Topology of the Idea of Being

Just as such a process is possible after one has once possessed the actual cognition, it is also in fact the case that even in our first scientific cognition and inquiry we in a certain sense already know the goal before it becomes distinct to consciousness in the form of a concept. This can be explained only by supposing that the concept of the thing must somehow already be unconsciously present in the nature of our reason. For just as, in recollection, the name that has become unconscious nevertheless continues to operate and rejects the incorrect names, so too, in inquiry, the still-unconscious form of reason operates and imperceptibly guides thought. It is therefore highly remarkable that Plato already conceived cognition as recollection. The forms that, according to his doctrine, eternally remain self-identical in the essence of reason and are unconsciously possessed by us prior to all cognition proper, he called Ideas.

Moreover, thought must also be compelled by its own nature to follow determinate paths that lead toward these Ideas as their goals. For if thought were not in a certain sense organized and fashioned in advance according to an inner plan, we could not possibly discover the goals or the truth. If thoughts were like drops in the sea, we could proceed arbitrarily from every thought in every direction without being compelled to follow determinate paths, since no drop differs from another and none contains within itself a sign directing us to proceed now this way rather than that.

We could, for example, represent a figure that we had thought of as triangular as also being round or square, and the poet could have Faust act and speak as Gretchen, and so forth. Nor would there be any goal of science; and even if we had reached such a goal, we could have no means of recognizing that we had reached it.

and railways, all of which lead to determinate cities as their termini and junctions, in which the paths find their goal.

If, therefore, we disdain the guidance of language because we believe that the word contains only an intimation—and often an inessential one—of the Idea of the thing itself, we can nevertheless trust ourselves in philosophizing and inquiry only because we are convinced that reason tacitly and unconsciously already possesses the truth, and that with Plato we need only recollect and discover it, since it bears witness to itself throughout the firmly determined order of thought and unconsciously guides the movement of thought toward the correct goal.

Opposition to Positivism

In order to make the meaning and value of this Platonic doctrine of reason still clearer to ourselves, however, we would do well to glance at the opposing doctrine. The assumptions current among human beings as answers to scientific questions are indeed all more or less intelligent; but the most simple-minded assumption concerning our present question consists in the view that reason is originally empty and devoid of content, and that no Idea unconsciously guides us in thought. Rather, it is supposed that only by reading off the common element in series of individual intuitive images do we create the concept, the Idea, and reason, so that we ourselves, through our sensory perceptions and operations of thought, would be the creators of

reason.

This is the assumption of the sensualists and positivists, who, in Cicero's expression, are the plebeians among philosophers. They suppose that one need only look at the plurality of given examples in order to extract the universal from them as their concept. To discover the concept of equality and inequality, for example, one need only look at one horse and another horse, and then at a horse and a dog. One would immediately know what equality and inequality are.

They fail entirely to notice—because in general they think little of thought—that the alleged universal, equality, does not occur at all in the examples and therefore cannot possibly be extracted or abstracted from them. Equality, for example, is no part of the horses: it is neither the eye nor the tail. When we speak of equality, therefore, an absolutely new concept is posited, one that lies neither in the representation of the horses nor in that of the dog. This new element belongs to reason and is discovered and recognized anew by thought.

Since we make use of the Ideas long before they have become scientifically clear to us and find them intimated by language, we prefer provisionally to assume with Plato that they dwell originally within reason, guide us unconsciously, and, in each particular act of thought, merely come to recollection or consciousness, elicited in some fashion by a stimulus supplied by the given examples. We defer the more precise explanation of this process to a later investigation; here this entirely general assumption is sufficient for us.

Chapter Two

Topology of the Idea of Being

§ 1. The Division of the Elements of Cognition

When we begin to philosophize, we find already complete within our consciousness the complex image of the world, together with all the opinions and views poured out over it. We must therefore first bid farewell, with Descartes, to this unavoidable product of our powers of imagination and thought, and undertake the task of seeking the A.B.C's, or elements, of all the complex forms of consciousness. Fortunately, we are not the first to occupy ourselves with this task, and so we can be brief and need only emphasize what presents itself to us as a new result of inquiry.

Let us therefore suppose that the entire fabric of ordinary consciousness has been dissolved according to the rules of skepticism and that everything has disintegrated into its elementary constituents. Since consciousness of the world was formed through association, fusion, and thought, our cognition and opinion of the world must necessarily break down into points of relation and forms of relation. If we are seeking the concept of being and do not wish to wander helplessly through the various domains of cognition, we must first separate out those domains in which we can be certain that we shall not encounter it. We are not qualified to make such a judgment, however, without having examined closely the nature of the elements of cognition. Our next task is therefore to characterize the elements of cognition.

[1.] The Points of Relation

If we first consider the points of relation, with reference to which the thinker arrives at standpoints and forms connections and entire systems of connection, three different domains immediately reveal themselves, all of which possess the common character of being merely immediate, relationless consciousness.

We can easily separate them from the relational unities in which they occur by means of logical chemistry, just as elements are separated from a salt. Take a simple relational whole, for example, the judgment “I see a green field,” “I hear gentle music,” or the like. We need only eliminate the forms of relation—that is, the article “a,” the representation of the object “field” or “music,” and the grammatical inflections—in order to leave behind three domains of simple points of relation.

We shall have much more to say about the first two domains, for they have been badly neglected, if not altogether overlooked, in previous psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics. For the present, it may suffice to have indicated their logical place.

The third domain can again be divided into two groups, which for now are to be provisionally defined only according to a property peculiar to each. The one group belongs to the so-called external senses, whose content we innocently and immediately project upon presupposed external objects; the other belongs to the so-called inner sense, whose content is just as innocently related to an I assumed without skepticism and is never projected upon external things.

In both cases, however, the projection—whether it falls upon external things or upon the I—is a later acquisition and has nothing to do with the immediate sensation and the peculiarity of it that becomes conscious to us. The projection can therefore be thought away without further ado and without doing any injury to the content of sensation. We may relate the sensation of brown to a horse or regard it as a hallucination; the sensation itself is not thereby altered and does not on that account turn into the sensation of red or green.

Likewise, the feeling of shame, anxiety, pleasure, and so forth remains wholly independent of every attempt at explanation and is known to us according to its content once we have experienced these feelings. Even the relation to the accompanying circumstances that occasioned the feeling is essential only to the occasion and definition of the feeling, but inessential to the feeling itself.

[2.] The Forms of Relation

We now come to the domain of the forms of relation. Here the threefold division of the first domain repeats itself in a peculiar manner. It becomes apparent that when, in the course of time, we pass over to other representations, the first three contents of consciousness do not disappear altogether, nor—although they appear in themselves relationless—are they incapable of entering into relations with one another. Rather, to use Locke's figurative expression, they undergo reflection and alter their direction and place by coming together with one another. We therefore do not find them originally in isolation, but must first separate them out from their connections in order to become acquainted with them.

We shall call these connections, which have sometimes been called psychological association and fusion and sometimes reflection, more simply and abstractly “relation.” In this relation, however, the entire process and its result once again become immediately conscious. Thus there must once again arise three domains which, since the earlier contents of consciousness occur within them as, so to speak, the material of relation, we can call forms of relation.

In order provisionally to illustrate the matter by means of an image, let us imagine a bow and arrow as the material. Let the relation be their use in shooting. Now there becomes conscious both the result of the entire relation, in the arrow flying forth with living force; and the individual acts of relation, the placing of the arrow upon the string and the drawing of the string and bow; and, finally, the connection and unity of the entire process according to its acts and its result.

[1.] With regard to the relationless material intuited in the relation, we shall call consciousness of the result “intuition” or the “perspectival image.” Thus, for example, we have an animal, a flower, a word, or a chord in consciousness as a form of relation, without the flower being sensed merely as an aggregate of patches of color, the word as a mere heap of letters, or the chord as individual tones alongside one another. Rather, separating the perspectival intuition into its elementary material requires effort, and it is precisely only of the result of the relation that we have a unified consciousness.

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[2.] Secondly, we also acquire an immediate consciousness of the kinds of relating themselves, and this now furnishes us with the so-called Ideas or forms, which we can accordingly compare with the knowledge of placing the arrow upon the string and drawing the string. Thus difference, equality, purpose, means, cause, acting, being acted upon, and the like become immediately conscious to us.

