2. The Four Theoretical Divisions
We have first to determine the underlying structure of the classification, that is, we have to seek the chief Divisions, of which our plan shows seven; four theoretical and three practical ones. It will be a secondary task to subdivide them later into the 24 Departments and 128 Sections. We desire to divide the whole of knowledge in a fundamental way, and we must therefore start with the question of principle:—what is knowledge? This question belongs to epistemology, and thus falls, indeed, into the domain of philosophy. The positivist is easily inclined to substitute for the philosophical problem the empirical question: how did that which we call knowledge grow and develop itself in our individual mind, or in the mind of the nations? The question becomes, then, of course, one which must be answered by psychology, by sociology, and perhaps by biology. Such genetic inquiries are certainly very important, and the problem of how the processes of judging and conceiving and thinking are produced in the individual or social consciousness, and how they are to be explained through physical and psychical causes, deserves fullest attention. But its solution cannot even help us as regards the fundamental problem, what we mean by knowledge, and what the ultimate value of knowledge may be, and why we seek it. This deeper logical inquiry must be answered somehow before those genetic studies of the psychological and the sociological positivists can claim any truth at all, and thus any value, for their outcome. To explain our present knowledge genetically from its foregoing causes means merely to connect the present experience, which we know, with a past experience, which we remember, or with earlier phenomena which we construct on the basis of theories and hypotheses; but in any case with facts which we value as parts of our knowledge and which thus presuppose the acknowledgment of the value of knowledge. We cannot determine by linking one part of knowledge with another part of knowledge whether we have a right to speak of knowledge at all and to rely on it.
We can thus not start from the childhood of man, or from the beginning of humanity, or from any other object of knowledge, but we must begin with the state which logically precedes all knowledge; that is, with our immediate experience of real life. Here, in the naïve experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective attitudes as agents of will, as personalities, here we find the original reality not yet shaped and remoulded by scientific conceptions and by the demands of knowledge. And from this basis of primary, naïve reality we must ask ourselves what we mean by seeking knowledge, and how this demand of ours is different from the other activities in which we work out the meaning and the ideals of our life.
One thing is certain, we cannot go back to the old dogmatic standpoint, whether rationalistic or sensualistic. In both cases dogmatism took for granted that there is a real world of things which exist in themselves independent of our subjective attitudes, and that our knowledge has to give us a mirror picture of that self-dependent world. Sensualism averred that we get this knowledge through our perceptions; rationalism, that we get it by reasoning. The one asserted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other asserted that our knowledge speaks of necessity which no mere perception can find out. Our modern time has gone through the school of philosophical criticism, and the dogmatic ideas have lost for us their meaning. We know that the world which we think as independent cannot be independent of the forms of our thinking, and that no science has reference to any other world than the world which is determined by the categories of our apperception. There cannot be anything more real than the immediate pure experience, and if we seek the truth of knowledge, we do not set out to discover something which is hidden behind our experience, but we set out simply to make something out of our experience which satisfies certain demands. Our immediate experience does not contain an objective thing and a subjective picture of it, but they are completely one and the same piece of experience. We have the object of our immediate knowledge not in the double form of an outer object independent of ourselves and an idea in us, but we have it as our object there in the practical world before science for its special purposes has broken up that bit of reality into the physical material thing and the psychical content of consciousness. And if this doubleness does not hold for the immediate reality of pure experience, it cannot enter through that reshaping and reconstructing and connecting and interpreting of pure experience which we call our knowledge. All that science gives to us is just such an endlessly enlarged experience, of which every particle remains objective and independent, inasmuch as it is not in us as psychical individuals, while yet completely dependent upon the forms of our subjective experience. The ideal of truth is thus not to gain by reason or by observation ideas in ourselves which correspond as well as possible to absolute things, but to reconstruct the given experience in the service of certain purposes. Everything which completely fulfills the purposes of this intentional reconstruction is true.
What are these purposes? One thing is clear from the first: There cannot be a purpose where there is not a will. If we come from pure experience to knowledge by a purposive transformation, we must acknowledge the reality of will in ourselves, or rather, we must find ourselves as will in the midst of pure experience before we reach any knowledge. And so it is indeed. We can abstract from all those reconstructions which the sciences suggest to us and go back to the most immediate naïve experience; but we can never reach an experience which does not contain the doubleness of subject and object, of will and world. That doubleness has nothing whatever to do with the difference of physical and psychical; both the physical thing and the psychical idea are objects. The antithesis is not that between two kinds of objects, since we have seen that in the immediate experience the objects are not at all split up into the two groups of material and mental things; it is rather the antithesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-attitude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the will-attitudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we have the will-attitudes themselves, and not a subject which wills them.
