orence Blackburn -KisYsYl -CS'J SCHOPENHAUER’S CRITICISM OF KANT/ By Willtam Caldwell. T Off-printed from Mind : a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy . Vol. XVI., No. 63.] tx W* What I wish to attempt in this paper is to sift out anything that may seem to be valuable in Schopenhauer’s criticism of the Kantian philosophy. It is matter of common agreement that the place of a post-Kantian philosopher in the history of philosophy may be more or less determined by his attitude towards Kant, but my object here is less to explain Schopenhauer through his opinions on Kant than Kantism through Schopen- hauer, although it is difficult in seeking to do even this much to forget that Schopenhauer claimed to be Kant’s only true successor in philosophy. It is important to remember that Schopenhauer’s first phil- osophical essay appeared (1813) only seven years after Hegel’s Phaenomenologie des Geistes, and his chief work (Die Welt als Wille , &c., 1819) one year after Hegel had begun his influential lectures at Berlin. Schopenhauer, in fact, was born just a little too late to have actually felt the fever of, the philosophical agitation which fell between 1795, the year of the appearance of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre , and 1804, when Hegel diverged from Fichte and Schelling into a line of thought of his own, ending in the publication of his Phaenomenologie. His first instructor in philosophy was G. E. Schulze, the sceptical critic of Kant, from whom, perhaps, he may have partly imbibed that b 40&28 356 W. CALDWELL : somewhat superficial view of the Kantian philosophy prevalent among its earliest critics and upholders as mainly a new species of Idealism with an inconsequent Dogmatism in the theory of the Thing-in-itself; and his first formal introduction to the speculative movement of the first decade of this century was through the lectures of Fichte, which he heard when he was twenty-three years of age at Berlin in 1811 — the Wissenschaftslehre appearing to him, as he wickedly put it, “ Wissenschaftsleere,” and Hegel’s philosophy “ a monstrous application of the ontological proof.” This is more than enough to create in many minds a profound initial prejudice against Schopenhauer ; but when for some years there has been an interest in the other of the two nineteenth- century philosophers who stand out in a sense from the wide stream of thought whose flood was Hegel’s system — I mean Herbart — it is not unnatural to seek to turn up the theoretic side of the roots of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. 1. Schopenhauer was half made by Kant ; the web of his philosophy is through and through Kantism, and again and again throughout his writings do we find such distinctively Kantian topics as the Thing-in-itself, Knowledge a priori , Idealism, Noumenal, Freedom, &c., discussed in extenso as integral parts of his own system. He has written, further, an explicit “Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy,” as at once an appendix and necessary introduction to his chief work ; and in the Parerga and Paralipomena we find a concise and eminently readable section called Noch Einige Erlauterungen zar Kantischen Philosophie. His point of departure in eousidering Kant’s work is, in a word, the first part of Kant’s K. d. r. V., the “ ^Esthetic ” ; and he prefers to get access to Kant through the first edition of the K . d. r. V., where Kant’s Idealism is stated more unreservedly and more at a stroke than in the second edition. It is his conviction, he says, to which he was forced after years of repeated study of Kant, that Kant’s only real discovery was that Space and Time were known by us a priori ; and that, gratified by this, he wished to pursue the same vein of thought further, his love of architectural symmetry affording him the clue. The only element of value Schopen- hauer finds in the “Analytic” is the principle of Causality, of which he thinks Kant might have given a much simpler account ; all else is to him mere confusion and superfiuitjL The “Dialectic” represented to him the negative side of the Critical Philosophy, which he accepts as a perfectly conclusive piece of work, although he does not believe that the antinomies exhibit a natural dialectic of the reason, or that the three ideas Schopenhauer’s criticism of rant. 357 of Kant are at all on the same level ; here too, also, he thought Kant might have proved his case much more simply. With these views we are not surprised to hear Schopenhauer calling the Prolegomena the most beautiful and comprehensible of all Kant’s writings. In Ethics he believes Kant to have rendered the immortal service of showing, in “quite a special way” (that is, by his attribution of a noumenal freedom to man, compen- sating for his phenomenal necessary determination), “ that the kingdom of virtue is not of this world,” although the K. d. prakt. V. is only an application to Ethics of the principles already reached in the sphere of the Pure Reason. The K. d. Urtheilskraft he finds to contain the characteristic defect of Kant’s whole Philosophy — the starting from indirect instead of direct knowledge ; in this case, the starting from the Judgment of the Beautiful instead of from the perception of the same. Lastly, the criticism of the Teleological Judg- ment only shows what the K. d. r. V. already showed — to wit, the subjectivity of what we may call the ontological cate- gories : Teleology commits the egregious error of first treating the world of things as a world of things-in- them selves and then of applying categories (which are subjective) to their determination. Schopenhauer’s ^Esthetic has its roots in Plato; Plato’s doctrine of Ideas constitutes the other half of Schopenhauer’s philosophy — the woof, in fact, of which Kant’s theory of the forms and matter of Knowledge may be said to constitute the web. His criticism, therefore, of the first half of Kant’s K. d. Urtheilskraft , in so far as it may be regarded as an outcome of his Platonism, does not concern me here. His criticism of the K. d. prakt. V. is too directly connected with his own philosophy to be entered upon summarily. I proceed, there- fore, to unfold critically Schopenhauer’s general characterisa- tion of the subject-matter of Kant’s philosophy, and shall thereafter examine in its light, in order, the “ ^Esthetic,” the “ Analytic,” the “ Dialectic,” aud the chief discovery of the K. d. r V. 2. The chief tendency of the Kantian philosophy, accord- ing to Schopenhauer, is to establish “ the total diversity of the real and the