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VI
Correction of an
Erroneous Conception of Experience As a Totality
(See Exposition on Brief, Chapter 6)
T
HIS IS
the proper point at which to refer to a preconception,
persisting since the time of Kant, which has been so absorbed
into the very life of certain circles as to pass for an axiom.
Whoever should presume to question it would be considered a
dilettante, a person not yet advanced beyond the most
rudimentary concepts of modern philosophy. I refer to the
opinion, held as if it were establisheda priori,
that the whole perceptual world, this endless
multiplicity of colors and forms, of tones and degrees of heat, were
nothing more than our subjective world of representations,
[Vorstellungswelt]
possessing existence only so long as we keep our senses receptive to
the influences from a world quite unknown to us. The whole phenomenal
world is interpreted on the basis of this opinion, as a
representation (Vorstellung)
inside our individual consciousness; and, on the basis of this
hypothesis, are constructed further assertions regarding the nature
of cognition. Volkelt also has adopted this
opinion and bases upon it his theory of knowledge, a masterly
production in its scientific process of development. Yet this is no
basic truth, and least of all is it appropriate to form the
very culmination of the science of
knowledge.
We
would not be misunderstood. We have no desire to utter a protest
— which would certainly be futile — against the
contemporary achievements in physiology. But what is wholly
justified as physiology is by no means for that
reason appropriate to be set up before the very gateway leading to a
theory of knowledge. It may pass as an unassailable physiological
truth that the complex of sensations and percepts which we call
experience first comes into existence through the cooperation of our
organism. Yet it remains quite certain that such an item of knowledge
as this can result only from much reflection and research. This
characterization — that our phenomenal world is, in a
physiological sense, of a subjective character — is itself a
characterization of that world reached by thinking, and has,
therefore, nothing whatever to do with its first manifestation. It
presupposes the application of thinking to experience. It must,
therefore, be preceded by an inquiry as to the interrelationship
between the two factors in the act of
cognition.
(See Notes to the New Edition, 1924, page 24)
It is supposed that this opinion raises one above the pre-Kantian
naïveté,
which considered the
things in space and in time as constituting reality, as is
still done by the “naïve” person who has no scientific
training.
Volkelt makes the assertion:
“All acts that call themselves objective cognitions are
inseparably bound up with the individual cognizing consciousness;
they take their course at first and immediately nowhere else than
in the consciousness of the individual; and they are utterly
incapable of reaching beyond the sphere of the individual and
laying hold of the sphere of the real lying outside, or of entering
it.”
[Cf. Volkelt: Erfahrung und Denken, p. 4.]
But it is quite
impossible for unprejudiced thought to discover what that form of
reality which touches us directly (experience) bears within itself
that could in any way justify us in designating it as mere
representation.
Even the simple
reflection that the “naïve” person observes in things
nothing which could lead him to this opinion teaches us that no
compelling reason for this assumption exists in things themselves.
What does a tree, a table, bear within itself that could lead me to
look upon it as a mere mental image? This should not, then, be
asserted — least of all as a self-evident
truth.
Just because Volkelt does
this, he entangles himself in a contradiction of his
fundamental principles. According to our conviction, he could
maintain the subjective nature of experience only by being disloyal
to the truth recognized by him, that experience consists of
nothing but an unrelated chaos of images without any thinkable
definition. Otherwise he would have been forced to see that the
cognizing subject, the observer, is just as unrelated within the
world of experience as is any other object belonging to it. But, if
one predicates subjectivity of the world of experience, this is at
once a thought-characterization, just as if one looks upon a falling
stone as the cause of an impression made in the ground. Yet
Volkelt himself will not admit any sort of interrelationships among the
things of experience. Here lies the inconsistency in his conception;
here he becomes disloyal to the principle he has expressed regarding
pure experience. Through this he shuts himself up within his
individuality, and is no longer capable of emerging. Indeed, he
admits this without reservation. Everything that lies beyond the
disconnected images of perception remains for him in
uncertainty. Our thinking, to be sure, endeavors according to his
view to reach out from this world of mental images and infer an
objective reality, but our going out beyond this world cannot lead to
really known truths. All knowledge that we win by means of
thinking is, according to Volkelt, not protected against
doubt. It does not by any means attain to a certitude like that of
immediate experience. This alone affords an indubitable knowledge. We
have seen how defective is this knowledge.
But all this grows out of the fact
that Volkelt
attributes to sense-reality (experience) a
characteristic which can by no means pertain thereto, and on
this presupposition bases his further
assumptions.
It has been
necessary to give special attention to this writing of Volkelt's
because it is the most important contemporary work in this field, and
also for the reason that it may serve as a typical specimen of all
endeavors after a theory of knowledge which are in basic opposition
to the direction of thinking that we represent, founded upon Goethe's
world-conception.
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