With regard to the whole of our discussion so far, we must still note the following. We started neither from the object nor from the subject, but from the representation, which contains and presupposes them both; for the division into object and subject is the first, universal, and essential form of the representation. We therefore first considered this form as such; then (though here we refer mainly to the introductory essay) the other forms subordinate to it, namely time, space, and causality. These belong only to the object, yet because they are essential to the object as such, and as the object again is essential to the subject as such, they can be found also from the subject, in other words, they can be known a priori, and to this extent are to be regarded as the boundary common to both. But they can all be referred to one common expression, the principle of sufficient reason, as is shown in detail in the introductory essay.
This procedure distinguishes our method of consideration wholly and entirely from every philosophy ever attempted. All previous systems started either from the object or from the subject, and therefore sought to explain the one from the other, and this according to the principle of sufficient reason. We, on the other hand, deny the relation between object and subject to the dominion of this principle, and leave to it only the object. One might regard the philosophy of identity, which has arisen and become generally known in our day, as not coming within the contrast above mentioned, in so far as it makes its real first starting-point neither object nor subject, but a third thing, namely the Absolute, knowable through reason-intuition, which is neither object nor subject, but the identity of the two. As I am completely lacking in all reason-intuition, I shall not venture to speak of the aforesaid revered identity and of the Absolute. Yet, since I take my stand merely on the manifestoes of the reason-intuiters, which are open to all, even to profane persons like us, I must observe that the aforesaid philosophy cannot be excepted from the above-mentioned antithesis of two errors. For it does not avoid those two opposite errors, in spite of the identity of subject and object, which is not thinkable, but is merely intellectually intuitable, or is to be experienced through our being absorbed in it. On the contrary, it combines them both in itself, since it is itself divided into two branches; first, transcendental idealism, that is Fichte’s doctrine of the ego; and consequently, according to the principle of sufficient reason, the object can be produced from the subject or spun out of it; and secondly, the philosophy of nature, which likewise represents the subject as coming gradually out of the object by the application of a method called construction, about which very little is clear to me, though enough to know that it is a process according to the principle of sufficient reason in various forms. I renounce the deep wisdom itself contained in that construction, for as I wholly lack reason-intuition. all those expositions which presuppose it must be to me like a book with seven seals. To such a degree is this the case that, strange to relate, with those doctrines of deep wisdom it always seems to me as if I were listening to nothing but atrocious and what is more extremely wearisome humbug.
The systems that start from the object have always had the whole world of perception and its order as their problem, yet the object which they take as their starting-point is not always this world or its fundamental element, namely matter. On the contrary, a division of these systems can be made in accordance with the four classes of possible objects set out in the introductory essay. Thus it can be said that Thales and the Ionians, Democritus, Epicurus, Giordano Bruno, and the French materialists started from the first of those classes, or from the real world. Spinoza (because of his conception of substance, as merely abstract and existing only in his definition), and before him the Eleatics, started from the second class, or from the abstract concept. The Pythagoreans and the Chinese philosophy of the I Ching started from the third class, namely from time, and consequently from numbers. Finally, the scholastics, teaching a creation out of nothing through the act of will of an extramundane personal being, started from the fourth class, namely from the act of will, motivated by knowledge.
