At the beginning of an epistemological inquiry we must, in accordance
with the conclusions we have reached, put aside everything which we
have come to know. For, knowledge is something which man has produced,
something which he has originated by his activity. If the Theory of
Knowledge is really to extend the light of its explanation over the
whole field of what we know, it must set out from a point which has
remained wholly untouched by cognitive activity--indeed which rather
furnishes the first impulse for this activity. The point at which
we must start lies outside of what we know. It cannot as yet itself
be an item of knowledge. But we must look for it immediately prior
to the act of cognition, so that the very next step which man takes
shall be a cognitive act. The method for determining this absolutely
first starting-point must be such that nothing enters into it which
is already the result of cognitive activity.
There is nothing but the immediately-given world-picture with which
we can make a start of this sort. This means the picture of the world
which is presented to man before he has in any way transformed it by
cognitive activity, i.e., before he has made the very least judgment
about it or submitted it to the very smallest determination by
thinking. What thus passes initially through our minds and what
our minds pass through--this incoherent picture which is not yet
differentiated into particular elements, in which nothing seems
distinguished from, nothing related to, nothing determined by, anything
else, this is the Immediately-Given. On this level of existence--if the
phrase is permissible--no object, no event, is as yet more important or
more significant than any other. The rudimentary organ of an animal,
which, in the light of the knowledge belonging to a higher level of
existence, is perhaps seen to be without any importance whatever for
the development and life of the animal, comes before us with the same
claim to our attention as the noblest and most necessary part of the
organism. Prior to all cognitive activity nothing in our picture of
the world appears as substance, nothing as quality, nothing as cause
or as effect. The contrasts of matter and spirit, of body and soul,
have not yet arisen. Every other predicate, too, must be kept away
from the world-picture presented at this level. We may think of it
neither as reality nor as appearance, neither as subjective nor as
objective, neither as necessary nor as contingent. We cannot decide
at this stage whether it is "thing-in-itself" or mere "idea." For, we
have seen already that the conclusions of Physics and Physiology, which
lead us to subsume the Given under one or other of the above heads,
must not be made the basis on which to build the Theory of Knowledge.
Suppose a being with fully-developed human intelligence were to
be suddenly created out of Nothing and confronted with the world,
the first impression made by the world on his senses and his thought
would be pretty much what we have here called the immediately-given
world-picture. Of course, no actual man at any moment of his life has
nothing but this original world-picture before him. In his mental
development there is nowhere a sharp line between pure, passive
reception of the Given from without and the cognitive apprehension of
it by Thought. This fact might suggest critical doubts concerning
our method of determining the starting-point of the Theory of
Knowledge. Thus, e.g., Eduard von Hartmann remarks: "We do not ask
what is the content of consciousness of a child just awakening to
conscious life, nor of an animal on the lowest rung of the ladder of
organisms. For, of these things philosophising man has no experience,
and, if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings
on primitive biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he cannot but base his
conclusions on his own personal experience. Hence, our first task is to
determine what is the content of consciousness which philosophising man
discovers in himself when he begins his philosophical reflection." [47]
But, the objection to this view is that the picture of the world
with which we begin philosophical reflection, is already qualified by
predicates which are the results solely of knowledge. We have no right
to accept these predicates without question. On the contrary, we must
carefully extract them from out of the world-picture, in order that
it may appear in its purity without any admixture due to the process
of cognition. In general, the dividing line between what is given
and what is added by cognition cannot be identified with any single
moment of human development, but must be drawn artificially. But this
can be done at every level of development, provided only we divide
correctly what is presented to us prior to cognition, without any
determination by thinking, from what is made of it by cognition.
Now, it may be objected that we have already piled up a whole
host of thought-determinations in the very process of extracting
the alleged primitive world-picture out of the complete picture
into which man's cognitive elaboration has transformed it. But, in
defence we must urge that all our conceptual apparatus was employed,
not for the characterisation of the primitive world-picture, nor
for the determination of its qualities, but solely for the guidance
of our analysis, in order to lead it to the point where knowledge
recognises that it began. Hence, there can be no question of the
truth or error, correctness or incorrectness, of the reflections
which, according to our view, precede the moment which brings us
to the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge. Their purpose is
solely to guide us conveniently to that point. Nobody who is about to
occupy himself with epistemological problems, stands at the same time
at what we have rightly called the starting-point of knowledge, for
his knowledge is already, up to a certain degree, developed. Nothing
but analysis with the help of concepts enables us to eliminate from
our developed knowledge all the gains of cognitive activity and to
determine the starting-point which precedes all such activity. But
the concepts thus employed have no cognitive value. They have the
purely negative task to eliminate out of our field of vision whatever
is the result of cognitive activity and to lead us to the point where
this activity first begins. The present discussions point the way to
those primitive beginnings upon which the cognitive activity sets to
work, but they form no part of such activity. Thus, whatever Theory of
Knowledge has to say in the process of determining the starting-point,
must be judged, not as true or false, but only as fit or unfit for this
purpose. Error is excluded, too, from that starting-point itself. For,
error can begin only with the activity of cognition; prior to this,
it cannot occur.
