of idea.” But how am I to know, prior to all knowledge, that the objects given to me are ideas?
The best way to convince ourselves of the truth of the assertion that this proposition has no right to be put at the head of the Theory of Knowledge, is to retrace the way which the human mind must follow in order to reach this proposition, which has become almost an integral part of the whole modern scientific consciousness. The considerations which have led to it are systematically summarised, with approximate exhaustiveness, in Part I of Eduard von Hartmann’s treatise, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie. His statement, there, may serve as a sort of guiding-thread for us in our task of reviewing the reasons which may lead to the acceptance of this proposition.
These reasons are physical, psycho-physical, physiological, and properly philosophical.
The Physicist is led by observation of the phenomena which occur in our environment when, e.g., we experience a sensation of sound, to the view that there is nothing in these phenomena which in the very least resembles what we perceive immediately as sound. Outside, in the space which surrounds us, nothing is to be found except longitudinal oscillations of bodies and of the air. Thence it is inferred that what in ordinary life we call “sound” or “tone” is nothing but the subjective reaction of our organism to these wave-like oscillations. Similarly, it is inferred that light and colour and heat are purely subjective. The phenomena of colour-dispersion, of refraction, of interference, of polarisation, teach us that to the just-mentioned sensations there correspond in the outer space certain transverse oscillations which we feel compelled to ascribe, in part to the bodies, in part to an immeasurably fine, elastic fluid, the “ether.” Further, the Physicist is driven by certain phenomena in the world of bodies to abandon the belief in the continuity of objects in space, and to analyse them into systems of exceedingly minute particles (molecules, atoms), the size of which, relatively to the distances between them, is immeasurably small. Thence it is inferred that all action of bodies on each other is across the empty intervening space, and is thus a genuine actio in distans. The Physicist believes himself justified in holding that the action of bodies on our senses of touch and temperature does not take place through direct contact, because there must always remain a definite, if small, distance between the body and the spot on the skin which it is said to “touch.” Thence it is said to follow that what we sense as hardness or heat in bodies is nothing but the reactions of the end-organs of our touch- and temperature-nerves to the molecular forces of bodies which act upon them across empty space.
These considerations from the sphere of Physics are supplemented by the Psycho-physicists with their doctrine of specific sense-energies. J. Müller has shown that every sense can be affected only in its own characteristic way as determined by its organisation, and that its reaction is always of the same kind whatever may be the external stimulus. If the optical nerve is stimulated, light-sensations are experienced by us regardless of whether the stimulus was pressure, or an electric current, or light. On the other hand, the same external phenomena produce quite different sensations according as they are perceived by different senses. From these facts the inference has been drawn that there occurs only one sort of phenomenon in the external world, viz., motions, and that the variety of qualities of the world we perceive is essentially a reaction of our senses to these motions. According to this view, we do not perceive the external world as such, but only the subjective sensations which it evokes in us.
Physiology adds its quota to the physical arguments. Physics deals with the phenomena which occur outside our organisms and which correspond to our percepts. Physiology seeks to investigate the processes which go on in man’s own body when a certain sensation is evoked in him. It teaches us that the epidermis is wholly insensitive to the stimuli in the external world. Thus, e.g., if external stimuli are to affect the end-organs of our touch-nerves on the surface of our bodies, the oscillations which occur outside our bodies have to be transmitted through the epidermis. In the case of the senses of hearing and of sight, the external motions have, in addition, to be modified by a number of structures in the sense-organs, before they reach the nerves. The nerves have to conduct the effects produced in the end-organs up to the central organ, and only then can take place the process by means of which purely mechanical changes in the brain produce sensations. It is clear that the stimulus which acts upon the sense-organs is so completely changed by the transformations which it undergoes, that every trace of resemblance between the initial impression on the sense-organs and the final sensation in consciousness must be obliterated. Hartmann sums up the outcome of these considerations in these words: “This content of consciousness consists, originally, of sensations which are the reflex responses of the soul to the molecular motions in the highest cortical centres, but which have not the faintest resemblance to the molecular motions by which they are elicited.”
If we think this line of argument through to the end, we must agree that, assuming it to be correct, there survives in the content of our consciousness not the least element of what may be called “external existence.”
To the physical and physiological objections against so-called “Naïve Realism” Hartmann adds some further objections which he describes as philosophical in the strict sense. A logical examination of the physical and physiological objections reveals that, after all, the desired conclusion can be reached only if we start from the existence and nexus of external objects, just as these are assumed by the ordinary naïve consciousness, and then inquire how this external world can enter the consciousness of beings with organisms such as ours. We have seen that every trace of such an external world is lost on the way from the impression on the sense-organ to the appearance of the sensation in our consciousness, and that in the latter nothing survives except our ideas. Hence, we have to assume that the picture of the external world which we actually have, has been built up by the soul on the basis of the sensations given to it. First, the soul constructs out of the data of the senses of touch and sight a picture of the world in space, and then the sensations of the other senses are fitted into this space-system. When we are compelled to think of a certain complex of sensations as belonging together, we are led to the concept of substance and regard substance as the bearer of sense-qualities. When we observe that some sense-qualities disappear from a substance and that others appear in their place, we ascribe this event in the world of phenomena to a change regulated by the law of causality. Thus, according to this view, our whole world-picture is composed of subjective sensations which are ordered by the activity of our own souls. Hartmann says, “What the subject perceives is always only modifications of its own psychic states and nothing else.”[9]
Now let us ask ourselves, How do we come by such a view? The bare skeleton of the line of thought which leads to it is as follows. Supposing an external world exists, we do not perceive it as such but transform it through our organisation into a world of ideas. This is a supposition which, when consistently thought out, destroys itself. But is this reflection capable of supporting any positive alternative? Are we justified in regarding the world, which is given to us, as the subjective content of ideas because the assumptions of the naïve consciousness, logically followed out, lead to this conclusion? Our purpose is, rather, to exhibit these assumptions themselves as untenable. Yet, so far we should have found only that it is possible for a premise to be false and yet for the conclusion drawn from it to be true. Granted that this may happen, yet we can never regard the conclusion as proved by means of that premise.
It is usual to apply the title of “Naïve Realism” to the theory which accepts as self-evident and indubitable the reality of the world-picture which is immediately given to us. The opposite theory, which regards this world as merely the content of our consciousness, is called “Transcendental Idealism.” Hence, we may sum up the outcome of the above discussion by saying, “Transcendental Idealism demonstrates its own truth, by employing the premises of the Naïve Realism which it seeks to refute.” Transcendental Idealism is true, if Naïve Realism is false. But the falsity of the latter is shown only by assuming it to be true. Once we clearly realise this situation, we have no choice but to abandon this line of argument and to try another. But are we to trust to good luck, and experiment about until we hit by accident upon the right line? This is Eduard von Hartmann’s view when he believes himself to have shown the validity of his own epistemological standpoint, on the ground that his theory explains the phenomena whereas its rivals do not. According to his view, the several philosophical systems are engaged in a sort of struggle for existence in which the fittest is ultimately accepted as victor. But this method appears to us to be unsuitable, if only for the reason that there may well be several hypotheses which explain the phenomena equally satisfactorily. Hence, we had better keep to the above line of thought for the refutation of Naïve Realism, and see where precisely its deficiency lies. For, after all, Naïve Realism is the view from which we all start out. For this reason alone it is advisable to begin by setting it right. When we have once understood why it must be defective, we shall be led upon the right path with far greater certainty than if we proceed simply at haphazard.
