There is nothing but the immediately-given world-picture with which we can make a start [305]of this sort. This means the picture of the world which is presented to man before he has in any way transformed it by cognitive activity, i.e., before he has made the very least judgment3 about it or submitted it to the very smallest determination by thinking. What thus passes initially4 through our minds and what our minds pass through—this incoherent picture which is not yet differentiated5 into particular elements, in which nothing seems distinguished8 from, nothing related to, nothing determined9 by, anything else, this is the Immediately-Given. On this level of existence—if the phrase is permissible—no object, no event, is as yet more important or more significant than any other. The rudimentary organ of an animal, which, in the light of the knowledge belonging to a higher level of existence, is perhaps seen to be without any importance whatever for the development and life of the animal, comes before us with the same claim to our attention as the noblest and most necessary part of the organism. Prior to all cognitive activity nothing in our picture of the world appears as substance, nothing as quality, nothing as cause or as effect. The contrasts of matter and spirit, of body and soul, have not yet arisen. Every other predicate, too, must be kept away from the world-picture presented at this level. We may think of it neither as reality nor as appearance, neither as subjective10 nor as objective, neither as necessary nor as contingent11. We cannot decide [306]at this stage whether it is “thing-in-itself” or mere12 “idea.” For, we have seen already that the conclusions of Physics and Physiology13, which lead us to subsume the Given under one or other of the above heads, must not be made the basis on which to build the Theory of Knowledge.
Suppose a being with fully14-developed human intelligence were to be suddenly created out of Nothing and confronted with the world, the first impression made by the world on his senses and his thought would be pretty much what we have here called the immediately-given world-picture. Of course, no actual man at any moment of his life has nothing but this original world-picture before him. In his mental development there is nowhere a sharp line between pure, passive reception of the Given from without and the cognitive apprehension15 of it by Thought. This fact might suggest critical doubts concerning our method of determining the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge. Thus, e.g., Eduard von Hartmann remarks: “We do not ask what is the content of consciousness of a child just awakening16 to conscious life, nor of an animal on the lowest rung of the ladder of organisms. For, of these things philosophising man has no experience, and, if he tries to reconstruct the content of consciousness of beings on primitive17 biogenetic or ontogenetic levels, he cannot but base his conclusions on his own personal experience. Hence, [307]our first task is to determine what is the content of consciousness which philosophising man discovers in himself when he begins his philosophical18 reflection.”1 But, the objection to this view is that the picture of the world with which we begin philosophical reflection, is already qualified19 by predicates which are the results solely20 of knowledge. We have no right to accept these predicates without question. On the contrary, we must carefully extract them from out of the world-picture, in order that it may appear in its purity without any admixture due to the process of cognition. In general, the dividing line between what is given and what is added by cognition cannot be identified with any single moment of human development, but must be drawn21 artificially. But this can be done at every level of development, provided only we divide correctly what is presented to us prior to cognition, without any determination by thinking, from what is made of it by cognition.
Now, it may be objected that we have already piled up a whole host of thought-determinations in the very process of extracting the alleged22 primitive world-picture out of the complete picture into which man’s cognitive elaboration has transformed it. But, in defence we must urge that all our conceptual apparatus23 was employed, not for the characterisation of the primitive world-picture, nor [308]for the determination of its qualities, but solely for the guidance of our analysis, in order to lead it to the point where knowledge recognises that it began. Hence, there can be no question of the truth or error, correctness or incorrectness, of the reflections which, according to our view, precede the moment which brings us to the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge. Their purpose is solely to guide us conveniently to that point. Nobody who is about to occupy himself with epistemological problems, stands at the same time at what we have rightly called the starting-point of knowledge, for his knowledge is already, up to a certain degree, developed. Nothing but analysis with the help of concepts enables us to eliminate from our developed knowledge all the gains of cognitive activity and to determine the starting-point which precedes all such activity. But the concepts thus employed have no cognitive value. They have the purely24 negative task to eliminate out of our field of vision whatever is the result of cognitive activity and to lead us to the point where this activity first begins. The present discussions point the way to those primitive beginnings upon which the cognitive activity sets to work, but they form no part of such activity. Thus, whatever Theory of Knowledge has to say in the process of determining the starting-point, must be judged, not as true or false, but only as fit or unfit for this purpose. Error is excluded, [309]too, from that starting-point itself. For, error can begin only with the activity of cognition; prior to this, it cannot occur.