This last proposition is compatible only with the kind of Theory of
Knowledge which sets out from our line of thought. For, a theory which
sets out from some object (or subject) with a definite conceptual
determination is liable to error from the very start, viz., in this
very determination. Whether this determination is justified or not,
depends on the laws which the cognitive act establishes. This is
a question to which only the course of the epistemological inquiry
itself can supply the answer. All error is excluded only when I can
say that I have eliminated all conceptual determinations which are
the results of my cognitive activity, and that I retain nothing but
what enters the circle of my experience without any activity on my
part. Where, on principle, I abstain from every positive affirmation,
there I cannot fall into error.
From the epistemological point of view, error can occur only within
the sphere of cognitive activity. An illusion of the senses is no
error. The fact that the rising moon appears to us bigger than the
moon overhead is not an error, but a phenomenon fully explained by the
laws of nature. An error would result only, if thought, in ordering
the data of perception, were to put a false interpretation on the
"bigger" or "smaller" size of the moon. But such an interpretation
would lie within the sphere of cognitive activity.
If knowledge is really to be understood in its essential nature,
we must, without doubt, begin our study of it at the point where
it originates, where it starts. Moreover, it is clear that whatever
precedes its starting-point has no legitimate place in any explanatory
Theory of Knowledge, but must simply be taken for granted. It is
the task of science, in its several branches, to study the essential
nature of all that we are here taking for granted. Our aim, here, is
not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that, but to investigate
knowledge as such. We must first understand the act of cognition,
before we can judge what significance to attach to the affirmations
about the content of the world which come to be made in the process
of getting to know that content.
For this reason, we abstain from every attempt to determine what is
immediately-given, so long as we are ignorant of the relation of our
determinations to what is determined by them. Not even the concept of
the "immediately-given" affirms any positive determination of what
precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point towards the Given,
to direct our attention upon it. Here, at the starting-point of the
Theory of Knowledge, the term merely expresses, in conceptual form, the
initial relation of the cognitive activity to the world-content. The
choice of this term allows even for the case that the whole
world-content should turn out to be nothing but a figment of our own
"Ego," i.e., that the most extreme subjectivism should be right. For,
of course, subjectivism does not express a fact which is given. It can,
at best, be only the result of theoretical considerations. Its truth,
in other words, needs to be established by the Theory of Knowledge. It
cannot serve as the presupposition of that theory.
This immediately-given world-content includes everything which can
appear within the horizon of our experience, in the widest sense of
this term, viz., sensations, percepts, intuitions, feelings, volitions,
dreams, fancies, representations, concepts, ideas.
Illusions, too, and hallucinations stand at this level exactly on
a par with other elements of the world-content. Only theoretical
considerations can teach us in what relations illusions, etc., stand
to other percepts.
A Theory of Knowledge which starts from the assumption that all the
experiences just enumerated are contents of our consciousness,
finds itself confronted at once by the question: How do we
transcend our consciousness so as to apprehend reality? Where is
the jumping-board which will launch us from the subjective into the
trans-subjective? For us, the situation is quite different. For us,
consciousness and the idea of the "Ego" are, primarily, only items
in the Immediately-Given, and the relation of the latter to the two
former has first to be discovered by knowledge. We do not start from
consciousness in order to determine the nature of knowledge, but, vice
versa, we start from knowledge in order to determine consciousness
and the relation of subject to object. Seeing that, at the outset,
we attach no predicates whatever to the Given, we are bound to ask:
How is it that we are able to determine it at all? How is it possible
to start knowledge anywhere at all? How do we come to designate one
item of the world-content, as, e.g., percept, another as concept,
a third as reality, others as appearance, as cause, as effect? How
do we come to differentiate ourselves from what is "objective,"
and to contrast "Ego" and "Non-Ego?"
We must discover the bridge which leads from the picture of the
world as given to the picture of it which our cognitive activity
unfolds. But the following difficulty confronts us. So long as we do
nothing but passively gaze at the Given, we can nowhere find a point
which knowledge can take hold of and from which it can develop its
interpretations. Somewhere in the Given we must discover the spot
where we can get to work, where something homogeneous to cognition
meets us. If everything were merely given, we should never get beyond
the bare gazing outwards into the external world and a no less bare
gazing inwards into the privacy of our inner world. We should, at most,
be able to describe, but never to understand, the objects outside of
us. Our concepts would stand in a purely external, not in an internal,
relation to that to which they apply. If there is to be knowledge,
everything depends on there being, somewhere within the Given, a field
in which our cognitive activity does not merely presuppose the Given,
but is at work in the very heart of the Given itself. In other words,
the very strictness with which we hold fast the Given, as merely
given, must reveal that not everything is given. Our demand for the
Given turns out to have been one which, in being strictly maintained,
partially cancels itself. We have insisted on the demand, lest we
should arbitrarily fix upon some point as the starting-point of the
Theory of Knowledge, instead of making a genuine effort to discover
it. In our sense of the word "given," everything may be given, even
what in its own innermost nature is not given. That is to say, the
latter presents itself, in that case, to us purely formally as given,
but reveals itself, on closer inspection, for what it really is.
