Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/93

Rh METAPHYSIG 83 of reason, the consciousness of it is immediately com bined with the consciousness of its limited and phenomenal character. The student of the Critique of Pure Reason cannot but recognize the strange balance between the real and the phenomenal in which it ends, allowing to man the consciousness of each so far as to enable him to see the defects of the other, so that by aid of the pure identity of reason he can criticize and condemn the &quot; blindness &quot; or unresolved difference of experience, and by means of the concreteness and complexity of experience he can condemn the &quot; empty &quot; identity of reason. In order, however, to understand the full bearing of Kant s criticism of knowledge, and at the same time to find the meeting-point of the opposite currents of thought which alternately prevail in it, it will be necessary to consider the subject a little more closely. The lesson of the Critique may be gathered up into two points. In the first place, it is a refutation of the ordinary view of experience as something immediately given for thought and not con stituted by it. In the second place, it is a demonstration of the merely phenomenal character of the objects of experience, i.e., the demonstration that the objects of experience, even as determined by science, are not things in themselves. Both these results require to be kept clearly in view if we would understand the movement of thought excited by Kant. On the one hand Kant had to teach that what is ordinarily regarded as real, the world of experience, is transcendently ideal, i.e.. is determined as real by a priori forms of thought. On the other hand he had to teach that the world so determined is empirically and not transcendentally real, i.e., its reality is merely phenomenal. With the former lesson he met the man of science, and compelled him to renounce his materialistic explanation of the world as a thing which exists in independence of the mind that knows it. The world we know is a world which exists only as it exists for us, for the thinking subject; hence the thinking subject, the ego, cannot be taken as an object like other objects, an object the phenomena of which are to be explained like other phenomena by their place in the connexion of experience. Having, however, thus repelled scientific materialism by the proof that the reality of experience is ideal, Kant refuses to proceed to the complete identification of reality with ideality, and meets the claims of the metaphysician with the assertion that the reality of experience is merely phenomenal. Hence he rejects any idealism that would involve the negation of things in themselves beyond phenomena, or the identification of the objects of experience with these things. The reality we know is a reality which exists only for us as conscious subjects, but this, though it is the only reality we can know, is not the absolute reality. It is, however, to be observed that the nature of this opposition between phenomena and things in themselves seems to change as we advance from the Analytic, where the existence of such things is presupposed, to the Dialectic, where the grounds of that presupposition are examined. At first the opposition seems to be between what is present in consciousness and what is absolutely beyond conscious ness. The matter of experience is regarded as given exter nally in the affections of the sensible subject, affections caused by an unknown thing in itself, of which, however, they can tell us nothing. On the other hand the form of experience, the categories and principles of judgment which ! turn these affections into objects of knowledge, are not pure ; expressions of the real nature, the pure identity, of the subject in itself, but only products of the identity of the self in relation to the sensibility and its forms of time and space. Hence, on both sides we must regard expe- ; rience as merely phenomenal, alike in relation to the noumenal object and in relation to the noumenal subject, which lurk behind the veil and send forth into expe rience on the one side affections which become objects through their determination by the unity of thought, and on the other side an identity of thought which becomes self-conscious in relation to the objects so determined by itself. Kant, however, having thus answered the question of the possibility of experience by reference to two things in themselves which are out of experience, is obliged to ask himself how the consciousness of these two things in themselves, and the criticism of experience in relation to them, is possible. And here, obviously, the opposition can no longer be conceived as an opposition between that which is and that which is not in consciousness. For the things in themselves must be present to consciousness in some fashion in order that they may be contrasted with the phenomena. If, therefore, phenomena are now regarded as unreal, it must be because we have an idea of reality to which the reality of experience does not fully correspond. In the Analytic Kant had beenjspeaking as if the real con sisted in something which is not present to the conscious subject at all, though we, by analysis of his experience, can refer to it as the cause of that which is so present. Now in the Dialectic he has to account for the fact that the conscious subject himself is able to transcend his experience, and to contrast the objects of it as phenomenal with things in themselves. Now it is obvious that such an opposition is possible only so far as the thought, which constitutes experience, is at the same time conscious of itself in opposition to the experience it constitutes. The reason why experience is condemned as phenomenal is, therefore, not because it is that which exists for thought as opposed to that which does not exist for thought, but because it imperfectly corresponds to the determination of thought in itself. In other words, it is condemned as unreal, not because it is ideal, but because it is imperfectly ideal. And the absolute reality is represented, not as that which exists without relation to thought, but as that which is identical with the thought for which it is. In the Dialectic, therefore, the noumenon is substituted for the thing in itself, and the noumenon is, as Kant tells us, the object as it exists for an intuitive or perceptive understanding, i.e., an under standing which does not synthetically combine the given matter of sense into objects by means of categories, but whose thought is one with the existence of the objects it knows. It is the idea of such a pure identity of knowing and being, as suggested by thought itself, which leads us to regard our actual empirical knowledge as imperfect, and its objects as not, in an absolute sense, real objects. The noumena are not, therefore, the unknown causes by whose action and reaction conscious experience is produced ; they represent a unity of thought with itself to which it finds experience inadequate. This higher unity of thought with itself is what Kant calls reason, and he identifies it with the faculty of syllogizing. Further, he finds in the three forms of syllogism a guiding thread which brings him to the recognition of three forms in which the pure unity of reason presents itself to us in opposition to the merely synthetic unity of experience, a psychological, a cosmo- logical, and a theological form. In each of these cases the empirical process of knowledge is accompanied, guided, and stimulated by an idea which nevertheless it is unable to realize or verify. In psychology we have ever present to us an idea of the identity of the self, which is never realized in our actual self-consciousness, because the self of which we are conscious is manifold in its states and because it stands in relation to an external world. The idea of simple identity is, therefore, something we may set