The objective method can be developed most consistently and carried farthest when it appears as materialism proper. It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and passes over the relation to the subject in which alone all this exists. Further, it lays hold of the law of causality as the guiding line on which it tries to progress, taking it to be a self-existing order or arrangement of things, veritas aeterna, and consequently passing over the understanding, in which and for which alone causality is. It tries to find the first and simplest state of matter, and then to develop all the others from it, ascending from mere mechanism to chemistry, to polarity, to the vegetable and the animal kingdoms. Supposing this were successful, the last link of the chain would be animal sensibility, that is to say knowledge; which, in consequence, would then appear as a mere modification of matter, a state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear notions, then, having reached its highest point, we should experience a sudden fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As though waking from a dream, we should all at once become aware that its final result, produced so laboriously, namely knowledge, was already presupposed as the indispensable condition at the very first starting-point, at mere matter. With this we imagined that we thought of matter, but in fact we had thought of nothing but the subject that represents matter, the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii20 disclosed itself unexpectedly, for suddenly the last link showed itself as the fixed point, the chain as a circle, and the materialist was like Baron von Münchhausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew his horse up by his legs, and himself by his upturned pigtail. Accordingly, the fundamental absurdity of materialism consists in the fact that it starts from the objective; it takes an objective something as the ultimate ground of explanation, whether this be matter in the abstract simply as it is thought, or after it has entered into the form and is empirically given, and hence substance, perhaps the chemical elements together with their primary combinations. Some such thing it takes as existing absolutely and in itself, in order to let organic nature and finally the knowing subject emerge from it, and thus completely to explain these; whereas in truth everything objective is already conditioned as such in manifold ways by the knowing subject with the forms of its knowing, and presupposes these forms; consequently it wholly disappears when the subject is thought away. Materialism is therefore the attempt to explain what is directly given to us from what is given indirectly. Everything objective, extended, active, and hence everything material, is regarded by materialism as so solid a basis for its explanations that a reduction to this (especially if it should ultimately result in thrust and counter-thrust) can leave nothing to be desired. All this is something that is given only very indirectly and conditionally, and is therefore only relatively present, for it has passed through the machinery and fabrication of the brain, and hence has entered the forms of time, space, and causality, by virtue of which it is first of all presented as extended in space and operating in time. From such an indirectly given thing, materialism tries to explain even the directly given, the representation (in which all this exists), and finally even the will, from which rather are actually to be explained all those fundamental forces which manifest themselves on the guiding line of causes, and hence according to law. To the assertion that knowledge is a modification of matter there is always opposed with equal justice the contrary assertion that all matter is only modification of the subject’s knowing, as the subject’s representation. Yet at bottom, the aim and ideal of all natural science is a materialism wholly carried into effect. That we here recognize this as obviously impossible confirms another truth that will result from our further consideration, namely the truth that all science in the real sense, by which I understand systematic knowledge under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason, can never reach a final goal or give an entirely satisfactory explanation. It never aims at the inmost nature of the world; it can never get beyond the representation; on the contrary, it really tells us nothing more than the relation of one representation to another.
Every science invariably starts from two principal data, one of which is always the principle of sufficient reason in some form as organon; the other is its special object as problem. Thus, for example, geometry has space as problem, the ground of being in space as organon. Arithmetic has time as problem, and the ground of being in time as organon. Logic has as problem the combinations of concepts as such, the ground of knowledge as organon. History has the past deeds of men as a whole as its problem, and the law of motivation as organon. Now natural science has matter as problem, and the law of causality as organon. Accordingly, its end and aim on the guiding line of causality is to refer all possible states of matter to one another and ultimately to a single state, and again to derive these states from one another, and ultimately from a single state. Thus in natural science two states stand opposed as extremes, the state of matter where it is the least direct object of the subject, and the state where it is the most direct object, in other words, the most dead and crude matter, the primary element, as one extreme, and the human organism as the other. Natural science as chemistry looks for the first; as physiology for the second. But as yet the two extremes have not been reached, and only between the two has something been gained. Indeed, the prospect is fairly hopeless. The chemists, assuming that the qualitative division of matter is not, like the quantitative, an endless process, are always trying to reduce the number of their elements, of which there are still about sixty; and even if they eventually reached two, they would want to reduce these two to one. For the law of homogeneity leads to the assumption of a first chemical state of matter which belongs only to matter as such, and which preceded all others, these being not essential to matter as such, but only accidental forms and qualities. On the other hand, it cannot be seen how this state could ever experience a chemical change, if there did not exist a second state to affect it. Thus the same dilemma here appears in the chemical realm that Epicurus met with in the mechanical, when he had to state how the first atom departed from the original direction of its motion. In fact this contradiction, developing entirely of itself and not to be avoided or solved, might quite properly be set up as a chemical antinomy. Just as an antinomy is to be found in the first of the two extremes sought in natural science, so will there appear in the second a counterpart corresponding to it. There is also little hope of reaching this other extreme of natural science, for we see more and more clearly that what is chemical can never be referred to what is