The
Reality of Freedom
CHAPTER EIGHT
The
Factors of Life
LET
us recapitulate what we have achieved in the previous
chapters. The world faces man as a multiplicity, as a mass of
separate details. One of these separate things, one entity
among others, is man himself. This aspect of the world we
simply call the given, and inasmuch as we do not evolve it by
conscious activity, but just find it, we call it percept. Within
this world of percepts we perceive ourselves. This percept of
self would remain merely one among many other percepts, if
something did not arise from the midst of this percept of
self which proves capable of connecting all percepts with
one another and, therefore, the sum of all other percepts
with the percept of our own self. This something which
emerges is no longer merely percept; neither is it, like
percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. To
begin with, it appears to be bound up with what we perceive
as our own self. In its inner significance, however, it
transcends the self. To the separate percepts it adds ideally
determined elements, which, however, are related to one
another, and are rooted in a totality. What is obtained by
perception of self is ideally determined by this something in
the same way as are all other percepts, and is placed as
subject, or “I”, over against the objects. This something is
thinking, and the ideally determined elements are the concepts
and ideas. Thinking, therefore, first reveals itself in the
percept of the self. But it is not merely subjective, for the self
characterizes itself as subject only with the help of thinking.
This relationship in thought of the self to itself is what, in
life, determines our personality. Through it we lead a purely
ideal existence. Through it we feel ourselves to be thinking
beings. This determination of our life would remain a purely
conceptual (logical) one, if no other determinations of our
self were added to it. We should then be creatures whose
life was expended in establishing purely ideal relationships
between percepts among themselves and between them and
ourselves. If we call the establishment of such a thought
connection an “act of cognition”, and the resulting condition
of ourself “knowledge”, then, assuming the above supposition
to be true, we should have to consider ourselves as
beings who merely cognize or know.
The supposition, however, does not meet the case. We
relate percepts to ourselves not merely ideally, through
concepts, but also, as we have already seen, through feeling.
Therefore we are not beings with a merely conceptual
content to our life. In fact the naïve realist holds that the
personality lives more genuinely in the life of feeling than in
the purely ideal element of knowledge. From his point of
view he is quite right when he describes the matter in this
way. To begin with, feeling is exactly the same, on the
subjective side, as the percept is on the objective side. From
the basic principle of naïve realism — that everything that can
be perceived is real — it follows that feeling must be the
guarantee of the reality of one's own personality. Monism,
however, as here understood, must grant the same addition
to feeling that it considers necessary for percepts, if these are
to stand before us as full reality. Thus, for monism, feeling
is an incomplete reality, which, in the form in which it first
appears to us, does not yet contain its second factor, the
concept or idea. This is why, in actual life, feelings, like
percepts, appear prior to knowledge. At first, we have merely
a feeling of existence; and it is only in the course of our
gradual development that we attain to the point at which the
concept of self emerges from within the dim feeling of our
own existence. However, what for us appears only later, is
from the first indissolubly bound up with our feeling. This
is why the naïve man comes to believe that in feeling he is
presented with existence directly, in knowledge only
indirectly. The cultivation of the life of feeling, therefore,
appears to him more important than anything else. He will
only believe that he has grasped the pattern of the universe
when he has received it into his feeling. He attempts to make
feeling, rather than knowing, the instrument of knowledge.
Since a feeling is something entirely individual, something
equivalent to a percept, the philosopher of feeling is making
a universal principle out of something that has significance
only within his own personality. He attempts to permeate the
whole world with his own self. What the monist, in the sense
we have described, strives to grasp through concepts, the
philosopher of feeling tries to attain through feelings, and he
regards this kind of connection with the objects as the more
direct.
The tendency just described, the philosophy of feeling, is
often called mysticism. The error in a mystical outlook based
upon mere feeling is that it wants to experience directly
what it ought to gain through knowledge; that it wants
to raise feeling, which is individual, into a universal
principle.
Feeling is a purely individual affair; it is the relation of
the external world to ourself as subject, in so far as this
relation finds expression in a merely subjective experience.
There is yet another expression of human personality.
The I, through its thinking, shares the life of the world in
general. In this manner, in a purely ideal way (that is,
conceptually), it relates the percepts to itself, and itself to
the percepts. In feeling, it has direct experience of a relation
of the objects to itself as subject. In the will, the case is
reversed. In willing, we are concerned once more with a
percept, namely, that of the individual relation of our self
to what is objective. Whatever there is in willing that is not a
purely ideal factor, is just as much mere object of perception
as is any object in the external world.
Nevertheless, the naïve realist believes here again that he
has before him something far more real than can be attained
by thinking. He sees in the will an element in which he is
directly aware of an occurrence, a causation, in contrast with
thinking which only grasps the event afterwards in conceptual
form. According to such a view, what the I achieves
through its will is a process which is experienced directly.
