The schema for carrying out this thought is the
dialectical
method.
Windelband - History of Philosophy
" Herbart's inclination toward the earlier philosophy consists in this, that he denies the creative spontaneity of conscious ness, and, like the associational psychologists, finds it determined ami dependent in both Form and content from without.
He opposes also the virtual innateness which had propagated itself from Leibniz on through the Inaugural DiKxertation into the Critique of Pure Rnunn : the forms of relation expressed in the categories are for him, like space and time, products of the ideational mechanism.
As regards the psycho-genetic questions, he stands entirely upon the platform of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
For this reason he knows no other logic than the formal logic whose principle is the principle of contradiction, i.
e.
the prohibition to commit a contra
more
584 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
diction. The supreme principle of all thought that which con tradicts itself cannot he truly real or actual. 1
Now evident that the conceptions in which we think experi ence are full of internal contradictions; we assume things, which are to be identical with themselves and yet made equal to a variety of attributes we speak of alterations in which that which
to itself successively different we trace all inner experience back to an "I" or "self" which as that "which mentally represents itself" (sich selbst VorsteUende) involves an infinite series in the subject as well as in the object, — we trace all outer experience back to a matter, in the idea of which the attributes of the discrete and the continuous are at variance. This experience can be only phenomenon but this phenomenon must have at its basis something real which free from contradictions, seeming things must have absolute "Reals" (Reale), seeming occurrence and change a real occurrence and change. Whatever seeming there is, there just so much indication of Being. To discover this the task of philoso phy working over of the conceptions of experience which are given and which must be re-shaped according to the rules of formal logic, until we know the reality that has no internal contradictions.
The general means to this end the method of relation. The fundamental form of contradiction always that something simple
thought as having differences (the synthetic unity of the mani fold in Kant). This difficulty can be removed only by assuming plurality of simple beings, through the relation of which to each other the " illusion " of the manifold or changeable produced in any individual object. Thus the conception of substance can be maintained only we suppose that the various qualities and chang ing states which substance said to unite, concern not substance itself, but only the relation in which successively stands to other substances. The things-in-themselves must be many from thing-in-itself the multiplicity of qualities and states could never be understood. But each of these metaphysical things must be thought as entirely simple and unchangeable; they are called by Herbart, "Reals" (Realen). All qualities which form the characteristics of things in experience are relative, and make these characteristics
Cf. Einleitung in die Philos. , W. , 72-82. The historical stimulus to this sharp presentation of the principle of contradiction was no doubt the deprecia tion which this principle found in the dialectic method (cf. 42, logically, however, Herbart's doctrine (with the exception of his treatment of the "I" conception) entirely independent of it. The Eleatic element in the Herbar- tian philosophy (cf. 226) is given with the postulate of Bring void of contra dictions, and to this circumstance the philosopher, who otherwise had little historical disposition, owed his fineness of feeling for the metaphysical motire
the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Cf, 237 ff. and XII. 61 ft
equal
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Chaf. 2, §41. ] Thiny-iitrltae\f ': llerbart. 585
appear only in relation to other things ; the absolute qualities of the Reals are, therefore, unknowable.
8. But they must be thought as the ground which determines the qualities that appear ; aud likewise we must assume as ground of the seeming changes which the mutation of qualities exhibits in the case of empirical things, an actual process or occurrence, a change of relations between the Reals. Here, however, this whole artificial construction of that which lies beyond experience began to waver. For the Eleatic rigidity of these Reals in nowise permits us to form an idea of the kind of " actual relations " which are held to obtain between them. First of all, these cannot be spatial ; ' space and time are products of the series formed by ideas, products of the
psychical mechanism, and hence phenomenal for Herbart in almost a higher degree than for Kant. Only in a transferred sense can the changing relations of substances be termed a " coming and going in the intelligible space"; what they are themselves the Herbartian doctrine has nd term to express. Only, in a negative direction it is obliged to make a questionable concession. Every Real has only simple and unchangeable determinations: the relation, therefore, which exists or arises between two Reals is not essential to either, and has not its basis in either. A tertium quid, however, which this
relation would postulate, is not to be discovered in this metaphys ics. * Hence the relations which the Reals sustain to each other, and from which the appearance of things and their relations are said to follow, are called " contingent views " (zu/SUige Ansichten) of the Reals ; and Herbart's meaning in several passages is scarcely to be understood otherwise than that consciousness is the intelligible apace in which the above relations between the Reals obtain, that the real process or occurrence, also, is some thing which itself only "takes place for the spectator" as "objective seeming. "1 If we add to this, that the " Being " of the Reals or absolute qualities is
1 Not only in thia point do Herbart's Reals distinguish themselves from the atoms of Detnocrilua, with which they have the common basis of a pluralistic rc-ihaping of the Eleatic conception of Being, but also by the difference in
quality, in the place of which atomism allows only quantitive differences. Just as little are the Reals to be confused with Leibniz's monads, with which indeed they share their absence of windows, but not the attribute of being a unity of the manifold. With the Platonic Ideas, they have in com mon the attributes of the Eleatic Being, but not the character of class-concepts.
(unknowable)
t in this gap of his metaphysics lierbart inserted his philo$ophy of religion; for since there is no knowledge of the real ground of the relations between the Reals, from which the world of phenomena proceeds, the impression of pur- posireness which the latter makes permits us to believe, in a manner which is theoretically unassailable, upon a supreme intelligence as the ground of these relations, — a very pale revival of the old pbysico-lheological proof.
'CtW, IV. 93 ff. , 127-132, 233, 240 (. , 248 ff. ; see also E. Zeller, Oeth. d. dtutaeA. Pkilo$. , 844.
586 Germany: Development of Ideal ism. [Pakt VI
defined by Herbart as " absohite position," i. e. as a " Setzung," ' a pos iting in which Being is at rest, and which is not taken back, we have opening before us the perspective into an " absolute " idealism.
This was, indeed, carried out by Herbart still less than by Kant ; here, too, it would have led to absolute contradiction. For the theory of Heals aims to deduce consciousness also, as a consequence, emerging in the realm of phenomena, of the "co-existence of the Reals. " The Reals are held to reciprocally " disturb " each other, and to call forth in each other as reactions against these disturb ances, inner states which have the significance of self-preserva tions. "* Such self-preservations are immediately known to us as those by the aid of which the unknown Real of our soul maintains itself against disturbance by other Reals ; they are ideas (VorsteUun- gen). The soul as a simple substance is naturally unknowable; psychology is only the science of its self-preservations. These, the ideas, sustain within the soul, which simply furnishes the indiffer ent stage for their co-existence, once more the relations of Reals ; they disturb and inhibit each other, and the whole course of the psychical life is to be explained from this reciprocal tension of ideas. By their tension the ideas lose in intensity ; and the consciousness depends upon the degree of intensity. The lowest degree of strength, which the ideas can have and still be regarded as actual, is the threshold of consciousness. If the ideas are pressed by others below this threshold, they change into impulse. Hence the essential nature of those psychical states which are called feeling and will is to be sought in the inhibitory relations of ideas. All these relations must be developed as a " statics and mechanics of ideas," * and since we have to do here essentially with the determining of differences of force, this metaphysical psychology must take on the form of a mathe matical theory of the mechanism of ideas. * Herbart lays particular
»Cf. W. , IV. 71 ff.
* The " suum esse conservare," with Hobbes and Spinoza the fundamental in
* In carrying out this thought Herbart assumed that ideas in their reciprocal inhibitions lose in intensity as much as the weakest of them possesses, and thai this Inhibition-sum is divided among the individual ideas in inverse ratio to their original strength, so that if in the simplest case, a > 6, a is reduced by
stinct of individuals, appears with Herbart as the metaphysical activity of the Reals, by virtue of which they produce the world of seeming, i. e. experience.
' On this metaphysical basis Herbart erected the structure of an immanent associational psychology. The assumption of a mechanical necessity of the ideational process, and the view that the volitions follow from this as likewise necessary relations, proved a fortunate basis for a scientific theory of pedagog ics, — a discipline which Herbart made also dependent upon ethics, since the latter teaches the goal of education (the formation of ethical character), while psychology teaches the mechanism through which this is realised. In a similar way Beneke, who took the standpoint of associational psychology without Her- bart's metaphysics, found the path to a systematic pedagogics.
