The influence of the doctrine of the will in post-Kantian idealism upon the philosophy of Josiah Royce

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THE INFLUEICE OP THE DOCTRINE OP THE WILL IN V \

POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM UPON THE PHILOSOPHY OP JOSIAH ROYOE

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School The University of Southern California

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

by Ha Tai Kim 1n June 1950

UMI Number: DP29619

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T h is d is s e rta tio n , w r it t e n by

.M.TAI KIM u n d e r the g u id a n c e o f /c~ia.. F a c u lt y C o m m itte e on S tudies, a n d a p p ro v e d by a l l its m em bers, has been p resen ted to a n d accep ted by the C o u n c i l on G ra d u a te S tu d y a n d Research, in p a r t i a l f u l ­ f i l l m e n t o f re q u ire m e n ts f o r the degree o f DOCTOR

D a te .....

C om m ittee onj&tudies

OF

P H IL O S O P H Y

TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER

PAGE

PREFACE I.

..................

vi

THE ORIGINAL FORM OF VOLUNTARISM (THE PHILOSOPHY OF FICHTE)..................

1

1.Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I

Meister Eekhart's Teachings

.......

Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. .

2 8

2. Fundamental Structure of Fichte's doctrine of the w i l l ..........

16

The Problem of F i c h t e .............

16

Dialectic of the evolution of moral j

self-consciousness . . . . . . . . . Characterizations of the Will

3.

....

24

Manner of its operation...........

29

Concept of the Absolute

31

.......

The theoretical w o r l d .........

33

Knowledge of an object............

- 33

Space and Time • • . • • • . • • . • •

.39

4. The moral world

II.

20

. . . . . . . . . . . .

43

6. Religion................... . * . .

47

6. Significance of the doctrine of the Will

53

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF VOLUNTARISM IN POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM..................

56

1.

56

Schelling.................. Three periods in his philosophy

...

56

iii

CHAPTER

PACE Philosophy of Hature

.............

His doctrine of the W i l l .... Identity Philosophy 2. Hegel

58

63

...............

. * * * ...............

65

66

The Plaoe of Hegel in post-Kantian idealism.................

68

Dynamic nature of the Absolute . . . .

71

Teleology

72

................

,fWhat is rational is actual” .

74

Dialectical Method . . . . . .. ......

76

Hegel’s doctrine of the Will. . . . .

79

3. Schopenhauer . . .

................

A new temperament in Schopenhauer

81 ..

81

His own summary of the doctrine of the W i l l ................. Teleology of the Will

84

........

88

Pessimism III.

90

THE PHILOSOPHY OP JOSIAH R O Y C E ........... 1. Royce and his Problems

**

92 92

Royce -- an heir of post-Kantian idealism in America

...........

The Problems of R o y c e ......

93

Royce -- A Hegelian or a Schopenhauerian? Royce --an American Philosopher .

92

..

96 100

iv

CHAPTER

PAGE 2. Royee's Absolute Idealism

........

106

His persistent methods: Voluntarism and the theory of the "present moment”

107

The theory of the "present moment" . . .

108

The First Period of Royce's philosophy . .

113

The Possibility of Err or ..........

.

113

Epistemology (Voluntarism) . . . . . . .

118

Metaphysics (The Absolute) . . . . . . .

122

The Second Period

. . .............. ..

The problem of Truth.............

129 130

Internal and External Meaning ofIdeas

132

The Concept of the

135

One Final Knower . .

Limit ..

......

. . . .. . . .

..

140

The Self-Representative System....

143

"Actual Infinite"...............

148

Hew Logic (Theory of O r d e r ) ......

150

t

The Third Period '

159

Social Character of his philosophy . ..

159

"Interpretation" . .

......

164

.. . w .

169

. ...

Community of Interpretation

.

The "real world" as the interpretation of our problematic situation....

170

The Absolute as the Beloved Community. .

173

Pragmatism and Royce*s Absolute Pragmatism

.......

*

.. . * .

175

V

CHAPTER IV.

PACE 181

CONCLUSION..................... Voluntarism of Fichte, Hegel and Royce is rationalistic

•

................

182

"Return to Kant" implicit in Royee's philosophy.................

185

Criticisms on Royce examined..

186

Development of Royee's philosophy

....

191

Agnosticism (Loewenberg).........* . .

191

Mysticism (Hocking)............... . .

195

Irrational Will BIBLIOGRAPHY

• • • • • . . • . . • •

.

..................................

196 201

PREFACE

The task of this thesis is to ascertain the funda­ mental structure of the doctrine of the will-in postKantian German Idealism, particularly in the philosophy of Fichte and also in the philosophies Of Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, and then to trace its influence on the philosophy of Josiah Royce, the foremost exponent of German idealism in America. This is hy no means an easy task to undertake. The field of investigation is such a vast one that it cannot possibly aim at a thorough and detailed study as it really deserves.

Another difficulty lies in the

originality and uniqueness of these philosophers under investigation.

Although they all, in varying degrees,

hold to position of voluntarism, their differences in approach and expression are so great that each system demands a careful examination.

However, my effort has

been directed toward grasping the fundamental stream of voluntarism which runs through them all.

Special attention

is given to the exposition of the philosophy of Fichte. He is the originator of the voluntaristic movement in the post-Xantian period, and a comprehensive understanding of him will, I believe, enable us to follow more easily the subsequent thinkers.

The discussion of Schelling, Hegel

and Schopenhauer is confined to the task of indicating in general the development of the movement*

Greatest emphasis

is laid on the analysis and exposition of the philosophy of Boyce in the light of the doctrine of the will manifested in post-Kantian idealism.

Before the examination of Fichte's philosophy in the first chapter, a brief account of Meister Eckhart*s teaching is given by way of introduction.

My opinion is that the

central thesis of the post-Xantian idealism may be clearly found in the preachings of this 14th century Dominican priest.

Since Kant's Critique of Practical Beason is the

real starting point of Fichte's philosophy» a short cussion of Kant's treatment of the ^Practical Beason" follows.

dis­

CHAPTER I

THE ORIGINAL POEM OF VOLUNTARISM (THE PHILOSOPHY OF FICHTE) 1. Introduction. Josiah Royce, in his hook The Spirit of Modem Philo­ sophy, indicates two different interests which determine one's attitude in philosophical inquiry: "One is the interest of the moral heing in finding some authority that may guide him in the conduct of his life.

The other is the interest of the

baffled and disappointed soul in coming into the presence of some external truth, some reality that is perfect, that lacks our weakness, that is victorious even thoughtwe fail, that X is good even though we are worthless." According to Royce, Rant belonged to the interest of the first type, and Spinoza to the second type.

In Kant, active moral freedom was empha­

sized as the main source of reality; while in Spinoza the passive longing for the eternal order was stressed.

Now,

Fichte was a synthesizer of Kant's moral outlook with Spinozistic pantheism; but at the same time he reaffirmed the mystical interpretation of the Christian religion. Before Fichte became acquainted with Kant's writings, he was an amateur Spinozist.

He had, like Spinoza, a love

1. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 46.

z for permanance, changelessness, and eternity,

fie held

Spinoza’s Substance to be the permanent ground of the universe# But he soon discovered that the nature of this Substance was not clearly revealed in Spinoza's philosophy,

fherefore it

was his problem to discover how Substance can be identified in the experience of finite beings#

He found his solution

from reading Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.*- The essential nature of Substance Fichte found in the freedom of the Absolute Will, the Practical Reason, which finite beings share.

When we combine these two elements -- substance

and freedom — we have Fichte's philosophy as union of the thought of Spinoza with that of Kant.

At the same time Fichte

keeps, although in a new form, the thesis of Christian mysticism#

Royce, referring to the age of post-Kantian

idealism, has observed that, 11the triumph of the new age shall thus be union of the 'form' of a new rationalism with the 'matter' of ancient mysticism."

2

Beginning with Fichte

all post-Kantian idealists fixed their starting point upon Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, and then reasserted the content and spirit of mysticism.

It will be of a great value, therefore, to examine 1. Fichte ’s enthusiastic words are quoted by Falckenberg as follows:."Ich lebe in einer neuen Welt, seit ich die 'Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft* gelesen habe." Falckenberg, History of:J!odern Philosophy, p. 420. 2. R6yce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, p. 76.

3 briefly the spirit of mysticism, particularly that of Eckhart, who is regarded as the father of German Idealism*1 We shall then proceed to a consideration of the significance of Kant’s account of Practical Eeason as it relates to Fichte*s thought, preliminarily to an analysis of that thought itself.

Meister Eckhart, the 14th century preacher of the Dominican order, laid the foundation of German Idealism with his piercing clarity, bold novelties and resourceful insights* Ail of the main systems of the post-Kantian idealism reveal his influence.

We shall survey here only his thoughts on

God, creatures and their mutual relationship. Eckhart’s notion of God is symbolically pictured in his parable entitled ’’Legend". "Meister Eckhart met a beautiful naked boy. He asked him wher§ he came from. He said;* I come from God* . Where did you leave him? ’In virtuous hearts’. Where are you going? ’lo God’. Where do you find him? ’Where I part with all creatures’. Who are you? *A king*. Where is your kingdom? ’In my heart* . lake care that no one divide it with you*. 1. Franz von Baader writes: "I was often with Hegel in Berlin. Once I read him a passage from Meister Eckhart, who was only a name to him. He was so excited by it that the next day, he read me a whole lecture on Eckhart, which ended with: ’There. indeed, we have what we want1 ." The above passage is quoted in E.B. Blakney’s Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation, Introduction, p. xiii. Windelband also calls him "Father of German Speculation" in his A History of Philosophy(p .554)

4 ’I shall* • Then he led him to his cell. Take whichever coat you will. *Then I should he no king*. * And he disappeared. For it was God Himself , Who was having a hit of fun.” The essence of mysticism here as elsewhere lies in the search for the unclothed reality which is vaster and better than what can he described through the medium of concepts. Eckhart was therefore driven sharply to distinguish between God and Godhead. "God and the Godhead”, he writes, "are as different from each other as heaven and earth."2

Our knowledge

can go so far as to formulate concepts about God, but Godhead ean never be exhaustively known to us.

What we know is only

that which is manifested and revealed.

In the Godhead, there

is a "nakedness?1, for in it clothes of categories are complete­ ly stripped off. of the Godhead.

God, according to Eckhart, is revelation Qualifications and attributes may be applied

only to God: creatures can speak only of God, but not of the Godhead.

Our concept ,of work and action ean be only appli­

cable to God, and not to the Godhead.

"The difference

between God and the Godhead", Eckhart points out, "is the difference between action and nonaction” . numerical differentiation is even possible. ""

In Godhead, no It is pure unity

1. Blakhey, Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation, p. 251 . 2. Ibid., p.T25. S. Ibid., p. 226.

and pure one*

On the unity of the Godhead he writes as

follows: "God (Godhead) is one and lives within his own pure being, which contains nothing else. He himself is a pure presence in which there, is neither this nor that, because what is God is God."1 "God{Godhead) is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one.”2 "Divine One is a negation of negations and a desire of desires. Something to which nothing is to he added. !Dhie doctrine of the unknowable Godhead explains much in the later history of German philosophy, particularly in light of the fact that Eckhart's writings are the root of teutonic idealism.

It is not unlikely that his notion is taken up by

Xant in his doctrine of the unknowable Ding an sich; and it obviously explains why the post-Kantian idealists, who attempt ed to eliminate this ghost in the Critical Philosophy, were unable totally to do so.

Its tenacious tradition in German

thought is, indeed, the chief cause of the "return to Kant" movement. Eckhart* s Godhead, or "the unnatured Nature”, in an "Eternal Now"* beholds Himself and becomes an object of consciousness to Himself.

When He becomes conscious of

Himself, there is a differentiation of subject and object,

1. Ibid., p. 142. 2. Ibid., p. 151. 3. TETcL , p. 247.

6

or of "father and son",

This activity of self-consciousness

is the eternal self-generating process in God which Eckhart calls the "begetting of the son". The universe is also the expression of the whole thought of God. ideas din the divine knowledge.

The world exists as

This principle of self*

consciousness plays a great role in the philosophies of the post-Kantian idealism as the principle and ground for the existence of the finite world. between God and creatures.

There is a necessary relation

In fact, Eckhart goes to the

extent of saying that God requires creatures in order that God may be God.

Therefore, the dualism between reality and

appearances is only a seeming one; they are inseparable aspects of the whole.

The necessary relation between God and

creatures is boldly and sharply stated by Eckhart in the following words: "Had not God thought of me, he would not have been God; so I am in a sense cause of him as much as he is cause of me."^ Creatures, as appearances, have no real being except in God.

In Eckhart’s words, "Creatures have no Being of

their own, for their Being is the presence of God.”* Creatures are pure nothing, not-beings, £>r God alone is being.

A dialectical method is suggested in Eckhart*s

notion of God.

We may express it as follows: Being(God)

1. Quoted in Royee’s Studies of Good and Evil, p. 280. 2. Blakney, p. 185.

requires, by necessity, non-being(creatures) for its selfdevelopment and self-satisfaction.

Creatures, in turn,

have an urge for the unity with God -- the return to their original status.

And there is glory and blessedness in the

union of creatures with God.

In this dialectical process,

Being is the thesis, the self-alienation of God in non-being is antithesis, and the return of the non-being to the Being is synthesis. This synthetic return of creatures to God is clearly observed in man.

Although man as a creature is pure nothing,

there is in man, according to Eckhart, something that is akin to God which enables us to contact and unite with Him. This is a divine agent in every human soul which is very sensitive to God.

To Eckhart, God is ^nearer to him than

he is to himself11. There is in man a "core of the soul” through which man seeks for his union with God. ■ The ultimate aim of God’s activity is termed by Eckhart as the "begetting of the son”. It is God’s coming into the human soul and, at the same time, it is the return of the soul to its divine center, to its "Spark”. In summary, of Eckhart1s main teachings the following five doctrines have direct bearing upon the post-Kantian idealism: (1) that there is an absolute reality which can not be explained by our concepts; (2) that reality is and must be more than we know conceptually and otherwise; (3)

8 that the natural man or creature is creation of God through his dialectical activity of self-consciousness; (4) that true reality(God) is infinite egress and at the same time it is endless regress; (5) that man as an image of God has a vocation of fulfilling God’s mission on earth. Among these five points, it is to be noted that the third becomes the core of the doctrine of the will.

For the

post-Kantian idealists self-consciousness is an activity of mind, and they hold that this activity of mind is nothing but will. Consequently, the will is the principle of reality itself, as well as the mode of our knowing of it, i.e. our knowledge of it is a product of our will.

She theistic

emphasis of post-Kantian idealism leads to a stress upon the ethical nature in man as exhibited in the fifth point.

fhe principle of self-consciousness as an act of mind becomes explicit in Kant’s assertion of the "Primacy of Practical Reason" over theoretical reason*

And since Fichte

himself found a new starting point from reading Kant* s Critique of Practical Reason, it is necessary to examine Kant’s ' concept of freedom of the will before proceeding to a consider­ ation of the philosophy of Fichte. Ihe greatest contribution of Immanuel Kant in his attempt to define the nature and conditions of our knowledge and to set the limit of our cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason, it seems to me, is the discovery and assertion of

the 11transcendental unity of apperception11• However, in that classical treatise his adventure stops at the point of recognizing the power of the self in cognitive process, for he insists that the real nature of the self remains as unknown as the ”things in themselves” . What is the real nature of the self? in manifoldness?

