My Son:
If on my return from some voyage I were to tell you of all the things I
have _not_ seen, you would justly doubt the order of my senses. Sane
reason demands that the description of unfamiliar things be given in a
positive, not in a negative manner. If that is so, is it not wrong to
proceed negatively by trying to prove in explaining the nature of the
intellect that it is not a miracle and no mysterious charm of wisdom? I
answer: No. For the present, the intellect is still a sort of _ignis
fatuus_ which is magnified into a fiery man. In order to understand the
_ignis fatuus_, it is necessary to remove the fiery man. Logic must show
that human reason is not a miracle, not a mystical receptacle of wisdom.
The negative process is in such a case positively in order. Wherever a
thing is obscured by prejudices, these must first be removed, in order
that room may be made for the bare fact.
It was the famous Kant who posed the question: "How is _a priori_
knowledge possible?" How do we arrive at the knowledge of things which
are not accessible to experience? The answer is that the intellect
cannot accomplish such a miracle, and Kant substantiates this in a
long-winded way and with admirable penetration. But he left a nasty hair
in the soup.
He found that by the help of our reason we can explain only phenomena.
The confusion between truth and phenomena had been handed down to him as
an infirmity of ancient times. He worked diligently on its solution, but
left some work for those coming after him. Originally the study of
supernatural and the profane study of natural things were closely
intermingled. Not until the obvious results of natural science became
known, did thinkers accommodate themselves to the habit of leaving
supernatural things to faith and limiting science to the study of
natural phenomena. Science had so to say passed on to the practical
order of business, not paying any further attention to the contrast
between phenomena and truth. But the logic, which is innate in the human
mind, cannot content itself with the dualistic split between faith and
science. It demands a monistic system and does not desist until the
primeval forests of faith are completely put under cultivation.
The logical impulse of culture caused Kant to continue what was begun by
Socrates. Philosophy before Socrates searched for truth externally.
While our logic teaches that everything is true, and truth is the
universe, the Ionic philosophers made a sort of fetish out of the
matter. Thales idolized the water as the thing of things, another the
fire, a third numbers. This worship of the fetish was the worship of
truth. The search for understanding starts out with misunderstanding.
From religious to scientific culture, it is a step, not a leap. When
Socrates turned to introspection and started out, with his "Know
thyself," in submitting the prodigy of the human soul to critique, he
made another important step.
You know that the "wisest of men" was not interested in air and water,
in natural science of the strict order, but rather in the good, the
true, and the beautiful, in the human in the narrower sense, in the
realm of the spirit, in the soul. It was indeed unwise that he was
interested to the verge of idolization, since in consequence of this
interest in a special part, the other, the material part was being
neglected. According to Goethe's statement that one thing is not fit for
all, Socrates did right. He and all philosophical lights after him
studied the intellect. What they missed was the now dawning
understanding that the faculty of thought is not a prodigy but a
special, and at the same time common, part of universal nature. While
these philosophers looked for truth in any one special form of
excellence, you are now invited to look for it in the total
interrelation of things.
Science has ever endeavored to do away with miracles and prodigies. This
could be accomplished only gradually, and the logicians have, therefore,
remained more or less biased and confused. The great Kant was no
exception. He looked for supreme truth, and for its sake he investigated
the intellect. He is celebrated because he explained so well that this
intellect feels no mission for anything transcendental, and cannot
understand anything but phenomena. Still he permitted something
transcendental to remain.
Kant is of the opinion that we perceive things as they appear, but not
as they are "in themselves." Nevertheless we should believe that a
mysterious truth is at the bottom of those phenomena, because we should
otherwise arrive at the irreconcilable contradiction that there are
phenomena without anything which could appear. The intellect, he holds,
can operate only on the field of phenomena, and for this reason we
should give up the endless grubbing after the transcendental. But we
should leave one little room in the house of reason, one little chamber
of faith, which points beyond experience up to the point where a
mysterious truth guards God and His commands.
The subsequent philosophers, especially the Hegelian philosophy, opposed
this separation which assigned to the intellect only the study of
phenomena and to faith the absolute and infinite for veneration. But
they did not yet succeed in completely mastering the matter, they did
not fully arrive at an indubitably clear exposition of the fountain of
understanding and of the unity of truth, so that reaction nowadays can
again sound the retreat after the melody: "Back to Kant." You know that
Lessing complained about the treatment of "a dead dog" accorded to
Spinoza, and Marx added pointedly: "Hegel is more of a dead dog to-day
than Spinoza was at Lessing's time." The enemies of the working class
are the enemies of evolution. They wish to preserve the existing order
of things and the good old time in which they feel at home. For this
reason it is the mission of the proletariat to continue the work of
logic. It is our duty to show clearly that the metaphysical truth which
Kant opposed to the phenomena of nature and could not eliminate from the
intellect, is nothing but just a metaphysical, a fantastically
exaggerated, thing.
According to our logic, the universe is the truth and everything
partakes of it. That such a truth is logical and such a logic true, is
shown by the interconnection of things, so that this science is
applicable to everything which the sciences respect as reasonable and
true.
In order to help you in the understanding of the absolute and liberate
your thought from all special miracles, I refer to Kant's critique of
reason. It teaches that our intellect becomes a source of understanding
only in connection with other phenomena of nature. Only his critique
stuck fast in the mysterious fountain of causality. Thus he showed that
he was only a seeker after logic, not its master. The conclusion that
there must be _something_ that does appear where there are phenomena is
certainly correct. But that which Kant was thinking of, something of a
transcendental or metaphysical nature, led him to the radically wrong
conclusion that there must be something different, peculiar, miraculous,
mysterious, wherever there are phenomena.
The Kantian conclusion that there must be an absolute truth by itself
behind a phenomenon, an absolute truth that exists independent of and
disconnected with such phenomenon, was due to his fetish-like conception
of truth. It is the first requirement for a correct use of the faculty
of logical reasoning to know that truth is the common nature of the
universe.
That a phenomenon must be based on nature, or an effect on a cause, is a
fact identical with "causality" which I already promised to discuss in
the preceding letter. This same problem may also be expressed in the
words: Where there are predicates, there must be a subject that carries
them. In order to make quite sure that I will not be misunderstood, I
emphasize once more the fact that I am not raising any doubt as to the
correctness of this conclusion, but only to the metaphysical application
of this conclusion after the Kantian manner which consists in making
the same use of it as a clergyman who tries to prove that his theology
is innate in reason.
Our conception of logic wishes to show that all causes and effects are
matter of the same kind, and that our faculty of reasoning is a matter
of fact thing which brooks no mysteries or metaphysical dreams.