[3.] Finally, we can also notice the relation of all these elements to one another, and this we call thinking. In this way, nothing individual is represented by itself; rather, one relation is compared with another relation and with that which is related, and the whole is intuited together as a unity in concepts. This we may also call intellectual intuition.

The Dialectical Character of Thought

Here, where the theory of knowledge is to be touched upon only briefly, we wish at once to eliminate the assumption that the forms of thought could somehow be reduced to the relationless elements of the first level by recalling a simple judgment. Suppose, for example, that one thinks and says, “Green and blue are different.” The colors are given to us through sensory sensation; but the Idea of difference is nothing sensory. Rather, it is a standpoint, insofar as under it I sense or represent neither the one color nor the other, but become conscious of the relation between the two acts of sensing.

If we compare with this the two acts of sensing that occur when we sense green and then green again, these stand in a different relation to one another. In the latter case we become conscious of sameness, in the former of difference. We cannot form these Ideas at will, any more than we can arbitrarily create sensations of color or sound. Just as these latter arise within sensibility under certain conditions, so the Ideas of reason enter our consciousness in our acts of relating.

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The points of relation themselves are relationless and can therefore also be separately conscious. We can, for example, be cold without at the same time being hot and without thinking of snow and wind; we can be ashamed without at the same time being proud; we can laugh without at the same time weeping; we can sense the beautiful without being unpleasantly affected by the ugly, and so forth.

The Ideas, however, are by their nature relational, and we cannot think equality without inequality, the beautiful without the ugly, the Idea of pleasure without that of pain, the straight without the curved, God without the world, being without nonbeing, or relation without relationlessness or absoluteness.

If we now wished, with Kant, to employ the customary expressions “matter” and “form” to designate the points of relation and the standpoint, there would be no obstacle, provided that we first detached the customary subsidiary notions from them.

First, since these expressions are borrowed from Aristotelian philosophy, they also bear a dogmatic stamp, for the ancients believed themselves capable of immediately distinguishing matter and form in a sensibly given thing in itself.

Second, even if with the critical Kant we cast off this dogmatism, the subsidiary notion must still be eliminated that, as in Kant, only what is sensory is to be understood by “matter,” whereas the singularly given self-consciousness, the consciousness of our acts, and the domain of inner sense —that is, feelings—stand on the same level as so-called sensibility.

Finally, the separation of the faculties of the soul, as found in Kant, must also be denyed of our terms. For matter and form do not arise as receptivity and spontaneity, or sensibility and understanding, in different places and from different faculties that would first have to seek channels of communication. In all their kinds and levels, they are nothing other than our single consciousness, within which we do not tumultuously mingle everything together, but distinguish the differences indicated above.

Once we have freed the traditional terms from these subsidiary notions, we may indeed understand by material and formal cognition the points of relation and the standpoint.

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In the expression “relation,” however, the dialectical character of thought appears more clearly. For matter and form, as building timber or model, possess something wooden and rigid, whereas thought mediates the brittle isolation of the elements by relating all of them to one another. According to its dialectical character, therefore, we can oppose thought to all the other elements of cognition, since through thought they address and answer one another, as it were, and communicate with one another as in a connected conversation.

Thought leaves nothing isolated. It resolves the relational forms of intuitive images into sensations and their accompanying feelings and activities, and then restores their community and relation. It brings the Ideas to consciousness and conceptual form through their relation to one another, and pursues them in their connection with intuitions throughout all judgments and inferences. Finally, it relates every content of consciousness to self-consciousness, since it is the I that sees and hears and feels and acts and represents and thinks.

For although immature consciousness immediately attaches sensory sensations to a foreign object that is apparently present in “intuition,” thought nevertheless takes both back into the I, which alone can have sensory sensations and which bears within itself the opinion of an object. Thought is therefore dialectical insofar as it leaves nothing relationless and joins all relations into unity.

Opposition to Kant and Hegel

I scarcely need say that the criterion we have obtained here achieves an entirely new conception, of which Kant, for example, knows nothing in his Critique of Pure Reason. For him the forms of thought, or categories, stand rigidly outside one another, just like the sensations given in outer and inner sense, or like the so-called objects of nature given in intuition, which appear to confront one another as mutually alien, like tree and horse.

We, however, found in every category the path to another. The categories are therefore all dialectical for us, but not as they are for Hegel, such that they pass over into one another and sublate themselves. For in Hegel negativity inheres in each category, and so each sublates itself as untrue and passes over into another as its truth, which in turn sublates itself, and so forth; the entire system thereby refutes itself.

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For even if Hegel's categories ultimately run back into themselves in a circle, the whole is thereby merely the perennial lie, and its truth is that it is the lie, or living and eternalized self-contradiction.

According to our conception, however, no category passes over into another, but each contains within itself a relation to another, which is therefore posited together with it as true. Thus the concept of the father is posited only together with that of the son, and never the one without the other; yet neither is identical with the other or passes over into it. All the categories together therefore form an inner unity, a system, an eternal truth attested from every side and living within thought.

When the relations are complex, we must treat them analytically—that is, dissect them according to their simple points of relation—just as we seek to divide complex sensations into their elements in order to understand them. Yet we plainly could not judge the given sensations or intuitions at all if that which thinks were not also that which senses. For as soon as, with Kant, we posit each separately by itself, judgment ceases, just as we cannot understand what someone says if we do not hear it. The hearer and the one who understands are necessarily one and the same person.

How am I to declare two colors equal or different if I do not see them both? That which thinks must therefore also be that which senses, though not conversely, for I can sense without thinking about it. Nor does this occur according to Hegelian dialectic, such that the one passes over into the other. Nothing passes over; rather, each remains what it was, the other is added, and both are in one without disappearing into one another.

Nor is this witchcraft, but a fact that everyone can establish within himself. They do not become one in number and quality; rather, there are many in number and differences in quality, yet nevertheless the same being. Nor do we require a Kantian schema by placing between the two a third thing that would possess something of each; for one does not connect a horse and an ass by placing a mule between them.

Thus we demand a unity for thinking and sensing, just as it is in fact given in our experience. We shall not, however, excuse ourselves from the more exact investigation of this remarkable experience, but shall undertake it at leisure in its proper place.

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The Next Task

It we now recall our task of finding the concept of being, it might be regarded as self-evident that we must eliminate the domains of the points of relation—the sensory sensations, the so-called subjective states, and the entire material of the points of relation—and ascribe being, as a standpoint, solely to intellectual intuition.

The decision is not so simple, however. Our thought is active long before it reaches the scientific level, and so it is natural that, when we attain scientific reflectiveness, we find all the points of relation already linked and intergrown through the most manifold standpoints. We shall therefore at least separate once again the two domains that have been formed through the elaboration of sensory sensations on the one hand and inner states on the other. For it will become apparent that each of these domains has usurped the concept of being and that in the next two sections we must first destroy illusions before we can securely establish the scientific place of this concept.

§ 2. The Being of So-Called Things Is Inferred

If we wish to discover what the concept of being means within reason—a concept that from childhood onward we have always used in language as though it were self-evident or as a valid and familiar designation—it immediately becomes apparent that the general conviction of human beings provides us with no clarification.

For people will of course immediately know how to answer our question by laughingly pointing to the so-called things that surely exist. This house, for example, is here now; it was built a few years ago; at that time it “was” not yet. In the same way, people point to everything that creeps and flies and always say, “This is!” Accordingly, they believe that in these seemingly most obvious examples they possess the concept itself.

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Yet a brief reflection is sufficient to make clear to these confident and easily satisfied people the insufficiency and uncertainty of their conviction. One need only remind them of the many deceptions. Does the colored arc really stand there in the air where it appears to stand? And are you alone so clever that you have never been deceived and never believed yourselves to see or hear things that were not present?

Have you never dreamed? Have you never noticed how a dog wags its tail at, or barks at, its image in a mirror?