What makes a self possess the unity

Where does this self reside?

To all these

questions, Kant, in his discussion of the theoretical reason, gave no adequate answer, for he was not able to escape from the rules of cognition he had established.

Following British

empiricism, Kant believed that all knowledge was acquired through experience.

In experience, we are given the data

to be constructed as knowledge after passing through the machine of cognitive forms, — understanding.

forms of intuition and of

Therefore, the true self cannot be sought

in the mental process as an object of knowledge which is on]y phenomenal.

However, the fact is that in our experience

there is a certainty about the self.

This certainty emerges

when we assert that ”1 am the author of my own deeds”. This author of deeds cannot be subject to the categories of understanding, for it is already assumed when we have phenomenal experience. The author of our deeds is not a fact iu space nor in time. indubitable.

It is to us unknowable, but

"It is our ethical postulate”, as Eoyce writes,

”but not our verifiable datum.

It is not the psychological

10 •me', but the ethical 'I'."1 In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant attempts to pave a road to a true self.

And through practical knowle­

dge of the self he finally secures a "bridge "between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.

This "bridge is the "ethical

I" that possesses freedom of will.

The "bridge is construct­

ed upon the solid foundation of the "moral law”, which to him is more real and absolute than the starry heaven.

The

"moral law" is nothing else hut "pure reason" itself as applied to the practical aspect of life.

In Kant's words,

"Pure reason is practical of itself alone, and gives (to man) a universal law which we call moral law."2

In men,

moral law is an imperative which commands "categorically" because the law is unconditioned.

The consideration of

this side of the rational self as an ethical being offers new light upon the mystery of the true self.

It enables us

to recognize a secure tie of the empirical self with the noumenal world.

Man belongs both to the sensible and the

supersensible world.

This double "citizenship" of the self

is clearly expressed by Kant as follows: 11

what makes

categorical imperatives possible is this, that the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world, in consequence of which, if I were nothing else, all my

1. Royce, Lectures on Modern idealism, p. 39. 2. Critique of Practical Reason, trans. by Abbott, p. 120.

actions wonId always conform to the autonomy of the will; hut as I at the same time intuit myself as a' member of the world of sense, they ought so to conform, and this categorical 'ought* implies a synthetic a priori proposition” Kant's conception of the autonomy of moral law is at the same time a recognition of freedom of will.

Freedom

of the will has its existence in the "intelligible” world. In as much as man belongs to two realms, Kant admits two kinds of causality: causality as a category of understand­ ing in the theoretical reason, and causality of freedom in the practical reason.

In so far as one conforms to the

dictates of the moral law in determining his will, we recognize a causal relation between the moral law and the determination of will.

ITevertherless, his will is free,

for he has capacity to choose his action in conformity to the law, instead of following the principle of selflove or private happiness.

The fact that the moral law

proves freedom is shown in the following passage from the Critique of Practical Season: "The moral law, which itself does not require a justification, proves not merely the possibility of freedom, but that it really belongs to beings who recognize this law as binding on themselves. The moral law is in fact a law of the causality of free

1. T.M. Creene, Kant ffoiactions, p. 337.

12 agents, and therefore of the possibility of a supersensible system of nature, just as,the metaphysical law of events in the world of sense was a law of causality of the sensible system of nature; and it therefore determines what speculative philosophy was compelled to leave undeter­ mined, namely, the law for a causality, the concept of which in the latter was only negative; and therefore for the first time gives this concept objective reality.”1 Xant himself recognizes the seeming conflict between freedom and the mechanism of nature in one and the same action.

He advances to a solution of it in the following o line of argument*: mechanism(notion of causality as physical

necessity) appertains only to the attributes of a thing that is subject to time-conditions, that is, to those of the acting subject as a phenomenon,

fherefore the deter­

mining principle of action resides in past time, and is no longer in his power.

But the same subject is conscious of

himself as a”thing-in-himselfn, and thus recognizes the fact of freedom.

Besides recognizing his existence as

phenomenal he considers it also as not subject to timeconditions, and regards himself as determinable by laws which he gives himself through reason.

Every acticn:, there-

Critique of Practical Reason, by Abbott, p. 13?. 2. Ibid., see p. 19Iff.

13

fore, Is only the result of his causality as a noumenon. Thus through freedom, Sant establishes the reality of the supersensible world, which is the real source of the true self; f,It is the concept of freedom alone that enables us to find the unconditioned and intelligiblefsupersensible) for the conditioned and sensible without going out of ourselves” * The task of the post-Kantian idealists was to advance further the notion of morality beyond its role as a bridge between the noumenal and phenomenal world, to reveal that it is the source and foundation upon which our "show” world ean have its existence.

Fichte’s admission of Kant's

influence upon him in forming his system is clearly stated in a letter to FrSulein Rahn: ”Tell your dear father that he and I used, to err in our investigations about the necessity of all man’s acts

*♦.... I have found out now that man* s

will is free, and that not happiness, but worthiness is the end of our being.”2 * Moral motive was the beginning as well as the end of Fichte’s philosophy.

What he learned from

Kant was the fact that the rational self builds its own world, and the external world is nothing apart from the self.

Thus he moves to hold an extreme subjectivistie

frrafrifl116 of Practical Reason, trans. by Abbott, p. 200. 2. Quoted by Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 148.

14

position in which moral "freedom” becomes the center of his philosophy. Ihe advance in post-Kantian idealists beyond the Kantian position was primarily due to the logical difficulties inherent in his account of both theoretical and practical reason.

While the immediate followers of Kant accepted his

transcendental and critical philosophy and also his conclusion that practical reason is superior to theoretical reason, it soon became obvious that his system needed amplification and correction along three lines.

First, there was the

need of securing a fundamental first principle.

Kant did

not posit a unified ground of the laws of intelligence. According to Kant, the fundamental condition was given in the synthetical unity of consciousness.

But he made no

attempt to show that the very nature of consciousness implied special necessary conditions.

In fact laws of intelligence

and the categories are derived by Kant from logic and experience, and are not deduced from the nature of intelli­ gence as such,

therefore since Fichte attempted to bare

the nature of consciousness itself, his philosophy is a further clarification of Kant’s transcendental system. Secondly, there was a need of overcoming the dualism between forms of sense and the categories or forms of understanding. Kant did not show any connection between forms of intuition, space and time, and the primary

15

conditions of pure cognition.

In Fichte, these two forms

are united and they are conceived as self-limiting spontan­ eity.

(Thirdly, there was a need of eliminating the Ding an

sich. In Kant, the matter of cognition is altogether given, or derived, from the Ding knowable to us.

For

an sich, although this is un­

himtheDing an sich was ontologically

real, but he failed to explain its nature.

The followers of

Kant, becoming suspicious about this inaccessible ghost, were tempted to discard a mysterious and alleged Unknowable entirely, as Royce asks, ”Do we care much for those shadowy things in themselves?1’1 Wien they gave up the existence of 3>ing an sich andmade

it a thought in the ego, they

were led to concludethatafter all, the source of the ’’things in themselves” must also be found in the ego.

Hence

in Fichte the foims and matter of cognition are finally brought together in the depth of the ego, in the act of the ego.

(Therefore, in post-Kantian idealism, the practical

reason wears its new attire as the essential spring of the theoretical reason; and the ultimate basis for the activity of cognition is given in the idea of the will.2 1. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 141. 2. In the article on'"’*Fichte” in the Encyclopedia Britanniea, 14th ed., Fichte is said to have been indebted to Sehultze and Maimon in criticizing Kantian philosophy. Pa1ekenberg, in his History of Modern Philosophy(p. 414 ff.) points out that in constructing his own system,Fichte combines the emphasis of three philosophers after Kant: Reinhold1s emphasis on the fundamental principle of unity; Beck’s idealistic interpretation of Kant; Jacobi’s elimination of the Ding an sich.

16

2. Fundamental structure of Fichte1s doctrine of the will. Although Fichte is deeply influenced hy Kant's notion of the "primacy of the practical reason" over pure reason, he is not merely interested in solutions of ethical problems*

As one of the greatest moral philosophers, he

is also concerned with solution of the problems of pure reason.

He attempted to complete and fulfill Kant's notions

of the pure and practical reason by creating a philosophy which united both but discriminated between each in his Wissenschaftslehre(Science of Knowledge). Fichte, like Kant, was concerned to reveal how absolute certainty of a fundamental principle could be demonstrated, while at the same showing that the authority to draw necessary conclusions from such a principle was valid.

His central question was, how are form and content

of a science possible?

Q?he answer was sought in a first

principle which would require no higher principle and from which the whole system of knowledge could be deduced.

To use

; Fichte's own expression, every thought must "hang firmly in a single ring, which is fastened to nothing, but manifests itself and the whole system by its own power".^

In Science

of Knowledge, he suggests a power in man to determine thought to "act generally", while particular sciences give 1. Quoted in Seth *s 3?he Development from Kant to Hegel, p. 18.

17

that act its detailed determinations.

In this work both

form and content are necessarily united in contrast to the method of ordinary logic which is concerned with form only. How is this postulated first principle ascertained? Fichte answers this question by suggesting that we turn to our own selves, a datum which remains as such even if we doubt everything else.

The object of knowledge presupposes

the subject — Ego; while we cannot prove that the known world of sense has any other existence than as product of the activity of the ego.

This empirical starting point is

Fichte's return to Descartes, as Husserl's phenomenology is a more recent revival of Cartesian philosophy. Fichte goes deeper than Descartes.

However,

While the Cogito is

the fundamental and unalyzed ground from which Descartes builds his philosophy, Fichte attempts to give an exhaustive account of the nature of Cogito itself and discovers that the real nature of Cogito is the activity of the ego.

He

thus finds the self'omnipresent in any inquiry about reality, and reaffirms the idealistic creed that the ego sees self everywherei

His own formula given is as follows: A is A by

virtue of a law in the ego which so affirms it; hence in seeing that A is A the ego is seeing its own law or self. Therefore Fichte writes, "no A can be anything else but an A posited in the Ego".'*' When a proposition, "A is An is 1. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. 48.

18

asserted, there is a necessary connection between these two ’’A^s, which we may call X*

Here, we are certain that

X is in the ego, and posited through the ego, for it is the ego which asserts the above proposition and asserts if hy virtue of X as a law,

The proposition MA is A” implies

the proposition ”1 am I”, which in turn implies ”1 am”. This proves that before all positing, the ego must be posited through itself,

This thought is expressed in the

following formula of Fichte's:”The ego posits originally its own being”.^ How the proposition ”A is A” is asserted.

Assertion

is an act of the human mind, 'Therefore, the positing2 of the ego through itself is the pure activity of the ego. Fichte’s key word that signifies the activity of mind is called, Thathandlung or ”deed-aet".

In the ego, the

positing and posited, the asserting and the asserted cannot be absolutely separated.

They may be separated only for

the convenience of thought,

The ego, therefore, is both

the acting and the product of the act; deed and act are

1. Ibid., p. 72. 2, The term ”positing” is a technical term that Fichte uses in his Wissenshaftlehre. It needs to be defined here in order to understand the full context of Fichte’s philosophy. It must be distinguished from the logical use of the term as in the ease of "positing” a proposition. Fichte uses the term as meaning the initial act of the ego. It can be best understood if we interpret it as a determin­ ation of our consciousness through the exercise of will so as to give a definite content for the thinking ego.

19

one and the .same thing.

In Fiehte, this way of thinking

lays a firm foundation for deducing nature(the external world) from the act of the self. is a reflective action.

Ihe activity of the self

She subject A can only he A

because the predicate A is already posited. the ego is, because it has posited itself.

In other words, In a more

picturesque statement Fichte writes: "In the knowledge of knowledge, Knowledge steps out of itself, and places itself before its own eye, in order to be reflected upon."*’ In regard to the form of its act, the ego acts according to the necessary law that it alone prescribes; while in regard to the content of its act, the product is both posited and given.

It is clear in the following words of Fiehte: "I

am absolutely because I am, and I am absolutely what I am for myself.”2 The "I am", then, is the ground of ”A is A" in Fichte*s philosophy, and the logical principlefA is A) is proven and determined through the ego. 'My existence ("I am") is nothing but my positing("I posit"), that is, an act.

The original act of the ego is not caused by

an other; it must be causa sui- But it is not in Spinoza’s sense that the ego is self-caused, for Spinoza*s substance has two distinct attributes, nature(extension) and thought

1. Fichte, Hew Exposition of the Science of Knowledge, p. 6. 2 • Science of Knowledge. p . 7i .

20

which are separated.

For Fichte*s thought, the ego can

he truly causa sui only if it is a free will which can will whether to he or not.

Fichte believes that this free will

is that of an Absolute, a potential principle which freely becomes the source of actual existence.

He concludes,

like Kant, with the notion of primacy of practical reason; "Only through this medium of the moral law do I perceive m y s e l f . A n d then, he boldly declares that ”my world p is the sphere of my duties, and absolutely nothing more,”6 As the first stage of Fichte*s dialectic of the evolution of moral self-consciousness, we have said that the ego is an absolute free will which determines its own self.

At the second stage, the ego is confronted by law,

thus being neither absolute nor free. the ego follows the laws of thought.

The activity of The ego, being

subject to law, cannot avoid the control of law.

Fichte's

term for this compulsion of law is called the ffnon-ego” in the Science of Knowledge and ”Sein" or "Being” in the Hew Exposition of the Science of Knowledge.

The non-ego

is posited in consciousness to make the exercise of freedom possible, and is, so to speak, a playground for

1. Quoted in Seth's From Kant to Hegel, p. 33. Vocation of Man, p. 108. In the barsteHung (Hew Exposition of the Science Knowledge), in place of the term ”egow, FTehte”uses The term hFreedom".

El

the ego.

In fact the very necessity of the existence of

the ego requires the existence of the non-ego.' Roy.ee paraphrases this thought as follows: "I need something not myself in order to he active, that is, in order to exist" The non-ego is also described as an Anstoss, or shook of opposition that the ego receives when it desires to act. The formula of the second stage of Fichte’s dialectics is given as follows: "To the ego there is absolutely posited a non-ego." The next stage appears when we relate the non-ego to the ego.

The ego, it has been said, posits the non-ego.

But the existence of the limiting non-ego depends upon the act of the ego.

On this point Thompson observes, "Law

is enfolded within it, it originates and ends in the ego; it is not a foreign

force that masters the ego, but some­

thing whose existence depends upon the ego, and whose existence must be in the ego.

Hence the ego still controls

content, and is therefore free, still is the circumference of all being, and is therefore absolute.”^

As a formula

for the third stage Fichte offers the following: "The Ego opposits in the ego a divisible non-ego to a divisible 3 ego". In this formula, it is admitted that both the ego

1. Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 157. 2. ThompsonT A.B., The Unity~f Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge, p. 16. 3. Science of Knowledge, p. 84.

22

and non-ego are products of the original act of the Ego. The original act of the Ego is the uniting of the opposites without their mutually cancelling each other. mutually limit each other.

The opposites

The original act is a limiting

of both opposites through each other and the connection between these two opposites signify the limits.

Fichte

explains the meaning of the limit, which is an important factor in his system, as follows; 11To limit something signifies to cancel the reality thereof not altogether, but only in part.

