Page:Avenarius and the Standpoint of Pure Experience.djvu/61

Rh there would have been no Kantian theory of the categories, and that we should not have seen Schopenhauer announcing as the most obvious of truisms that the world is my representation. By thus explaining idealism as the final result of the soul-concept which was itself a bit of introjection left over from the original animistic reine Erfahrung, Avenarius includes it among the E-values which will be eliminated in the course of the history of ΣC, if that history is not interrupted.

As the subjective additions to nature are eliminated from our view of the world, we approach a purely descriptive concept. We no longer speak of the world of our experience as the phenomenal world, while the real world is something else, we know not quite what. The world we observe is accepted as the real world, precisely as the plain man accepts it. And if we ask what the whole world is, our answer to this question will seek to state what the whole world has in common as the object of our clarified experience which has at last got the world pure. The judgment about the whole world will then state merely what can be observed by any one, and not what is the product of the poetic imagination of a few,—as when one says, everything is a bit of one absolute experience. The final Weltbegriff will express a knowledge of genuine R-values only, which affect the peripheral nerves. This concept of nature being the product of maximum experience will not be liable to variation.

I think it is clear enough in a general way what Avenarius is trying to state, although it is not always clear in detail. We have a historical process, the evolution of experience. This historical process has, as its first stage, a view of the world, which if put into words would tell simply how nature is experienced. This Welthegriff describes what is reine Erfahrung. By constant variation the Weltbegriff comes to describe the world as it is not experienced. The actual experience of the world gives the lie to the 'critical* theory of it. The process approaches a Weltbegriff which describes the world as it is experienced. The experience which this view of the world asserts is an E-value and expresses such a 'final' state of the system C as can follow upon the presentation of any R-value.

As to the content of this E-value Avenarius can say only that it will be Vorgefundenes. This may seem a poor outcome, but it means that the world is whatever it is observed to consist of. Trees are trees and houses are houses and clouds are clouds. They are not thoughts of God nor experience of the absolute nor phantasms of our own. There will be no effort to go behind what experience offers. Every single fact will be just this that we observe, the empirical fact before us. This is what Avenarius means by saying