Chap. 2, $ 41. ] Thing-in-Ittelf : Eerbart. 587
weight upon the investigation of the process by which newly entering ideas are "assimilated," ordered, formed, and in part altered, by the ideas already present; he employs for this the expression appercep tion (first coined by Leibniz ; cf. p. 463), and his theory of this takes the form of an explanation of the " I " or " self " by associational psychology. The " I " is thought as the moving point in which the apperceiving and apperceived ideas continually converge.
While the self-preservation of the Real which constitutes the soul, against disturbance by other Reals thus produces the phenomena of the ideational "life, the reciprocal self-preservation and " partial inter-penetration of several Reals produce for the consciousness of the spectator the "objective seeming or illusion" of matter. The
various physical and chemical phenomena are here tortured out of the metaphysical presuppositions with an unspeakably toilsome deduction,1 — an attempt forgotten to-day, which remained as desti tute of results in natural science as in philosophy.
9. Another Gottingen professor, Bouterwek, attacked the thing-in- itself with other weapons. He showed in his Apodiktik, that if the doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason are to be taken in earnest, nothing remains for the "object to which the subject necessarily relates" except a completely inconceivable X. We cannot talk of a thing-in-itself or of things-in-themselves; for in this are involved already the categories of Inherence, of Unity and Plurality,' and of
Reality, which hold good only for phenomena. The transcendental philosophy must become " negative Spinozism. " * It can teach only that to the " consciousness in general " a " something in general " corresponds, concerning which nothing whatever is to be affirmed in absolute knowledge. (Cf. with regard to Spinoza, above, pp. 408 f. ). On the other hand, this absolutely real asserts itself in all relative knowledge through the consciousness of trilling. * For this shows everywhere the living force of individuality. We know of the subject because it wills something, and of the object because it furnishes
the inhibition to + "* ~ and to _ —. Cf. on thin arbitrarily axiomatic a a+"
assumption and on the mistaken nature of the whole psychological calculus," A. Lange, Die Grundlegung dtr mathftnatuehen Ptyehologif, Duisburg, 1866.
Allgrm. Mttnphyrik. «f 240 ff. . 331 If. VV\, IV. 147 ft. , 3*7 fl. In llerbart's metaphysics the branching out of general ontology into the beginnings of psy chology and natural philosophy designated by the names Eidology and Sfneehology.
Cf. asp. Apodiktik. 261, 302 ff.
lb. 386 ff.
Following the example of Kant and Fichte, Bouterwek ends his theoretical
Apodiktik in scepticism or in completely abstract-formal, absolute knowledge U the "practical" apodictic which first gala* a relation of its content to
reality.
it
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;
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588 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI
resistance to this will. The antithesis of force and resistance thus furnishes a common basis to the knowledge of the reality of our selves, and to that of the reality of other things, — of the I and the Not-I. 1 This doctrine Bouterwek would have called absolute Virtu- alism. We know our own reality in that we will, and the reality of other things in that our will finds in them a resisting force. The feeling of resistance refutes pure subjectivism or solipsism, but this relative knowledge of the particular forces of the real is supple mented by the consciousness of our own willing to form a merely empirical science. 8
This thought of his Gottingen teacher was developed by Schopen hauer, under the influence of Fichte, to a metaphysics. With a bold leap he swings himself up from the position of Virtualism to the knowledge of the essential nature of all things. We recognise the will within us as the true reality, and the resistance from which we know the reality of other things must, therefore, be likewise will. This is demanded by the " metaphysical need " of a unitary explana tion for all experience. The world " as idea " can be only phenome non ; an object is possible only in the subject and determined by the Forms of the subject. Hence the world in man's idea or mental representation (as " phenomenon of the brain," as Schopenhauer has often said with a dangerously contradictory laxity of expression) appears as a manifold ordered in space and time, a manifold whose connection can be thought only in accordance with the principle of causality, — the only one of the Kantian categories which Schopen hauer can admit to an originality of the same rank as that which belongs to the pure perceptions. Bound to these Forms, conceptional knowledge can have for its object only the necessity which prevails between individual phenomena: for causality is a relation of phe nomena to each other; science knows nothing absolute, nothing unconditioned; the guiding thread of causality, which leads from one condition to the other, never breaks off and must not be broken off arbitrarily. 8 The conceptional work of science can, therefore, in nowise raise itself above this infinite series of phenomena ; only an intuitive interpretation of the whole world of ideas, a look of genius over experience, an immediate apprehension, can penetrate to th6 true essence, which appears in our ideas as the world determined in space and time and hy causality. This intuition, however, is that by which the knowing subject is given immediately through itself as will. This word solves, therefore, the mystery of the outer world
i Apodiktik II. 68 ,ft a lb. II. 67 I.
8 In this Schopenhauer is in complete agreement with Jacobi (cf. above, p. 674).
Cm Ac. 41. Thing-in-itself Schopenhauer. 589
also. For we must apprehend the significance of all that given to ns immediately in space and time as idea,1 according to this analogy
of the only thing which immediately given. The thing-in-itself the Will.
The word "will" as here used must indeed be taken in an ex tended sense. In men and in animals the will appears as motiva tion determined through ideas, in the instinctive and vegetative life of the organism as susceptibility to stimulation, in the rest of the world of experience as mechanical processes. The meaning which
common to these different internal or external kinds of causality, should be designated a potiori as will, in accordance with that form in which alone immediately known to us. Accordingly the philosopher emphasises expressly the point, that the particular peculiarities with which the will given in human self-perception, i. e. its motivation through ideas and conceptions, must be kept quite apart from our notion of the will as thing-in-itself, — requirement which was, indeed, hard enough for Schopenhauer himself to
fulfil.
At the same time, however, the relation between thing-in-itself
and phenomenon must not be thought according to the rule of the understanding, i. e. causally. The thing-in-itself is not the cause of phenomena. Even in the case of man the will not the cause of his body or of the bodily activities but the same reality, which given us mediately, through our ideas in space and time perception, as body, and which in cognition conceived as something causally necessary and dependent upon other phenomena, — this im mediately given as will. Because the thing-in-itself not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, we have the paradox, that man feels himself as will immediately free, and yet in idea knows him self to be necessarily determined. So Schopenhauer adopts Kant's doctrine of intelligible and empirical character. In the same way, however, phenomenal Nature must everywhere be regarded as objectificatum that as the perceptional and conceptional mode of representation of the will or the immediately real, and must not be regarded as the product of the latter. The relation of essence to phenomenon not that of cause and effect
" Further, the will as thing-in-itself can be only the one, universal Korld-tcill. " All plurality and multiplicity belong to perception
in space and time; these latter are the principium indieiduationis. Hence things are different and separate from each other only as phenomena — in idea and cognition; in their true essence they are
Cf. World as Will, etc. , II. 18-83.
if
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590 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Past VL
all the same. The will is the tv «i war. Here lies for Schopen hauer the metaphysical root of morals. It is the deception of the phenomenal that makes the individual distinguish his own weal and woe from that of other individuals, and brings the two into opposition : in the fundamental moral feeling which feels another's sorrows as one's own — in sympathy, the transcendental unity of will of all reality comes to light.
Finally, the will can have for its object no particular content that can be empirically presented in consciousness; for every such content belongs already to its "objectivity. " The world-will has only itself for its object ; it wills only to will. It wills only to be actual; for all that actually is, is itself only a willing. In this sense Schopenhauer calls it the will to live. It is the thing-in-itself which ever gives birth to itself in timeless, eternal process, and as such it is represented in the restless mutation of phenomena.
§ 42. The System of Reason.
The direction which the main line of the idealistic development was to take was prescribed by the principle from which Fichte made bold to throw overboard the conception of the thing-in-itself. The relation of Being and consciousness can be explained only out of consciousness, and by the fact that consciousness " looks at its own action" and creates thereby at once the real and the ideal series of experience — objects and the knowledge of them. The problem of the Wissenschaftslehre therefore, to comprehend the world as a necessary connected whole of rational activities, and the solution can proceed only by reflection on the part of the philos ophising reason upon its own action and upon that which is requi site therefor. The necessity, therefore, which prevails in this system ofreason not caused, but teleological. The dogmatic system understands the intelligence as product of things, the idealistic develops intelligence as an inherently purposeful connection of acts, some of which serve to produce objects. The progress of philo sophical thought should not take the form, that because something is, therefore something else also, but should rather shape itself after the guiding principle that in order that something may take
place, something else must take place also. Every act of reason has a task; to perforin this needs other acts and thus other tasks; the connected series of all activities for the fulfilment of all tasks, taken as a purposeful unity, the system of the reason, the " history of consciousness. " The ground or reason of all Being lies
is
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is,
Crap. 2, { 42. ] System of Reason : Dialectic. 591
in the ought ; that is, in the activity of self-consciousness directed toward an end.
