From Kant To Schopenhauer.doc

From Kant to Schopenhauer In this context, the Machian foundations of Austrian neoclassical theory (and, on the opposite side, the Austro-Marxist ‘Neo-Kantian’ response to them) constitute an attempt to remove “the obscure veil” (Nietzsche) that Kant had interposed between esse et percipi, turning the adaequatio rei et intellectus into an adaequatio intellectus ad rem. Once the objective world is reduced to an inscrutable noumenon or “thing-in-itself”, it is evident that all we have left for philosophical analysis is the world of “phenomena”, of what we perceive - esse est percipi. This was the basis of Schopenhauer’s critique, and the cause of Kant’s doubts in the ‘OpPost’ concerning “causality” and “the systematicity of physics”. The principal point here is that the “whence and wherefores” are substituted with the “what” (Sch., WWV, p108) because the former are lost in the indefiniteness of “sufficient reason”. The question is not one of ‘being’ but of ‘knowing’, and only the ‘being’ of the “ideas” is determined. For Sch., Kant’s “grosste Verdienst ist die Unterscheidung der Erscheinung vom Dinge an sich” (Appendix on Kant, beginning). It is this “Unterscheidung” (we would say ‘Trennung’) that puts the question of “nature and causes” beyond the purview of rational inquiry. We are left with the empiricism of the causal relationship between events – just as they appear. Morphology replaces aetiology; process replaces meaning; form unseats substance; perception, rational inquiry. There are no more “qualitates occultae” (p106), no “explanations” (108). Relativity and “exchangeability” triumph (cf. Simmel, ‘S u N’, ch 2, esp. pp24, 27). Kant had sought to preserve the transcendental subject in the very consciousness/awareness by the thinking entity of its “unity of apperception”. If indeed the identities of logic and mathematics were independent of experience – in fact, as in the “divisibility” of space, contradictory to it – and yet were inconceivable without experience, then the “independence” of these “identities” necessitated the existence of a noumenon, a human reason that could not be reduced to a “phenomenon” or a mere inexplicable “appearance” that was reduced/relegated to could discover/recover “autonomously” the independent causal relations and synthetic a priori judgements that it derived from the “heteronomy” of mere empirical induction or observation. (Cf. Forster’s ‘The Transition’ from his commentary on OpPost re Kant’s Preface to 2nd edn of KRV mention of “giving back to nature what we derive from it”). For “negative thought”, such transcendence (independence from experience) did not require the positing of, and stood in op-position to (Gegenstand), a “reality”, a world of “things” or noumena that lay “behind” the observable empirical phenomena. The subject is no longer transcendental but mundane; it is “of the World”. Indeed, it is “in the World” and it has become, through perception and the Vorstellung and the Verstand identified with the World itself, the better to command it. Kant’s hesitations in the ‘OpPost’ reveal “the Gap” that allowed Schopenhauer to pour scorn on Kantian metaphysics as the foundation of human experience and of science

generally – particularly where “the transition” to “the systematicity of physics” from natural science – hence the principle of causation – was concerned. The illegitimacy of compounding logico-mathematical rules with physical causation tormented Kant in his last years. With Sch., it is impossible to conceive “the stars above me” as the complement of a universe made meaningful and purposeful by Practical Reason through the “freedom”/unconditionality of the Truth of its a priori judgements. Remember, it was the ability of Pure Reason to discern a priori – in-dependently of experience! – the validity of causation that made it “necessarily” in-dependent/autonomous against the heteronomy of “the object of perception” and “liberated” it as “practical Reason”. This is the “interior realm” subject to the categorical imperative: “the starry sky above me and the moral law inside me”. The “connection” of the Subject with the exterior world, the Object that is also constituted by the community of “practical reason”, gives Kant the hope (“What can I hope?”) that Practical Reason may follow the path of Truth followed by Pure Reason in the sphere of causality in the physical sciences where “Error” is routinely defeated. (Cf. Tsanoff’s conclusions, pp19-20: 2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as incapable of attaining knowledge of ultimate reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason. ) But with Sch., Reason has become purely instrumental and functional, even if there is still a simulacrum of a nexus between logic-mathematics and “science” (p82). Truth for Sch. is not what it is for Kant where the very possibility of “truth” in a priori judgements leads directly to the postulation of Practical Reason: “immediate perception is the ultimate ground and source of truth” (p100), even when it is a priori, as with mathematics. In Sch., Reason is only a higher level of conceptual abstraction, different in degree but not in kind from the understanding, and easily confused with it (error confused with illusion). We have therefore a wholly “functional” notion of truth defined now not in terms of “whences and wherefores” but in terms of “what”, that is in purely instrumental and functional predictive effectiveness. That explains why Sch. has difficulty distinguishing Vorstellungen from Begriffen (pp53-4). (One could argue therefore contra Tsanoff [pp19-20 below] that it is Kant rather than Schop. who relies on rigid distinctions for the sake of speculative thoroughness, whereas Schop.’s real sin is, as he correctly puts it, “shallowness”: “Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21 the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failure to discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion is the confusion of depths not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's lucidity manifests epistemological shallowness. Later idealism, of course, brought to light much that escaped Kant himself…”

Thus, for Schop., Reason is neither good nor bad. Rational action and virtuous action are entirely unrelated (p113). And the ultimate manifestation of “practical reason” is the aloofness of the philosopher in his “reflection”, the differentiation with “brutes”, including “inferior life forms” (pp111-4) even down to indifference to “suicide, execution, duel, enterprises fraught with danger to life” (p112-3). The objectification of

the Will is the Body, which therefore shares no communion with the rest of humanity. Even language occupies no special role in this system. Truly Sch. is “the real prophet of the understanding” (Bosanquet quoted in Tsanoff, p40 – and Heidegger follows with his reproach that Kant neglected “the imagination” [sensibility]). And the Kantian antinomies can be easily dispatched by Sch. now that all links with Dinge an sich have been severed – that is Kant’s “great contribution/service” (Appendix). Transcendental Reason ‘Negatives Denken’ was not a return to solipsism or pure idealism – far from it. It was simply the realization that the synthetic a priori judgements could be analysed independently of a Transcendental Subject from which these judgements emanated in opposition to the anarchy or autonomy of the noumenon-linked “phenomena”. In other words, Kantian idealism exalted the Subject in op-position to a noumenal “reality” that it could “govern” only mechanically or intuitively (like “sight” and “touch” – hence thoughts without perception are empty; perception without concepts is blind”) but could not “possess” and by which in fact it was “conditioned” and “relegated” to a mere “unity of apperception”, and only formally could aspire to transcendental status (akin to God) on which morality [Sollen] and “judgement” [Urteilkraft] could be founded. It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer, whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one of Kant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which he makes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency, although the tendency is to discriminate between: (a) the fundamental forms of intuition, the productive imagination, and the functions of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and 'constitute' its organization; and {h) the rational assumptions which, while not determining the actual form of experience, serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment. The distinction, otherwise expressed, is between the mechanical 42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,' and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reason and of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^ The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to its organic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical procedure. The teleological categories are declared to be merely 'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanically considered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive') categories constitutive of moral and aesthetic experience? Such considerations, which Kant would have been the last to take lightly, should have warned him of the untenability of a distinction that negates the immanent unity of experience, which is the fundamental postulate of the Critical philosophy.

This dictatorship of Reason that had started with Descartes also became the subject of Heidegger’s “Destruktion” of Kant. Indeed, one may agree with Heidegger that Kant’s

aim in the Critique is not to erect an epistemology but rather establish by “formal” means the ‘being’ of a “reason” that is a “noumenon” that can “order” the noumena op-posite to it (Gegenstande). Kant’s interest is not in the “things-in-themselves” but rather in the Vernunft/Verstand (Under-standing) hierarchy from perception to conception, which must lead to a ‘causa noumenon’ (in Aristotelian fashion, causa causans) “free” from the “heteronomy” of causation and the physical world. This “freedom” or autonomy then becomes “the Will”, with its “Ethik des reinen Willens”, an aspect of “praktische Vernunft”. From here it is a very short step to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – and to Heidegger, who is not in the least concerned with the possibility of “synthetic a priori judgements” or “meta-ta-physica” in that Aristotelic sense, but rather with the “Grund” of meta-physics, which is “the Being” of those “beings” that Kant (and Schopenhauer) had left to “themselves”. The “pessimism” (Schopenhauer) that followed had to do with the need to remove the “teleological” and “eschatological” aspirations/delusions of Kantian idealist formalism and at the same time eliminate the (bourgeois) “antinomies” (cf. Lukacs) occasioned by the opposition between noumena and phenomena, the “rupture” or chasm that occurred and the “projectio per hiatus irrationalem” that it called for and that Kantian practical reason hoped to bridge (Brucke from immanence to transcendence, see T. below). Empiricism did this in its Machian form by eliminating even the possibility of “ruptures” or “salta” in the perception of “phenomena” by encompassing them in a psychological sequence, a “pictographic” or “psychological” representation of reality (Cacciari, p40) that goes back to Locke, then Hume (association of ideas, impressions) and Berkeley (ideas in God’s mind, similar to Leibnitz’s monads). Note also that with British empiricism the “realism” of Platonic and Scholastic philosophy is refuted both in its “temporal” (always psychological in any case) and its “spatial” dimension (contra Descartes’s and Spinoza’s “extension”). In this sense, empiricism already questions Newton’s universe (cf. even Smith’s “Hist.ofAstr.” so dear to the Austrians). 31 Relationships Since a cause and a beginning of existence are distinct ideas,

according to the first part of the separability thesis, it follows that they are also distinguishable ideas. (Bayne)