These questions establish that the being of things is not originally certain to us, but that we infer it.*) An inference is required in order to say, “I was deceived”; an inference is likewise required in order to say, “I am not deceived; this here is actual.” The fact that such an inference is performed quickly and wholly unconsciously is no reason to claim that it is an immediate cognition. For when reading, we are likewise entirely unconscious that we first apprehend the individual letters and words before we can pronounce the word and sentence, and yet this inevitably occurs. Only when the handwriting is illegible do we first notice the activity we had previously performed unconsciously.

If, however, it is an inference when we declare the so-called things to be, then we must already know beforehand what nature that which is has—the middle term—in order to be able to ascribe or deny this concept to things. In the same way, we must already know very well what characteristics belong to the antique or the Cinquecento if we wish to venture to classify a new discovery under one or the other.

Since, on account of the wide-open doors of the senses, our consciousness is always filled by the tumult of sensory perceptions and their combinations, every thinker will find it natural that the great mass of human beings, who cannot reflect more deeply upon concepts, should regard as that which is the perspectival intuitions of the so-called external things that occur most frequently and remain most persistently in consciousness—that is, the relational unities of sensory consciousness.

*) The inference, squared into Barbara, runs as follows:

Everything that appears under such-and-such conditions (middle term) is actual (major term); This appearance here (minor term) corresponds to the specified conditions (middle term); This appearance is actual.

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Popular positivism therefore follows this current, and even scholars who are distinguished in the special disciplines of science, such as Wundt, allow themselves to be seduced by this illusion. I am far from failing to recognize Wundt's merits; but they do not rest upon his views concerning metaphysics. Strictly speaking, his Logic could remain entirely out of consideration, because it contains no section, chapter, or paragraph dealing with the concept of being. Yet since on page 7 he understands metaphysics as knowledge that has become, just as he understands logic as knowledge that is becoming, and since knowledge aims at truth, while truth presupposes the distinction between that which is not actual and that which we declare to be actual and in some fashion existent, his Logic must inevitably presuppose some concept of being and actuality.

This seems to me to be the fundamental defect of the entire work: it speaks on many occasions of being, reality, and actuality without investigating the origin, meaning, or validity of these concepts. If we wish to see what presupposition concerning being is present in Wundt, we should follow the chapter “On Objects” and “On the Concept of Substance,” because it is there that the words “being” and “reality” are most frequently inserted into the train of thought.

Wundt's Doctrine

If I understand him correctly, Wundt assumes (p. 410) “that an object is given to our thought” when a complex of properties and states occurs together with a certain constancy. Although (p. 412) no single thing of experience is in actuality persistent, and although the representation of continual changeability forms an invariably present constituent of the empirical concept of a thing, nevertheless, despite the rejection of the philosophically constructed “false representation of unity,” a “connection” must still be retained.

Thus a “thing” is whatever “remains connected throughout the continual change of appearances.” The appearances must be given to us—that is, imposed upon us by the compulsion of sensory perception—and the connection must be seen in the spatial independence of the thing and the temporal continuity of its changes. It is a “fixed idea of modern times” to think the concept of an unchanging bearer of appearances into things from the outset.

Our body is (p. 415) “the nearest objective thing” that we distinguish. In the same way, he wishes to posit spiritual things formed by analogy with external things (p. 418); here too, however, “a mythological representation” first added in thought a “thing in itself,” “an unknown bearer.”

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However false the absolute determination of the concept of substance may be (p. 483), its relative significance nevertheless remains valid, since by it nothing other than the concept of the thing is meant—that is, something changeable whose changing states are connected with one another by our thought. Accordingly, one must (p. 489) supplement the material concept of substance so that it also applies to psychological processes; that is, one must presuppose that a psychological quality belongs to the elements of substance. This concept, however, remains merely hypothetical.

Finally, since (p. 493) “real objects are given to us only as objects of experience,” “experience decides in favor” of the proposition that “real objects conform to the laws of our intuition,” and hence that we should “transfer the fundamental properties of space to the real substances given in space.”

In sum, then, Wundt wishes actual substances to be understood as changeable things insofar as they are given to us spatially through sensibility; these things are then also supposed to possess psychological properties that mediate their connection. Their unity remains just as uncertain for him as it is unfixed within sensibility.

Toward a Critique

We must first once again express our astonishment that Wundt calls these objects “real objects” without instructing us as to what he understands by reality and actuality and how he arrived at this concept in opposition, for example, to semblance and appearance. For these objects are surely mere representations or appearances. Without reality as their opposite, however, we do not know what an appearance is and therefore cannot ascribe reality to these so-called things. Second, it is therefore also impermissible to substitute the concept of objects for that of substances, since “substance” is always intended to mean something real and metaphysical, even according to Wundt's conception. If we generalize the things flower, ox, ass, and so forth, then let the concept of an “object” analyzed by Wundt arise, for all I care; but no concept of a substance has thereby been obtained. For the concept of being does not lie in the appearances from which the object has been abstracted.

No matter how greatly we generalize the intuitive images or representations of ox and cabbage, we shall never obtain the concept of food; and if we declare a commodity expensive or cheap, no division of this predicate can possibly produce the concept of a horse or scissors.

We therefore see that Wundt's theory of knowledge falls under the paralogism treated in this section. For when we declare any things to be, we intend to exclude nonbeing and semblance and, as the case may be, also to separate essence from appearance. We therefore choose among several predicates, none of which inheres in the object itself.

Kather, the “object” identified by Wundt as a “complex of properties and states” supplies merely one point of relation, which we characterize in one way or another by comparing it with another point of relation not identified by Wundt, according to a standpoint that Wundt does not consider at all. In the same way, we call a horse or a pair of scissors cheap or expensive by comparison with other needs or earlier times, according to the standpoint of price.

Thus we must regretfully take leave of a mode of explanation that promises to interpret for us the most important concept of metaphysics, yet does not even locate the scientific place of the concept, but loses itself in investigations that have nothing further to do with the question.

Only when, through the unconscious activity of reason, we have long since ascribed being to the images of sensibility can we later believe that we have analytically rediscovered this concept within them. The concept of being itself, however, does not belong to the sensory sphere.

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§ 3. Being Does Not Consist in Consciousness of the Activities of the Soul

Let us therefore attempt to find another path by following the guidance that reason provides through the nature of thought itself. We saw that we ascribe being to the so-called things of the external world—that is, to the relational forms of sensibility—only through an inference, and that we must therefore have learned what being is from somewhere else.

Since, once the external world has been subtracted, only our I remains, we might at first believe that being designates merely our psychological activities, of which we become conscious and which we have somehow gathered together into a representation as a sum or unity.

This hypothesis has much that is seductive about it. For we also become conscious of the quantity of our being through the quantity of our psychological activity — our feeling, willing, acting, and thinking. In a state of great activity, rich feeling, and intense sensation, one believes oneself to be more than when one senses and reacts weakly. When the wealth of psychological life is diminished by illness or weakness, one believes oneself no longer to be anything, or to be only a shadow of oneself.

Under this hypothesis, being would also lose the lifelessness that so incensed the noble Fichte. Being would then be nothing but life and activity or, in Lotze's expression, “self-performing activity.”

Finally, we also have immediate consciousness of the activities of our soul. It is not first whispered to us by another; rather, when we sense, we ourselves know immediately that we sense, what we sense, and how we sense. Only we ourselves can know this at first hand, whereas all others can infer it only from external signs. We therefore appear here to have reached the proper and primary source from which the concept of being flows.

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This would be very welcome if only the hypothesis could withstand examination. But as soon as we draw the thought somewhat tighter, its untenability becomes apparent for two reasons. First, being is something one and self-identical. For however often we predicate being of an object, we always mean the same thing, since otherwise we would have to employ several different words in order to designate our thought precisely. But the activities and states disclosed to us by inner sense differ essentially from one another, and it is altogether impossible to think them as mutually equal and identical.

How could we posit weeping and laughing, doubting and believing, desiring and abhorring as one and the same? What, then, is the one and equal element within them that we would have in mind if we wished to call all the infinitely different kinds of manifestations of psychological life our being?

A practiced logician will certainly be at no loss for an answer. He will be able to arrange our activities and states under genera and classes just as easily as animals and plants. Just as “animal,” “plant,” or “organism” then appears to him as the highest universal, he will also be able to maintain that being is the one and equal universal inhering in all the manifestations of our psychological life.

