Here
under follows the transcription of the chapter Kant of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant, published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1914.
|
167
KANT
SCIENCE AND RELIGION
WITH AN EXCURSUS ON THE “THING IN ITSELF“
The value which life possesses for
us
reckoned only by what we
enjoy, is easily decided: it falls
below zero.
Nothing remains but
the value which we ourselves give
to our life by
means
of that which
we not only do, but do to an end
so independent of nature
that the
very existence of nature can only
be thought of upon this
condition.
Immanuel Kant.
168
(Blank
page)
169
KANT
IN this last discourse there is no
need
to waste time over any preamble; for the previous lectures should have
placed us in such a position as should enable us to take a final and
conclusive
survey of the workshop of Kantian thought, without any risk of carrying
away with us half-understood utterances and anaemic conceptions in the
place
of clear perceptions.
Our plan from the
outset has been
to keep in view the proposition that all human recognition consists of
combinations. Our first lecture pointed to the specially complicated
relation
between Idea and Experience: in the second we saw how conception and
perception
came to an almost inextricable conflict in consequence of the one-sided
methods of our modern science: the third addressed itself to
constructive
criticism and to the fundamental distinction which it draws between
understanding
and sensibility in all experience of nature, the one being impotent to
effect anything without the help of the other; and here we first began
clearly to recognise the combination of duality as an essential
condition
of all thinking: this view was
theoretically carried further in the
fourth
lecture, when we saw those two dissimilar elements, differently
developed
and differently proclaimed
by the various
thinkers,
and in which we pursued the error of all monism to its very roots;
but was only under the leadership
of a truly critical thinker like Plato that the matter could be cleared
up. Here we found a grandiose and perfectly
plastic union
170 KANT
of
these combinations, which
constitute
the woof and warp of all our thinking, in the manifestation of a life
which,
looked at from the visible or sensible side, is consistent organism,
that
is to say, form, while if taken from the conceptual or intellectual
side,
it reveals itself as organic unity, and that means Teleology, — and
that
in such a way that neither of these two notions would have any
thinkable
meaning without the other.
We shall shortly have
to return
to these relations, which Kant teaches us to designate as
“transcendental.“
But let me say at once, for I think that I am here bringing forward
something
which, thanks to what has gone before, will no longer be an empty
phrase,
that this combination, or in other words, this apprehension, according
to which experience, thought, recognition, truth, always arise out of
the
conjunction of duality, is not only characteristic of Kant's
theoretical
thinking, and of his philosophy in the narrower and more professional
sense
of the word, but, as a general proposition, of his whole intellectual
personality, — of
that which he was, and of that which he desired. In a comparatively
early
work, Von dem ersten Grunde des
Unterschiedes der Gegenden im Raume (on
the first principle of the difference of regions in space), he gives us
the deepest reflections on the essence of “right“ and
“left,“ — reflections
which when examined critically contain the germ of all criticism. The
clearness
of his intellect, his persistent pains to draw boundary lines, to
distinguish
with the utmost care between words, conceptions, thoughts, sciences,
intellectual
powers, ideas, and systems, — so that there should be no interchange of
powers,
no encroachments with their consequent confusion, — are facts that in the last resort must
be attributed to the fundamental, innate, peremptory, and gradually
ripened
sense of duality in every intellectual activity. What Plato taught us
in his Theaitetos (182 B),
that nothing is thinkable which can be
described
straight
171 KANT
away
as unity, inasmuch as every “something“ and every thought consists of
the uniting (συνγιγνομαι) of
two things
(see p. 507), that with Kant is the beginning and the end; it is not
only
the fundamental instinct which gradually developed him into the
keenest
analyst of all times, but it is also the fundamental perception which
becomes
more and more firm and powerful in proportion as his philosophic views
become riper and more perfect, so that the mighty synthesis which is
worked
up in ever-growing degree in his three critiques — Reine Vernunft, 1781,
Praktische Vernunft, 1788, Urteilskraft, 1790, consists not in
a
fusion,
but in a combination.
This is a fact which
repeats
itself
everywhere in Kant, no matter what stage of his thought and of his life
we are considering. But if we seek for its commonest and most
comprehensive
expression, we find it in the sharp distinction between the theoretical
and the practical. If I had said between theory and practice you might
easily misunderstand me, for we are apt to give a rather frivolous
meaning
to those words: theory tells us how we ought to act, practice shows how
we act in reality: that is not Kant's meaning. By “theory“ Kant
understands
theoretical philosophy, and therein the critical analysis of human
recognition:
what is recognised here is nature, about which we do not possess mere
inconsistent
rhapsodies, but an exact, objectively certain, recognition, — that is
shown
by the existence of an exact science of nature; Kant does not ask with
the hair-splitters, is there any
such thing as positive
science? Can such a thing be?
and so forth; — but he says,
“that such a thing exists is
evident since the days of
Galilei
and Newton“; and then he asks
himself what inference
is to be drawn from this fact in relation to our human intellectual organisation; ultimately then “the
theoretical,“ as Kant conceives it, rests upon the fact of natural
science, but aims at
establishing the value, the
exact importance
172 KANT
and
the boundaries of a scientific
doctrine
of recognition. By practical philosophy Kant does not understand “the
technical,“
nor the rules of executive skill, but rather an enquiry into the
dealings
of mankind, of man considered as an autonomous personality, that is to
say, as independent of that nature, the immutable laws of which science
investigates, and as subject to peculiar laws of its own; just as in
the
one place the fact of science serves as foundation, so here the given,
undeniable fact of moral personality serves in the same way: here too
there must be the element of law: if none such existed the conception
of
a personality would be void: it could not be grasped, it would be a
mere
rhapsody: the person would not be the experience which it is: but this
subjection to law must manifestly be different from that of nature: we
call it Freedom; its laws are commandments, ethical commandments; and
if
we look into these commandments of freedom as methodically and clearly
as we do elsewhere into the subjection of nature to laws, then we
arrive
at an exact understanding of what Kant calls, “Religion within the
boundaries
of pure reason.“ Within the experience, or whatever you choose to call
it, of man, there exist nature and freedom as the two fundamental facts
facing one another; “ the theoretical“ asks for an answer to the
question,
What is recognition of nature? “the practical“ for an answer to the
question,
What is freedom? Just as little as the searching and, as far as
possible,
unbroken criticism of the theoretical is in itself a science of nature,
only establishing the essence and the functions of recognition by an
exact
analysis, so too the thorough criticism of the practical is not itself
religion, though in a similar way it fixes the domain and the
boundaries
of all religion, thus showing once for all where superstition and
delusion
begin.
Out of this survey we
have
arrived
at four fundamental contrasts: laws and commandments as the given
173 KANT
facts;
nature and freedom as ideas
under
which we comprise the facts homogeneously; theoretical and poetical
reason,
as methods or intellectual implements, by means of which we may
investigate
these facts by thought; science and religion as systems in which the
sum
of our knowledge and opinions upon the subject of each of the two
series
of facts is dissected and represented. There is, however, certainly one
difference to which attention must be called in passing. We may say of
the two methods — that is to say, the theoretical reason and the
practical
reason — that they branch out into two opposite directions from a
demonstrably
single stem. As Kant writes, “It is always one and the same reason
which
pronounces judgment, whether it be in a theoretical or a practical
sense“
(pr. V. 2 B, 2 H, III); on the other hand, the permanent facts of
experience
(the laws of nature and the moral commandments) and consequently also
the
changing collective conceptions (science and religion) are and remain
absolute
contrasts, between which, as Kant says, “there is fixed an illimitable
cleft, so that there is no possible crossing over from the one to the
other,
just as if they were so many different worlds“ (Kr. d. U., Introduction
II, p. xix and p. liii). 1
Yet in spite of this “illimitable cleft“
nature
and freedom are inseparably united, — united indeed in the personality
of
every human being: it is just this combination which makes a man to be
a man; it possesses for the essence of personality exactly the same
significance
as the combination of form and teleology possesses for the essence of
life;
it is a transcendental union by means of which “the Thing“ first
arises:
neither of these two contrasts has any existence without the other:
there
can be no nature without freedom, no freedom without nature: and so it
is that this duality forms a unity. It is a gross error, as we saw in
the
previous lecture, if we believe ourselves to be able to see organic
form,
unless, consciously or
174 KANT
unconsciously,
the thought of purpose
or teleology realises itself in this form: and this is true of the
converse;
in the same way it is the mistake of an intellect not yet cleared by
criticism,
if we think that we can represent freedom to ourselves unless nature
should,
as it were, form the background from which it raises itself, or that
nature
with its fundamental law of cause and effect possesses a meaning,
unless
the personal experience of freedom teaches us to think this thought of
causality. This unity of duality, however, is not a logical unity: it
is
not the reduction of nature and freedom, of science and religion, to
one
and the same thought; in other words, it is not the factitious and
subtilised
unity of the Monists, but it is organic unity, that is to say, as we
know,
a unity of which the essence is that it should be plurality. Well does
Kant more than once insist that this whole system of faster and looser
combinations, out of which our intellectual activity proceeds, might
possibly
spring from a common but to us unknown root (see pp. 145-6); as a
genuine
critic he cannot exclude this possibility; yet the consideration of the
matter has no theoretical or practical value in his eyes, for, except
by
fiction, by enthusiasm, or dogmatisation, there is nothing to be made
out
of this idea.
It will be
intelligible to you
that a philosophy of this nature should be called “critical
philosophy“: the Greek root-word means to distinguish, to part, to
sift. You need
only open your eyes and look around you. Everywhere you will become
aware
of a lack of clear distinction of conceptions and domains. On all sides
the fight between religion and science is surging; none, neither men of
learning, nor the ignorant, neither the investigators of nature nor the
theologists know the boundaries; only a few suspect that they exist.