The schema for carrying out this thought is the dialectical method. If the world is to be comprehended as reason, the system of reason must be developed from an original task; all particular acts of intelligence must be deduced as means to its performance. This
act [lit "deed-act," Thathandlung'] is self-consciousness. A begin ning without assumptions, such as philosophy needs, is not to be found by means of an assertion or proposition, but by means of a demand, which every one must be able to fulfil : " Think thyself! " And the whole business of philosophy consists in making clear what takes place in this act, and what is requisite for it. But this principle can lead on farther, only so long as it is shown that between that which should take place and that which does take place to this end, there is still a contradiction, out of which the new task results, and so on. The dialectical method is a system in
which every problem or task creates a new one. There is in the reason itself a resistance to the result it seeks to achieve, and to overcome this resistance it unfolds a new function. These three momenta are designated as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
If Kant had maintained the necessity of insoluble problems of reason for his explanation and criticism of metaphysics, the idealis tic metaphysics now makes this thought a positive principle. By this means the reason's world becomes an infinity of self-production, and the contradiction between the task and the actual doing is declared to be the real nature of the reason itself. This contradic tion is necessary and cannot be abolished. It belongs to the essen tial nature of the reason ; and since only the reason is real, the con tradiction is thus declared to be real. Thus the dialectical method, this metaphysical transformation of Kant's transcendental logic, came into stronger and stronger opposition to formal logic. The rules of the understanding, which have their general principle in the principle of contradiction, are adequate, perhaps, for the ordi nary elaboration of perceptions into conceptions, judgments, and conclusions; for the intellectual perception of the philosophising reason they do not suffice, before the problems of " speculative con struction" they sink to a relative importance.
This doctrine asserts itself already in the first exposition which Fichte gave to his Science of Knowledge;' it was then spoken out more and more boldly by disciples and associates like Fr. Schlegel, and, ultimately, the speculative reason affected a superiority to the
Omuttage der gtt. W. -L. , f 1 j W, I. 92 H. [Kroegfr's tr„ pp. 63 ff. ].
692 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
"reflective philosophy of the understanding" hemmed in within the principle of contradiction. Schelling ' appealed to the coind- dentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno, and Hegel2 sees in the triumph of the "narrow understanding" over the reason the hereditary error of all earlier philosophy. 3 Meta physics, of which Kant has shown that it is not possible for the understanding, seeks an organ of its own in intellectual perception or intuition, and a form of its own in the dialectical method. The productive synthesis of the manifold must keep its unity above the antitheses into which it divides itself. It is the essential nature of mind or spirit to disunite itself, and from this state of being rent apart, to return back to its original unity.
This triplicity rests entirely upon the above (Fichtean) funda mental characterisation of the mind as that which beholds itself. The reason is not only "in-itself" as a simple ideal reality, but also " for-its. elf " ; it appears to itself as "something other, alien"; it becomes for itself an object different from the subject, and this otherness is the principle of negation. The doing away with this difference, the negation of the negation, is the synthesis of the two moments above named. These are annulled or sublated
[" aufge- hoben," which has no exact English equivalent ; Bosanquet suggests "put by"] in the threefold aspect that their one-sided force is overcome, their relative meaniug is preserved, and their original sense transmuted into a higher truth. Following " this scheme of the "in-itself," "for-itself," and " in-and-for-itself (An-sich, Fir-
sich, An-und-fiir-sich). Hegel developed his dialectical method with great virtuosoship by making each conception " turn into its oppo site," and from the contradiction of the two making the higher con ception proceed, which then experienced the same fortune of finding an antithesis which required a still higher synthesis, and so on. The Master himself, in his employment of this method, particularly in the Phcenomenology and in the Logic, worked in an astonishing wealth of knowledge, a quite unique fineness of feeling for concep- tional connections, and a victorious power of combining thought, while occasionally his profundity passed over into obscurity and schematic word-building. In the case of his disciples, a philosophical jargon grew out of this, which pressed all thought into the triple scheme, and by the thoughtless externality with which it was used,—
> Sixth Vorl. after Meth. d. ak. St. , W. , V. 267 ff.
3 Cf. esp. hia article on Glauben und Wissen, W. , I. 21 ff.
* It is from this point of view that we best can understand Herbart's polemic
against absolute idealism. He, too, finds contradictions in the fundamental conceptions of experience, but just on this account they ought to be worked over until the contradictionless reality is recognised ; cf. above, § 41, 7.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Fichte. 598
and used for a time in widely extended circles, — it was all too well adapted to discredit philosophy as an empty bombast1
2. The system of reason with Fichte, in the first period of his philosophical activity (about 1800), is, in its content also, in full accord with the above method. The original "act" (Tliathandlung) of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing except itself, is that the " J" or self can only be ** posited " by being distinguished from a " Not-I" or "not-self. " Since, however, the not-self is posited only in the self, — i. e. historically expressed, the object posited only in consciousness, — the self and the not-self (i. e. subject and object) must reciprocally determine each other within the " I " or self. From this results the theoretical or the practical series of self-conscious ness, according as the Not-I or the " I " is the determining part.
The functions of the theoretical reason are now developed by Fichte in the following manner : The particular stages result from the reflection of consciousness upon its own previously determined action. By virtue of its own activity, which is limited by nothing external, it presses beyond every bound which the "I" has set for itself in the Not-I as object. The pure perceptions, space and time, the categories as rules of the understanding, and the principles of the reason, are treated as the several forms of this self-determin ing. In place of the antitheses which Kant had set up between these particular strata, Fichte set the principle, that in each higher stage the reason apprehends in purer form what it has accomplished in the lower stage. Knowing is a process of self-knowledge on the part of the reason, beginning with sense perception and ascending to complete knowledge. ' But this whole series of the theoretical reason presupposes an original " self-limitation " of the I. If this is given, the entire series is comprehensible in accordance with the principle of self-perception ; for every activity has its object and its reason in the preceding. The first self-limitation has its ground in no preceding act, and therefore, theoretically, no ground what
ever. It is a groundless, free activity, but as such, the ground of all other activities. This groundless [undetermined] free act is sen sation. It falls into consciousness, therefore, only in its content, which is to be taken up into perception ; as act it like all that has
Of. the humorous portrayal in G. Rtlmelin, Reden nnd AuftaUt, pp. 47-60, Freiburg. 1888.
Without any directly visible influence from Leibniz, his conception of the relation of the different knowing faculties asserts itself here in contrast with the Kantian separation. Only to be noted that this "history of the devel opment of reason " la, with Leibniz, determined causally, with Fichte teleologi- cally . What Hainan and Herder (cf. above, p. 670) demanded as requirement of the unity of intelligence in the I/eibnizian sense, Fichte and Schelling had
lwhile performed in quite another sense.
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it is
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694 Germany: Development of Idealism. (. i'art VI.
no ground, unconscious. 1 In this consists its " givenness," by virtue of which it appears as foreign and coming " from without. " In place of the thing-in-itself comes, therefore, the unconscious self- limitation of the I. Fichte calls this activity the productive imagina tion. It is the world-producing activity of the reason.
For sensation there is then no ground which determines it; it is there with absolute freedom, and determines on its part all knowledge as regards content. Hence it can be comprehended only through its end — in the practical Wissenschaflslehre, which has to investigate to what end the self limits itself. This is only to be understood if we regard the I or self, not as resting Being, but as in its nature infinite activity or impulse. For since all action is directed toward an object in connection with which it develops, so the self, which finds its object not given to as the case with the empirical will, must, in order to remain impulse and action, set objects for itself. This takes place in sensation sensation has no ground, but only the end of creating for the impulse of the self
limit beyond which the self passes in order to become object for itself. The actual world of experience, with all its things, and with the " Reality " which has for the theoretical consciousness, only the material for the activity of the practical reason.
The inmost essence of the ego, therefore, its action, directed only toward itself, determined only by itself, — the autonomy of the ethical reason. The system of reason culminates in the categorical imperative. The the ethical will, and the world the material of duty put into sensuous form. It there, to the end that we may be active in it. It not that Being the cause of doing, but Being brought forth for the sake of the doing. All that is, only to be understood or explained from the point of view of that which ought to be {soil) .
