The Approach to Philosophy

by Ralph Barton Perry

Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that "an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philosophy.[369:7] However, unless the very term "object" is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources.

We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inaccessible to knowledge, and the definition of being in terms of subjectivity. To avoid scepticism he accepted the latter alternative. But among the Greeks with whom this theory of perception originated, it drew its meaning in large part from the distinction between perception and reason. Thus we read in Plato's "Sophist":

"And you would allow that we participate in generation with the body, and by perception; but we participate with the soul by thought in true essence, and essence you would affirm to be always the same and immutable, whereas generation varies."[370:8]

It is conceived that although in perception man is condemned to a knowledge conditioned by the affections and station of his body, he may nevertheless escape himself and lay hold on the "true essence" of things, by virtue of thought. In other words, knowledge, in contradistinction to "opinion," is not made by the subject, but is the soul's participation in the eternal natures of things. In the moment of insight the varying course of the individual thinker coincides with the unvarying truth; but in that moment the individual thinker is ennobled through being assimilated to the truth, while the truth is no more, no less, the truth than before.

The Principle of Subjectivism Extended to Reason.

§ [183]. In absolute idealism, the principle of subjectivism is extended to reason itself. This extension seems to have been originally due to moral and religious interests. From the moral stand-point the contemplation of the truth is a state, and the highest state of the individual life. The religious interest unifies the individual life and directs attention to its spiritual development. Among the Greeks of the middle period life was as yet viewed objectively as the fulfilment of capacities, and knowledge was regarded as perfection of function, the exercise of the highest of human prerogatives. But as moral and religious interests became more absorbing, the individual lived more and more in his own self-consciousness. Even before the Christian era the Greek philosophers themselves were preoccupied with the task of winning a state of inner serenity. Thus the Stoics and Epicureans came to look upon knowledge as a means to the attainment of an inner freedom from distress and bondage to the world. In other words, the very reason was regarded as an activity of the self, and its fruits were valued for their enhancement of the welfare of the self. And if this be true of the Stoics and the Epicureans, it is still more clearly true of the neo-Platonists of the Christian era, who mediate between the ancient and mediæval worlds.

Emphasis on Self-consciousness in Early Christian Philosophy.

§ [184]. It is well known that the early period of Christianity was a period of the most vivid self-consciousness. The individual believed that his natural and social environment was alien to his deeper spiritual interests. He therefore withdrew into himself. He believed himself to have but one duty, the salvation of his soul; and that duty required him to search his innermost springs of action in order to uproot any that might compromise him with the world and turn him from God. The drama of life was enacted within the circle of his own self-consciousness. Citizenship, bodily health, all forms of appreciation and knowledge, were identified in the parts they played here. In short the Christian consciousness, although renunciation was its deepest motive, was reflexive and centripetal to a degree hitherto unknown among the European peoples. And when with St. Augustine theoretical interests once more vigorously asserted themselves, this new emphasis was in the very foreground. St. Augustine wished to begin his system of thought with a first indubitable certainty, and selected neither being nor ideas, but self. St. Augustine's genius was primarily religious, and the "Confessions," in which he records the story of his hard winning of peace and right relations with God, is his most intimate book. How faithfully does he represent himself, and the blend of paganism and Christianity which was distinctive of his age, when in his systematic writings he draws upon religion for his knowledge of truth! In all my living, he argues, whether I sin or turn to God, whether I doubt or believe, whether I know or am ignorant, in all I know that I am I. Each and every state of my consciousness is a state of my self, and as such, sure evidence of my self's existence. If one were to follow St. Augustine's reflections further, one would find him reasoning from his own finite and evil self to an infinite and perfect Self, which centres like his in the conviction that I am I, but is endowed with all power and all worth. One would find him reflecting upon the possible union with God through the exaltation of the human self-consciousness. But this conception of God as the perfect self is so much a prophecy of things to come, that more than a dozen centuries elapsed before it was explicitly formulated by the post-Kantians. We must follow its more gradual development in the philosophies of Descartes and Kant.

Descartes's Argument for the Independence of the Thinking Self.