Appendix: Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy

C'est le privilège du vrai génie, et surtout du génie qui ouvre une carrière, de faire impunément de grandes fautes. —Voltaire.

It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the work of a great mind than to give a distinct and full exposition of its value. For the faults are particular and finite, and can therefore be fully comprehended; while, on the contrary, the very stamp which genius impresses upon its works is that their excellence is unfathomable and inexhaustible. Therefore they do not grow old, but become the instructor of many succeeding centuries. The perfected masterpiece of a truly great mind will always produce a deep and powerful effect upon the whole human race, so much so that it is impossible to calculate to what distant centuries and lands its enlightening influence may extend. This is always the case; for however cultivated and rich the age may be in which such a masterpiece appears, genius always rises like a palm-tree above the soil in which it is rooted.

But a deep-reaching and widespread effect of this kind cannot take place suddenly, because of the great difference between the genius and ordinary men. The knowledge which that one man in one lifetime drew directly from life and the world, won and presented to others as won and arranged, cannot yet at once become the possession of mankind; for mankind has not so much power to receive as the genius has power to give. But even after a successful battle with unworthy opponents, who at its very birth contest the life of what is immortal and desire to nip in the bud the salvation of man (like the serpents in the cradle of Hercules), that knowledge must then traverse the circuitous paths of innumerable false constructions and distorted applications, must overcome the attempts to unite it with old errors, and so live in conflict till a new and unprejudiced generation grows up to meet it. Little by little, even in youth, this new generation partially receives the contents of that spring through a thousand indirect channels, gradually assimilates it, and so participates in the benefit which was destined to flow to mankind from that great mind. So slowly does the education of the human race, the weak yet refractory pupil of genius, advance. Thus with Kant's teaching also; its full strength and importance will only be revealed through time, when the spirit of the age, itself gradually transformed and altered in the most important and essential respects by the influence of that teaching, will afford convincing evidence of the power of that giant mind. I have, however, no intention of presumptuously anticipating the spirit of the age and assuming here the thankless rôle of Calchas and Cassandra. Only I must be allowed, in accordance with what has been said, to regard Kant's works as still very new, while many at the present day look upon them as already antiquated, and indeed have laid them aside as done with, or, as they express it, have left them behind; and others, emboldened by this, ignore them altogether, and with brazen face go on philosophising about God and the soul on the assumption of the old realistic dogmatism and its scholastic teaching, which is as if one sought to introduce the doctrines of the alchemists into modern chemistry. For the rest, the works of Kant do not stand in need of my feeble eulogy, but will themselves for ever praise their author, and though perhaps not in the letter, yet in the spirit they will live for ever upon earth.

Certainly, however, if we look back at the first result of his teaching, at the efforts and events in the sphere of philosophy during the period that has elapsed since he wrote, a very depressing saying of Goethe obtains confirmation: “As the water that is displaced by a ship immediately flows in again behind it, so when great minds have driven error aside and made room for themselves, it very quickly closes in behind them again by the law of its nature” (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Theil 3, s. 521). Yet this period has been only an episode, which is to be reckoned as part of the lot referred to above that befalls all new and great knowledge; an episode which is now unmistakably near its end, for the bubble so long blown out yet bursts at last. Men generally are beginning to be conscious that true and serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it. At any rate, I cannot see that between Kant and myself anything has been done in philosophy; therefore I regard myself as his immediate successor.

What I have in view in this Appendix to my work is really only a defence of the doctrine I have set forth in it, inasmuch as in many points that doctrine does not agree with the Kantian philosophy, but indeed contradicts it. A discussion of this philosophy is, however, necessary, for it is clear that my train of thought, different as its content is from that of Kant, is yet throughout under its influence, necessarily presupposes it, starts from it; and I confess that, next to the impression of the world of perception, I owe what is best in my own system to the impression made upon me by the works of Kant, by the sacred writings of the Hindus, and by Plato. But I can only justify the contradictions of Kant which are nevertheless present in my work by accusing him of error in these points, and exposing mistakes which he committed. Therefore in this Appendix I must proceed against Kant in a thoroughly polemical manner, and indeed seriously and with every effort; for it is only thus that his doctrine can be freed from the error that clings to it, and its truth shine out the more clearly and stand the more firmly. It must not, therefore, be expected that the sincere reverence for Kant which I certainly feel shall extend to his weaknesses and errors also, and that I shall consequently refrain from exposing these except with the most careful indulgence, whereby my language would necessarily become weak and insipid through circumlocution. Towards a living writer such indulgence is needed, for human frailty cannot endure even the most just refutation of an error, unless tempered by soothing and flattery, and hardly even then; and a teacher of the age and benefactor of mankind deserves at least that the human weakness he also has should be indulged, so that he may not be caused pain. But he who is dead has thrown off this weakness; his merit stands firm; time will purify it more and more from all exaggeration and detraction. His mistakes must be separated from it, rendered harmless, and then given over to oblivion. Therefore in the polemic against Kant I am about to begin, I have only his mistakes and weak points in view. I oppose them with hostility, and wage a relentless war of extermination against them, always mindful not to conceal them indulgently, but rather to place them in the clearest light, in order to extirpate them the more surely. For the reasons given above, I am not conscious either of injustice or ingratitude towards Kant in doing this. However, in order that, in the eyes of others also, I may remove every appearance of malice, I wish first to bring out clearly my sincere reverence for Kant and gratitude to him, by expressing shortly what in my eyes appears to be his chief merit; and I shall do this from a standpoint so general that I shall not require to touch upon the points in which I must afterwards controvert him.

Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, based upon the proof that between things and us there still always stands the intellect, so that they cannot be known as they may be in themselves. He was led into this path through Locke (see Prolegomena zu jeder Metaph., § 13, Anm. 2). The latter had shown that the secondary qualities of things, such as sound, smell, colour, hardness, softness, smoothness, and the like, as founded on the affections of the senses, do not belong to the objective body, to the thing in itself. To this he attributed only the primary qualities, i. e., such as only presuppose space and impenetrability; thus extension, figure, solidity, number, mobility. But this easily discovered Lockeian distinction was, as it were, only a youthful introduction to the distinction of Kant. The latter, starting from an incomparably higher standpoint, explains all that Locke had accepted as primary qualities, i. e., qualities of the thing in itself, as also belonging only to its phenomenal appearance in our faculty of apprehension, and this just because the conditions of this faculty, space, time, and causality, are known by us a priori. Thus Locke had abstracted from the thing in itself the share which the organs of sense have in its phenomenal appearance; Kant, however, further abstracted the share of the brain-functions (though not under that name). Thus the distinction between the phenomenon and the thing in itself now received an infinitely greater significance, and a very much deeper meaning. For this end he was obliged to take in hand the important separation of our a priori from our a posteriori knowledge, which before him had never been carried out with adequate strictness and completeness, nor with distinct consciousness. Accordingly this now became the principal subject of his profound investigations. Now here we would at once remark that Kant's philosophy has a threefold relation to that of his predecessors. First, as we have just seen, to the philosophy of Locke, confirming and extending it; secondly, to that of Hume, correcting and making use of it, a relation which is most distinctly expressed in the “Prolegomena” (that most beautiful and comprehensible of all Kant's important writings, which is far too little read, for it facilitates immensely the study of his philosophy); thirdly, a decidedly polemical and destructive relation to the Leibnitz-Wolfian philosophy. All three systems ought to be known before one proceeds to the study of the Kantian philosophy. If now, according to the above, the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, thus the doctrine of the complete diversity of the ideal and the real, is the fundamental characteristic of the Kantian philosophy, then the assertion of the absolute identity of these two which appeared soon afterwards is a sad proof of the saying of Goethe quoted above; all the more so as it rested upon nothing but the empty boast of intellectual intuition, and accordingly was only a return to the crudeness of the vulgar opinion, masked under bombast and nonsense, and the imposing impression of an air of importance. It became the fitting starting-point for the still grosser nonsense of the clumsy and stupid Hegel. Now as Kant's separation of the phenomenon from the thing in itself, arrived at in the manner explained above, far surpassed all that preceded it in the depth and thoughtfulness of its conception, it was also exceedingly important in its results. For in it he propounded, quite originally, in a perfectly new way, found from a new side and on a new path, the same truth which Plato never wearies of repeating, and in his language generally expresses thus: This world which appears to the senses has no true being, but only a ceaseless becoming; it is, and it is not, and its comprehension is not so much knowledge as illusion. This is also what he expresses mythically at the beginning of the seventh book of the Republic, the most important passage in all his writings, which has already been referred to in the third book of the present work. He says: Men, firmly chained in a dark cave, see neither the true original light nor real things, but only the meagre light of the fire in the cave and the shadows of real things which pass by the fire behind their backs; yet they think the shadows are the reality, and the determining of the succession of these shadows is true wisdom. The same truth, again quite differently presented, is also a leading doctrine of the Vedas and Puranas, the doctrine of Mâyâ, by which really nothing else is understood than what Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing in itself; for the work of Mâyâ is said to be just this visible world in which we are, a summoned enchantment, an inconstant appearance without true being, like an optical illusion or a dream, a veil which surrounds human consciousness, something of which it is equally false and true to say that it is and that it is not. But Kant not only expressed the same doctrine in a completely new and original way, but raised it to the position of proved and indisputable truth by means of the calmest and most temperate exposition; while both Plato and the Indian philosophers had founded their assertions merely upon a general perception of the world, had advanced them as the direct utterance of their consciousness, and presented them rather mythically and poetically than philosophically and distinctly. In this respect they stand to Kant in the same relation as the Pythagoreans Hicetas, Philolaus, and Aristarchus, who already asserted the movement of the earth round the fixed sun, stand to Copernicus. Such distinct knowledge and calm, thoughtful exposition of this dream-like nature of the whole world is really the basis of the whole Kantian philosophy; it is its soul and its greatest merit. He accomplished this by taking to pieces the whole machinery of our intellect by means of which the phantasmagoria of the objective world is brought about, and presenting it in detail with marvellous insight and ability. All earlier Western philosophy, appearing in comparison with the Kantian unspeakably clumsy, had failed to recognise that truth, and had therefore always spoken just as if in a dream. Kant first awakened it suddenly out of this dream; therefore the last sleepers (Mendelssohn) called him the “all-destroyer.” He showed that the laws which reign with inviolable necessity in existence, i. e., in experience generally, are not to be applied to deduce and explain existence itself that thus the validity of these laws is only relative, i. e., only arises after existence; the world of experience in general is already established and present; that consequently these laws cannot be our guide when we come to the explanation of the existence of the world and of ourselves. All earlier Western philosophers had imagined that these laws, according to which the phenomena are combined, and all of which – time and space, as well as causality and inference – I comprehend under the expression “the principle of sufficient reason,” were absolute laws conditioned by nothing, æternæ veritates; that the world itself existed only in consequence of and in conformity with them; and therefore that under their guidance the whole riddle of the world must be capable of solution. The assumptions made for this purpose, which Kant criticises under the name of the Ideas of the reason, only served to raise the mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, the shadow world of Plato, to the one highest reality, to put it in the place of the inmost and true being of things, and thereby to make the real knowledge of this impossible; that is, in a word, to send the dreamers still more soundly to sleep. Kant exhibited these laws, and therefore the whole world, as conditioned by the form of knowledge belonging to the subject; from which it followed, that however far one carried investigation and reasoning under the guidance of these laws, yet in the principal matter, i. e., in knowledge of the nature of the world in itself and outside the idea, no step in advance was made, but one only moved like a squirrel in its wheel. Thus, all the dogmatists may be compared to persons who supposed that if they only went straight on long enough they would come to the end of the world; but Kant then circumnavigated the world and showed that, because it is round, one cannot get out of it by horizontal movement, but that yet by perpendicular movement this is perhaps not impossible. We may also say that Kant's doctrine affords the insight that we must seek the end and beginning of the world, not without, but within us.