The subjectivism which we have sketched above is the result of the elaboration of certain facts by thought. Thus, it takes for granted that, from given facts as starting-point, we can by consistent thinking, i.e., by logical combination of certain observations, gain correct conclusions. But our right thus to employ our thinking remains unexamined. There, precisely, lies the weakness of this method. Whereas Naïve Realism starts from the unexamined assumption that the contents of our perceptual experience have objective reality, the Idealism just described starts from the no less unexamined conviction that by the use of thought we can reach conclusions which are scientifically valid. In contrast to Naïve Realism, we may call this point of view “Naïve Rationalism.” In order to justify this term, it may be well to insert here a brief comment on the concept of the “Naïve.” A. Döring, in his essay Über den Begriff des Naiven Realismus,[10] attempts a more precise determination of this concept. He says, “The concept of the Naïve marks as it were the zero-point on the scale of our reflection upon our own activity. In content the Naïve may well coincide with the True, for, although the Naïve is unreflecting and, therefore, uncritical or a-critical, yet this lack of reflection and criticism excludes only the objective assurance of truth. It implies the possibility and the danger of error, but it does not imply the necessity of error. There are naïve modes of feeling and willing as there are naïve modes of apprehending and thinking, in the widest sense of the latter term. Further, there are naïve modes of expressing these inward states in contrast with their repression or modification through consideration for others and through reflection. Naïve activity is not influenced, at least not consciously, by tradition, education, or imposed rule. It is in all spheres (as its root nativus, brings out), unconscious, impulsive, instinctive, dæmonic activity.” Starting from this account, we will try to determine the concept of the Naïve still more precisely. In every activity we may consider two aspects—the activity itself and our consciousness of its conformity to a law. We may be wholly absorbed in the former, without caring at all for the latter. The artist is in this position, who does not know in reflective form the laws of his creative activity but yet practises these laws by feeling and sense. We call him “naïve.” But there is a kind of self-observation which inquires into the laws of one’s own activity and which replaces the naïve attitude, just described, by the consciousness of knowing exactly the scope and justification of all one does. This we will call “critical.” This account seems to us best to hit off the meaning of this concept which, more or less clearly understood, has since Kant acquired citizen-rights in the world of philosophy. Critical reflection is, thus, the opposite of naïve consciousness. We call an attitude “critical” which makes itself master of the laws of its own activity in order to know how far it can rely on them and what are their limits. Theory of Knowledge can be nothing if not a critical science. Its object is precisely the most subjective activity of man—knowing. What it aims at exhibiting is the laws to which knowing conforms. Hence, the naïve attitude is wholly excluded from this science. Its claim to strength lies precisely in that it achieves what many minds, interested in practice rather than in theory, pride themselves on never having attempted, viz., “thinking about thought.”
[2] Zur Analyse der Wirklichkeit (Strassburg, 1876), p. 28. [↑]
[3] Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, Section i. [↑]
[4] A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen (Berlin, 1887). [↑]
[6] Die Lehre vom Wissen (Berlin, 1868). [↑]
[7] Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie (Mainz, 1887) p. 385. [↑]
[8] System der kritischen Philosophie, I. Teil, p. 257. [↑]
[9] Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, p. 37. [↑]
[10] Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. xxvi (1890), p. 390. [↑]
IV
THE STARTING-POINTS OF THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
At the beginning of an epistemological inquiry we must, in accordance with the conclusions we have reached, put aside everything which we have come to know. For, knowledge is something which man has produced, something which he has originated by his activity. If the Theory of Knowledge is really to extend the light of its explanation over the whole field of what we know, it must set out from a point which has remained wholly untouched by cognitive activity—indeed which rather furnishes the first impulse for this activity. The point at which we must start lies outside of what we know. It cannot as yet itself be an item of knowledge. But we must look for it immediately prior to the act of cognition, so that the very next step which man takes shall be a cognitive act. The method for determining this absolutely first starting-point must be such that nothing enters into it which is already the result of cognitive activity.
There is nothing but the immediately-given world-picture with which we can make a start of this sort. This means the picture of the world which is presented to man before he has in any way transformed it by cognitive activity, i.e., before he has made the very least judgment about it or submitted it to the very smallest determination by thinking. What thus passes initially through our minds and what our minds pass through—this incoherent picture which is not yet differentiated into particular elements, in which nothing seems distinguished from, nothing related to, nothing determined by, anything else, this is the Immediately-Given. On this level of existence—if the phrase is permissible—no object, no event, is as yet more important or more significant than any other. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which, in the light of the knowledge belonging to a higher level of existence, is perhaps seen to be without any importance whatever for the development and life of the animal, comes before us with the same claim to our attention as the noblest and most necessary part of the organism. Prior to all cognitive activity nothing in our picture of the world appears as substance, nothing as quality, nothing as cause or as effect. The contrasts of matter and spirit, of body and soul, have not yet arisen. Every other predicate, too, must be kept away from the world-picture presented at this level. We may think of it neither as reality nor as appearance, neither as subjective nor as objective, neither as necessary nor as contingent. We cannot decide at this stage whether it is “thing-in-itself” or mere “idea.” For, we have seen already that the conclusions of Physics and Physiology, which lead us to subsume the Given under one or other of the above heads, must not be made the basis on which to build the Theory of Knowledge.
Suppose a being with fully-developed human intelligence were to be suddenly created out of Nothing and confronted with the world, the first impression made by the world on his senses and his thought would be pretty much what we have here called the immediately-given world-picture. Of course, no actual man at any moment of his life has nothing but this original world-picture before him. In his mental development there is nowhere a sharp line between pure, passive reception of the Given from without and the cognitive apprehension of it by Thought. This fact might suggest critical doubts concerning our method of determining the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge. Thus, e.g., Eduard von Hartmann remarks: “We do not ask what is the content of consciousness of a child just awakening to conscious life, nor of an animal on the lowest rung of the ladder of organisms. For, of these things philosophising man has no experience, and, if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings on primitive biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he cannot but base his conclusions on his own personal experience. Hence, our first task is to determine what is the content of consciousness which philosophising man discovers in himself when he begins his philosophical reflection.”[1] But, the objection to this view is that the picture of the world with which we begin philosophical reflection, is already qualified by predicates which are the results solely of knowledge. We have no right to accept these predicates without question. On the contrary, we must carefully extract them from out of the world-picture, in order that it may appear in its purity without any admixture due to the process of cognition. In general, the dividing line between what is given and what is added by cognition cannot be identified with any single moment of human development, but must be drawn artificially. But this can be done at every level of development, provided only we divide correctly what is presented to us prior to cognition, without any determination by thinking, from what is made of it by cognition.
Now, it may be objected that we have already piled up a whole host of thought-determinations in the very process of extracting the alleged primitive world-picture out of the complete picture into which man’s cognitive elaboration has transformed it. But, in defence we must urge that all our conceptual apparatus was employed, not for the characterisation of the primitive world-picture, nor for the determination of its qualities, but solely for the guidance of our analysis, in order to lead it to the point where knowledge recognises that it began. Hence, there can be no question of the truth or error, correctness or incorrectness, of the reflections which, according to our view, precede the moment which brings us to the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge. Their purpose is solely to guide us conveniently to that point. Nobody who is about to occupy himself with epistemological problems, stands at the same time at what we have rightly called the starting-point of knowledge, for his knowledge is already, up to a certain degree, developed. Nothing but analysis with the help of concepts enables us to eliminate from our developed knowledge all the gains of cognitive activity and to determine the starting-point which precedes all such activity. But the concepts thus employed have no cognitive value. They have the purely negative task to eliminate out of our field of vision whatever is the result of cognitive activity and to lead us to the point where this activity first begins. The present discussions point the way to those primitive beginnings upon which the cognitive activity sets to work, but they form no part of such activity. Thus, whatever Theory of Knowledge has to say in the process of determining the starting-point, must be judged, not as true or false, but only as fit or unfit for this purpose. Error is excluded, too, from that starting-point itself. For, error can begin only with the activity of cognition; prior to this, it cannot occur.