ideal.” The Ideal, Schopenhauer explains, 1 is the “ visible, spatial appearance with the qualities that are perceived on it; the Real, on the contrary, is the thing-in- and-for-itself, independent of its being presented in the head of another or of itself.” Kant’s greatest service is to have 1 IVerkc (1888), v. 91. / 358 W. CALDWELL : separated the phenomenal from the thing-in-itself by proving that between us and things there always stands the intellect. Kant’s Copernican discovery is aptly hit off by Schopenhauer in the words d “ Before Kant we were in Time ; now Time is in us,” and so on. It is obvious from this that Schopen- hauer accepts the negative consequences of Kant’s philosophy as well as the positive ; we cannot know the thing-in-itself, because, as Kant showed, the laws which govern the pheno- menon cannot be used to deduce and explain existence itself. Kant’s defect is that he could not discover the thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer does not attempt a criticism of the notion of the thing-in-itself; the thing-in-itself is to him the reality under- lying and determining the world of experience, and, as such, a real and not a hypothetical entity. He never allows himself to speak of it in the plural, as Kant does, and so keeps consistently to a monistic point of view. The recognition of the thing-in-itself is part of Kant’s great service to philosophy, and Schopenhauer denounces in the strongest terms the attempt of Fichte to set up a philosophy without the thing-in-itself, and also the attempt of Schelling in the Identitatsphilosophie to fuse together the Ideal and the Real after Kant’s express separation of the two. “ Certainly in no way,” he says, “ is the assumption of a thing-in-itself behind appearances, of a real kernel among so many husks, untrue ; indeed the denial of it would be absurd ; only the way in which Kant introduced such a thing-in-itself and sought to reconcile it with his philosophy was faulty.” The latter part of this sentence is more important for our purpose than the former. It concerns Kant’s method, against which Schopenhauer directs the full force of his criticism. A few words on this general statement of Kant’s work. The tendency of Kant’s philosophy is generally confessed to be twofold; to vindicate or justify knowledge, and to limit knowledge. Schopenhauer’s representation refers more to the second point than the first, and may broadly be said to be true of it : Kant did say and show that we have no knowledge of things-in-themselves, and he in a public statement repudiated the proposal of Fichte to dispense with the function of the thing-in-itself — merely limitative though it was. The Idealism of Kant, Schopenhauer ought to have remembered, was a means to an end, viz., the justification of knowledge : we were enabled to predicate necessary connexion of the elements of experience, because the forms of knowledge (and also the affections of sense) were subjective. Thus it can hardly be said that Schopenhauer 1 lb. i. 502. Schopenhauer's criticism of rant. 359 has stated fully the drift of Kant’s philosophy. It is important, of course, to have the negative side of the K. d. r. V. emphasised as Schopenhauer did, because it may incline us to seek another proof of the entities which are disposed of in the “Dialectic”; only, the whole force of the negative side of the K. d. r. V., and consequently of any philosophy which is built upon it, would be nullified if it could be shown that the thing-in-itself is not an integral part of the Critical Philosophy ; that, in particular, the limitation of knowledge to experience can be stated in a way which does not involve the idea of a thing-in-itself. Now, I think it can be shown that the thing-in-itself is not an integral part of Kant’s system in the way in which Schopenhauer thought it was — a sort of substrate bodying reality into the phenomenal world — though still an element incidental to the system for another reason. What this other reason is seems to me to come, not out of Schopenhauer’s solution of the thing-in-itself, as we might perhaps expect, but out of his criticism of the method in which he says Kant sought the thing-in-itself. I pass, then, to what Schopenhauer says about Kant’s method, as more important for my present purpose than his opinions on the actual results of Kant. Only, we will remember that from the “ ^Esthetic ” of the K. d. v. V. Schopenhauer learns Idealism — Subjective Idealism ; it was only natural, therefore, that he should wish for a thing-in-itself, whereby to pull himself out of this partial philosophy. 3. The fundamental principle of Kant’s method Schopen- hauer takes to be the starting from indirect reflective know- ledge : Philosophy is for Kant a science of conceptions, while for himself it is a science in conceptions. By this he means that Kant found in conceptions the subject-matter of philo- sophy, while he found in conceptions only the form of philo- sophy — philosophy being a conceptualised or generalised state- ment of the matter of our knowledge. The path which was followed by Kant, starting from the point of view of abstract knowledge, to find the elements and inmost spring of intuitive knowledge also, was quite a wrong one. This is Schopenhauer’s first charge against Kant; his second is that Kant had this fundamental principle of his method only very imperfectly pre- sent to his mind, and that consequently we have to arrive at it only by conjecture even after a thorough study of his philo- sophy. This is really more a limitation of the first charge than a withdrawal of it, as it seems at first sight to be ; all students, indeed, of Kant have found it difficult to adopt definitely and persistently one line of interpretation. The importance of Schopenhauer’s main charge, however, interests one more than 360 W. CALDWELL: its partial truth or error. In the preface to the first edition of the K. d. r. V. Kant says that it is his task to answer the ques- tion how far Reason 1 can go without the material presented and the aid furnished by experience. In the essay Von dem Ersten Grunde des TJ r> terchieds der Gedenclen im Rawme he calls space a primal conception (Grundbegriff ). 