Our thinking has a twofold task: firstly, to create concepts with
sharply delineated contours; secondly, to bring together the
individual concepts thus created into a unified whole. In the first
case we are dealing with the activity that makes distinctions; in the
second, with the activity that joins. These two spiritual tendencies
by no means enjoy the same cultivation in the sciences. The keen
intellect that enters into the smallest details in making its
distinctions is given to a significantly larger number of people than
the uniting power of thinking that penetrates into the depths of
beings.
For a long time one saw the only task of science to be the making of
exact distinctions between things. We need only recall the state of
affairs in which Goethe found natural history. Through Linnaeus it had
become the ideal to seek the exact differences between individual
plants in order in this way to be able to use the most insignificant
characteristics to set up new species and subspecies. Two kinds of
animals or plants that differed in only the most inessential things
were assigned right away to different species. If an unexpected
deviation from the arbitrarily established character of the species
was found in one or another creature that until then had been assigned
to one or another species, one did not then reflect how such a
deviation could be explained from this character itself; one simply
set up a new species.
Making distinctions like this is the task of the intellect
(Verstand). It has only to separate concepts and maintain
them in this separation. This is a necessary preliminary stage of any
higher scientific work. Above all, in fact, we need firmly
established, clearly delineated concepts before we can seek their
harmony. But we must not remain in this separation. For the intellect,
things are separated that humanity has an essential need to see in a
harmonious unity. Remaining separate for the intellect are: cause and
effect, mechanism and organism, freedom and necessity, idea and
reality, spirit and nature, and so on. All these distinctions are
introduced by the intellect. They must be introduced, because
otherwise the world would appear to us as a blurred, obscure chaos
that would form a unity only because it would be totally undefined
for us.
The intellect itself is in no position to go beyond this separation.
It holds firmly to the separated parts.
To go beyond this is the task
of reason (Vernunft). It has to allow the concepts created by
the intellect to pass over into one another. It has to show that what
the intellect keeps strictly separated is actually an inner unity. The
separation is something brought about artificially, a necessary
intermediary stage for our activity of knowing, not its conclusion. A
person who grasps reality in a merely intellectual way distances
himself from it. He sets in reality's place — since it is in
truth a unity — an artificial multiplicity, a manifoldness that
has nothing to do with the essential being of reality.
The conflict that has arisen between an intellectually motivated
science and the human heart stems from this. Many people whose
thinking is not yet developed enough for them to arrive at a unified
world view grasped in full conceptual clarity are, nevertheless, very
well able to penetrate into the inner harmony of the universe with
their feeling. Their hearts give them what reason offers the
scientifically developed person.
When such people meet the intellectual view of the world, they reject
with scorn the infinite multiplicity and cling to the unity that they
do not know, indeed, but that they feel more or less intensely. They
see very well that the intellect withdraws from nature, that it loses
sight of the spiritual bond joining the parts of reality.
Reason leads back to reality again. The unity of all existence, which
before was felt or of which one even had only dim inklings,
is clearly penetrated and seen by reason. The intellectual view must be
deepened by the view of reason. If the former is regarded as an end in
itself instead of as a necessary intermediary stage, then it does not
yield reality but rather a distorted image of it.
There are sometimes difficulties in connecting the thoughts that the
intellect has created. The history of science provides us with many
proofs of this. We often see the human spirit struggle to bridge the
differences created by the intellect.
In reason's view of the world the human being merges with the world in
undivided unity.
Kant pointed already to the difference between intellect and reason.
He designated reason as the ability to perceive ideas; the intellect,
on the other hand, is limited merely to beholding the world in its
dividedness, in its separateness.
Now reason is, in fact, the ability to perceive ideas. Here we must
determine the difference between concept and idea, to which we have
hitherto paid no attention. For our purposes until now it has only
been a matter of finding those qualities of the element of thought
that present themselves in concept and idea. The concept is the single
thought as it is grasped and held by the intellect. If I bring a
number of such single thoughts into living flux in such a way that
they pass over into one another, connect with one another, then
thought-configurations arise that are present only for reason, that
the intellect cannot attain. For reason, the creations of the
intellect give up their separate existences and live on only as
part of a totality. These configurations that reason has created shall
be called ideas.
The fact that the idea leads a multiplicity of the concepts created by
the intellect back to a unity was also expressed by Kant. But he
presented the configurations that come to manifestation through reason
as mere deceptive images, as illusions that the human spirit eternally
conjures up because it is eternally striving to find some unity to
experience that is never to be found. According to Kant, the unities
created in ideas do not rest upon objective circumstances; they do not
flow from the things themselves; rather they are merely subjective
norms by which we bring order into our knowing. Kant therefore does
not characterize ideas as constitutive principles, which would have to
be essential to the things, but rather as regulative principles, which
have meaning and significance only for the systematics of our
knowing.