Hence the conception of limits involves,

besides the conceptions of reality and negation, that of divisibility(of quantitability generally, not of a determin1 ed quantity).** The third principle of FichteIs philosophy is again expressed as follows: "Through the act Y (the original act of the Ego), the Ego as well as the Hon-Ego O is posited divisible." Here, we may recognize two /

different kinds of the ego:The absolute Ego(the "I”) and the determined ego(the "me").

The absolute Ego is free,

and its act is the original act; the determined ego is limited by containing in itself the non-ego.

The absolute

Ego is posited as indivisible, but the empirical ego, to which the non-ego is opposed, is posited as divisible.

Soienoe Enowledge, p. 82. We may find in this statement, incidentally, the foundation of the dialectics which Hegel later fully developed. 2. Ibid., p. 82.

23

As the final and last stage, Fichte’s system culminates in the reconciliation of a Free and a Limited Ego as a work of the Holy will, or a God of Love.

The moral

law finds objective existence only in the free will when the will voluntarily submits to it.

Therefore, the true

nature of the ©go is Will-stuff which freely becomes law and thereby appears as the world of consciousness. Thompson has clearly expressed the nature of the world: "The pheno­ menal world may be defined as Will-stuff freely becoming law; in substance it is Will, in form it is Necessity.n Freedom and necessity cannot be ultimately divorced from one another; separation is only due to our thinking.

The

nature of consciousness must be found in the unity of freedom and necessity.

Law and freedom equally involve

the whole world of consciousness and each involves the existence of the other, as the condition of its own existence.

The true being, reality, is the potential

existence; and the result of its act, the phenomenal world, may be regarded as appearance.

In this stage of

Fichte’s philosophy, a shift is made from metaphysics to religion.

The absolute free will is Holy Will-which

unites the absolute Ego with the empirical Ego.

Holy Will

chooses law because it loves law, and it is a God of Love. Thompson summarizes the doctrine as follows: "The Ego is

1. Unity of Fichte1s Doctrine of Knowledge, p. 17.

24

in its very essence love, for the ego is forever two who are yet one."^

Postponing a discussion of Fichte's doctrine

of religion, we shall now probe further into Fichte's doctrine of the will by defining its nature, by observing the manner in which it operates and the goal of its activity, and, finally, by clarifying the concept of the Absolute. 3?he source of our knowledge of the activity of the will, Fiehte insists, is faith rather than thought.

Uo

knowledge, he argues, can be its own foundation or its own proof; every instance of knowledge presupposes another higher knowledge on which it is founded, and there is no end to this ascent.

It is faith alone that knows the 2 ultimate source of our knowledge. Faith is a resolution of the will to acknowledge the validity of knowledge, and is none other than an immediate feeling of the ethical consciousness • What is the essential nature of the will?

Generally

speaking, the will is Power that makes a being take a certain course of action.

According to Fichte, it is a "power

determining itself solely through and in itself, that is, 3 giving itself a direction." Phis power is recognized as

1. (Thompson, 0£. cit., p. 23. 2. In modem terminology "intuition" may be substitu­ ted for it. 3- Science of Knowledge, p. 221.

25

the motive of self-reflection; ”fhe Power is felt as impelling; the Ego feels impelled to go out of itself,” She will is not only confined to making a decision between alternatives as commonly supposed, hut it is a power that gets something done.

It is a creative power and, therefore,

supports a creative process.

Phe Absolute Will, therefore,

may he conceived as the power which motivates the eternal creation. 3*he will, according to Fiehte, is not a "blind power; it is an intelligible Principle, the principle of infinite possibilities.

As a principle the will is the ground of

all actual and possible existences; it is the principle of the eternal world, as motion is the principle of the physical world,

fhus, to Fichte, ”the will is the efficient,

living principle of the world of reason, as motion is 2

the efficient, living principle of the world of sense.” Once the will as a principle is recognized, Fichte’s doctrine of the will becomes strictly rational.

Fiehte

himself acknowledges that ”self-active reason is will."^ He simply asserts that the will which is the living principle of reason is itself Reason. Here, Fichte’s

Science of Enow ledge, p. 300. 2* Vocation of Man, p. 134. 3. Ibid., p. 151

26

position is close to Kantfs notion of the practical reason; in Kant, the practical reason is the Beason itself applied for practical use. Psychologically speaking, the will may he identified with 11Yearning”

which Fichte describes as an activity

that has no object, but which is "irresistibly impelled to produce an object and which is merely felt." 2

This yearn­

ing is an impulse toward a completely unknown which manifests itself solely as requirement, as dissatisfaction. Again, this yearning is an "emptiness" which seeks to be fill­ ed.

It is the "will to be", or the will to exist,

"This

yearning is", Fichte writes, "an important determination. Only through it is the Ego impelled in itself to go out of itself; only through it does an external world reveal itself in the ego."3 We have two opposite feelings; that of yearning and that of limitation.

Yearning, however,

1. In the above paragraph, I have said that Fichte*s doctrine of the will is rational. But in this notion of "yearning", we find the other aspect of Fichte’s doctrine of the will, which is irrational. The "yearning" and "impulse" are devoid of rational element; they do not possess any purpose in themselves. This irrational aspect of voluntarism was strongly stressed by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. At this point, we may interpret this irrational aspect of the will as the original status of the ego before rational reflection is made, as the "Godhead" in the teachings of Eckhart. It is truly the ground motive for the activity of the ego. And the activity of the ego (the exercise of the willT becomes rational, for it is regulated by law which the Ego posits. Science of Knowledge, p. 306. 3. Ibid., p. 307.

27

pays, no attention to limitation and moreover, it transcends all limitations,

So the yearning is, according to Fichte,

"the original and absolutely independent expression of the tendency in the Ego." 1 This tendency is the condition of the possibility of all objects.

It is a tendency without

limit of gaining a fuller content for the Ego,

"The Ego”,

Fichte writes, *is originally tendency to fill up the infinite.112 Onto logically speaking, the will is also the Absolute Being, which is the true reality.

The eternal will of the

absolute reality unfolds itself continuously.

This medieval

term, Being(Sein), stands in contrast to Ex-istence(Pa-Sein). She absolute Being is defined as "simple, homogeneous, and immutable11, in which is "neither beginning nor ending, no variation or change of form, but it is always and forever the same, unalterable and continuing Being." 3 Ba-Sein or Existence is the manifestation or revelation of this Being.

The world is the result of the activity of the

eternal Will, or the eternal will becomes the creator of the world.

Creation, however, is not the creation from

an everlasting inert matter, nor production of the world out of nothing; it is rather an eternal procession of its self-developmentThis Eternal Will or the Absolute 1. Ibid. , p . 3G8. 2. Ibid. , p. 295. 3. Fiebte1s Popular Works , p. 393. 4. Here, we may find "bHe source of Hegel1s philosophy of the monistic universe.

28

Being is none other than the God of religion.

The Life

of God discloses itself, appears, Becomes visible, manifests itself as such; and its manifestation is the world. Finally, Fichte identifies the will with the notion of LoVe. Love is the self-sufficient, self-supporting and self-maintaining life of the Absolute.

Love is the source

of all certainty, all truth, and all reality.

Love demands

its object, and the object of Love is posited by Love itself. Love, in brief, creates its own object for itself.

"The

Action", Fichte states, "flows forth from Love as light seems to flow forth from the sun, and as the world actually flows forth from the inward Love of God to himself."*' These characterizations of the will as power, principle. yearningr tendency, being, God, and love, contain within themselves an opposite, and thus form a dialectical relation.

The will requires, by the necessity of its own

nature, a field for its activities, a stage upon which it plays.

This condition for the activity of the Ego(the

exercise of the will) is the creating principle of the world.

Fichte’s dialectics, in sum, is this,: the Ego

posits the non-ego in order to exist, and when the non-ego is posited, both the ego and the non-ego are divisible (determined).

This formula underlies the principle that

our knowledge of the sense-worid must be deduced from the positing of the will. 1« Popular Works, p. 541.

29

The manner in which the will operates is as follows: (1) it operates by itself and absolutely.

It does not require

any other cause to operate; its operation is self-caused. Concerning this absoluteness of the act of the Ego, Fiehte writes, ”the absolute act of the Ego, as act, is in its form(in its realization) absolute (and this, its absolute­ ness, is the ground of the absolute spontaneity of reflection in the theoretical part, and of the will in the practical part of the Science of Knowledge), but in the content(that it is a relation) it is conditioned by the absolute self-positing of the Ego as totality of all r e a l i t y . (2) The will has a peculiar mode of manifestation: it is both act and product. It is both acting and being acted; both determining and determined. The act and product, in short, are two aspects of the same will.

This characteristic is what is called

Tathandlung-or Deed-Act. law.

(5) The will has in itself a

The spontaneity of the will, when it is determined

and actualized, abides within the law.

The law comes

from no other source than the will itself, fo*r the will gives the law to its activity. Fichte explicitly recognizes the dialectical mode that his doctrine of the will implies.

s°3-en°3 of Knowledge, p. 271.

This is clearly

30

expressed in the following statement: "The positing Ego (by productive imagination) holds the vanishing accidence firmly, until it has compared it with the accidence whereby it is pushed aside.

This power is it which from perennial opposites,

forms a unity which enters between moments(contradictions) that would mutually cancel each other, and thus maintain both; this power is it which alone makes life and conscious­ ness (and particularly consciousness as a continuing series of time-moments) possible."*’ In Fichte*s dialectics, the thesis is the Ego(subjective) and the antithesis is the $fon-ego(ob jeetive),and thesynthesis

comprisesthe

co-existence of the two, mutually determining each other. But the essential characteristic of these dialectics is the fact that "all the three acts are only one and the same act, and are distinguished only in reflection as moments of one act.**2 We have seen.that the will in Fichte’s system gives itself a direction or course of action.

From a rational­

istic view, furthermore, the will is characterized as involving an end or purpose.

The conception of a purpose

appears in two forms: subjectively it is a thought and objectively it is an action.

The goal of the will,

however, gains its significance from the fact that it is a manifestation of the Absolute Ego, rather than a mere 1. Ibid., p. 171. 2. TbTcL , p.173*

51 achievement or fulfilment of an end as such.

The fact that

the importance of the will lies in its act and not in itsspecific product or its goal, is well summarized in the following remark made by Mr. Uishita, a contemporary Japanese idealistic philosopher: "Thirsty moment is not yet the ego, nor when the thirst is quenched; the ego appears in the process of transition from the former to the latter.

The end of the will lies not in its

terminal, hut rather in its process. As to the concept of the Absolute Fichte holds that it is ultimately epistemological*

The Absolute is through

and through an absolute point of view .defined as being g what is "capable of being conceived by itself alone." %

On occasion Fichte calls the Absolute, "reines Sein", or pure being.

It does not imply a material being, but a

being that is the mirror of the universe.

"Dieses Sein",

he writes, "ist an sich night etwa Compression, sondefn es JLst durchaus AgilitSt, reine Durchsichtigkeit, Lipht, nicht das Lieht zuruckwerfender Korper."^

Thus, the

Absolute is, so to speak, the self-seeing Light.

Royee

interprets Fichte's notion of the Absolute as follows: 1. JSishita, Kitaro, Problems of Consciousness, Tokyo, Iwanami Co., 1920, p. 187. The translation of the quotation is made by the writer. 2. Thompson, Unity of Fichte1s Doctrine of Knowledge, p. 21 3. Quoted by Royce Tn Thompson*s tfnity of~Fichte*s Doctrine of Knowledge, Introduction, p. xx.

zz "(The Absolute Is thus the principle of the conceived unity of the truth as conceived.

It is the conceived

light whereby the truth is seen.

It is known as such

light.

It has no presence but this.”1 Hence Fiehte*s

Absolute is strictly a rationalistic one; its essence lies in seeing* viewing, and reasoning.

However, by refusing

to define the nature of the Absolute, he finally resorts to mysticism, as indicated in a letter to Schelling in which he writes, **I asserted that the Absolute has only one manifestation, simple, eternal; and this is absolute knowledge.

The Absolute itself is no being, no knowledge,

nor yet(Schelling*s) Identity or Indifference of the two.

It is Just the Absolute.n2

1. 2. Quoted by Royce in Thompson*s Unity of Fichte*s Doctrine of knowledge, Introduction, p. xx. Royce, in his Lectures on Modern Idealism, explains that he substitutes HAbsolute*1 for "Self". The motive of this substitution is, according to Royce, due to * social consciousness. The Absolute is the unity of selfhood which includes all individuals.

3* Theoretical World, Fichte’s thesis, "Oughtness is the ground of being it has been shown, involves two aspects of his system: the spontaneity of reflection in the theoretical world, and the free will in the moral world.

When he refers to

the original act of the Ego as the ground of all being, Fichte is not contemplating on the beginning of the world in time; he is rather concerned with the logical basis of our consciousness.

It is now necessary to

examine his theory of knowledge. The central question for an epistemology is, how can we have an adequate knowledge of an object?

In order

to answer this question, Fichte tells us, we must turn our attention to our own consciousness.

Our self-

consciousness is the basic condition of all perception: "In all perception thou perceivest only thine own condition.”2

Therefore, whatever is not contained in

this perception of our own self is not perceived at all. Two kinds of knowledge are distinguished: immediate knowledge, which consists of sensation or affection, and mediate knowledge which is that of objects.

That the

knowledge of objects is mediate is explained by the

1. ”8011 ist der grund des Seins." Vocation of Man, p. 39.

34

fact that oar consciousness of things is really a "consciousness of a consciousness of things."!

Fichte

recognizes that the thinking process is an act of mind, which involves a leap from our presentation of an object to a knowledge of it.

Knowledge of an object requires a

synthetic activity of mind which is to be identified with Thought. What is presented to us as an object is really what is created by us.

Although in ordinary experience

man is not aware of this process when he has a knowledge of an object, it is neverthless assumed and is implicit although not recognized.

"My consciousness of the object",

Fichte writes, "is only a yet unrecognized consciousness of my creation of a presentation of an object.”2 What is here boldly proposed is a radical epistemological subjectivism which is offered with eloquence and sincerity, as, for example in the following conclusion*. "All knowledge is merely a knowledge of thyself; that thy consciousness never goes beyond thyself; that what thou assumest to be a consciousness of the object is nothing but a consciousness of thine own supposition of an object, which, according to an inward law of thy thought, thou dost necessarily make simultaneously with the sensation itself." 3

!• Vocation of Man, p. 55. 2. Ibid., p. 61. 3. Ibid., p . 62.

35

This. subjectivism, which rejects both the materialis­ tic and Spinozistie realism and Berkelian subjectivism, is rooted in Kant's Critical philosophy. both systems.

He finds faults in

The fault of Dogmatic Realism, according

to Fichte, is that it asserts the non-ego to be the eause of all representation and the ego to be merely an accidence of the non-ego.

The fault of Dogmatic Idealism,

on the contrary, lies in its view that the ego is the substance of representation and representation is the accidence of the ego.

On this view the non-ego is merely

an ideal ground having no reality beyond representation. Although these two systems are equally faulty, Fichte attempts to combine them to form a synthetic position. This synthetic position is arrived at by positing the ego as the ground of the non-ego.

Fichte believes

that his synthetic position explains the epistemological problem "by positing the Ego(which is in so far practical) as an Ego which shall contain in itself the ground of the existence of the non-ego, through which the activity of the Ego as intelligence is d i m i n i sh ed .T h e positing of the Ego is the original pure act and the non-ego, "through which the activity of the Ego as intelligence is diminished", is the deed or the product.

