14. The Ground of Things and the Activity of Knowing
Kant, insofar as he directed the human being back upon himself,
achieved a great step in philosophy. The human being should seek the
grounds of certainty for his beliefs in what is given to him in his
spiritual abilities and not in truths forced upon him from outside.
Scientific conviction through oneself alone, that is the slogan of
Kantian philosophy. He therefore called it above all a critical
philosophy in contrast to a dogmatic one that receives fixed beliefs
from tradition and afterward seeks proofs for them. With this, an
antithesis of two scientific directions is given; but this antithesis
was not thought through by Kant as keenly as it could have been.
Let us look more exactly at the way a scientific postulate can arise.
A postulate joins two things: either a concept with a perception, or
two concepts. A postulate of the latter kind is, for example: there is
no effect without a cause. Now, the factual reasons for two concepts
flowing together can lie beyond what they themselves contain and
therefore beyond what alone is given me. I may then also have some
formal reasons (logical consistency, particular axioms) for arriving
at a particular combination of thoughts. But these have no influence
upon the thing itself. The postulate rests upon something that I can
never reach factually. A real insight into the thing is therefore not
possible for me; I know about it only as an outsider. Here, what the
postulate speaks of is in a world not known to me; the postulate alone
is in my world. This is the nature of dogma. There are two kinds of
dogma: the dogma of revelation and that of experience. The
first kind passes down to man in one way or another truths about things that
are withheld from his view. He has no insight into the world from which
the postulates spring. He must believe in their truth; he has no
access to their basis. The situation with the dogma of experience is
quite similar. Someone who believes he should stick to bare, pure
experience and can observe only its changes, without penetrating to
its causal forces, is also setting up postulates about a world whose
basis is inaccessible to him. Here too the truth is not attained
through insight into the inner workings of the things, but rather is
imposed by something external to the thing itself. Whereas the dogma
of revelation ruled earlier science, present-day science suffers from
the dogma of experience.
Our view has shown that any assumption about some ground of being that
lies outside of the idea is nonsense. The entire ground of being has
poured itself into the world and has merged with it. In thinking, the
ground of being shows itself in its most perfect form, as it is in and
for itself. If thinking therefore makes a connection, forms a judgment,
it is the very content of the ground of the world itself, having flowed into
thinking, that is connected. In thinking, postulates are not given to
us about some ground of the world in the beyond; rather the ground of
the world, in its very substance, has flowed into thinking. We have
direct insight into the factual grounds, not merely the formal
grounds, for why a judgment takes place. The judgment does not
determine anything about something foreign to it but only about its
own content. Our view, therefore, establishes a true knowing. Our
epistemology is really critical. According to our view, not only must
nothing be allowed in, with respect to revelation, for which there are
no factual grounds within thinking; but also experience must be
recognized not only from the aspect of its manifestation, but also
within thinking, as something causative. Through our thinking we lift
ourselves from the view of reality as a product to a view of reality
as something that produces.
Thus the essential being of a thing comes to light only when the thing
is brought into relationship with the human being. For only within the
human being does there manifest for each thing its essential being.
This establishes relativism as a world view, that is, the direction in
thought that assumes we see all things in the light bestowed upon them
by human beings themselves. This view also bears the name
anthropomorphism. It has many adherents. The majority of them,
however, believe that this characteristic of our activity of knowing
takes us away from objectivity as it is in and for itself. We perceive
everything, so they believe, through the glasses of subjectivity. Our
view shows us the exact opposite of this. We must look at things
through these glasses if we want to come to their essential being. The
world is not known to us only in the way it manifests to us, but
rather it manifests as it is, although only to thinking contemplation.
The form of reality that the human being produces in science is the
ultimate, true form of reality.
Now it is still our task to extend into the individual realms of
reality the way of knowing we have recognized as the correct one,
i.e., the one that leads to the essential being of reality. We will
now show how, in individual forms of experience, their essential being
is to be sought.
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