Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/715

No. 6.]

The Kantian philosophy has two fundamental propositions: (1) that all our knowledge begins with sense experience, and (2) that objects are only mediated through sensations. The highest principle of knowledge is the unity of self-consciousness in which I am conscious of a necessary synthesis a priori, through which all the given states of consciousness are brought under an original synthetic unity of apperception without which they would not be mine. Kant saw clearly that our consciousness is completely determined on one side by external forces acting upon our sense organs, and that it supposes on the other hand a reaction proceeding wholly from the subject. He hoped to explain sense experience as a compound of these two moments. This S. holds contradictory and impossible. The subject must remain identical with itself and hence cannot have any relations to anything foreign to it, nor can the effect of external things acting upon the sense organs be connected with anything a priori. It follows, then, that consciousness is entirely active and creative, produces its own object; the sensibility, however, through which alone we receive impressions is completely unconscious and the necessary presupposition of consciousness, yet not an element of it. Since our consciousness constructs its objects with necessity according to the impressions which the sensibility receives, this can only be regarded as a dialectic movement in which knowledge continually places itself in opposition to lack of knowledge (Nichtwissen) and takes up this opposition into itself. For us, the knowledge, the creative identity, is second, while in reality it is the first. Our consciousness cannot be partly a priori and partly a posteriori, nor one of the two, but must be both at once, and each entirely. It is entirely a priori because it is creative, and entirely a posteriori because it is reproductive. Both elements belong necessarily to the movement out of which our consciousness constantly proceeds. Kant himself maintained that a sense object must be given to the human understanding, but left it problematical whether there might not be another understanding, — perhaps the Divine, — which produces its own objects. But if the human understanding does not produce its objects, and can only receive them from without, it must stand within the bounds of natural causality, and the objects would be only a result of the stimulation of its sensory mode of existence, which indeed must correspond to the human organization, but can lay no claim to universality. On the other hand, a consciousness that produces the objects from itself is absolute identity; it cannot be different from the thing in itself, for it is the thing in itself, nor be wanting in existence, for outside of it there is nothing.