Yet we would immediately notice the logical error of an ignoratio elenchi. This definition does not define the being whose concept was being sought, but rather something belonging to being, while being itself is simply presupposed as already known. It is as if, in response to the question "What is a horse?" someone were to answer that horses are brown or white or black, and so forth, and that the universal—color—was the definition of the horse.

For even if it had proved possible to bring the various activities of the soul and inner states under a common designation, only a property accompanying being would thereby have been defined. What is at issue is not the content and object of sensations, volitions, and cognitive activities, since, expressed universally, this presents only what the Scholastics called possibility, to which there still lacks, as a complement, the particular occasion through which posse becomes esse. [Page 31]

According to the hypothesis, the individual activities count as that which is, not the universal or the represented abstract content. For it is of course true that only something falling under the universal possible content of that which is can be, just as there can be no horse that does not have some color. But the definition was supposed to capture not the content of that which is, but precisely that peculiar nature of being whose presence makes the content into something that is. Thus we would have grown no wiser concerning the nature of being even if the content had been defined, because we would thereby have obtained no definition of being itself.

We have also already good-naturedly conceded that, according to the customary practice of abstraction, one could really find something universal and equal for all the different inner states of the soul. But this is entirely impossible. For the definition that is supposed to determine universally the essence of that which is must necessarily, in abstracting from individuality, also abstract from the very reality that was to be defined.

When we arrange animals and plants systematically, the universal remains within the same genus as the particular and individual, because the individual is considered not as existence, but only as form or type—in short, as something ideal belonging to that which exists. For what was to be classified was not the actual, but the forms of the actual; and every zoologist knows that neither his orders and classes nor even his individual species-types are as such anything real or actual. Our concern, however, was not with the forms of the content of psychological life, but with being itself. The representatives of this theory were therefore compelled to make a logical leap from one genus to another, for the definition gave us something ideal, whereas we were seeking reality.

Thus the one and equal element of being is not extracted from all the inner states and conceptually gathered together by the definition. On the contrary, it is simply omitted, and the definition suffers from an ignoratio elenchi.

If we wished to inquire more precisely why the universal applying to all manifestations of the soul could not be found, we would encounter the second reason that destroys the hypothesis advanced above. Since the individual activities differ so fundamentally and nothing universally equal can be found within them, their equality is reducible only to an equal relation to a point lying outside them.

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In attempting to find the universal applying to our activities, we immediately notice that we regard them as being only insofar as we connect them with the I in our consciousness, by saying: I think, I wish, I rejoice, and so forth. We regard the universal—wishing or thinking—only as something possible that first becomes actual when I wish or when I think.

Thus we regard the I as what properly is, while the possible activities appear to acquire a share in being only once we can describe them as given within the I. Accordingly, the activities would not be the source of the concept of being either, and consciousness of them would make us conscious only of what thinking, feeling, willing, abhorring, and so forth are, but would provide no information about being itself.

For through consciousness of our activities we perceive merely the What, the content, but not the That. Rather, this consciousness of the fact relates to the connection of the What with the I.

§ 4. The Concept of Being Belongs to the Domain of Intellectual Intuition

After briefly surveying the elements of cognition, we readily saw where the place of the concept of being must not be sought. We could not count being among intuitions or so-called objects, because a judgment must first be passed upon such objects, according to which they might be declared to be or not to be.

Nor could we count being among the activities of the soul or consciousness of them, because these too appeared to offer only points of relation for this concept.

Since presumably no one would wish to regard the mere sensations of the so-called external senses, or immediate, singular self-consciousness, as the logical place of the concept of being, only intellectual intuition remains to us—that is, the domain of the Ideas, which are transformed into concepts through dialectic.

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Three Levels of Consciousness

We shall now immediately hear the objection that it is impossible to call the representation of being a concept, since even children, before they know at all what a concept is, always already speak of being—for example, by distinguishing a cake actually given to them from one merely promised, or by answering the question “Who is there?” with “It is I,” and so forth.

It is therefore well to recall here at once the different levels of consciousness through which one and the same representation can pass. To avoid misunderstandings, we shall also initially prefer to call the contents of intellectual intuition “Ideas.”

The lowest level at which Ideas are cognized must be the one that we perhaps undergo in common with animals. If we hold a piece of meat before an animal and, just as it greedily attempts to seize it, quickly substitute a piece of wood, vexation must arise in it, just as in a child. The tactile, gustatory, and visual image of the meat, which came alive in consciousness together with desire, does not coincide with the sensations occasioned by the wood in its mouth. The images fly apart; the desire is deceived.

Should we not assume that animals, like children, somehow notice this inner process in consciousness and could distinguish it, for example, from the opposite case, in which they actually receive the meat they desire? A relation of the two images and sensations to one another would then occur, and the ideal relational unity would be otherness or, as the case may be, identity. I therefore assume that these Ideas are thought obscurely by animals and children.

The second level, however, already separates animal and child. With language, the child obtains a means of becoming more distinctly conscious of those Ideas by designating the processes within its consciousness with different words and interweaving them, as expressly named Ideas, with representations from the objective and subjective spheres of intuition.

Thus, when the child can say, “That is a different thing and not the same thing I wanted,” it stands at a higher level of consciousness than the animal with respect to cognition of the Ideas. [Page 34]

The highest level, however, is attained only when this Idea, which through language we can determinately separate from others, is related not merely to intuitive images, but once again placed in relation to other Ideas and thus made an object of consideration. At this level the Idea is to be called a concept.

Yet when a thing passes through different levels, its name is often taken from the highest level. We therefore cannot be denyed the right to employ the expression “concept,” as the case may be, for this entire sphere of cognition by the understanding and reason.

We can therefore call the Idea of being a concept insofar as by this we mean a cognitive content that, although in some manner already present prelinguistically in the minds of animals and children, is designated and acknowledged by a word in language and is thereby already separated and more clearly apprehended, but first receives conceptual formulation from the thinker.

The Generic Character of Intuition

Correct concepts do not prevail concerning the essence of intuition in general. People believe that one may speak of intuition only when an object immediately affects our senses, which appears to occur only with objects of the external senses.

For this reason, Kant, strangely enough, applies his category of substance only to these objects and is unwilling to concede substantiality either to the soul as an object of inner sense or to God as an object of reason. In this respect Kant stands under the pressure of his sensualistic prejudices, just as in general he merely reflects, in an exceedingly contorted form, the mode of thought that prevailed in the preceding century.

Just as he posits a thing in itself for the appearances of outer sense, he could also have assumed a subject for feelings and desires. Both would indeed contradict his doctrine concerning the use of the categories in the same way, but he would at least have been consistent in his inconsistency, whereas he now bestows upon material things alone the favor of demanding for them a substance in itself as a limiting concept of experience.

Accordingly, he makes an entirely arbitrary use of the word “intuition” and refuses to concede intuitiveness to reason because under intuition he always represents only sensory objects, [Page 35]

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as though the essence of intuition did not consist solely in immediacy, which belongs to the elements of inner sense and also to reason and understanding in exactly the same manner as it belongs to the elements of outer sense.

If, therefore, we seek the common character of all intuition, we must contrast it with mediated cognition and fix our gaze upon both simultaneously. What is mediated is of such a kind that it is joined together only gradually from elementary intuitions, as, for example, the image of a tree is composed of the individual impressions of color that together form the figure and the whole of the tree. For in apprehending it our soul must proceed in the same manner as the painter proceeds in creating it, by adding one patch of color to another.

Likewise, for inner sense it is a mediated cognition when—

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we analyze for ourselves, for example, the total impression of a festival and intuitively call to mind the individual feelings of which that total impression was composed. In the intellectual domain, cognition is mediated when, as in Euclid's proofs, it does not arise immediately upon our hearing the conditions of the theorem, but follows only from additionally introduced lemmas and constructions; likewise, every definition mediates the unity of a concept by specifying its characteristics.

We may, however, relate the concept of the intuitive in the first instance only to what is absolutely simple, and then, in accordance with experience, leave a certain latitude for an acquired power of intuition, because the extent of consciousness determines what is cognized in a single act and what no longer falls within it.

For the infant, to be sure, all the objects and persons in its surroundings are still incomprehensible, and its sensibility, as experience shows, is filled only point by point, as it were, with individual impressions. But once the infant has gained greater insight through repetition, the whole images of persons and things fall within a single intuition for it, just as they do for adults.