This last proposition is compatible only with the kind of Theory of Knowledge which sets out from our line of thought. For, a theory which sets out from some object (or subject) with a definite conceptual determination is liable to error from the very start, viz., in this very determination. Whether this determination is justified25 or not, depends on the laws which the cognitive act establishes. This is a question to which only the course of the epistemological inquiry itself can supply the answer. All error is excluded only when I can say that I have eliminated all conceptual determinations which are the results of my cognitive activity, and that I retain nothing but what enters the circle of my experience without any activity on my part. Where, on principle, I abstain26 from every positive affirmation, there I cannot fall into error.
From the epistemological point of view, error can occur only within the sphere of cognitive activity. An illusion of the senses is no error. The fact that the rising moon appears to us bigger than the moon overhead is not an error, but a phenomenon fully explained by the laws of nature. An error would result only, if thought, in ordering the data of perception, were to put a false interpretation27 on the “bigger” or “smaller” size of the [310]moon. But such an interpretation would lie within the sphere of cognitive activity.
If knowledge is really to be understood in its essential nature, we must, without doubt, begin our study of it at the point where it originates, where it starts. Moreover, it is clear that whatever precedes its starting-point has no legitimate28 place in any explanatory Theory of Knowledge, but must simply be taken for granted. It is the task of science, in its several branches, to study the essential nature of all that we are here taking for granted. Our aim, here, is not to acquire specific knowledge of this or that, but to investigate knowledge as such. We must first understand the act of cognition, before we can judge what significance to attach to the affirmations about the content of the world which come to be made in the process of getting to know that content.
For this reason, we abstain from every attempt to determine what is immediately-given, so long as we are ignorant of the relation of our determinations to what is determined by them. Not even the concept of the “immediately-given” affirms any positive determination of what precedes cognition. Its only purpose is to point towards the Given, to direct our attention upon it. Here, at the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge, the term merely expresses, in conceptual form, the initial relation of the cognitive activity to the world-content. The choice of this term [311]allows even for the case that the whole world-content should turn out to be nothing but a figment of our own “Ego,” i.e., that the most extreme subjectivism should be right. For, of course, subjectivism does not express a fact which is given. It can, at best, be only the result of theoretical considerations. Its truth, in other words, needs to be established by the Theory of Knowledge. It cannot serve as the presupposition of that theory.
This immediately-given world-content includes everything which can appear within the horizon of our experience, in the widest sense of this term, viz., sensations, percepts, intuitions, feelings, volitions, dreams, fancies, representations, concepts, ideas.
Illusions, too, and hallucinations stand at this level exactly on a par7 with other elements of the world-content. Only theoretical considerations can teach us in what relations illusions, etc., stand to other percepts.
A Theory of Knowledge which starts from the assumption that all the experiences just enumerated29 are contents of our consciousness, finds itself confronted at once by the question: How do we transcend30 our consciousness so as to apprehend31 reality? Where is the jumping-board which will launch us from the subjective into the trans-subjective? For us, the situation is quite different. For us, consciousness and the idea of the “Ego” are, primarily, only items in the Immediately-Given, and the relation of the latter to the two [312]former has first to be discovered by knowledge. We do not start from consciousness in order to determine the nature of knowledge, but, vice32 versa, we start from knowledge in order to determine consciousness and the relation of subject to object. Seeing that, at the outset, we attach no predicates whatever to the Given, we are bound to ask: How is it that we are able to determine it at all? How is it possible to start knowledge anywhere at all? How do we come to designate one item of the world-content, as, e.g., percept, another as concept, a third as reality, others as appearance, as cause, as effect? How do we come to differentiate6 ourselves from what is “objective,” and to contrast “Ego” and “Non-Ego?”