This last proposition is compatible only with the kind of Theory of Knowledge which sets out from our line of thought. For, a theory which sets out from some object (or subject) with a definite conceptual determination is liable to error from the very start, viz., in this very determination. Whether this determination is justified or not, depends on the laws which the cognitive act establishes. This is a question to which only the course of the epistemological inquiry itself can supply the answer. All error is excluded only when I can say that I have eliminated all conceptual determinations which are the results of my cognitive activity, and that I retain nothing but what enters the circle of my experience without any activity on my part. Where, on principle, I abstain from every positive affirmation, there I cannot fall into error.
From the epistemological point of view, error can occur only within the sphere of cognitive activity. An illusion of the senses is no error. The fact that the rising moon appears to us bigger than the moon overhead is not an error, but a phenomenon fully explained by the laws of nature. An error would result only, if thought, in ordering the data of perception, were to put a false interpretation on the “bigger” or “smaller” size of the moon. But such an interpretation would lie within the sphere of cognitive activity.
If knowledge is really to be understood in its essential nature, we must, without doubt, begin our study of it at the point where it originates, where it starts. Moreover, it is clear that whatever precedes its starting-point has no legitimate place in any explanatory Theory of Knowledge, but must simply be taken for granted. It is the task of science, in its several branches, to study the essential nature of all that we are here taking for granted. Our aim, here, is not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that, but to investigate knowledge as such. We must first understand the act of cognition, before we can judge what significance to attach to the affirmations about the content of the world which come to be made in the process of getting to know that content.
For this reason, we abstain from every attempt to determine what is immediately-given, so long as we are ignorant of the relation of our determinations to what is determined by them. Not even the concept of the “immediately-given” affirms any positive determination of what precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point towards the Given, to direct our attention upon it. Here, at the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge, the term merely expresses, in conceptual form, the initial relation of the cognitive activity to the world-content. The choice of this term allows even for the case that the whole world-content should turn out to be nothing but a figment of our own “Ego,” i.e., that the most extreme subjectivism should be right. For, of course, subjectivism does not express a fact which is given. It can, at best, be only the result of theoretical considerations. Its truth, in other words, needs to be established by the Theory of Knowledge. It cannot serve as the presupposition of that theory.
This immediately-given world-content includes everything which can appear within the horizon of our experience, in the widest sense of this term, viz., sensations, percepts, intuitions, feelings, volitions, dreams, fancies, representations, concepts, ideas.
Illusions, too, and hallucinations stand at this level exactly on a par with other elements of the world-content. Only theoretical considerations can teach us in what relations illusions, etc., stand to other percepts.
A Theory of Knowledge which starts from the assumption that all the experiences just enumerated are contents of our consciousness, finds itself confronted at once by the question: How do we transcend our consciousness so as to apprehend reality? Where is the jumping-board which will launch us from the subjective into the trans-subjective? For us, the situation is quite different. For us, consciousness and the idea of the “Ego” are, primarily, only items in the Immediately-Given, and the relation of the latter to the two former has first to be discovered by knowledge. We do not start from consciousness in order to determine the nature of knowledge, but, vice versa, we start from knowledge in order to determine consciousness and the relation of subject to object. Seeing that, at the outset, we attach no predicates whatever to the Given, we are bound to ask: How is it that we are able to determine it at all? How is it possible to start knowledge anywhere at all? How do we come to designate one item of the world-content, as, e.g., percept, another as concept, a third as reality, others as appearance, as cause, as effect? How do we come to differentiate ourselves from what is “objective,” and to contrast “Ego” and “Non-Ego?”
We must discover the bridge which leads from the picture of the world as given to the picture of it which our cognitive activity unfolds. But the following difficulty confronts us. So long as we do nothing but passively gaze at the Given, we can nowhere find a point which knowledge can take hold of and from which it can develop its interpretations. Somewhere in the Given we must discover the spot where we can get to work, where something homogeneous to cognition meets us. If everything were merely given, we should never get beyond the bare gazing outwards into the external world and a no less bare gazing inwards into the privacy of our inner world. We should, at most, be able to describe, but never to understand, the objects outside of us. Our concepts would stand in a purely external, not in an internal, relation to that to which they apply. If there is to be knowledge, everything depends on there being, somewhere within the Given, a field in which our cognitive activity does not merely presuppose the Given, but is at work in the very heart of the Given itself. In other words, the very strictness with which we hold fast the Given, as merely given, must reveal that not everything is given. Our demand for the Given turns out to have been one which, in being strictly maintained, partially cancels itself. We have insisted on the demand, lest we should arbitrarily fix upon some point as the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge, instead of making a genuine effort to discover it. In our sense of the word “given,” everything may be given, even what in its own innermost nature is not given. That is to say, the latter presents itself, in that case, to us purely formally as given, but reveals itself, on closer inspection, for what it really is.
The whole difficulty in understanding knowledge lies in that we do not create the world-content out of ourselves. If we did so create it, there would be no knowledge at all. Only objects which are given can occasion questions for me. Objects which I create receive their determinations by my act. Hence, I do not need to ask whether these determinations are true or false.
This, then, is the second point in our Theory of Knowledge. It consists in the postulate that there must, within the sphere of the Given, be a point at which our activity does not float in a vacuum, at which the world-content itself enters into our activity.
We have already determined the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge by assigning it a place wholly antecedent to all cognitive activity, lest we should distort that activity by some prejudice borrowed from among its own results. Now we determine the first step in the development of our knowledge in such a way that, once more, there can be no question of error or incorrectness. For, we affirm no judgment about anything whatsoever, but merely state the condition which must be fulfilled if knowledge is to be acquired at all. It is all-important that we should, with the most complete critical self-consciousness, keep before our minds the fact that we are postulating the very character which that part of the world-content must possess on which our cognitive activity can begin to operate.
Nothing else is, in fact, possible. As given, the world-content is wholly without determinations. No part of it can by itself furnish the impulse for order to begin to be introduced into the chaos. Hence, cognitive activity must issue its edict and declare what the character of that part is to be. Such an edict in no way infringes the character of the Given as such. It introduces no arbitrary affirmation into science. For, in truth, it affirms nothing. It merely declares that, if the possibility of knowledge is to be explicable at all, we need to look for a field like the one above described. If there is such a field, knowledge can be explained; if not, not. We began our Theory of Knowledge with the “Given” as a whole; now we limit our requirement to the singling out of a particular field within the Given.
Let us come to closer grips with this requirement. Where within the world-picture do we find something which is not merely given, but is given only in so far as it is at the same time created by the cognitive activity?