All this, however, rests on the fundamental distinction between dogmatic and critical or transcendental philosophy. Whoever wishes to make this quite clear to himself, and realise it by means of an example, may do so very briefly by reading, as a specimen of dogmatic philosophy, an essay of Leibnitz entitled “De Rerum Originatione Radicali,” and printed for the first time in the edition of the philosophical works of Leibnitz by Erdmann (vol. i. p. 147). Here the origin and excellence of the world is demonstrated a priori, so thoroughly in the manner of realistic-dogmatism, on the ground of the veritates æternæ and with the assistance of the ontological and cosmological proofs. It is indeed once admitted, by the way, that experience shows the exact opposite of the excellence of the world here demonstrated; but experience is therefore given to understand that it knows nothing of the matter, and ought to hold its tongue when philosophy has spoken a priori. Now, with Kant, the critical philosophy appeared as the opponent of this whole method. It takes for its problem just these veritates æternæ, which serve as the foundation of every such dogmatic structure, investigates their origin, and finds it in the human mind, where they spring from the peculiar forms which belong to it, and which it carries in itself for the purpose of comprehending an objective world. Thus, here, in the brain, is the quarry which supplies the material for that proud dogmatic edifice. But because the critical philosophy, in order to attain to this result, was obliged to go beyond the veritates æternæ upon which all the preceding dogmatism was founded, and make these truths themselves the objects of investigation, it became transcendental philosophy. From this, then, it also follows that the objective world, as we know it, does not belong to the true being of the thing in itself, but is merely its phenomenal appearance conditioned by those very forms which lie a priori in the intellect (i. e., the brain), therefore it cannot contain anything but phenomena.

Kant, indeed, did not attain to the knowledge that the phenomenon is the world as idea, and the thing in itself is the will. But he showed that the phenomenal world is conditioned just as much through the subject as through the object, and because he isolated the most universal forms of its phenomenal appearance, i. e., of the idea, he proved that we may know these forms and consider them in their whole constitution, not only by starting from the object, but also just as well by starting from the subject, because they are really the limits between object and subject which are common to them both; and he concluded that by following these limits we never penetrate to the inner nature either of the object or of the subject, consequently never know the true nature of the world, the thing in itself.

He did not deduce the thing in itself in the right way, as I shall show presently, but by means of an inconsistency, and he had to pay the penalty of this in frequent and irresistible attacks upon this important part of his teaching. He did not recognise the thing in itself directly in the will; but he made a great initial step towards this knowledge in that he explained the undeniable moral significance of human action as quite different from and not dependent upon the laws of the phenomenon, nor even explicable in accordance with them, but as something which touches the thing in itself directly: this is the second important point of view for estimating his services.