The empiricist “pictographic” or “sequential” (one would say “kinematic”, slide show) notion of “causality” paved the way to Hume’s skepticism and Berkeley’s empiricist “idealism”. For Hume, ideas and impressions are genuinely similar to each other. They are similar in two main ways. First of all, both ideas and impressions are imagistic— that is, both impressions and ideas can be thought of as being a type of picture.9

(Bayne, ‘Kant on Causation’, p5). Now, this can also be turned very quickly into an argument that Kant cannot allow both intuitions and concepts to be imagistic. Kant makes it clear that he believes that images are not themselves general, and thus in the Schematism Chapter Kant writes:

No image [gar kein Bild] of a triangle would ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle in general. For it would not attain the generality of the concept, which makes it valid for all triangles, . . . Still even less does an object of experience or an image of the same ever attain the empirical concept. (A141/B180) (ibid., p7). In general, according to Kant, concepts serve as rules that are used to organize (unify) our thought. Sensible intuitions, however, can be thought of as being imagistic (pictorial) representations. Now, when the question of application arises (Which intuitions, if any, are subsumed under this concept? Which concept[s] does this intuition fall under?) we may be at a loss for direction. Intuitively we might think that I must somehow compare some concept to some sensible intuition in order to see whether the content of the concept, which is represented discursively in the concept, stands in the appropriate relation to the content of some intuition, which is represented pictorially in the intuition. Yet this may not be so easy.(p8)

From Hobbes’s “man-machine” to Berkeley’s “idealism” the approach to “reality” is mechanically subjective in the sense that the Subject is “estranged” from the Object and views it “in contemplation”, from afar. This obviously originates with Descartes’s methodical doubt which puts “external reality” on a par with “dreams”. Only the “consciousness” of the “doubting” can persuade the Subject of its own reality. But the empiricists were quick to deny not only the Cogito (a syllogistic non sequitur on any plane) but also the very “id-entity” of the Subject, as famously dis-abused by Hume. Search as I may about a notion of “I”, I cannot find it, except by reference to some other “empirical impression or idea”. The unity of the Subject is dis-solved, and so is the possibility of causality, even before we start enquiring about the relationship between things in themselves. The “cinematic sequence” is broken because only a unified Subject can re-compose it. So it turns out that neither mathematical concepts nor empirical concepts stand in immediate relation to sensible intuitions, but like pure concepts they too are “always directly related to the schema of the imagination” (A141/B180). (P8) Schemata for mathematical and empirical concepts are rules for producing spatial images that are correlated with the concept. It is this spatial image, derived from the concept through its schema, that can then be directly compared with sensible intuitions. Schemata for pure concepts, on the other hand, are not rules for producing spatial images. For “the schema of a pure concept of understanding is something that cannot be brought into any image at all” (A142/B181). Rather than being correlated with a spatial image, a pure concept is correlated with a transcendental time determination. That is, the pure concepts are correlated with distinct temporal structures or relationships—temporal images if you like.14 (p9) Unfortunately, when it comes time to spell out the details of how images, pure shapes in space, or transcendental time determinations are produced from concepts via schemata Kant waves his hands and mentions something about the Schematism being “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (A141/B181). (p11) In the Transcendental Deduction Kant believes he has shown that a consciousness cannot be conscious of a representation unless that representation is unified—that is, the representation is one organized unit. It cannot be an 14 KANT ON CAUSATION

unorganized set of various unconnected parts. Furthermore, Kant argues that a representation must get its unity from the understanding because there is no combination in representations apart from the understanding. 17

This is the problem, the hiatus irrationalis, that Kant inherits. He seeks “to bridge” it through a series of “categories” (Schematismus), from human intuition to the Verstand to Pure Reason, that seek “to govern” apodictically the Object through the a priori synthetic judgements that must culminate in the “unconditionality” of Pure Reason because a phenomenon cannot “explain” a sequence of phenomena, however long, and must therefore be toto genere different from that “causally necessary” sequence: it must be “unconditioned” and of a different order from both the Dinge an sich and the world of possible experience or perception. Tsanoff (p44): The unconditioned is unthinkable; and Kant himself, of course, does not claim objective validity for the conception. He does, however, regard the demand of reason for the unconditioned as a regulative principle, "subjectively necessary. "^ In the third Critique Kant stresses the difference between what is required for nature and what is required for an o rd e r of nature. Those things required for nature are constitutive while those things required to produce an order of nature will be regulative. The constitutive things are again categories and principles—things that are required for the possibility of experience. Kant often calls these “universal [allgemeiner] laws of nature.” In addition to this, understanding develops rules for explaining particular aspects of nature. 20 KANT ON CAUSATION

For example, one of the rules from the discussion on the paths of comets above: planets have circular orbits. These rules are ones we come to know through experience, but because of a further requirement, understanding “must think these rules as laws (i.e., as necessary).”26This further requirement is that understanding “also requires a certain order of nature in its particular rules”27 (CJ,184).(Bayne, “K.on Causation’.) As we saw back in chapter 1, a regulative principle “is not a principle of the possibility of experience and the empirical cognition of objects of sense, consequently not a principle of understanding” (A509/B537). Whereas a constitutive principle of understanding deals with the requirements for the possibility of experience, a regulative principle of reason deals with “only the unique way in which we must proceed in the reflection about the objects of nature with the intention of representing a thoroughgoing 159 Conclusion

connected experience” (CJ, 184).

Tsanoff doubts the validity of the distinction: It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer, whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one of Kant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which he makes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency, although the tendency is to discriminate between: (a) the fundamental forms of intuition, the productive imagination, and the functions of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and

'constitute' its organization; and (b) the rational assumptions which, while not determining the actual form of experience, serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment. The distinction, otherwise expressed, is between the mechanical 42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,' and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reason and of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^ The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to its organic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical procedure. The teleological categories are declared to be merely 'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanically considered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive') categories constitutive of moral and aesthetic experience? Such considerations, which Kant would have been the last to take lightly, should have warned him of the untenability of a distinction that negates the immanent unity of experience, which is the fundamental postulate of the Critical philosophy.

[Note that grosso modo equilibrium is regarded by Mises as a “regulative” principle to deduce a priori “human action” – a “category” or “form” of action. Hayek would see it as “constitutive” – a heuristic “goal” or “guide” for action.] But here Kant has gone too far and too fast in at least two respects: the first is that a priori synthetic judgements do not pertain to the physical world, to causation, but rather to logico-mathematical id-entities that remain firmly in the “domain” of reason, not in the mechanical one of “objects” – however much these judgements might arise only with “experience”. Kant is committed to holding that through conceptual analysis alone it is not possible to prove the causal principle. According to Kant, the causal principle although a priori is synthetic not analytic. Something more than the analysis of concepts is required for the proof of a synthetic judgment. According to Hume, if the causal principle is not a relation of ideas, then it must be a matter of fact. According to Kant if the causal principle is not analytic, then it must be synthetic. For a synthetic claim the concept of the predicate is not contained within the concept of the subject. That is to say, concept of the predicate extends (goes beyond) the concept of the subject. Whether or not the concept of the predicate is rightly applied to the concept of the subject cannot be determined by simply examining the content of either or both of the two concepts. Since the correctness of a synthetic judg- ment cannot be determined solely by the content of one or both of the two concepts, something else is required for determining correctness. In order to prove a synthetic claim, we need some “third thing” to test our claim against. Typically, we need some intuition in which the subject and the predicate are connected as claimed.(Bayne, p32)

But then this “something more”, this “experience” must mean “being” tout court, “intuition”, and not just conscious perception. In other words, a priori synthetic judgements alone contain already all the elements of what Kant himself styled as “the Gap” (Forster), the “hiatus irrationalis”, the chasm between Subject and Object, being-in-

itself and for-itself (consciousness). We need not go further into “Naturgesetz”, the “laws” of physics to find this hiatus. All the “bridges” or “projections” in the world will not help us trans-port ourselves, will allow this “Transition” (Ubergang) from the sphere of “immanence” to that of “trans-scendence”, from the Object to the Subject and vice versa. Kant’s “formalistic method”, which in the end boils down to Cartesian rationalism, simply will not do. Tsanoff: Kant says: "As in this way everything is arranged step by step in the understanding, inasmuch as we begin with judging problematically, then proceed to an assertory acceptation, and finally maintain our proposition as inseparably united with the understanding, that is as necessary and apodictic, we may be allowed to call these three functions of modality so many varieties or momenta of thought."^ The three characteristic stages in the logical progression might well indicate three points of view in the self-organization of experience, and in this sense Kant may be justified in distinguishing three categories of Modality. Never 40 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. theless Kant's distinctions are too sharp and abstract: while he suggests a process of logical development in the passage just quoted, he fails to explain the matter adequately and clearly to emphasize the essential interdependence of these 'momenta of thought,' which involve each other in the systematic organization of experience.^

(Of course, that is Hegel’s starting point.) The second difficulty follows from the first, because if logico-mathematical id-entities are attributed to an “unconditioned” pure reason rather than confined to “instrumentality”, then we introduce a formalistic distinction between Vernunft and its concepts and Verstand as the intuitive unity of experience and by so doing we introduce a “regulative principle” that smacks of teleology. For Schopenhauer, Vernunft is simply the ability to connect ideas or concepts, not a “higher” faculty distinct from Verstand. It follows that “causality” is essentially subjective and the role of science is simply to organize perception in a predictable formula. Contingency is relative, just as necessity is relative, and for the same reason. Every thing, every event in the actual world "is always at once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation to the one condition which is its cause; contingent in relation to everything else."^ The absolutely contingent would be something out of all relation: a thought as meaningless, Schopenhauer insists, as the absolutely necessary, dependent upon nothing else in particular. In both necessity and contingency the mind turns PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION IN EXPERIENCE. 39 back in search of explanation ; the necessary and the contingent thus mean merely the relevant and the irrelevant in the process of organization.

