Main Philosophical Directions

Directions of Epistemological Theory

Panlogism

The critical philosophy of Kant sought to reconcile empiricism and rationalism by assigning each its rightful place: we owe the material of knowledge to external experience, presented through sensation; our capacity for knowledge relies on the sensory forms of space and time, which serve to organize this material, alongside general concepts. However, these forms of contemplation and categories were not derived by Kant from a singular principle; the material of sensation was, for him, entirely contingent yet nonetheless necessary for all knowledge. Moreover, Kant's critique established a sharp boundary between theoretical and practical reason, between knowledge and will, positioning them in complete opposition to one another while also treating will as an unknowable force beyond the reach of any forms of knowledge, rendering it a mystical power. Consequently, the realm of knowledge, which also governs human will and action, is plagued by an irreconcilable discord. In contrast to the contradictions arising from Kant's critique, his followers revived a rationalist tendency, attempting to supplement and correct Kant by deriving all principles of knowledge from a single logical principle. In this regard, Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" sought to reconstruct critical philosophy on the basis of the postulate that all content of theoretical and practical reason must be derived from a continuous series of completed rational actions. A singular, unconditional, and necessary foundational law is established as the starting point; the principle of thought's development is reduced solely to the common logical laws of identity, contradiction, and foundation. For Fichte, this initial point is grounded in the Cartesian dictum "cogito, ergo sum," which he reformulates, eliminating its misapplied form of reasoning, as the first of the logical laws: the law of identity. Just as the law "I = I" serves as the first premise of all thought, so too must the application of the law of contradiction to the thinking "I" entail an act that is immanent to thought itself, thus differentiating "I" from "non-I." Following the addition of a third law, also immanent to thought—the law of foundation—the necessity arises to relate "I" and "non-I" to one another. It is evident that two relations are possible: either "non-I" defines "I," or conversely, "I" defines "non-I." In the former case, "I" becomes the sufferer, the knower; in the latter, the actor, the willer. From this, Fichte concludes that the activities of theoretical and practical reason are governed by the same logical necessity inherent in self-consciousness. However, since "I" represents the original from which "non-I" emerges solely through opposition, the movement of thought must return to "I": "I" posits itself against "non-I," endowed with various conceivable definitions, ultimately aiming to return to itself as the final foundation of all movement. Therefore, the task of philosophy is to traverse the path traced by thought in this circular motion. Along this journey, all a priori fundamental laws of knowledge and then of will must necessarily be derived. The method for finding this path can only mirror that which has already occurred in the development of the three general logical axioms. Just as the law of identity, through the logical function of opposition, leads to the law of contradiction, and both together, through the immanent function of thought of relation and connection, lead to the law of foundation, so too must every thesis established in the further development of thought necessarily give rise to its antithesis, which in turn connects to a synthesis. As synthesis may be viewed as a newly established thesis, the same process will repeat within it, continuing until the movement initially charted by the actions of both members of the first synthesis returns through the diverse definitions of "non-I" to "I" as the primordial determinant.

If the ontological method aimed to discover a concept that is self-founded, panlogism sought to unveil a self-developing concept that not only possesses intuitive veracity, hence requiring no proof, but also engenders further concepts through its inherent necessity of development. Representing an advanced evolution of ontologism, panlogism simultaneously intertwines fundamental ideas of Platonic dialectics with ontologism. Platonic dialectics already acknowledged the self-development of thought. Notably, Plato indicated that thought, through its intrinsic power of negation, is capable of generating new ideas from established concepts. Panlogism merely adds a further specification: the synthesis of such newly acquired concepts with the original yields a third concept, which can, in turn, initiate a similar process. From ontologism, panlogism inherits the postulate that the original concept must be directly verifiable through itself.

Thus emerges the premise of self-development of concepts: through this premise, panlogism aspires to bridge the chasm that arose in establishing the ontological principle between the necessarily conceivable and empirical reality. By attempting to demonstrate that empirical concepts are themselves necessary products of the evolution of primary necessary concepts, panlogism constructs a bridge over this chasm.

