The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazineVarious
Philosophy
The Monist, Vol. 2, 1891-1892 : $b A quarterly magazine
Various
Philosophy -- Periodicals
sees all Kant’s errors contained in the following sentence from the _K.
d. r. V._: “If I take away all thought” (through the categories), “from
empirical knowledge, there remains absolutely no knowledge of an object,
for through mere perceptions nothing at all is thought.” In endeavoring
to construct a philosophy out of pure conceptions Kant failed to solve
the problem, in having the thing-in-itself left on his hands. This proved
to Schopenhauer that the path of abstract reflection was closed as the
path of philosophy. Mr. Caldwell demurs to Schopenhauer’s statement
that the “Æsthetic” is Kant’s only discovery, yet as the “Æsthetic”
shows the tendency to conceptual abstraction, his view of Space and Time
is of extreme importance. It is of the “Logic” of the _K. d. r. V._
that Schopenhauer’s criticism is materially and formally most radical.
He gives a different account of the functions of the Soul, rejecting
altogether the faculty-distinctions of Kant: he associates Kant’s faculty
of Understanding more with Sense and the category of Cause with the
spatio-temporal or perceptual construction of the world, and holds the
other eleven categories to be mere blind windows put into a scheme
through Kant’s love of symmetry; and, secondly, he holds Kant’s account
of Reason to be utterly false, and substitutes his own doctrine of the
thing-in-itself for Kant’s three Ideas of Reason. By Reason Schopenhauer
means the power the mind has of forming general conceptions and of
knowing by way of conception or idea, the matter for conceptions and
ideas being of course derived from Perception. Reasoned knowledge is an
abstraction from perceived knowledge, and all knowledge, as Schopenhauer
says, is originally and in itself perceptive. The confusion in Kant’s
account of the elements entering into knowledge, is Schopenhauer’s
reason for holding that Kant can only have had the fundamental principle
of his method imperfectly present to his mind. His whole difficulty
in relating the elements of knowledge to each other arose from the
fact that he in his thought likened the categories to conceptions
through want of an explicit and persistent recognition of the nature of
conception. Schopenhauer himself classifies the categories according to
the planes or stages of experience they characterise: the perceptual,
the mathematical, the logical, and the ethical in order. The categories
are all abstractions, but not conceptions or notions. Conceptions are a
particular kind of abstractions, and so are categories: to conceptions
_material_ entities correspond, but to categories only relations or
forms. Knowledge consists in the detection of relations existing between
the different planes or sections of the perceptual continuum, the
difference in perceived things being that some are immediately and others
only mediately perceived. The true reason of Schopenhauer’s revolt from
the method of conceptions is to be found in the difficulties in which he
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