And this is what prompts Schop. to abolish the Kantian separation of Subject and Object implicit in the distinction of bloss Erscheinung and Ding an sich. There are no “mere” appearances (bloss Erscheinungen), but rather different “stimuli” that constitute the

Vorstellungen connected by the Understanding-Reason – esse est percipi in this sense; “existence and perceptibility are convertible terms” (p4). It is no longer a question of “knowing” the Vorstellungen, but of intuiting their “being”, because the “knowing” is in their immediate perception and a priori knowledge of causality (Sufficient Reason). Tsanoff: Kant's argument is summarized by Schopenhauer as follows: "If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, and therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality becomes complete. "^ But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality of the conditions of everything conditioned' is contained in its nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, and which is only thus a sufficient reason or ground.* In the alternating series of conditioned and conditioning states, "as each link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principle of sufficient reason entirely satisfied, it arises anew because the condition becomes the conditioned."^ This is the actual modus 43 44 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. operandi of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. "Only through an arbitrary abstraction," Schopenhauer says, "is a series of causes and effects regarded as a series of causes alone, which exists merely on account of the last effect, and is therefore demanded as its sufficient reason."^

“Sufficient Reason” defined by Kelly (‘Kant’s Ph. As Rectified By Schop.’): CHAPTER VI Schopenhauer's principle of the sufficient ground The definition of this Principle is :—" Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit quam non sit." There is nothing without a ground for its being so. AS RECTIFIED BY SCHOPENHAUER 31 The Root of this Principle Our cognitive consciousness, appearing as outer and inner sensibility (receptivity), intelligence, and reason, is divided into subject and object, and contains nothing more. To say that a thing is an object of the subject^ means that it is our presentation, and that all our presentations are objects of the subject. It will be seen that all our presentations are connected together by certain laws, which, so far as the form is concerned, are a priori determinable, and that, in consequence of this connection, nothing existing separately and detached from the others can become an object for us. This connection is what the Principle of the sufficient Ground in its generality expresses, and assumes a different form for the different classes of objects without altering its general character. The word " root" is used to indicate the relations that underlie each class. It must be understood, however, that there are not four distinct roots for the four different classes of objects, but that there

is a common root manifesting itself in four different forms. In other words, the root is a fourfold one.

Sch. relegates reason to the sphere of immanence quite simply by abolishing the “dualism” of Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich, by “mixing” the two together into a “Doppelcharakter” (the object implies the subject implies the object) that makes the Erscheinungen immediately “ordered” by the Verstand/Vernunft, without the need to postulate a “Gap” between Subject and Object and between Verstand and Vernunft that needs to be “bridged”. Tschauschoff (p26): Die objektive Anschauung ist nach Schopenhauer durch und durch eine kausale Erkenntnis, d. h. eine Verstandeserkenntnis oder, wie er sich anders ausdrückt, „die ganze Wirklichkeit ist für den Verstand, durch den Verstand, im Verstände" (W.a.W.u. V.§ 4. S.43).

Thus, for Schopenhauer, the distinction between Verstand as the moment of unifying perception, as intuition, and Vernunft as the awareness of this ability (a kind of consciousness-in-itself and for-itself) simply evaporates. There is no need for this “object of experience” to stand as an “obscure veil” between the Vernunft/Wille and the perception of causality, the faculty of experience or “intuition”. (Tsanoff, pp20-2, but good summary on pp23ff.) Furthermore, there is also no need to distinguish between the “perception” of causal events and their “conceptualization” by the Verstand – because this is assumed to be “immediate” in the unity or “equi-valence” or “interchangeability” or “conversion” (WWV, p4) of esse and percipi. Kant’s impossible task lay in his original “rationalist” assumption that perception of Erscheinungen (“appearances/phenomena”) must be ordered rationally and already transcendentally by an entity that he will ultimately call “Pure Reason” – though he tries to dis-guise this with a whole chain of intermediate categories and faculties (Intuition, Verstand). For better or worse, when we consider the meaning of the phrase “object of representations” in the transcendental sense we will have to focus on representations. For transcendentally speaking an object “is no thing in itself, but rather only an appearance, i.e., representation” (A191/B236). If this is true, then how can objects, which are themselves representations, be “that which ensures that our cognitions are not haphazardly or arbitrarily determined” (A104). Kant’s answer is that in order for representations to be objects in this sense they themselves must not be associated in a haphazard or arbitrary way. That is, the representations must themselves be connected according to rules. In other words, representations, in so far as they are in these relations (in space and time) connected and determinable according to the rules of the unity of experience are called objects. (A494/522) (Bayne, p109) “Now admittedly one can call everything, and even every representation, in so far as one is conscious of it, an object, but what meaning this word has with regard to appearances, not in so far as they (as representations) are objects, but rather only

in so far as they signify an object, is a matter for deeper investigation. (A189– 90/B234–35)” (Kant quoted in Bayne, p108)

The circularity in Kant’s reasoning or “Transcendental Deduction” from “objects” to “representations subject to rules” is evident – because the “rules” themselves will be what turns “representations” into “objects”! Bayne cannot escape the difficulty: Kant’s point is straightforward. The object is that which grounds the objectivity of cognition. If I take some set of my representations to have an object, then I represent my cognition in this case as having been constrained by the features of the object.1 (p109).

But the ineluctable question remains: how can representations themselves be “constrained by the features of the object”? Clearly, at all times Kant is positing a “Realitat”, a solid reality of Dinge an sich that lies “behind” or “beneath” the “ordered consciousness” of the Subject from Intuition all the way to Pure Reason. By so doing, Kant is also then presupposing not only the transcendental a priori character of experience, but also the ability of pure reason to lend a “systemic order” to the individual, separate, empirically “dis-covered” laws of physics: “…there must be something like an a priori ‘elementary system’ of the moving forces of matter if physics is to be possible as a systematic science,” (Forster, ‘Kant’s Final Synthesis’, p11). Earlier, in the KdU, Kant had observed that “Nature, for the sake of judgement, specifies its universal laws to empirical ones according to the form of a logical system,” (in Forster, ‘K’sFS, p6). And in the Preface to the 2nd edn of the KRV there is the famous reference to “giving back to nature” what we have found empirically in it: in other words, the “discovery” of regularities in nature from the constitutive principles must then correspond to a unity of reflective judgement or regulative principles that gives “systematicity” to the natural laws themselves (yet another bolster to Kant’s mythical “architectural symmetry” derided by Schop., “alles gute sind drei”). Shortly before this formulation, Kant describes Galileo’s experiments (ball and slide) virtually as a Machian “thought-experiment”, that is an empirical demonstration (“that which reason must seek in nature, not fictitiously ascribe to it” [Forster, p11]) of regularities or laws that have already been “projected” by reason and regulative principles. The OpPost was intended to supply the “Transition” (Ubergang), the “bridge” or “projectio per hiatus irrationalem” between observation and generalization, between perception and concepts. Oftentimes when Kant discusses rules, he writes of them as being the means by which unity is produced in something. For example, when Kant is comparing reason(Vernunft) with understanding(Verstand) he states that the understanding may be a faculty[Vermögen] of the unity of appearances by means of rules, so reason is the faculty[Vermögen] of the unity of the rules of understanding under principles. (A302/B359) (Bayne, p108).

The possibility of experience is thus that which gives all our cognitions a priori objective reality. Now experience is founded on the synthetic unity of appearances, i.e., on a synthesis according to concepts of the object of appearances in general, without which it would not even be cognition, but only a rhapsody of perceptions that would not fit to-

gether in any context according to rules of a thoroughly connected (possible) consciousness, consequently it would also not fit into the transcendental and necessary unity of apperception. Experience thus has principles of its form a priori lying at the foundation, namely, general rules of the unity in the synthesis of appearances. (A156–57/ B195–96) (Bayne, p108).