We need to be absolutely clear that this creative activity must, in its turn, be given to us in all its immediacy. No inferences must be required in order to know that it occurs. Thence it follows, at once, that sense-data do not meet our requirement. For, the fact that they do not occur without our activity is known to us, not immediately, but as an inference from physical and physiological arguments. On the other hand, we do know immediately that it is only in and through the cognitive act that concepts and ideas enter into the sphere of the Immediately-Given. Hence, no one is deceived concerning the character of concepts and ideas. It is possible to mistake a hallucination for an object given from without, but no one is ever likely to believe that his concepts are given without the activity of his own thinking. A lunatic will regard as real, though they are in fact unreal, only things and relations which have attached to them the predicate of “actuality,” but he will never say of his concepts and ideas that they have come into the world without his activity. Everything else in our world-picture is such that it must be given, if it is to be experienced by us. Only of our concepts and ideas is the opposite true: they must be produced by us, if they are to be experienced. They, and only they, are given in a way which might be called intellectual intuition. Kant and the modern philosophers who follow him deny altogether that man possesses this kind of intuition, on the ground that all our thinking refers solely to objects and is absolutely impotent to produce anything out of itself, whereas in intellectual intuition form and matter must be given together. But, is not precisely this actually the case with pure concepts and ideas?[2] To see this, we must consider them purely in the form in which, as yet, they are quite free from all empirical content. In order, e.g., to comprehend the pure concept of causality, we must go, not to a particular instance of causality nor to the sum of all instances, but to the pure concept itself. Particular causes and effects must be discovered by investigation in the world, but causality as a Form of Thought must be created by ourselves before we can discover causes in the world. If we hold fast to Kant’s thesis that concepts without percepts are empty, it becomes unintelligible how the determination of the Given by concepts is to be possible. For, suppose there are given two items of the world-content, a and b. In order to find a relation between them, I must be guided in my search by a rule of determinate content. Such a rule I can only create in the act of cognition itself. I cannot derive it from the object, because it is only with the help of the rule that the object is to receive its determinations. Such a rule, therefore, for the determination of the real has its being wholly in purely conceptual form.
Before passing on, we must meet a possible objection. It might seem as if in our argument we had unconsciously assigned a prominent part to the idea of the “Ego,” or the “personal subject,” and as if we employed this idea in the development of our line of thought, without having established our right to do so. For example, we have said that “we produce concepts,” or that “we make this or that demand.” But these are mere forms of speech which play no part in our argument. That the cognitive act is the act of, and originates in, an “Ego,” can, as we have already pointed out, be affirmed only as an inference in the process of knowledge itself. Strictly, we ought at the outset to speak only of cognitive activity without so much as mentioning a cognitive agent. For, all that has been established so far amounts to no more than this, (1) that something is “given,” and (2) that at a certain point within the “given” there originates the postulate set forth above; also, that concepts and ideas are the entities which answer to that postulate. This is not to deny that the point at which the postulate originates is the “Ego.” But, in the first instance, we are content to establish these two steps in the Theory of Knowledge in their abstract purity.
[1] Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, p. 1. [↑]
[2] By “concept” I mean a rule for the synthesis of the disconnected data of perception into a unity. Causality, e.g., is a “concept.” By “idea” I mean nothing but a concept of richer connotation. “Organism,” taken quite generally, is an example of an “idea.” [↑]
V
KNOWLEDGE AND REALITY
Concepts and ideas, then, though themselves part of the Given, yet at the same time take us beyond the Given. Thus, they make it possible to determine also the nature of the other modes of cognitive activity.
By means of a postulate, we have selected a special part out of the given world-picture, because it is the very essence of knowledge to proceed from a part with just this character. Thus, we have made the selection solely in order to be able to understand knowledge. But, we must clearly confess to ourselves that by this selection we have artificially torn in two the unity of the given world-picture. We must bear in mind that the part which we have divorced from the Given still continues, quite apart from our postulate and independently of it, to stand in a necessary connection with the world as given. This fact determines the next step forward in the Theory of Knowledge. It will consist in restoring the unity which we have destroyed in order to show how knowledge is possible. This restoration will consist in thinking about the world as given. The act of thinking about the world actually effects the synthesis of the two parts of the given world-content—of the Given which we survey up to the horizon of our experience, and of the part which, in order to be also given, must be produced by us in the activity of cognition. The cognitive act is the synthesis of these two factors. In every single cognitive act the one factor appears as something produced in the act itself and as added to the other factor which is the pure datum. It is only at the very start of the Theory of Knowledge that the factor which otherwise appears as always produced, appears also as given.
To think about the world is to transmute the given world by means of concepts and ideas. Thinking, thus, is in very truth the act which brings about knowledge. Knowledge can arise only if thinking, out of itself, introduces order into the content of the world as given. Thinking is itself an activity which produces a content of its own in the moment of cognition. Hence, the content cognised, in so far as it has its origin solely in thinking, offers no difficulty to cognition. We need only observe it, for in its essential nature it is immediately given to us. The description of thinking is also the science of thinking. In fact, Logic was never anything but a description of the forms of thinking, never a demonstrative science. For, demonstration occurs only when there is a synthesis of the products of thinking with a content otherwise given. Hence, Gideon Spicker is quite right when he says in his book, Lessing’s Weltanschauung (p. 5): “We have no means of knowing, either empirically or logically, whether the results of thinking, as such, are true.” We may add that, since demonstration already presupposes thinking, thinking itself cannot be demonstrated. We can demonstrate a particular fact, but we cannot demonstrate the process of demonstrating itself. We can only describe what a demonstration is. All logical theory is wholly empirical. Logic is a science which consists only of observation. But if we want to get to know anything over and above our thinking, we can do so only with the help of thinking. That is to say, our thinking must apply itself to something given and transform its chaotic into a systematic connection with the world-picture. Thinking, then, in its application to the world as given, is a formative principle. The process is as follows. First, thinking selects certain details out of the totality of the Given. For, in the Given, there are strictly no individual details, but only an undifferentiated continuum. Next, thinking relates the selected details to each other according to the forms which it has itself produced. And, lastly, it determines what follows from this relation. The act of relating two distinct items of the world-content to each other does not imply that thinking arbitrarily determines something about them. Thinking waits and sees what is the spontaneous consequence of the relation established. With this consequence we have at last some degree of knowledge of the two selected items of the world-content. Suppose the world-content reveals nothing of its nature in response to the establishment of such a relation, then the effort of thinking must miscarry, and a fresh effort must take its place. All cognitions consist in this, that two or more items of the Given are brought into relation with each other by us and that we apprehend what follows from this relation.
Without doubt, many of our efforts of thinking miscarry, not only in the sciences, as is amply proved by their history, but also in ordinary life. But in the simple cases of mistake which are, after all, the commonest, the correct thought so rapidly replaces the incorrect, that the latter is never, or rarely, noticed.
Kant, in his theory of the “synthetic unity of apperception,” had an inkling of this activity of thought in the systematic organisation of the world-content, as we have here developed it. But his failure to appreciate clearly the real function of thinking is revealed by the fact, that he believes himself able to deduce the a priori laws of Pure Natural Science from the rules according to which this synthetic activity proceeds. Kant has overlooked that the synthetic activity of thinking is merely the preparation for the discovery of natural laws properly so-called. Suppose we select two items, a and b, from the Given. For knowledge to arise of a nexus according to law between a and b, the first requirement is that thinking should so relate a and b, that the relation may appear to us as given. Thus, the content proper of the law of nature is derived from what is given, and the sole function of thinking is to establish such relations between the items of the world-picture that the laws to which they are subject become manifest. The pure synthetic activity of thinking is not the source of any objective laws whatever.
We must inquire what part thinking plays in the formation of our scientific world-picture as distinct from the merely given one. It follows from our account that thinking supplies the formal principle of the conformity of phenomena to law. Suppose, in our example above, that a is the cause, b the effect. Unless thinking were able to produce the concept of causality, we should never be able to know that a and b were causally connected. But, in order that we may know, in the given case, that a is the cause and b the effect, it is necessary for a and b to possess the characteristics which we mean when we speak of cause and effect. A similar analysis applies to the other categories of thought.