If one looks at the way in which ideas come about, however, this view
immediately proves erroneous. It is indeed correct that subjective
reason has the need for unity. But this need is without any content;
it is an empty striving for unity. If something confronts it that is
absolutely lacking in any unified nature, it cannot itself produce
this unity out of itself. If, on the other hand, a multiplicity
confronts it that allows itself to be led back into an inner harmony,
it then brings about this harmony. The world of concepts created by
the intellect is just such a multiplicity.
Reason does not presuppose any particular unity but rather the empty
form of unification; reason is the ability to bring harmony to light
when harmony lies within the object itself. Within reason, the
concepts themselves combine into ideas. Reason brings into view the
higher unity of the intellect's concepts, a unity that the intellect
certainly has in its configurations but is unable to see. The fact
that this is overlooked is the basis of many misunderstandings about
the application of reason in the sciences.
To a small degree every science, even at its starting point —
yes, even our everyday thinking — needs reason. If, in the
judgment that every body has weight, we join the subject-concept with
the predicate-concept, there already lies in this a uniting of two
concepts and therefore the simplest activity of reason.
The unity that reason takes as its object is certain before all
thinking, before any use of reason; but it is hidden, is present only
as potential, does not manifest as a fact in its own right. Then the
human spirit brings about separation, in order, by uniting the
separate parts through reason, to see fully into reality.
Whoever does not presuppose this must either regard all connecting of
thoughts as an arbitrary activity of the subjective spirit, or he must
assume that the unity stands behind the world experienced by us and
compels us in some way unknown to us to lead the manifoldness back to
a unity. In that case we join thoughts without insight into the true
basis of the connection that we bring about; then the truth is not
known by us, but rather is forced upon us from outside. Let us call
all science taking its start from this presupposition dogmatic. We
will still have to come back to this.
Every scientific view of this kind will run into difficulty when it
has to give reasons for why we make one or another connection between
thoughts. It has to look around for a subjective basis for drawing
objects together whose objective connection remains hidden to us. Why
do I make a judgment, if the thing which demands that subject-concept
and predicate-concept belong together has nothing to do with the
making of this judgment?
Kant made this question the starting point of his critical work. At
the beginning of his
Critique of Pure Reason
we find the question: How are synthetical judgments possible a priori? —
this means, how is it possible for me to join two concepts (subject,
predicate), if the content of the one is not already contained in the
other, and if the judgment is not merely a perception judgment, i.e.,
the establishing of an individual fact? Kant believes that such
judgments are possible only if experience can exist only under the
presumption of their validity. The possibility of experience is
therefore the determining factor for us if we are to make a judgment
of this kind. If I can say to myself that experience is possible only
if one or another synthetical judgment is true a priori, only then is
the judgment valid. But this does not apply to ideas themselves. For
Kant these do not have even this degree of objectivity.
Kant finds that the principles of mathematics and of pure natural
science are such valid synthetical principles a priori. He takes, for
example, the principle that 7 + 5 = 12. In 7 and 5 the sum 12 is in no
way contained, concludes Kant. I must go beyond 7 and 5 and call upon
my intuition;
[
Anschauung — “Intuition” is the conventional
translation of Kant's Anschauang. — Ed.
]
then I find the concept 12. My intuition makes it
necessary for me to picture that 7 + 5 = 12. But the objects of my
experience must approach me through the medium of my intuition, must
submit to the laws of my intuition. If experience is to be possible,
such principles must be correct.
This entire artificial thought-edifice of Kant does not stand up to
objective examination. It is impossible that I have absolutely no
point of reference in the subject-concept which leads me to the
predicate-concept. For, both concepts were won by my intellect, and
won from something that in itself is unified. Let us not deceive
ourselves here. The mathematical unit that underlies the number is not
primary. What is primary is the magnitude, which is so and so many
repetitions of the unit. I must presuppose a magnitude when I speak of
a unit. The unit is an entity of our intellect separated by the
intellect out of a totality, in the same way that it distinguishes
effect from cause, substance from its attributes, etc. Now, when I
think 7 + 5, I am in fact grasping 12 mathematical units in thought,
only not all at once, but rather in two parts. If I think the total of
these mathematical units at one time, then that is exactly the same
thing. And I express this identity in the judgment 7 + 5 = 12. It is
exactly the same with the geometrical example Kant presents. A limited
straight line with end points A and B is an indivisible unit. My intellect
can form two concepts of it. On the one hand it can regard the straight
line as direction, on the other as the distance between two
points A and B. From this results the judgment that a straight line is
the shortest distance between two points.
All judging, insofar as the parts entering into the judgment are
concepts, is nothing more than a reuniting of what the intellect has
separated. The connection reveals itself at once when one goes into
the content of the concepts provided by the intellect.
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