The
Pope of Rome maintains that true science, Vera Scientia, is a property
of the Church: 2
while at the same moment
175 KANT
the
ultra-modern psychologists and
ethical
societies are labouring to bring into being an empirically logical
“substitute
for religion.“ The most complete and unhappily still active example of
the irretrievable confusion of domains was furnished by Spinoza with
his
famous formula Deus sive Natura;
here religion and science are 3
so
confused
that there is no longer any possible distinction of their respective
domains,
and so we come to the experience of a “geometrical doctrine of morals“
and a nature which must be “conceived out of God“ 4 (Ethica, I, prop.
15
and 18), hence a scientific religion and a religious science. In all
this
unintelligible jumble the “herd of subtilisers,“ as Kant
disrespectfully
calls them, finds an unfailing joy, and the “immanent monism“ as this
hocus-pocus dubs itself still flourishes luxuriantly amongst a
generation
who
are Kant's grandchildren. In this philosophy we have the direct
opposite
to that of Kant. Kant refuses to take one step outside of the field of
possible experience: whatever pretends to come from beyond that field
he
dismisses as “fairy tales out of Utopia“ (Tr. II, 1), but experience, —
that is to say, the exact observation of that which has been
experienced, — shows
us that in our intellect every apparent unity arises out of the meeting
(συνγιγνομαι) of duality.
Once we make
ourselves clear as
to the results of this method, which cannot but be of service to us in
our purpose, we see that Kant's most comprehensive division is that
into
nature and freedom. 5
There is a nature, that is to say, a world in
which
freedom never and nowhere comes to the front, a world which would be
annihilated
by the mere thought of freedom, and in which as a consequence no
morality,
no responsibility, no sympathy has
place or meaning, since everything
in it proceeds mechanically according to laws without a flaw, in the
eternally
immutable sequence of necessary reciprocal
176 KANT
action;
and there is a freedom, that
is to say, a world in which not that which is, but that which ought to
be, is the law, — a conception which in nature would be utterly
unmeaning,
out of which a totally different order arises, in which the conceptions
duty, merit, kindness, dignity, holiness, etc., gain importance, and in
which the commandments and moral ideas correspond to the laws and
nature-ideas
of the first-mentioned world.
Let me make a diagram
of the
result
of what we have been anticipating, — this series of the great,
universal,
accurately corresponding contrasts, carried only so far as is
absolutely
indispensable. We start of necessity from the Ego, and however widely
the
series of thoughts flying from one another may strive to diverge, the
Ego
in its knowledge and opinion still gathers together all that exists for
us. So it is immaterial whether we begin methodically from the
distinction
between theoretical and practical reason, and thence rise upwards, to
that
which is more and more complicated, until on the one side we come to
science
and on the other to religion; or whether, on the other hand, we take
the
great synthesis science and religion as the given starting-point and
then
keep widening out the series of conditions, until we find the ultimate
most elementary branchlets in the various practical proofs of reason.
As
a matter of fact it was the latter way that Kant pursued; he is just a
scientifically empirical observer, not a speculator: but in his method
of representation he followed the contrary way, the one which he called
“scholastic.“
This table, as I
think, speaks
for itself; whoever is a stranger to the world of this critically
analytical
thinking, will in it find matter enough for thought. Only a few words
more
by way of explanation, in order to guard against any possible
misunderstanding.
Every single
expression exactly
corresponds to the one standing opposite to it on the same level: the
divergence,
177 KANT
however, increases by degrees
from
below
to above. Practical reason is nearly related to theoretical reason; it
is not possible to discuss either of the two without the other:
commandments
and laws too are in appearance near enough to one another to be
occasionally
interchanged by the inexperienced, — we say moral law just as readily
as
moral commandment; the distinction between personality and recognition
is perhaps the clearest for mankind in general. That freedom and nature
stand still further apart from one another is assuredly a fact which
anybody
can see as soon as he has learnt to open his eyes, — were this not so
it
might occur to him that the earth attracts the moon out of a feeling of
duty, and that the fact of an honest man not betraying his trust is due
to the operation of the obliquity of the ecliptic; in general, however,
the confusion of domains is here inextricable, simply because we have
not
sufficient command of criticism to disentangle the very diverse
operations
of our reason in dealing with the subject-matter afforded by
experience.
This distinction between Science and Religion, if we examine both
intently,
is so complete that they can in truth only be placed in relation to
each
other in so far as they present
themselves
as united in the consciousness of a single being; and yet for lack of
the
178 KANT
critical
power alluded to we do not
possess
a clear perception of the cleft which separates them: besides which
there
stands here every intellectual narrowness, every superstition, every
moral
vulgarity, together with the immeasurable community of interests of the
speculators in religion of all the confessions of the world, as a
closed
phalanx against any attempt once for all to arrive at something clear.
So much for the contrasts. But as regards the serial sequence of
conceptions
from below to above, where on both sides of my diagram the one seems as
it were to grow out of the other, we must not attempt to show a logical
progression: it is no case of foundation and consequence, of cause and
effect; we might more appropriately think of concentrically widening
circles.
Yet this comparison only leads us approximately on the right track; for
the rungs of this ladder differ from one another not only in extent but
in value: religion and science are systems, artificial and artistic
constructions,
in which our knowledge and our opinions are ordered into a perspicuous
whole; freedom and nature are ideas in which and through which our
reason
visibly represents to itself facts; personality and recognition are
conceptions,
the former symbolical, the latter schematic, in which, to express
myself
allegorically, the transition between within and without, between
reason
and empiricism is effected (see I, 285 seq.). Commandments and laws are
the given facts 6
as ordering reason first grasps them, — they are its
material;
theoretical reason and practical reason are methods of consciousness. 7
We are dealing, therefore, in an ascending series, on the right hand as
on the left, with methods, facts, conceptions, ideas, systems: every
stage
corresponds with a different function of our intellect. My scheme is
only
intended, as you see, to exhibit certain relations of reciprocal forms
in the space of thought. Such schemes should be looked upon as
comparison;
we require of a comparison that it
179 KANT
should
illuminate a course of
thought,
not that it should serve as a substitute for thought: what we expect is
a suggestive operation, not a portrayal in the shape of an exposition,
and that holds good here.
Here we may pause for
a moment.
It has been my aim at the very beginning of this lecture to place you
in
sight of the very simple ideas of this philosophy, of this method of
surveying
the world: the very simple is always at the same time the very great;
it
is also that which is universally intelligible. That at any rate is
what
Kant has in his mind when he utters the memorable words, “True wisdom
is
the companion of simplicity,“ and adds, “it enables us for the most
part
to dispense with the great equipments of scholasticism, and its aims
need
no such means as can never more be accessible to all mankind“ (Tr. II,
3). It is impossible that Kant's critical work can ever in its
technical
details become common property, — Kant knew that full well and wrote,
“my
method is not very well fitted to attract the reader and to please him
... only the human understanding fails here by reason of subtleties
and
must be refuted“ (Ref. II, 6). Kant then only becomes subtle because he
wishes once for all to sweep away the subtleties of the sophists, and
the
fine points of his contentions serve him rather as an indispensable
protection
against false arguments than as foundations for his own
thought-building.
We also must ask ourselves the question — What do we mean when we
affirm
that Kant must become a factor in culture? In the main we can only deal
with that wisdom “which enables us to dispense with the great
equipments
of scholarship.“ Influence over wide circles can only be won by simple
conceptions. The Kant who reveals the transcendental properties of the
human intellect remains accessible only to a very small minority: the
Kant,
on the other hand, who might succeed in setting free all the leading
intellects
of the
180 KANT
world
from the night of the
superstitions
of decades of centuries, and in bringing them over to the bright
daylight
of the belief that religion and science are two entirely separate
domains,
each of them autonomous and autocratic within its own boundaries, —
that
Kant must be the founder of a new epoch in the history of mankind; it
must
be his to break the tyranny of the churches for ever, and once for all
to brush away the fantasies of the “natural philosophers.“ Then at last
the human intellect would be free. “The salvation of freedom“ is indeed
Kant's highest aim. 8
But if we turn our gaze from political freedom,
and
look only to the freedom of our human reason, we become aware that this
freedom is continually being robbed from two sides at the same time,
namely
from the side of theoretical reason, and from the side of practical
reason: the priest of science, says Kant laughing in his witty way,
leaves
mankind
nothing but “the freedom of a wound-up turnspit“ (pr. V. 1, end); the
sort of freedom which the priest of religion leaves us is a matter of
common
knowledge. And here there is a still more important consideration:
Kant
points out that the unsophisticated investigator of nature, who in his
innocence ventures upon dabbling in the domain of practical reason and
of the moral commandments, who retails miraculous fables about the
souls
of animals, about Darwinist morality, etc., is not only guilty of
working
mischief in the domain of freedom, but is actually from the very outset
hindering the observation of empirical nature; whilst his counterpart,
the theologian, who is so accurately informed upon the subject of the
making
of the world, the object of creation, etc., is not only bringing dire
confusion
into the science of nature, but is, at the same time, undermining the
true
foundations of genuine religion. The science, on the contrary, for
which
Kant strives, is a pure science, flawlessly mechanical; whereas our
anti-metaphysical
empiricists, such as Mach,
181 KANT
Haeckel,
Ostwald, and others, are
ever
and again crossing over into a domain outside of mechanics, into what
Kant pointedly calls an “imaginary science“; and the religion which
Kant
desires
is a pure religion, that is a religion purged of all history and of all
dogma. It is out of the confusion of domains that dogma, scientific as
well as religious, arises. If theoretical reason only, or practical
reason
only, oversteps the mark, that constitutes no irremediable evil; it is
in this way that ideas, in the narrower Kantian sense of the word,
arise,
and these are indispensable for the systematic moulding of science as
well
as of religion. Precisely because no web of dualism arises in these
genuine
ideas, — or at any rate because the slightest test serves to dissipate
its
appearance, — they become fused like cloud-pictures as soon as they are
closely examined; they render good service and do little harm:
as examples only think of the aether,
and of the conception of grace. But when the intellect breaks out in
both domains at once, whilst under such covering words as “soul,“
“plan,“
“unconscious,“ etc., it tries to smuggle a little freedom into
science,
or, with all theologians and theosophists, tries to draw nature into
the authority of religion, then there arises a sham web hard to
destroy,
and that is the birthplace of dogma. That is what, in order to express
it allegorically, if you please, but rightly and powerfully, I should
like
to call the Sin of Thought:
it is the sin against our own being,
against the intellect which should be sacred to us: it is at the same
time
the hereditary sin in the Thinking of our race. Kant then wishes to
redeem
us from this sin, from the night of dogmatism: that is the function of
the “pure“ distinction of domains. It in no way destroys the unity
of our being, it is rather a question of the true, conscious culture
of
human individuality. Kant defines culture as “the bringing to the front of the
aptitude of a reasonable being for all and any object, consequently in
its freedom“
182 KANT
(Ur.