2 Kant, that is, does seem to think he can start from certain formal or abstract con- ceptions yielded to him by an abstract analysis of our represen- tations, and his question is about the value such abstracta have for knowledge. In the K. d. r. V. he talks of the categories as the pure conceptions of the understanding which make know- ledge possible: “If I 3 take away all thought” (through the categories), he says, “ from empirical knowledge, there remains absolutely no knowledge of an object, for through mere preceptions nothing at all is thought,” — a sentence which, according to Schopenhauer, contains all Kant’s errors in a nutshell. Kant accordingly looked away from perception, and, regarding knowledge from the side of abstract conceptions, hinted that an intuitus origin arius, an intelligence which could supply from within itself the empirical matter to fill its conceptions, would be a complete explanation of knowledge ; only, as he did not believe we could put ourselves at the point of view of such an intelligence, he refused to use an absolute subject in his philosophy, and declared Fichte’s use of such an hypothesis to be contrary to the spirit of the Critical Philosophy. Equally little, he held, could we know an absolute object, for, from the side of perception, an object must be conditioned by our faculties, in order that we may know it. Kant was, therefore, left with the thing-in -itself. What Schopenhauer says about this is, that Kant sought the thing-in-itself — sought the ultimate explanation of experience in the abstractions of knowledge — sought to construct a philosophy out of pure conceptions, and that, just because he adopted this path of procedure, he failed to solve the problem of philosophy, in having the thing-in -itself left on his hands. The very fact that Kant was left with the thing-in- itself — with a surd, say — proved to Schopenhauer that the path of abstract reflexion was closed as the path of philosophy. Others in his day were, he thought, professing to go further on such a path [“Don’t know the thing-in-itself ! ” says Hegel ; “ on the contrary, there is nothing we know so easily!”], and Schopen- hauer absolutely refused to credit any of their results with even the possibility of truth because he believed the path they followed to be “ in the air.” Schelling, instead of saying that 1 I Verkfi (Hartensteiu), ii. 67. 2 lb. iii. 122. 3 lb. il 82. Schopenhauer’s criticism of rant. 361 he knew God by “ intellectual intuition,” would have done better by the public if he had said he had found a new deity ; for, in truth, the deity of the post-Kantians generally is altogether different from the deity dismissed from the courts of knowledge by the Aufklarung. Kant’s actual problem in the K. d. r. V. is an answer to the inquiry whether Metaphysic as a science is possible. By Meta- physic he meant, as he tells us in the Prolegomena , not physical knowledge, but knowledge beyond experience, the source and principles of that knowledge never beingderived from experience, but from the pure understanding and the pure reason. The pos- sible analogy of Philosophy to Mathematics was a wonted and a favourite one with Kant : each seemed to be based on concep- tions ; only Mathematics had the advantage of constructing its own conceptions, and of constituting itself a science. Could the mental tendency (metaphysica naturalis) to the creation of a body of real speculative truth be justified? To settle this question, Kant proposed to himself a preliminary K. d. r. V., to find out if there were any valid pure conceptions in the mind (he had already reason to believe there were), and, if so, what they were : that is, Kant hoped to settle his ulterior question by showing the a priori knowledge that the mind could legiti- mately lay claim to. It is important, as Prof. Caird in his great book insists, and also Prof. Riehl (though of course with a very different ulterior aim) in his Philosophischer Kriticismus , to associate the definite problem of the K. d. r. V. with the general problem that lay behind it in Kant’s mind. We know the solution of the K. d. r. V. Categorically, it is a negative one : there is no knowledge out of mere conceptions: we have, it is true, certain pure forms and conceptions in our mind, but these refer only to sense-experience, which, at least, we do not make (but have to wait for). The table of the pure conceptions of the understanding with its appendages, and the judgment as the key to knowledge, measure Kant’s positive contribution to philosophy. The theory of the K. d. r. V., as Riehl remarks, is, before all things, a logic. Schopenhauer practically understands this, because he makes out the K. d. r. V. to be concerned chiefly with conceptions or logical entities. He would grant, too, that the method of Kant can be traced even in the “ Esthe- tic,” which he praises so highly. But where do these pure conceptions come from ? Con- ceptions, it is evident, must reside in a mind ; consequently, we have Kant’s doctrine of the transcendental unity of self- consciousness. Here at once a difficulty arises, and from here radiate different lines of interpretation of Kant. Is the 362 W. CALDWELL: self-consciousness Kant speaks of, the psychological subject ? Then Schopenhauer, for example, tells Kant that there is experience without the functions of thought. Further, if the categories are supplied by the knowing subject to experience, they cannot be regarded, except by some artificial hypothesis or other, as real determinations of things. If, on the other hand, the self-consciousness is the metaphysical subject (as with Green, say), the subject in general corresponding to the object in general, then Kant has simply shown, only in an infinitely more penetrating way than Berkeley did, that the object implies a subject. He here opened the door to the speculations of Fichte, who ran off with this transcendental subject and made it God ; and to Hegel, who treats the categories as, therefore, objective conceptions. Besides, to say that the world, as object, implies a subject, is only a particular way of stating the general truth that one term of a relation implies the other ; difference implies identity, analysis synthesis, and so on. But this kind of analysis is no real explanation of anything ; it shows, it is true, how Dogmatic Realism is impossible, because one kind of dogmatism — say, a belief only in the object — can be met by a counter dogmatism, Subjective Idealism. The theorist who isolates a relation out of the concrete whole of fact may by dialectic skill show how he is compelled in thought to pass through an infinitude of other abstract relations to correct his first abstraction. In so doing, he shows, indeed, the connective and connected character of the tissue of the world, whatever that is, but he is eclipsed in speculative daring by the pantheist with his movable indifference-point (the quatenus consideratur of