The same holds for intellectual intuition. For the more practiced thinker, not only are the categories simple elements of cognition, but the simple syllogism and the definition of many concepts are also given in a single intuition. Only in the case of inferences whose outcome cannot be foreseen does one notice the composition and plurality of the intuitions. In such cases, one or another member of the connection may also have disappeared from memory, so that one cannot complete the definition or the conclusion.

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Whatever one sees with a single glance of the mind is also cognized intuitively. Thus, just as is customary in the case of sensory intuition, we may extend intellectual intuition to the cognition of more complex relations, provided that these still fall within one and the same act of consciousness and therefore preserve the general character of immediacy.

Whether one is dealing with purely intuitive cognition or with an acquired capacity to intuit several elements together can easily be distinguished. Every intuition indeed has the peculiarity that no question of method arises in it, and hence no question of teaching and learning either; for either one intuits it or one does not, and at first it does not occur to one at all that what is intuited should or could also be proved.

But this character of indemonstrability, immediacy, and revelation can be maintained only in the case of pure intuition, not in that of a more highly developed capacity for intuition. Colors, for example, are seen only by one who sees them; tones are heard only by one who hears them; pain is known only by one who feels it; causality is understood only by one who understands it. Intuitions of this kind cannot be taught, and it would be ridiculous to attempt to teach and demonstrate sensations of color to a blind person, or to attempt to demonstrate the concept of cause to a horse.

Composite intuitions, by contrast, must all be capable of methodical analysis and can be taught and learned, even if not everyone succeeds afterward in intuiting the many elements together at a single glance. Thus, for example, once one is practiced, one can grasp the concept of a regular quadrilateral at a single glance. Nevertheless, it can be analyzed into six elements: figure, side, angle, rightness, fourness, and equality; and one can state the rule according to which the parts are to be joined and related to one another.

Likewise, 32 can be intuitively cognized in its unity as a sum, whereas only a calculating prodigy can immediately grasp two twelve-digit numbers intuitively as a sum. Nevertheless, the method must be shown for the smaller as well as for the larger addition, and this operation can be taught, whereas the concept of unity cannot be taught.

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The Specific Character of Intellectual Intuition

Since we have already oriented ourselves concerning the division of the elements of cognition, it will suffice for our purpose—the discovery of the competent tribunal for the concept of being—if we emphasize what is specific to intellectual intuition.

It now becomes apparent that the elements of cognition combine with one another. This combination deserves the greatest attention because it contains the specific character we are seeking. Take the proposition “I see two brown horses.” Here elements from all the sources of cognition have already fused together.

In “I” we have singular self-consciousness; in “see,” consciousness of our activity or inner state; in “brown,” sensory intuition; in “horses,” the relational unity of perspectival intuition; in “two,” the Idea through which the act of relating the intuitions to one another is apperceived; and finally, in the grammatical inflection of the words and the construction of the sentence, the relational unity through which all these elements are comprehended together as belonging together and as distinct from one another.

This last is the specific character of intellectual intuition, for what occurs and becomes conscious in every domain of cognition here stands together before our eyes. We already find a relational unity in the intuition of the horses, through which many different elements are perspectively comprehended together.

Higher still stands the relational unity of the number two, which in turn reduces those relational unities of intuition to mere points of relation for my relating activity and gives me consciousness of my unified relating activity itself.

But only the whole sentence guarantees for me the comprehension into a unity of the elements of cognition that have arisen separately. For here a subject—"I"—is represented that is conscious of its activity of seeing and at the same time has before it and judges the content of sensory sensation. This relation of the activity to a subject and an object, and their comprehension into unity,

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is therefore possible only if interlection transcends the separation of the elements of consciousness and can apprehend all of them simultaneously as distinct and as one. This is consequently the specific character of intellectual intuition in contrast to the other groups of cognition.

Opposition to Kantian Empiricism

It is now appropriate to emphasize the opposition between this definition of rational cognition and Kant's doctrine. We saw that reason relates the entire content of the elements of cognition to one another. Since this relating consists of acts that become conscious as Ideas, reason must in turn relate these Ideas and thus arrive at concepts of them and of their points of relation. One might now easily fall into Kant's opinion that the comprehending cognitive faculty of intellection is bare and devoid of all content because it has merely to stamp the material points of relation with its categories. Thus he says: intuitions without concepts are blind, concepts without intuitions are empty.

By this one is supposed to understand that the categories and concepts are useful only for comprehending appearances in the sensory sphere and acquiring experiences, but are otherwise useless. Kant believes that only through sensibility is what possesses content given as existing, and that the concept has sense and significance only when fused with this content as a mere form of experience.

Reiff rightly inferred from this that Kant adheres to pure empiricism and that the priority of the categories is idle talk, since they are supposed to occur and possess validity only in experience, and hence are merely forms of experience—that is, empirical concepts.

The concept of the emptiness of the categories likewise remains entirely obscure. For if, according to Kant, a bucket filled with water were apprehended merely as the form of the water, then once emptied it would have to be not merely empty and useless, but nothing. If, however, it remains something in itself, then it is not merely the form of the water.

Just as we can consider the empty bucket by itself and judge it from many standpoints—its workmanship, material, size, and so forth—the categories and all concepts likewise possess a content of their own that has not arisen, even remotely, from sensory material and is not inseparably connected with it.

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The number two, for example, is not the form of the two horses, nor is it already offered to us together with the intuition of them. Kant therefore did not arrive at his proposition by perceiving a relation or coordination between concept and material, to which every thinker would assent, but through his sensualistic prejudice, as though all existence and actuality could be woven only with the weft-thread of sensory sensation.

In doing so he forgets that the relation to external things presupposed by him must also presuppose an inner thing that stands in relation to this external world, and that this inner thing can also be considered by itself. For if, as he assumes, it merely supplied the form for an alien content, the alien content could not be refracted against the subject and consequently could not elicit now this form and now that. The content would thus pass by the subject without making an impression, just as one cannot push or strike the images in a mirror.

Even if existence and actuality came about merely through the relation of form to sensibility, therefore, one would at least also have to assume an inner sensibility through which the subject perceived not alien things but its own states and actions; and the categories and concepts would then have to count as the contentful actuality of its own nature. Kant, however, granted no adequate attention whatsoever to the concept of being; otherwise he would have abandoned his sensualism.

The Specific Character of Intellection Does Not Lie in Universality

The difficulty of making the special character of intellectual intuition, or intuitive intellect, distinct to oneself also appears in the question of whether the concepts of reason contain something singular or something universal.

Plato, Aristotle, and the entire host of their followers, as well as Kant, saw, as is well known, the distinguishing character of reason precisely in the universality of its concepts, since cognition of the singular was ascribed to sensibility.

This is entirely false. For sensibility knows nothing at all about whether a sensation is singular, since number belongs to intellection. Moreover, sensations are by their nature just as universal as concepts, which is why we designate arbitrarily many stimulations of the eye by the same sensation “red” or “blue,” and so forth.

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Even in combinations—for example, in the image of a horse—the senses make no judgment concerning singularity. Only reflection, with the aid of the concepts of reason, brings singularity to consciousness in opposition to plurality and totality. Precisely the same holds for the concepts of reason, which in themselves are entirely indifferent to singularity and universality.

To set out this difficulty in somewhat greater detail, I shall choose a historical example.

Descartes had innocently uttered, in his fashion, the proposition cogito ergo sum. Gassendi then attacks him and maintains that the validity of this inference depends upon the major premise “Tout ce qui pense existe” [“Everything that thinks exists”], which would first have to be proved. Descartes is naturally embarrassed by this, for his most certain proposition of all now appears as a mere consequence of an altogether doubtful axiom that he had not considered at all. How is he to extricate himself from this difficulty? With military brevity he asserts: “Universal propositions, on the contrary, derive from particular propositions” (ce sont au contraire les propositions universelles qui dérivent des propositions particulières; Works, Prévost, p. 206). If this were correct, there would be only induction, and mathematics would be an inductive science. But if this were so, there would be no mathematics. For if, for example, the proposition that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles were derived inductively from individual observations, it could never be expressed universally with unconditional certainty, because an innumerable number of triangles can be thought or will be representable in the future, in each of which the same observation would first have to be made.

