Problems of Epistemology

The Problem of Essence or the Relationship Between Knowledge and Reality

The Restoration of a Realistic Understanding of the Inner World

In addressing the phenomenological line of thought, I wish to preface my analysis with a remark concerning the aforementioned final point. A different spatial discourse in contemporary epistemological literature might present the matter as though we genuinely face the danger of believing that the sum of my perceptions and representations constitutes the entirety of the world, with nothing truly real existing beyond that. I contend that this danger is, in fact, quite minimal; there has never been a healthy—or perhaps even an unhealthy—mind that has, for even a moment, doubted whether the world exists independently of its own representations. Johann Gottlieb Fichte never entertained the thought that he and his ideas were the entirety of reality. Thus, the refutation of so-called solipsism can be considered an unnecessary endeavor for now. The question is not whether things exist outside my world of representations, but rather what the assertion means and how the belief in a reality that exists independently of my representations emerges, into which I, with my representations, am included as an infinitesimal part. If I know the world solely through my own representations, how do I arrive at the understanding that transcends these to the realm of absolutely existing activity?

However, I find it prudent to first examine another question: is it justified to assert the claim of phenomenology that our knowledge does not at any point encompass reality, and that we possess as little adequate knowledge of our own inner world as we do of the world outside ourselves?

First, let me say a word about the meaning and significance of this question. It has been stated that phenomenology, as preached by Kant, amounts to hopeless skepticism: what remains for knowledge if I cannot even know my own self as it is in itself? Kant’s critique seems to annihilate knowledge altogether. Even Faust’s lament, “I see that we can know nothing, and this consumes my heart,” has been linked to Kantian criticism.

Such complaints and accusations are entirely unfounded. First and foremost, it must be said that no theory of knowledge alters the composition and value of our understanding in any way. Sciences remain, as before and afterward, precisely what they are; the cessation or destruction of knowledge cannot be a topic of discussion based on any theoretical reflection on knowledge. Likewise, the significance of the sciences remains unchanged; critique neither diminishes their practical value nor their theoretical worth. Our astronomy, physics, psychology, and history provide us with what they do, entirely independent of the results of any subsequent epistemological reflection, just as they were historically independent of that latter aspect.

Perhaps this misunderstanding is related to ambiguous expression. Kant's view can perhaps be summarized in the following formula: we can only know phenomena; penetrating the inner essence of things remains beyond our reach. This seemingly indicates a certain deficiency in our knowledge that could be pinpointed and rectified if our understanding were only expanded and enlightened. When we say that the essence of the northern lights or electricity is yet to be understood, or that I have yet to grasp the essence of a particular person, we denote a deficiency; we know only the external phenomenon but not the ultimate causes. Or, if I know what this person looks like and what position they occupy in society, but do not know their character, principles, or views, then I cannot predict what to expect from them. Conversely, if I am familiar with all this—if I have come to know them through prolonged friendship, and if there is no doubt in my mind about how they will judge and act in a given situation—then I can say that their essence is well-known to me.

In contrast, the distinction between phenomenon and the thing-in-itself in the theory of knowledge signifies something entirely different. The most perfect understanding of the nature, character, and life of any individual—such that I could predict their behavior with the same certainty as a lunar eclipse—would still, according to Kant’s perspective, amount to nothing more than the knowledge of phenomena: it would reveal nothing about the soul itself, its “in itself,” or its essence.

Now, how does the assertion hold that we know things only as they appear, not as they exist in themselves? Is this assertion justified? Let us first examine the knowledge of our own inner life. Here, too, it is asserted that we must distinguish between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. I come to know myself not as I am in myself, but only as I appear. The “in itself” of the soul, manifesting in the facts of consciousness, remains as impenetrable to knowledge as the “in itself” of the things that present themselves in consciousness as the physical world. Is this assertion justified?

