Part 27 (2/2)

The one-sidedness of the nineteenth century creed is felt in the deeper thought all over the world: popular movements and scholarly efforts alike show the signs of a coming idealism, which has something better and deeper to say than merely that our life is a series of causal phenomena. Our time longs for a new interpretation of reality; from the depths of every science wherein for decades philosophizing was despised, the best scholars turn again to a discussion of fundamental conceptions and general principles. Historical thinking begins again to take the leaders.h.i.+p which for half a century belonged to naturalistic thinking; specialistic research demands increasingly from day to day the readjustment toward higher unities, and the technical progress which charmed the world becomes more and more simply a factor in an ideal progress. The appearance of this unifying congress itself is merely one of a thousand symptoms of this change appearing in our public life, and if the scientific philosophy is producing to-day book upon book to prove that the world of phenomena must be supplemented by the world of values, that description must yield to interpretation, and that explanation must be harmonized with appreciation: it is but echoing in technical terms the one great emotion of our time.

This certainly does not mean that any step of the gigantic materialistic, technical, and psychological development will be reversed, or that progress in any one of these directions ought to cease. On the contrary, no time was ever more ready to put its immense energies into the service of naturalistic work; but it does mean that our time recognizes the one-sidedness of these movements, recognizes that they belong only to one aspect of reality, and that another aspect is possible; yes, that the other aspect is that of our immediate life, with its purposes and its ideals, its historical relations and its logical aims. The claim of materialism, that all psychical facts are merely functions of the organism, was no argument against psychology, because, though the biological view was possible, yet the other aspect is certainly a necessary supplement. In the same way it is no argument against the newer view that all purposes and ideals, all historical actions and logical thoughts, can be considered as psychological phenomena. Of course we can consider them as such, and we must go on doing so in the service of the psychological and sociological sciences; but we ought not to imagine that we have expressed and understood the real character of our historical or moral, our logical or religious life when we have described and explained it as a series of phenomena. Its immediate reality expresses itself above all in the fact that it has a meaning, that it is a purpose which we want to understand, not by considering its causes and effects, but by interpreting its aims and appreciating its ideals.

We should say, therefore, to-day that it is most interesting and important for the scientist to consider human life with all its strivings and creations from a biological, psychological, sociological point of view; that is, to consider it as a system of causal phenomena; and many problems worthy of the highest energies have still to be solved in these sciences. But that which the jurist or the theologian, the student of art or of history, of literature or of politics, of education or of morality, is dealing with, refers to the other aspect in which inner life is not a phenomenon but a system of purposes, not to be explained but to be interpreted, to be approached not by causal but by teleological methods. In this case the historical sciences are no longer sub-sections of psychological or of sociological sciences; the conception of science is no longer identical with the conception of the science of phenomena. There exist sciences which do not deal with the description or explanation of phenomena at all, but with the internal relation and connection, the interpretation and appreciation of purpose.

In this way modern thought demands that sciences of purpose be coordinated with sciences of phenomena. Only if all these tendencies of our time are fully acknowledged can the outer framework of our cla.s.sification offer a fair field to every scientific thought, while a positivistic system would cripple the most promising tendencies of the twentieth century.

2. _The Four Theoretical Divisions_

We have first to determine the underlying structure of the cla.s.sification, 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 subst.i.tute 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 nave experience in which we do not know ourselves as objects which we perceive, but where we feel ourselves in our subjective att.i.tudes 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, nave 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 att.i.tudes, 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 a.s.serted that experience gives us the data which mere abstract reasoning can never supply; the other a.s.serted 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 nave 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 ant.i.thesis 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 ant.i.thesis between the object in its undifferentiated state on the one side and the subject in its will-att.i.tude on the other side. Yes, even if we speak of the subject which stands as a unity behind the will-att.i.tudes, we are already reconstructing the real experience in the interest of the purposes of knowledge. In the immediate experience, we have the will-att.i.tudes 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-att.i.tude, 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tudes must be acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object without att.i.tude, and no att.i.tude without object. The two are one state; object and att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude. It is a different kind of awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the att.i.tude. 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-att.i.tudes and objects of will, and the different att.i.tudes of the will give the fundamental cla.s.ses 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-att.i.tudes. 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 a.n.a.logy. But the complex reconstructions of physiological psychology are therein subst.i.tuted 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-att.i.tude as merely individual and our will-att.i.tude as act of agreement with the will-att.i.tude 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 const.i.tutes the historical significance of our att.i.tude. 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-att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude, 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 superst.i.tion 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 a.s.sume 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, const.i.tutes our knowledge.