As in the descriptive natural sciences, therefore, we would be dealing only with incomplete induction and consequently with problematic assumptions—that is, there would no longer be any mathematics. From this one sees that in his embarrassment Descartes seized upon a resource that he himself must certainly have regarded as objectionable.

How did he come to do this? Plainly because he did not immediately see that the concepts of reason are wholly indifferent to quantity. It is irrelevant whether, for example, I assert the proposition above of this triangle or that one, of several triangles, or of all triangles, because the proposition has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of its applications.

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Descartes was also in the position in which most philosophers have found themselves: because of his long use of the word “existence,” he believed that he already knew what “existing” was and did not need to give an account of this concept. Gassendi was equally naïve on this point, since it did not even occur to him to demand clarification concerning this most important question.

The specific character of intellectual intuition therefore does not consist in the universality of the concepts of reason. In universality, rather, all the elementary sources of cognition agree, since they are without distinction indifferent to the number of applications.

Instead, the specific character consists in the fact that the concepts of reason, as relational units or standpoints, not only presuppose that to which they relate, but also sublate the separation of these points of relation and unite everything within a single consciousness.

The concept of reason is therefore, first, formal insofar as it is indifferent to the character of the given points of relation and, for example, predicates twoness just as readily of a pair of horses as of a pair of human beings. Second, however, it is at the same time material insofar as cognition dawns upon us as a distinct and new content that can also be considered and defined entirely by itself and can even be combined with other concepts of reason into a new relational unity.

Just as sensations of color are revelations that are not granted to the blind, the Ideas of reason—both the simple Ideas and those discovered through speculation—are revelations of a peculiar content that do not belong to a being devoid of reason. Like sensory sensations, they require a predisposition and very particular conditions under which alone they can occur, as everyone who has attempted to teach philosophy knows.

We may, however, accommodate ourselves to the linguistic usage prevailing since Plato by designating intellectuals as the formal, provided that one keeps in mind that they never arise without material—that is, without regard to presupposed points of relation—and hence, although they possess a content of their own and independent content, are nevertheless always relational unities.

One must only dispose once and for all of the Kantian prejudice that they are empty forms that can first be mediated with sensory intuitions schematically through temporal intuition and first acquire content through this application. For what is empty and contentless, being nothing, cannot enter into relation and is unfit for cognition.

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Rather, isolated sensations and intuitions, in revealing themselves as capable of being freed from their isolation and related, lead to a new and distinct act of reason. As the revelation of a cognitive content not yet contained in its conditions, this act both unifies what is isolated and at the same time leaves it untouched in its particularity. This is the specific character of all intellectual intuition.

The Concept of Being Is an Intellectual Intuition

After these preliminaries, it is not difficult to determine the domain of cognition in which we must seek the concept of being. In such heavily disputed questions, however, it is always advisable to proceed methodically.

With respect to immediacy, all sources of cognition stand on the same level, for none can be vicariously represented by another or derived from simpler elements. But since it became apparent that neither perspectivea intuitive images, as Wundt and the positivists maintain, nor consciousness of our activities, as Fichte and Lotze maintain, supplies the concept of being—because being must first be ascribed to them through a judgment, through a relation—it is evident that, for the same reason, neither singular self-consciousness nor sensations and feelings can in any manner hand over to us the representation, Idea, or concept of being.

For if it were asked how we could know this without already possessing the definition of being, the answer can be given by an apagogical proof: none of these domains is capable of furnishing an explanation, a ground, or a justification for the content of its manifestations, whereas we decidedly demand a proof for every attribution of being and actuality.

Only the tribunal of dialectic, therefore, through which we not only apprehend but also ground relations—that is, only intellectual intuition—can possess jurisdiction over being. For if it is in question whether sensibility or some other so-called cognitive faculty gives us information about being, only that cognition which does not have a determinate domain before it to the exclusion of the others can decide the matter.

Just as sight knows nothing of tones and hearing nothing of colors, every source of cognition knows only its specific content. Intellectual intuition alone possesses the right not to be obstructed by the petty principalities and customs barriers of the other domains of cognition, but to feel everywhere at home in its kingdom and to understand the relations among them all.

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Thus it is precisely the specific character of intellection that first makes possible the concept of being, the question concerning the essence of being, and a topology of cognitive content in general.

The only thing that might disturb us would be the prejudice that such intellection requires a specially trained understanding and that not everyone can acquire such cognition without further ado. Yet we see that all who learn to speak receive the name for this concept and apply it everywhere, and hence must also think the corresponding content, insofar as they are actually understood by others, as universal experience attests.

But we have already discarded this prejudice. We know that, taken broadly, the concept passes through three stages of development: it is obscurely cognized even before language, consciously separated out in the word, and finally defined by the thinker.

There is therefore no difficulty in assigning the Idea of being to intellectual intuition while nevertheless assuming a cognition of being already in the infant and the animal, and in a much higher manner in the human being who possesses language, although at these preliminary stages we do not yet obtain a definition of the concept. For the definition can be expected only at the third stage of cognition of the Idea.

Chapter Three

Definition of Being

§ 1. The Method of Investigation

As soon as we begin to philosophize, we already stand at the third stage in the development of reason and thus already possess within ourselves the prelinguistic and linguistic consciousness of the Idea. Consequently, in our inquiry we shall already be guided by this preliminary knowledge, while the definition we discover must in turn also suffice to explain linguistic usage and satisfy immediate consciousness of the Idea.

We are far from taking linguistic usage as our master and judge, as Aristotle did. Nevertheless, even if we investigate independently of it, we must afterward know how to explain why language followed this or that path, because natural thought and the psychological paths of association produced linguistic usage, and these two powers are so strong that scarcely anything could possess validity without having reached a compromise with them.

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The First Method: Lexicography

Elimination of So-Called Objects, That Is, of Perspectival Intuitive Images

The first method according to which we seek the definition of being will consist in assembling, in accordance with linguistic usage, the examples or groups of examples in which unconscious reason has already designated the Idea of being linguistically.

Here, however, in order not to be deceived by the projection—to be discussed later—of the sensuous-imaginative world of representation, that is, of so-called things or real objects, we must from the outset exclude this entire sphere.

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We shall therefore calmly set aside the concrete substantives and proper names that are designated in language as beings or as essences—that is, the sensibly perceptible, so-called substances, human beings, animals, stones, and so forth, with which Aristotle had principally to concern himself—since this Fata Morgana is no longer to lead us astray.

For the fact that even Kant, although he had recognized space as a mere form of intuition, nevertheless fell back into that popular conception cannot induce us to follow him. It can serve only to reveal in Kant the superior power of the old sensualistic prejudices over the consistency of his thought.

[1.] Being in the Copula

When this great mass of alleged being is omitted, there remain three things in language that we shall consider individually by lexicographically distinguishing the verb “to be” according to its usage.

First, we find being as What. With respect to everything spoken of, one asks what it is. What is “repentance”? What is “a contract”? and so forth. This being was noticed long ago and designated as copulative, since it always serves merely as a copula joining a subject to a predicate.

In this manner, being is connected with every part of speech, each of which can occur arbitrarily as subject or predicate. Only one pronoun constitutes an exception, of which we shall speak presently. Otherwise, every part of speech, including substantives and even proper names, can be used both as subject and as predicate. For just as one says, for example, “For” is a conjunction,” one can also say, “I am the robber Jaromir”; “You are Peter.”

[2.] Being in the Existential Proposition

We can designate the second meaning of being by means of the conjunction “that,” thereby remaining in agreement with the historical terminology distinguishing từ đơttiv from Ổti đơttiv. For when we say that something is or exists, the emphasis falls upon being itself. Being becomes sufficient as a predicate by itself and is not intended merely, as a copula, to express the relation between a subject and some further predicative expression that must be added.

In this meaning, the German word sein has been almost entirely overgrown by the Latin existieren. The adverb “actually” is also frequently added for emphasis.

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Language therefore distinguishes between what a thing is and whether it exists, or that it is—for example, what the sea serpent is and whether it is or exists.