The demand of the Wissenschaflslehre, so paradoxical for the ordinary consciousness,* amounts, accordingly, to robbing the category
The paradox of the "unconscious activities of consciousness" lies in the expression, not in the thing. German philosophers have frequently been very unfortunate in their terminology, most unfortunate precisely where they wished to give German words a new meaning. Fichte not only uses consciousness and self-consciousness promiscuously, but he understands by consciousness, on the one hand, the actual idea or mental presentation of the individual or the empirical ego (hence in this sense " unconscious," bewunttlos), and on the other hand, the functions of the " consciousness in general," of the transcen dental apperception or the " universal ego or self " (in this sense he speaks of "history of consciousness"). In these verbal relations rests good part of the difficulty of Fichte's exposition and of the misunderstanding which has called forth.
In this spirit Fr. H. Jacobi protested against this knitting, not indeed of the stocking, but of the knitting (W. , III. 24 ff. ). Cf. , on the other hand, C. Fort- lage, Beitragc zur Psychologie (Leips. 1876), pp. 40
f.
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Chaf. 2, § 42. ] System oj Reason : Fichte. 595
of substantiality of the fundamental significance which it has in the naive, sensuous view of the world. In this a something that " is," a " Being " (" Seiendes ") is always thought as support and cause of activities; in Fichte's thought the "doing "or action is conceived as the original, and Being is regarded as only the means posited for that end. This antithesis came sharply to light in the atheism controversy, which had so important consequences for Fichte per sonally. The Wissenschaftslehre could not allow God to be regarded as " substance " ; in this case he would necessarily be something derived ; it could seek the metaphysical conception of God only in the "Universal Ego or Self" (allgemeinen Ich), in the absolutely free, world-creating action; and in clear contrast to the natura naiurans of dogmatism it calls God the Moral World-order,1 the ordo ordinans.
Accordingly, the chief philosophical discipline for Fichte is moral science. Projected before Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Fichte's system takes from the same the categorical imperative in the formula " act according to thy conscience," for the starting-point of a strictly carried out science of duties, which develops the general and particular tasks of man from the opposition appearing in the empirical self between the natural impulse and the moral impulse. At the same time, the Kantian rigour is softened by the fact, that man's sensibility, also, is permitted to assert its rights as product
of reason. The dualism still survives, but it is already on the way toward being overcome, and in the thought that the purposeful connected whole of the reason assigns each of its members a voca tion prescribed by its natural manifestation, ethical theory is brought to an elaboration of the " material for the fulfilment of duty," which is much more penetrating and gives a deeper value to the data of experience. This shows itself in Fichte's exposition of professional duties, in his nobler conception of marriage and family life, in the finer penetration of his ethical investigations into the manifold relations of human life.
The like is true, also, of Fichte's treatment of the problems of public life. A youthful energy masters the Kantian fundamental thoughts here, and gives them a much more impressive formulation than they could receive from Kant himself, who undertook the systematic carrying out of these thoughts, only in his old age. The reciprocal limitation of spheres of freedom in the outer social life of individuals for Fichte also, the principle of Natural Right. As "primitive rights" he regarded the claims of the individual to
Ficbte, W. , V. lttt H. , 210 B.
is, '
696 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
freedom of his body as the organ for performance of duty, of his property as being the external sphere of operation to this end, and finally of his self-preservation 'as personality. But these primitive rights become efficient as compulsory rights or laws only through the authority of (positive) laws in the state. The idea of the com pact which is at the basis of the state, Fichte analyses into the citizen, the property, and the defence contract. It is interesting in this connection to see how these thoughts culminate in his politics in the principle, that the state has to make provision that every one may be able to live by his work, — the doctrine, named after him, of the so-called right to work. 1 Work is the duty of the moral person ality, the condition of existence of the physical ; it must uncondi tionally be furnished by the state. Hence the regulation of the relations of labour must not be left to the natural working of supply
and demand (as according to Adam Smith), and the profits of labour must not be left to the mechanism of society's war of interests, but the rational law of the state must enter here. From the point of view of this thought, with a careful consideration of the conditions given by experience,8 Fichte projected his ideal of the socialistic state as "the complete industrial state" (geschlossenen Handelsstaates) . which itself takes in hand all production and manufacturing, and all trade with foreign countries, in order to assign to each citizen his work and also the full revenue for his work. The powerful idealism of the philosopher did not shrink from a deep system of compulsion, if he could hope to assure to every individual thereby a sphere for the free fulfilment of duty.
3. The problem of conceiving the universe as a system of reason was solved in the main in the Science of Knowledge by the method of deducing the external world of the senses as a product, appearing in the empirical ego, of the " consciousness in general " ; in this sense Fichte's doctrine, like Kant's, was later characterised as-" sub jective idealism. " Fichte's meaning in this, however, was through out that " Nature," which it was his intention to have posited as an organic whole,8 should possess the full significance of an objective product of reason, in contrast with the ideas of individuals ; to set this forth he lacked the penetrating knowledge of his subject which he possessed in the case of the relations of human life. Thus it was a supplementing of this work, that was welcome to Fichte
» Naturrecht, § 18 ; W. , III. 210 fl. ; Grschl. Handelsst. , I. 1 ; W„ III. 400 ff.
1 Cf. G. Schmoller, Studie iiber J. G. Fichte in Hildebrand's Jahrb. /. Nat. u. Stat. , 1866; also W. Windelband, Fichte't Idee det deutschen StaaUt (Frei
burg, 1890). * « Fichte, W. . IV. 116.
•
also.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schelling. 597
when Schelling undertook to solve the other part of the problem and took up in earnest the thought of constructing or deducing Nature as the objective system of reason. According to the Science of Knowledge and Kant's Philosophy of Nature this was possible only if Nature could be successfully comprehended as a connected whole
j}f_fprces, having their ultimate end in a service toward the realisa tion of the reason's command. The starting-point for this construc tion was necessarily Kant's dynamic theory, which derived the existence of matter from the relation of the forces of attraction and repulsion (cf. § 38, 7), and its goal was given by that manifestation of Nature in which alone the practical reason evinces itself — the human organism. Between the two the whole wealth of Nature's forms and functions must be spread out as a life in unity, whose rational meaning was to be sought in the organic growth of the final goal out of the material beginnings. Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becoming — this is the theme of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises, seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving asserted itself the more vigorously, as the progress of empirical science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century. The derivation of the organic from the inorganic remained, as Kant stated, problematical, to say the least; a genetic development of organisms on this basis was a vexed question ; for the theory of medieine, which was then passing through a great movement, no key had as yet been found by which it could be fitted into the mechanical conception of the world ; now came, also, the discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena, for which at that time it could not be anticipated that it would be possible to subsume their peculiar mysterious qualities under the point of view of the Galilean mechanics. In contrast with this, Spinoza had made his powerful impression upon the minds of men just because he thought all Nature, man not excluded, as a con nected unity, in which the divine Being manifests itself in all its fulness, and for the development of German thought it became of decisive importance that Goethe made this conception his own. The poet, indeed, as we find it best expressed in his splendid apho risms Die Natur, reinterpreted this view in his own way ; in the stead of the " mathematical consequence " and its mechanical neces sity he set the concrete idea of a tiring unity of Nature, in which the
Weltanschauung of the Renaissance was revived, though without a
598 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
formulation in abstract thought. This poetic Spinozism ' became an essential link in the development of the idealistic systems.
