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
coexistence of objects of experience are not sensuously apprehended, but
are only brought into Nature by the understanding, and that Nature itself
first becomes possible in this way. Yet it is certain that Nature, the
course of events, and the coexistence of states, is purely perceptible,
and no mere abstract thought.
I challenge every one who shares my respect towards Kant to reconcile
these contradictions and to show that in his doctrine of the object of
experience and the way it is determined by the activity of the
understanding and its twelve functions, Kant thought something quite
distinct and definite. I am convinced that the contradiction I have
pointed out, which extends through the whole Transcendental Logic, is the
real reason of the great obscurity of its language. Kant himself, in fact,
was dimly conscious of the contradiction, inwardly combated it, but yet
either would not or could not bring it to distinct consciousness, and
therefore veiled it from himself and others, and avoided it by all kinds
of subterfuges. This is perhaps also the reason why he made out of the
faculties of knowledge such a strange complicated machine, with so many
wheels, as the twelve categories, the transcendental synthesis of
imagination, of the inner sense, of the transcendental unity of
apperception, also the schematism of the pure conceptions of the
understanding, &c., &c. And notwithstanding this great apparatus, not even
an attempt is made to explain the perception of the external world, which
is after all the principal fact in our knowledge; but this pressing claim
is very meanly rejected, always through the same meaningless metaphorical
expression: “The empirical perception is given us.” On p. 145 of the fifth
edition, we learn further that the perception is given through the object;
therefore the object must be something different from the perception.
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