It will be appropriate to notice here in a few words Hume’s discussion of causality. According to Hume, the concepts of cause and effect have their origin solely in custom. We observe repeatedly that one event follows another and become accustomed to think of them as causally connected, so that we expect the second to occur as soon as we have observed the first. This theory, however, springs from a totally mistaken view of the causal relation. Suppose for several days running I observe the same person whenever I step out of the door of my house, I shall gradually form the habit of expecting the temporal sequence of the two events. But, it will never occur to me to think that there is any causal connection between my own appearance and that of the other person at the same spot. I shall call in aid essentially other items of the world-content in order to explain the coincidence of these events. In short, we determine the causal nexus of two events, not according to their temporal sequence, but according to the essential character of the items of the world-content which we call, respectively, cause and effect.
From this purely formal activity of our thinking in the construction of the scientific picture of the world, it follows that the content of every cognition cannot be fixed a priori in advance of observation (in which thinking comes to grips with the Given), but must be derived completely and exhaustively from observation. In this sense, all our cognitions are empirical. Nor is it possible to see how it could be otherwise. For, Kant’s judgments a priori are at bottom, not cognitions, but postulates. On Kant’s principles, all we can ever say is only this, that if a thing is to become the object of possible experience, it must conform to these laws. They are, therefore, rules which the subject prescribes to all objects. But, we should rather expect cognitions of the Given to have their source, not in the constitution of the subject, but in that of the object.
Thinking makes no a priori affirmations about the Given. But it creates the forms, on the basis of which the conformity of phenomena to law becomes manifest a posteriori.
From our point of view, it is impossible to determine anything a priori about the degree of certainty belonging to a judgment which embodies knowledge thus gained. For, certainty, too, derives from nothing other than the Given. Perhaps it will be objected that observation never establishes anything except that a certain nexus of phenomena actually occurs, but not that it must occur, and will always occur, in like conditions. But, this suggestion, too, is in error. For any nexus which I apprehend between elements in the world-picture is, on our principles, nothing but what is grounded in these elements themselves. It is not imported into these elements by thinking, but belongs to them essentially, and must, therefore, necessarily exist whenever they themselves exist.
Only a view which regards all scientific research as nothing but the endeavour to correlate the facts of experience by means of principles which are subjective and external to the facts, can hold that the nexus of a and b may to-day obey one law and to-morrow another (J. S. Mill). On the other hand, if we see clearly that the laws of nature have their source in the Given, and that, therefore, the nexus of phenomena essentially depends upon, and is determined by, them, we shall never think of talking of a “merely relative universality” of the laws which are derived from observation. This is, of course, not to assert that any given law which we have once accepted as correct, must be absolutely valid. But when, later, a negative instance overthrows a law, the reason is, not that the law from the first could be inferred only with relative universality, but that it had not at first been inferred correctly. A genuine law of nature is nothing but the formulation of a nexus in the given world-picture, and it exists as little without the facts which it determines, as these exist without it.
Above, we have laid down that it is the essence of the cognitive activity to transmute, by thinking, the given world-picture by means of concepts and ideas. What follows from this fact? If the Immediately-Given were a totality complete in itself, the work which thinking does upon it in cognition would be both impossible and unnecessary. We should simply accept the Given, as it is, and be satisfied with it as such. Cognitive activity is possible only because in the Given something lies hidden which does not yet reveal itself so long as we gaze at the Given in its immediacy, but which becomes manifest with the aid of the order which thinking introduces. Prior to the work of thinking, the Given does not possess the fulness of its own complete nature.
This point becomes still more obvious by considering in greater detail the two factors involved in the act of cognition. The first factor is the Given. “Being given” is not a quality of the Given, but merely a term expressing its relation to the second factor in the act of cognition. This second factor, viz., the conceptual content of the Given, is found by our thought in the act of cognition to be necessarily connected with the Given. Two questions arise: (1) Where are the Given and the Concept differentiated? (2) Where are they united? The answer to these two questions is to be found, beyond any doubt, in the preceding discussions. They are differentiated solely in the act of cognition. They are united in the Given. Thence it follows necessarily that the conceptual content is but a part of the Given, and that the act of cognition consists in re-uniting with each other the two parts of the world-picture which are, at first, given to it in separation. The given world-picture thus attains its completion only through that mediate kind of givenness which thinking brings about. In its original immediacy the world-picture is altogether incomplete.
If the conceptual content were from the first united with the Given in our world-picture, there would be no cognition. For, no need could ever arise of transcending the Given. So, again, if by thinking and in thinking we could create the whole world-content, once more there would be no cognition. For, what we create ourselves we do not need to cognise. Hence, cognition exists because the world-content is given to us originally in a form which is incomplete, which does not contain it as a whole, but which, over and above what it presents immediately, owns another, no less essential, aspect. This second aspect of the world-content—an aspect not originally given—is revealed by cognition. Pure thinking presents in the abstract, not empty forms, but a sum of determinations (categories) which serve as forms for the rest of the world-content. The world-content can be called REALITY only in the form which it acquires through cognition and in which both aspects of it are united.
VI
THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT PRESUPPOSITIONS VERSUS FICHTE’S THEORY OF SCIENCE
So far, we have determined the idea of knowledge. This idea is given immediately in the human consciousness whenever it functions cognitively. To the “Ego,” as the centre[1] of consciousness, are given immediately external and internal perceptions, as well as its own existence. The Ego feels impelled to find more in the Given than it immediately contains. Over against the given world, a second world, the world of thinking, unfolds itself for the Ego and the Ego unites these two by realising, of its own free will, the idea of knowledge which we have determined. This accounts for the fundamental difference between the way in which in the objects of human consciousness itself the concept and the Immediately-Given unite to form Reality in its wholeness, and the way in which their union obtains in the rest of the world-content. For every other part of the world-content we must assume that the union of the two factors is original and necessary from the first, and that it is only for cognition, when cognition begins, that an artificial separation has supervened, but that cognition in the end undoes the separation in keeping with the original and essential unity of the object-world. For consciousness the case is quite otherwise. Here the union exists only when it is achieved by the living activity of consciousness itself. With every other kind of object, the separation of the two factors is significant, not for the object, but only for knowledge. Their union is here original, their separation derivative. Cognition effects a separation only because it must first separate before it can achieve union by its own methods. But, for consciousness, the Concept and the Given are originally separate. Union is here derivative, and that is why cognition has the character which we have described. Just because in consciousness Idea and Given appear in separation, does the whole of reality split itself for consciousness into these two factors. And, again, just because consciousness can bring about the union of the two factors only by its own activity, can it reach full reality only by performing the act of cognition. The remaining categories (ideas) would be necessarily united with the corresponding lands of the Given, even if they were not taken up into cognition. But the idea of cognition can be united with the Given which corresponds to it, only by the activity of consciousness. Real consciousness exists only in realising itself. With these remarks we believe ourselves to be sufficiently equipped for laying bare the root-error of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and, at the same time, for supplying the key to the understanding of it. Fichte is among all Kant’s successors the one who has felt most vividly that nothing but a theory of consciousness can supply the foundation for all the sciences. But he never clearly understood why this is so. He felt that the act which we have called the second step in the Theory of Knowledge and which we have formulated as a postulate, must really be performed by the “Ego.” This may be seen, e.g., from the following passage. “The Theory of Science, then, arises, as itself a systematic discipline, just as do all possible sciences in so far as they are systematic, through a certain act of freedom, the determinate function of which is, more particularly, to make us conscious of the characteristic activity of intelligence as such. The result of this free act is that the necessary activity of intelligence, which in itself already is form, is further taken up as matter into a fresh form of cognition or consciousness.”[2] What does Fichte here mean by the activity of the “intelligence,” when we translate what he has obscurely felt into clear concepts? Nothing but the realisation of the idea of knowledge, taking place in consciousness. Had this been perfectly clear to Fichte, he ought to have expressed his view simply by saying, “It is the task of the Theory of Science to bring cognition, in so far as it is still an unreflective activity of the ‘Ego,’ into reflective consciousness; it has to show that the realisation of the idea of cognition in actual fact is a necessary activity of the ‘Ego.’ ”