All these motives come into play in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature : as a result itsjsentral conception, is life, and it makes the attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate end of the production of organic life. Nature is not to be described and measured, but the meaning and significance which belong to its particular phenomena in the purposeful system of the whole are to be understood. The " categories of Nature " are the forms or shapes in which the reason sets itself as objective to itself; they form a system of development in which every particular phenomenon finds its logically determined place. In carrying out this idea Schelling
was of course dependent upon the condition of the natural science of his time. Of the connection of forces, of their transformation into each other, which was the principal point of interest for his purpose, ideas at that time were still very imperfect, and the philosopher did not hesitate to fill out the gaps of knowledge by hypotheses, which he took from the a priori construction of the teleological system. In many cases these theories proved valuable heuristic principles (cf. above, p.
more
584 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
diction. The supreme principle of all thought that which con tradicts itself cannot he truly real or actual. 1
Now evident that the conceptions in which we think experi ence are full of internal contradictions; we assume things, which are to be identical with themselves and yet made equal to a variety of attributes we speak of alterations in which that which
to itself successively different we trace all inner experience back to an "I" or "self" which as that "which mentally represents itself" (sich selbst VorsteUende) involves an infinite series in the subject as well as in the object, — we trace all outer experience back to a matter, in the idea of which the attributes of the discrete and the continuous are at variance. This experience can be only phenomenon but this phenomenon must have at its basis something real which free from contradictions, seeming things must have absolute "Reals" (Reale), seeming occurrence and change a real occurrence and change. Whatever seeming there is, there just so much indication of Being. To discover this the task of philoso phy working over of the conceptions of experience which are given and which must be re-shaped according to the rules of formal logic, until we know the reality that has no internal contradictions.
The general means to this end the method of relation. The fundamental form of contradiction always that something simple
thought as having differences (the synthetic unity of the mani fold in Kant). This difficulty can be removed only by assuming plurality of simple beings, through the relation of which to each other the " illusion " of the manifold or changeable produced in any individual object. Thus the conception of substance can be maintained only we suppose that the various qualities and chang ing states which substance said to unite, concern not substance itself, but only the relation in which successively stands to other substances. The things-in-themselves must be many from thing-in-itself the multiplicity of qualities and states could never be understood. But each of these metaphysical things must be thought as entirely simple and unchangeable; they are called by Herbart, "Reals" (Realen). All qualities which form the characteristics of things in experience are relative, and make these characteristics
Cf. Einleitung in die Philos. , W. , 72-82. The historical stimulus to this sharp presentation of the principle of contradiction was no doubt the deprecia tion which this principle found in the dialectic method (cf. 42, logically, however, Herbart's doctrine (with the exception of his treatment of the "I" conception) entirely independent of it. The Eleatic element in the Herbar- tian philosophy (cf. 226) is given with the postulate of Bring void of contra dictions, and to this circumstance the philosopher, who otherwise had little historical disposition, owed his fineness of feeling for the metaphysical motire
the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. Cf, 237 ff. and XII. 61 ft
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Chaf. 2, §41. ] Thiny-iitrltae\f ': llerbart. 585
appear only in relation to other things ; the absolute qualities of the Reals are, therefore, unknowable.
8. But they must be thought as the ground which determines the qualities that appear ; aud likewise we must assume as ground of the seeming changes which the mutation of qualities exhibits in the case of empirical things, an actual process or occurrence, a change of relations between the Reals. Here, however, this whole artificial construction of that which lies beyond experience began to waver. For the Eleatic rigidity of these Reals in nowise permits us to form an idea of the kind of " actual relations " which are held to obtain between them. First of all, these cannot be spatial ; ' space and time are products of the series formed by ideas, products of the
psychical mechanism, and hence phenomenal for Herbart in almost a higher degree than for Kant. Only in a transferred sense can the changing relations of substances be termed a " coming and going in the intelligible space"; what they are themselves the Herbartian doctrine has nd term to express. Only, in a negative direction it is obliged to make a questionable concession. Every Real has only simple and unchangeable determinations: the relation, therefore, which exists or arises between two Reals is not essential to either, and has not its basis in either. A tertium quid, however, which this
relation would postulate, is not to be discovered in this metaphys ics. * Hence the relations which the Reals sustain to each other, and from which the appearance of things and their relations are said to follow, are called " contingent views " (zu/SUige Ansichten) of the Reals ; and Herbart's meaning in several passages is scarcely to be understood otherwise than that consciousness is the intelligible apace in which the above relations between the Reals obtain, that the real process or occurrence, also, is some thing which itself only "takes place for the spectator" as "objective seeming. "1 If we add to this, that the " Being " of the Reals or absolute qualities is
1 Not only in thia point do Herbart's Reals distinguish themselves from the atoms of Detnocrilua, with which they have the common basis of a pluralistic rc-ihaping of the Eleatic conception of Being, but also by the difference in
quality, in the place of which atomism allows only quantitive differences. Just as little are the Reals to be confused with Leibniz's monads, with which indeed they share their absence of windows, but not the attribute of being a unity of the manifold. With the Platonic Ideas, they have in com mon the attributes of the Eleatic Being, but not the character of class-concepts.
(unknowable)
t in this gap of his metaphysics lierbart inserted his philo$ophy of religion; for since there is no knowledge of the real ground of the relations between the Reals, from which the world of phenomena proceeds, the impression of pur- posireness which the latter makes permits us to believe, in a manner which is theoretically unassailable, upon a supreme intelligence as the ground of these relations, — a very pale revival of the old pbysico-lheological proof.
'CtW, IV. 93 ff. , 127-132, 233, 240 (. , 248 ff. ; see also E. Zeller, Oeth. d. dtutaeA. Pkilo$. , 844.
586 Germany: Development of Ideal ism. [Pakt VI
defined by Herbart as " absohite position," i. e. as a " Setzung," ' a pos iting in which Being is at rest, and which is not taken back, we have opening before us the perspective into an " absolute " idealism.
This was, indeed, carried out by Herbart still less than by Kant ; here, too, it would have led to absolute contradiction. For the theory of Heals aims to deduce consciousness also, as a consequence, emerging in the realm of phenomena, of the "co-existence of the Reals. " The Reals are held to reciprocally " disturb " each other, and to call forth in each other as reactions against these disturb ances, inner states which have the significance of self-preserva tions. "* Such self-preservations are immediately known to us as those by the aid of which the unknown Real of our soul maintains itself against disturbance by other Reals ; they are ideas (VorsteUun- gen). The soul as a simple substance is naturally unknowable; psychology is only the science of its self-preservations. These, the ideas, sustain within the soul, which simply furnishes the indiffer ent stage for their co-existence, once more the relations of Reals ; they disturb and inhibit each other, and the whole course of the psychical life is to be explained from this reciprocal tension of ideas. By their tension the ideas lose in intensity ; and the consciousness depends upon the degree of intensity. The lowest degree of strength, which the ideas can have and still be regarded as actual, is the threshold of consciousness. If the ideas are pressed by others below this threshold, they change into impulse. Hence the essential nature of those psychical states which are called feeling and will is to be sought in the inhibitory relations of ideas. All these relations must be developed as a " statics and mechanics of ideas," * and since we have to do here essentially with the determining of differences of force, this metaphysical psychology must take on the form of a mathe matical theory of the mechanism of ideas. * Herbart lays particular
»Cf. W. , IV. 71 ff.
* The " suum esse conservare," with Hobbes and Spinoza the fundamental in
* In carrying out this thought Herbart assumed that ideas in their reciprocal inhibitions lose in intensity as much as the weakest of them possesses, and thai this Inhibition-sum is divided among the individual ideas in inverse ratio to their original strength, so that if in the simplest case, a > 6, a is reduced by
stinct of individuals, appears with Herbart as the metaphysical activity of the Reals, by virtue of which they produce the world of seeming, i. e. experience.
' On this metaphysical basis Herbart erected the structure of an immanent associational psychology. The assumption of a mechanical necessity of the ideational process, and the view that the volitions follow from this as likewise necessary relations, proved a fortunate basis for a scientific theory of pedagog ics, — a discipline which Herbart made also dependent upon ethics, since the latter teaches the goal of education (the formation of ethical character), while psychology teaches the mechanism through which this is realised. In a similar way Beneke, who took the standpoint of associational psychology without Her- bart's metaphysics, found the path to a systematic pedagogics.
Chap. 2, $ 41. ] Thing-in-Ittelf : Eerbart. 587
weight upon the investigation of the process by which newly entering ideas are "assimilated," ordered, formed, and in part altered, by the ideas already present; he employs for this the expression appercep tion (first coined by Leibniz ; cf. p. 463), and his theory of this takes the form of an explanation of the " I " or " self " by associational psychology. The " I " is thought as the moving point in which the apperceiving and apperceived ideas continually converge.
While the self-preservation of the Real which constitutes the soul, against disturbance by other Reals thus produces the phenomena of the ideational "life, the reciprocal self-preservation and " partial inter-penetration of several Reals produce for the consciousness of the spectator the "objective seeming or illusion" of matter. The
various physical and chemical phenomena are here tortured out of the metaphysical presuppositions with an unspeakably toilsome deduction,1 — an attempt forgotten to-day, which remained as desti tute of results in natural science as in philosophy.