The system of knowledge is thus the system of experience with all that is involved in it in so far as it demands submission from our over-individual will, and the cla.s.sification which we are seeking must be thus a division and subdivision of our over-individual submissions.

But the submission itself can be of very different characters and these various types must give the deepest logical principles of scientific cla.s.sification. To point at once to the fundamental differences: our will acknowledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We cannot live our life--and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, first of all, in a teleological sense--our life becomes meaningless, if our will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may be either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any individuality. We can say at once that in the same way we are led to acknowledge that the object has partly an over-individual character, that is, necessarily belongs to the world of objects of every possible subject, and partly an individual character, as our personal object. We have thus four large groups of experiences to which we submit ourselves: over-individual will-acts, individual will-acts, over-individual objects, individual objects. They const.i.tute the first four large divisions of our system.

The over-individual will-acts, which are as such teleologically binding for every subject and therefore norms for his will, give us the Normative Sciences. The individual will-acts in the world of historical manifoldness give us the Historical Sciences. The objects, in so far as they belong to every individual, make up the physical world, and thus give us the Physical Sciences; and finally the objects, in so far as they belong to the individual, are the contents of consciousness, and thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarcation lines of our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Historical, the Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and method and difference must be characterized more fully. We must understand why we have here to deal with four absolutely different types of scientific systems, why the over-individual objects lead us to general laws and to the determination of the future, while the study of the individual will-acts, for instance, gives us the system of history, which turns merely to the past and does not seek natural laws; and why the study of the norms gives us another kind of system in which neither a causal nor an historical, but a purely logical connection prevails. Yet all these methodological differences result necessarily from the material with which these four different groups of sciences are working.

Let us start again from the consideration of our original logical purpose. We feel ourselves bound and limited in our will by physical things, by psychical contents, by the demands of other subjects, and by norms. The purpose of all our knowledge is to develop completely all that is involved in this bondage. We want to develop in an over-individual way all the obligations for our submission which are necessarily included in the given objects and the given demands of subjects. We start of course everywhere and in every direction from the actual experience, but we expand the experience by seeking those objects and those demands to which, as necessarily following from the immediately given experience, we must also submit. And in thus developing the whole system of submissions, the interpretation of the experience itself becomes transformed: the physicist may perhaps subst.i.tute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the psychologist may subst.i.tute sensations for the real idea, and the historian may subst.i.tute combinations of influences for the real personality, and the student of norms may subst.i.tute combinations of conflicting demands for the one complete duty; yet in every case the subst.i.tution is logically necessary and furnishes us what we call truth inasmuch as it is needed to develop the concrete system of our submissions and thus to express our confidence in the order-lines of reality. And each of these subst.i.tutions and supplementations becomes, as material of knowledge, itself a part of the world of experience.

3. _The Physical and the Mental Sciences_

The physicist, we said, speaks of the world of objects in so far as they belong to every possible subject, and are material for a merely pa.s.sive spectator. Of course the pure experience does not offer us anything of that kind. We insisted that the objects of our real life are objects of our will and of our att.i.tudes, and are at the same time undifferentiated into the physical things outside of us and the psychical ideas in us. To reach the abstraction of the physicist, we have thus to cut loose the objects from our will and to separate the over-individual elements from the individual elements. Both transformations are clearly demanded by our logical aims. As to the cutting loose from our will, it means considering the object as if it existed for itself, as if it were a mere pa.s.sively given material and not a material of our personal interests.

But just that is needed. We want to find out how far we have to submit ourselves to the object. If we want to live our life, we must adjust our att.i.tudes to things, and, as we know our will, we must seek to understand the other factor in the complex experience, the object of our will, and we must find out what it involves in itself. But we do not understand the object and the submission which it demands if we do not completely understand its relation to our desires. Our total submission to the thing thus involves our acknowledgment of all that we have to expect from it. And although the real experience is a unity of will and thing, we have thus the most immediate interest in considering what we have to expect from the thing in itself, without reference to our will.

That means finding out the effects of the given object with a subject as the pa.s.sive spectator. We eliminate artificially, therefore, the activity of the subject and construct as presupposition for this circle of knowledge a nowhere existing subject without activity, for which the thing exists merely as a cause of the effects which it produces.

The first step towards natural science is, therefore, to dissolve the real experience into thing and personality; that is, into object and active subject, and to eliminate in an artificial abstraction the activity of the subject, making the object material of merely pa.s.sive awareness, and related no longer to the will but merely to other objects. It may be more difficult to understand the second step which naturalism has to take before a natural science is possible. It must dissolve the object of will into an over-individual and an individual part and must eliminate the individual. That part of my objects which belongs to me alone is their psychical side; that which belongs to all of us and is the object of ever new experience is the physical object.

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