Fichte tries to determine the activity of the “Ego.” He declares “that the being, the essence of which consists solely in this that it posits itself as existing, is the Ego as absolute subject.”[3] This positing of the Ego is for Fichte the original, unconditioned act “which lies at the basis of all the rest of consciousness.”[4] It follows that the Ego, in Fichte’s sense, can likewise begin all its activity only through an absolute fiat of the will. But, it is impossible for Fichte to supply any sort of content for this activity which his “Ego” absolutely posits. For, Fichte can name nothing upon which this activity might direct itself, or by which it might be determined. His Ego is supposed to perform an act. Yes, but what is it to do? Fichte failed to define the concept of cognition which the Ego is to realise, and, in consequence, he struggled in vain to find any way of advancing from his absolute act to the detailed determinations of the Ego. Nay, in the end he declares that the inquiry into the manner of this advance lies outside the scope of his theory. In his deduction of the idea of cognition he starts neither from an absolute act of the Ego, nor from one of the Non-Ego, but from a state of being determined which is, at the same time, an act of determining. His reason for this is that nothing else either is, or can be, immediately contained in consciousness. His theory leaves it wholly vague what determines, in turn, this determination. And it is this vagueness which drives us on beyond Fichte’s theory into the practical part of the Wissenschaftslehre.[5] But, by this turn Fichte destroys all knowledge whatsoever. For, the practical activity of the Ego belongs to quite a different sphere. The postulate which we have put forward above can, indeed, be realised—so much is clear—only by a free act of the Ego. But, if this act is to be a cognitive act, the all-important point is that its voluntary decision should be to realise the idea of cognition. It is, no doubt, true that the Ego by its own free will can do many other things as well. But, what matters for the epistemological foundation of the sciences is not a definition of what it is for the Ego to be free, but of what it is to know. Fichte has allowed himself to be too much influenced by his subjective tendency to present the freedom of human personality in the brightest light. Harms, in his address on The Philosophy of Fichte (p. 15), rightly remarks, “His world-view is predominantly and exclusively ethical, and the same character is exhibited by his Theory of Knowledge.” Knowledge would have absolutely nothing to do, if all spheres of reality were given in their totality. But, seeing that the Ego, so long as it has not been, by thinking, inserted into its place in the systematic whole of the world-picture, exists merely as an immediately-given something, it is not enough merely to point out what it does. Fichte, however, believes that all we need to do concerning the Ego is to seek and find it. “We have to seek and find the absolutely first, wholly unconditioned principle of all human knowledge. Being absolutely first, this principle admits neither of proof nor of determination.”[6] We have seen that proof and determination are out of place solely as applied to the content of Pure Logic. But the Ego is a part of reality, and this makes it necessary to establish that this or that category is actually to be found in the Given. Fichte has failed to do this. And this is the reason why he has given such a mistaken form to his Theory of Science. Zeller remarks[7] that the logical formulæ by means of which Fichte seeks to reach the concept of the Ego, do but ill disguise his predetermined purpose at any price to reach this starting-point for his theory. This comment applies to the first form (1794) which Fichte gave to his Wissenschaftslehre. Taking it, then, as established that Fichte, in keeping with the whole trend of his philosophical thinking, could not, in fact, rest content with any other starting-point for knowledge than an absolute and arbitrary act, we have the choice between only two ways of making this start intelligible. The one way was to seize upon some one among the empirical activities of consciousness and to strip off, one by one, all the characteristics of it which do not follow originally from its essential nature, until the pure concept of the Ego had been crystallised out. The other way was to begin, straightway, with the original activity of the Ego, and to exhibit its nature by introspection and reflection. Fichte followed the first way at the outset of his philosophical thinking, but in the course of it he gradually switched over to the other.
Basing himself upon Kant’s “synthesis of transcendental apperception,” Fichte concluded that the whole activity of the Ego in the synthesis of the matter of experience proceeds according to the forms of the judgment. To judge is to connect a predicate with a subject—an act of which the purely formal expression is a = a. This proposition would be impossible if the x which connects predicate and subject, did not rest upon a power to affirm unconditionally. For, the proposition does not mean, “a exists”; it means, “if a exists, then there exists a.” Thus, a is most certainly not affirmed absolutely. Hence, if there is to be an absolute, unconditionally valid affirmation, there is no alternative but to declare the act of affirming itself to be absolute. Whereas a is conditioned, the affirming of a is unconditioned. This affirming is the act of the Ego which, thus, possesses the power to affirm absolutely and without conditions. In the proposition, a = a, the one a is affirmed only on condition of the other being presupposed. Moreover, the affirming is an act of the Ego. “If a is affirmed in the Ego, it is affirmed.”[8] This connection is possible only on condition that there is in the Ego something always self-identical, which effects the transition from the one a to the other. The above-mentioned x is this self-identical aspect of the Ego. The Ego which affirms the one a is the same Ego as that which affirms the other a. This is to say Ego = Ego. But this proposition, expressed in judgment-form, “If the Ego is, it is,” is meaningless. For, the Ego is not affirmed on condition of another Ego having been presupposed, but it presupposes itself. In short, the Ego is absolute and unconditioned. The hypothetical judgment-form which is the form of all judgments, so long as the absolute Ego is not presupposed, changes for the Ego into the form of the categorical affirmation of existence, “I am unconditionally.” Fichte has another way of putting this: “the Ego originally affirms its own existence.”[9] Clearly, this whole deduction is nothing but a sort of elementary school-drill by means of which Fichte tries to lead his readers to the point at which they will perceive for themselves the unconditioned activity of the Ego. His aim is to put clearly before their eyes that fundamental activity of the Ego in the absence of which there is no such thing as an Ego at all.
Let us now look back, once more, over Fichte’s line of thought. On closer inspection, it becomes obvious that it contains a leap—a leap, moreover, which throws grave doubts upon the correctness of his theory of the original act of the Ego. What precisely is it that is absolute in the affirmation of the Ego? Take the judgment, “If a exists, then there exists a.” The a is affirmed by the Ego. So far there is no room for doubt. But, though the act is unconditioned, yet the Ego must affirm something in particular. It cannot affirm an “activity in general and as such”; it can affirm only a particular, determinate activity. In short, the affirmation must have a content. But, it cannot derive this content from itself, for else we should get nothing but affirmations of acts of affirmation in infinitum. Hence, there must be something which is realised by this affirming, by this absolute activity of the Ego. If the Ego does not seize upon something given in order to affirm it, it can do nothing at all, and, consequently, it cannot affirm either. This is proved, too, by Fichte’s proposition, “the Ego affirms its own existence.” “Existence,” here, is a category. Thus, we are back at our own position: the activity of the Ego consists in that it affirms, of its own free will, the concepts and ideas inherent in the Given. If Fichte had not unconsciously been determined to exhibit the Ego as “existing,” he would have got nowhere at all. If, instead, he had built up the concept of cognition, he would have reached the true starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge, viz., “The Ego affirms the act of cognition.” Because Fichte failed to make clear to himself what determines the activity of the Ego, he fixed simply upon the affirmation of its own existence as the character of that activity. But, this is at once to restrict the absolute activity of the Ego. For, if nothing is unconditioned except the Ego’s affirmation of its own existence, then every other activity of the Ego is conditioned. Moreover, the way is cut off for passing from the unconditioned to the conditioned. If the Ego is unconditioned only in the affirmation of its own existence, then at once there is cut off all possibility of affirming by an original act anything other than its own existence. Hence, the necessity arises to assign a ground for all the other activities of the Ego. But Fichte, as we have seen above, sought for such a ground in vain.