9. Another Gottingen professor, Bouterwek, attacked the thing-in- itself with other weapons. He showed in his Apodiktik, that if the doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason are to be taken in earnest, nothing remains for the "object to which the subject necessarily relates" except a completely inconceivable X. We cannot talk of a thing-in-itself or of things-in-themselves; for in this are involved already the categories of Inherence, of Unity and Plurality,' and of
Reality, which hold good only for phenomena. The transcendental philosophy must become " negative Spinozism. " * It can teach only that to the " consciousness in general " a " something in general " corresponds, concerning which nothing whatever is to be affirmed in absolute knowledge. (Cf. with regard to Spinoza, above, pp. 408 f. ). On the other hand, this absolutely real asserts itself in all relative knowledge through the consciousness of trilling. * For this shows everywhere the living force of individuality. We know of the subject because it wills something, and of the object because it furnishes
the inhibition to + "* ~ and to _ —. Cf. on thin arbitrarily axiomatic a a+"
assumption and on the mistaken nature of the whole psychological calculus," A. Lange, Die Grundlegung dtr mathftnatuehen Ptyehologif, Duisburg, 1866.
Allgrm. Mttnphyrik. «f 240 ff. . 331 If. VV\, IV. 147 ft. , 3*7 fl. In llerbart's metaphysics the branching out of general ontology into the beginnings of psy chology and natural philosophy designated by the names Eidology and Sfneehology.
Cf. asp. Apodiktik. 261, 302 ff.
lb. 386 ff.
Following the example of Kant and Fichte, Bouterwek ends his theoretical
Apodiktik in scepticism or in completely abstract-formal, absolute knowledge U the "practical" apodictic which first gala* a relation of its content to
reality.
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588 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VI
resistance to this will. The antithesis of force and resistance thus furnishes a common basis to the knowledge of the reality of our selves, and to that of the reality of other things, — of the I and the Not-I. 1 This doctrine Bouterwek would have called absolute Virtu- alism. We know our own reality in that we will, and the reality of other things in that our will finds in them a resisting force. The feeling of resistance refutes pure subjectivism or solipsism, but this relative knowledge of the particular forces of the real is supple mented by the consciousness of our own willing to form a merely empirical science. 8
This thought of his Gottingen teacher was developed by Schopen hauer, under the influence of Fichte, to a metaphysics. With a bold leap he swings himself up from the position of Virtualism to the knowledge of the essential nature of all things. We recognise the will within us as the true reality, and the resistance from which we know the reality of other things must, therefore, be likewise will. This is demanded by the " metaphysical need " of a unitary explana tion for all experience. The world " as idea " can be only phenome non ; an object is possible only in the subject and determined by the Forms of the subject. Hence the world in man's idea or mental representation (as " phenomenon of the brain," as Schopenhauer has often said with a dangerously contradictory laxity of expression) appears as a manifold ordered in space and time, a manifold whose connection can be thought only in accordance with the principle of causality, — the only one of the Kantian categories which Schopen hauer can admit to an originality of the same rank as that which belongs to the pure perceptions. Bound to these Forms, conceptional knowledge can have for its object only the necessity which prevails between individual phenomena: for causality is a relation of phe nomena to each other; science knows nothing absolute, nothing unconditioned; the guiding thread of causality, which leads from one condition to the other, never breaks off and must not be broken off arbitrarily. 8 The conceptional work of science can, therefore, in nowise raise itself above this infinite series of phenomena ; only an intuitive interpretation of the whole world of ideas, a look of genius over experience, an immediate apprehension, can penetrate to th6 true essence, which appears in our ideas as the world determined in space and time and hy causality. This intuition, however, is that by which the knowing subject is given immediately through itself as will. This word solves, therefore, the mystery of the outer world
i Apodiktik II. 68 ,ft a lb. II. 67 I.
8 In this Schopenhauer is in complete agreement with Jacobi (cf. above, p. 674).
Cm Ac. 41. Thing-in-itself Schopenhauer. 589
also. For we must apprehend the significance of all that given to ns immediately in space and time as idea,1 according to this analogy
of the only thing which immediately given. The thing-in-itself the Will.
The word "will" as here used must indeed be taken in an ex tended sense. In men and in animals the will appears as motiva tion determined through ideas, in the instinctive and vegetative life of the organism as susceptibility to stimulation, in the rest of the world of experience as mechanical processes. The meaning which
common to these different internal or external kinds of causality, should be designated a potiori as will, in accordance with that form in which alone immediately known to us. Accordingly the philosopher emphasises expressly the point, that the particular peculiarities with which the will given in human self-perception, i. e. its motivation through ideas and conceptions, must be kept quite apart from our notion of the will as thing-in-itself, — requirement which was, indeed, hard enough for Schopenhauer himself to
fulfil.
At the same time, however, the relation between thing-in-itself
and phenomenon must not be thought according to the rule of the understanding, i. e. causally. The thing-in-itself is not the cause of phenomena. Even in the case of man the will not the cause of his body or of the bodily activities but the same reality, which given us mediately, through our ideas in space and time perception, as body, and which in cognition conceived as something causally necessary and dependent upon other phenomena, — this im mediately given as will. Because the thing-in-itself not subject to the principle of sufficient reason, we have the paradox, that man feels himself as will immediately free, and yet in idea knows him self to be necessarily determined. So Schopenhauer adopts Kant's doctrine of intelligible and empirical character. In the same way, however, phenomenal Nature must everywhere be regarded as objectificatum that as the perceptional and conceptional mode of representation of the will or the immediately real, and must not be regarded as the product of the latter. The relation of essence to phenomenon not that of cause and effect
" Further, the will as thing-in-itself can be only the one, universal Korld-tcill. " All plurality and multiplicity belong to perception
in space and time; these latter are the principium indieiduationis. Hence things are different and separate from each other only as phenomena — in idea and cognition; in their true essence they are
Cf. World as Will, etc. , II. 18-83.
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590 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Past VL
all the same. The will is the tv «i war. Here lies for Schopen hauer the metaphysical root of morals. It is the deception of the phenomenal that makes the individual distinguish his own weal and woe from that of other individuals, and brings the two into opposition : in the fundamental moral feeling which feels another's sorrows as one's own — in sympathy, the transcendental unity of will of all reality comes to light.
Finally, the will can have for its object no particular content that can be empirically presented in consciousness; for every such content belongs already to its "objectivity. " The world-will has only itself for its object ; it wills only to will. It wills only to be actual; for all that actually is, is itself only a willing. In this sense Schopenhauer calls it the will to live. It is the thing-in-itself which ever gives birth to itself in timeless, eternal process, and as such it is represented in the restless mutation of phenomena.
§ 42. The System of Reason.
The direction which the main line of the idealistic development was to take was prescribed by the principle from which Fichte made bold to throw overboard the conception of the thing-in-itself. The relation of Being and consciousness can be explained only out of consciousness, and by the fact that consciousness " looks at its own action" and creates thereby at once the real and the ideal series of experience — objects and the knowledge of them. The problem of the Wissenschaftslehre therefore, to comprehend the world as a necessary connected whole of rational activities, and the solution can proceed only by reflection on the part of the philos ophising reason upon its own action and upon that which is requi site therefor. The necessity, therefore, which prevails in this system ofreason not caused, but teleological. The dogmatic system understands the intelligence as product of things, the idealistic develops intelligence as an inherently purposeful connection of acts, some of which serve to produce objects. The progress of philo sophical thought should not take the form, that because something is, therefore something else also, but should rather shape itself after the guiding principle that in order that something may take
place, something else must take place also. Every act of reason has a task; to perforin this needs other acts and thus other tasks; the connected series of all activities for the fulfilment of all tasks, taken as a purposeful unity, the system of the reason, the " history of consciousness. " The ground or reason of all Being lies
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Crap. 2, { 42. ] System of Reason : Dialectic. 591
in the ought ; that is, in the activity of self-consciousness directed toward an end.