If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference between those two elements of our pure experience, between the object and the will-attitude, we stand before the ultimate data: we call that element which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the object, and we call that element of our experience which is complete in itself, the attitude of the will. If we experienced liking or disliking, affirming or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way in which we experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, the rock and the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. But we do experience them in quite a different way. The rock and the tree do not point to anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic attitudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state; object and attitude form a unity which we resolve by the different way in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the object and we live through the attitude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the attitude. In real life our will is never an object which we simply perceive. The psychologist may treat the will as such, but in the immediate experience of real life, we are certain of our action by doing it and not by perceiving our doing; and this our performing and rejecting is really our self which we posit as absolute reality, not by knowing it, but by willing it. This corner-stone of the Fichtean philosophy was forgotten throughout the uncritical and unphilosophical decades of a mere naturalistic age. But our time has finally come to give attention to it again.
Our pure experience thus contains will-attitudes and objects of will, and the different attitudes of the will give the fundamental classes of human activity. We can easily recognize four different types of will-relation towards the world. Our will submits itself to the world; our will approves the world as it is; our will approves the changes in the world; our will transcends the world. Yet we must make at once one more most important discrimination. We have up to this point simplified our pure experience too much. It is not true that we experience only objects and our own will-attitudes. Our will reaches out not only to objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experience, not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agreement or disagreement with other wills; tries to influence them, and receives influences and suggestions from them. The pseudo-philosophy of naturalism must say of course that the will does not stand in any direct relation to another will, but that the other persons are for us simply material objects which we perceive, like other objects, and into which we project mental phenomena like those which we find in ourselves by the mere conclusion of analogy. But the complex reconstructions of physiological psychology are therein substituted for the primary experience. If we have to express the agreement or disagreement of wills in the terms of causal science, we may indeed be obliged to transform the real experience into such artificial constructions; but in our immediate consciousness, and thus at the starting-point of our theory of knowledge, we have certainly to acknowledge that we understand the other person, accept or do not accept his suggestion, agree or disagree with him, before we know anything of a difference between physical and mental objects.
We cannot agree with an object. We agree directly with a will, which does not come to us as a foreign phenomenon, but as a proposition which we accept or decline. In our immediate experience will thus reaches will, and we are aware of the difference between our will-attitude as merely individual and our will-attitude as act of agreement with the will-attitude of other individuals. We can go still further. The circle of other individuals whose will we express in our own will-act may be narrow or wide, may be our friends or the nation, and this relation clearly constitutes the historical significance of our attitude. In the one case our act is a merely personal choice for personal purposes without any general meaning; in the other case it is the expression of general tendencies and historical movements. Yet our will-decisions can have connections still wider than those with our social community or our nation, or even with all living men of to-day. It can seek a relation to the totality of those whom we aim to acknowledge as real subjects. It thus becomes independent of the chance experience of this or that man, or this or that movement, which appeals to us, but involves in an independent way the reference to every one who is to be acknowledged as a subject at all. Such reference, which is no longer bound to any special group of historical individuals, thus becomes strictly over-individual. We can then discriminate three stages: our merely individual will; secondly, our will as bound by other historical individuals; and thirdly, our over-individual will, which is not influenced by any special individual, but by the general demands for the idea of a personality.
Each of those four great types of will-attitude which we insisted on—that is, of submitting, of approving the given, of approving change, and of transcending—can be carried out on these three stages, that is, as individual act, as historical act, and as over-individual act. And we may say at once that only if we submit and approve and change and transcend in an over-individual act, do we have Truth and Beauty and Morality and Conviction. If we approve, for instance, a given experience in an individual will-act, we have simply personal enjoyment and its object is simply agreeable; if we approve it in harmony with other individuals, we reach a higher attitude, yet one which cannot claim absolute value, as it is dependent on historical considerations and on the tastes and desires of a special group or a school or a nation or an age. But if we approve the given object just as it is in an over-individual will-act, then we have before us a thing of beauty, whose value is not dependent upon our personal enjoyment as individuals, but is demanded as a joy forever, by every one whom we acknowledge at all as a complete subject. In exactly the same way, we may approve a change in the world from any individual point of view: we have then to do with technical, practical achievements; or we may approve it in agreement with others: we then enter into the historical interests of our time. Or we may approve it, finally, in an over-individual way, without any reference to any special personality: then only is it valuable for all time, then only is it morally good. And if our will is transcending experience in an individual way, it can again claim no more than a subjective satisfaction furnished by any superstition or hope. But if the transcending will is over-individual, it reaches the absolute values of religion and metaphysics.
Exactly the same differences, finally, must occur when our will submits itself to experience. This submission may be, again, an individual decision for individual purposes; no absolute value belongs to it. Or it may be again a yielding to the suggestions of other individuals; or it may, finally, again be an over-individual submission, which seeks no longer a personal interest. This submission is not to the authority of others, and is without reference to any individual; we assume that every one who is to share with us our world of experience has to share this submission too. That alone is a submission to truth, and experience, considered in so far as we submit ourselves to it over-individually, constitutes our knowledge.