§ 83). But in order to be
able
to build up this freedom of ours, and to make full use of it, we must
be
instructed in two particulars, first, as to the limits of our
abilities,
secondly, about the directions which are open to us without limitation.
We must, on the one hand, learn “to confine all our speculative claims
only to the field of possible experience“ (R.V. 1, 395), and, on the
other
hand, we must learn to perceive that, as Kant expresses himself,
“freedom
is man's work,“ — that here everything depends upon ourselves, i.e.
upon
our perceptions and intentions, and that it is accordingly incumbent
upon
us men to raise ourselves out of the condition of an animal race into a
moral genus, inasmuch as it is our duty now consciously and
systematically
to take in hand that culture which has hitherto proceeded as it were
without
any plan. (Cf. Kant, Mutmasslicher
Anfang der Menschengeschichte).
Man
must be a creator where he can, that is in the realm of freedom. Here
the
“know thyself“ of the Hellenes surges up again in a new and more exact
form. For man can only become a conscious systematic creator in respect
of himself, if he grasps the same method which has proved so successful
in the case of nature: the exact analysis of his complicated being, the
exact distinction between the practical and the theoretical, between
freedom
and nature, precision in the recognition of his own self, must form the
foundation. This would not only bring about a far-reaching
transformation
of his scientific and religious ideas, but would also in the end work a
change in all human relations. Kant, for all his modesty, enunciates it
with precision: his philosophy makes for a revolution, against which
all
previous merely political revolutions shrink into insignificant
episodes:
he wishes to realise ideas, but not
by fanaticism and philosophical phantasies, but by the dispassionate
and
conscious change in the direction of human thought and will, a change
worked
out slowly but surely in the humble
183 KANT
study
of the quiet thinker. He
comforts
himself with no illusions; “I much doubt whether I shall be the man to
bring about this change; the human mind is such that besides the
grounds
that should enlighten it, time is also necessary in order to give it
strength
and impetus“ (Ref. II, 18). Yet, however that may be, in this way,
sooner
or later, that “Kingdom, which does not exist, but which may be
realised
by what we do and by what we neglect to do, will be brought into being“
(Gr. II, 1). All this means a complete change in all those conceptions
and habits in science, religion, morals, law, society, which show us to
be in intimate brotherhood with the Babylonians of six thousand years
ago:
it means an upsetting of all values such as the devotees of Nietzsche
and
his school have never dreamt of, a growth of mankind, an accretion of
strength
over all that it has hitherto been, not by the idea of a will to
possess
power, but, on the contrary, by the finer moulding of man's
consciousness,
by the clearer apprehension of his intellectual organisation, and so
(which
is the same thing) of the organisation of the world of his
experience, — in
other words, by the still more tightly fettering of the dumb-beasts'
instincts
of his will in the service of a reason perfectly self-controlled and
consciously
creative.
This thought I take
to be Kant's
great cultural accomplishment; it is what concerns us all; it is what
we
can all assimilate sufficiently to be taught by it: it unquestionably
forms
the living centre of Kant's way of looking upon the world: it was his
starting-point,
to which the toilsome path of nearly half a century of critical work
brought
him back. And it is precisely upon this that you will find little or no
instruction in the writings of the professional philosophers. How many
of them have really grasped Kant's practical view of life? How many of
them see on the scale on which he saw? How many know what he means
when
he, the grim enemy of all the metaphysics
184 KANT
of
the schools, talks of “the leaking
vessel of the Danaids,“ as he sarcastically calls metaphysics in one of
his latest writings, — and when he says, in spite of that, “I am
convinced
that the true and lasting weal of the human race depends upon
metaphysics“
(R.V. 8, 4, 1766). If you now know, or at any rate if you suspect, the
services which are rendered by metaphysics towards the freeing of the
human
race, towards the freeing of freedom, and towards nothing else, then
you
have gained an advantage which may comfort you if you fail to follow
Kant
in many a subtle scholastic question.
It is good every now
and then
to allow the impression of a mighty whole to work as a unity upon
oneself
without stopping to consider any one detail. Even if there should be
much
in this introduction which remains hazy to you, do not let that trouble
you. Kant himself, the painfully conscientious man, says, “it often
happens
that the analysis of a thought weakens the effect which it brought out,
dark and undeveloped as it might be, whilst it was yet entire and
unbroken.“ 9
It is therefore important not to be in too great a hurry, but rather to
dwell upon the general thought which we conceive upon a large scale
though
darkly; that is one of the laws of our ψύχη: we must gather strength
as a machine gathers heat; even Goethe, the master of us all, teaches
that the great problems must in the first place “be treated with a
sense
of lofty passion“; it is questionable whether a new view can as a
general
proposition be grasped without some such driving or attracting power.
To
follow Kant in detail would be the work of a lifetime: I should be
loath
to say anything which should weaken this proposition: far be it from me
to rock you in the belief that Kant is easy to understand; what I do
wish
is to inspire you with a lasting ambition to understand him. Let each
man
follow as best he may, according to his pleasure and power. We
Englishmen
have a way of
185 KANT
saying
about such great,
half-understood
thoughts that “they grow upon one,“ they grow of themselves high above
our heads, and lock us in their embrace; it is like Parsifal's approach
to the temple of the Holy Grail: the fool takes only a few steps
towards
it, “I hardly step, yet meseems I am already far,“ and the holy
sanctuary
is all round him. In like manner I have tried to take you at once into
the heart of Kant's world: the atmosphere of this world must exercise a
certain spell, and under its influence the otherwise almost
unattainable
thoughts will no longer seem so alien to us.
The aim of these
lectures will
not suffer me to dally here as I fain would do. It is not Kant's work
that
I have promised to set before you, but something quite different, — an
introduction
to his work by familiarising you with his special way of thinking.
Once
more then we must dive into the depths of his personality.
In the highest degree
characteristic
is an admission of Kant's uttered at the time when critical thought
began
daily more and more to exercise his speculations. “Often Alps rise up
before my eyes, when others see a level and comfortable path along
which
they wander or think that they are wandering“ (Tr. I, 1). Kant will
never
be understood unless the same difficulties be felt which he felt. He
sees
mountains where others wander over the plain; and that leads us to the
conclusion that his thinking struck upon a new and hitherto untrodden
direction.
Yet if we study and judge Kant without having made ourselves clear as
to
the direction of his thought, then we not only misunderstand him, but
the
misunderstanding grows with mathematical necessity like the distance
between
two diverging lines: then the more we think about him the greater the
misunderstanding becomes: that is the story of ninety-nine out of every
hundred commentators on Kant. The first point then is that you should
strike
the right line, the
186 KANT
unaccustomed
line, the one which is
opposed
to all our inherited and inbred habits of thought. So soon as you
achieve
that, those Alps of which Kant speaks will arise before your eyes, and
then you must climb those rugged walls, for on the summit is Kant's
standpoint.
The man who without more ado thinks that Kant's philosophy is manifest
to him, — whether he be friend or foe to it, — he surely does not
understand
it: whereas to the man who sees the obstacles that Kant saw, travels
along
the path which leads to the new recognitions which he discovered,
sooner
or later that revolution of which we spoke just now will take place in
his intellect. As you see, the question is simple enough, and yet for
that
very reason almost impossible. The Kritik
der Reinen Vernunft was
written
by Kant in five months: but he had wrestled for twenty-five years
before
he, in his dissertation of 1770, distinctly admitted the true line of
thought,
and twelve years more of unbroken thinking did it cost him before he
had
finally won his standpoint. 10
That must account for the obstinacy with
which I over and over again bring you back to the same or very similar
reflections; for in the first instance my duty is confined to giving
your
intellect a single impetus: you have to learn like our mountaineer in
the
Bruno lecture to turn round,
— to give your Thinking the new
direction;
when you have done that you will see the problems of our Thinking and
Being
in a new connection: then you will be ripe for Kant's work, and have no
further need of me.
Let us have recourse
to Plato:
in that way we shall surely gain possession of plastic elements.
In our predilection
for simple
formula we found the following in our last lecture. Plato proceeds
positively
and affirmatively, Kant negatively and contradictorily. That must
strike
every man who observes with even slight attention. But we know from the
Goethe lecture, and have often found it confirmed since, that a simple
187 KANT
observation
of that nature only has
any
value for the recognition of personality, because and in so far as it
leads
into the depths. A fact only gains a value from the use which we make
of
it. Here we must make ourselves clear: why is it that we clutch at the
great simple relations and apply them to the investigation of
personality?