I do not believe we have reason to accept it. Here, two positions are asserted: first, that behind or beyond the phenomena of consciousness, as phenomena of the psychic life, there exists the soul itself as a thing-in-itself; second, that we do not know this thing-in-itself. The second assertion is undoubtedly true: what we know about our self is indeed nothing other than those same phenomena of sensations, representations, feelings, and desires, but in our self-consciousness, the thing “soul” or “I” never appears. However, it must be added immediately that the first assertion is groundless; there is no distinct thing called the “soul” that exists independently of psychic life; the concept of a soul, which, as a thing-in-itself, would possess some unknown reality apart from psychic life, is an empty notion. The soul itself is nothing other than the unity of psychic life; its being is encompassed by its “appearances”; no obscure, impenetrable residue of reality exists for consciousness.

This is such a decisive point for the theory of knowledge and metaphysics that, having outlined this understanding earlier, I will return to it here for a somewhat more detailed examination. Anyone who wishes to arrive at a sound philosophy must definitively put an end to this specter of the “soul-in-itself.”

In the common understanding, reality is posited to have approximately the following structure: there exist three kinds or levels of the actual: 1) the first-order actual: these are things or substances; 2) the second-order actual: these are properties or forces; 3) the third-order actual: these are activities, events, and relationships.

The least degree of autonomy is possessed by the third-order actual; activities or events require something beyond themselves to come into existence: these are forces. However, forces or properties also cannot exist independently; they, in turn, require something else in which they exist: these are substances. Only the latter rest upon themselves and do not depend on anything else for their existence; they are thus the truly actual. Among substances, vulgar metaphysics, following Descartes, typically distinguishes two kinds: bodily or extended substances and spiritual or thinking substances, which are non-extended. The differences in their essences correspond to different forces. The universal forces or properties of a body include impenetrability, weight, chemical affinities, or simply forces of attraction and repulsion; conversely, the forces of the soul would encompass the capacity for sensation, memory, imagination, desire, emotion, and will.

Is such a conception of the inner structure of reality tenable? Let us first direct our attention to the second term in this series: to properties or forces. Do they indeed represent an entity that exists by itself, independently of manifestation or expression, as an element of reality? Let us take any body, for example, a piece of chalk. It possesses numerous forces or properties. Firstly, there is the property of impenetrability or a force that prevents other bodies from intruding upon the space it occupies; there is the property of whiteness or the force to reflect light in a particular way; further, the property of weight or the force that exerts pressure on a support or, if that support is removed, produces a certain motion; it also possesses the property of being suitable as a writing material or the force to produce white strokes on a board. What does this imply? Do all these properties or forces reside in the chalk as distinct actualities that can be seen or observed within it? Is there in the chalk a force to make strokes or, more precisely, a force to produce white strokes on a blackboard, as a peculiar, always-present, constant element of reality? And is there, of course, a corresponding force or capacity in the board to be marked? Just as in the hand, alongside a multitude of other forces, is the force of writing, manifested in various forms: as the force of writing with chalk, a pencil, or a pen? As the force of writing German, Latin, or Greek letters? Certainly, no one believes this; the chalk possesses the force to make strokes, which means simply that if one were to draw it across a rough surface, particles would detach from it and remain on the board, thus indicating the path of movement.

The strokes do not exist within the chalk, and there is no force of marking contained within it; rather, we anticipate what will occur under certain circumstances; these anticipated phenomena, which we call possible, we summarize, substantiate, and attribute to the chalk as its constant possession. The same applies to other forces: we anticipate that the chalk, under specific circumstances, will exhibit a particular action, will move to a certain degree, exert pressure, or impart acceleration to another body. By substantiating these anticipated phenomena, we attribute them to the chalk as the force of gravity. The same is true for the living force of a moving body; the work we expect from it we project into it as a force. Thus, force is not a separately existing actuality but rather a mode of thinking in which we conceive the connections between phenomena. Force is defined by its potential actions or work; this explanation finds its perfect expression in the law that speaks to the magnitude of potential acceleration of a given mass.