[Kant and ‘Judgement’] Schopenhauer does away with the Ubergang altogether. Instead he replaces Kant’s “dualism” of noumena/phenomena, of subject/object, of perception/concept, of Verstand/Vernunft with the unity of the Vorstellung, which already encapsulates the logical interdependence of subject and object. Thus the Erscheinungen occasioning Vorstellungen are sui generis and immediately causally connected qua Vorstellungen to the Verstand and thence to the Vernunft. There is no “mediation” between these categories; no “obscure veil” separates experience from “Realitat” which now becomes all “active” as “Wirklichkeit/Actuality”. Tschauschoff again (p27): Dieser Prozess der Objektivation, den der Verstand an den Empfindungen vollzieht, die uns durch die Sinne zugeführt werden, ist kein bewusst reflektierender, sondern ein intuitiver, unbewusster Prozess. Im Anschluss daran unterscheidet Schopenhauer eine intuitive und eine diskursive Erkenntnis.

And Tsanoff: This is the way Schopenhauer reads his Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason, he thinks, treats experience as the result of the conceptualizing of the perceptual material, by which process this material of sensation first becomes organized and real. Now he finds perception in no need of such conceptual transformation, for it possesses in itself all the concrete reality that is possible in experience. Thinking owes its whole significance to the perceptual source from which it arises through abstraction. " If we hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes evident that the perception of things only obtains reality and becomes experience through the thought of these very things 18SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. applying its twelve categories. Rather in perception itself the empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given; but the perception itself can only come into existence by the application to sensation of the knowledge of the causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding. Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just what Kant denies."^

It follows that the Dinge an sich cannot consist of “objects” or a “Realitat” that lie “behind or beneath” or “at the end” as a quaestio occulta (or causa finalis) of experience. The Dinge an sich must be an entity toto genere separate and different from the realm of experience and reason, from perception and conception, which are entangled in the Veil of Maya. (Hegel will have a different answer.)

It is in positing this “distance” between the “thing-in-itself” and the rational a priori awareness of it in Pure Reason – a “gap” that no Schematismus or Ubergang can “bridge” - that Kant (Tsanoff, p18) prepares the ground for Schopenhauerian pessimism and the “unfoundedness” of the world of possible experience (Kant) or the “World of Vorstellungen” (‘illusionism’ or mysticism in Schop.) in that Practical Reason cannot be “the necessary implication of the unconditioned coming from the perception and conception of the conditioned” (Tsanoff, p38), and consequently it too is “conditioned” by the veil of Maya or “the wheel of life”. Only the Will can “comprehend/envelop” the World of Vorstellungen – and thus become the ultimate Ding an sich – the obverse and the ground of the world of immediate perception. Like Janus again, Will enters where Vorstellungen exit and it exits where they enter. But even Heidegger attacks Kant on the “autonomy” of Reason in its metaphysical moment and also as Will subject to formal rational and logical Imperatives in its ethical aspect. Above all, Sch. lays the foundations of Machism (Tsanoff, p26). (Tsanoff proceeds, pp26ff, to argue why the two “moments” of reason need to be distinguished categorically in that consciousness-in-itself already contains the for-itself but as a separate “moment” [Kant’s “momenta of thought” mentioned on p40] that goes beyond the “perception” and becomes aware of the “conceptualized form” of “perception” itself – inevitably, he quotes Hegel, p28. Schopenhauer is identified thus as “the real prophet of the understanding”, as does Hegel, p40.) Because Reason is not separable from the Understanding, even the Will in its objectification as body, though not in its character as the objectification of the Ding an sich, is part of the “causality” it “understands” – so that the Will-as-body is immersed in the World and is subject to its “causation”, to the Law of Sufficient Reason, like any Vorstellung. Body as Objectified Will Schop.’s system is based entirely on the critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism. What Kant “transcended” was more than Hume’s skepticism; it also seeks to supplant the British utilitarian empiricism that had portrayed human beings as “individuals” in isolation from and in competition with one another. Kant sought to place the Subject at the centre of a universe that was more than mechanical or “subjective”, one that was also “ethical”. But the result of the categorical ascension from constitutive to reflective principles was the apotheosis not so much of Reason, of the Ratio-Ordo, but rather of its “freedom” from contingency, and therefore of its existential manifestation as “will” subject to the Naturgesetz and yet restrained only by “formalistic” ethical laws derived from its “rational” introspection “in accordance with rules”. The “rules” therefore could acquire the requisite universality only if they could encompass the “thing in itself” – because so long as this remained “out of the reach” of either Reason or intuition or perception the very “necessity” of a priori judgements and of causality could not be “founded”. Schop.’s critique marks the “reappropriation” of the

object by the subject through the sheer “renunciation” of the substantive rationality of human knowledge. Schop. accepts the “formality” of human experience, its introspective “conventionality” by re-dimensioning the claims of Reason, indeed by reducing it to a mere intellectual “mechanism”, a “function” whose “truth” can be only formal and instrumental, always “contingent” and limited to the neighbourhood of “sufficient reason”. The very “limitation” of reason, its inability “to prove or think” its ultimate reality is turned by Schop. into the ‘freedom” of immersion in existence. His “theory of reality” can then admit only a nihilistic “Will” that cannot derive any “reflective” or “practical” guidance from reason, which indeed is now confined to the mechanical and instrumental realm of “Wirklichkeit” or “action” – to the sphere of immanence on the same plane as the Verstand. Only in the “absolutisation” of reason, in its “moment” as consciousness for itself, can reason become aware of its “being something else”, of its being immersed in Being - but still subject to it, “consciousness” only of its being “objectification of the Ding an sich! and therefore of its existence as “Will”, as “will to life” whose “objectification” is the body. We have now two new themes, that of will and that of “Entwicklung”, that will await the mediation of Darwin to become the Nietzschean Wille zur Macht (Simmel). In light of the influence on Mach attributed to Berkeley, it is important to stress the instructive and paramount differences between the positions of British “empiricism” (to which Berkeley belongs despite the “subjective idealist” sobriquet) and Schop.’s critique of Kant in paving the road to Machism. The distinction lies in the fact that British empiricism from Hobbes to Hume involves a “subjectivism” of both experience and values (also based on experience) that does not theorise the relationship of Subject to Object in its “practical” – ethical and political – dimension. The “empiricist” perspective is entirely “within” the world of human perception; it does not seek to pose the problem of “the thing in itself” even when, as in Berkeley, it denies its “content” as “matter”. British empiricism is profoundly “subjective”, its world view is “cinematic” or “imagistic” or “pictographic” and delivers a “passive, inert, contemplative Subject” more interested in the theory of knowledge (how we learn things) than in the theory of reality (what “things” are, in themselves [an sich] and “fur uns”). Empiricism is a form of “pragmatism” – and this is how it will be handed down to Mach. But not without the all-important “mediation” of Kant and Schop., after which it will become not just a Weltanschauung but rather a Lebensphilosophie. That is why Schop. could rightly claim that Kant’s “grosste Verdienst” was to distinguish between Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich – because the British empiricists never inquired into or enquired about “the thing itself” and the “active” or “practical” role of the Subject in the “world”. For Kant as well as for Schop., “the world” will no longer be something “to be interpreted”, to be contemplated or observed from without; rather it will be a “Wirklichkeit” that encompasses the Ich (the “I think”) as also an “I will” – whether in its formalistic Kantian or in its “negative” Schopenhauerian or in its “dialectical” Hegelian directions. Reason is no longer a “receptive” or “reflective” entity: it now yields, whether

in its formal or dialectic or in its “negative (anti-)dialectic” guise, a “Will” that is either “free” or from which the Subject has to be “freed” – a “free will” that is either a “freedom to will” or a “will to freedom”, and then a Pouvoir-Vouloir or a Vouloir-Pouvoir. A “World” separates the “truth” of the empiricists and the “truth” of the post-Kantians – contemplative the former (a stable, immutable adaequatio mentis et rei that challenges the Newtonian mechanistic vision of reality [Berkeley, Hume] and even of self-identity [Hume]) and the “activist” notion of “truth” canvassed by the latter (cf. the CassirerHeidegger diatribe over precisely this aspect, with the Neo-Kantians taking the extreme formalist and contemplative version of Kant’s meta-physics; see also Heidegger on “Das Wesen der Wahrheit” – and Simmel’s scathing review of “Schopenhauers Metaphysik des Willens”, ch.2), where “truth” becomes an “Entwicklungsprozess” in the “historial” being of Dasein. By “separating” Erscheinungen and Dinge an sich, Kant is opening up the entire question of how “truth” is more than the simple “correspondence” or adaequatio of the intuition (intellectus) with “the thing” (res), but rather the “Weltvernunft”, the transcendental process of “regulating” the intellect to the thing. Machism lies at the crossroads of the discovery of this “processuality”, of not moving beyond the “instrumentality” of reason (as equal to Verstand in its mechanical character) whereby not only the vision of the world (Weltanschauung) becomes “subjective”, but also its entire “unfolding”, its entire “actuality” or “action” or “Wirklichkeit” as against “Realitat”. The empiricists had a “subjective” perspective on what they considered to be “objective truth”, even in the “skeptical” Humean version. But Machism replaces this “truth” with sheer “functionality” through the critique of Kant and Kant’s critique of Hume – although this fact will be made explicit by Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, not by Schop. or Mach. (Cf. Simmel on “Relativitat” and “Traum”, pp24-36.) Thus, Schop.’s empiricism becomes more than “materialistic” or “mechanical”: it becomes “instrumental”, “neutral” from a “meta-physical” viewpoint – indeed, it becomes “anti-metaphysical” and “scientific” in its “instrumentality” (“the body is objectified Will”). That is why Berkeley’s insight that “the world is my idea” cannot be carried deeper than its vague “universal” tone to the “particulars” of Kant’s analysis (WWV, pxxv and p4). Similarly, Hume’s skepticism is derived from the inability of “experience” – understood uncritically as “evident” – to yield the principle of causation or “sufficient reason”, whereas Schop. makes it the very foundation of experience. For Hume, then, “the world” exists independently of “the idea (Vorstellung)” and refers us back to those “objects” that the subject cannot com-prehend. Hence, realism and idealism face dogmatism and skepticism in an endless squabble over “the nature of reality and knowledge” (WWV, pp15-6). Hobbes and Hume remain in a “realistic” world where objects make “impressions” on minds or “ideas” need to be “objectified” in God (Berkeley, discussed on p4). This is still a Newtonian world; their “world” and their “utility” are “commensurable” through a commonality of “experience” and “possessive individualism” respectively.