We must discover the bridge which leads from the picture of the world as given to the picture of it which our cognitive activity unfolds. But the following difficulty confronts us. So long as we do nothing but passively gaze at the Given, we can nowhere find a point which knowledge can take hold of and from which it can develop its interpretations33. Somewhere in the Given we must discover the spot where we can get to work, where something homogeneous to cognition meets us. If everything were merely given, we should never get beyond the bare gazing outwards34 into the external world and a no less bare gazing inwards into the privacy of our inner world. We should, at most, be able to describe, but never to understand, the objects outside of us. Our [313]concepts would stand in a purely external, not in an internal, relation to that to which they apply. If there is to be knowledge, everything depends on there being, somewhere within the Given, a field in which our cognitive activity does not merely presuppose the Given, but is at work in the very heart of the Given itself. In other words, the very strictness with which we hold fast the Given, as merely given, must reveal that not everything is given. Our demand for the Given turns out to have been one which, in being strictly35 maintained, partially36 cancels itself. We have insisted on the demand, lest we should arbitrarily fix upon some point as the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge, instead of making a genuine effort to discover it. In our sense of the word “given,” everything may be given, even what in its own innermost nature is not given. That is to say, the latter presents itself, in that case, to us purely formally as given, but reveals itself, on closer inspection37, for what it really is.
The whole difficulty in understanding knowledge lies in that we do not create the world-content out of ourselves. If we did so create it, there would be no knowledge at all. Only objects which are given can occasion questions for me. Objects which I create receive their determinations by my act. Hence, I do not need to ask whether these determinations are true or false.
This, then, is the second point in our Theory [314]of Knowledge. It consists in the postulate38 that there must, within the sphere of the Given, be a point at which our activity does not float in a vacuum, at which the world-content itself enters into our activity.
We have already determined the starting-point of the Theory of Knowledge by assigning it a place wholly antecedent to all cognitive activity, lest we should distort that activity by some prejudice borrowed from among its own results. Now we determine the first step in the development of our knowledge in such a way that, once more, there can be no question of error or incorrectness. For, we affirm no judgment about anything whatsoever39, but merely state the condition which must be fulfilled if knowledge is to be acquired at all. It is all-important that we should, with the most complete critical self-consciousness, keep before our minds the fact that we are postulating40 the very character which that part of the world-content must possess on which our cognitive activity can begin to operate.
Nothing else is, in fact, possible. As given, the world-content is wholly without determinations. No part of it can by itself furnish the impulse for order to begin to be introduced into the chaos41. Hence, cognitive activity must issue its edict and declare what the character of that part is to be. Such an edict in no way infringes42 the character of the Given as such. It introduces no arbitrary affirmation into science. For, in truth, it affirms nothing. [315]It merely declares that, if the possibility of knowledge is to be explicable at all, we need to look for a field like the one above described. If there is such a field, knowledge can be explained; if not, not. We began our Theory of Knowledge with the “Given” as a whole; now we limit our requirement to the singling out of a particular field within the Given.
Let us come to closer grips with this requirement. Where within the world-picture do we find something which is not merely given, but is given only in so far as it is at the same time created by the cognitive activity?