The same is true for the forces of spiritual substances. Here the matter is even clearer. We speak of moral forces, of the force of self-control, courage. All we express by this is that we expect from a certain individual a specific behavior in the face of danger or temptation. We do not presume that self-control resides in the soul as a distinct material entity. The same applies to memory, reason, will, and the other forces of the soul. Psychology has long recognized this; particularly noted among the Germans is Herbart, who observed that the capacities of the soul are not distinct elements of reality that can serve as causes for explanation, but rather, the actual consists of representations, desires, feelings, and the task of science is to represent the lawful relationships among these phenomena. If anyone has yet to part with the notion of forces as distinct elements of reality that exist in substances as their properties, let them labor to resolve various obscure questions: does force always act? What does it do when it does not act? Do forces spread throughout the entire space occupied by a body? How are forces contained within non-extended substances, or how are they connected with them?

If the intermediate term, forces, is discarded, then for the construction of reality, only substances and events remain. What then of substances? Do they constitute a distinct actuality alongside accidents?

Let us first consider the substance of the soul. It is assumed that, in addition to sensations, representations, feelings, and desires, there exists, as a distinct actuality, or to use Herbart's expression, as something real, the soul itself; the phenomena of consciousness are but manifestations of the soul, not the soul itself; they could come and go, could even—at least for a time—cease to exist altogether: the substance of the soul continues to exist in an unaltered and unscathed reality.

It seems to me that adhering to this conception is utterly impossible. The substance of the soul is entirely the same as the forces of the soul; they are, as it were, hypostatizations of phenomena; they represent a kind of second-degree hypostatization; the substance of the soul is the capacity of capacities, a general capacity in comparison to those specific capacities. Just as a force can only be defined by its actions, so too can a substance only be defined by forces; it is nothing other than a collection of forces, and thus, ultimately, a collection of possible events. The being of the soul consists in its life, in the unity of related psychic phenomena; if one were to remove these last, nothing would remain. The phenomena of consciousness are the actual itself; they do not depend on anything else, nor do they require any substantial soul that would render them actual or uphold and bear them in actuality; nothing of the sort exists at all.

To renounce such a carrier and bearer of something may initially seem a heavy, indeed entirely unbearable demand to the common human reason. After all, sensation or feeling cannot exist absolutely; there must be some sensing or feeling being possessing them; representation without someone to represent it—language itself rejects such an assumption. Moreover, how can one construct facts such as the unity of consciousness, attention, self-observation, or self-control without the aid of the soul?

Well, the soul certainly exists, and the matter is not about eliminating it but rather about agreeing on what it is. It is posited here that it is not some immutable, inert, absolutely constant point of reality that, existing by itself, would serve as a point of support for forces and phenomena in reality; rather, it is the unity of mental life, the sum of conscious or subconscious internal phenomena related to one another— a sum in which each individual phenomenon exists and is recognized as belonging to the whole. Those presumed pieces of common reality do not exist in actuality; they are nothing but hypostatized shadows of false metaphysical concepts.

That for our thinking the mental substantiality, existing by itself, does not constitute such a precious and necessary possession as vulgar metaphysics believes, can perhaps be most readily demonstrated by forcing oneself to attempt to answer questions such as the following. What is the essence of this mental substantiality? After all, it must be something that exists by itself, independently of its accidents, as it must be the presumption of the latter. What is it then? Can you articulate this? Or does something akin to what once happened to Locke occur with you, when he reflected on the concept of substance: he finds that the latter is something whose essence cannot be defined? Perhaps you may be able to explain what it does and produces? Of course, it is a bearer on which accidents exist or, so to speak, are affixed. But what do these expressions mean? I well know what it means when you say: a horse bears a rider: does the soul bear its thoughts in the same way? And does some passion exist on the soul, like paint on a canvas? You say these are inappropriate comparisons. Well then, indicate the contemplative representation denoted here by those words? Or will you say: it is implied that substance produces accidents from its essence or realizes itself in them? But look, does this make it any easier? I am well aware of what it means when you say: a tree produces flowers and fruits, an embryo realizes itself in the development of shoots, of rudimentary leaves, and so forth. But what does it mean: a non-material "something" produces representations and feelings from itself? I truly do not know. It seems to me to be mere empty words, mere indications of some significance that contemplation refuses to realize.