Mach preserves the “validity” of Newton’s mechanics but from a radically different epistemological perspective that removes the “dualism” of mind and matter “coordinated” by a universal “truth” (however hard to detect, as in Hume), and resolves it in the “phenomenology” of Will – an extreme “subjectivism” that does not preserve “egoism” and “utility” as an “inter-subjective” entity, an inter-esse of sorts that lies “accanto all’affermazione del sistema newtoniano” (Cacciari, Krisis, p.31, see pp.29ff). Thus, Classical Political Economy was founded inevitably on “the labour theory of value” that even Smith (“the father of GE”, Arrow-Hahn) could not avoid as the “matter/substance”, the substratum or Kantian “ether’ of economic enquiry. With Machism and the neoclassics, the individual becomes a bottomless pit or black hole of “utility/will” in which “truth” is only an instrument and no “common-ality” or “interesse” is epistemologically possible. “I neoclassici definiscono un sistema generale d’equilibrio [di mercato]… che parte dalla individualita’ economica concreta e ne segue lo sviluppo fino alla costituzione di un sistema che non e’ se non l’incontro, empirico, impotente a operare qualsiasi metamorfosi, tra gli interessi specifici di ogni individualita’” (Cacciari, p29) – interests that will remain inscrutable and insubstantial except as “observable” relative prices. How to reconcile or “co-ordinate” these interests will become the principal problem of economics either “providentially” (Smith) or abstractly (GE) or “a priori” (Misesian praxeology, game theory, rational expectations) or technically-empirically in GE framework (Hayek-Robbins “science of choice”) or “through evolutionary institutional factors” (immanent, in Hayek and NIE or transcendental, in Schump and “innovation”). [Matters of interest: Hobbes finds the volitional source of the contractual or conventional basis of the status civilis in the “ultima ratio” of the self-preservation of self-interested individuals: the fear of death leads to the “agreement” to alienate individual independence – which never existed in the status naturae. The state of nature is a state of civil war by definition – so it is only a hypothetical state that justifies or “rationalizes” the civil state. Loasby offers the same “self-preservation” arising from the division of labour as a founding principle for “co-ordination”. But the two notions are very different. Exchange is a dira necessitas only if one presupposes “individual labours”, instead of “social labour”, which is historically and anthropologically the reality. In that case there is no “exchange” in the sense intended by Smith. So we are still in need for a “reason” for co-ordination. Moreover, even if one allows the dira necessitas of exchange, it still does not lead to co-ordination because there is no “alienation” of individual freedom to a “sovereign” central market authority. The other matter is Lowith’s discussion of the Zeitgeist as a possible reference or link to Simmel’s “Entwicklung” in his work on Schop. and Nietzsche.] Even Schop.’s pessimism, easily reminiscent of Hobbes’s but infinitely more complex in its trans-formation of the Subject into a Will, goes well beyond the Vorstellungen to the “active” deontological exhortation of the A-skesis, piercing the Veil of Maya, “renouncing” the World and the Will itself to achieve a “unity with reality”, a Nirvana that, in effect (as Cacciari brilliantly explains), only serves to re-present the World – the

renunciation of the Vor-stellungen leads us back to the Dar-stellung of the World! (This is the impasse confronted by Nietzsche with the Ubermensch.) As we have seen, Vernunft and Verstand are merely “mechanical” properties of “immediate perception” (p199) Thus knowledge generally, rational as well as merely sensuous, proceeds originally from the will itself, belongs to the inner being of the higher grades of its objectification as a mere mechane, a means of supporting the individual and the species, just like any organ of the body. Originally destined for the service of the will for the accomplishment of its aims, it remains almost throughout entirely subjected to its service: it is so in all brutes and in almost all men.

But if immediate perception has an “intuitive” dimension that links the Vorstellungen causally by virtue of “the principle of sufficient reason”, then the deontological status of the “entity”, the “awareness” that “perceives” even the body as its “objectification” – this “entity” must have certain characteristics: - first, it is not a “practical” entity in the ethical-moral Kantian sense of “practical reason; secondly, it must be aware of itself only in its “totality”, be “one” (p166), “have no multiplicity” (p166 and169, also Kant-Plato section, pp221-7) but not as an “id-entity” or “subject” or “self” or “forma substantialis”. In other words, this ultimate “entity” is a “qualitas occulta” for which “the world is my Vorstellung”, where “my” refers to this “qualitas occulta” which, therefore and in turn, must be “the thing in itself” of which “no Vorstellung” can be formed and no “aetiology” can be given (p158 and p176) except in its “manifestations”, which are the “cause” of the Vorstellungen, but whose “cause” in turn, that is, the “cause” of the will’s manifestation or objectification as Vorstellung, cannot be “known” by the Vernunft/Verstand but can be intuited in its “totality” as a “Will”, as a qualitas occulta, as the cause of the Vorstellungen, and therefore as “thing in itself” that is “groundless”. As a qualitas occulta, this “entity without id-entity/self-hood”, conscious of its “being” but not of its “substance” or “whatness” or “quidditas” or “forma substantialis” (p162), is the awareness of the totality of causes and effects that are the “object” of the Vorstellungen without which the “object” would have no “being”, and whose “being” is this “knowing” on the part of the Vernunft/Verstand (p166). It is “the objectification of the thing-in-itself” – the will (p227) This “entity” therefore has a “principium individuationis”, not an identity or self-consciousness; it is not a “multiplicity” (p226-7). It has a source but has no “cause” and no “place” – it is indivisible or in-dividual and “ethereal” in the sense of “in-substantial” and therefore not a “meta-physical” entity. But it is “a force of nature”: It “acts”, it “decides” but without a particular “reason”, with-out “explanation” (Simmel, ‘Energie’, p36) – like Spinoza’s stone in mid-air (p164) it thinks it is “free”, and yet it is truly “free” even as it obeys all the “laws of nature” in its “objectification as Vorstellung” (p162 and 174-5, 183, p226-7) because its only “selfawareness” is as a “motivation” (Motif) or an even deeper “character” (p164 and 180) that is “original” (source, fons et origo) yet “in-explicable”, “un-founded”…. Schop. says that it is “groundless” (p170).

Unlike Kant, therefore, it is not the regulative principle of pure reason that “necessitates” its self-consciousness as “freedom of the will” under the rules of pure reason itself in its “moment” as practical reason. No such ethical-rational formalism is allowed, no RatioOrdo lies “behind” the “appearance” of the World – because the World is already the Vorstellung which is the manifestation, not of a “Realitat”, but rather of a “Wirklichkeit”, an “actuality” that is constituted by the Will itself as its “objectification”. This is how the philosophia perennis is side-lined, circum-vented. The Will is a “force of nature” that com-prehends, envelops itself, an extrinsic-ation that is not a Fichtean Ich or Hegelian Idea or indeed a Kantian “dialectic” of transcendental idealism whereby the introspective discovery of a priori judgement is “proof” of the existence of pure reason in its “regulative, practical-volitional” aspect. Instead, Vernunft/Verstand itself is a “mechanical” adaptation of the Will from its “elemental” state (“grade”, below) to its higher manifestations (grades) or “teleology” in its pursuit of life. And if this “will” is in-divisible, irrepressible, universal and insatiable (Simmel calls it “Energie”, p36) in its “manifestations” as Vorstellungen, as “the world”, then its singular “manifestations” must express a “conflict” or “strife” or “polarity” (“Yin and Yang”, p187) that “results” in “higher manifestations” or “adaptations” of the Will through the “subduing assimilations” of lower manifestations or adaptations (p190 circa), spurring each being to “the ideal of beauty in its species” (p191). Thus everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory, and in it we shall come to recognise more distinctly that variance with itself which is essential to the will. Every grade of the objectification of will fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. The permanent matter must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrest the matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own Idea. This strife may be followed through the whole of nature; indeed nature exists only through it : 192 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. ii. Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself which is essential to the will. This universal conflict becomes most distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. For animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and the food of another; that is, the matter in which its Idea expresses itself must yield itself to the expression of another Idea, for each animal can only maintain its existence by the constant destruction of some other. Thus the will to live everywhere preys upon itself, and in different forms is its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as a manufactory for its use. Yet even the human race, as we shall see in the Fourth Book, reveals in itself with most terrible distinctness this conflict, this variance with itself of the will, and we find homo homini lupus.