We need to be absolutely clear that this creative activity must, in its turn, be given to us in all its immediacy. No inferences must be required in order to know that it occurs. Thence it follows, at once, that sense-data do not meet our requirement. For, the fact that they do not occur without our activity is known to us, not immediately, but as an inference from physical and physiological43 arguments. On the other hand, we do know immediately that it is only in and through the cognitive act that concepts and ideas enter into the sphere of the Immediately-Given. Hence, no one is deceived concerning the character of concepts and ideas. It is possible to mistake a hallucination for an object given from without, but no one is ever likely to believe that his concepts are given without the activity of his own thinking. A lunatic will regard as real, though they are in fact [316]unreal, only things and relations which have attached to them the predicate of “actuality,” but he will never say of his concepts and ideas that they have come into the world without his activity. Everything else in our world-picture is such that it must be given, if it is to be experienced by us. Only of our concepts and ideas is the opposite true: they must be produced by us, if they are to be experienced. They, and only they, are given in a way which might be called intellectual intuition. Kant and the modern philosophers who follow him deny altogether that man possesses this kind of intuition, on the ground that all our thinking refers solely to objects and is absolutely impotent to produce anything out of itself, whereas in intellectual intuition form and matter must be given together. But, is not precisely44 this actually the case with pure concepts and ideas?2 To see this, we must consider them purely in the form in which, as yet, they are quite free from all empirical content. In order, e.g., to comprehend the pure concept of causality, we must go, not to a particular instance of causality nor to the sum of all instances, but to the pure concept itself. Particular causes and effects must be discovered by investigation45 in the world, but causality as a Form of Thought must be created [317]by ourselves before we can discover causes in the world. If we hold fast to Kant’s thesis that concepts without percepts are empty, it becomes unintelligible46 how the determination of the Given by concepts is to be possible. For, suppose there are given two items of the world-content, a and b. In order to find a relation between them, I must be guided in my search by a rule of determinate content. Such a rule I can only create in the act of cognition itself. I cannot derive47 it from the object, because it is only with the help of the rule that the object is to receive its determinations. Such a rule, therefore, for the determination of the real has its being wholly in purely conceptual form.
Before passing on, we must meet a possible objection. It might seem as if in our argument we had unconsciously assigned a prominent part to the idea of the “Ego,” or the “personal subject,” and as if we employed this idea in the development of our line of thought, without having established our right to do so. For example, we have said that “we produce concepts,” or that “we make this or that demand.” But these are mere forms of speech which play no part in our argument. That the cognitive act is the act of, and originates in, an “Ego,” can, as we have already pointed48 out, be affirmed only as an inference in the process of knowledge itself. Strictly, we ought at the outset to speak only of cognitive activity without so much as mentioning a cognitive [318]agent. For, all that has been established so far amounts to no more than this, (1) that something is “given,” and (2) that at a certain point within the “given” there originates the postulate set forth49 above; also, that concepts and ideas are the entities50 which answer to that postulate. This is not to deny that the point at which the postulate originates is the “Ego.” But, in the first instance, we are content to establish these two steps in the Theory of Knowledge in their abstract purity.
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1
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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cognitive
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| adj.认知的，认识的，有感知的 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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initially
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| adv.最初，开始 | |
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differentiated
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| 区分，区别，辨别( differentiate的过去式和过去分词 )； 区别对待； 表明…间的差别，构成…间差别的特征 | |
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differentiate
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| vi.(between)区分；vt.区别；使不同 | |
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par
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| n.标准，票面价值，平均数量；adj.票面的，平常的，标准的 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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contingent
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| adj.视条件而定的；n.一组，代表团，分遣队 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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physiology
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| n.生理学，生理机能 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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alleged
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| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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abstain
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| v.自制，戒绝，弃权，避免 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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legitimate
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| adj.合法的，合理的，合乎逻辑的；v.使合法 | |
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enumerated
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| v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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transcend
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| vt.超出，超越(理性等)的范围 | |
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apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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interpretations
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| n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 )；表演；演绎；理解 | |
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outwards
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| adj.外面的，公开的，向外的；adv.向外；n.外形 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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partially
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| adv.部分地，从某些方面讲 | |
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inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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postulate
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| n.假定，基本条件；vt.要求，假定 | |
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whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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postulating
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| v.假定，假设( postulate的现在分词 ) | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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infringes
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| v.违反（规章等）( infringe的第三人称单数 )；侵犯（某人的权利）；侵害（某人的自由、权益等） | |
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physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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derive
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| v.取得；导出；引申；来自；源自；出自 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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entities
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| 实体对像； 实体，独立存在体，实际存在物( entity的名词复数 ) | |
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