Spinoza) as the centre of the world, and his negation of all difference and relation. Hegel might have begun the Logic with any one category instead of Pure Being — Identity and Difference, say, which Plato inclines to regard as the highest abstracta of Thought — and deduced therefrom all the others. But, surrendering the question of the source of the categories, let us simply take them as the discovery of the K. d. r. V., and concern ourselves more with what they are than where they come from ; for in settling this we shall settle the question of origin or source. Schopenhauer, in contending against the abstract conception of Kant, helps to disentangle the veil of confusion that has been thrown over the nature of knowledge by the assimilation with Kant himself of the categories of conceptions. The main drift of his criticism, that is, strikes at the very roots of Kant’s idea of Metaphysic as the Science of First Principles, and raises a question prior to Kant’s most general one. Kant asked himself whether a Science out of conceptions was possible. Schopen- Schopenhauer’s criticism of kant. .363 hauer bids us pause before the question, with the prior one — What sort of knowledge we could expect to find out of, or in and through, mere conceptions — and to look at the nature of some of Kant’s pure conceptions. How does his charge apply to the different main sections of the K. d. r. V. ? 4. While we may agree with Schopenhauer that the “ ^Esthetic ” is enough to immortalise the name of Kant, we distinctly demur to its being called Kant’s only discovery. Kant professes to have been awakened from bis dogmatic slumber by Hume, and, as Hume’s main difficulty was in re- ference to Causality, it is evident that the discovery of the a priori character of Causality — and, in fact, of the systematic table of the Categories — must have been at least as important to Kant himself as his earlier discovery (probably as early as 1768) about Space and Time. Still, the way in which he thought of Space and Time as a priori wholes probably had some influence over his statement of the Categories. I seem to find in the “ Esthetic ” the same tendency to abstraction, to conceptual abstraction, that strikes Schopenhauer so specially in the case of the “ Analytic,” with its deduction of the Cate- gories. The point of the “ ^Esthetic ” is, therefore, of extreme importance. It is somewhat difficult, of course, to represent Kant’s meaning. We saw above that in one place he called Space a fundamental conception ; in the K. d. r. V. he tends to call it a pure perception or intuition. This vacillation is in- evitable and well-grounded ; for, strictly, space is neither a pure conception nor a pure perception, although it is partly con- ceptual and partly perceptual. Space is not a concept ; for, though the space we think of is one whole — a sphere, as Kant pointed out — the space we see, on the contrary, is not one whole, for we cannot talk of seeing one anything when there is not the possibility of seeing two. Space is not a percept ; for we never see space-extension apart from, say, mass-extension, coloured extension, and so on. Thus we may deny that space is a thing either in our heads or out of them. It is a form — that is, an abstract-percept ; it cannot be located anywhere : by space we mean spatial extension. Kant’s space is, on the whole, the space of conception, one whole sphere — that is, a fiction of thought or conception. So far from making knowledge possible, this sort of space makes it impossible : for, if we allow ourselves to make, in conception, the forms of experience into things-in- themselves or absolute entities, we introduce several universes for consideration instead of one. Schopenhauer, for example, took Kant’s space as he found it, and got himself inclosed in it without being able to find, logically, a way out of it ; and, 864 W. CALDWELL : truly, if space is in my head, there is no way of getting out of my head : the world is, from first to last, a Hirn-gespenst. The speculations of Transcendental Geometry, too, are based on the same erroneous and impossible view of space as a thing complete in itself ; they are, in fact, of a piece with dogmatical Physical Realism in general, which Kant — as his lasting contribution to the sum of human knowledge — completely destroyed. Unfortunately, Kant, in destroying Physical Realism, fell himself into the Scylla of Idealistic Realism or Dogmatic Idealism. Kant practically tells the Physical Realist that in his atoms, and his void, and so on, he is manipulating so many mental fictions : only, it is utterly erroneous to think that after Kant there existed, wherever appropriate, a metaphysical idea or conception, in place of the physical entity of the scientist. The Idealist is guilty of making abstractions just as much as the Dogmatic Realist is — and, perhaps, he is more to blame ; he, too, like the Realist, peoples the world with things-in-themselves — a species of Epicurean gods, that may be safely left to enjoy the serenity of their repose beyond the moenia mundi. I am not here seeking to use again Locke’s argument against innate or a priori principles, although I do think with Schopenhauer that, say Fichte and Schelling, in interpreting Kant generally, again and again speak as if Locke had never written. I only wish to protest against the categories being taken to be conceptions or pure conceptions (which enter into experience to condition it) : Kant, that is, has not described the space of real perception, but the space of abstraction — pure space, which is pure nothing. 5. It is of the “ Logic ” of the K. d. r. V. that Schopen- hauer’s criticism is materially and formally most radical. Let me outline his positions. He gives a different account of the functions of the soul, rejecting altogether the faculty- dis- tinctions of Kant : he associates Kant’s faculty of Under- standing more with Sense and the category of Cause with the spatio-temporal or perceptual construction of the world, and holds the other eleven categories to be mere blind windows put into a scheme through Kant’s love of symmetry ; and, secondly, he holds Kant’s account of Reason to be utterly false, and substitutes his own doctrine of the thing-in-itself for Kant’s three Ideas of Reason. As to the faculty-psycho- logy of Kant, few people, of course, will now seek to defend that. Schopenhauer did not wage war against the faculty- psychology as such, as Herbart did ; still we may regard his reduction of all the faculties to manifestations of one supreme mental fact as a step in that