Here, endlich, we have the apotheosis of vitalism, “the will to life”, as strife leads to Vernunft in a pyramidal “metamorphosis” of “adaptations” (p209) that can be called “teleology” (pp201 ff) – the “Entwicklung” Simmel talks about that leads from Hobbes to Nietzsche.

It is this “sense-lessness” of the will, this lack of ultima ratio, except as qualitas occulta, that displays the vanity of the world, the Veil of Maya – the futility of all attainments and satisfaction: the satisfaction of a wish is the annihilation of that wish, the ultimate proof of the “nothingness” of the wish itself, its “evanescence” (p253). Hence, the “renunciation” of the will as a “force”, the negation of its strife or “suffering” – endless and vain – is the identification of “the pure subject of the will” with the World itself through “contemplation”, which allows the consciousness of the will achieved through the “mechanical” reflection of reason to detach itself from its bondage, from the “necessity” (principle of sufficient reason) of its objectifications. Science itself is mere instrumentality, systematic ordering of the World of Vorstellungen – it is immanence that cannot penetrate the Dinge an sich; science cannot transcend these manifestations of the will (p229). Only by “sublimating” the strife or suffering of the “will to live” through Art and contemplation of the world (p229, 240), which is the admiration of the Idea, can the pure subject become “non-will”. (We have here the Janusfaced character of the attainment-exit of Nirvana-equilibrium – something Myrdal grossly miscomprehends as “meaningless” and without “content”! – Just as Carnap dispatches Heidegger’s metaphysics as “meaningless”.) Yet we shall see in the Third Book how in certain individual men knowledge can deliver itself from this bondage, throw off its yoke, and, free from all the aims of will, exist purely for itself, simply as a clear mirror of the world, which is the source of art. Finally, in the Fourth Book, we shall see how, if this kind of knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring about self-surrender, i.e., resignation, which is the final goal, and indeed the inmost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is deliverance from the world. (p199)

Simmel catches this Doppelcharakter of the Will (operari): “wir…Zuschauer u. Akteure, … Geschaffene u. Schaffende sind”, p31, foreshadowing Nietzsche’s expression “die geschaffene Menschen” (in HATH1 re’Poets’). There are “pantheistic”and “monistic” and mystic tones (Simmel, p28, p38, p62-3) as well as Freudian ones (the fragmentation of the Subject/Self [p54], sublimation) and Darwinian/vitalist (“adaptation of the will” in its “con-ditioned” aspect, p57) that lead to insoluble antinomies (undifferentiated unity of will against its multiple manifestations, self-lessness of will against “awareness” both of its “being” and of its mechanical aspect as Verstand, the volitional unity of will and “polarity” of the strife [Kampf] for “Life”, posed by what obstacle or opposition? – pp58 ff; hence, the “purpose-lessness” of the Will [Zwecklosigkeit – p68] which, on the other hand, supports the “Wertlosigkeit” of the world and the preponderance of “Leid” over “Lust” because the attainment of pleasure/wish nullifies its object and defeats the purpose).

Schop. intimates instead from the outset that “ethics” must be derived from “metaphysics”, as Kant prescribed (Met.d.Sittens). The “Grundprobleme der Ethik” opens with the MachiavelliHobbesian distinction between what men “ought” to do and what they “actually” (wirklich) do. The inability of Kant “to bridge the gap” between the Ding an sich and Pure Reason, indeed the very “formal purity” of that Reason that could found its essence only upon the postulate of an allencompassing transcendental “Freedom” at the end of the causal chain immanent to human intuition and the Verstand “subject to rules” – this very “gap” or distinction (Unterschied) that Schop. recognized as Kant’s “greatest contribution” to metaphysics can be “bridged” only by the “force” (a fortiori) of human experience - the principle of sufficient reason, according to which the fact that something exists is the very “ground” or “reason” for its existence. The chain of causality, therefore, cannot be abstracted from into a false infinity “at the end of which” there must be a “transcendental” substance or category that can “com-prehend” it as its “op-posite” (ob-ject or Gegen-stand) – the “freedom” and “reason” upon which Kant wishes to erect or “found” both Pure Reason as the rational entity and Practical Reason as the “ethical moment” of Pure Reason whereby the “free will” is “governed” by “rational rules” that lead to the “Categorical Imperative”. To indulge in such abstraction is “to posit” unjustifiably the very “conclusion” that we are seeking to prove. Not only is the Categorical Imperative nowhere to be seen “empirically”, in reality; but also nowhere is it “written”: it is a delusion both empirically in terms of observable human nature and formally in terms of the internal consistency of its “ethical content or Diktats”. Kantian Practical Reason is initially the offspring of the “freedom” of the will, but soon under the “regulative principle” of Pure Reason, of a “Logic” that Schop. shows is only “instrumental” and “phenomenic” - that is belongs only to the Verstand/Vernunft as a “mechanical” application of “formal reasoning” to “the world as Vorstellung”- pretends to arrogate to itself the “right” to dictate “categorical imperatives” that rule the conduct of the will! For Schop., this is the height of imposture, the sublime Ohnmacht of the Ratio-Ordo – the impotent pretence of “moral Theology”.

Critique of Kant with Hegel in mind (essays rejected because of invective). Kantian formalism rejected. Separation of noumena and phenomena already destroys the basis for formalist ethics. Benthamite utilitarianism also because it “reconciles” individual wills so that labour is seen as source of synthesis-osmosis-value through “constructive character”. Competition has only a “distributive” role in the market mechanism. The Will is an operari, striving in the world of other manifestations of will, “adapting” to this world and therefore “evolving”. Labour therefore cannot amount to “creation” of utility but to its “use”: labour/operari “consumes” the world in search of “satisfaction”. The “evanescence” of the world means that the “drive” (Trieb) of the Will toward satisfaction defeats itself. That is the source of pain (Leid) countering the search for Pleasure (Lust). Entsagung is the intellectual awareness of the Verstand/Vernunft to refrain and restrain the Will from seeking Lust, the “utility” of the world.. Hence “dualism” of satisfaction/Nirvana (Robbins, “Nirvana is satisfaction of all needs”). It is of vital importance that Entsagung is the culmination of an “intellectual” effort “to master” the will. In this role, the “intellect” is a “mechane” – a means – for directing the otherwise “blind drive” of the will – it is the equivalent of the Kantian “concepts” emanating from “Pure Reason” even in its “Practical moment”, and of the Freudian superego or ego where the Will is the Es/Id.

Phenomenology instead sought to return to Cartesian transcendence by decreeing “apodictic rules of thought” determined a priori. And the Neo-Kantians sought to circumvent Kantian agnosticism through the autonomy and universality of logic and judgements, including ethical maxims. In each of these cases it was the ‘Ding-an-sich’ that was eliminated from the field of enquiry so that what were once “appearances” or “phenomena” came now to represent (Vorstellungen) the totality of experience - and therefore to constitute as “science” a historically specific political strategy of capitalist command. What we will attempt here is to highlight the strategic features of this attempt in the sense that the goal of the theory was to establish the rules of a game that, if adhered to or enforced by its participants, would be effective in ensuring the practical political survival/reproduction of capitalist social relations.

This is the way Schopenhauer reads his Kant. The Critique of Pure Reason, he thinks, treats experience as the result of the conceptualizing of the perceptual material, by which process this material of sensation first becomes organized and real. Now he finds perception in no need of such conceptual transformation, for it possesses in itself all the concrete reality that is possible in experience. Thinking owes its whole significance to the perceptual source from which it arises through abstraction. " If we hold firmly to this, the inadmissibleness of the assumption becomes evident that the perception of things only obtains reality and becomes experience through the thought of these very things iG., I. pp. 563-564; HK.. II, p. 382G., I, p. 564; H.K., II, p. 393G., I, pp. 564-565; H.K., II, p. 3918SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. applying its twelve categories. Rather in perception itself the empirical reality, and consequently experience, is already given; but the perception itself can only come into existence by the application to sensation of the knowledge of the causal nexus, which is the one function of the understanding. Perception is accordingly in reality intellectual, which is just what Kant denies."^ Schopenhauer thinks that Kant makes a triple division: (i) the idea, (2) the object of the idea, and (3) the thing-in-itself. "The first belongs to the sensibility, which in its case, as in that of sensation, includes the pure forms of perception, space and time. The second belongs to the understanding, which thinks it through its twelve categories. The third lies beyond the possibility of all knowledge."- The confusion seems evident to Schopenhauer: "The illicit introduction of that hybrid, the object of the idea, is the source of Kant's errors,"^ he says. All we have in concrete knowledge and experience is the Vorstellung; " if we desire to go beyond this idea, then we arrive at the question as to the thing-in-itself, the answer to which is the theme of my whole work as of all metaphysics in general."^ With this epistemological hybrid, i. e., the 'object of the idea,' "the doctrine