The consideration of the question leads to the following result. The
analyses
of persons built up of thousands of indications, such as men of letters
and novelists are so fond of giving us, are an illusory labour, a game;
for the mystery of life is the singularity of the individual. The man
who
sets out before me the multiplicity of thousands of conditioned
manifestations,
is a mere reporter, at the most a soul-photographer: what he gives is
history:
it is knowledge, not science. “Knowledge,“ says Goethe, “rests upon the
appreciation of that which is distinctive, science upon the recognition
of that which cannot be distinguished.“ 11 In other words, knowledge
brought
into form arises out of the fact that, as Plato taught us, we see the
one
in the many. We are therefore surely in the right way if we search for
simple recognitions, and leave subtleties out of the question. We saw
in
the former lecture that in life unity means form. Every form of life,
even
the meanest, is a symbol of the eternal: for the relations which are
here
before us are unthinkably manifold, and have neither beginning nor end:
but form itself is limited and unconditionally unified, for that is its
essence: it is unity, κατ εξόχην;
it alone can therefore really be
grasped;
besides, our sensibility shows itself as more congenial to nature than
our understanding. But if, considered visibly, the essence of life is
form,
then of necessity the deepest depth of thought must also be form,
since
thinking is a phenomenon of life. And just as in the visible world
life-form
gives birth to life-form, — indeed under such sure if incomprehensible
laws
of ever-reciprocal con-
188 KANT
ditions,
that a single bone is
sufficient
to enable the expert to reproduce the whole form, — even so must the
form
of thought bring forth thoughts, and the true investigator of the inner
man will aim at grasping the simplest features, because from them alone
can he hope to establish the fundamental lines of this physical
form, — by
which then all that is possible for the knowledge of the personality is
attained. These simple recognitions, however, are only of use when by
their
help “form“ is really built up. No single line suffices for building up
figures in space, it needs a system of co-ordinate intersecting lines;
in the same way too there is necessary here a methodically chosen
system
of certain simple and true recognitions reciprocally supplementing one
another. Otherwise the only result is a flat picture. So, for example,
the observation, otherwise correct, “Goethe all eye, Kant no eye at
all,“
would have appeared quite erroneous, had it not been supplemented by a
series of other observations, which, as it were, came to the assistance
of the one which had been originally made. Simple recognitions of this
nature furnish one another reciprocally with meaning:
taken by itself no truth is other than
empty; the man who confines himself to the simple truth is an
incontestable
phrase-monger; but if we have correctly selected our recognitions in
consonance
with truth and then carefully observe the points where they intersect
one
another, then we obtain by degrees the outline of the form for which we
are seeking. So we will complete the saying about the affirmative Plato
and the negative Kant by two others which directly intersect it.
The man who in the
domain of
critical
thought is affirmative must of necessity speak in parables: Plato is a
case in point, and we have seen what an imperishable living value lies
hidden in such fictions, but at the same time to what endless
misunderstandings
they lead both in enemies and in friends: the man who, on the contrary
189 KANT
is
negative as a matter of
consequence
defines, and in defining obtains strictly circumscribed forms: you
will,
I hope, understand in what a conditioned and yet entirely and
positively
real sense Kant, — the so-called man of negation, barren of all
imagination, — is
nevertheless of the two men the one who deserves the title of
constructor.
Thinking is for Kant a process of building up. He says, “the human
intellect
is by nature architectonic.“ That intellect which in himself was
developed
in such extraordinary measure, was also therefore that of a great
architect.
That is one observation to which we will at once add another as
supplement.
Since Plato is in so high a degree a Seer, who aims at grasping
everything
by the help of his eyes, Logic for that very reason, wherever he makes
use of it, appears hard and arbitrary, like something foreign and
artificial — think
only of the many dialectic discussions, of the logical proofs for the
immortality
of the soul, and all manner of similar subjects, in which at last
everything
seems to be in suspense without any firm outline, and remember how the
born poet and Dionysus-like intoxicated seer of forms scourges himself
with the asceticism of a tyrannically self-imposed scorn of art, and in
his state of the future hands over poetry and music to the pedagogue
and
pedant: Kant, on the other hand, the thinker and logician, into whose
colourless
life art never penetrated, was nevertheless above all men the
discoverer
of the essence of beauty and of the essence of creative art, the
possessor
of a special gift, peculiar to himself, of giving a schematic
visibility
to the most abstract thinking, — the only form of visibility possible
in
the
circumstances. Kant is therefore not only a constructor by right of
negative
definitions, but he is also an artistic constructor of schemes.
I take the
significance of form
in Kant's philosophy to be one of the most important observations that
can be made as affording an introduction to his work. For since
190 KANT
we
have in what has preceded
recognised
“direction“ as a first requisite for all understanding of this
philosophy, 12
I must here add by way of supplement, that we generally lose the
direction
in Kant, even before we have set out on the special journey. When,
shortly
before his death, Kant surveyed his life's work, he called his
transcendental
philosophy “the science of forms“; 13 (Ug. III, 393). On the
other
hand,
amongst the Kantians it has become the current custom to give up form
in
Kant in favour of what it contains, and indeed generally of only part
of
the contents, of a few so-called fundamental thoughts, just as they
suit
this or that person.
You will find the
proofs of this
everywhere. I open one of those books on Kant which are the most read
by
all students and cultured persons, and find Kant's system reproached
with
being “stiff and formalistic“: most of his arguments are “casual and
failures“; 14 but
his “great fundamental thoughts have a lasting
value.“ And one
of the most famous professional Kantians, in his memorial lecture, on
the
centenary of the philosopher's death, assured us that “the form of the
Kantian system might perish, — what does form signify?“ It is,
therefore,
assumed to be plain without further discussion that it is possible to
set
Kant's thoughts free from the form which is peculiar to them; people
seem
not even to ask themselves whether the so-called fundamental thoughts
which
remain over can really be Kant's thoughts. This way of looking at form
and contents as two separate entities with which we may deal singly as
we please, — this conception of form as something which can ever and
anywhere
be treated as a matter of secondary consideration, is a legacy of the
most
barren scholastic epochs of the Middle Ages. It is time to take a
lesson
from Gustave Flaubert; l'idée
n'existe qu'en vertu de sa forme
(Lettres, I, 157). 15 Yet here, where we are
dealing with the most
masterful
and at the same time most patient constructor
191 KANT
of
form in the domain of thought that
ever lived, we ought very earnestly to reflect whether it was not in
this
same scouted “system,“ in the organisation which was thought out down
to its minutest detail, that the greatest power of his life's work lay.
In addition to this the careful observer cannot fail to be struck by
the
fact that even in the case of his enthusiastic adherents, the moment
they
renounce Kant's form its contents also by degrees fall to pieces. That
was the case with all, from Fichte downwards: Kant was admired, but men
thought that they might look upon the “form,“ the “system,“ the
“schemes“
of his manner of thought as matters of secondary consideration: yet it
soon became evident that those much-belauded “fundamental thoughts“ had
been understood in a spirit as unlike Kant's as possible, and every day
removed men further and further from him. Only take Schopenhauer to wit!
Schopenhauer in his
principal
work speaks with reverence of “the great Kant,“ and at the end he
professes
himself to have “done no more than carry into effect Kant's work,“ and
thus the impression is created that he identifies himself completely
with
Kant. But there is one thing which he rejects at once, and that is
Kant's
form. On almost every page of his criticism of the Kantian philosophy
(Kritik
der Kantischen Philosophie), of his exegeses (Erläuterungen), and
also in other places, he scoffs at “Kant's love of architectonic
symmetry,“
he compares it contemptuously to Gothic church buildings, calls it
“child's
play“ (Spielerei), and
maintains that it “leads to farce,“ and so
forth.
In regard to the distinction between theoretical and practical reason,
at the meaning of which we have arrived at the outset of our sketch to-day, and which constitutes
the conditioning
fundamental thought of Kant's whole
system, Schopenhauer grows witty: “in obedience to the love of
architectural
symmetry, theoretical reason must also have a
192 KANT
pendant“; he does not see any
deeper
connection. And like the general outline of the building, so by degrees
every feature of the form which Kant had given to his view of the
world,
is first derided and then rejected:
nothing is spared, neither the
distinction
between reason and understanding in Kant's sense, nor his conception of
the relation between understanding and sensibility (which Schopenhauer
calls a non-entity, as indeed it is when its meaning is so utterly
missed),
nor the importance which he defends in the “Idea,“ nor the antinomy of
reason in the sense which you have learnt, nor the fundamental laws of
our judgment which are the foundation of the architecture of the Kritik
der Reinen Vernunft, nor the categories, nor the distinctive
part
played
by temporal schematism, nor the difference between Thing and
Phenomenon,
nor the analysis of the Ego, nor the categorical imperative — nothing,
absolutely
nothing: in the whole structure no stone is left standing upon another.
And in spite of all, Schopenhauer in his later days expressly confesses
himself to be a Kantian, 16
and, as I have said before, considers
himself
to be the direct sequel of Kant. But it is easy to prove
incontrovertibly
that Schopenhauer has never grasped a single one of Kant's fundamental
thoughts in Kant's sense: 17
that is no matter of wonder since he never
understood the critical standpoint, but took Kant's critique from a
purely
psychological point of view, and as an analysis of the function of the
brain (in both volumes of his chief work and repeatedly in the
Parerga); it would be very
desirable that some one should expose the
whole
matter
consistently, briefly and systematically. 18 Indirectly even here I
can
bring forward the mathematically certain proof that Kant remained
absolutely
misunderstood by Schopenhauer. The intellectual personality of Kant is
by now pretty well familiar to you; so far then you possess a reliable
touchstone; now listen to Schopen-
193 KANT
hauer's
judgment. It would be possible to
compile
out of his writings the most acrimonious pamphlet against Kant that
ever
was written. Of Kant's thought he says that it is unclear, uncertain,
wrong,
illogical, shameless, unanswerably careless, pedantic, sophistic,
inconsistent,
queer, simple, grotesque, full of contradictions, etc., and of single
thoughts
he affirms that they are “brought forward in defiance of all truth,“
surreptitiously
obtained, mere plays upon words, monstrous mongrels, and so forth ad
infinitum.
