Outlines of Metaphysic/Introduction

INTRODUCTION.
§ 1. Our every-day apprehension of the World is pervaded throughout with suppositions concerning an inner coherency of its phenomena, which is in no wise immediately perceived by us, and yet is regarded as needing no explanation and as necessary. Thus, for example, even the most common apprehension of the world is impossible without articulating the content of our perceptions in such a manner that we assume ‘Things’ as the supports and centres of its phenomena and events, and all kinds of ‘reciprocal actions’ as being interchanged between them. Neither those things, however, nor these actions, are immediate objects of perception. In the same manner are both a theoretic apprehension and a practical treatment of the world inconceivable without the supposition of a causal connection of that which has actual existence.

All these and other suppositions we have become accustomed to in life with the feeling of their necessity, but without availing ourselves of a clear knowledge of their precise meaning and of the grounds and limits of their validity. There are therefore never wanting occasions where doubts at once arise in us concerning their validity. Thus in the consideration of human transactions, the new conception of freedom stands opposed to the ‘causal nexus’ previously deemed of universal applicability. Thus on consideration of the soul, the conception of ‘Thing’ seems to be in general inept to designate the permanent subject of its changeable phenomena.

These contradictions, in which the extra-scientific form of representation is involved, and to which the particular sciences also lead,—in so far as the axioms which some one of them follows in its domain run counter to those which another of them leaves undisputed in its domain,—make us sensible of the necessity for a universal science, which takes as the objects of its investigation those conceptions and propositions that, in ordinary life and in the particular sciences, are employed as principles of investigation.

This science is Metaphysic.

§ 2. The two questions that lie. nearest at hand would accordingly be: How can we get possession of those suppositions completely, in order to have in collective form that total content of our reason which is necessary to thought? and, then: How can we demonstrate that these suppositions have any validity, or what validity they have?

As to the former question, it is well known that Aristotle first directed attention to those most general conceptions which are expressed concerning everything actual (the ‘Categories’); but without conducting his search for them according to any principle, or giving any security that his enumeration of their series was complete. In more recent times, Kant attempted to make good this deficiency: Every act of cognition, he held, takes place by combination of ideas, whose form is that of logical judgment. If now it is sought to discover the different suppositions which we make about possible or necessary combinations of ‘Things,’ then there is only need to collect all the essentially different forms of the logical judgment, and it will thereupon be found that a special model of combination has been followed in each, according to which subject and predicate are thought of as cohering. For example: the categorical judgment (“gold is yellow”) simply combines subject and predicate as thing and attribute; and this relation between thing and attribute is one of those suppositions which we make concerning the coherency of things. The hypothetical judgment (“if gold is heated, it melts”) unites the predicate to the subject, not absolutely but conditionally; and the thought which lies herein,—namely, that of a combination of changeable phenomena according to a law of conditionating, is a second of those universal suppositions. Kant expresses them both by the brief titles of the categories of ‘substantiality and of causality.’ [In reference to this point it is common to remark, that the correct form, in which we are able to express those suppositions concerning the nature of actuality that are necessities of our thought, is without exception that of the proposition, not that of the conception. Only a proposition states a truth from which, by application to particular cases, definite determinations can be deduced. Conceptions are only elements which can form truths by composition; of themselves alone they are nothing, until we are told what is to be done with them. It was on this account a hindrance to the history of philosophy, and led to inapplicable ways of speaking, that Aristotle reduced those thoughts to the form of fundamental conceptions; and that Kant also, at least at first, represented the truth which is necessary to thought as a series of conceptions, (‘pure notions of the understanding’). In a round-about-way he annulled again this deficiency, when he afterwards sought to deduce a system of fundamental propositions of the understanding from these conceptions of the understanding.]

On the whole, it cannot be admitted that this clue, or that the series of forms of judgment to which it conducts, can lead to the complete, correct, and useful discovery of the metaphysical suppositions. Logical thinking is a combination of ideas according to laws of a universal truth; but these ideas do not relate to what is merely actual, but to all that is thinkable, even to all abstractions which can never of themselves have any actuality. The logical forms are, further, modes of experience, by means of which our human thinking combines and disposes manifold ideas, in such manner that a cognition of what is actual can be gained therefrom; but these logical forms themselves are not immediate copies of the combinations which take place between the elements of actuality. It is therefore to be expected, that this clue will indeed remind us of many metaphysical conceptions, because, of course, even that which is actual can be thought of only in the aforesaid logical forms; but that, on the one side, we cannot be led by it to all the fundamental propositions of metaphysic, and that, on the other side, we may by following this clue hit upon conceptions which have merely a logical value, and of which the metaphysical applicability is not clear.

§ 3. In the above-mentioned way Kant had discovered twelve categories, and, on account of the consciousness of necessary and universal validity which accompanied them, had considered them as not derived from experience, but as an originally inborn possession of our spirit.

Fichte took offence at the view that our spirit, which every one inclines to think of as a unity in the strictest sense, be supposed to possess twelve different, isolated, fundamental conceptions; and he proposed to deduce these Kantian categories from a single original act or original truth of the spirit, as a series of consequences, every one of which has its definite place beside the others. Such original act he found in this, that the spirit never merely is (namely, as object for another observer), but continuously, and in all forms of its activity, withal is ‘for itself’ (für sich ist); that is, it knows, feels, enjoys, or possesses itself, etc. (“the Ego posits itself”). And now Fichte sought to show how this ‘self-positing,’ in order to accomplish what it wishes or is obliged to accomplish, necessarily leads also to the positing of a ‘non-ego,’ to the ascription of quality to the non-ego, to the assumption of its divisibility, etc.; that is to say, how the spirit is necessitated by its original act to represent in general an external world, and to make, with reference to the inner coherence of the component parts of this world, those necessary suppositions which are expressed by the categories of Kant.

