Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/96

Rh 86 METAPHYSIC of identity the abstract oneness of formal logic that Kant proves that it is impossible for experience to be made adequate to ideas. But it is only of the latter kind of identity the oneness of self-consciousness that it can be said that it furnishes a guiding principle to scientific investigation or an ideal of knowledge. The same con fusion is still more evident in Kant s account of our moral experience, in dealing with which he directly attempts to get synthetic propositions out of the pure identity of reason, in other words, to draw definite moral laws out of the logical principle of non-contradiction. Whatever success he attains is gained by substituting for the formal principle of self-consistency the positive idea of consistency with the self, and again by conceiving this self as a concrete individual, the member of a society, and so standing in essential relation to other selves. The pure abstraction from all the external results of action and from all motives of desire, which at the beginning of the Metaphysic of Ethics Kant declares to be essential to morality, is modified and indeed transformed, as we go on, by the admissions that other rational beings are not external to us in any sense that excludes their good from being an end of our endeavour, and that the desires are not irrational and immoral except in so far as they are directed to the pleasures of the sensuous individual (which in a conscious being they never entirely are). Both in the speculative and in the practical sphere, therefore, the absolute opposi tion of the ideal or noumenal to the empirical disappears, as soon as Kant attempts to apply it. For in both the abstract identity of formal logic, which is really the meaning of the noumenon as absolutely opposed to and incommensurable with experience, gives way to the unity of self -consciousness, a unity which is so far from being absolutely opposed to the difference of the empirical consciousness that it necessarily implies it. For self- consciousness presupposes the consciousness of objects ; though it is opposed to that consciousness, it is essentially correlated with it, and therefore its opposition cannot be regarded as absolute, or incapable of being transcended. These considerations may throw some light on the relation of the Analytic and Dialectic of Kant, and on the nature of the opposition of noumenon and phenomenon as it is presented in the latter. In the deduction of the categories, Kant pointed out the essential relation of the objective world of experience to what he called the &quot;transcendental unity of apperception&quot;; i.e., he pointed out that the unity of consciousness is implied in all its objects. This unity, he further showed, must be conceived as &quot;capable of self -consciousness &quot;; but it actually becomes conscious of self only in relation, though also in opposi tion, to the other objects determined by it. Now it is this consciousness of itself in opposition to other objects which is the source of Kant s &quot; ideas of reason,&quot; of the dissatisfac tion of the mind with its empirical knowledge, even in its scientific form, and of the demand for a higher kind of know ledge to which experience is not adequate. That a standard is set up for experience by which it is condemned is simply a result of the further development of that unity which is implied in experience a result of the progress of thought from consciousness to self-consciousness, and of the contrast between the former and the latter. The problem with which Kant s Dialectic attempts to deal, and which it treats as insoluble, is, therefore, simply the problem of raising con sciousness to the form of self-consciousness ; in other words, of attaining to a knowledge of the world of experience as not merely a &quot; synthetic, &quot;and therefore imperfect, unity of things external to each other, but as an organic unity of transparent differences, a self-differentiating, self-integrating unity, such as seems to be presented to us in pure self-consciousness. Nor can this problem be regarded as insoluble ; for the unity of self-consciousness is identical with the unity of consciousness ; it is only that unity become self-conscious. Hence the point of view at which consciousness and self- consciousness seem to be absolutely opposed to each other, the highest point of view which Kant distinctly reaches, can be regarded only as a stage of transition from the point at which their relative difference and opposition is not yet developed to the point at which they are seen to be the factors or elements of a still higher unity. The later philosophy of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, is little more than the development of the idea just stated in its twofold aspect. In the first place, it is an attempt to show what is involved in the idea of thought or self- consciousness as in itself an organic whole, a many-in-one, a unity which expresses itself in difference, yet so that the difference remains transparent, and therefore is immediately recognized as expression of the unity. In the second place, it is an attempt to bridge over the difference between thought or self-consciousness and the external world of experience, and to show that this opposition also is subordinated to a higher unity. Or, to put it more directly, the idealistic philosophy of Germany seeks, on the one hand, to develop a logic or metaphysic which bases itself, not, like formal logic, on the idea of bare identity, but on the idea of self-consciousness; and, on the other hand, to show, in a philosophy of nature and spirit, how, by means of this logic, the opposition of thought to its object, or of the a priori to the a posteriori in knowledge, may be transcended. In the third and fourth sections of this article something more will be said of the manner in which this task was fulfilled. Here only a few words are necessary to sum up the results reached, and to give more distinctness to the new ideal of knowledge which those results suggest. We have seen that Kant s critical attitude involved two things, on the one hand, the assertion that the existence we know is necessarily existence for thought, and, on the other hand, the denial that that which exists for our thought is absolute reality, a denial which again involves the presence to our thought of an ideal of know ledge, by which our actual knowledge is condemned. This ideal, however, was falsely conceived by Kant as an identity without any difference, and, in this sense, he does not hesitate to apply it even to self-consciousness itself. For, in a remarkable passage, 1 he attempts to prove that the consciousness of self is not a knowledge of the self, by a simple reference to the duality of the self knowing and the self known, arguing that the ego &quot; stands in its own way,&quot; just because it exists only for itself, i.e., because in knowing itself it presupposes itself. Kant evidently thinks that to know the real self it would be necessary to apprehend it in simple identity as purely an object without reference to a subject, or purely a subject without reference to an object. Yet to this it seems sufficient to answer that such an object or subject would lose its character as object or subject and become equivalent to mere being in general, and that, as such being is a mere abstraction, to know it cannot be the ideal of knowledge. If therefore there be a unity or identity of thought which is not realized in ex perience, and in reference to which we can regard experience as an imperfect form of knowledge, it cannot be found in this abstract identity of being. In truth, as we have seen, it is found in that very idea of self-consciousness which Kant is criticizing. Just because we are self-conscious, and there fore oppose the unity of the conscious self to the manifold- ness of the world in space and time, do we seek in the world of space and time for a transparent unity which we cannot at first find there. But, when this is seen, we find in Kant himself the partial solution of the difficulty, 1 Kritik, p. 279 (Rosenkranz s edition), &amp;lt;/. Hegel, v. p. 258.