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
There are still a few points in the further course of the transcendental
analytic which I should have to refute were it not that I am afraid of
trying the patience of the reader; I therefore leave them to his own
reflection. But ever anew in the “Critique of Pure Reason” we meet that
principal and fundamental error of Kant’s, which I have copiously
denounced above, the complete failure to distinguish abstract, discursive
knowledge from intuitive. It is this that throws a constant obscurity over
Kant’s whole theory of the faculty of knowledge, and never allows the
reader to know what he is really speaking about at any time, so that
instead of understanding, he always merely conjectures, for he alternately
tries to understand what is said as referring to thought and to
perception, and remains always in suspense. In the chapter “On the
Division of all Objects into Phenomena and Noumena,” Kant carries that
incredible want of reflection as to the nature of the idea of perception
and the abstract idea, as I shall explain more fully immediately, so far
as to make the monstrous assertion that without thought, that is, without
abstract conceptions, there is no knowledge of an object; and that
perception, because it is not thought, is also not knowledge, and, in
general, is nothing but a mere affection of sensibility, mere sensation!
Nay, more, that perception without conception is absolutely void; but
conception without perception is yet always something (p. 253; V. 309).
Now this is exactly the opposite of the truth; for concepts obtain all
significance, all content, only from their relation to ideas of
perception, from which they have been abstracted, derived, that is,
constructed through the omission of all that is unessential: therefore if
the foundation of perception is taken away from them, they are empty and
void. Perceptions, on the contrary, have in themselves immediate and very
great significance (in them, indeed, the thing in itself objectifies
itself); they represent themselves, express themselves, have no mere
borrowed content like concepts. For the principle of sufficient reason
governs them only as the law of causality, and determines as such only
their position in space and time; it does not, however, condition their
content and their significance, as is the case with concepts, in which it
appears as the principle of the ground of knowing. For the rest, it looks
as if Kant really wished here to set about distinguishing the idea of
perception and the abstract idea. He objects to Leibnitz and Locke that
the former reduced everything to abstract ideas, and the latter everything
to ideas of perception. But yet he arrives at no distinction; and although
Locke and Leibnitz really committed these errors, Kant himself is burdened
with a third error which includes them both—the error of having so mixed
up knowledge of perception and abstract knowledge that a monstrous hybrid
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