To all of which Schopenhauer adds the assurance that it is “all the
respect
which is otherwise due to Kant“ which restrains him “from expressing
himself in hard terms“! The reproach which he oftenest brings against
Kant,
the thinker, is that of a “lack of adequate consideration,“ — once he
goes
so far as to talk of “an incredible lack of consideration.“ 19 To talk of
Immanuel Kant and a lack of consideration in the same breath is too
amusing!
and that is the reproach of a man who before he was thirty years old
had
fixed and made an end of his own philosophy, and never advanced a step
further, addressed to another man who was nearly sixty before he looked
upon his system of thought as sufficiently ripe for him to hand over
for
publication the first of his fundamental writings. “It is marvellous,“
Schopenhauer writes, “how Kant without further consideration, follows
his
own way, striving after his symmetry, ordering everything according to
it, without ever taking any one of the subjects in itself into
consideration.“
We may judge Kant's philosophy as we will, we may reject it as a
failure,
but every man who has any knowledge of his writings and his life will
nevertheless
admit that this assertion of Schopenhauer's is simply grotesque: the
only
thing that is marvellous here is the infatuation, almost amounting to
blindness,
and the superficiality of Schopenhauer. But he outdoes himself when, in
a rising scale of calumny, he accuses Kant of moral cowardice, of
194 KANT
lying,
of deserting his colours. You
yourselves, though you have not yet gone into the theoretical teaching
of Kant, are in a position to pronounce judgment with absolute
certainty,
and maintain that Schopenhauer's conception of Kant must be false from
its very foundations: for a man who can, after studying his works,
arrive
at such a ridiculous caricature of his personality, can certainly not
have
rightly understood those works. As a matter of fact all the
inconsistencies,
the contradictions, the absurdities, and, indeed, the dishonesties into
which in Schopenhauer's opinion Kant involves himself, are nothing but
the inevitable consequences of his own stiff-necked misunderstanding.
And
then the question arises, how was it possible that such a brilliantly
gifted
thinker as Schopenhauer, who delighted in being called “the keenest of
the keen,“ could fall into such unholy error? 20 Truly one-sidedness
and
a passionate nature played many another trick upon this man, worthy as
he was of admiration, but they afford no adequate explanation here.
Kant
was the subject of his study during his whole life, and yet he so
utterly
misunderstood both his work and his personality: how was that possible?
I answer only because he held himself to be justified in everywhere
separating
the form of Kant's thinking from the thought itself, because he held
Kant's
system of architectonics to be an idle adjunct, an old crone, a mere
seducer
and destroyer.
Judgments like those
of
Schopenhauer,
more politely and less cleverly expressed, will meet your ears from the
most different philosophical camps. Almost every professor will tell
you
that “Kant's form, Kant's system are secondary considerations; do not
grow grey over the distinction between pure reason and practical
reason,
with the power of judgment as the 'third,' — over the table of
categories,
and schematism and the Thing in itself, and the transcendental ideas
and
the autonomy of
195 KANT
the
moral personality, and the rest
of
it; all this is mere pedantry which may be explained historically: they
are no longer of any value in these days, we men of the twentieth century have gone far beyond
all that: keep to the great, new world-moving thoughts; the rest is
scrap
iron.“ As against this I tell you that unless you are prepared lovingly
to grasp the architectonics of Kant's thinking you will never know what
Kant thought. To talk of growing above Kant is like talking of growing
superior to Homer, Leonardo, Plato; we may thank God if by honest work
we gain the power of merely understanding such men, and of enriching
our
poverty-stricken public-school and high-school wisdom with the glorious
thought-life of the heroes. Right is on the side of the man with the
strong
fist: with improved lyddite bombs and such weapons we may rise superior
to him: but the man with the strong head is a cosmic phenomenon just
like
the Sun or the Dogstar; he is HE; taken as a personality he is neither
right nor wrong: if we wish to understand him, we look upon him face to
face as something that is, not as something which is yet to be; he is
eternal:
whether he will be of service to us or not, time will show: but the
historic
plague of our days snatches him away, and we have hardly had leisure
even
to have a glimpse of him as he really was.
In what I am telling
you and in
what I wish to impress upon you I am swimming against the stream,
almost
alone: but that does not matter: you can trust me, I know that I am
right;
stronger men than myself will sooner or later assure the victory to
truth.
It is true that I am no professional philosopher, but I possess instead
of that the great advantage of having busied myself with Kant all my
life,
without making any other call upon him than that he should help me to
build
up my own personal view of the world. I neither chose, like our private
tutors, as a half-fledged boy of twenty-
196 KANT
five,
to lecture as best I might upon
the ripe teaching of the man of sixty, in that way blocking my
understanding
for ever, nor would I meet him with a system of my own, the
justification
of which I should have had to make good by attacks upon his: there was
no need for me to bind myself to any party: I did not require to
inveigh
against what I did not understand, nor to make myself the
representative
of what my own thought was unable to receive. There are in Kant things
that to this day I do not understand; but since I am still removed by
ten
years from the age at which Kant wrote the Reine Vernunft, and twenty
from
that at which he wrote the Urteilskraft;
and since ever and again the
oftener
I read those wonderful books, and the more I reflect upon this
philosophy,
new lights suddenly blaze up before me, I hope, if I live, gradually to
arrive nearer to an understanding of them. For entire success I must
not
hope: I know it; I am not
sufficiently gifted
in the matter of abstraction, and besides that I am so different from
the
great Kant by aesthetic tendencies and impulses of will that inevitably
much must remain unattainable by me. On the basis then of the
experience
which I have gained I can affirm as my slowly won and ever more
strongly
fixed conviction, that neither the one thought, nor the many thoughts
of
Kant can be understood if we disintegrate them from the architectonic
scheme
in which he set them, — if we
try to tear them from the scheme
in which he gave them form and many-sided relations. The schematism of
the Kantian philosophy is as it were an expanded language; it is the
visible
and at the same time precise interpretation of thoughts, which in no
other
way could attain expression: and that is why we may maintain, with only
unimportant limitations, that in Kant form is thought.
This also I pledge
myself to
confirm
without impinging upon technicalities which have no right to any place
in these lectures.
197 KANT
One
thing in the first place: I
attach more value to Kant's own testimony than the professors do. For
in
such matters there is no question of learning, and still less of the
vote
of the majority; it is only a matter of insight and judgment: in both
respects
Kant soared above all the men who since his time have taken up their
parable
upon philosophy. Since Kant, moreover, in contradistinction to
Schopenhauer,
was a pattern of modesty and reflection and prudent reserve, it is
unquestionably
significant when he repeats again and again that he has much to add to
his exposition and excuses himself if in order “to bring the whole into
existence“ some parts “have been left in a certain unfinished state“
— if, however, in spite of that, in
speaking
of his system as a whole, he is convinced that it will be maintained
unchanged
later on. 21 In
1787 he writes to Reinhold, “I may well assure you,
without
laying myself open to the charge of self-sufficiency, that the longer I
pursue my course the less anxious I am lest any contradiction, or even
any coalition, such as we commonly see nowadays, should do any
important
damage to my system. This is an inmost conviction, which grows in me
from
the fact that when I proceed to other undertakings, I not only find my
system always consistent with itself, but, moreover, when from time to
time I am puzzled as to the method of investigating a subject, I only
have
to look back upon that general description of the elements of
recognition
and of the incident powers of the mind, in order to arrive at lights of
which I was not aware“ (Br. I, 488). When Kant wrote those words he was
standing on the highest pinnacle of his powers: the Prolegomena had
been
in circulation for several years, the second and partly altered edition
of the Reine Vernunft had
appeared at the beginning of the year, the
Kritik
der Praktischen Vernunft had been finished in manuscript six
months
earlier,
and as he announces in this letter he had begun to work at the
198 KANT
Kritik der Urteilskraft. 22 And this
is
the moment at which the thinker himself gives us his testimony as to
the
exact reciprocity which his whole thinking bears to the architectonic
form
of his philosophy! And yet even this surely weighty judgment must not
be
taken as authoritative; Kant might have been in this relation the
victim
of a mistake, of an auto-suggestion: we should not expect it of him,
but
it might be. For this reason I will now bring forward the positive
arguments
which must determine us to accept Kant's judgment. To the two
recognitions
which we already possess of Kant as constructor and as artist in
schemes,
the opportunity will now occur for adding more than one supplementary
recognition.
In the first place,
we must
mention
certain strongly marked characteristics of the individual with which we
are already partially acquainted.