The adherent of this philosophy believes that in the will he
has really got hold of the machinery of the world by one
corner. Whereas he can follow other occurrences only from
the outside by means of perception, he is confident that in
his will he experiences a real process quite directly. The
mode of existence in which the will appears within the self
becomes for him a concrete principle of reality. His own
will appears to him as a special case of the general world
process; hence the latter appears as universal will. The will
becomes the principle of the universe just as, in mysticism,
feeling becomes the principle of knowledge. This kind of
theory is called the philosophy of will (thelism). It makes
something that can be experienced only individually into a
constituent factor of the world.
The philosophy of will can as little be called scientific as
can the mysticism based on feeling. For both assert that the
conceptual understanding of the world is inadequate. Both
demand a principle of existence which is real, in addition to a
principle which is ideal. To a certain extent this is justified.
But since perceiving is our only means of apprehending these
so-called real principles, the assertion of both the mysticism
of feeling and the philosophy of will comes to the same thing
as saying that we have two sources of knowledge, thinking
and perceiving, the latter presenting itself as an individual
experience in feeling and will. Since the results that flow
from the one source, the experiences, cannot on this view be
taken up directly into those that flow from the other source,
thinking, the two modes of knowledge, perceiving and
thinking, remain side by side without any higher form of
mediation between them. Besides the ideal principle which
is accessible to knowledge, there is said to be a real principle
which cannot be apprehended by thinking but can yet be
experienced. In other words, the mysticism of feeling and the
philosophy of will are both forms of naïve realism, because
they subscribe to the doctrine that what is directly perceived
is real. Compared with naïve realism in its primitive form,
they are guilty of the yet further inconsistency of accepting
one particular form of perceiving (feeling or will, respectively)
as the one and only means of knowing reality, whereas
they can only do this at all if they hold in general to the
fundamental principle that what is perceived is real. But in
that case they ought to attach equal value, for the purposes
of knowledge, also to external perception.
The philosophy of will turns into metaphysical realism
when it places the element of will even into those spheres
of existence where it cannot be experienced directly, as it
can in the individual subject. It assumes, outside the subject,
a hypothetical principle for whose real existence the sole
criterion is subjective experience. As a form of metaphysical
realism, the philosophy of will is subject to the criticism
made in the preceding chapter, in that it has to get over the
contradictory stage inherent in every form of metaphysical
realism, and must acknowledge that the will is a universal
world process only in so far as it is ideally related to the rest
of the world.
Author's addition, 1918
The difficulty of grasping the essential nature of thinking
by observation lies in this, that it has all too easily eluded the
introspecting soul by the time the soul tries to bring it into
the focus of attention. Nothing then remains to be inspected
but the lifeless abstraction, the corpse of the living thinking.
If we look only at this abstraction, we may easily find ourselves
compelled to enter into the mysticism of feeling or
perhaps the metaphysics of will, which by contrast appear so
“full of life”. We should then find it strange that anyone
should expect to grasp the essence of reality in “mere
thoughts”. But if we once succeed in really finding life in
thinking, we shall know that swimming in mere feelings, or
being intuitively aware of the will element, cannot even be
compared with the inner wealth and the self-sustaining yet
ever moving experience of this life of thinking, let alone be
ranked above it. It is owing precisely to this wealth, to this
inward abundance of experience, that the counter-image of
thinking which presents itself to our ordinary attitude of
soul should appear lifeless and abstract. No other activity of
the human soul is so easily misunderstood as thinking. Will
and feeling still fill the soul with warmth even when we live
through the original event again in retrospect. Thinking all
too readily leaves us cold in recollection; it is as if the life
of the soul had dried out. Yet this is really nothing but the
strongly marked shadow of its real nature — warm, luminous,
and penetrating deeply into the phenomena of the world.
This penetration is brought about by a power flowing
through the activity of thinking itself — the power of love in
its spiritual form. There are no grounds here for the
objection that to discern love in the activity of thinking is to
project into thinking a feeling, namely, love. For in truth this
objection is but a confirmation of what we have been saying.
If we turn towards thinking in its essence, we find in it both
feeling and will, and these in the depths of their reality; if
we turn away from thinking towards “mere” feeling and will,
we lose from these their true reality. If we are ready to
experience thinking intuitively, we can also do justice to the
experience of feeling and of will; but the mysticism of feeling
and the metaphysics of will are not able to do justice to the
penetration of reality by intuitive thinking — they conclude
all too readily that they themselves are rooted in reality, but
that the intuitive thinker, devoid of feeling and a stranger to
reality, forms out of “abstract thoughts” a shadowy, chilly
picture of the world.
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