direction, to be asso- ciated with Herbart’s reduction of mental processes to Vor- SCHOPENHAUER’S CRITICISM OF KANT. 365 stellungen and the relations of Vorstellungen. [The Four-Fold Root and the Lehrbuch appeared in the same year, 1813.] Schopenhauer, for example, in the Four-Fold Root talks of Understanding and Reason and Sensibility as “ subjective cor- relates” of certain “ representations.” [The words appear to have been in the first edition.] Of course, he takes the ordinary licence of speaking of soul-functions under separate names. The Understanding with him is concerned, not in thinking, but solely in the spatio-temporal construction of the world as an object of Perception, and is common to man and the brutes ; its chief function is not that of working the “ com- plicated machinery ” of the twelve categories, but simply of projecting and disposing the data of the senses into the casual temporo-spatial order ; Causality is its only category. The faculty which thinks objects is Reason, the faculty of conceptions. One or two observations on this account of Understanding : — (a) It seems of distinct advantage to have sense-experience marked off from reflective knowledge, as in Schopenhauer’s rigid separation of perceptual and reflective knowledge. It is not easy to figure clearly what Schopenhauer meant by Understanding ; its equivalent in the K. d. r. V. would probably be the Synthesis of Imagination, a schematic construction of the data of perception into an objective order. It is assigned by him to animals as well as men, because they too have a perceptual knowledge of the world, and must, therefore, be credited with the synthetic co-ordination of the data of sense which this implies. Thus he helps to bring out the fact that Kant’s Synthetical Unity of Apperception is not necessarily a distinctly intellectual operation, but, in the first instance, simply a general co-ordination of the elements of sense-experience in relation to the unity of the psychological subject. One does not know whether Kant thought animals equal to the f I think ’ of his Apperception, but one can hardly imagine him denying to them a perceptual knowledge, which latter is certainly possible without conceptions. The ‘ 1 think,’ in short, of Reflexion is a higher mental fact than the synthetic apprehension of the data of sense or organic experience ; animals, for example, certainly have the latter, but evidently not the former. The associative synthesis of their experiences common to all percipient beings is the co-ordination of the elements of an organic movement - series with the elements of sensory affection. This is what Schopenhauer at bottom meant by the spatio-temporal con- struction of the data of experience effected by the action of the Understanding on Sense. 366 W. CALDWELL : ( b ) By calling this synthesis the work of the Understand- ing, Schopenhauer may seem to be either unduly intellec- tualising Perception — a thing he objects to in Kant — or to be degrading Understanding in making it subservient to Per- ception. As to intell equalising Perception, he might justify his use of the word Understanding by maintaining that we have no reason for restricting it to denote merely the conscious co-ordination and segregation of the data of experience to the exclusion of the unconscious process of relation which must have preceded it ; and, as to degrading Understanding, he might contend that the degree of Understanding a being has will be found to be in the end just that degree which is necessary and adequate to the performance of its life-preserving and life- furthering functions. Kant, it is true, has distinguished three aspects of his Synthesis, and his distinction is of value. In pointing out, first the synthesis of Apprehension, which is simply the combination into one whole of the successive elements of Perception ; and, secondly, the synthesis of Imagination, which is association by means of a schematic or productive act on the part of the knowing subject ; and, thirdly, the intellectual synthesis of Apperception, which is unification in relation to a self-consciousness, — Kant may be held to have distinguished three stages of the development of psychical life, which may be exemplified in different percipient beings. Kantians are some- times anxious to save their master from the apparent inconsistency of admitting an empirical synthesis (in the much-disputed example of seeing the parts of a house) to be possible apart from the functioning of the categories and the self, from the danger of allowing nature to be possible apart from intelligence : such an apprehension, however, is groundless, for the dependence of the object upon the subject does not stand or fall with the position that experience is only possible through transcendental apperception. It might be urged, of course, that the' end of experience is implied in the beginning, but this is going into teleology, which I want here to avoid. (c) Another fault in Schopenhauers use of the word Under- standing is that he does not allow in his explanation for its close connexion with what he calls Reason. In his anxiety to put Reason and Perception on two different planes of experi- ence, he has not seen the connexion of the Reason that is latent in Sense (according to himself even) with the fully developed or conscious Reason which proceeds from first to last in and through abstract conceptions. Understanding is really a middle stage of knowing between Sense and Reason : it begins in de- tecting the connexions among the elements of Perception, and Schopenhauer’s criticism of kant. 367 ends by being able to figure these connexions abstractly. Schopenhauer restricts Understanding too closely to Sense-per- ception ; Kant, on the contrary, to Reason. To Kant know- ledge must be rational, or it is almost not worth the name of knowledge ; while to Schopenhauer rational knowledge is only a very small part of experience, intuitive knowledge being a much greater part. That is, while there would seem to be degrees in the extent to which a psychological subject is able to discriminate, and effect a redistribution of, the ele- ments constituting its experience, Kant tends to see only the upper limit of knowledge, Schopenhauer the lower. It is true that Kant in the K. d. r. V. says, for example, that “ mere in- tuition does not stand in any need of the functions of thought ” — categories, say-^-a sentence which is often explained away on the ground that Kant, overcome by the weight of the old dogmatism which he had really destroyed, occasionally “ nods.” Schopenhauer