Yet, you might assert that the unity of self-consciousness can be comprehended only through the lens of a singular and constant substance of the soul. I must confess that I struggle to grasp how the substantial could offer assistance here. It is a fact that the phenomena of inner life do not manifest in isolation and that each such phenomenon is experienced with an awareness of its belonging to the unified whole of this individual life. How such a connection occurs is beyond my articulation, just as I cannot fully elucidate how consciousness itself is even possible. However, I believe I can clearly see the following: the proposed “bearer,” that nothing to which we bestow the title of substance, does not aid us in making our inquiry any clearer; it would, in fact, remain a riddle rather than a resolution of the mystery. Or perhaps, merely due to the existence of phenomena a, b, and c within the same A, must consciousness of their unity arise? If that is the case, then self-consciousness must represent a form of every union of accidents within a single substance. Thus, an additional quality must be appended to the soul's substance to render its accidents members of the unity of consciousness. In this light, we must identify this quality if the substantial is to be of any use. As far as I can see, we lose nothing by discarding this “something, I do not know what.”

Certainly, we will not declare: hence, there is no soul; rather, we shall assert that the soul is a multiplicity of facts of inner life, connected in unity in a manner that we cannot more precisely describe. We will resolutely alter nothing in our ordinary language; as before, we will speak of the soul and the phenomena occurring within it, of the thoughts produced by it, and of the inner movements nourished or diverted by it. We shall not shy away from employing the term “substance” in reference to the soul or in discussing its states and properties; we will not even hesitate to use the forbidden phrase “mental capacity.” The essential task is to clarify once and for all what we mean by these terms. Only then shall we find that all those traditional designations indeed possess their own meaningfulness—not the one attributed to them by metaphysics, which is misled by physical atomism. If we define substance as that which possesses independent existence (to paraphrase Spinoza: id quod in se est et per se concipitur), then the soul, in any case, will have its substantiality, while the individual phenomena will bear existence as accidents (in alio esse et per aliud concipi): they exist and are understood solely within the whole of psychic life. It is a fact that sensations, representations, thoughts, and desires do not, to the best of our knowledge, occur in reality in isolation but only as components within the composite of inner phenomena that we term psychic life. Moreover, this latter does not arise as a mechanical summation of pre-existing elements, but, echoing Aristotle’s words, exists prior to the parts: the individual elements are, as it were, produced or necessarily provided by the whole, as moments belonging to it, essential for its expression of itself.

This relationship can be elucidated through the following analogy. Language consists of words; furthermore, it exists solely in the assemblage of words and forms; if you remove all words, language ceases to exist; it does not stand as a separate, actual substance alongside the words. However, on the other hand, it is not merely a mechanical combination of pre-existing words, as a wall is a mechanical assembly of pre-existing stones. Rather, language constantly generates words and transforms them according to necessity. Each word is a contingent, transitory accident created by language, modified, and ultimately discarded by it. In the same vein, a poetic work is not a mechanical combination of individual verses; it does not exist apart from the individual verses as a self-sufficient substance; instead, it exists within them, such that the idea of the whole provides the particular or reveals itself in the particular. Similarly, the soul exists not outside or beneath the phenomena of consciousness, as a solid, immovable, immutable reality, but only within them; yet, certainly not in a manner that it is constituted from pre-existing, self-sufficient elements, but rather that it produces individual elements and is realized within them. The idea of the whole likewise provides the particular: thought, feeling, and desire in a specific form can only occur and be comprehended within a particular life, hence it relates to that life as an accident relates to a substance.

If, thus, the entirety of psychic life is, in relation to the individual element of consciousness, a self-sufficient and constant essence, a substance, it cannot merely rest there; rather, this whole must in turn be constructed as a non-independent and dependent member of an even greater whole: individual life, in turn, relates to the life of the nation as an accident relates to a substance. The nation or the soul of the nation exists solely in individual souls, yet again, not in such a manner that it is composed of them, but rather that it produces them from itself and is realized within them. In turn, the life of the nation is also encompassed within an even greater life, the life of humanity, and alongside this last, it is included in the singular, composite life of the earth, the external manifestation of which is described in broad strokes by the physical history of the earth. Finally, every life flows from a singular all-encompassing life, from the unified life of God. Thus, we would arrive, from this perspective, at the thought: God is substance, the only truly self-sufficient, self-existing essence to which every individual reality relates as a non-sufficient accident.