Science of Knowledge. p. 134.

It becomes

36

evident that Fichte's notion of Tathandlung (Eeed-Act) is the main principle of his doctrine of the will. Fichte's account for the external universe depends upon his principle that "nothing appertains to the Ego hut what it posits in itself."

From this

principle Fichte deduce©

another which may he regarded as the

principle of the

non-ego, namely, that "the Ego posits activity."

something as not pure

The Ego, according to Fichte, tends

toexelude

the activity of opposition from itself, thus externalizing the Ego.

This externalization of the Ego is held to he

the origin of the external universe.

"Here we see for

the first time clearly", he writes, "how something, as it were, loosens itself from the Ego, which will prohahly change gradually hy further determination into an external universe.

It is because the Ego in either case excludes,

posits outside, externalizes that activity of the non-ego."*’ Once the external universe is determined as an externaliza­ tion of the Ego, the relation between the Ego and the external universe(the non-ego) talces the form of "Sensation". The Ego immediately senses the world which is something ideally thrown out of itself.

"This relation of the

condition of contradictory direction to the Ego", he explains, "is called sensation a finding of a foreign other. W

........ a discovering, It is the canceled,

Science of Knowledge, p. 197.

37

repressed activity of the Ego which is felt in sensation. It is felt, found as something foreign, because it is canceled, limited; whereas, the original activity of the Ego is pure and absolute.

Hence, it is externalized.11^

Here, we observe that the fundamental law of perception in Fichte's philosophy is the law of reciprocal determination between two different parts of an organic entity.

This

law is stated as follows: "The Ego posits itself as 2

determined through the non-ego.”

The Ego determines it­

self through absolute and spontaneous activity, but this determination is made through the positing of the non-ego. The Ego has a power to posit infinitely possible objects, but through the act of the will, once posited, it becomes a determined and real object.

This capacity for infinite

positing of objects is called "productive imagination1? or "contemplation". It functions to suggest the infinitely possible ideas which are, thus far, in the domain of an ideal ground.

But when an idea is determined and limited by the non-ego, it becomes an object in the real ground. 3

1. Ibid., p. 197. 2. Ibid*, p. 100♦ 3. fichte's own statement is as follows:"In so far as the limit is posited by the Ego it is ideal; and in so far as it is posited by the non-ego it is real; but is both in a synthetical unity." Science of Enowledge, p. 207.

(Hie main factor in this principle is the act of the Ego, or the determination of the will.

The reciprocal deter-

mination between the Ego and the non-ego, “ between the act and the product, hetween the ideal and real, is a relation by which Fichte seeks to bring a reasonable harmony to antithetical problems such as that of existence and non­ existence, of freedom and necessity, of mind and matter, of God and man, of the infinite and finite, the like. Finite existences have their being grounded in the infinite totality of possibilities; and all possibilities become meaningful only when they are externalized as limited quanta*

Herein lies his principle of individuation and

of all existence. Fiehte*s notion of reciprocal determination hints of Hegel*s idea of the "Concrete Universal**, which is plainly suggested in the following statement: **The contem­ plation of Here, is the annihilation of the undetermined infinity of space, and the contemplation of the How the annihilation of the undetermined infinity of Time; while at the same time the infinity of both space and time is contained in the contemplation of Here and How, and i annihilates them again in their turn.*1 The same is suggested also in the following passage, which seems to anticipate Hegel*s contention that judgement is **der B©griff in seiner Besonderheit1*? ’’The contemplation of 1. Hew Exposition of Science of Knowledge, p. 43.

39

the determined This(X) separates this x (a tree, for instance) from the infinite chain of all the other These (trees and non-trees) and thus annihilates the latter; while, vice versa, all these others must be contemplated and consequent­ ly posited as existing, if x is to he contemplated as x.”3* The law of reciprocal determination is also the source of Fichte’s theory of Space and Time.

Quantitability

which is given in reciprocal determination between the Ego and the non-ego, is the principle of his theory of Space.

Quantitability appears not as a product of the Ego,

but as something absolutely found or given beyond all consciousness.

Space is, according to Fichte, nothing but

quantitability itself.

Quantitability implies the limit

or determination of the act of the Ego, and the limit signi­ fies a determined product. a place.

The product, in turn, occupies

This point is clearly made in the statement that

"every power fills up a place in space; and space is nothing 2

but this sphere, filled or to be filled by these products.” Time * according to Fichte, is quantitability in succession.

He recognizes that the law of succession is

the law of nature, nature being characterized as quantita­ bility.

The Ego is absolute being or causa sui which

wills its own existence; while causation involves

1. Hew Exposition of Science ef Knowledge, p. 44* 2. Science of Knowledge, p. 245.

sequence or a succession of antecedents and consequents. A succession of reciprocally excluding members within the Ego is empirically presented in time.

In other words, if

the externalization of the Ego involves causality fthe Ego being the pure cause and the non-ego being effect), it takes place in quantitability of succession, that is, in time.

3?he time-process in the original act of the Ego

involves "series of points as points of synthetical union 'f between a causality of the Ego and of the Non-Ego in contemplation, wherein each point depends upon a determined other which does not depend upon it, and wherein each has a determined other which is dependent upon it while itself does not depend upon this other; in short, we obtain a •time series* Another concept which is inseparable from that of Space is "Matter11. Although Matter is not space, it is in space.

Matter is the fixed constructibility of space

itself or it is the construction which is carried in space. All knowledge, according to Fichte, is that of quantitating; for its confinedness is a confinedness of the quantitating.

Hence, the ground form of all aetual

in knowledge is threefold: space, Matter and time. Ho knowledge, consequently, is possible except in matter and no matter can be conceivable except in time.

1. Science of Knowledge, p. £52.

Fichte does not deny the empirical reality of the material world. absolute.

He denies the world to he existing as

fhe world, he insists, is formal freedom (pure

Ego) in its positedness as being (non-ego).

$he world is

the sphere of quantitability, of the changeable.

In itself

the world is the empty and unsubstantial form of the beginning of consciousness itself; it is indeed pure nothing.

It is not a mirror, expression, revelation,

or symbol of the eternal, but stands as an opposition to the Ego: !,fhis world is picture and expression of the formal Freedom, and is this for and in itself; is the described conflict of Being and Hon-Being, the absolute, inner contradiction.”1

In more popular language, he

declares, "my world is the object and sphere of my duties, o and absolutely nothing more.” In sum, practical reason is the ground of our perceiving the world and, moreover, is the ground of our creating the world. In regard to the world-view, a similarity may be detected between the thinking of Fichte and that of Spinoza, fhese thinkers agree on the following points:(l) Absolute Substance;(2) two modifications — extension and thinking; (3) finite knowledge as accidence of substance -an absolute

Exposition of the Science of Knowledge, p. 81. 2* The Vocation of Man, tr. by W. Smith, Chicago, The Open Court” (Third Ed.), 1916, p. 108.

42

accidence, unalterably determined through Being itself; (4) the highest absolute synthesis of absolute substantiality. Spinoza however overlooks the point of transition from the substance to accidence.

In reality, he claims,

substance and accidence are not separated.

Fichte, on

the contrary, finds the point of transition in Formal Freedom, or the act of the Ego, which is the ground-form of knowledge, and traces to knowledge itself the necessity of a separation.

43

Moral World, It has been repeatedly pointed out that the moral world is, according to Fichte, the ground of the theoretical world.

(Thinking presupposes moral act.

She absolute Ego

is free will which voluntarily subjects itself to law and this act of subjugation is the immediate appearance of the world of consciousness.

(The law is necessary, but

it is product of the act of free will.

(Therefore, the

theoretical world which comes into being by the law which is posited by the Ego is grounded on the moral freedom of the will.

In other words, freedom is the form

of the act of the Ego, and necessity is the content of the act of the Ego. (There are two aspects of the Ego: the Ego as absolutely posited, whieh is unlimited, and the ego as intelligence, whieh is limited.

(The Absolute Ego is a

being posited through itself, but the empirical ego is a being representing or a being as an intelligence. (The ego as intelligence is dependent upon an undetermined and altogether undeterminable non-ego.

(Therefore, the absolute

Ego and the intelligent ego are opposed to each other, which contradicts the absolute identity of the Ego.

Fichte

attempts to solve this contradiction by asserting that the Ego must determine through itself that same unknown non­ ego.

By recognizing the practical power of the Ego, he

44

explains the relation of the absolute Ego with the empirical ego:fTthe Absolute Ego is only active and thus determines the non~ego, which is now passive, in so far as this non-ego is to determine the Ego as i n t e l l i g e n c e T h a t Reason is product of the will is explicitly asserted in Fichte’s treatment of the practical part of the Science &£ Knowledge, in which he uses psychological terms in an attempt to relate knowledge with the act of the Ego*

In the Ego he recognizes

11tendency" or "impulse” which necessarily results in the self-reflection of the Ego* this tendency.

All reflection is grounded upon

In other words, the Ego which is originally

impulse becomes the particular impulse to representation, which is the first and highest manifestation of impulse. Thus the Ego first becomes intelligence. Hence, the intelligent

ego is also a moral ego; for the intelligent

©go, by its own nature has a feeling of compulsion due to the check of the non-ego upon it.

When the Absolute Ego,

which posits itself as the totality of all reality, applies this positing to the infinite objective world, the Ego becomes a practical or moral ego, and this moral ego is, at once, the empirical and intelligent ego. The moral Ego is both limited and unlimited, and both finite

and infinite.

The moral Ego resides in .two

worlds -- spiritual and sensuous.

The Ego as a free

1, ScieUce of Knowledge, p. 262.

45

being is unlimited and infinite, residing in the spiritual kingdom, but-the ego as confronted with the necessity of the non-ego is finite and limited, residing in the sensuous world of intelligence.

"I am a member of two orders:” ,

writes Fichte, "the one purely spiritual, in whieh I rule by my will alone; the other sensuous, in which I operate by my deed.

She whole end of reason is pure activity;

absolute freedom.”* She Absolute impulse in man appears as conscience, absolute law, and categorical imperative.

Therefore the

vocation of man is, "to listen to it(conscience), to obey it honestly and unreservedly, without fear or equivocation.

This is my vocation, the whole end and

purpose of my existence."

2

Fichte holds that the world

is the sphere of fulfilling man’s duty, and that act comes before knowledge, and not vice versa.

"We do not

act", he writes, "because we know, but we know because we are called upon to act:- the practical reason is the root of all reason."

55

With the recognition of the primacy

of the practical reason, Fichte, like Kant, attempts to bridge the contradiction that arises between the finite and infinite nature of the Ego, and between Freedom and

1. Vocation of Man, p. 140. £. Ibid., p.~T05. 3. Ibid., p. 111.

46

Hecessity.

The Absolute Impulse as conscience is the

. Eternal Will which is the true creator of the world*

The

empirical Ego has a sense of longing for this Eternal will, for it is capable of fulfilling the duty*

This

longing and this fulfilling is a manifestation of man's religious life.

The outcome of Eichte's philosophy,

in fact, is a religious reaffirmation of the essential teachings of Christian mysticism.

47

5. Religion, According to Fichte the final goal of man, as finite existence, is the "True Life”, the religious life. there is a yearning for this authentic life.

In man

Religious

need is admittedly one of the fundamental natures of man: "The aspiration towards the Eternal is the primitive root of all Finite Existence."^

The Eternal "surrounds

us at all times, offers itself incessantly to our £

regards" , and we have nothing more to do than to lay hold of it. This religious consciousness is acquired through the attainment of true knowledge.

"A Doctrine of

Blessednessfof religion)", he writes, "can be nothing else than a Doctrine of Knowledge.

To live truly, means IZ

to think truly and to discern the truth." In his Doctrine of Religion4 or The Way towards the Blessed Life, Fichte expounds freshly his system of religious philosophy, by employing such terms as Sein and Dasein (Being and Ex-istence) in place of Ego and Non-Ego.

Sein or Being

is by itself, from itself, and through itself.

It is

the absolute Being which is God; it is eternal, an absolute

1. 2. 3. 4.

Doctrine of Religion in Fichte*s Popular Works, p. 394, Ibid., p. 39Wl Ibid., p. 398. His lectures delivered at Berlin in 1806.

48 One, a self-comprehensive, self-sufficient and absolutely unchangeable unity.

Basein of Ex-istence, is the manifesta

tion or revelation of this Sein or Being.

Basein is

nothing but the consciousness or conception of Being. "Ex-istence" is, as it were, Being out of its Being. Sein must ex-ist(dasein). Hence, Sein is, in itself, different from Ex-istence and is opposed to it.

Basein

must apprehend, recognize and image forth itself as mere Ex-istence, and, opposed to itself, it must assume and image forth an absolute Being whose mere ex-istence it is.

i

knowledge cannot transcend the Ex-istence itself, because it is manifestation of Being in its only possible form. Knowledge is the living and efficient ex-istence of the Absolute itself, for the actual life of knowledge is, at bottom, the essential Being of the Absolute itself. Knowledge is, according to Fichte, a "characterization" of the thing distinguished; and every characterization is in itself an assumption of the fixed and abiding Being and Presence. the world.

3?hus conception is the true creator of

In consciousness the Bivine Life is changed

into an actual and abiding world; further, every actual

1. In this distinction between Sein and Basein, we notice a remarkable similarity of thought between Fichte and Eckhart. Eckhart's own distinction is "Godhead" and "God", as we have discussed in the Introduction.

49

consciousness is an aot of reflection; the act of reflection divides the One World into an infinite variety of shapes. "By reflection upon itself”, wrote Fichte in explaining the principle of multiplicity, “Knowledge give hirth 1 to a division in itself." Although the root of our “being may he found in original Being, and we ourselves are portions of One Being, our finite “ beings assume the form of consciousness and reflection and thus being limited.

At the same time

we retain our sense of oneness with Being in feeling of bond with God whieh is termed "love".

This is the Love

of God which unites pure Being and reflection.

In this

Love, Being and Existence, God and man are one.

This Love

is the Love of Being for itself, its own Love toward itself in the form of feeling.

Love surpasses reflection;

conceptions only describe Love. doubts.

Love transcends all

Love is truly the very life of the Absolute.

Here again Fichte places "Love^*, which may be regarded as a manifestation of the will, above reason.

He simply

asserts: "Love is higher than all Beason; it is itself the fountain of Reason and the root of Reality; the sole creator of Life and Time.

Thus, in Fichte*s thought,

doctrine of Religion, p. 444. 2. Ibid., p. 539.

Life, Love and Blessedness are one and the sane thing, and in this identification philosophy "becomes identical with religion. Fichte’s view of the place of man in the universe is succinctly stated as follows: ”1, this sent, this expressly commissioned individual, as I may now call myself, am actually here, have entered into existence for this cause and no other; that the eternal counsel of God in this universe may through me be seen of men in another, hitherto unknown light, - may be made clearly manifest and shine forth with inextinguishable lustre over the world; and this phase of the Divine Thought, thus bound up with my personality, is the only true living being within me; all else, though looked upon even myself as belonging to my being, is dream, shadow:., nothing; this alone is imperishable and eternal within me; all else shall again disappear in the void from whieh . it has seemingly, but never really come forth.”1 Although Fichte rejects Judaistic Christianity, especially the Hebrew notion of creation, he welcomes the Johannine Gospel.