must have seen many such utterances in Kant, and so added the restricting clause to his charge. But if the categories are not to be retained for perception as “ functions of thought ” or pure conceptions, we must simply find a better name for the categories that are undoubtedly implied in Perception. What Schopenhauer rejects, then, in the “Analytic” is the assertion that without thought Perception is impossible, and that conceptions alone make knowledge possible. He regards the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories as an attempt to find the last elements of reality in conceptions. Eleven of the categories he declares to be useless. The Principles of the Understanding he does not in so many words reject as formal or schematic principles of knowledge, and we must regard his table of Predicabilia a 'priori with the table of Metalogical Judgments as in some sense a substitute. H. Cohen in his Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung charges Schopenhauer with a gross misapprehension of the purpose of the Deduction, in for- getting or not seeing that what Kant really teaches is that both the a priori of Sense and the a priori of Understanding are necessary to constitute experience, and that these two things must be taken together. I cannot exactly see that Schopenhauer proceeds in the teeth of this truth; for, granting it, it is still desir- able to have the a priori of Sense marked off from the a priori of Thought, and Schopenhauer’s polemic against the Categories as conceptions is a negative step to the ascertainment of what the Categories really are. It is strictly not true that the ‘I think ’ and the pure conceptions of thought are necessary to the possibility of experience. Kant is right in pointing out the 368 W. CALDWELL : synthetical unification that the subject makes of its represen- tations, but his logical unity is only one typical form of synthetic “conjunction of the manifold.” 6. By Reason Schopenhauer means the power the mind has of forming general conceptions and of knowing by way of conception or idea, the matter for conceptions and ideas being of course derived from Perception. To say that Reason bpi-tigs anything to experience that it has not already receiyed from experience is to him simply a remnant of Medievalism which contradicts fact, and he often in this connexion speaks with approval of Locke’s criticism of innate ideas and of Hume’s l History of Natural Religion. The simplicity of this is the simplicity of fact. Schopenhauer rejects altogether, therefore, Kant’s conception of Reasou as the faculty for seeking and knowing the unconditioned ; when Kant says that Reason demands the completion of a series of conditions, Schopenhauer denies that the mind seeks anything more than the next condition — the condition of this condition — the next or the prior cause, for example. It seems too, if we reflect, that it is the Understanding which investigates the relations of the world and not the Reason. Reason is really only a second way of knowing, a power of knowing by way of idea instead of by percept. Reason is the power we have, through abstraction, of regarding the sphere of being from any one point of the perceptual field as centre. Reasoned knowledge is an abstraction from perceived knowledge, and all knowledge, as Schopenhauer says, is originally and in itself perceptive : conceptions cannot be the root of reality, for out of conceptions nothing but con- ceptions follow. Kant’s “Dialectic” showed conclusively that from ideas we could never prove things. Schopenhauer turned then from the “Indirect” or Reflective Method to the Direct or Perceptual Method ; only, in doing so, he forgot that it is impossible to see the whole of the world, that the world can only be perceived in sections, as it were, which Reason or Abstraction can help us to make. He forgot, that is, to think of the necessary relation of Perception to Conception, and in con- sequence of this he afterwards made the mistake of taking that side of the world which he saw for the whole world. Although it is true that conceptions do not make Perception possible, in that the entities of conception are not real ultimate things, it is still true that through Reason we are enabled to focus Perception. I wish to follow out the consequences of the view that the validity of conceptions must be vindicated by perceptions. Kant, of course, reiterated his assertion that without perceptions concep- tions are empty, but he did not make a clean sweep of empty SCHOPENHAUERS CRITICISM OF KANT. 369 conceptions. The “ emptiness ” of the Categories is instruc- tive. 7. The confusion in Kant’s account of the elements enter- ing into knowledge is, I imagine, Schopenhauer’s reason for holding that Kant can only have had the fundamental principle of his method imperfectly present to his mind. It is really almost impossible, as Schopenhauer remarks, to say what Kant regarded as the object of experience. In the K. d. r. V. ideas of sense, objects, tbings-in-themselves, sensations, conceptions, schemata, all play the role of objects of the mind. The Cate- gories, too, are defined in many ways. At one place they are called “ the mere rules of the synthesis of that which empirical apprehension has given a priori ” ; at another they are said to “ differ in no respect from the formal acts of the understanding in judging” ; and as a mean between these two we have the most generally cited definition of them as “notions of objects gene- rally by which the sense elements of these objects are conceived to be determined in respect of one or more of the various logical functions of judgment.” The chief cause of this confusion, or “ principle of accommodation ” — to use Schelling’s phrase — seems to me to be the fact that Kant could not freely state what Perception was because he had the idea of finding, as Schopenhauer notices, the last elements of intuitive knowledge, of all knowledge, in the dbstracta of thought ; having this idea, he had always the secret fear of wrecking himself with his Copernican find of the categories in the “ given,” as he called it, which he felt got on somehow quite well without pure con- ceptions. Fichte and Schelling inherited from Kant this dread of making Metaphysic dependent upon an assumption, and so of lapsing back into Dogmatic Realism ; and, accord- ingly, we find both seeking to constitute for it a first principle which was above all proof, and which developed difference out of itself. But such transcendent explanations of experience were only invented to overcome an unreal difficulty, for “ the given,” if properly underst##d, is no difficulty nor reproach to Meta- physic ; it really represents an abstraction incident to philoso- phical reflexion, and not an element in, or a feature of, naive or uncritical consciousness, for such consciousness is an un- differentiated sense of existence in which the distinction of subject and object does not exist. The only assumption that philosophy requires to make is that there is a world to explain, if this can be called an assumption. The attempt that Spinoza made to prove the existence of his universe, although the most splendid piece of speculative daring in the history of philosophy, is a superfluity, and an artificial difficulty. 