§ 4. Kant had considered the ‘pure notions of the understanding’ as only subjective forms of cognition belonging to our spirit, and therefore as valid only for that which has once become ‘phenomenon’ for us, and not as valid for things themselves. But that such ‘Things’ in general exist, he had constantly in praxi assumed.

Even this the idealism of Fichte had to call in question: even that there are ‘Things’ appeared to it as an imagination unavoidable by our spirit, the external world as a mere product of a faculty of imagination working unconsciously within us. The necessity of explaining how different spirits construct pictures of the world that fit together so as to make one common world, led to the assumption of a single creative power, which, harmoniously active in all spirits, both images before them the phenomenal world, and also necessitates them to judge of this same world according to certain suppositions.

Henceforward this fundamental conception of an ‘Absolute’ determined the character of Metaphysic. The attempt was made to translate one’s self immediately into the nature of this Absolute, in such a manner as to have a real experience of its developments, and not merely bring them to one’s contemplation from without by the quondam means of human cognition, comparison of conceptions, and adduction of proof. In a ‘dialectical method’ (concerning which, further on) the means appeared to be given of beholding this self-development of the Absolute within us, in its simplicity and without disturbing it by admixture of subjective investigation. Schelling withal does not separate the two problems of deducing from this Absolute the general laws of all actuality and the definite particular forms of phenomena. Hegel designs at least to make this separation; and in his Metaphysic (which he calls ‘Logic’) he intends to depict that first inner development of the Absolute, through which it projects within itself those laws of every future possible world that are necessities of thought.

§ 5. Without passing judgment in this place upon the substantial value of the above-mentioned apprehension of the world, we cannot approve of the method it employs. For it takes its departure from an assumption (the conception of the Absolute) which lies very remote from the common representation; the content of which is very difficult for even the philosophers to define exhaustively; but the erroneous determinations of which become sources of mistakes in all subsequent investigations,—mistakes that are always the more hazardous, the more decidedly it is proposed to deduce the entire content of Metaphysic, in an unbroken series and without anywhere taking a new start, from a single principle.

Such kind of deduction appears to us the natural method of representing a truth with which we are already acquainted. Investigation, on the contrary, whose first business is to discover the truth, must take its departure from the largest possible number of independent, perfectly obvious and well-recognized considerations, with the proviso that the results which the prosecution of one consideration yields, shall be subsequently corrected, so far as is necessary, by the results of the rest.

In this matter, therefore, we esteem Herbart right, who assumes as many independent sections of Metaphysic as there are different distinct questions, problems, or contradictions, that meet us in our common contemplation of the world, and that are the separate causes of our philosophizing in general. For they compel us to attempt the reduction of the problems or contradictions given in perception, to one consistent, actual ‘way of behavior’ on the part of ‘the Existent’; and, more precisely, to such a way of behavior as will withal furnish an explanation, how the appearance of contradiction cannot fail to originate for our point of view.

§ 6. That we are right in following Herbart in this matter is shown by the fact that the most different schools, however wide the other differences of their fundamental views and their methods, have, nevertheless, composed an articulated system of Metaphysic in quite analogous manner.

All these different schools experienced the necessity of discussing in the first place, in a section on ‘Ontology,’ (so the old Metaphysic and Herbart; called ‘Doctrine of Being’ in Hegel) those most general suppositions which we cannot avoid making concerning the nature of all things and the possibility of their coherence. ‘Being,’ ‘Becoming,’ ‘efficient causation,’ and such questions form the chief problems of all this section. They experienced

(2) The necessity of examining the forms in which the particular elements of actuality are united in one orderly totality. The intuitions of ‘Space,’ ‘Time,’ ‘Motion,’ and the most abstract of the cognate conceptions of ‘the Natural,’ form the chief points of this section, called ‘Cosmology,’ (‘Synechology in Herbart’; ‘Doctrine of Essence and Phenomenon’ in Hegel). Finally,

(3) They all arrive at the inquiry concerning the relation in which the objective world stands to that world of spirits by which it is apprehended. Within wider or narrower limits, the ‘Rational Psychology’ of the old school, the ‘Eidolology’ of Herbart (doctrine of the forms of cognition), and Hegel’s ‘Doctrine of the Idea,’ treat of the same subjects.

§ 7. The second of the questions adduced above (§ 2),—namely, How we can certify ourselves of the truth and validity of our metaphysical suppositions, cannot be decided previous to, but only in and by Metaphysic itself. For the bare question is without meaning so long as it concerns merely the validity in general of these suppositions; it interests us only so far as it touches upon the validity of metaphysical cognition in reference to an actual world, which we think of as an object standing over opposite to us. But the question whether such a world may be thought of, and how it may be thought of, is a metaphysical one. And as a rule it will always be found that those who, previous to the application of our cognition to actuality, are pleased first to decide the point whether it is thus applicable at all or not, judge this point in such a way as to assume readymade a crowd of propositions concerning the nature of objective actuality, concerning the nature of the cognitive spirit, and concerning a possible relation of interaction between the two; while, nevertheless, it is only Metaphysic that can in the first instance demonstrate these propositions. The question which is disposed of unconsciously in such cases, we are going to undertake consciously; and we relegate it to the third principal division of Metaphysic.