The schema for carrying out this thought is the dialectical method. If the world is to be comprehended as reason, the system of reason must be developed from an original task; all particular acts of intelligence must be deduced as means to its performance. This
act [lit "deed-act," Thathandlung'] is self-consciousness. A begin ning without assumptions, such as philosophy needs, is not to be found by means of an assertion or proposition, but by means of a demand, which every one must be able to fulfil : " Think thyself! " And the whole business of philosophy consists in making clear what takes place in this act, and what is requisite for it. But this principle can lead on farther, only so long as it is shown that between that which should take place and that which does take place to this end, there is still a contradiction, out of which the new task results, and so on. The dialectical method is a system in
which every problem or task creates a new one. There is in the reason itself a resistance to the result it seeks to achieve, and to overcome this resistance it unfolds a new function. These three momenta are designated as Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis.
If Kant had maintained the necessity of insoluble problems of reason for his explanation and criticism of metaphysics, the idealis tic metaphysics now makes this thought a positive principle. By this means the reason's world becomes an infinity of self-production, and the contradiction between the task and the actual doing is declared to be the real nature of the reason itself. This contradic tion is necessary and cannot be abolished. It belongs to the essen tial nature of the reason ; and since only the reason is real, the con tradiction is thus declared to be real. Thus the dialectical method, this metaphysical transformation of Kant's transcendental logic, came into stronger and stronger opposition to formal logic. The rules of the understanding, which have their general principle in the principle of contradiction, are adequate, perhaps, for the ordi nary elaboration of perceptions into conceptions, judgments, and conclusions; for the intellectual perception of the philosophising reason they do not suffice, before the problems of " speculative con struction" they sink to a relative importance.
This doctrine asserts itself already in the first exposition which Fichte gave to his Science of Knowledge;' it was then spoken out more and more boldly by disciples and associates like Fr. Schlegel, and, ultimately, the speculative reason affected a superiority to the
Omuttage der gtt. W. -L. , f 1 j W, I. 92 H. [Kroegfr's tr„ pp. 63 ff. ].
692 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Part VL
"reflective philosophy of the understanding" hemmed in within the principle of contradiction. Schelling ' appealed to the coind- dentia oppositorum of Nicolaus Cusanus and Giordano Bruno, and Hegel2 sees in the triumph of the "narrow understanding" over the reason the hereditary error of all earlier philosophy. 3 Meta physics, of which Kant has shown that it is not possible for the understanding, seeks an organ of its own in intellectual perception or intuition, and a form of its own in the dialectical method. The productive synthesis of the manifold must keep its unity above the antitheses into which it divides itself. It is the essential nature of mind or spirit to disunite itself, and from this state of being rent apart, to return back to its original unity.
This triplicity rests entirely upon the above (Fichtean) funda mental characterisation of the mind as that which beholds itself. The reason is not only "in-itself" as a simple ideal reality, but also " for-its. elf " ; it appears to itself as "something other, alien"; it becomes for itself an object different from the subject, and this otherness is the principle of negation. The doing away with this difference, the negation of the negation, is the synthesis of the two moments above named. These are annulled or sublated
[" aufge- hoben," which has no exact English equivalent ; Bosanquet suggests "put by"] in the threefold aspect that their one-sided force is overcome, their relative meaniug is preserved, and their original sense transmuted into a higher truth. Following " this scheme of the "in-itself," "for-itself," and " in-and-for-itself (An-sich, Fir-
sich, An-und-fiir-sich). Hegel developed his dialectical method with great virtuosoship by making each conception " turn into its oppo site," and from the contradiction of the two making the higher con ception proceed, which then experienced the same fortune of finding an antithesis which required a still higher synthesis, and so on. The Master himself, in his employment of this method, particularly in the Phcenomenology and in the Logic, worked in an astonishing wealth of knowledge, a quite unique fineness of feeling for concep- tional connections, and a victorious power of combining thought, while occasionally his profundity passed over into obscurity and schematic word-building. In the case of his disciples, a philosophical jargon grew out of this, which pressed all thought into the triple scheme, and by the thoughtless externality with which it was used,—
> Sixth Vorl. after Meth. d. ak. St. , W. , V. 267 ff.
3 Cf. esp. hia article on Glauben und Wissen, W. , I. 21 ff.
* It is from this point of view that we best can understand Herbart's polemic
against absolute idealism. He, too, finds contradictions in the fundamental conceptions of experience, but just on this account they ought to be worked over until the contradictionless reality is recognised ; cf. above, § 41, 7.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Fichte. 598
and used for a time in widely extended circles, — it was all too well adapted to discredit philosophy as an empty bombast1
2. The system of reason with Fichte, in the first period of his philosophical activity (about 1800), is, in its content also, in full accord with the above method. The original "act" (Tliathandlung) of self-consciousness, which is determined by nothing except itself, is that the " J" or self can only be ** posited " by being distinguished from a " Not-I" or "not-self. " Since, however, the not-self is posited only in the self, — i. e. historically expressed, the object posited only in consciousness, — the self and the not-self (i. e. subject and object) must reciprocally determine each other within the " I " or self. From this results the theoretical or the practical series of self-conscious ness, according as the Not-I or the " I " is the determining part.
The functions of the theoretical reason are now developed by Fichte in the following manner : The particular stages result from the reflection of consciousness upon its own previously determined action. By virtue of its own activity, which is limited by nothing external, it presses beyond every bound which the "I" has set for itself in the Not-I as object. The pure perceptions, space and time, the categories as rules of the understanding, and the principles of the reason, are treated as the several forms of this self-determin ing. In place of the antitheses which Kant had set up between these particular strata, Fichte set the principle, that in each higher stage the reason apprehends in purer form what it has accomplished in the lower stage. Knowing is a process of self-knowledge on the part of the reason, beginning with sense perception and ascending to complete knowledge. ' But this whole series of the theoretical reason presupposes an original " self-limitation " of the I. If this is given, the entire series is comprehensible in accordance with the principle of self-perception ; for every activity has its object and its reason in the preceding. The first self-limitation has its ground in no preceding act, and therefore, theoretically, no ground what
ever. It is a groundless, free activity, but as such, the ground of all other activities. This groundless [undetermined] free act is sen sation. It falls into consciousness, therefore, only in its content, which is to be taken up into perception ; as act it like all that has
Of. the humorous portrayal in G. Rtlmelin, Reden nnd AuftaUt, pp. 47-60, Freiburg. 1888.
Without any directly visible influence from Leibniz, his conception of the relation of the different knowing faculties asserts itself here in contrast with the Kantian separation. Only to be noted that this "history of the devel opment of reason " la, with Leibniz, determined causally, with Fichte teleologi- cally . What Hainan and Herder (cf. above, p. 670) demanded as requirement of the unity of intelligence in the I/eibnizian sense, Fichte and Schelling had
lwhile performed in quite another sense.
n
a
it is
><
is,
694 Germany: Development of Idealism. (. i'art VI.
no ground, unconscious. 1 In this consists its " givenness," by virtue of which it appears as foreign and coming " from without. " In place of the thing-in-itself comes, therefore, the unconscious self- limitation of the I. Fichte calls this activity the productive imagina tion. It is the world-producing activity of the reason.
For sensation there is then no ground which determines it; it is there with absolute freedom, and determines on its part all knowledge as regards content. Hence it can be comprehended only through its end — in the practical Wissenschaflslehre, which has to investigate to what end the self limits itself. This is only to be understood if we regard the I or self, not as resting Being, but as in its nature infinite activity or impulse. For since all action is directed toward an object in connection with which it develops, so the self, which finds its object not given to as the case with the empirical will, must, in order to remain impulse and action, set objects for itself. This takes place in sensation sensation has no ground, but only the end of creating for the impulse of the self
limit beyond which the self passes in order to become object for itself. The actual world of experience, with all its things, and with the " Reality " which has for the theoretical consciousness, only the material for the activity of the practical reason.
The inmost essence of the ego, therefore, its action, directed only toward itself, determined only by itself, — the autonomy of the ethical reason. The system of reason culminates in the categorical imperative. The the ethical will, and the world the material of duty put into sensuous form. It there, to the end that we may be active in it. It not that Being the cause of doing, but Being brought forth for the sake of the doing. All that is, only to be understood or explained from the point of view of that which ought to be {soil) .
The demand of the Wissenschaflslehre, so paradoxical for the ordinary consciousness,* amounts, accordingly, to robbing the category
The paradox of the "unconscious activities of consciousness" lies in the expression, not in the thing. German philosophers have frequently been very unfortunate in their terminology, most unfortunate precisely where they wished to give German words a new meaning. Fichte not only uses consciousness and self-consciousness promiscuously, but he understands by consciousness, on the one hand, the actual idea or mental presentation of the individual or the empirical ego (hence in this sense " unconscious," bewunttlos), and on the other hand, the functions of the " consciousness in general," of the transcen dental apperception or the " universal ego or self " (in this sense he speaks of "history of consciousness"). In these verbal relations rests good part of the difficulty of Fichte's exposition and of the misunderstanding which has called forth.