370 W. CALDWELL : Kant’s question, Schopenhauer rightly says, is the question of conceptions. True, the problem of the K. d. r. V. comes to be the relation of conceptions to perceptions and vice versa , and Kant more than once insists that the two are mutually related ; yet, as his theory of knowledge is a logic, he tends to find the rationale of knowledge in pure conceptions. His whole difficulty in relating the elements of knowledge to each other arose from the fact that he in his thought likened the categories to con- ceptions through want of an explicit and persistent recognition of the nature of conceptions. [Kant, as is said, rarely defined his working terminology.] If the categories are conceptions they must be explained as coming from experience, the source of all conceptions. The categories are indeed necessary to experience, but to experience in general — each stage, that is, of experience is determined by the relevant categories ; but the lower stages of experience, for example, are not determined by the categories of higher stages — perception by the categories of reflexion, for example — although the higher stages embrace and transcend the lower, Schopenhauer himself classifies the Categories according to the planes or stages of experience they characterise : the per- ceptual, the mathematical, the logical and the ethical in order. As in Logic we say that the subjects of our propositions exist as real in the continuum in which we happen to be at the time moving, so the categories are real, each in its appropriate sphere. We must not seek for Cause in the world of perception, for ex- ample ; we can never see a cause which is wholly cause and not partly effect and also wholly distinct from its own effect ; equally vain would it be to look there for Freedom or Identity, although people have done both (as when court-ladies sought for two precisely similar flowers on hearing of Leibniz’ principle of the identity of indiscernibles). Prof. Laurie somewhere calls Cause a dialectic percept, and the expression is a very good one, for it briogs out the fact that we can only see or perceive Cause by an effort of abstraction. Schopenhauer has taught us that the reality of any element of knowledge can only be vindicated by its being showm to be perceptual or perceptible, although in his polemic against the Abstract Method he forgets that certain elements in things and in knowledge can only be seen or per- ceived by abstraction. There is something, for example, ideal and something real about every category ; Cause, say, is at once a principle of the Understanding and really the energy or move- ment in the world of things. In one sense, of course, no cate- gory represents a reality or thing either in my head or out of it ; there is no such a thing anywhere as mere space, or mere Schopenhauer’s criticism of kant. 371 cause, or mere negation. The categories are, in short, all abstractions, but not conceptions or notions. Conceptions are a particular kind of abstractions, and so are categories : to con- ceptions material entities correspond, but to categories only- relations or forms. As abstractions, the categories are indeed ideal, mental ; and we ma} r , therefore, say they are supplied by the mind to experience in general, if we remember not to substantiate them in this handing over. A category repre- sents a formal aspect of experience which we may think of apart (we may have conceptions of the categories) : as to real existence, a category is as real as a law of nature ; both are abstract- percepts, which we may choose by an act of abstract attention to see. Knowledge consists in the detection of rela- tions existing between the different planes or sections of the perceptual continuum, the difference in perceived things being that some are immediately and others only mediately perceived. The psychologist recognises the fact that all knowledge is in its first and last aspects, as Schopenhauer says, Perception, by his conception of various mental objectiva and by his calling all mental entities presentations ; even sensations by being apper- ceived become and are presentations or perceptions. In think- ing the categories out, Kant’s mind must have been influenced by the Scholastic conception of Essence , as Hegel’s afterwards was when he talked of thinking, by the might of thought, through the hard husk of things. i 8. The true reason of Schopenhauer’s revolt from the method of Conceptions is to be found, it seems to me, in the difficulties in which he felt himself involved by the theory of Subjective Idealism. That Kant distinguished the Ideal from the Real (see above) means to Schopenhauer that Kant’s working doctrine was Subjective Idealism. I will not here seek to inquire whether a good case could be made for Schopenhauer’s interpretation. The first step towards Subjective Idealism was made, he says, by Berkeley, a philosopher to whom Kant does scant justice, and Berkeley’s Idealism Schopenhauer takes as established matter of philosophy. The second and final step towards Subjective Idealism was taken by Kant, who proved that the forms of knowledge were subjective, and this step must be associated with the first. Schopenhauer again and again states andprofesses the doctrine of Subjective Idealism with a remark- able evenness of candour and conviction. “ The world is my idea,” is the opening announcement of his chief work. “ If I am not, there is no longer time.” he elsewhere says ; and he con- sistently employs the expressions “objects” and “ideas of the subject ” as convertible. Locke, Berkeley, Kant, and himself, W. CALDWELL : 372 he held, represented the stages in the development of a single thought ; it having been reserved for himself to give the proper proof of the ideality of the world by showing it to be through and through, i.e., formally and materially, a creation