of the categories as conceptions a priori also falls to the ground."^ iG., I, p. 566; H.K., II, p. 40. 2G., I, p. 567; H.K.. II. p. 41; Kr. d. r. V., pp. io8f.; M., pp. 89 f. 'G., I, p. 567; H.K., II, p. 41. ^G., I, pp. 567-568; H.K., II, p. 42. 'G., I, p. 567; H.K.. II, pp. 41-42. It should be noted that Schopenhauer does not recognize what, after all, is Kant's real distinction between understanding and reason, the distinction, namely, between understanding as the faculty by which we deal with the conditioned and reason as the faculty which demands the unconditioned. The understanding itself Kant seems to treat in a twofold manner: (i) understanding in the wider sense, as the fundamental principle of objectivity in experience, including within itself the immanently organizing function of the productive imagination; and (2)^ understanding in the narrower sense, as the faculty of judgment or interpretation, operating primarily through the categories.. This distinction is of great importance for the interpretation of Kant's pure concepts of the understanding; and it should be noted that Kant explicitly limits the application of the understanding to finite experience, to the sphere of the conditioned. On the other hand, Kant holds: "It is the peculiar principle of reason (in its logical use) to find for every conditioned knowledge of the understanding the unconditioned, whereby the unity of that knowledge may be completed. "^ The pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, find their meaning and their sphere of operation in the organic interdependence of 'C/., in this connection, Richter's treatment of 'Verstand' and 'Vernunft' as used by Kant and Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer's Verhaltnis zu Kant in seinen Grundziigen, pp. 144 ff. "^Kr. d. r. V., p. 307; M., p. 249. 20 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. the different sides of conditioned experience. The concepts of pure reason, on the other hand, or the 'Transcendental Ideas,' as Kant calls them, are explicitly concerned with the unconditioned ground of experience; they refer to "something to which all experience may belong, but which itself can never become an object of experience."^ In this sense the distinction between pure understanding and pure reason, in Kant's technical procedure, tends to correspond to the distinction between theory of knowledge and theory of reality.^

Returning to Schopenhauer, it is hardly too much to say that his whole argument is specious. The fact that in Kant's admittedly confused way of treating perception and conception he sees nothing but a solemn warning against undue adherence to an ideal of 'architectonic symmetry,' shows how hopelessly he misconceives both the aim and the fundamental trend of Kant's 'Critical' method.^ Kant's 'confusion' of the perceptual and ^Kr. d. r. V., p. 311; M., p. 253. Cf. the introductory sections of the 'Transcendental

Dialectic' especially Kr. d. r. V., pp. 299 fif., 305 ff., 310 ff., 322 ff.; M., pp. 242 ff., 247 ff., 252 ff., 261 ff. 2 Kant regards speculative reason, however, as incapable of attaining knowledge of ultimate reality, and therefore he introduces the notion of practical reason. But this problem will more naturally come up for discussion in the sequel. 3 Mere textual criticism of Kant's Critiques is sure to lead one astray, unless the fundamental spirit of his philosophy is kept constantly in mind. As Richter

NATURE AND GENESIS OF EXPERIENCE. 21 the conceptual in experience is to be regarded, not as the failure to discriminate ultimate differences, but rather as the imperfect realization and the inadequate expression of the underlying essential unity of concrete experience, which cannot be reduced to merely perceptual or conceptual terms. Kant's confusion is the confusion of depths not yet clarified; Schopenhauer's lucidity manifests epistemological shallowness. Later idealism, of course, brought to light much that escaped Kant himself; but Kant was far more nearly right than Schopenhauer when he said: "Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. . . . The understanding cannot see, the senses cannot think. By their union only can knowledge be produced."^ The fundamental defect of Schopenhauer's epistemology is to be found in his constant endeavor to explain one abstract phase of experience in terms of another, supposedly prior, phase, —really the vice of the older rationalism,—instead of reading both into the organic unity which embraces both and derives its own meaning precisely from such systematization of aspects meaningless in abstract isolation. The relation between the organizing principles of experience is for Kant, not one of formal subsumption, but of organic interdependence. Experience involves both perception and conception, the one as much as the other; its progressive organization consists in the gradual evolution of the two, which unifies them in one concrete process. The perceptual content is essentially meaningful, and the application of the categories brings out what is implicit in it. Schopenhauer's universals are the universals of the old scholastic logic, abstractions which do not exist outside of its text-books and are alien to concrete experience. Conception, in the true Kantian sense, is no mere attenuated perception, but the significant aspect of experience. Conceptions, or, perhaps better, puts it: "Es ist wirklich nicht so schwer, wenn man sich nur an den wortlichen Text der Kritiken halt, Rationalismus und Empirismus, Dogmatismus (im weitesten Sinne) und Scepticismus, Idealismus und Realismus aus ihnen herauszulesen" {op. cit., pp. 91-92). And again, with special reference to Schopenhauer's procedure: "Kantische Elemente hat Schopenhauer aufgenommen, Kantisch fortgebildet hat er sie nicht" {op. cit., p. 77). iKr. d. r. V., p. 51; M., p. 41.

22 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. meanings, are involved in experience from the very beginning; they are not merely its abstract terminus ad quern, as Schopenhauer would have it.^ Universality means, not erasure of details and differences, but their gradual organization from a point of view ever growing in catholicity. The progress of knowledge is not from perception to conception, but from less

concrete to more concrete organization of both. iG.. II. p. 55; H.K., II. p. 213. 38 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. One should keep clearly in mind that, while the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself, being a ' metalogical truth,' is axiomatic and incapable of proof, nevertheless everything which comes under its regulation, has its meaning, truth, and reality precisely in reference to something else. Hence, Schopenhauer insists, the thoroughly relative character of all necessity becomes evident. Nothing is necessary in itself, but solely by virtue of something else upon which it depends and in which it finds its meaning. Necessity is thus the general way of expressing this coherence, this multiform organization in experience, of which the Principle of Sufficient Reason is, for Schopenhauer, the most general statement. If once this relative character of necessity is comprehended, the meaning of contingency becomes obvious. Kant's confusion on this point is due to his adherence to the abstract rationalistic notion of the contingent (as that of which the nonexistence is possible), opposed, on the one hand, to the necessary (that which cannot possibly not be), and, on the other hand, to the impossible (that which cannot possibly be).^ This Aristotelian conception of the contingent^ in Kant results from "sticking to abstract conceptions without going back to the concrete and perceptible."^ As a matter of fact, contingency is nothing more nor less than the denial of necessity in a particular case, i. e., '"absence of the connection expressed by the principle of sufficient reason. "* Contingency is relative, just as necessity is relative, and for the same reason. Every thing, every event in the actual world "is always at once necessary and contingent; necessary in relation to the one condition which is its cause; contingent in relation to everything else."^ The absolutely contingent would be something out of all relation: a thought as meaningless, Schopenhauer insists, as the absolutely necessary, dependent upon nothing else in particular. In both necessity and contingency the mind turns iC/. K. d. r. v., II ed., p. 301; M., p. 198; G.. I, p. 594; H.K., II. p. 70. ^ Ibid. Schopenhauer refers here to De generatione et conuptione, Lib. II, C.-9 et II. 'G.. I. p. 594; H.K.. II, p. 71. •...-. *G., I, p. 591; H.K., II, p. 67. 'G., I. p. 591; H.K., II, p. 68. PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION IN EXPERIENCE. 39 back in search of explanation ; the necessary and the contingent thus mean merely the relevant and the irrelevant in the process of organization. If one considers merely the given event by itself, merely the effect, without looking for the explanatory cause which necessitates it and makes it contingent with respect to everything else, then one understands the meaning of the immediately existing, the actual, the thing as directly apprehended. The actual in nature, however, is always causally related, hence also necessary here and now. If, on the other hand, the mind abstracts from this 'here' and 'now,' and presents to

itself all the laws of nature and thought, physical and metaphysical, i. e., known to us a posteriori and a priori respectively/ then the conception of possibility arises, which means compatibility with our conceptual systems and laws, without reference to any particular time and place. That which is inadmissible even from this abstract point of view, Schopenhauer calls the impossible. This development of the conceptions of necessity, actuality (existence), and possibility, showing as it does their common basis in the one Principle of Sufificient Reason, demonstrates, Schopenhauer asserts, " how entirely groundless is Kant's assumption of three special functions of the understanding for these three conceptions. "^ A comparison of this outline of Schopenhauer's conclusions with Kant's summary of his own treatment of the modality of judgments, will illustrate the difference between the two positions. Kant says: "As in this way everything is arranged step by step in the understanding, inasmuch as we begin with judging problematically, then proceed to an assertory acceptation, and finally maintain our proposition as inseparably united with the understanding, that is as necessary and apodictic, we may be allowed to call these three functions of modality so many varieties or momenta of thought."^ The three characteristic stages in the logical progression might well indicate three points of view in the self-organization of experience, and in this sense Kant may be justified in distinguishing three categories of Modality. Never iG.,I. p. 592; H.K., II. p. 69. ^G.. I, p. 593; H.K.. II. p. 69. 2Kr. d. r. V.. p. 76; M.. p. 63 40 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. theless Kant's distinctions are too sharp and abstract: while he suggests a process of logical development in the passage just quoted, he fails to explain the matter adequately and clearly to emphasize the essential interdependence of these 'momenta of thought,' which involve each other in the systematic organization of experience.^ On the other hand, Schopenhauer is quite unable to realize the organic character of concrete experience, which implies, not the absorption of possibility and actuality into necessity, but their proper correlation in the systematic whole. In his constant tendency to make hard and fast distinctions, to the neglect of the concrete unity of the system of experience, Schopenhauer represents what Hegel called ' the standpoint of the understanding.' As Professor Bosanquet says: "The real prophet of the understanding . . . was Schopenhauer. His treatment of the principle of sufficient reason as at once the fundamental axiom of human science and the innate source of its illusions, forms an ultimate and irreversible criticism on the aspect of intelligence which consists, to sum up its nature in a popular but not inaccurate phrase, in explaining everything by something else—a process which taken by itself is necessarily unending and unsatisfying. "^ 'C/. in this connection Bosanquet's analysis and criticism of Kant's treatment of Modality, Logic, Vol. I, pp. 377 ff. ^Op. cit.. Vol. II. pp. 81-82.