It was purely visible
problems
for which logically there is no corresponding expression that, in the
first
instance, led Kant, the mathematician and physicist, to investigations
in the criticism of recognitions. I have already mentioned the fact
that
one of his earliest writings which touch upon the domain of the
criticism
of recognition is devoted to the question of the first principle of the
difference of regions in space. That is highly characteristic; you see
how the visible, the element of all construction, takes the lead. What
are the relations between right and left? In this question is rooted
the
life-work of Kant. The question would never even occur to the pure
logician:
to him right and left are identical; only the man who starts from pure
perception, and from that point searches for the connection with pure
understanding,
discovers that here there is indeed a problem, and one which cannot be
solved by empirical methods. That is how this apparently very simple
question
leads a Kant into the depths of the criticism of recognition, and
199 KANT
here
he immediately shows up the
empirical
acceptation that the conception space arises out of the experience of
matter
as being once for all impossible and senseless. Five years earlier we
already
see Kant following similar ways: the work of the year 1763 entitled,
“an
attempt to introduce the conception of Negative Magnitudes into the
science
of the world,“ is one of the most instructive which we possess for the
study of the intellectual personality of Kant. Here the thinker still
lives
wholly in the conceptions of mathematics and physics; in this very work
there are remarkable hints as to the essence of electricity as a motive
form of the aether, and here for the first time Kant defines the
impenetrability
of bodies as “negative attraction.“ But he has another aim in view, and
this other aim is the introduction into the consideration of philosophy
of those problems which arise out of the nature of our perception by
the
senses, whereas they remain hidden to abstract logic, and indeed remain
so hidden without the logician's being conscious of it, because he is
lacking in the organ necessary for the purpose. “Right and Left“ was
one
example, the conception of negative magnitudes is another. The formula
+a and -a, directly set over against one
another, looked upon from a
purely
logical point of view mean that of the same thing I say at the same
time,
yes and no. The result is a contradiction, — a non-sense. I might as
well
have said nothing. For the physicist and the mathematician the matter
is
quite different. Plus and minus are for him the one as
positive as the
other: the principle of this is the perception of space: plus is motion
in one direction, minus is
motion in the opposite direction; if,
however,
we are dealing with mere numbers, that is to say, with space-lacking
mathematics,
motion ceases to exist in practice, though it continues to exist
figuratively,
that is to say, in my thought, 23
and in calculation all minus
signs
are
added up just like the plus
signs, because
200 KANT
they
belong to the same direction of
motion, and it is a simple matter of convention which of the two
complexes
of magnitude I choose to indicate with plus and which with minus. If a
body remains entirely without movement because four horses are pulling
it to the right and four equally powerful horses are pulling it to the
left, then, from a purely logical point of view there is nothing more
to
be said about its motional condition than that the body is at rest;
physically,
on the other hand, its motion is equally null, but the ○
does not here
signify the nothing of contradiction, but rest as a consequence, a
result,
the practical sum of two opposite movements. This trivial example will
suffice to show you what is the question at issue. Here is no question
of rendering an abstract recognition familiar by demonstration, but the
reverse: The perception and that which is annexed to it,
— as the interplay between scheme and
symbol, which the third lecture exhibited as the essence of
mathematics, — must first reveal the problems and guide reason on the
road to
thinking.
So in Kant it is everywhere that the constructor leads the way: it is
out
of perception that the problems of the criticism of recognition arise.
And just as elsewhere in the case of right and left, so here he is led
by the distinction of directions, that is to say, of real in
contradistinction
to logical contrasts, to the most profound ethical and critical
thoughts:
it is in this essay on “negative magnitudes“ that, so far as I know, a
hint of the categorical imperative crops up for the first time; in this
essay the system of the pure conceptions of the understanding
(categories)
is clearly proclaimed. Both are shown as the direct result of thinking
stimulated by the scheme of directions, or to speak mathematically, the
contrast between positive and negative. For example, “un-virtue“
according
to Kant cannot be a mere negation, else it would be a nonentity; rather
is it something positive and real, namely a negative virtue, a virtue
201 KANT
turned
in an opposite direction, “not
merely a lack.“ And here it becomes clear that virtue itself is
nothing,
unless it be positive and real, — a motion with a fixed direction. If,
for
example, a man does not carry out a good deed which it was his duty to
carry out, then this neglect is not a mere zero = nothing, but it is
the
result of a struggle between two powers with opposite directions; the
categorical
command of reason was “do it“! against which the impulse of pleasure,
of
selfishness, etc., said, “do it not“! The direction or inaction is the
result of the adding together of the various plus and minus quantities.
In the same way there arises here for Kant the question of the
importance
of causality in our recognition. For the perfectly clear distinction
between
a purely logical foundation, and a real foundation, that is to say, a
true
cause, corresponds to the aforesaid distinction between a merely
logical
contrast and a real contrast shown according to the scheme of
direction.
If I deduce B from A that is only the more accurate displaying of the
greater
circle of conception A considered as already granted: this
disintegration
of that which is granted is the function of logic, as against which in
the real original cause I deduce from the existence of A that X must
also
exist, although the two are not the same but different. If I say this
body
is at rest and therefore does not move, that is a logical deduction; in
the expression a body at rest is included the notion that the body in
question is not moving. But if I say this body remains motionless in
suspense
between
the Earth and the Moon, because it is at that point where the powers of
attraction of the two luminaries are exactly balanced, that is no
logical
deduction, but I exhibit two real and opposite motive tendencies as
working causes in order by that means to account for the condition of
rest.
And here arises the fundamental question of the criticism of
recognition
which Kant raises — “How am I to understand that because some-
202 KANT
thing
exists therefore something else
exists?“ And at once, though only two or three pages of printed matter
are devoted to these reflections, he soars into the heights and enters
upon the subject of God. From Anaxagoras and his Nous (see p. 330) to
Descartes
and Leibniz, thinkers had imagined that they could come to a logical
conclusion
about the existence of God; whereas Kant from the simple consideration
in question deduces that this is a case where a logical conclusion can
only be arrived at if God and the world are identical: but if God is to
be thought of as the cause of the world, then the divine will is one
thing
and the existing world another, and we see that the acceptation of a
divine
Creator explains absolutely nothing; for we are once more faced by the
question: what is the meaning of the proposition that because A exists
therefore X must exist? “That is something that I should wish to have
clearly explained to me,“ says Kant. 24 And now he tells us in a
few
words
that he has pondered over these relations which lie outside of logic,
and
which are therefore not capable of explanation in the ordinary sense of
this conception, and announces his intention of giving the result of
these
reflections in detail: for the present he only communicates the one
result,
namely that we must force our way to something which lies beyond our
judgment,
and that can only be a question of conceptions, and then we shall find
that all our recognition “ends in simple and insoluble conceptions of
the
variegated groundwork of reality.“ These insoluble conceptions are what
Kant later named “pure conceptions of the understanding, or
categories.“ 25
Once more I must ask
you not to
be discouraged if in the course of these studies you should now and
then
come upon points of which you cannot at once fathom the meaning: our
aim for the present is no more than to arrive at a certain general
recognition
of the personality.
203 KANT
Whoever
will compare these two little
treatises on Right and Left and Negative Magnitudes, and will consider
them attentively, will see in them the programme of the Kantian
critique
of recognition sketched out in tolerably clear outlines: but above all
he will see laid out before him the way which Kant, the thinker,
followed. 26
It is the way of a man who starts from perception, — from reality
afforded
empirically; it is the way of a man whose intellect is penetrated
through
and through by the strict necessity of combination, of the ever
perspicuous
schematisation of all mathematics and mathematical physics; it is the
way
of a man who with rare keenness of sense grasped the essence of space.
But in the relations of space it is form that is the important matter;
the man who here perceives form possesses, if not the whole recognition
which it includes, for it is inexhaustible, — at any rate all the
elements
requisite for recognition. This standpoint was in Kant the result of
instinct
and of schooling: it was the characteristic of genius magnified by
method.
And you must not fail to observe that this way is peculiar to Kant
alone
among all the philosophers. Descartes and Leibniz alone show any
analogy
to it. But Descartes does not dwell for long upon the investigation of
recognition; he is more inclined to arrive at a hasty and arbitrary
compromise
with it, in order then to devote himself as undividedly as possible to
the cosmic, physical, and physiological problems, whereas Kant starting
from cosmology and physics which in the meantime had both grown into
powerful
systems, soon arrives at the problem of our recognition to which from
that
time forth he dedicates all his strength. And in regard to Leibniz, he
is the abstract mathematician as opposed to the physicist, and that is a mighty
distinction;
Leibniz belongs to those mathematicians who, if I may refer to what I
urged
in the Descartes lecture, view everything from the side of the
understanding,
and at the same
204 KANT
time
attach as little value as
possible
to the perception of the senses as a subordinate element. Thus, for
example,
the “principle of the indistinguishable“ forms a pillar of Leibniz's
philosophy:
two circles which are like to one another in every respect, are, to the
man who takes the world into consideration, logically not two circles
but
a repetition of one and the same circle; the same holds good of all
things
that are equal; hence it is deduced, that it is impossible that two
equal
beings should exist in nature, and this deduction again serves as a
main
pillar of support for the monist doctrine, — a philosophy of which the
imperishable
value consists in the fact that it gives a pure reflection of the
cosmic
picture of the abstract mathematician. But here Kant, plain and always
starting from experience, steps forth and cries, Halt! that is all
abstraction
and could only have any value if mankind were purely beings of
understanding;
but the senses possess the same dignity as the understanding; it is the
senses that give us space; and entities which can be comprehended as
“undistinguishable,“
be they two, or two hundred, or two thousand, are at once fully
distinguished
from one another as soon as they are separated by space.
This remark is very
important
for the appreciation of Kant's intellect. For Kant is often called an
“intellectualist“ or a “rationalist,“ that is to say, a man for whom
understanding
apart
from sensibility is the supreme court of appeal: and here you see how
false
and one-sided such a judgment is, and that Kant might just as fairly be
accused of relying solely upon the evidence of the senses. In truth he
is open to neither objection, but is an entirely objective critic of
recognition.
It is precisely this absolute objectivity which makes him so difficult
of comprehension to all of us: every interpreter of Kant drags him over
to the one side or the other.
So Kant goes forth on
his lonely
road fully conscious
205 KANT
of
his solitude, as he writes in his
treatise on the comprehension of the Negative Magnitudes, “usually I
least
understand that which all men believe that they understaxtd with
ease“;
from the outset all problems present to him a special and unusual
aspect.