What language means by these distinctions is not so easy to say. We have it in our feeling and regard the sense of these two modes of expression as self-evident, because through innumerable examples supplied by our own daily use of language we unconsciously but securely possess the corresponding Idea, even when we are wholly incapable of defining it. Aristotle himself therefore does not make the slightest attempt to elucidate the Idea of being as What and as That except through examples.

We would now have nearly finished with language after distinguishing these two meanings in the customary manner. But the distinction among the parts of speech gives us occasion to add a third meaning.

We also find being in language as a substantive, and thereby obtain the being, the essence, or the thing (o00e9to alpha , substantia). This is exceedingly difficult to understand because it is so simple, and for that reason we find the explanation of this linguistic usage neglected everywhere.

Let us therefore begin again from the start. Being as predicate differs from being as copula—something that, so far as I can see, has not previously been noticed—also by virtue of time. Copulative being has nothing whatsoever to do with time and therefore always stands in the present tense. For example: the earth is round; the triangle is a figure; and so forth.

But being as existence passes through all tenses. The reason this difference was not noticed presumably lies in the fact that copulative being is also thought as immanent in verbs and thus apparently also assumes temporal determinations. For example: Caesar was murdered; the triangle in the semicircle will be divided into two similar triangles by the line drawn to the center of the diameter.

If one does not look more closely, temporal difference appears to belong just as much to logical or copulative being as to existential being. But once attention has been drawn to it, everyone must concede that in the examples given, and in all others one might compare with them, one always adds the thought of actuality or existence to the mere logical copulation of two concepts whenever tense is indicated in any way.

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For example, the proposition “David smote the Philistines” does not mean merely that I am to connect the representations David and smiting-the-Philistines, but that this actually occurred, that it existed.

The mere copula gives me the timeless connection of two or more representations. But the temporal determination attached to the verb, according to which it indicates something present, past, or future, together with their further relations, unfailingly gives us an additional thought—namely, that of existence, of the That.

It is naturally altogether irrelevant whether the verb “to be” is linguistically expressed at all or has disappeared entirely into the predicative verbs—for example, whether we say “he struck” or “he has been striking.”

The thought is therefore entirely different according as I say “the triangle divides into two similar triangles” or “it will be divided” or “has been divided.” The same geometrical theorem is indeed authoritative for both propositions. In the first proposition, however, no actual execution need be thought; one can apprehend merely the geometrical relations in general, that is, timelessly. In the second case, however, we unfailingly think of ourselves as constructing and look toward an actual individual figure that we shall divide or have divided and whose then-existing component triangles we are to compare.

Tense in the copula or in verbs therefore everywhere combines the thought of being as What with the thought of being as That. As soon as we dissolve this synthesis, it becomes apparent that the temporal determination belongs not to the copula or to the verb in its logical sense, but to an intermingled existential proposition.

This finer distinction may be entirely without importance for grammar;*) for logic, however, and for the concept of being in particular, it has considerable significance, as we shall presently see. *) As I am told, such a distinction is nevertheless authoritative for the correct use of the nominative and instrumental cases in Russian and of the nominative and factive cases in Estonian.

[3.] Being as Essence, Which Is Always Subject

Now that this has been established, we return to an observation of Aristotle. He astutely noticed that words can be distinguished according to their use as subject or in the predicate, and that proper names or generically used names employed singularly always occur only as subject and never predicatively—for example, Socrates or this horse here.

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Accordingly, he believed that in what is always only subject he had encountered the true substantive—that is, the essence, the thing, substance proper.

We have already set aside all the so-called substances formed merely through projection of sensuous-imaginative syntheses, however, and must therefore renounce all these primary and proper substances discovered by Aristotle.

This is precisely the point at which logic intervenes to correct the influence of language. For language operates not only in conformity with thought, but also under the pressure of the laws that psychology has already demonstrated fairly well for associations and reproductions.

Although, therefore, we cannot accept the result of Aristotle's line of thought, his standpoint is so subtle and significant that, in accordance with it, we must continue to ask, on purely linguistic grounds, what word overlooked by Aristotle remains after the exclusion of the entire sensory sphere just characterized and always occurs only as subject.

We then find only the pronoun “I.” For the concept at issue, it is initially irrelevant that language has also placed “you,” “we,” and “he” at the same rank as “I”; for we shall later see that the “you” is created as a projection by analogy with the “I.”

What is important for us is only that language in fact never employs the “I” predicatively, and that it therefore occupies an exceptional position. For if we omit sensory substances, as stated, only the “I” remains, of which all being is predicated—that is, both predicative being with a copula and being as existence.

The “I” is therefore regarded as the underlying ground (Greek text) of being—that is, as essence—as, for example, in “I am” and “I am cheerful.” For when we say “I am,” being or existence is supposed to belong to the I.

Since being without a further predicate likewise contains nothing other than being, the subject is thus acknowledged by language as a being or as an essence, and in such a manner that nothing other than the I occupies this place. The Aristotelian mode of consideration therefore leads us to a new result, which we must value as an important indication.

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Result

If we now summarize these considerations, we must distinguish three meanings of being indicated by language:

[1.] Logical being in the copula, which corresponds to the question What?

[2.] Being by itself, or existing, which develops temporal forms and answers to the conjunction that.

[3.] Being as subject or essence, which is expressed by the pronoun I.

Everything else that occurs as being in language can be reduced to these three highest standpoints. Nor were these standpoints first discovered here; they have been recognized since antiquity.

In Aristotle, the “What” is called tí Greek text and indicates the accident (Greek text) according to all the categories; being as “That” is called Greek text and Greek text; being as essence and subject, Greek text and Greek text.

What is new in our investigation lies in three points: first, the omission of illusory sensory substances; second, the demonstration that temporal forms belong to the existential proposition and therefore, wherever they occur, require the intermingling of the concept of existence with the representation of the What; third, the restriction of essence to the I.

With this, however, the instruction furnished by language comes to an end. For language proceeds merely by creating or symbolizing; it supplies no explanation or speculation concerning its deeds or symbols. This it leaves to philosophy, which must now take up the word.

The Second Method: Dialectic

In the first method, we began from given language and finished names, merely sorting the linguistic treasury under the guidance of the still-undefined meaning of the word being and setting aside for ourselves what corresponded to that meaning.

We could therefore arrive by this means at no concept, but only at distinctly grouped names, in connection with which we do indeed think something, though without scientific consciousness. We now bid farewell to language and take as our presupposition only consciousness itself, leaving it to the living dialectic of thought to fix itself through its own nature. In doing so, to be sure, we cannot dispense with the unconsciously guiding Idea that also served as our guide, in the form of the meaning of the word being, in the first method. (Compare above, p. 14.) [Page 50]

Whereas in the first method we could not know with certainty whether a thing and a concept corresponded to the name discovered, through the second method we now acquire at once both concepts and a guarantee of the certainty and truth of cognition.

For all truth consists only in thought and is discovered and established through the dialectic of thought. Certainty, however, lies in the paths of thought. That is uncertain for which we find no path; that is doubtful which we sometimes reach by the same path and in whose place we sometimes reach something else; but that is certain which presents itself always and unalterably as the goal of a necessary path or of every path.

Thus, through the second method, both the concept and the proof of truth are discovered at once, and we require no other proof, since there is no truth outside thought.

What then remains is merely to select from among the names found in language those that coincide most closely with our concept and possess conventional validity.

Presupposition of Ordinary Consciousness

In presupposing our ordinary consciousness, we do nothing unscientific. No one begins to philosophize before first reaching a certain age at which his consciousness is already furnished with the ordinary experiences of life.

It is therefore indeed permissible to abstract entirely from what is given, as Spinoza and Hegel do. Yet no speculative theory designed without such a basis can count as true unless the content of ordinary consciousness can afterward be derived once more as a consequence of the hypothetically assumed principles.

But one can arrive at all such principles only by discovering them through analysis of consciousness and reflection upon its content. If, therefore, these principles are placed first as axioms and definitions, as in Spinoza, or presupposed as known, as in Hegel, then one either knows nothing to think by them or is compelled tacitly to recall the facts of consciousness that could have furnished the occasion for such speculative concepts and judgments.