The Johannine Gospel, indeed,

contains the core of his own system.

In Judaism the

record of creation begins with the sentence that ”In the beginning God created”, but in the Gospel of John, we read, ”In the beginning was the Word,”

This passage

endorses his doctrine of thought as the basis for the creation of the world; for in Fichte, everything exists

of Scholar in Fichte’s Popular Works, p. 172.

51

only in conception, and the conception, the word, is

the

only creator of the world. In this pantheistic system of Fichte, the reality of evil is excluded.

Evil is regarded as consequence of

the abuse of freedom, for Fichte believes in only one world, a thoroughly good world.

The apparent sin is rather

regarded as a figment of faulty intelligence which does not understand the truth of relations.

For him, evil

is not sin, but is merely an opportunity for holiness. Even death is regarded as the visible appearance of the second Life.

"Death”, he writes, "is the ladder by which

my spiritual vision rises to a new Life

1 and a new Mature.”*

This extremenmonistic view of Fichte is often rightly charged as being pantheistic and mystical.

Thompson,

who attempts to defend Fichte against this charge, insists that "Fichte's doctrine is as far removed from mysticism as from pantheism.

.... Mysticism, like pantheism,

teaches absorption in another; we yield ourselves to an extra-mentem God, who has an independent existence of his own.

Fichte’s &0d is thought, conscious of its own

nature and attributes; is mind in its largest aspect; is the greater self, in whom the lesser selves live and move and have their being." 2

Thompson1s understanding

1. Vocation of Man, p. 175. 2. Thompson,"Unity of Fichte1s Doctrine of Knowledge p . 59.

of mysticism is apparently the traditional one whieh regards mysticism a dangerous heresy to the Christian church.

Ihe spirit of Fichte's metaphysical egoism

is quite obviously as pantheistic and mystical as was that of Spinoza and Eckhart.

His philosophy of conscious­

ness may he characterized as a pantheism with an idealism of the Ego.

It is a pantheism that recognizes the value

and significance of the principle of individuation and of the principle of multiplicity.

53

6. Significance of the Doctrine of the Will, Fichte1s doctrine of. the will, which is the central principle in all post-Hantian German idealism, enlightened many difficult metaphysical problems• The will, in Fichte, is the key which opens the age-long deadlock of metaphysical antinomies: between the One and the Many, the Being and Hon-Being, Spirit and Body, Sein and Dasein, reality and appearance, subject and object, God and Man, Infinite and Finite.

Fichte showed that all these contradictions

are only contradictions in our reflection whieh itself is due to the act of the will.

Through the spontaneous

aet of the will, consciousness is divided into subject and object, the one determining and the other determined, or ffoesis and Hoema in the terminology of Husserl* s Phenomenology. Fichte sought the solution of this problem of duality in the fundamental first principle which is supposed to work prior to our thinking process.

This

first principle he identified with a monism of the will; that is, a doctrine that true reality is will existing as an undifferentiated unity.

He also proposed that the act

of the free will results in consciousness of the subjective and the objective.

Reflection or thinking, then, is

nothing but an act and reflection or reason is the creator of the world.

There is only one act of "Seeing*1, but the

"Seeing" involves two elements: the "Seer” and the "Seen” #

54

The important factor here is that neither the "Seer” nor the "Seen" is possible without assuming the act of "Seeing". The free activity of the will is unlimited.

But

the will posits the non-ego, thus limiting its own activity.

This limited ego is the free ego checked^

The mutual determination of the Ego and non-ego yields our world of sensation.

That world, however, does not

hold the free activity of the will in bondage, for there is an eternal yearning and impulse on the part of the checked ego.

The Ego freely crosses the boundary line

of the limit or determination through the faculty of the "productive imagination." limit it is ideal.

As far as the Ego posits the

Infinite divisibility is one instance

of an ideal determination.

The world, fact,however,

is the real determination by the non-ego.

"The Ego

in order to be able to limit itself, must remove(extend) the limit; and in order to remove the limit it must limit it self." This limit is where yearning ceases and satisfaction commences.

Fichte identifies the feeling or judgment

of "approval" with the experience of the harmony of impulse and act, "disapproval" with the feeling or awareness of disharmony between them.

Our knowledge of the world,

Science of Knowledge, p. 208.

he teaches, involves varying degrees of approval and disapproval: "All the internal determinations of things are nothing hut degrees of approval and disapproval." 1 This passage strikes us as resembling the method of present-day pragmatism.

In fact, Boyce classifies the

post-Kantian idealists as pragmatists by observing that "nothing is true, for them, unless therein the sense, the purpose, the meaning of some active proeess is carried out, expressed, accomplished.112

Science of Knowledge, p. 327. 2. Boyce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, p. 86. F.S.G. Borthrop, in his The Meeting of Bast and West, points out that even American students of science and scientific method such as G. I. Lewis and Wilmon Sheldon have been influenced by Fichte.

56 CHAPTER II

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF VOLUNTARISM IN POST-KANTIAN IDEALISM 1. Schelling. Fichte, whose ethical idealism "became an extreme ■subjective idealism, often ignored the practical impaet of nature and history.

His explanation of natural world

as the "non-ego" was unsatisfactory to the post-Kantian idealists who followed him, "because it seemed hastily arrived at,

Schelling, Fichte's "brilliant student, was

not altogether content with his master's account of the universe as merely the non-ego; and he advanced "beyond Fichte's insufficient system with a philosophy of Nature, Hegel subsequently developed Fichte's idea of history into a complete philosophy of history. John Watson divides Schelling's philosophy into three phases^*: (1) The period of "storm and.stress” was that in which, in harmony with Fichte's earlier philosophy, he refused to admit the reality of any supreme Being other than the moral order of the world.

It is this period of

Schelling's philosophy which Kuno Fischer described; "He is regarded as FichteTs ablest student, as the best exponent

1. Watson, John, Schelling's Transcendental idealism, Chicago, S. C. Griggs, lS$£, p. 1.

57

of his system. (Wissenschaftslehre) and as its ‘second founder1.”

(8) The intermediate stage in which man and

nature are regarded as two coordinate manifestations of a single activity that is revealed in each with equal fullness and perfection.

(3) The crowning stage, in which

an attempt is made to prove* the personality of God, while preserving the freedom and the moral responsibility of man which he had maintained in the two earlier stages. Schelling may he regarded as forming, with Fichte, a dual bridge between Kant and Hegel.

Watson clearly

suggests this in his conclusion that ”the interest in the philosophy of Schelling is thus twofold: firstly, as a record of the intellectual development of a singularly gifted mind, and secondly, as forming the transition ©

from Kant to Hegel through Fichte.”

It would be a mistake

to minimize the influence of Fichte over Schelling. "k*16

Both

content of his philosophy were through and

through in. the tradition of Fiehtean voluntarism; and the V

further development of his thought is only a clarification of the obscure parts in Fichte's philosophy.

Schelling,

for example, applied the dialectical method, which he inherited from Fichte, not only to the sphere of knowledge

1. Kuno Fischer, Schellings heben, Werke, hehre, p. E81, quoted in James Gutmann's Schelling: of Human Freedom, p. xii. 2. Watson, Schelling1s Transcendental Idealism, p. 3.

of the Absolute, as M s teacher had done, but also to the realm of knowledge about Nature.

Moreover, Schelling's

notion of the Absolute Identity may be regarded as an elucidation of Fichte's Absolute Ego; for no specific elaboration on the nature of the Absolute Ego is given in Fichte's philosophy.

Still further, Fichte's central

position manifested in the doctrine of the will is also the central core of Schelling*s philosophy.

Thus the

Fiehtean doctrine of the will becomes the form and content of post-Santian idealism.

This simply means that if the

post-^antian idealists recognize the will as the fundamental nature of realityfcontent), they further believe that it is also through will as the activity of the ego(form) that we have a knowledge of reality.

We shall now proceed to

expound Schelling*s position in regard to his Nature philosophy, his doctrine of the will, and his notion of Identity. It is Schelling's contention that Fichte failed to provide an adequate substitute for a philosophy of Nature when he asserted, in his moral philosophy, that the non-ego is merely a product of the ego.

As A. Seth

has pointed out, "It was the meagreness of Fichte’s treatment of Nature that impelled Schelling to what he was fond of calling his 'Nurchbrueh zur Bealit&t'.

59

Mature will not be dismissed simply as not-I*"^

When

Schelling set out to expound the philosophy of Mature, he found his clue not in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, but in the philosophy of Kant.

"Mot Fichte’s Wissenschafts­

lehre ,n writes Watson, "but Kant’s Metaphysischo Anfangsgrtlnde der Haturwissenschaft and Kritik der Prtheilskraft form the starting point of his philosophy of Mature***2 It was not Fichte*s notion of the non-ego, but Kant’s teleological view of nature that gave impetus to Schelling*s philosophy of Mature.

This is obvious from Schelling*s

explanation why his philosophy of Mature must be teleologi­ cal: "Mature, as a whole, no less than in its different productions, necessarily appears as a work produced by consciousness and yet at the same time as the production of the blindest mechanism.

It is the result of purpose

without being explainable as such.

The philosophy of the

aims of Mature, or teleology, is therefore the required 3 point of union of theoretical and practical philosophy.” The conception of the teleology of Mature, derived from Kant, convinced Schelling that nature is not the dead, lifeless thing, as Fichte’s non-ego or negation of the active Ego would make it, but is active and lively

1* Seth, The development from Kant to Hegel, p. 53. 2. Watson, Sche 1ling *s TranscendentaT Idealism, p. 91. 3. Schelling*s System of Transcendental Idealism, from Rand*s Modern Classical Philosophers, p. 544.

60

and embodies intelligence.

He therefore advanced beyond

Fichte, not by stressing the separation and opposition of Hature(the non-ego) from the Ego, but rather by carrying the principle of intelligent activity over into nature. At first glance it might be suspected that Schelling is returning to Spinoza.

It is even possible to discover a

similarity in terminology between them.

"Hature as a mere

product(Hatura Haturans)11, he remarks, "we call nature as objeet(with this alone all empiricism deals),

nature

as pro duetiv ity(Hatura Haturans) we call nature as subject (with this alone all theory d e a l s ) . B u t Schelling parts from Spinoza both by establishing a teleology of nature and by attributing this fundamental principle to intelligence(Fichte*s Ego),

fhus intelligence is everything,

as it was in Fichte, but it manifests itself in different modes,

"Intelligence", as Schelling explains, "is productive

in two modes - that is either blindly and unconsciously ,or freely, and consciously; unconsciously productive in external intuition, consciously in the creation of an ideal world."

In brief intelligence (the activity of the

Ego, or the will) is found in Hature, however blind and

1. Schelling, "Introduction to the Outlines of a System of natural Philosophy", trans. by T. Davidson, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. I, 1867, no. 4, p. 199. 2. Ibid., p. 193.

61

unconscious it may "be, as well as in the moral ego which is conscious of its freedom.

Thus Schelling1s nature is

not a mere non-ego ; it is also an Ego in a different mode. In his own words, "Hature is to be visible intelligence, 1 and intelligence invisible nature." How, then* does Hature manifest itself as visible intelligence?

He answers, through a dialectics of nature,

just as Fichte explains the whole of reality by his dialectics of the Ego.

Hature, according to Schelling,

is not simply a product; it is also that which produces. As Fichtefs "deed-act" is the essence of self-consciousness, so Schelling*s Hature is the union of productivity and product.

In Hature is a union ofsubject and object

which is the result of the activity of the subject. Fichte’s dialectics of the ego is thus transplanted by Schelling in the field of Hature.

The absolute productivity

of Hature must pass over into an empirical nature as a determined product, because the infinite ideal productivity aims at the real and concrete nature.

Since Hature finds

its own object in itself, it involves duality in whieh the object becomes an original limitation and the limitation is an opposite tendency in Hature.

These opposite

tendencies in the process of mutually annihilating each

1. Quoted in A. Seth’s From Kant to Hegel, p. 54.

62

other, reproduce and arrive at a product.

It is evident

that Schelling1s dialectics of Nature is rooted in Fichte’s formula, "The Ego opposits in the Ego a divisible non-ego to a divisible ego.n

Schelling regards nature as an

eternal evolution in which the infinite intelligence is manifesting itself through its finite and concrete products. The streaming evolution of nature is at once infinite and finite, whose seeming finite product is but process of the infinite development of Nature*

"Through this product",

he writes, "an original infinity evolves itself; this infinity can never decrease."3' The dialectical character of the process is indicated as follows: "By virtue of the first construction, the product is posited as identity; this identity, it is true, again resolves itself into an antithesis, which, however, is no longer an antithesis cleaving to products, but an antithesis in the productivity itself -- the product, therefore, as product, is identity."

2

This productivity is an eternal activity of a Hature that is an infinite self-activity, realizing itself in the finite, and yet unexhausted in that realization. The evolving process of Nature embodies an ascending series; it proceeds from the lowest to the highest level

1. Schelling, Introduction to the Outlines of a System of Natural Philosophy, p. 203.

T: IbTd.—

p: 215. '

63

which is intelligent “being*

The goal of this activity is

to become fully aware of itself, that is, self-consciousness. In the words of Boyce, "Nature appears simply as a sort of external symbol or image of the self*

Nature is the self

taken as object - the self unconscious, hidden, but endless­ ly striving to free itself and to become conscious. "What Schelling did", A. Seth aptly observes, "or attempted to do, was to take nature as we know it, and to exhibit it as, in reality, a function of intelligence, pointing through all the gradations of its varied forms towards o its necessary goal in self-consciousness*" The doctrine of the will is the underlying principle of Schelling*s philosophy as it was in Fichte’s.

The

essential nature of intelligence lies in self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is an act of the Sgo.

Schelling

repeatedly expresses this thought in his Transcendental Idealism, from whieh the following passages have been 3 extracted: "The Ego does not exist at all before that act vwhereby the thought becomes its own object." "The Ego is pure act, pure doing, and because it is

1. Eoyce, Lectures on Modern Idealism, p. 104. 2. A* Seth,frrom Kant to Hegel, p. 57* 3* Band, Modern Classical Philosophers, pp. 559, 561, 563.

64

the principle of all knowledge, must “be absolutely non-objective in knowledge.” "The Ego is nothing other than a producing which becomes its own object, i.e. it is an intellectual intuition. But this intellectual intuition is itself an absolutely free act.” ”Transcendental philosophy proceeds from no being, but from a free act; and this can only be postulated.” Thus it becomes evident that even in Schelling the will is the primary condition of all knowledge.

Our

knowledge of the external world is only possible when the will is so determined as to create a reciprocal relation between the ego and its own object.

An object, according

to Schelling, is external for us just because our will is determined in relation to it.

Then, it is apparent

that the will is both free and also limited in relation to the object.

The will is free in so far as the Ego is

willing, but the will is limited and finite when the Ego is compelled to accept the world of objects as it presents in perception.

Herein, a contradiction seems to arise

between free will and limited will.

In an attempt to

solve contradiction, Schelling introduces a medium which floats between the infinite and finite will and is texmed 1 "Imagination”. The products of this activity are ideas and not conceptions of objects.

The will is finite when

1. "Ideas” here may be identified with imaginative images that serve as suggestions, in Dewey*s sense, in which the mind leaps forward to a possible solution.

65

viewed in relation to a particular object which is willed; and it is infinite when viewed as self-activity.

