2. Now, even for the ordinary use of reason, there is nothing immediately certain except the affirmation I am, which, as it loses all meaning outside of immediate consciousness, is the most individual of all truths, and the absolute prejudice, which must be assumed if anything else is to be made certain. The affirmation There are things outside of us, will therefore be certain for the transcendental philosopher, only through its identity with the affirmation I am, and its certainty will be only equal to the certainty of the affirmation from which it derives it.
According to this view, transcendental knowledge would be distinguished from ordinary knowledge in two particulars.
First—That for it the certainty of the existence of external objects is a mere prejudice, which it oversteps, in order to find the grounds of it. (It can never be the business of the transcendental philosopher to prove the existence of things in themselves, but only to show that it is a natural and necessary prejudice to assume external objects as real.)
Second—That the two affirmations, I am and There are things outside of me, which in the ordinary consciousness run together, are, in the former, separated and the one placed before the other, with a view to demonstrate as a fact their identity, and that immediate connection which in the other is only felt. By the act of this separation, when it is complete, the philosopher transports himself to the transcendental point of view, which is by no means a natural, but an artificial one.
3. If, for the transcendental philosopher, the subjective alone has original reality, he will also make the subjective alone in knowledge directly his object; the objective will only become an object indirectly to him, and, whereas, in ordinary knowledge, knowledge itself—the act of knowing—vanishes in the object, in transcendental knowledge, on the contrary, the object, as such, will vanish in the act of knowing. Transcendental knowledge is a knowledge of knowing, in so far as it is purely subjective.
Thus, for example, in intuition, it is only the objective that reaches the ordinary consciousness; the act of intuition itself is lost in the object; whereas the transcendental mode of intuition rather gets only a glimpse of the object of intuition through the act. Ordinary thought, therefore, is a mechanism in which ideas prevail, without, however, being distinguished as ideas; whereas transcendental thought interrupts this mechanism, and in becoming conscious of the idea as an act, rises to the idea of the idea. In ordinary action, the acting itself is forgotten in the object of the action; philosophizing is also an action, but not an action only. It is likewise a continued self-intuition in this action.
The nature of the transcendental mode of thought consists, therefore, generally in this: that, in it, that which in all other thinking, knowing, or acting escapes the consciousness, and is absolutely non-objective, is brought into consciousness, and becomes objective; in short, it consists in a continuous act of becoming an object to itself on the part of the subjective.
The transcendental art will therefore consist in a readiness to maintain one’s self continuously in this duplicity of thinking and acting.
III.—PRELIMINARY ARRANGEMENT OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.
This arrangement is preliminary, inasmuch as the principles of arrangement can be arrived at only in the science itself.