This is the reason why he shifted to the second of the two ways, indicated above, for the deduction of the Ego. Already in 1797, in his Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, he recommends self-observation as the right method for studying the Ego in its true, original character. “Observe and watch thyself, turn thy eye away from all that surrounds thee and look into thyself—this is the first demand which philosophy makes upon its disciple. The topic of our discourse, is, not anything outside thyself, but thyself alone.”[10] This introduction to the Theory of Science is, in truth, in one way much superior to the other. For, self-observation does not make us acquainted with the activity of the Ego one-sidedly in a fixed direction. It exhibits that activity, not merely as affirming its own existence, but as striving, in its many-sided development, to comprehend by thinking the world-content which is immediately-given. To self-observation, the Ego reveals itself as engaged in building up its world-picture by the synthesis of the Given with concepts. But, anyone who has not accompanied us in our line of thought above, and who, consequently, does not know that the Ego can grasp the whole content of reality only on condition of applying its Thought-Forms to the Given, is liable to regard cognition as a mere process of spinning the world out of the Ego itself. Hence, for Fichte the world-picture tends increasingly to become a construction of the Ego. He emphasises more and more that the main point in the Wissenschaftslehre is to awaken the sense which is able to watch the Ego in this constructing of its world. He who is able thus to watch stands, for Fichte, on a higher level of knowledge than he who has eyes only for the finished construct, the ready-made world. If we fix our eyes only on the world of objects, we fail to perceive that, but for the creative activity of the Ego, that world would not exist. If, on the other hand, we watch the Ego in its constructive activity, we understand the ground of the finished world-picture. We know how it has come to be what it is. We understand it as the conclusion for which we have the premises. The ordinary consciousness sees only what has been affirmed, what has been determined thus or thus. It lacks the insight into the premises, into the grounds why an affirmation is just as it is and not otherwise. To mediate the knowledge of these premises is, according to Fichte, the task of a wholly new sense. This is expressed most clearly in the Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre.[11] “My theory presupposes a wholly novel inward sense-organ, by means of which a new world is given which does not exist for the ordinary man at all.” Or, again, “The world of this novel sense, and thereby this sense itself, are hereby for the present clearly determined: it is the world in which we see the premises on which is grounded the judgment, ‘Something exists’; it is the ground of existence which, just because it is the ground of existence, cannot, in its turn, be said to be or to be an existence.”[12]
But, here, too, Fichte lacks clear insight into the activity of the Ego. He has never worked his way through to it. That is why his Wissenschaftslehre could not become what else, from its whole design, it ought to have become, viz., a Theory of Knowledge as the fundamental discipline of philosophy. For, after it had once been recognised that the activity of the Ego must be affirmed by the Ego itself, it was very easy to think that the activity receives its determination also from the Ego. But how else can this happen except we assign a content to the purely formal activity of the Ego? If the Ego is really to import a content into its activity which, else, is wholly undetermined, then the nature of that content must also be determined. For, failing this, it could at best be realised only by some “thing-in-itself” in the Ego, of which the Ego would be the instrument, but not by the Ego itself. If Fichte had attempted to furnish this determination, he would have been led to the concept of cognition which it is the task of the Ego to realise. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre proves that even the acutest thinker fails to make fruitful contributions to any philosophical discussion, unless he lays hold of the correct Thought-Form (category, idea) which, supplemented by the Given, yields reality. Such a thinker is like a man who fails to hear the most glorious melodies which are being played for him, because he has no ear for tunes. If we are to determine the nature of consciousness, as given, we must be able to rise to, and make our own, the “idea of consciousness.”
At one point Fichte is actually quite close to the true view. He declares, in the Einleitungen zur Wissenschaftslehre (1797), that there are two theoretical systems, viz., Dogmatism, for which the Ego is determined by the objects, and Idealism, for which the objects are determined by the Ego. Both are, according to him, established as possible theories of the world; both can be developed into self-consistent systems. But, if we throw in our lot with Dogmatism, we must abandon the independence of the Ego and make it dependent on the “thing-in-itself.” If we do not want to do this, we must adopt Idealism. The philosopher’s choice between these two systems is left by Fichte wholly to the preference of the Ego. But he adds that if the Ego desires to preserve its independence, it will give up the belief in external things and surrender itself to Idealism.
But, what Fichte forgot was the consideration that the Ego cannot make any genuine, well-grounded decision or choice, unless something is presupposed which helps the Ego to choose. All the Ego’s attempts at determination remain empty and without content, if the Ego does not find something wholly determinate and full of content, which enables it to determine the Given, and thereby also to choose between Idealism and Dogmatism. This “something wholly determinate and full of content” is, precisely, the world of Thought. And the determination of the Given by thinking is, precisely, what we call cognition. We may take Fichte where we please—everywhere we find that his line of thought at once gets meaning and substance, as soon as we conceive his grey, empty activity of the Ego to be filled and regulated by what we have called “the process of cognition.”
The fact that the Ego is free to enter into activity out of itself, makes it possible for it, by free self-determination, to realise the category of cognition, whereas in the rest of the world all categories are connected by objective necessity with the Given which corresponds to them. The investigation of the nature of free self-determination will be the task of Ethics and Metaphysics, based on our Theory of Knowledge. These disciplines, too, will have to debate the question whether the Ego is able to realise other ideas, besides the idea of cognition. But, that the realisation of the idea of cognition issues from a free act has been made sufficiently clear in the course of our discussions above. For, the synthesis, effected by the Ego, of the Immediately-Given and of the Form of Thought appropriate to it, which two factors of reality remain otherwise always divorced from each other in consciousness, can be brought about only by an act of freedom. Moreover, our arguments throw, in another way, quite a fresh light on Critical Idealism. To any close student of Fichte’s system it will appear as if Fichte cared for nothing so much as for the defence of the proposition, that nothing can enter the Ego from without, that nothing can appear in the Ego which was not the Ego’s own original creation. Now, it is beyond all dispute that no type of Idealism will ever be able to derive from within the Ego that form of the world-content which we have called “the Immediately-Given.” For, this form can only be given; it can never be constructed by thinking. In proof of this, it is enough to reflect that, even if the whole series of colours were given to us except one, we should not be able to fill in that one out of the bare Ego. We can form an image of the most remote countries, though we have never seen them, provided we have once personally experienced, as given, the details which go to form the image. We then build up the total picture, according to the instructions supplied to us, out of the particular facts which we have ourselves experienced. But we shall strive in vain to invent out of ourselves even a single perceptual element which has never appeared within the sphere of what has been given to us. It is one thing to be merely acquainted with the world; it is another to have knowledge of its essential nature. This nature, for all that it is closely identified with the world-content, does not become clear to us unless we build up reality ourselves out of the Given and the Forms of Thought. The real “what” of the Given comes to be affirmed for the Ego only through the Ego itself. The Ego would have no occasion to affirm the nature of the Given for itself, if it did not find itself confronted at the outset by the Given in wholly indeterminate form. Thus, the essential nature of the world is affirmed, not apart from, but through, the Ego.
The true form of reality is not the first form in which it presents itself to the Ego, but the last form which it receives through the activity of the Ego. That first form is, in fact, without any importance for the objective world and counts only as the basis for the process of cognition. Hence, it is not the form given to the world by theory which is subjective, but rather the form in which the world is originally given to the Ego. If, following Volkelt and others, we call the given world “experience,” our view amounts to saying: The world-picture presents itself, owing to the constitution of our consciousness, in subjective form as experience, but science completes it and makes its true nature manifest.