Hence,

the idea whieh is neither finite nor infinite, but is simply the transition from the one to the other, implies an ideal, which is a mediating element bearing the relation to action.

The ideal is a specific determination of an idea.

It is a plan of action which urges us to follow.

Thus,

the idea has a possibility of being realized when, as the concrete goal of an action, it is adopted or willed as an ideal.

What gives Schelling*s doctrine of the will

a special significance here is that it identifies nature and history as a sphere in which ideas are realized. This doctrine points in the direction of that philosophy of history with which Hegel was able to complete the idealistic tradition. Schelling seeks his final synthesis of Hature and Intelligence in absolute Identity.

This Identity

is a complete union of the subject with the object, and the total, blank **Indifference” which Hegel critically characterized as the "night in which all cows are black". This Absolute Identity considered by Schelling to be none other than Absolute Eeason.

It is not the cause

of the universe, but is the universe itself.

If we

summarize Fichte's philosophy in a single sentence as "Ego is All" , then the objeotive idealism of Schelling

may be formulated as WA11 is Ego."

In Schelling*s universe,

as in that of Spinoza, individual things exist merely as modes or "potences" of the Absolute Identity,

In other

words, the Absolute Identity exists only under the form of all potenees and modes.

Seth, in pointing out a

similarity of Schelling*s philosophy with Spinoza*s remarks, "Schelling*s terminology is an advance over that of Spinoza, but his result is very similar*"3* It should be particularly noted that Schelling*s separation of Intelligence and Hature, like Spinoza*s separation of Thought and Extension, made him hold a complete parallelism between these two realms.

Consequently

his attempt to escape from this parallelism caused him to reject both in favor of his Absolute Identity - a total indifference, devoid of all contents.

Thus, we

are led to believe that Schelling's Absolute Identity is, after all, total nothingness, unconsciousness. 2 From what has been presented thus far, it is evident that the objective is often sacrificed in Fichte because of his excessive claim on the subjective.

In

Schelling, the objective which was neglected by Fichte

1. Seth, From Kant to Hegel, p. 6E. S. This is the conception in which the subsequent philosophies of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann are rooted.

6?

is exalted in the form of Mature and is raised up to equal importance, thus making subject and object strictly parallel. In Hegel, the subject includes the object in itself.

Hegel’s

absolute dialectical idealism seeks dialectical unity of the object and subjeat in Absolut© Subject.

He agrees

with Schelling that the Absolute is Reason, but to him it is not blank Identity.

His Absolute, possessing

a subtle structure of its own, manifests itself in history.

Consequently in his system of Absolute Idealism

the opposition between the subjective and objective is not a stumbling block; it is simply a necessary step for development, because only through the opposition of subjective and objective can the Absolute exist in actuality.

68

2. Hegel. Hegel is an Aristotelian in modern times.

He

resembles Aristotle, first of all, by being an ecleetie. Moreover, he accepts the philosophy of movement, process and becoming, which Aristotle advocated long before him. Hegel*s eclecticism, in fact, involves a revival of the Aristotelian notion of evolution, while it retains the essence of Spinoza’s rationalism; and yet this synthesis expresses the essence of Christian Theology. This by no means, however, makes him depart from the German idealism of his immediate predecessors.

On the

contrary, he follows closely the principle which Fichte introduced.

"When Fichte had dug out of Kant his great

principle of the unconditionedness - of thought," Andrew Seth remarks, "the fundamental conception of idealism was won.

Heither Schelling nor Hegel relinquished

Fichte’s position.”^ We may apply Hegel's own dialectical method to the development of post-Kantian German idealism. In Fichte, we have a subjective idealism, nature being ignored.

We have already expressed his philosophy in

the proposition, "Ego is All,"

As its antithesis,

Schelling*s philosophy is an objective idealism, in which nature is elevated to a position equal with the Ego.

1. Seth, From Kant to Hegel, p. 86.

69

The formula of this system may be given as, "All is Ego." Hegel attempts to bring fortli a synthesis which is an extension of the thesis by way of its opposition,

Thus

Hegel recovers the subjective ego, which with Schelling lay hidden in the abyss of Absolute Indifference.

He

does this without neglecting the facts of nature(Natura JTaturata) , and gives the significance of the ego again to the "dead" or "objectified" part of the Absolute, that is, Nature itself(Natura Naturans).

Hegel's synthesis

may be expressed as follows; "Ego is all, only because All is ego." As with Fichte and Schelling, Hegel's Absolute is reason.

It is the same as Spinoza's substance.

Hegel's

advance lies in his recognition that the Absolute is not only the self-caused substance, but is also self-enfolding subject that awaits its own infinite activity. there is no subject without predicate.

The subject must

be characterized as such in the predicate. is essentially the becoming of itself.

In grammar,

The subject

In the same way,

the Absolute is nothing but the system of its manifestations. The Absolute as reason is a self that expresses itself. This leads to the conclusion that the manner in which the expression takes place is as rational as the outcome of the expression.

Thus* everything is rational in Hegel's

philosophy; the expressor, the expressing, and the expressed.

70

Reason is a system of categories; therefore there is nothing in nature which cannot be subsumed under them* Categories are forms of Reason and of Absolute Consciousness. These forms, when they are expressed, turn into concrete objects in Mature. metaphysics.

HegeUs logic becomes at once his

This is what is meant when he asserts that

reason is the world or the soul of the world.

The central

position of Hegel's philosophy is indicated in the following passage taken from his Logic: "The Absolute is the universal and one idea, which, by an act of ?judgment*, particularises itself to the system of specific ideas; whieh after all are constrained by their nature to come back to the one idea where their truth lies." 1 Hegel's Absolute, it may be said, knows himself by becoming others through his own will, thus solidifying his own being. 2 The fact that Hegel subordinates the ego to conceptions and categories indicates that there is a decisive movement of the "return to Kant” in his philosophy. Seth observes, this fact when he declares that Mthe analysis of the content of universal thought whieh Hegel presents in his Logic is nothing but the Kantian list of categories, amended, completed, unified, with a thousand inter-

1. Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, p. 353. 2. This is none other than the meaning of ’judgment* in Hegel’s Logic.

71 connections, and without Kant*s presuppositions about i the subjectivity of the scheme of thought thus unfolded.” / In Hegel*s system Hature does not claim independency but remains dependent upon reason as a phenomenal embodiment of the categories.

Hature is simply the negation or the

"other" of reason.

The world of nature, in Hegel's

Phenomenology of Mind, is described as ”the Absolute in its aspect of self-dispersion.*^ The dialectic of this system culminates in the world of finite minds, in which a conflict arises between nature and reason*

A finite mind is a process whereby

the Absolute expresses itself as some special instance of a conflict with nature that is resolved by the Absolute. Spirit is the unity of reason and nature, that is, the Idea returned from the otherness into itself. is existent Reason.

The Spirit

In the words of Falekenberg, "The

Absolute(the concept) develops from in-itself(Ansioh) through out-of-self(Aussersich) or other-being to for-itself(Ftirsich); it exists first as reasonfsystem of logical concepts), then as nature, finally as living spirit.”2 In Hegel, Spinoza's God, as it were, floats down

1. Seth, op. pit., p* 77. 2. Falekenberg, History of Modern Philosophy, p. 491.

72

the stream of Heraclitus and Aristotle, and finally reaches the concept of the Christian Cod,

But the genius of Hegel

lies in his realistic discovery that the stream is violently rough and that God is an adventurous God.

"Hegel", as

Royoe aptly remarks, "makes his Absolute, the Lord, most decidedly a man of war."1 Hegel1s Cod is loath to hide his own being, to keep the secret of his being within himself; he dislikes mystery. God,

He is not a retired and an indifferent

He has a will to impart his nature, a nature that

is reason itself.

Reason has by its nature an urge to

express and to formulate a system within its own prescribed law.

Reason gains its proper status only by expressing

itself concretely, as our thought becomes clear and definite only after we express it in concepts or in words. The spirit of Hegel*s philosophy reveals that logic must be lived, and theory must be accompanied by Life. He attempts to show that God enriches his own being by living the life of the finite and determined being, that the Absolute is not an indifferent Mothing, but has his existence in Hature. Hegel’s dynamic view of the Absolute follows Aristotle by presupposing the notion of an End; it is toward the final end that the Absolute moves.

Any

1. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 214.

73

moving and developing thing has a definite direction that is determined antecedent to its movement.

The Absolute

Idea,, whieh is the last category, is the foundatioa and presupposition of all other categories.

Like Aristotle*s

God, it is pure Form whieh is the ultimate end of all finite beings.

Andrew Seth has this in mind in his

statement that ^the Idea is nearly akin to the Aristotelian T& T

05

oc

or the perfected

. It is in the

or end to which the whole creation moves, that

the true explanation of its apparent beginning and subse2.

166

self who interprets them; the future self to whom the interpretation is a d d r e s s e d . A self can never he conceived of without an interpretation in the light of his own past and future.

This process of interpretation g is also applied to historical process as a whole: "What our own inner reflection exemplifies is out­ wardly embodied in the whole world*s history. For what we all mean hy past time is a realm of events whose historical sense, whose records, whose lessons, we may now interpret, in so far as our memory and the documents furnish us the evidences for such interpretation. We may also observe that what we mean hy future time is a realm of events which we view as more or less under the control of the present will of voluntary agents, so that it is worth while to give to ourselves, or to our fellows, counsel regarding this future. And so, whereever the world*s processes are recorded, wherever the records are preserved, and wherever they influence in any way the future course of events, we may say that (at least in these parts of the world) the present potentially interprets the past to the future, and continues so toHTo ad infinitum.** "In sum, if we view the world as everywhere and always recording its own history, by processes of aging and weathering, or of evolution, or of stellar and nebular clusterings and streamings, we can simply define the time order, and its three regions, -past, present, future, - as an order of possible interpretation. That is, we can define the present as, potentially, the interpretation of the past to the future.11 In analysing the process of interpretation, Royce

distinguishes three psychological traits.

First, interpre-

Problem of Christianity, vol. it, p. 144. 2. Ibid., pp. 145-147.

167

tation is a conversation, and not a lonely enterprise; it involves some one who addresses someone else*

The one who

addresses interprets some object to the one. addressed. In the second place, the interpreted object is itself something which has the nature of a mental expression, since the object to be interpreted becomes a "sign”. Thirdly, since the interpretation is a mental act, and is an act which is expressed, the interpretation itself is, in its turn, a sign.

And the new sign calls for

further interpretation, ad infinitum. This third trait, which shows the endless recurrence of the act of interpretation, expresses the very nature of the principle of the "Recurrent Operation of Thought" as described in his "Self-Representative System” of the supplementary essay of The World and the Individual, First Series. This is confirmed in the following statement? "Thus interpretation is not only an essentially social process, but also a process which, when once initiated, can be terminated only by an external and arbitrary interruption, such as death or social separation.

By itself, the

process of interpretation calls, in ideal, for an infinite sequence of interpretations.

For every interpretation,

being addressed to somebody, demands interpretation from the once to whom it is addressed.”^* Professor Loewenberg 1. Problem of Christianity, vol. II, p. 160.

168

has pointed out that Boyce’s new method actually supplements his early views instead or altering them; 11This ’social1 theory of knowledge which requires three terms of a different kind and order for the cognition of any meaning has led Professor Boyce, not indeed to alter any of his earlier vi.ews concerning the ’world' and the ’individual*, hut to deepen and to clarify them.”1

Interpretation

itself, he argues, is a self-representative process. Loewenberg gives a symbolic*formula of the self-representa­ tive character of interpretation as follows "list x

any sign;

” y

interpreter;

”

interpretee.

z —

Then B(x,y, z) — any interpretation, i.e., the triadic which unites the sign, the interpreter, and the interpretee into a complex. But the triad, R(x,y,z), is in turn a sign, requiring interpretation. The new complex will he B(R(x,y,z)) y* , z*. This again requires a new interpretation which can he / represented R{tB(x,y ,zY) y 1, z'^y**, z’1. This process goes on indefinitely. The whole series will run; R(x,y,z). B(R(x,y,z)) y 1, z*. Kto(x,y,z)j j' , z’V y " , . z" ' Bm; R(x,y,z)J y' , zj- y'', "

1. loewenherg’s article on ”Interpretation as a Self-Representative* Process", in Papers in Honor of J. Boyce, p. 193. 2. Ibid., pp. 194-5.

169

Th© world of Interpretation, then, is ultimately a world of mind, in which the existence of selves is possible as part of the great community, and in which the Mind evolves toward the completion of its own purpose.

This

truth, according to Royee, cannot he apprehended by the medium of perceptions and conceptions.

It must be

interpreted and, since only a mind can understand other mind, it must be signified to a mind.

This new restatement

of Boyee*s idealism embodies a new approach which comes originally from Peirce*s cognitive method.

Peirce,

however, had employed it exclusively. Boyce makes use of the Peircean method in the metaphysics of the Community.

What unifies the interpreter,

the mind to which he addresses his interpretation, and the mind which he undertakes to interpret, into a community is the will to interpret.

The spirit of science, for

example, is one of loyalty to a Community of Interpretation* In this instance the motive behind the belief in the community of interpretation is the will to interpret, for the will to interpret presupposes that somehow, at some time, in some fitting embodiment, a community of interpre­ tation exists, and is in process of aiming towards its goal.

In other words, the Will to Interpret presupposes

an Absolute Khower who fulfils his knowledge through the manifestation of the piecemeal knowledges on the part of

170

the finite "beings.

Royee, in the spirit of Hegel and of'

his own earlier philosophy, endeavors to show the spirit of the Absolute that prevails in the lives of men.

”Any

conversation with other men”, he writes, *?any process of that inner conversation whereof, as we have seen, our individual self-consciousness consists, any scientific investigation, is carried on under the influence of the generally subconscious belief that we all are members of a community of interpretation. ”

This is merely a restate­

ment of his initial method, "The Possibility of Error”. It is to be noted that even in his theory of reality derived by the method of interpretation, Royee1s strong attachment to Schopenhauer is pervasive.

According to

Royee, the ”real world” is the ”true interpretation” of our problematic situation.

The problem of reality arises

from our confronting two conflicting ideas or antitheses. These are the idea of present experience and the idea of the goal of experience.

This conflict leads us to compare

these antithetical notions and to discover a "third” mediating idea.

This consummatory state is the character­

istic aim of our interpretative act. question takes various forms.

The contrast in

It may be the ethical

contrast between the actual life and the ideal life; it may be the Pauline contrast between the flesh and the I. Problem of Christianity, vol. II, p. 253.

171

spirit; or it may be the stoic contrast between the life of the wise and that of fools.

It may be also a theoretical

contrast between our ignorance and our possible enlighten­ ment , between our endlessly numerous problems and their solutions, between our innumerable uncertainties and those attainments of certainty at which our sciences and our arts aim.

Or, again, it may be .the religious contrast

between nature and grace, between good and evil, between God and the world.

At the basis of all these contrasts

and conflicts there is an antithesis which Schopenhauer has so eloquently shown; the opposition between our Will and its Fulfilment,

By the "real world", then, Royee

means "the true interpretation ofthe problematic situation which this antithesis presents tous in so far as we compare what is our ideal with what is so far given to us."3" In other words, the real world isthe solution of the problem presented to us in this antithesis.

Ihus, our

knowledge is an endless process of this solving of problems, of interpreting, until we shall reach to that Absolute Knowledge of which we finite beings partake.