The whole difficulty in understanding knowledge lies in that we do
not create the world-content out of ourselves. If we did so create
it, there would be no knowledge at all. Only objects which are given
can occasion questions for me. Objects which I create receive their
determinations by my act. Hence, I do not need to ask whether these
determinations are true or false.
This, then, is the second point in our Theory of Knowledge. It
consists in the postulate that there must, within the sphere of the
Given, be a point at which our activity does not float in a vacuum,
at which the world-content itself enters into our activity.
We have already determined the starting-point of the Theory of
Knowledge by assigning it a place wholly antecedent to all cognitive
activity, lest we should distort that activity by some prejudice
borrowed from among its own results. Now we determine the first step
in the development of our knowledge in such a way that, once more,
there can be no question of error or incorrectness. For, we affirm no
judgment about anything whatsoever, but merely state the condition
which must be fulfilled if knowledge is to be acquired at all. It
is all-important that we should, with the most complete critical
self-consciousness, keep before our minds the fact that we are
postulating the very character which that part of the world-content
must possess on which our cognitive activity can begin to operate.
Nothing else is, in fact, possible. As given, the world-content is
wholly without determinations. No part of it can by itself furnish
the impulse for order to begin to be introduced into the chaos. Hence,
cognitive activity must issue its edict and declare what the character
of that part is to be. Such an edict in no way infringes the character
of the Given as such. It introduces no arbitrary affirmation into
science. For, in truth, it affirms nothing. It merely declares that,
if the possibility of knowledge is to be explicable at all, we need
to look for a field like the one above described. If there is such a
field, knowledge can be explained; if not, not. We began our Theory
of Knowledge with the "Given" as a whole; now we limit our requirement
to the singling out of a particular field within the Given.
Let us come to closer grips with this requirement. Where within
the world-picture do we find something which is not merely given,
but is given only in so far as it is at the same time created by the
cognitive activity?
We need to be absolutely clear that this creative activity must, in
its turn, be given to us in all its immediacy. No inferences must be
required in order to know that it occurs. Thence it follows, at once,
that sense-data do not meet our requirement. For, the fact that they
do not occur without our activity is known to us, not immediately,
but as an inference from physical and physiological arguments. On the
other hand, we do know immediately that it is only in and through the
cognitive act that concepts and ideas enter into the sphere of the
Immediately-Given. Hence, no one is deceived concerning the character
of concepts and ideas. It is possible to mistake a hallucination for an
object given from without, but no one is ever likely to believe that
his concepts are given without the activity of his own thinking. A
lunatic will regard as real, though they are in fact unreal, only
things and relations which have attached to them the predicate of
"actuality," but he will never say of his concepts and ideas that they
have come into the world without his activity. Everything else in our
world-picture is such that it must be given, if it is to be experienced
by us. Only of our concepts and ideas is the opposite true: they must
be produced by us, if they are to be experienced. They, and only they,
are given in a way which might be called intellectual intuition. Kant
and the modern philosophers who follow him deny altogether that man
possesses this kind of intuition, on the ground that all our thinking
refers solely to objects and is absolutely impotent to produce anything
out of itself, whereas in intellectual intuition form and matter must
be given together. But, is not precisely this actually the case with
pure concepts and ideas? [48] To see this, we must consider them purely
in the form in which, as yet, they are quite free from all empirical
content. In order, e.g., to comprehend the pure concept of causality,
we must go, not to a particular instance of causality nor to the sum
of all instances, but to the pure concept itself. Particular causes
and effects must be discovered by investigation in the world, but
causality as a Form of Thought must be created by ourselves before we
can discover causes in the world. If we hold fast to Kant's thesis
that concepts without percepts are empty, it becomes unintelligible
how the determination of the Given by concepts is to be possible. For,
suppose there are given two items of the world-content, a and b. In
order to find a relation between them, I must be guided in my search
by a rule of determinate content. Such a rule I can only create in the
act of cognition itself. I cannot derive it from the object, because
it is only with the help of the rule that the object is to receive
its determinations. Such a rule, therefore, for the determination of
the real has its being wholly in purely conceptual form.
Before passing on, we must meet a possible objection. It might seem as
if in our argument we had unconsciously assigned a prominent part to
the idea of the "Ego," or the "personal subject," and as if we employed
this idea in the development of our line of thought, without having
established our right to do so. For example, we have said that "we
produce concepts," or that "we make this or that demand." But these
are mere forms of speech which play no part in our argument. That
the cognitive act is the act of, and originates in, an "Ego," can,
as we have already pointed out, be affirmed only as an inference in
the process of knowledge itself. Strictly, we ought at the outset
to speak only of cognitive activity without so much as mentioning a
cognitive agent. For, all that has been established so far amounts
to no more than this, (1) that something is "given," and (2) that
at a certain point within the "given" there originates the postulate
set forth above; also, that concepts and ideas are the entities which
answer to that postulate. This is not to deny that the point at which
the postulate originates is the "Ego." But, in the first instance,
we are content to establish these two steps in the Theory of Knowledge
in their abstract purity.
V