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However greatly one may abstract from everything given at the beginning of metaphysics and profess to construct purely, one nevertheless always once again presupposes ordinary consciousness, both in oneself and in those who are supposed to understand us.

Since this state of affairs cannot remain concealed from any reflective thinker, Hegel has been misunderstood and unjustly criticized when his dialectic has been interpreted as presuppositionless in an absolute sense. Rather, as he himself demands, it is intended to be merely the further process of consciousness educated up to the standpoint of dialectic. According to his system, philosophically conscious dialectic begins only as the third stage of absolute spirit. Exner and Trendelenburg have therefore not refuted Hegel in this respect, since they attack a point that does not fall within the Hegelian circle of thought.

To avoid misunderstanding, I therefore expressly repeat that we intend to presuppose the ordinary consciousness of human beings as it is found among the uneducated and the scientifically educated and as it is deposited in literature. We do not, however, intend to content ourselves with the forms of representation given within it, but merely to take our point of departure from a point lying outside all dispute.

[1.] The What, or Ideal Being

In analyzing our ordinary consciousness, we find that we think now of this and now of that. We always represent something, or will this or that, or do this or that which we have in mind.

If we now look, on the one hand, toward the changing acting, willing, or thinking, and, on the other, toward the particular given contents of this acting, willing, and thinking, there arises within us, through this relation, a concept that comprehends into one all these particular contents, whether sensory or scientific, artistic or moral and religious.

In doing so, we do not omit the distinguishing characteristics by leaving behind only what is equal and universal, as many have conceived the matter altogether unclearly and called it abstraction. Rather, we discover a concept that is present in none of the given contents but is valid for all these contents because it expresses the relation of this whole to a different whole. For one cannot discover the category by abstraction, as though by a chemical sublimation, since it was not present in what was given.

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If one continually omits from every content of consciousness whatever distinguishes it, then with the disappearance of the last difference, nothing—absolutely nothing—remains.

The Idea we mean, however, is itself nothing contentual, but merely the relation of this particular content, or of content expressed universally, to the changing activities. In this relation, a clear or unclear Idea arises in every thinker through which we represent or posit the fact that we thought of some content.

If we now look within language for the expressions by which we customarily designate this Idea, we immediately encounter the What. Someone begins to relate: “He did—.” “What did he do?” we ask. “He thought—.” “What did he think?” “He wanted—.” “What did he want?”

By means of the What, we indicate that we always wish to relate the mere activity to a certain content. This content is not itself already given with any determinacy; rather, it is merely demanded by us as the point of relation for the relational unity of this category “What?”

The What is the exponent; the changing activity is one member of the relation; we demand the second member. Let a be given; we think n and demand na.

Instead of the name “What,” however, we also employ others, such as content or object. When we think, accordingly, we must also think something, and this something is the object or content of our thinking.

The question now is whether we have also defined being by means of this category. That we ascribe the name “being” to the What or to the content of our activities is easy to show. We need only recall the results of the first method in order to see immediately that copulative being expresses nothing other than this content, this “what a thing is.” “What is it?” we ask, and answer by specifying the content: it is a horse, good, just, and so forth.

Nevertheless, we may not say that being has already been defined by this. Because of the relation, our gaze immediately remains fixed upon the other point of relation as well, and we must therefore say provisionally only that one side of being is expressed by this category. We shall therefore apply this category attributively to being and call this side of being ideal being. This designation agrees with classical terminology, although our derivation differs entirely and the meaning also initially appears narrower. I mean, namely, the term eidos or he ousia he kata ton logon.

Aristotle conceived matter as the opposite and did not yet distinguish within consciousness itself the two sides of being that we here sharply separate from one another.

[2.] The That, or Real Being

We now turn our gaze toward the other side. Ideal being serves us here as one point of relation; the perpetually changing activities serve as the second; and we seek the relational unity.

We need only take our ordinary consciousness to know that we not only now do, will, or think this and now that, but also remember very well that the same thought a, the same motive, the same feeling comes, disappears, and returns.

Thus the ideal content of the activity—that is, what it is—detaches itself from the activity itself. We therefore say: “What are you thinking about now?” We consequently take thinking as an x that can be determined in one or another way according to its content.

We also say, “I do not yet rightly know what I want,” and thus posit willing as x and the motives as the ideal content of willing. If one and the same content a returns, we posit it as one; the activities in which we represent or will it, by contrast, as two, three, n—as, for example, when we hear the same tone n times.

Thus the plurality of changing activities emerges quite distinctly in opposition to the identity of ideal being, which, however often we consider it, is always identically what it is or was. The tone C, for example, is, whether we hear it once or n times, always the same tone C according to its ideal being; and the same anecdote can be told seven times. But the activities themselves are never the same; each is different every time and cannot be united with the others. They are held apart by time; and when the same thing is thought n times, n activities are given, but only one ideal content.

If we now look in this way, on the one hand, toward the What and, on the other, toward the many changing activities that always possess a What as their content, we apprehend the relational unity. We think these activities taken together not according to their content, for that leads to ideal being, but according to their relation to it.

We christen the concept or category that thereby arises in our consciousness with a name from our own or another language and call it real being, existence, Dasein, or actuality.

By these words, therefore, we mean neither a single activity, nor many activities, nor all activities, but only the relation in which they all stand to ideal being.

It is therefore natural that this concept cannot be discovered through abstraction and that it does not lie in the genera—for example, in willing, thinking, or some other content of ideal being. For it does not consist, as people imagined, in the residue remaining after the different characteristics of the individual activities have been omitted. Rather, it reveals itself over the heads of this tumultuous multitude through an external relation, just as a human being is called a son not because of his physical and mental properties, but because of his external relation to a father.

The Relation of Ideal and Real, or Actual, Being

If we now look back at the results of the first method, it is immediately clear that the real being we have just discovered coincides with the existential proposition in which being occurs as existing, without a predicate and with temporal forms.

We must now consider somewhat attentively the relation between the two kinds of being. It is evident that the two kinds could be distinguished with the utmost clarity, for there are three characteristics by which we separate them from one another.

Ideal being, although also given in a plurality, is nevertheless, when we consider each of its parts by itself, always one and not many, like every sensory sensation, every concept, every tragedy, and also every arbitrary part of a whole—for example, the first verse of the Odyssey. By contrast, activities as real being or actuality are present in arbitrary plurality, just as that first verse can be recited arbitrarily many times and every concept employed many times.

Second, real activities are always different, since one and the same activity can never repeat itself; their ideal content, however, can be identical.

Third, real existence is differentiated by time, whereas its content is timeless.

The principle of the distinction therefore lies in the standpoint of unity and plurality, identity and otherness, timelessness and temporal differentiation.

It is therefore indubitable that we must distinguish real and ideal being. Nevertheless, the question might trouble us whether, if we really have before us two kinds of being, we are also capable of joining them together again.

How is ideal being to belong to real being, which differs from it in three respects? Let us reflect more carefully.

Can a What, a concept, or a sensation be cognized and become conscious without there being a real activity of which it is the content and ideal being? And can we represent to ourselves any actually existing activity of thought or sensation in which something is not thought or sensed? Can we know that we think or sense if we do not know what we think or sense? This is a rhetorical question, because everyone will immediately decide within himself and exclaim that this is altogether impossible.

First, presumably no one can know through experience a content of thought that he thought without thinking, or recollect an act of thinking in which he thought nothing. Second, even apart from all experience, we can show the impossibility through dialectic, since one That of thinking, sensing, and willing cannot be distinguished from another That in any way other than through relation to a different content.

So long as the same content continues, we call it one and the same state. Only through the addition of a different content of feelings or thoughts do we have different and multiple activities.

Thus the isolation and independence of the two kinds of being is entirely impossible. At the same time, however, it is thereby also recognized that we can assume only one being that becomes conscious both of its existence and of its content.

If we now look back again toward language, we find that this fusion had also been accomplished there. For copulative being, both in the forms of the word “to be” and when immanent in verbs expressing a particular content, had assumed temporal forms and thus fused with the existential proposition.

For example, the proposition “Troy was destroyed” expresses not merely an ideal connection between the representations Troy and destroying, but at the same time that this actually occurred in the past.

Even the simple existential proposition does not isolate existence from ideal content, since the subject always adds the “What” of existence.