Royee1s

metaphysical doctrine set forth in relation with the doctrine of interpretation is clearly manifest in the

1, Ibid., p. 267,

172

following summary given "by him: "The problem of reality is furnished to us by a certain universal antithesis of two Ideas, or, if one prefers the word, by the antithesis of two 'Selves, The first thesis of this doctrine is that Reality -- the solution of this problem -- is the interpretation of this antithesis, the process of mediating between these two selves and of interpre­ ting each of them to the other. Such a process of interpretation involves, of necessity, an infinite sequence of acts of interpretation. It also admits of an endless variety within all the selves which are thus mutually interpreted. These selves, in all their variety, constitute the life of a single Community of Interpretation, whose central member is that spirit of the community whose essential function we now know. In the concrete, then, the universe is a community of interpretation whose life comprises and unifies all the social varieties and all the social communities which, for any reason, we know to be real in the empirical world which our social and our historical sciences study. The history of the universe, the whole order of time, is the history and the order and the expression of this Universal Community."1 Interpreted in terms of Peirce1 doctrine, Royee's "real world" is identified with a world of signs.

According

to Peirce* a sign, in its essence, is either a mind or a quasi-mind, an object that fulfils the functions of a mind. For Boyce-f therefore, the universe consists of real Signs and of their interpretation.

The universe as signs for

interpretation is either a mind or a quasi-mind, and, following the fundamental thesis of his idealism, it is a community; "Our Doctrine of Signs extends to the whole

1. Problem of Christianity, vol. II, pp. 272-5.

173

world the same fundamental principle. Community.

The world is the

The world contains its own interpreter.

Its

processes are infinite in their temporal varieties;

But

their interpreter, the spirit of this universal community, -- never absorbing varieties or permitting them to blend* -- compares and, through a real life, interprets them all." In his later writings, Boyee seems to identify his Absolute Self with the Beloved Community, although Mary W. Calkins insists that he does not do so.g

Even if

interpreted parsonalistieally, the "person" that Royee talks about is not the same kind of "person" which is conceived in traditional Christian theology. commenting on Miss Calkins* article

a

Royee, 4

in his letter to

her, dated March 20 * 1916, accepts her interpretation of his philosophy and expounds in new detail the concept of the Community as a person.

The following quotations are

taken from this letter: "I stand for the importance of this process, which has led Christianity to regard a community not merely as an aggregate but as a Person, and at

1. Ibid., p. 324. 2. Calkins * article on "The Foundation in Royee*s philosophy for Christian Theism" in Papers in Honor of £. Royee, p. 59; 3. Originally written for an address at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Dec. 26, 1915. 4. "Comment by Prof. Royee. Extracts from a letter to Miss Calkins", in Papers in Honor of J . Royee, pp. 65-68.

174

the same ti$e to enrich its ideal memory of a person until he became transformed into a Community...... She process in question is not merely theological, and is not merely mystical, still less merely mythical. Nor is it a process invented merely by abstract metaphysicians. It is the process which Victor Hugo expressed in "Les Miserabies” when he put into the mouth of Enjolras the words, *Wa m^re, c*est la republique.* As I write you these words, Frenchmen are writing the meaning of these words in their blood, about Verdun. Ihe mother which is a republic is a community which is also a person, and not merely an aggregate, and not merely by metaphor a person.”! Ihis person” can hardly be identified with the Christian concept of God as Father, any more than can Professor Ames* concept of God as "Alma Mater".

Nevertheless,

the interpreting Spirit in the Beloved Community is the fundamental principle of Royee*s philosophy which he claims to discovers in the Pauline Epistles.

The world as the

process of the Spirit is repeatedly asserted by Royee, in the same sense that Hegel glorifies History as the revela­ tion of the Divine Spirit.

However, Royee insists with

Schopenhauer that the order of time or history, is a perpetual pursuit of the completing of a purpose; for time requires an endless act of interpretation.

Ihe

pursuit, of course, involves that tragedy of not attaining the goal, which constitutes the problem of the universe. But the problem can be ultimately solved by being loyal

1. Ibid., p. 67.

175

to the Absolute; for the world can he reconciled to its own purposes, when viewed in the light of its goal.

All

this is seen in the relationship between the community and the members, in the precise sense that Paul related the Church as the body of Christ and the members.

Thus in

his later period Royee*s treatment of the problem of the Absolute and the world, the One and the Many, the Order and the series, takes the form of the relationship between the Community and its members.

Here, we may note that

Boyce*s effort to effect harmony between the One and the Many has been a persistent one, even though his methods were various. One important matter still to be discussed is a comparison of Royee*s position with that of Pragmatism. In its voluntaristie emphasis that truth involves an action or a plan of action, Boyce is in agreement with Pragmatism.

He agrees with James and Vaihinger that

a philosophy is a resolution to treat the real world as if that world possessed certain characteristics, and as if our experience enabled us to verify these characters. He also agrees with their voluntarism, that is, the doctrine of the inescapable role of an active attitude of the will in epistemology.

However, he is not satisfied with

Pragmatism*s "mere pragmatism", which is confined to relativism and individualism.

Truth in "mere pragmatism"

176

Is always relative to the men concerned,, to their experiences, and to their situations,

Truth grows, changes, and refuses

to be tested by absolute standards.

For mere pragmatists,

truth whappens to ideas, in so far as they work."'*' Pragmatism is insufficient, because it merely seeks to find the idea working in onefs own experience.

It does

not guarantee the verity of the workings of the other man's ideas.

What Royee repudiates in James' Pragmatism

and Dewey's Instrumentalism, while agreeing with their voluntarism, is their dyadic approach to cognition and their lack of absolute standards.

He advocates what

he terms "Absolute Voluntarism" or "Absolute Pragmatism", which insists that truth involves a social interpretation in the community of interpretation. Royee points out that Pragmatisin itself contains an act of interpretation, which has been neglected to consider.

The "idea" which James talks about is not a

mere perception nor conception.

It is a "leading", an

"active tendency", a "fulfilment of purpose", or an effort towards such fulfilmenti

Therefore, what pragmatism

actually does is to make a comparison of his ideas of present success or failure .with the ideas of his past

1* Royee, William James and Other Essays, p. 216.

177

efforts.

This comparison is essentially an interpretation

of some portion of his own past life, in the light of the present.

It is an act of interpretation: "The comparison

upon which the very idea *my success* also depends, the comparison, namely, which is expressed by saying, *what I sought at a past moment is the very same as what, at the present moment, I now find*, is an instance of an act i of interpretation." Royee*s Absolute Pragmatism requires not only an interpretive act in the community of interpretation, but it also requires an absoluteness of truth.

The will is

a thirst for complete and conscious self-possession, for fullness of life.

The will defines the truth that it

endlessly seeks as a truth which possesses completeness, totality, self-possession, and therefore, absoluteness. What Royee seeks is one, general and decisive attitude of the will which is the right attitude, when we stand in presence of the universe.

Our concepts and our

knowings are determined by the purpose to conform ourselves to absolute standards. eternal.

So Royee declares: "We will the

We define the eternal."^

Relativism is only

proof that the absolute truth exists.

We can admit our

Ignorance of truth only by acknowledging the absoluteness

1. Royee*s article on "Mind" in Hastings* Encyolopaeai a of Religion and Ethics, vol* 8 , p. 653. 2. "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion", in William James and Other Essays, p. 236.

of that truth of which we are ignorant.

In this argument

Boyeefs early method, "the Possibility of Error", still persists; "She denial that there is any absolute truth," he maintains, "simply leads to its own denial, and rein­ states what it denies.”^ This logical foundation for the postulation of the Absolute is ascribed to the very nature of the rational will.

He writes: "There are some

truths that are known to us not by virtue of the special successes which this or that hypothesis obtains in particular instances, but by virtue of the fact that there are certain modes of activity, certain laws of the rational will, which we reinstate and verify, through the very act of attempting to presuppose that these modes of activity do 2 not exist, or that these laws are not valid." Dewey’s Statement of his own difference from Royee's voluntarism is interesting in this connection: "Construing the operation of fulfilling a supreme cognitive interest in terms of purpose and will is a very different thing from construing the cognitive interest in terms of a process of fulfilment of other interests, vital, social, tr

ethical, esthetic, technological, etc,"

Towards the

1. Ibid., p. 237. 2. ^Principles of Logic" in Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, pp. 121-2. IDewey, Papers in Honor of J. Boyce, p. 25.

179

end of his address, "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion” , Royee quotes the following Tennyson*s lines as constituting the core of his own Absolute Pragmatism: ”Qh living Will that shalt endure when all that seems shall suffer shock, Rise in the spiritual rock, Plow through our deeds and make them pure." He then goes on to observe, with reference to Instrumental­ ism, "That cry of the poet was an expression of moral and religious sentiment and aspiration; but he might have said essentially the same thing if he had chosen the form of praying: Make our deeds logical. sense and unity.

Give our thoughts

Give our Instrumentalism some serious

unity of eternal purpose.

Make our Pragmatism more than

the mere passing froth of waves that break upon the beach of triviality.

In any case, the poet*s cry is an

expression of that Absolute Pragmatism, of that Voluntarism, which recognizes all truth as the essentially eternal 1 creation of the Will." It would be interesting to examine the application of his methods to the social, ethical and religious philoso­

1. "The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion", in William James and Other Bssays, pp. 253-4.

180

phy, as he has so eloquently written in Studies of Good and Svil(1898); The Philosophy of Loyalty(1908); Race Questions, Provincialisms, and Other American Problems(1908); William Jamies and other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (1911); The Sources of Religious Insight(1912); and War and Ingurance(1914),

Since such an examination is beyond

the scope of the present study, however, which is limited to the methodology, epistemology and metaphysics of Royee*s Absolute Idealism, it must be regretfully relinquished.

181

CHAPTER IY C0JIC1USI0JJ The doctrine of the will in philosophy has two aspects: the epistemological and the metaphysical. Epistemological voluntarism maintains that the will is the condition of knowledge; while metaphysical voluntarism holds that the will is not only the condition of knowledge hut is also the source of all heing and fact in the universe* The doctrine of the will finds its original pattern in the philosophy of Fichte and in Schopenhauer who accent to the greatest degree the metaphysical aspect of the voluntaristie doctrine.

Royee, as a student of post-

Kantian German Idealism, interprets these two types of voluntarism in a most systematic way with the spirit of American independence and novelty, and with Hegel reaches an optimistic conclusion. I am fundamentally sympathetic with this postKantian voluntarism as expounded ahove.

However, I think

that the real significance of the doctrine of the will lies not so much in the realization of purpose, as Royee sees it, as in the activity of the will itself.

The

essential meaning of the activity of the will may he found in its determinateness. When the will determines a specific

18 E

content out of infinitely possible contents, it achieves concrete knowledge; through determination, the will finds a concrete being. the will.

Thus determination is the* essence of

It is this determination which Leibniz has in

mind when he asserts that God selected and created the best possible world out of all the infinitely possible worlds.

When the will determines the ego and this

determination becomes an objectified contrast to the ego, we have knowledge, for knowledge is a fixed and limited content of mind.

When the Absolute Will determines

itself, the determined object becomes the world or nature. At the root of thought and perception, there is Will. The Will includes thought and perception as part of its life. The doctrine of the will expounded by Fichte, Hegel and Royee is rationalistic.

But the rationalistic

will cannot be a pure will, for it is already a will objectified in thought. The pure will must possess an irrational element in it, for it must transcend the ideational separation between subject and object, affirmation and negation, form and content.

Pure will

is the foundation of these thought processes.

Royee,

of course, accepts the thesis that the individual is due to the determination of the Absolute Will.

But Royce's

183

Absolute will is rational, entirely lacking caprice. However, the truth of the matter is that the determination itself is a caprice of the life-of the Absolute.

In this

sense the Absolute will may be regarded as irrational. When a determination has taken place, the course of the will activity may be said to be rational because it follows the prescribed law that is set forth by that very deter­ mination.

Let me illustrate this*

I may write this thesis

either in the English or in Korean language. caprice to choose one of them.

It is my

But once a language is

chosen, I must follow the grammar of that language chosen. Rationality arises from the law which is established by the determination.

Its result is knowledge, for knowledge

consists of relations which fall under that law, order or type.

However, knowledge can not transcend the limit of

that law or order, for therealm beyond that is the kingdom of the will, in which rationality is mere possibili­ ty. This irrational or supra-rational element in the will brings us back to the unknowable "ihing-in-itself" of Kant's philosophy.

This fact has been already admitted

in Fichte's philosophy in the doctrine that the Absolute Ego as Will is a reality prior to any relational knowledge. The Absolute Ego transcends both the divisible ego and the divisible non-ego.

The "divisible” here signifies

184

that the ego and non-ego become objects of knowledge.^ A serious examination of Joyce’s philosophy reveals that it suggests strongly a "-Return, to Kant" tendency.

An

interpretation of the will as purpose is applied by Royee only to the world of knowledge, and leads to the conclusion that this knowledge of the world becomes more definite and concrete by fulfilling our purposes and ideas.

But

at the end he does not explain the nature and source of the purpose.

Addison Webster Moore justifiably complains

on this pointKthat "Mr. Royee starts his account by simply accepting from psychology a general description of the purposive character of the idea.

Even in the more detailed

passages on purpose we have nothing but descriptions of purpose after it is formed. of this purposiveness.

Rothing is said of the origin

The purposive character of

experience is of course very manifest, but what is the significance of this purposing in experience as a whole? p What is the source and the material of the purposes?"

1. It is needless to point out that this attitude is dominant in the philosophies of Schelling and Schopenhauer. Hegel, in so far as his Absolute Knower is not exhaustively revealed to the finite knowers, also admits the unknowable reality of the "thing-in-itself"• It may be pointed out that inspite of the post-Kantian idealists1 intention of getting rid of the "thing-in-itself", they have never completely succeeded in doing so. 2. A.W* Moorefs article on "Some Logical Aspects of Purpose" in Studies in Logical Theory, ed. by John Dewey, p. 373.

185

The source must “be sought in the will itself prior to any ideational activities.

The will is ultimately

irrational or supra-rational and knowledge is not adequate to describe the whole of its reality, for knowledge is only part of the reality, the will. There is another sense in which Boyce’s philosophy includes a surreptitious element of the "return to Kant" program.

The Absolute of Boyce, it seems to me, logically

implies an hypothetical reality which is infinitely unknowable as a whole, for he recognizes the infinite extension of the series of empirical experiences and the Absolute knower both of which forever lie beyond the reach of our apprehension.

This simply means that the

Absolute is unknowable in quantitative completeness. The Absolute is a logical goal which satisfies our desire to know.

William James, who has made the same point,

writes, "I must therefore treat the notion of an AllKnower simply as an hypothesis, exactly on a par logically with the pluralist notion that there is no point of view, no focus of information extant, from which the entire content of the universe is visible at once."

The Absolute

as logical hypothesis, however, does not eliminate the the necessity of its existence.

Here, I am merely

1. James, Pragmatism, p. 146.

pointing out that Boyce's Absolute contains an irrational element and, since it is absolute, it cannot be completely known.

It is, in brief, the "thing-in-itself” of Kant's

philosophy,

Prom the'logical point of view, Boyce's

Absolute may be regarded as an hypothesis, or as "necessary" but this does not necessarily eliminate the ontological status of the Absolute,

On the contrary, the Absolute

reality must be posited and we finite selves are constantly striving toward that supreme enlightenment which is the life of the Absolute,

However, as finite minds, we can

never reach the totality of the Absolute by the medium of our knowledge.