mechanical, and that what is organic can never be referred to what is chemical or electrical. But those who today once more take this old misleading path will soon slink back silent and ashamed, as all their predecessors have done. This will be discussed in more detail in the next book. The difficulties mentioned here only casually, confront natural science in its own province. Regarded as philosophy, it would be materialism; but, as we have seen, it carries death in its heart even at its birth, because it passes over the subject and the forms of knowledge that are presupposed just as much with the crudest matter from which it would like to start, as with the organism at which it wants to arrive. For “No object without subject” is the principle that renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets with no eye to see them and no understanding to know them can of course be spoken of in words, but for the representation these words are a sideroxylon, an iron-wood.21 On the other hand the law of causality, and the consideration and investigation of nature which follow on it, lead us necessarily to the certain assumption that each more highly organized state of matter succeeded in . time a cruder state. Thus animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the inorganic before that which is organic; consequently the original mass had to go through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet the existence of this whole world remains for ever dependent on that first eye that opened, were it even that of an insect. For such an eye necessarily brings about knowledge, for which and in which alone the whole world is, and without which it is not even conceivable. The world is entirely representation, and as such requires the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. That long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form, till finally there came into existence the first knowing animal, the whole of this time itself is alone thinkable in the identity of a consciousness. This world is the succession of the representations of this consciousness, the form of its knowing, and apart from this loses all meaning, and is nothing at all. Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent on the first knowing being, however imperfect it be; on the other hand, this first knowing animal just as necessarily wholly dependent on a long chain of causes and effects which has preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory views, to each of which we are led with equal necessity, might certainly be called an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge, and be set up as the counterpart to that found in the first extreme of natural science. On the other hand, Kant’s fourfold antinomy will be shown to be a groundless piece of jugglery in the criticism of his philosophy that is appended to the present work. But the contradiction that at last necessarily presents itself to us here finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s language, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its appearance or phenomenon, of which they are the form. In my language, this means that the objective world, the world as representation, is not the only side of the world, but merely its external side, so to speak, and that the world has an entirely different side which is its innermost being, its kernel, the thing-in-itself. This we shall consider in the following book, calling it ‘will’ after the most immediate of its objectifications. But the world as representation, with which alone we are dealing here, certainly begins only with the opening of the first eye, and without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and hence before this it did not exist. But without that eye, in other words, outside of knowledge, there was no before, no time. For this reason, time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, to which all phenomena are adapted by means of the bond of causality, time with its whole infinity in both directions is also present in the first knowledge. The phenomenon which fills this first present must at the same time be known as causally connected with, and dependent on, a series of phenomena stretching infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as much conditioned by this first present as, conversely, this present is by that past. Accordingly, the past, out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent on the knowing subject, and without this it is nothing. It happens of necessity, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, in other words, as having no past for its mother, and as being the beginning of time; but rather as the consequence of the past according to the principle of being in time, just as the phenomenon filling this first present appears as the effect of previous states filling that past according to the law of causality. Anyone who likes mythological interpretations may regard the birth of Chronos (Xρóνoς), the youngest of the Titans, as the description of the moment here expressed, when time appears, although it is beginningless. As he castrates his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men now occupy the scene.
This explanation at which we have arrived by following materialism, the most consistent of the philosophical systems that start from the object, helps at the same time to make clear the inseparable and reciprocal dependence of subject and object, together with the antithesis between them which cannot be eliminated. This knowledge leads us to seek the inner nature of the world, the thing-in-itself, no longer in either of those two elements of the representation, but rather in something entirely different from the representation, in something that is not encumbered with such an original, essential, and therefore insoluble antithesis.
Opposed to the system we have discussed, which starts from the object to make the subject result from it, is the system that starts from the subject and tries to produce the object therefrom. The first has been frequent and general in all philosophy hitherto; the second, on the other hand, affords us only a single example, and that a very recent one, namely the fictitious philosophy of J. G. Fichte. In this respect, therefore, he must be considered, however little genuine worth and substance his teaching had in itself. Taken on the whole, it was a mere piece of humbug, yet it was delivered with an air of the profoundest seriousness, with a reserved tone and keen ardour, and was defended with eloquent polemic against weak opponents, so that it was able to shine, and to seem to be something. But genuine earnestness, which, inaccessible to all external influences, keeps its goal, truth, steadily in view, was completely lacking in Fichte, as in all philosophers who like him adapt themselves to circumstances. For him, of course, it could not be otherwise. The philosopher always becomes such as the result of a perplexity from which he tries to disengage himself. This is Plato’s θαυμάξειν,22 which he calls a μάλα ϕιλoϭoϕιὸν πάθoς,22 But what distinguishes ungenuine from genuine philosophers is that this perplexity comes to the latter from looking at the world itself, to the former merely from a book, a