The thought just articulated is not novel; indeed, it can be said that it pervades the entire history of philosophy. I do not intend to recount its history here, yet I shall nonetheless sketch a few key points. The epistemological analysis was brought to it by D. Hume; just as he dispelled the fog that obscures the ordinary understanding of the concept of action, so too did he banish the specter of a hidden mental substance behind psychic life. In his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature, in the last sections of the first book, he critiques the traditional metaphysical notion of mental substance. He finds nothing in it that withstands scrutiny; it is utterly impossible, in his view, even to grasp the meaning of the question: do representations exist in a material or immaterial substance? Not to mention the possibility of confirming the necessity of positing an immaterial substance to serve as the bearer of representations. Therefore, he prefers to remain with what is given: the multiplicity of consciousness phenomena, united in one through memory and causal relations. “There are philosophers,” he states in one often-cited passage, “who think that we are every moment conscious in the depths of our soul of what we call our self, that we feel its existence and its constancy in existence, and that we are assured of its complete identity and simplicity with a more than demonstrative certainty.” He is unfortunate enough not to make such observations: “Whenever I seek to penetrate into what I call my self, I always encounter one or another distinct perception—warmth or cold, light or shadow, love or hate. I can never catch my self without some perception, nor can I notice anything other than a perception.”

From metaphysical reasoning, Spinoza arrived at the transformation or, indeed, the dissolution of the concept of substance in the ordinary sense, a theorem which Hume wove, as it were, into his aforementioned analysis. Individual things are not substances but accidents (modi); this applies both to bodies and to souls: substance, the self-sufficient substance, is only God, the totality of reality; every individual reality necessarily exists within the All-One as dependent and limited. It goes without saying that the substantiality of God cannot be conceived in terms of an extended physical atom or an unextended mental atom. His unity does not consist in immediate contiguity or existence as a point, but is a unity of ideas, realized in the multiplicity of moments. Within the orbit of this same view, Leibniz essentially remains, perceiving the essence of substance in powers and ultimately uniting many finite substances into the unity of one substance.

Kant, building upon the philosophy of Hume, arrives at the view that substance and existence within a substance must be regarded as forms of thought rather than as forms of being. In doing so, he effectively eradicates the notion that substance is a truly existent reality in itself. Substance is that which remains constant within phenomena. However, the matter becomes somewhat clouded by the idea of the thing-in-itself, supposedly concealed behind phenomena; here and there, it appears as if the thing-in-itself is a hidden substance, “what it is, I do not know”—Locke. It is here that Fichte intervenes, and in this lies the significance of his celebrated destruction of the thing-in-itself: being is life, an inner life—this is Fichte's fundamental view; the dead, immobile, absolutely constant being, the psychic atom behind the psychic life, does not exist; substance, existing only, does not exist in the spiritual realm any more than it does in the corporeal realm, which in itself has no absolute being but is merely a reflection of the inner world. This thought remains a foundational assumption of all speculative philosophy, in which one cannot take a step without assimilating it.

From this, Lotze derives his own ideas; he decisively rejects the notion of a universal substance of reality, a small piece of which is supposed to be hidden in every actual thing as its innermost core. For him, the soul is nothing more than an actual idea, inexplicably positioned in the form of autonomy capable of action, and it seems to him that it does not require any further point of support to be actual. This view is also maintained by Fechner, and in recent times, it has been echoed by Wundt in his contemporary conception of the soul. This expression points to the actus purus of the scholastics, to Aristotle's pure entelechy: God is actus purus, not a dead being; His essence is eternal thought of absolute thought, which is reality. Thus, we arrive at the ultimate origin of this entire structure of thought, to Plato, the great founder of Western European philosophy: reality is the world of ideas, an actual system of thoughts, and these thoughts are the truly real and do not require anything else on which or through which they might exist. Ideas are not lifeless images, gazing upon the world like dumb idols, but living content, as it is visibly expressed in the soul itself.