of the brain (!). He does not consider the inconsistency of hold- ing that the brain as an “ object” is of course an “ idea” of the subject, and yet at the same time the cause of experience and the world. We may draw the line here, and refuse to pro- ceed over a logical contradiction, but the exigency of the system demands our allowing it to lapse. It is partly atoned for or explained by the fact that he takes “ The world is my idea ” to be true of every percipient, and lets the question of the origin of the world slide into the darkness of the thing-in- itself. But his difficulty is, &nd this is the chief point : granting that the world is my Vorstellung, how ever am I to get out of Vorstellung or subjectivity ? Philosophy, he says — all philo- sophy from Hinduism to his own times — is a search for the Thing-in-itself. We may agree to this, if it means that philo- sophy seeks the unification of experience. He then tells Kant that from the idea nothing but the idea follows (he here makes an inclusive sweep of all ideas : his own “ perceptions ” or “ objects ” and Kant’s ideas — all are ideas, Vorstellungen), and that, in short, the path of Reflexion or Knowledge is closed as the path of philosophy. The obvious thing to say about the “Dialectic” of Kant is that, of course, it is true, but it would have been much more natural to seek to account for conceptions out of perceptions, and perceptions out of— something else — the Thing-in-itself, say— than perceptions or objects out of conceptions. Now, Schopenhauer was per- fectly right in saying that knowledge is originally and in itself perception, but he ought to have kept more true to this ruling of his own. Had he done so, he would not have maintained that the world is only my idea, for Perception does not teach us that. When Berkeley “ sends a man to his senses ” to find that matter is really a plexus of ideas, he forgets that he is asking the man to test and to satisfy a philosophical hypothesis, and that Perception, in fact, never is equal to the distinction between idea and thing, for it does not break up the unity which the world is to intuition. In Intuition or Perception we never ask ourselves what the data of experience mean {e g., whether they are “ things ” or “ affections ” in us, or signs, &c.,) for the very forcible reason that we do not, in the simplest form of Perception, define ourselves as over against the world ; we are in Perception ourselves part of the great order which is to Per- ception a sphere whose centre is anywhere. A healthy cow Schopenhauer’s criticism of rant. 373 perceives just as well as a philosopher — better, possibly, because it has had no difficulties about the Ego and the Non-Ego. The Thing-in-itself is the shadow cast by the Reflective or Abstracting Understanding ; it represents a structural paralog- ism or “ idol” of the intellect: it seems to mean generally either the pseudo reality we attach to an abstract-percept, such as Space, or Cause, or Identity, or the world which we leave for the moment out of count in focusing attention exclusively on one of its elements. Both meanings of the word can be exem- plified in both Kant and Schopenhauer. Both, for example, treat Space as one indivisible whole; and both require a Thing- in-itself to determine or account for what Kant called the “ given ” : Kant, for the reason that we do not originate the particular element in experience : Schopenhauer, because he felt the unsatisfactory character of the teaching of Subjective Idealism. As, in the latter case, with both philosophers the Thing-in-itself is primarily invented to get rid of the difficulty bred of a belief in an abstraction or unreality — “ the given,” to wit, in the shape of mere sense-idea or sense-affection — and as, in the former, the ThingTn-itself is a pure mental fiction, we may safely deny that there is any such thing in reality. V. Hartmann’s expression for the Thing-in-itself in Kant hits off perfectly what it really is in general; he calls it a negativen Gvenzbegriff — a negative limiting conception . 1 The abstrac- tion made by the Subjective Idealist in his false account of Perception has wrought the direst havoc in Philosophy; his account is based on the untrue and absurd supposition that Perception gives with one hand what it takes away with the other; that it says at once : “Here I give you fact,” and “No, it is only idea.” The truth is that Perception discloses from first to last fact, and that any “ ideas ” or fictions or negations we find in sense-perception represent a subjective equation or subjec- tive abstraction. This may seem an unguarded statement in view of the fact that Perception sometimes is illusory. Illusion is an extremely difficult factor and an extremely important factor to cope with, but I think it will be found that nature corrects her own illusions by natural process — that is, the fact, if illusive, does not destroy for the mind the objectivity and reality of Perception. “ All knowledge is in itself and originally Perception ” ; Science rests on the objective validity of Per- ception. Schopenhauer has helped to bring out — and indeed, by his own failures, has helped to illustrate — the extravagances of the method of Indirect Reflexion upon experience when relied on 1 Studien und Aufsatze, 556. 1 1111 [ini i o CM T" t— O CO 5151 32C )75 374 W. CALDWELL : SCHOPENHAUER^ CRITICISM OF KANT. more or le'ss exclusively to the neglect or discredit of the method of Direct Perception. In his mirror (which is by no means always clear) we see the paralogisms incidental to an imperfect analysis or recognition of the nature of conceptions, and in himself we can see. the paralogisms incidental to an imperfect analysis or recognition of the nature of perceptions. Thus he has helped to bring philosophy into the daylight of Realism, by bringing out the realistic elements in the Kantian doctrine. In the rdle he assigns to Understanding and Reason — a somewhat subordinate one, it may seem, but not really so — of interpreting the data of perceptual experience, one finds a valuable corrective to the Fichte-Schellingian theories of a primary and absolute knowledge resident in pure reason. Many questions cannot be answered owing to the radical error that lies in them as questions': the Thing-in-itself question is one of these. I have had to leave many extremely interesting aspects of Schopenhauers criticism out of sight. One would have liked to look carefully through the holes he has drilled into the “ blind- windows ” on the Category-list, but that would mean a separate study.