It is unfortunate, though not difficult to explain, that Schopenhauer, whose keen criticism of the doctrine of the categories had disclosed so many of its flaws, should have overlooked one of Kant's most questionable distinctions, namely, that which he makes between 'constitutive' and 'regulative' principles. This distinction is employed by Kant with little consistency, although the tendency is to discriminate between: (a) the fundamental forms of intuition, the productive imagination, and the functions of thought, which condition the possibility of all experience and 'constitute' its organization; and (b) the rational assumptions which, while not determining the actual form of experience, serve to rationalize the moral order and the aesthetic judgment. The distinction, otherwise expressed, is between the mechanical 42 SCHOPENHAUER'S CRITICISM OF KANT. categories of the Understanding, which Kant calls 'constitutive,' and the teleological categories, the postulates of Practical Reason and of the Esthetic Judgment, which he regards as 'regulative.'^ The incompatibility of this hard and fast distinction with any interpretation of experience which attempts to do justice to its organic character is amply illustrated in Kant's own technical procedure. The teleological categories are declared to be merely 'regulative,' because not 'constitutive' of experience mechanically considered. But are the mechanical {i. e., 'constitutive') categories constitutive of moral and aesthetic experience? Such considerations, which Kant would have been the last to take lightly, should have warned him of the untenability of a distinction that negates the immanent unity of experience, which is the fundamental postulate of the Critical philosophy. "It is the peculiar principle of reason (in its logical use)," Kant says, "to find for every conditioned knowledge of the understanding the unconditioned, whereby the unity of that knowledge may be completed."^ Now Schopenhauer insists that the whole plausibility of Kant's conception is due to its abstractness. Kant's argument is summarized by Schopenhauer as follows: "If the conditioned is given, the totality of its conditions must also be given, and therefore also the unconditioned, through which alone that totality becomes complete. "^ But, Schopenhauer argues, this 'totality of the conditions of everything conditioned' is contained in its nearest ground or reason from which it directly proceeds, and which is only thus a sufficient reason or ground.* In the alternating series of conditioned and conditioning states, "as each link is laid aside the chain is broken, and the claim of the principle of sufficient reason entirely satisfied, it arises anew because the condition becomes the conditioned."^ This is the actual modus ^Cf. above, pp. 14 ff., 19 ff. ^Kr. d. r. V., p. 307; M.. p. 249. 3G., I. p. 612; H.K., II, pp. 90-91
causes and effects regarded as a series of causes alone, which exists merely on account of the last effect, and is therefore demanded as its sufficient reason."^ The unconditioned is unthinkable; and Kant himself, of course, does not claim objective validity for the conception. He does, however, regard the demand of reason for the unconditioned as a regulative principle, "subjectively necessary. "^ The employment of reason in this sense, as the faculty which demands the unconditioned, offers Kant a great opportunity for satisfying his ideal of 'architectonic symmetry.' CHAPTER IV. from Tsanoff. Experience and Reality: The Will as the Thing-in-Itself. The Critical epistemology leads inevitably to the conclusion that all possible experience is phenomenal, i. e., that it has no meaning except in terms of knowledge and in reference to the knowing subject. This realization of the fundamentally subjective character of the phenonemal 'object,' Schopenhauer regards as "the theme of the 'Critique of Pure Reason.' "^ The organization of this subject-object world of possible experience is formulated by Kant in terms of the mechanical categories, to the exclusion of the teleological. This is the formal result of the 'Dialectic'. The rejection of the rationalistic solution of the teleological problem does not, however, do away with the problem itself. The 'practical' can have no real application in an experience conceived in purely mechanical terms; nevertheless, Kant is deeply impressed with the undeniable significance of the moral and aesthetic phases of experience, and with the inadequacy of the mechanical categories to explain these. His vindication of the real significance of the teleological categories is intimately connected with his justification of the notion of the thing-in-itself. A change of philosophical method is to be observed at this stage of Kant's exposition, which Schopenhauer interprets as follows. Kant does not affirm, clearly and distinctly, the absolute mutual dependence of subject and object in all possible experience. "He does not say, as truth required, simply and absolutely that the object is conditioned by the subject, and conversely, but only that the manner of appearance of the object is conditioned by the forms of knowledge of the subject, which^therefore, come a priori to consciousness. But that now which in opposition to this is only known a posteriori is for him the immediate effect of the thing in itself, which becomes phenom iG., II, p. 205; H.K., II, p. 381. 62 EXPERIENCE AND REALITY. 63 enon only in its passage through these forms which are given a priori/'^ And Kant fails to realize that "objectivity in general belongs to the forms of the phenomenon, and is just as much conditioned by subjectivity in general as the mode of appearing of the object is conditioned by the forms of knowledge of the subject; that thus if a thing in itself must be assumed, it absolutely cannot be an object, which however he always assumes it to be, but such a thing in itself must necessarily lie in a sphere toto genere different from the idea (from knowing and being known). "2 Schopenhauer criticises Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself in the same manner in which he had criticised his theory of the a priori character of the causal law. “Both doctrines are true, but their proof is false. "^ Kant argues that "the phenomenon, thus the visible world, must have a reason, an intelligible cause, which is not a phenomenon, and therefore belongs to no possible experience."^ But this is perverting entirely the meaning of the law of causality, which applies exclusively to relations between phenomenal changes, and can therefore in no way account for the phenomenal world as a hypostatized entity. This "incredible inconsistency "^ was early discerned by Kant's critics, especially by G. E. Schulze.® Schopenhauer explains it as due to Kant's irresistible desire to establish in some way the reality of the practical postulates, God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul, which he found himself unable to establish upon the speculative basis of rationalism. Making use of the distinction between theoretical and practical reason, he now transports the machinery of rational dogmatism into the practical sphere, and thus justifies the practical validity of the

Ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality in the world of possible experience, by maintaining their metaphysical validity in the supersensible world of things-in-themselves.

From Tschauscheff, p35: Schopenhauer kennt zwei Betätigungsformen der Kausalfunktion : eine reflektierendebewusste und eine intuitive-unbewusste. Es ist die zweite Form der Kausalität, die er in seiner Untersuchung im Auge hat, nicht die erste, die bei ihm gar nicht in Betracht kommt.- An diesem Ort tadelt er mit Recht an Kant, dass er die beiden Formen der Kausalität vermischt und nicht auseinandergehalten hat. Er sagt hier: „Kant hat die Vermittlung der empirischen Anschauung durch das uns vor aller Erfahrung bewusste Kausalitätsgesetz entweder nicht eingesehen, oder weil es zu seinen Absichten nicht passte geflissentlich umgangen" (S. v Gr., S. 96, ^ 2()V Schopenhauer zitiert ferner andere Belegstellen von Kants Kritik, um zu beweisen, dass Kant tatsächlich dem transzendentalen Realismus nahe gestanden hat. Er sagt hierzu : Nach Kant ist die „Wahrnehmung etwas ganz unmittel* V(>rij[l. Liol)miiiiii, „Kant und Epigonen'", S. 167. '' Volkelt, „Se-hop.'-. S. 102 11— 85 — bares, welches ohne alle Beihülfe des Kausalnexus und mithin des Verstandes zustande kommt; er identifiziert sie geradezu mit der Empfindung". Aus diesem Grunde kommt er zu der falschen Annahme, dass das Kausalgesetz als allein in der Reflexion, also in abstrakter, deutlicher Begriffserkenntnis vorhanden und möglich ist, hat daher keine Ahnung davon, dass die Anwendung desselben aller Reflexion vorhergeht, was doch offenbar der Fall ist, namentlich bei der empirischen Sinnesanschauung, an welche ausserdem nimmermehr zustande käme" (S. v. G., S. 97, ;- 21). ^ Das Hauptverdienst Schopenhauers besteht, um dies zu rekapitulieren, darin, dass er am schlagendsten den Nachweis führte, dass wir nur unter der Voraussetzung des Kausalnexus zu einer extramentalen Erkenntnis der Dinge kommen können. Das Kausalgesetz ist das Band, das die Sinnesempfindung mit der objektiven Anschauung verknüpft. Es ist gleichsam die Brücke, die uns von der Sphäre der Immanenz zu der Sphäre der Transzendenz hinüberführt.- In diesem Punkt hat Schopenhauer, wie Liebmann richtig bemerkt, Kant wirklich korrigiert.