Why, then, does the ordinary conception so strongly resist this thought? Upon first encountering it, the immediate sensation is undoubtedly as follows: it is inconceivable; thought must rest upon some substance of the soul; otherwise, it sinks into emptiness. It is insufficient merely to demonstrate the unreliability of this support; vulgar metaphysics, encountered not only among coal miners and bricklayers, insists that without something to bear it, without some small chunk of reality to which it might be attached, its reality is inconceivable. Perhaps the origins of this inconceivability should be sought in the following.

One can distinguish two kinds of logical necessity: true, or logical, necessity, and false, or psychological, necessity. The former is inherent in any formally valid syllogism; once one acknowledges the premises, one cannot subsequently evade the conclusion. The latter, or psychological necessity, arises from habit: what we often or always see, hear, think, or conceive ultimately appears to us as necessary, while the opposite is perceived as impossible. When the Dutch envoy informed the Siamese king that in his homeland, water occasionally becomes entirely solid and firm, allowing one to walk upon it, the king found this utterly inconceivable and impossible. Had he studied scholastic philosophy in his youth, he would likely have been inclined to demonstrate the impossibility of this: being liquid belongs to the essence of water; hence, it is impossible for it to become solid.

This kind of necessity is encountered everywhere. What I have never seen seems impossible: this is the great principle governing the judgments of the average intellect. A well-educated person, having no religion and never having encountered individuals who genuinely possess it, does not believe that anything of the sort could possibly exist; it can only be hypocrisy or deceit, or at best, self-deception. A physiologist who has never observed hypnotic phenomena confidently declares all such things impossible. The same kind of logical necessity is tied to conceptions of the future: that which does not exist today cannot exist and will never exist. In historical life, there is no major change whose impossibility has not been clearly demonstrated beforehand: without slavery, spiritual culture is inconceivable; without punishment, discipline in the army is impossible; without Latin composition, the gymnasium cannot exist.

The same logical necessity governs vulgar physics. A heavy body, unsupported, must fall; it is inconceivable for it to remain in place while freely floating; since the Earth is a heavy body and does not fall, as is evident to all, it must have support; this is the starting point of all primitive cosmology. Thus, the Earth either floats on water, or, as that aforementioned Indian philosopher suggested, stands on a gigantic elephant, which in turn rests upon a turtle, and so on, until the questioner tires of asking.

Of a completely similar nature is the necessity of psychic substance. Sensory perception continually shows us that all properties and phenomena are associated with some substance: color, weight, warmth, movement are always found in some body, in some tangible matter. Consequently, thoughts and representations must also reside within some substance. For ordinary perception, this substance is, of course, primarily our body. But here a strange difficulty arises. Psychic phenomena cannot be tied to extended matter; how can one conceive of, for instance, the feeling of love or hatred residing in the brain, or on the brain, or in a ganglion cell, or on it? Is the feeling itself distributed throughout the extended mass? Do the concept of a circle and the theorems on parallels occupy space in the brain? Let it be so that when the thought is conceived: the quadrature of the circle is impossible, then through more or less extensive parts of gray matter, a series of movements or chemical transformations, or whatever processes occur; but this is still not the thought itself; the latter cannot be conceived as a scattered process in space. This is precisely the difficulty that has led to the formation of the concept of a special psychic substance; ordinary extended matter is here inapplicable, yet one cannot altogether abandon the notion of substance; thus, a non-extended or immaterial substance must exist, i.e., a psychic substance.

Indeed, the immaterial substance remains a strange entity—what it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Hence, there remains a tendency to replace this unreal shadow of substance with a truly tangible one: here, at least, it is known what and how it is. One can observe everywhere how the natural inclination of thought strives to materialize spiritual substance, to imagine it as a subtle, entirely ethereal substance. Only in this way does the word gain a vivid meaning; a non-extended, immaterial psychic atom gives no support whatsoever to contemplation. Hence, spiritualism, which requires psychic substance, constantly reverts to materialism. Indeed, anyone who cannot conceive that thought exists as a self-sufficient reality, without attachment to some substantial entity, must necessarily remain in a materialistic conception, no matter how much they may oppose it. Truly realized spiritualism is possible only if one relinquishes this shadow of corporeal substance and regards psychic phenomena as freely floating in reality, much as we have become accustomed to envisioning celestial bodies freely floating in space.