In this spirit Fr. H. Jacobi protested against this knitting, not indeed of the stocking, but of the knitting (W. , III. 24 ff. ). Cf. , on the other hand, C. Fort- lage, Beitragc zur Psychologie (Leips. 1876), pp. 40
f.
a1
it
it is
is
I is
is is
it, a is:
is is
is
it
a
is
Chaf. 2, § 42. ] System oj Reason : Fichte. 595
of substantiality of the fundamental significance which it has in the naive, sensuous view of the world. In this a something that " is," a " Being " (" Seiendes ") is always thought as support and cause of activities; in Fichte's thought the "doing "or action is conceived as the original, and Being is regarded as only the means posited for that end. This antithesis came sharply to light in the atheism controversy, which had so important consequences for Fichte per sonally. The Wissenschaftslehre could not allow God to be regarded as " substance " ; in this case he would necessarily be something derived ; it could seek the metaphysical conception of God only in the "Universal Ego or Self" (allgemeinen Ich), in the absolutely free, world-creating action; and in clear contrast to the natura naiurans of dogmatism it calls God the Moral World-order,1 the ordo ordinans.
Accordingly, the chief philosophical discipline for Fichte is moral science. Projected before Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, Fichte's system takes from the same the categorical imperative in the formula " act according to thy conscience," for the starting-point of a strictly carried out science of duties, which develops the general and particular tasks of man from the opposition appearing in the empirical self between the natural impulse and the moral impulse. At the same time, the Kantian rigour is softened by the fact, that man's sensibility, also, is permitted to assert its rights as product
of reason. The dualism still survives, but it is already on the way toward being overcome, and in the thought that the purposeful connected whole of the reason assigns each of its members a voca tion prescribed by its natural manifestation, ethical theory is brought to an elaboration of the " material for the fulfilment of duty," which is much more penetrating and gives a deeper value to the data of experience. This shows itself in Fichte's exposition of professional duties, in his nobler conception of marriage and family life, in the finer penetration of his ethical investigations into the manifold relations of human life.
The like is true, also, of Fichte's treatment of the problems of public life. A youthful energy masters the Kantian fundamental thoughts here, and gives them a much more impressive formulation than they could receive from Kant himself, who undertook the systematic carrying out of these thoughts, only in his old age. The reciprocal limitation of spheres of freedom in the outer social life of individuals for Fichte also, the principle of Natural Right. As "primitive rights" he regarded the claims of the individual to
Ficbte, W. , V. lttt H. , 210 B.
is, '
696 Germany : Development of Idealism. [Pabt VL
freedom of his body as the organ for performance of duty, of his property as being the external sphere of operation to this end, and finally of his self-preservation 'as personality. But these primitive rights become efficient as compulsory rights or laws only through the authority of (positive) laws in the state. The idea of the com pact which is at the basis of the state, Fichte analyses into the citizen, the property, and the defence contract. It is interesting in this connection to see how these thoughts culminate in his politics in the principle, that the state has to make provision that every one may be able to live by his work, — the doctrine, named after him, of the so-called right to work. 1 Work is the duty of the moral person ality, the condition of existence of the physical ; it must uncondi tionally be furnished by the state. Hence the regulation of the relations of labour must not be left to the natural working of supply
and demand (as according to Adam Smith), and the profits of labour must not be left to the mechanism of society's war of interests, but the rational law of the state must enter here. From the point of view of this thought, with a careful consideration of the conditions given by experience,8 Fichte projected his ideal of the socialistic state as "the complete industrial state" (geschlossenen Handelsstaates) . which itself takes in hand all production and manufacturing, and all trade with foreign countries, in order to assign to each citizen his work and also the full revenue for his work. The powerful idealism of the philosopher did not shrink from a deep system of compulsion, if he could hope to assure to every individual thereby a sphere for the free fulfilment of duty.
3. The problem of conceiving the universe as a system of reason was solved in the main in the Science of Knowledge by the method of deducing the external world of the senses as a product, appearing in the empirical ego, of the " consciousness in general " ; in this sense Fichte's doctrine, like Kant's, was later characterised as-" sub jective idealism. " Fichte's meaning in this, however, was through out that " Nature," which it was his intention to have posited as an organic whole,8 should possess the full significance of an objective product of reason, in contrast with the ideas of individuals ; to set this forth he lacked the penetrating knowledge of his subject which he possessed in the case of the relations of human life. Thus it was a supplementing of this work, that was welcome to Fichte
» Naturrecht, § 18 ; W. , III. 210 fl. ; Grschl. Handelsst. , I. 1 ; W„ III. 400 ff.
1 Cf. G. Schmoller, Studie iiber J. G. Fichte in Hildebrand's Jahrb. /. Nat. u. Stat. , 1866; also W. Windelband, Fichte't Idee det deutschen StaaUt (Frei
burg, 1890). * « Fichte, W. . IV. 116.
•
also.
Chap. 2, § 42. ] System of Reason : Schelling. 597
when Schelling undertook to solve the other part of the problem and took up in earnest the thought of constructing or deducing Nature as the objective system of reason. According to the Science of Knowledge and Kant's Philosophy of Nature this was possible only if Nature could be successfully comprehended as a connected whole
j}f_fprces, having their ultimate end in a service toward the realisa tion of the reason's command. The starting-point for this construc tion was necessarily Kant's dynamic theory, which derived the existence of matter from the relation of the forces of attraction and repulsion (cf. § 38, 7), and its goal was given by that manifestation of Nature in which alone the practical reason evinces itself — the human organism. Between the two the whole wealth of Nature's forms and functions must be spread out as a life in unity, whose rational meaning was to be sought in the organic growth of the final goal out of the material beginnings. Nature is the ego, or self, in process of becoming — this is the theme of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature. This task, which had its basis in philosophical premises, seemed at the same time set by the condition of natural science, which had once again reached the point where scattered detail-work craved a living conception of Nature as a whole. And this craving asserted itself the more vigorously, as the progress of empirical science gave little satisfaction to the highly pitched expectations which had been set upon the principle of the mechanical explanation of Nature after the seventeenth century. The derivation of the organic from the inorganic remained, as Kant stated, problematical, to say the least; a genetic development of organisms on this basis was a vexed question ; for the theory of medieine, which was then passing through a great movement, no key had as yet been found by which it could be fitted into the mechanical conception of the world ; now came, also, the discoveries of electric and magnetic phenomena, for which at that time it could not be anticipated that it would be possible to subsume their peculiar mysterious qualities under the point of view of the Galilean mechanics. In contrast with this, Spinoza had made his powerful impression upon the minds of men just because he thought all Nature, man not excluded, as a con nected unity, in which the divine Being manifests itself in all its fulness, and for the development of German thought it became of decisive importance that Goethe made this conception his own. The poet, indeed, as we find it best expressed in his splendid apho risms Die Natur, reinterpreted this view in his own way ; in the stead of the " mathematical consequence " and its mechanical neces sity he set the concrete idea of a tiring unity of Nature, in which the
Weltanschauung of the Renaissance was revived, though without a
598 Germany: Development of Idealism. [Part VI.
formulation in abstract thought. This poetic Spinozism ' became an essential link in the development of the idealistic systems.
All these motives come into play in Schelling's Philosophy of Nature : as a result itsjsentral conception, is life, and it makes the attempt to consider Nature from the point of view of the organism, and to understand the connection of its forces from the ultimate end of the production of organic life. Nature is not to be described and measured, but the meaning and significance which belong to its particular phenomena in the purposeful system of the whole are to be understood. The " categories of Nature " are the forms or shapes in which the reason sets itself as objective to itself; they form a system of development in which every particular phenomenon finds its logically determined place. In carrying out this idea Schelling
was of course dependent upon the condition of the natural science of his time. Of the connection of forces, of their transformation into each other, which was the principal point of interest for his purpose, ideas at that time were still very imperfect, and the philosopher did not hesitate to fill out the gaps of knowledge by hypotheses, which he took from the a priori construction of the teleological system. In many cases these theories proved valuable heuristic principles (cf. above, p.