(Therefore, the unknowable character

of the Absolute is unquestioned.

Since the Absolute

is the totality of all possible knowledge, it cannot be completely known, because the full knowledge of the Absolute is logically contrary to the idea of the Absolute. •How, let us examine some criticisms made against Boyce's idea of the Absolute, and see whether or not they are justifiable.

Critics of Boyce seem to be quite*

puzzled about his notion of the Absolute as all-inclusive knower, and its relation with the individuals or finite knowers.

Their puzzle is the question of how the Absolute

1, Korzybski calls Boyce's Absolute "necessary". See his Science and Sanity, Hew York, Science Press, 1933, p. 220.

remains as Absolute while it includes all finite beings. Their difficulty is increased by Boycefs attempt to reconcile the Absolute Idealism with ’’social realism”. Professor Aliotta argues that ”the inclusion of human consciousness in the divine consciousness only becomes possible if one or the other lose the characteristic 1 of personality -- self-consciousness.” Professor 3.G. Macintosh offers a similar comment and believes that Absolute Idealism is self-contradictory, since ’’the elements of finite experience are what they are in some measure by reason of the finiteness of the experience, so that their inclusion, without modification, in an infinite or absolute experience is, in the nature of things, impossible.” His argument is strengthened by a quotation from A. K. Rogers;?What can the duplication of thought and experience be like for an Absolute Being?

I think of things only

because direct experience is impossible for the time...... How can we make our ignorance a part of an all-inclusive experience without denying its existence(or changing it)? Can I feel baffled and see the solution in the same experience?

Is my feeling of ignorance identical with Cod’s

consciousness of ignorance?

If so, we must accept an

1. Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction Against Science, p. 263. See also similar criticism made by Santayana in his Character and Opinion in the United States, p. 132. 27 Macintosh, Problem of !^nowTedge7 p. 146.

188

Absolute that grows in knowledge..........

If not, there

are two faets, only one of which is the experience of the Absolute; for my feeling of ignorance dominates my 1 consciousness, and cannot dominate God's.” Beneath all these criticisms made against Royeefs Absolutistic monism, there is an unstated assumption, on the part of critics, of a pluralistic relationship between the Absolute and finite individuals.

They assume

that the Absolute is another being (or another individual) like us, though he may be superior in power and wisdom. And when they discuss the Absolute, the critics use the same sense of time that we use in our empirical experiences. However, it is unfair to criticize Royee on these terms, since it involves a lack of complete understanding of his position.

These critics unconsciously accept the Hebrew

concept of God as the creator of the world, and from that point of view it is not surprising to find them puzzled. If God or the creator is one person, one individual, and the finite beings are other individuals created by Him, then of necessity the relationship between God and men will be interpreted as a pluralistic one.

Royee however

does not teach that the Absolute is the power or the

1. Originally from Rogers' article on "Prof. Royee and Monism", in Philosophical Review, XII, 1903.

cause of the universe.

His interest was exclusively in the

process of the universe toward absolute perfection.

Boyce's

God is essentially Aristotelian, supported as a logical postulate.

Perhaps this postulate is inevitably derived

from the needs of man.

Boyce's Absolute is more akin

to that of Bruno and Spinoza than to that of Orthodox Christianity.

Using "A” to symbolize the Absolute and

nemerais to represent finite minds, we may formulate the argument in the following way: Boyce's Absolute is not -A-f 1 + 2 ^ 3 + 4 + ....... ad infinitum. It may be expressed rather, as

A==l*£*-34-4*

..,. .ad infinitum.

In all probability, the conception of the Absolute that Boyce holds is that it is the absolute totality of all, including all actual and possible individual finite beings. This may be illustrated as follows.

The relationship

between the Absolute and the individual beings may be likened to the relationship between a nation and its citizens.

Apart from all the citizens involved, the nation

cannot exist.

The citizens actually constitute a nation.

But the nation is always more than a citizen or a group of citizens.

In the same way, the individual beings, actual

and possible, constitute the very life of the Absolute. We have seen this in detail in the discussion of Boyce's conception of the Pauline "community".

190

Rogers, in the above quoted passage, argues that Royeean Absolute must grow in knowledge.

This point is

well taken if we consider the life of the Absolute only from our view point, from the standpoint of our sense of time, because the life of the Absolute is being fulfili­ ed through our empirical experiences.

But if we had the

Absolute*s way of knowing, it would be impossible to say that the Absolute grows in knowledge.

The Absolute itself

must be out of "Time11, as we understand time.

Royee*s

concept of the totum simul is the only kind of time that the Absolute knows.

For instance, we can imagine an

entirely different kind of time from our’s if we take the "lapse time camera11 into consideration.

The camera

has a device to record a long process of events and sjiow this process as if it had happened in a short period of time*

Thus a thousand years in our history may be but

a day for the Absolute life.

It is, at any rate, utterly

false to apply our sense of time to the life of the Absolute, for it we do that, we face irreconcilable contradictions. All of this discussion leads ultimately to a conclusion that the Absolute cannot be known completely through our methods of knowing, and we are led to agnosticism and scepticism.

Thus the ’’Return to Kant11

is implicit in Royee*s philosophy, if it is not explicit.

191

This element in Royee*s Absolute idealism prompted his disciples to adopt either one of two alternatives. The first is a return to Kant, in which the unknowable element in the Absolute is acknowledged, and the position of scepticism and agnosticism is accepted.

This is the

choice of Professor J, loewenberg of the University of California.

The second choice is that which attempts to

overcome this scepticism by resorting to the "intuition*1 of mysticism.

We find this attitude dominant in the thought

of Professor W. E. Hocking.

As far as our perceptual

knowledge is concerned, and if that is all the knowledge we need, we shall be satisfied with the Kantian critical ^>and sceptical attitude.

If, however, we have a peculiar

desire to possess a total perspective of the universe above and beyond perceptual knowledge, we are led to follow the steps of the mysties. The first program manifested in the thinking of Professor Loewenberg has inspired the comment from J. H. Muirhead that T,Loewenberg has returned to Kant, not with the view of feeling his way onward to a more thorough­ going idealism, but rather of emphasizing the sceptical strain, which took form in nineteenth century agnosticism, knowledge, he holds, assures us of the reality of a thingin-itself, call it substance, cause, absolute, or what not.

192

It gives us no assurance of its nature*

Once having taken

up this attitude, and with the modern advance on the theory of judgment before it, it is possible for philosophy to develop a doctrine of the entire problematicalness of all speculations as to the nature of reality.Loewenberg believes that what he calls "Problematic Realism" is actually the spirit and method of science.

He thinks

that the elasticity of the ultimate, instead of the finality of the ultimate, is demanded by the scientific method.

In his outlook Royce’s Absolute is replaced by

what he calls "the elastic ultimate" which is a relative absolute demanded by man’s will to know.

"!Dhe elastic

ultimate as furnished by science", he writes, "is a singular instance of what 1 mean by the real which is problematic and the problematic which is real.

For such

an ultimate is describable by the two adjectives simultaneously and interchangeably: it is real, since it represents the actual limit of scientific verification and discovery; and it is problematic, since a later limit­ ing state of observation and inference may render precarious the ’ultimates* now in f o r c e . H e goes on to say that

1. J. H. Udirhead’s article on "Philosophical currents on Pacific Coast", in Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 3, 1928, p. 509. 2.Loewenberg1s article on "Problematic Realism" in Contemporary American Philosophy, vol. II, p* 59.

193

"reality is always manifest substantivally but never 1 adjectivally." Thus Loewenberg admits Kant's ”thing-initseif” as the ultimate reality, and claims it is not completely known to us.

This, he says, is the lesson he

learned from Eoyce himself: ^Boyce's metaphysics, with which I earnestly wrestled with all my might, had the effect of establishing in my own mind as fundamental the distinction between reality as substantival or cosmocentrie and the adjectival limitations of it inspired by willattitudes either incommensurably individual or concurrently 2 human*" One way to overcome agnosticism is the road to mysticism.

A.E. Taylor has clearly shown in his

Elements of Metaphysics that the alternative to agnosticism is a right kind of mysticism, even though agnosticism is a necessary step toward mysticism.

"Thus our Agnosticism,"

Writes he, "if it is to be called so, neither discredits our human estimate of the relative truth of different theories about the real, nor lends any support to the notion that 'Knowledge is relative^ in the sense that there may conceivably be no correspondence between Beality and the scheme of human knowledge as a whole.

1. Ibid., p . 66. 2. Ibid., p. 78.

194

It is based not on the distrust of human reason, but upon determination to trust that reason implicitly, and it claims, in declaring mere truth to fall short of Beality, to be expressing reason's own verdict upon itself.

Heneo it does not, like vulgar Agnosticism,

leave us in the end in pure uncertainty as to the ultimate structure and upshot, so to say, of the world, but definitely holds that we have genuine and trust-worthy knowledge of the type of that structure and the nature of its materials............... So again with the mystical element in our result. In holding that all genuine individuality, finite or infinite, involves a type of immediate felt unity which transcends reduction to the relational categories of thought and will, we may fairly be said to have reached i

a conclusion which, in a sense, is mystical.”

The kind

of mysticism that Taylor accepts is the kind that McTaggart suggests in his Studies in Hegelian Cosmology. According to McTaggart,

Mysticism which ignored the claims of the

understanding would no doubt be doomed.

Hone ever went

about to break logic, but in the end logic broke him. But there is a Mysticism which starts from the standpoint

1. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, pp. 412-3.

195

of the understanding, and only departs from it in so far as that standpoint show itself not to he ultimate, hut to postulate something heyond itself.

To transcend the lower

X

is not to ignore it,”

The road to mystioism is already implicit in Boyce*s philosophy.

Taylor rightly points this out hy

observing, ”0n the whole, then, it seems that Professor Boyce1s investigations only make it more apparent than before that the relational scheme which discursive thought uses does not adequately express the true nature of the real, and that the mystics of all ages have been so far justified in their contention that the form of our experience which presents the truest analogy to the experience of the Absolute must be supra-relational, or in other words, that the most real type of finite experience must be one which transcends the distinction of subject and predicate.”^ Professor W. E'. Hocking, who is generally regarded as the foremost successor of Boyce *s Absolute Idealism, observes that Boyce was inclined toward mysticism in his later period.

It may be asserted

that Boyce*s unique cognitive method, "interpretation”,

Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 292. The passage is quoted By Taylor in his book, Elements of Metaphysics, p. 413. 2. Baylor, op, cit., p, 152. 3. See Hocking*s article in Oontemporary American Philosophy, vol. I.

196

Which differs from conception and perception, and yet. at the same time uses the method of conception and perception, is a mystical intuitive method.

For interpretation comprehends

signs and symbols, as a mystic comprehends immediately the reality which transcend our conceptual structure. It is not therefore a matter of surprise to discover that Hocking develops Boyce*s Absolute Idealism toward mysticism, and acknowledges that while our concepts fail to guide us to the Absolute, ffthe mystic finds the absolute in immediate experience.”^ Hocking admits that ”the mystic cannot find the whole of reality, but he may find its center; he may find the only handle by which the whole can be held as a unity.”2 Once again, we return to voluntarism,

The Absolute

in the mystical experience must be characterized as Will, for the will is the root of every being.

Hocking,

departing from Boyce*s rationalistic and teleological concept of the will, sees the will as ”fiat”, "Deliberation”, he writes, "deals with possibilities and possibilities to one, still a universal.

Fiat translates decision into

action, and therewith the universal necessarily becomes particular........

Fiat moves through this infinite

1. Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, preface, p. xix. 2. Ibid., p. 554.

197 distance silently and timelessly; in the will act, the space-time world of a free imagination slips timelessly into the actual space-time context, and thereupon loses 1

its freedom, while gaining 1e x i s t e n c e * T h e irrational i

element in the fiat is recognized by Hocking as the ultimate mystery of the world. It is interesting to note that the Japanese philosopher, Kitaro Hishita, one of the foremost contemporary Oriental representatives of voluntarism, who professes to have been influenced by Royee’s Gifford Lectures, shows a similar line of the development of voluntarism as that of Hocking.

His is less rational than Fichte, and less

teleologieal than Royce;

His philosophy, which began

with Fichte and Royce, concludes with the same position advocated by mystics.

The following is a passage of Hishita

taken from his book, Intuition and Reflection in SelfQbnsciousnesss "But we must recognize the world of Experience(Erleben), before we find the world of meanings. ?>

Prior to the Ideas of Plato, the One (t*Y) of Plotinus must be recognized, and the One must be understood not as the source of ’Emanation* of which Plotinus spoke,

1. Hocking*s article on ’’System of Metaphysics" in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1940,p. £60.

198

but rather-as the Creative Will as Eriugena thought. When the Absolute Free Will turns back to itself and sees itself, there is an endless creative progress of the world, and the original object which is immediately given as the object of cognition is nothing else than history, fhus the creation of the world has taken place when the objectless will, as Bbehme said, saw itself by turning back to itself.

But what does reflection mean, and how

is reflection possible?

Absolute Free Will contains in

itself the possibility of both advancing and retreating; it is both 1creans et non creata1 and fnec creata nec creans1* Beflection means the shifting of the perspectives, from the limited to the larger.

And it also means the

returning of the self to the root of the self.

On the

other hand, act means the advancing from one position to another, the developing of the self.

However, it may

be speculated that reflection itself is an act; retreating is, in turn, advancing; and returning to itself is a developing itself.

2)hus viewed, cognition becomes a will,

and everything is the progression of the will.

A mere

reflection sees the inclusive larger view point from the included limited view point.

Viewed from the vantage

point of Absolute Unity or Absolute Will, everything becomes one whole will.

Of course, strictly speaking,

since the Absolute Unity or the Absolute Will cannot be

199

thrown into the world of objects, as the object of thought, it is impossible for us to speak of either Unity or Disunity.

Therefore, in the true Absolute Unity everything

is knowledge and at the same time everything is will, Augustine has expressed this experience when he said that God knows not because there are things, but things i

are because God knows.*"4’

Thus, the doctrine of the will in the post-Kantian German Idealism begins and ends with the teachings of mystics, as we saw at the outset.

Boyce who follows

the steps of post-Kantian Idealism also begins and ends with mysticism.

Being typically American his waywardness

makes him original in his thinking; but logical consistency of the whole philosophy of post-Kantian Idealism requires that he return to mysticism.

He has at least implicitly

manifested this inevitable phase of the thinking which he pledged himself to defend.

In conclusion we may

restate the fundamental principles of Eckhart’s teaching, since these were the flesh and bones of all post-Kantian idealistic philosophy, including Boyce1s.

2

Eekhart

taught that (1) there is an absolute reality whieh cannot

1. Uishita, Kitaro, Intuition and Beflectlon in Self-Consciousness, Iwanami Co., Tokyo, l&lf, p. 353. The quoted passage is translated from Japanese by the writer* 2. See p. 7 of this thesis.

200

be completely explained by our concepts; (2) that reality is and must be more than we know conceptually and otherwise; (3) that the natural man or creature is creation of Sod through his dialectical self-consciousness; (4) that true reality(Sod) Is infinite egress as well as endless regress; (5) that man as an image of Sod has the vocation of fulfill­ ing God's will in concrete experience.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

201

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