Starting from the point of cosmology and physics, it seems to him
organically impossible to leave out of sight the form of perception
which has been
given to us — namely space; rather do all the problems of recognition
arise
for him out of and in perception. Space, related on the one side, as is
sufficiently proved by mathematics, to the subjective understanding, is
yet on the other side, as Plato calls it in the Timaeus (52 D), “the
foster-mother
of all Being,“ the condition, the form of objective things. Here Kant
gains
a foothold for further investigation in both directions. That is why it
is inexplicable that our professional teachers should have called the
writings
in which Kant examines the properties of space “pre-critical,“ because,
as they say, his analysis had not yet made a thorough investigation of
understanding. On the contrary, what we have just said shows that out
of
these writings we obtain a highly important, indeed conclusive, insight
into the accurate judgment of Kant's intellect and of its work: it is
with
the critique of space that his critical work begins: this is the
starting-point,
just as this same criticism later on is the beginning of the perfected
exposition. But another insight, hardly less important, which we gain
here
is the perception that geometrical instinct and mathematical schooling
must make schematic construction not only into an indifferent habit,
but
into a fundamental method of this manner of thinking. And so in Kant we
see, from the very beginning, concrete perception, the geometrically
practised
eye acting as guide to thoughts, so that the architectonics, the scheme
of thoughts, were forced of necessity to grow together organically with
the thoughts themselves, and that no
206 KANT
stripping
of these thoughts out of
the
shell of their scheme is possible in the case of Kant.
But there is yet more
to be said
of the significance of form in Kant. The matter is far too important in
regard to the exact understanding of the intellectual personality, for
me to omit any of the arguments.
We have already seen
why and how
far we are entitled to describe Kant as a constructor as against Plato;
for if Kant is from the very outset pre-eminently a constructor of
thoughts,
then it is impossible for this construction to be of slight value. I
will
not repeat myself; but I wish to impress upon your attention still more
earnestly the architectonic side of Kant.
You remember the
anecdote about
Westminster Bridge in our first lecture (I, p. 38); since then we have
often observed how characteristic of Kant's thought is all that has to
deal with the architectonic art. In the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft he
expressly
makes architectonics the equal of science. It is not unity of itself,
but
systematic unity which “turns ordinary recognition into science,“ and
therefore in general “architectonics are the doctrine of science in our
recognition“ (R.V. 860). Those of us who are only capable of seeing
what
is artificial in such a construction, do not recognise the resultant
importance
that in such architectonics refined to their utmost capability
everything
stands in relations of the closest interdependence to everything else;
no matter what we take into consideration in such a structure, every
single
detail is so closely conditioned, and has at the same time such exact
conditioning
power in return, that it is hopeless here and there to break up greater
or smaller portions, and judge them by themselves. There may well be
much
that is artificial in all this: I readily believe it: but this
artificiality
is art, the art of Genius: here we see what Goethe calls “highest art:
the magic of the sages.“ Wherever such operations come to the front
they
depend
207 KANT
upon
incomprehensible, undefinable
relations,
upon things which are imponderable; one single clumsy touch and the
strength
of the fabric, the “magic of the sages,“ is gone. We may dissect, break
up, cut to pieces, pick to bits products of nature in order better to
understand
them: — not a work of art, for that is either a unity or it is nothing.
In very truth, like iconoclastic monks, have our philosophers and
professors
attacked the masterpiece of the fabric of Kantian thought!
In relation to this
painfully
exact architectonic quality of Kant's work it is now important to be
able
to watch him at work, especially in the bundles of sketches for his
last
planned works which remained unwritten. Every single pithy thought here
occurs over and over again, the sentence is turned and tested in every
conceivable, sometimes hardly observable, variation, — so laboriously
are
the stones worked up one by one, till they fit into one another and at
the same time into the general plan of the architect. Our historians of
philosophy ascribe this mode of writing to Kant's advanced age and to
the
beginning of the failure of his intellectual powers: but that is an
easy
way of dealing with the analysis of personality; for even if such an
assertion
partly hits the mark, — even if some features should show signs of
decay,
still the manner of working is none the less characteristic. If we
think
of the eleven years which Kant spent upon sketches for the Kritik der
Reinen Vernunft, which he ultimately wrote in five months, and
if on the other
hand
we consider the wondrous depth and productivity of the thoughts in
these
fragmentary relics, which are just beginning to be appreciated by the
professors,
we may readily conclude that these leaves are typical of Kant's method of work. 27
Far from seeing nothing but what
is sickly in these
working manuscripts of Kant's, I find in them a strong family likeness
to the
sketch-books of that other great
architect, Beethoven.
208 KANT
Here
too we find an untidy muddle and
endless repetition; for years the same apparently simple motives recur
over and over again, until they have received the exact shape which
corresponds
to the master's sense and to the whole which hovers before his mind's
eye.
This fact may help to sharpen our understanding for the formal
significance
of Kant's working: had the man not been an artist, he would never have
given himself up to this torturing work like that of Beethoven. There
is
no difficulty in arriving at a merely logical indisputability or a
mathematically
precise organisation; however complicated the matter may be, it can be
solved with the certainty of an arithmetical sum, and constructed
according
to rule. On the other hand, in all artistic work unity is necessary; we
learnt in the previous lecture to regard it as the essence of life;
only
where this unity exists does work deserve the title of creative: here
an
indivisible ideal unity has to arise out of divisions, and since this
unity
consists of parts, it follows that the parts are not parts in the sense
of pieces, but organs, and that in turn means unities; so here you have
circle within circle to all eternity. This is the ideal which hovers
before
the artist, — this is the
necessity which forces
a law upon him. You must not then in appraising the significance of
form
in Kant's thought simply say: here we have a thinker who takes his
departure
from the visible, and his method is that of the mathematically physical
scheme, but you must add: he is an architect, an artistic creator, and
in obedience to that he wills to produce organic and not merely logical
unity.
Out of this
consideration there
arises another which must not be passed over without mention.
I spoke of “organic
not logical
unity,“ and as a matter of fact these are two different things: this
you
already know, and I need not dwell upon the proofs of it: a single
example
may suffice. Logically I neither may nor
209 KANT
can
say, unity is plurality: the
predicate
would destroy subject, and the sentence would be a type of absolute
senselessness. In life, on the contrary,
as was shown in the previous lecture, “a unity is of necessity a
plurality,
and it is plurality which constitutes a unity“ (p. 105). In life, then,
we are subject to another code of laws differing from the logical code:
we must not call it “illogical,“ for that would be unintelligible; but
it embraces an incomparably wider world, a world that is more richly
constituted.
You must have observed this more than once to-day. Now come the purely
logical schoolmen, and discover dozens of “contradictions“ in Kant: if
only one-tenth of the so-called “contradictions“ were really
“contradictions“
in the true and broader sense of the word, that is to say, if one-tenth
of them not only attacked the narrow rules of mere logic, but also the
organic conditions of all life, — then Kant must have been a quite
exceptionally
stupid man, and Schopenhauer's reproach of chronic want of
consideration
would even be flattery! In truth it is baseless misunderstanding upon
which
this is founded, and that indeed not only with reference to Kant. Let
us
try to arrive at some clear notions upon these matters.
We have seen that
Life is Form,
and Form is Unity (p. 98): later on we learnt if the essence of Life
is
Form, it must of necessity follow that the deepest foundation of
thinking
must equally be Form (p. 188). Even the thinking of an individual must
first and foremost be uniform, and it is only by extraneous
circumstances
that it is broken up and turned out of its course so that it seems to
destroy
itself. The childish doctrines of the middle of the nineteenth century,
according to which thought must be looked upon as matter, 28 have long
since
been carried to their grave, amid the jeers of all scientifically
competent
judges; still the fashionable idea of to-day which sees in thought a
motion
and there-
210 KANT
fore
an energy, is patently no more
than
the repetition of the same thesis in a veiled form: it is always the
same
mistake of looking upon life as a result of matter and force: whereas
as
we have seen, life is the aboriginal and only concretely given
phenomenon,
while matter and force, the closer we look into them, are for ever
evaporating
more and more into abstractions. If, on the other hand, Life is Form,
and
thinking a result of form, then what we are wont to call the “Soul“
is,
to speak allegorically, no more than the inner side of the Form of
Life.
How astonished our worthy empiricists were when positive investigation
proved more and more clearly not only that the weight of the brain, as
they premised, but also its relative complexity, the number and the
variety
of its superficial folds, etc., stood in direct relation to the power
of
thought of the individual. And yet even to this fact no more than a
symbolical
value can be attached; but it shows that the conception of thinking as
a direct manifestation of form is not so senseless as it might seem to
be at first sight to many a man who, shrouded in the dust-cloud of
false
anti-metaphysical empiricism, stalks in the great high-road of the
vulgar
herd. And since every phenomenon of life is fixed, and therefore
necessarily
bound up by the form of the essence of life into an organic unity, — in
which
all parts point to one another, condition one another, and together
constitute
a whole, therefore thinking must also form a unity in the place of its
birth, that is in the inmost soul of the personality. But in almost all
men thoughts remain in suspense, and never gain a firm impression; they
are the children of form, but they do not attain form: they fall short,
and do not reach the goal, like bullets missing the white, missing the
black, burying themselves in the earth on the hither side of the
target.
Sometimes men of this sort want to carry their point arbitrarily, and
are
lacking in the indispensable measure
211 KANT
of
formative power. The work of
projecting,
in the sense of the Latin word projicere,
and setting up again that
which
lives within us, is beset by very important difficulties. The one
difficulty
is that of speech: words are never fully adequate to true thoughts.
Cusanus,
a clear thinker, warns us that oportet
supra verborum vim intellectum
efferre,
the reader must lift himself above the narrow meaning of my words to a
higher point of conception: 29
and Goethe says, “For the superior man
the
power of speech which has been vouchsafed to him is insufficient; ...
he falls short almost everywhere“ (G. VIII, 96); that is why the
handling
of speech is an art; it is not every man who knows how to exercise it.
