The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)Schopenhauer, Arthur
Philosophy
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3)
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Idea (Philosophy); Knowledge, Theory of; Philosophy; Will
object? what is subject? what is truth, illusion, error? But he follows
his logical schema and his symmetry without reflecting or looking about
him. The table of judgments ought to, and must, be the key to all wisdom.
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I have given it above as the chief merit of Kant that he distinguished the
phenomenon from the thing in itself, explained the whole visible world as
phenomenon, and therefore denied all validity to its laws beyond the
phenomenon. It is certainly remarkable that he did not deduce this merely
relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple undeniable truth
which lay so near him, “_No object without a subject_,” in order thus at
the very root to show that the object, because it always exists merely in
relation to a subject, is dependent upon it, conditioned by it, and
therefore conditioned as mere phenomenon, which does not exist in itself
nor unconditioned. Berkeley, to whose merits Kant did not do justice, had
already made this important principle the foundation-stone of his
philosophy, and thereby established an immortal reputation. Yet he himself
did not draw the proper conclusions from this principle, and so he was
both misunderstood and insufficiently attended to. In my first edition I
explained Kant’s avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as arising from an
evident shrinking from decided idealism; while, on the other hand, I found
idealism distinctly expressed in many passages of the “Critique of Pure
Reason,” and accordingly I charged Kant with contradicting himself. And
this charge was well founded, if, as was then my case, one only knew the
“Critique of Pure Reason” in the second or any of the five subsequent
editions printed from it. But when later I read Kant’s great work in the
first edition, which is already so rare, I saw, to my great pleasure, all
these contradictions disappear, and found that although Kant does not use
the formula, “No object without a subject,” he yet explains, with just as
much decision as Berkeley and I do, the outer world lying before us in
space and time as the mere idea of the subject that knows it. Therefore,
for example, he says there without reserve (p. 383): “If I take away the
thinking subject, the whole material world must disappear, for it is
nothing but a phenomenon in the sensibility of our subject, and a class of
its ideas.” But the whole passage from p. 348-392, in which Kant expounded
his pronounced idealism with peculiar beauty and clearness, was suppressed
by him in the second edition, and instead of it a number of remarks
controverting it were introduced. In this way then the text of the
“Critique of Pure Reason,” as it has circulated from the year 1787 to the
year 1838, was disfigured and spoilt, and it became a self-contradictory
book, the sense of which could not therefore be thoroughly clear and
comprehensible to any one. The particulars about this, and also my
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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