History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

The relation between the thing in itself and the phenomenon is also variable.  Now they are regarded as entirely heterogeneous (that which can never be intuited exists in a mode opposed to that of the intuited and intuitable), and now as analogous to each other (non-intuitable properties of the thing in itself correspond to the intuitable characteristics of the phenomenon).  The former is the case when it is said that phenomena are in space and time, while things in themselves are not; that in the first of these classes natural causation rules, and in the second freedom; that in the one-conditioned existence alone is found, in the other unconditioned.[1] But just as often things in themselves and phenomena are conceived as similar to one another, as two sides of the same object,[2] of which one, like the counter-earth of the Pythagoreans, always remains turned away from us, while the other is turned toward us, but does not reveal the true being of the object.  According to this each particular thing, state, relation, and event in the world of phenomena would have its real counterpart in the noumenal sphere:  un-extended roses in themselves would lie back of extended roses, certain non-temporal processes back of their growth and decay, intelligible relations back of their relations in space.  This is approximately the relation of the two conceptions as in part taught by Lotze himself, in part represented by him as taught by Kant.  Herbart’s principle, “So much seeming, so much indication of being” (wie viel Schein so viel Hindeutung aufs Sein), might also be cited in this connection.  That which continually impelled Kant, in spite of his proclamation of the unknowableness of things in themselves, to form ideas about their character, was the moral interest, but this sometimes threw its influence in favor of their commensurability with phenomena and sometimes in the opposite scale.  For in his ethics Kant needs the intelligible character or man as noumenon, and must assume as many men in themselves (to be consistent, then, in general, as many beings in themselves) as there are in the world of phenomena.  But for practical reasons, again, the causality of the man in himself must be thought of as entirely different from, and opposed to, the mechanical causality of the sense world.  Kant’s judgment is, also, no more stable concerning the value of the knowledge of the suprasensible, which is denied to us.  “I do not need to know what things in themselves may be, because a thing can never be presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon.”  And yet a natural and ineradicable need of the reason to obtain some conviction in regard to the other world is said to underlie the abortive attempts of metaphysics; and Kant himself uses all his efforts to secure to the practical reason the satisfaction of this need, though he has denied it to the speculative reason, and to make good the gap in knowledge by faith.  From the theoretical standpoint an extension of knowledge beyond the limits of phenomena appears impossible, but unnecessary; from the practical standpoint it is, to a certain extent, possible and indispensable.

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History of Modern Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.