But this is only the difficulty of the lower layers, the caprice of the
building material: then comes the building itself, the question of
architecture:
even the “superior man“ will only master it after many years of devoted
labour, and only within certain bounds laid down by his personality. In
all ordinary cases the much complained of contradictions in thinking
arise
simply from the fact that the personality in question had not grown up
to this work of construction: it is not their thinking which fails in
unity, but the expression of their thinking; it is our business to
build
up unity out of the chaos of matter. On the other hand, what is so
extraordinary
in Kant is that he succeeds in an almost perfect “projection“ from
within
to without. In every projection there is much that is artificial even
though
it be according to rule: it is a combination of convention and law:
besides
that there belongs to it the exercised faculty to express bodily the
picture
which is superficial: lastly, the geometrician may often have been
mistaken:
even admitting that all this is to be found in Kant, there still
remains
the fact that in him every single thought possesses its mathematically
appropriate place, and with that its appropriate function. Thoughts are
not stones:
212 KANT
the
thinker cannot raise up a great
cathedral
before our eyes and say — that is my scheme of philosophy: he can only
give
us the plan, ground-plan and elevation; but these are a far more
delicate
matter than buildings of stone and mortar: a chip hurts these but
little; even out of ruins our thoughts can build up their form: but
whoever
touches
an architectural drawing ever so little, displaces the various
relations,
so that the original form, the thought of the architect, can no longer
be guessed at. It is in this way that Kant is radically spoilt for us:
soon no one will any longer know what he was talking about. Fragments
of
thought of a hundred men pass current under Kant's name to-day, so that
Hägerström, an expert in philosophy, complained that “Kant's
whole philosophy is represented in such a fashion that it might have
had
its origin not in one great thinker, but in many little ones.“ 30
In this connection it
may be
opportune
to insert an observation of general significance: we must in general
and
everywhere distinguish between contradictions and contradictions. There
are contradictions which are of a purely logical nature, they result in
an absurdity, a nullity, an emptiness of thought, — and there are
relations
which logic is apt to point to as contradictions, because they overstep
its powers of conception, but which are in reality the simple
affirmation
of the living fact. These contradictions are necessarily found in all
thinking,
but appear in “monumental“ shape in proportion to the pre-eminence of
the
thinker; for it is precisely in them that organism proves itself as
organism,
and that means as unity. In my work upon Richard Wagner I made use of
the
expression “plastic contradictions“ for this phenomenon. 31 There is in
thinking, as we have already seen, a right side and a left, and just as
it is not possible to draw the left glove on to the right hand, so it
is
impossible to expect to find in a genuine and honest thinker
213 KANT
unity
in anything except in the
organic
interdependence, in the reciprocal correspondence, in the relation of
the parts to one another. Here again is the proof of Plato's saying:
there is
no knowledge unless in the many we see the one. And sure it is that we
have not understood an intellectual personality, that is to say,
personality
as a thinking being, until we recognise it as being just as uniform and
necessarily self-conditioned in its organisation, as it is conscious,
in
the midst of all inmost conflicts, of being a unity. But to reproach
with
contradictions a man gifted as Kant was, a man equipped as perhaps no
other
mortal ever was with all the means for the architectonic and systematic
exposition of a philosophy that was supra-logical, and therefore
contained
all logic in itself, — devoting to this one task almost exclusively a
whole
life of most painfully exact, scientific work, — to bring such a charge
against
such a man wherever we fail to understand him off-hand, and cannot
without
pains see into the organic relations of his thought-work which embraces
all the domains of the intellect, is not only void of understanding and
childish, but above all impertinent.
We have now become
acquainted
with Kant the constructor as a physicist, gifted with exact perception,
as a master geometrically skilled in schemes, as an architectonic
builder,
as a magician in art, as an organic creator. Possibly Kant may have
been
excelled by others in any one particular, but what constitutes his
personality,
and gives it such extraordinary importance, is the fusion of these
various
branches of the creative faculty into one unity: for the gifts which we
have been unravelling are naturally only various manifestations,
aspects
and facets of the one uniform phenomenon. All that we have said up to
the
present is directed at these faculties subjectively as faculties; but
if
we cross over to the objective and ask, what is the relation to the
214 KANT
world
of this intellect thus equipped? then we come to a new experience, and
what we find is of decisive
importance
for the recognition of the peculiarity and value of the formal element
in the Kantian system. Moreover, we here touch the point where the hope
arises of growing into something which may go beyond what Kant
achieved,
for here is revealed the connection with nature.
When we watch Kant
the
systematiser
at work objectively, it becomes necessary to distinguish between
artificial
systematising and natural systematising. There have been many systems
in
philosophy, — indeed we may say that from Thales to Schopenhauer, even
down
to the present day, it has been the ideal of most thinkers to
set
up a “system.“ The Greek word “system“ means originally a uniformly and
arbitrarily accepted number of persons or things, for instance, a
college
of priests or a body of troops; by degrees it came to have a
theoretical
sense, and so betokened the unity of a doctrine composed of more or
less
numerous theses; but the arbitrary and conventional sense which it bore
in the first instance was attached and remains attached to the second
signification.
By “system“ our thoughts in the first instance turn to the autocracy of
an intellect which forces things to assume whatever shape or position
suits
it; it seems to be the opposite to nature. And now as regards
philosophy! If anywhere we see arbitrary will at work it is here; here
assumption
is set against assumption, and nowhere do we see the trace of a
strictly
straight procedure such as, in spite of all conflict of opinions, is
shown
in the other sciences. In the Bruno lecture we spoke in detail of this
philosophical system-mongering. Aristotle, who asks the stars how many
heavenly spheres there are, in order to deduce the number of substances
which exist in the world, the number of the creative intellectual
powers,
the number of aims, is the pattern
215 KANT
of
the systematiser: a second extreme
example is furnished by Spinoza, who builds up a whole philosophical
system “after the manner of geometry“ with definitions, axioms,
corollaries,
etc.,
which naturally has all the appearance of consistency, just as
consistent
as Euclid's Elements, but where there is this one oversight, that all
mathematical
definitions are without exception merely verbal explanations, but that
these words always premise the perception by the senses of the
relations,
and refer to it, whereas all Spinoza's definitions relate to things
which
are incapable of being perceived, and are therefore more geometrico
worthless. 32
What must specially strike us in this connection is the circumstance
that
Plato, the great and true man, left behind him no philosophical system,
not even the rudiments of a system, indeed that he scoffs at all the
systems
together (see p. 494), and further that Kant in the same way never
wearies
of warning us against the “systems of the idle reason,“ as he calls
them:
he who otherwise took but little notice of other philosophers, does
battle
energetically with the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, Berkeley,
Leibniz, Wolff, which were held in esteem in his day. In a certain
sense,
therefore,
critical philosophy must be a radical opponent of all system. This it
is
that Schiller extols as the “intolerance“ of the Kantian philosophy:
“This
does it honour in my eyes, for it proves how little it can tolerate
arbitrariness.“ 33
And, nevertheless, Kant himself tells us in his Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft,
that he is “striving after a complete system of transcendental
philosophy,“
and at the end of his life he energetically repudiates Fichte's
assertion
that he (Kant) had only aimed at giving us “a preparation, not a
system,“
convinced as he was that he had
given “the completed whole,“ and that
“the system of criticism rests upon a fully assured foundation,
established
for all time.“ No system then, and yet a system. What are we to
understand
by that?
216 KANT
One word suffices to explain:
Kant
here understands by system “natural system“ precisely in the sense of
our
modern natural science, and in exact contradiction to all former, and
yet
to be born, artificial systems of the idle reason.
In the sciences of
life we do
not in these days understand by “system“ the attempt to produce an
artificial
order out of practical and convenient considerations, — nor a logical
or
mathematical order such as man in his wisdom thinks would be fitting:
still
less do we think to create order based on arbitrary acceptations: what
we aim at is an attempt to follow up the trail of nature, to fix as
exactly
as possible the relations between its phenomena, secret as these may
be, — in
short, to reveal its true organism, that is to say, the necessary
connection
which dominates it — the unity of its plurality. Upon this subject I
have
expressed myself in detail, based upon a rich empirical stock of
examples,
in my Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century (p. 789 seq. [English
edition: Vol.
II, p. 305]), and I
need
not
repeat myself: laboriously precise, exactly obedient observation of
nature,
united to a bold, creative power of construction, — those are the two
gifts
which we find at work together in our great biological systematists. If
a man is to render services in the domain of natural systematics it is
indispensable that he should be endowed with aptitudes nearly allied to
artistic receptivity, failing which he cannot see form in nature: and
equally
indispensable is it that he should be possessed of a rare creative
power,
without which that which he sees and divines is not projected outwards
as a form such as is humanly recognisable. In all natural systematics,
therefore, we have to deal with something extraordinarily delicate,
with “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul,“ as in all
productive
schematising
(R.V. 180); once it is discovered, system can be made use of even by
average
intellects, and indeed built up in
217 KANT
detail;
nature herself then leads us
further;
but the
founders of systems have always been
brains of the very first rank. That plastic contradiction, of which I
spoke a while ago, must be most powerfully developed in the intellect
of a
systematist,
and must penetrate the whole mind: for the systematist must at the same
time discover and invent, obey and command, receive and generate; to
use
a coarse image he must stand on the dividing line between man and
woman.
You must not overlook the fact that we can never reach further than
symbolism,
even though it should be an exact symbolism. Goethe's saying is
universally
known, “natural system, a contradictory expression; nature has no
system“; 34 yet
system is to us men the tool of the understanding: that constitutes its incomparable
importance.
By means of the telescope we see