Our Theory of Knowledge supplies the basis for an Idealism which, in the true sense of the word, understands itself. It supplies good grounds for the conviction that thinking brings home to us the essential nature of the world. Nothing but thinking can exhibit the relations of the parts of the world-content, be it the relation of the heat of the sun to the stone which it warms, or the relation of the Ego to the external world. Thinking alone has the function of determining all things in their relations to each other.
The objection might still be urged by the followers of Kant, that the determination, above-described, of the Given holds, after all, only for the Ego. Our reply must be, consistently with our principles, that the distinction between Ego and Outer World, too, holds only within the Given, and that, therefore, it is irrelevant to insist on the phrase, “for the Ego,” in the face of the activity of thinking which unites all opposites. The Ego, as divorced from the outer world, disappears completely in the process of thinking out the nature of the world. Hence it becomes meaningless still to talk of determinations which hold only for the Ego.
[1] It ought not to be necessary to say that the term “centre,” here, is not intended to affirm a theory concerning the nature of consciousness, but is used merely as a shorthand expression for the total physiognomy of consciousness. [↑]
[2] Fichte’s Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I, p. 71. [↑]
[7] Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 605. [↑]
[8] Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. I, p. 94. [↑]
[10] l.c., Vol. I, p. 422. [↑]
[11] Delivered in the autumn of 1813 at the University of Berlin. See Nachgelassene Werke, Vol. I, p. 4. [↑]
VII
CONCLUDING REMARKS: EPISTEMOLOGICAL
We have laid the foundations of the Theory of Knowledge as the science of the significance of all human knowledge. It alone clears up for us the relation of the contents of the separate sciences to the world. It enables us, with the help of the sciences, to attain to a philosophical world-view. Positive knowledge is acquired by us through particular cognitions; what the value of our knowledge is, considered as knowledge of reality, we learn through the Theory of Knowledge. By holding fast strictly to this principle, and by employing no particular cognitions in our argumentation, we have transcended all one-sided world-views. One-sidedness, as a rule, results from the fact that the inquiry, instead of concentrating on the process of cognition itself, busies itself about some object of that process. If our arguments are sound, Dogmatism must abandon its “thing-in-itself” as fundamental principle, and Subjective Idealism its “Ego,” for both these owe their determinate natures in their relation to each other first to thinking. Scepticism must give up its doubts whether the world can be known, for there is no room for doubt with reference to the “Given,” because it is as yet untouched by any of the predicates which cognition confers on it. On the other hand, if Scepticism were to assert that thinking can never apprehend things as they are, its assertion, being itself possible only through thinking, would be self-contradictory. For, to justify doubt by thinking is to admit by implication that thinking can produce grounds sufficient to establish certainty. Lastly, our theory of knowledge transcends both one-sided Empiricism and one-sided Rationalism in uniting both at a higher level. Thus it does justice to both. It justifies Empiricism by showing that all positive knowledge about the Given is obtainable only through direct contact with the Given. And Rationalism, too, receives its due in our argument, seeing that we hold thinking to be the necessary and exclusive instrument of knowledge.
The world-view which has the closest affinity to ours, as we have here built it up on epistemological foundations, is that of A. E. Biedermann.[1] But Biedermann requires for the justification of his point of view dogmatic theses which are quite out of place in Theory of Knowledge. Thus, e.g., he works with the concepts of Being, Substance, Space, Time, etc., without having first analysed the cognitive process by itself. Instead of establishing the fact that the cognitive process consists, to begin with, only of the two elements, the Given and Thought, he talks of the Kinds of Being of the real. For example, in Section 15, he says: “Every content of consciousness includes within itself two fundamental facts—it presents to us, as given, two kinds of Being which we contrast with each other as sensuous and spiritual, thing-like and idea-like, Being.” And in Section 19: “Whatever has a spatio-temporal existence, exists materially; that which is the ground of all existence and the subject of life has an idea-like existence, is real as having an ideal Being.” This sort of argument belongs, not to the Theory of Knowledge, but to Metaphysics, which latter presupposes Theory of Knowledge as its foundation. We must admit that Biedermann’s doctrine has many points of similarity with ours; but our method has not a single point of contact with his. Hence, we have had no occasion to compare our position directly with his. Biedermann’s aim is to gain an epistemological standpoint with the help of a few metaphysical axioms. Our aim is to reach, through an analysis of the process of cognition, a theory of reality.
And we believe that we have succeeded in showing, that all the disputes between philosophical systems result from the fact that their authors have sought to attain knowledge about some object or other (Thing, Self, Consciousness, etc.), without having first given close study to that which alone can throw light on whatever else we know, viz., the nature of knowledge itself.
[1] cf. his Christliche Dogmatik, 2nd edit., 1884–5. The epistemological arguments are in Vol. I. An exhaustive discussion of his point of view has been furnished by E. von Hartmann. See his Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, pp. 200 ff. [↑]
VIII
CONCLUDING REMARKS: PRACTICAL
The aim of the preceding discussions has been to throw light on the relation of our personality, as knower, to the objective world. What does it signify for us to possess knowledge and science? This was the question to which we sought the answer.
We have seen that it is just in our knowing that the innermost kernel of the world manifestly reveals itself. The harmony, subject to law, which reigns throughout the whole world, reveals itself precisely in human cognition.
It is, therefore, part of the destiny of man to elevate the fundamental laws of the world, which do indeed regulate the whole of existence but which would never become existent in themselves, into the realm of realities which appear. This precisely is the essential nature of knowledge that in it the world-ground is made manifest which in the object-world can never be discovered. Knowing is—metaphorically speaking—a continual merging of one’s life into the world-ground.
Such a view is bound to throw light also on our practical attitude towards life.
Our conduct is, in its whole character, determined by our moral ideals. These are the ideas we have of our tasks in life, or, in other words, of the ends which we set ourselves to achieve by our action.
Our conduct is a part of the total world-process. Consequently, it, too, is subject to the universal laws which regulate this process.
Now, every event in the universe has two sides which must be distinguished: its external sequence in time and space, and its internal conformity to law.
The apprehension of this conformity of human conduct to law is but a special case of knowledge. Hence, the conclusions at which we have arrived concerning the nature of knowledge must apply to this sort of knowledge, too. To apprehend oneself as a person who acts is to possess the relevant laws of conduct, i.e., the moral concepts and ideals, in the form of knowledge. It is this knowledge of the conformity of our conduct to law which makes our conduct truly ours. For, in that case, the conformity is given, not as external to the object in which the action appears, but as the very substance of the object engaged in living activity. The “object,” here, is our own Ego. If the Ego has with its knowledge really penetrated the essential nature of conduct, then it feels that it is thereby master of its conduct. Short of this, the laws of conduct confront us as something external. They master us. What we achieve, we achieve under the compulsion which they wield over us. But this compulsion ceases, as soon as their alien character has been transformed into the Ego’s very own activity. Thereafter, the law no longer rules over us, but rules in us over the actions which issue from our Ego. To perform an act in obedience to a law which is external to the agent is to be unfree. To perform it in obedience to the agent’s own law is to be free. To gain knowledge of the laws of one’s own conduct is to become conscious of one’s freedom. The process of cognition is, thus, according to our arguments, the process of the development of freedom.
Not all human conduct has this character. There are many cases in which we do not know the laws of our conduct. This part of our conduct is the unfree part of our activity. Over against it stands the part the laws of which we make completely our own. This is the realm of freedom. It is only in so far as our life falls into this realm that it can be called moral. To transform the actions which are unfree into actions which are free—this is the task of self-development for every individual, this is likewise the task of the whole human race.
Thus, the most important problem for all human thinking is to conceive man as a personality grounded upon itself and free.