philosophical system which lies in front of them. This was also the case with Fichte, for he became a philosopher merely over Kant’s thing-in-itself, and had it not been for this would most probably have concerned himself with quite different things with much greater success, for he possessed considerable rhetorical talent. If he had penetrated only to some extent the meaning of the Critique of Pure Reason, the book that made him a philosopher, he would have understood that its principal teaching was in spirit as follows. The principle of sufficient reason is not, as all scholastic philosophy asserts, a veritas aeterna; in other words, it does not possess an unconditioned validity before, outside, and above the world, but only a relative and conditioned one, valid only in the phenomenon. It may appear as the necessary nexus of space or time, or as the law of causality, or as the law of the ground of knowledge. Therefore the inner nature of the world, the thing-in-itself, can never be found on the guiding line of this principle, but everything to which it leads is always itself also dependent and relative, always only phenomenon, not thing-in-itself. Further, this principle does not concern the subject, but is only the form of objects, which are for this very reason not things-in-themselves. With the object the subject exists forthwith, and with the subject the object; hence the object cannot be added to the subject or the subject to the object, merelv as a consequent to its ground or reason. But Fichte did not take up the least fragment of all this. The only thing that interested him in the matter was setting out from the subject, which Kant had chosen in order to show the falsity of the previous setting out from the object, which had thus become the thing-in-itself. Fichte, however, took this setting out from the subject to be the chief thing, and, like all imitators, imagined that if he were to outdo Kant in this, he would also surpass him. Now in this direction he repeated the mistakes which the previous dogmatism had made in the opposite direction, and which had thus been the cause of Kant’s Critique. Thus in the main nothing was changed, and the old fundamental mistake, the assumption of a relation of reason or ground and consequent between object and subject, remained just the same as before. Hence the principle of sufficient reason retained as before an unconditioned validity, and the thing-in-itself was now shifted into the subject of knowing instead of into the object as previously. The complete relativity of both subject and object, indicating that the thing-in-itself, or the inner nature of the world, is to be sought not in them, but outside both them and every other thing that exists only relatively, still remained unknown. Just as though Kant had never existed, the principle of sufficient reason is for Fichte just what it was for all the scholastics, namely an aeterna veritas. Just as eternal fate reigned over the gods of the ancients, so over the God of the scholastics reigned those aeternae veritates, in other words, metaphysical, mathematical and metalogical truths, in the case of some even the validity of the moral law. These veritates alone depended on nothing, but through their necessity both God and the world existed. Therefore with Fichte, by virtue of the principle of sufficient reason as such a veritas aeterna, the ego is the ground of the world or of the non-ego, the object, which is just its consequent, its product. He has therefore taken good care not to examine further, or to check the principle of sufficient reason. But if I am to state the form of that principle, under the guidance of which Fichte makes the non-ego result from the ego as the web from the spider, I find that it is the principle of sufficient reason of being in space. For it is only in reference to this that those tortuous deductions of the way in which the ego produces and fabricates out of itself the non-ego, forming the subject-matter of the most senseless and consequently the most tedious book ever written, acquire a kind of sense and meaning. This philosophy of Fichte, not otherwise even worth mention, is therefore of interest to us only as the real opposite of the old and original materialism, making a belated appearance. Materialism was the most consistent system starting from the object, as this system was the most consistent starting from the subject. Materialism overlooked the fact that, with the simplest object, it had at once posited the subject as well; so Fichte too overlooked the fact that with the subject (let him give it whatever title he likes) he posited the object, since no subject is thinkable without object. He also overlooked the fact that all deduction a priori, indeed all demonstration in general, rests on a necessity, and that all necessity is based simply and solely on the principle of sufficient reason, since to be necessary and to follow from a given ground or reason are convertible terms.23 But the principle of sufficient reason is nothing but the universal form of the object as such; hence it presupposes the object, but is not valid before and outside it; it can first produce the object, and cause it to appear in accordance with its legislative force. Therefore, generally speaking, starting from the subject has in common with starting from the object the same defect as explained above, namely that it assumes in advance what it professes to deduce, that is to say, the necessary correlative of its point of departure.
Now our method of procedure is toto genere different from these two opposite misconceptions, since we start neither from the object nor from the subject, but from the representation, as the first fact of consciousness. The first, essential, fundamental form of this is the division into object and subject; again, the form of the object is the principle of sufficient reason in its different aspects. Each of these rules its own class of representations so much that, as has been shown, with the knowledge of that aspect or form the nature of the whole class is known also, since this (as representation) is nothing but this aspect or form itself. Thus time itself is nothing but the ground of being in it, i.e., succession; space is nothing but the principle of being in it, i.e., position; matter is nothing but causality; the concept (as will appear at once) is nothing but reference to the ground of knowledge. This complete and universal relativity of the world as representation according to its most general form (subject and object) as well as to the form that is subordinate thereto (principle of sufficient reason) suggests to us, as we have said, that we look for the inner nature of the world in quite another aspect of it which is entirely different from the representation. The next book will demonstrate this in a fact that is just as immediately certain to every living being.
However, there must first be considered that class of representations which belongs to man alone. The substance of these is the concept, and their subjective correlative is the faculty of reason, just as the subjective correlatives of the representations so far considered were understanding and sensibility, which are also to be attributed to every animal.24