Let us now return to the question from which we initially diverged: do we know our own inner being as it is in itself? We respond: undoubtedly, it exists in consciousness as it is in itself. Feelings, desires, representations, and thoughts are felt, presented, and thought as they are in themselves; their being is nothing other than their feelability and thinkability. If now the soul is nothing other than its own spiritual life, if there is no dark, impenetrable psychic atom remaining as a residue, we must assert that the distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself has no significance here. To be and to be known coincide in one. In an empirical sense, of course, the knowledge of the self is limited and insufficient. Fragments of our past life remain in memory, which coalesce into a unified view, interpreted in various ways under the influence of what is currently in the foreground of consciousness, while countless phenomena play out below the threshold of consciousness, casting their shadows into awareness or disturbing the conscious life of representations and feelings. Furthermore, the future remains obscure; only gradually does the self unveil itself, often deceiving its own representations and expectations regarding itself. Thus, it is conceivable that a much broader and deeper knowledge of my self exists than that which I currently possess; to a certain extent, this is even achieved by another person. A biographer, endowed with the advantage of surveying a life that has reached its conclusion, with all its implications and its actions upon others, often judges more clearly and accurately than the hero themselves. Yet all this signifies only the empirical limitation of self-knowledge; there is, on the contrary, no mention of transcendental limitation or the distinction between the thing-in-itself and appearance here. Thus, we would again obtain a foundational point for a realistic perspective on knowledge: I know reality as it is in itself, insofar as I myself am that reality.

I shall briefly touch upon a doubt that may arise against this assertion based on previous reasoning. Time, we stated alongside Kant, is not an absolutely existing order of absolute reality but rather a form of subjective contemplation; I do not think we can retract this view. Time can only be constructed as an order in which we arrange elements of consciousness; it remains conceivable that for some other mind, this order of "before and after" holds no significance or is of a different kind: it may contemplate reality outside of time, sub specie aeternitatis, in Spinoza's phrase. And since we necessarily imagine our inner life as a flow through time, it appears that phenomenality also enters into our self-knowledge.

I would counter: here, too, it is largely a matter of empirical limitation rather than transcendental; it cannot be said that our knowledge of our inner life is somehow falsified by this. That absolute mind, which would grasp reality as existing outside of time, would still see in my life nothing other than the same content. Otherwise, I would say: this is no longer I; phenomenality or inadequacy would then not be on my side but on theirs. That presumed absolute mind perceives nothing other in content; it simply sees differently, encompassing the same content with a more comprehensive, all-embracing vision. Whoever could view the annual course of the Sun around the Earth at a glance, just as our eye perceives the oscillations of a pendulum, or who could observe the development of the planetary system as we see the blossoming and withering of a flower, for them millennia would be but an instant of the present. Their gaze simultaneously sees the past and the future; at every point, they perceive all causes and all actions—that is to say, they see reality as a unified whole, as an ideal system in which every moment is conditioned by or necessary for the whole. A boy learning to read initially sees only letters; gradually, he learns to see words, then sentences, and finally, as an adult, he grasps the book as one grand thought, revealing its content across numerous moments. The connection between these moments is no longer temporal but internal; logical or aesthetic necessity encompasses all parts, pointing out each one's place. Thus does God see all things: the temporal distribution, to borrow from Lotze (Mikrokosmos, III, 599), vanishes before the internal relationship, the inner order of conditioning, in which the most distant and the nearest are intertwined in His consciousness. Our limited awareness struggles to grasp words and lines; even its own content it can only apprehend by gradually recalling it. Of the thousands of relations in which it stands, only a few moments are grasped; of their causes, let alone their effects, it scarcely knows in the most general terms. Our life resembles a wandering in a labyrinth; God's knowledge of our life is akin to a view from above, where one can survey all the entanglements at a glance.