Fichte's philosophy, however, does not strictly adhere to panlogism. It displays inconsistency in two respects. First, individual self-consciousness, while indeed a necessary prerequisite for all thought development, can only serve as a particular starting point. Therefore, it, in turn, requires a general foundation, which, since it must serve as the basis not merely for subjective concept formation but for objective regularity, must be consciousness as such. Consequently, since such general consciousness contains the subject and object in complete unity, it equates to being in general or pure being. Second, the three logical axioms of identity, contradiction, and foundation, while entirely evident, should not be established as existing independently of one another, given that the self-development of thought originates from a single foundational concept; they must instead arise from the indicated immanent self-development of the concept. Thus, it must be shown that each concept inherently contains its opposite, and thus, its unity with it, so that thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, while they may appear separately in our thought, are already initially immanent to the concept itself. Since this principle applies to the entire process of concept development, the self-development of thought must be nothing other than the unfolding of a singular being. From this premise necessarily follows the postulate of the unity of thought and being: only in subjective thought, which represents a sequential reconstruction of being, are these two elements—thought and being—separated from one another; in reality, they are entirely identical.

This postulate of the "unity of thought and being" was primarily proposed by Schelling in his "System of Identity," which concluded his diverse constructions of natural philosophy. However, in Schelling's dialectical method, the focus devolves into an arbitrary play of analogies, causing his system of identity, much like his preceding presentations of natural philosophy, to assume the character of a fantastical poetic construction, having only a fleeting impact on its time. Hegel, building upon the principles of the philosophy of identity, was the first to attempt to articulate panlogism through a rigorous method. He substitutes being for self-consciousness, which had played a fundamental role in Fichte's philosophy. This marked a similar advancement within panlogism as Spinoza made within ontologism in relation to Descartes, by recognizing not the statement "cogito, ergo sum" as self-evident, but rather the concept of substance. With a foundation in the general concept of being, the self-development of thought has the potential to significantly expand its domain, finding application not only concerning universal foundational laws of knowledge and will but also in relation to the entire realm of motion within the concepts of thought, from the most abstract to the most concrete forms of the concept. From this perspective, there exists only a single philosophy, which consists of the systematic self-development of thought from being and back to being. Logic, natural philosophy, philosophy of law, aesthetics, etc., are merely incidental excerpts from this self-contained circle, delineated solely for practical considerations. Hegel refined the method of the self-development of the concept, attempting initially to uncover "coincidentia oppositorum" within the concept of being, and subsequently to extend this to all other stages of the development of the concept. Pure being is a completely empty concept and, as such, is identical to its opposite, nothingness. Yet being and non-being, being both identical and opposite to each other, continuously transition into one another and are therefore identical with the concept that encompasses both simultaneously, emergence, in which a similar process of self-development may be repeated. Since in this process of self-motion of thought being is revealed in all the diversity of its content, forming a whole indivisible unity, it becomes entirely unwarranted to distinguish between appearance and being— a distinction that played a significant role in ontological metaphysics when delineating adequate and inadequate knowledge, muddled and clear representations, a distinction that Kant himself accepted in his critical system, thus revealing a clear kinship with ancient rationalism. Appearance is being itself in the diversity of its particular definitions; the development of the world of appearances is the unfolding of being in the fullness of its concrete content. In doing so, Hegel completely eradicates the notion of a transcendent world, which had dominated all earlier forms of rationalism. The sensual empirical world is the only real world. Yet, according to Hegel, the true essence of things is not the immediate content of sensual perception but the content of reality, grasped in concepts and understood as rational.

In truth, as a detailed examination of the system revealed, the panlogistic method is wholly incapable of fulfilling the demands placed upon it. It proved impossible to conduct the self-development of thought with even approximate completeness, which is, in reality, non-immanent to the concepts. Already within the realm of the most general concepts, and even more so in concrete constructions, the panlogistic method inevitably resorts to deliberate tricks and sometimes arbitrary trichotomies of concepts to serve its purposes. Thus, the essential result of panlogism ultimately reduces itself to the doctrine of the identity of thought and being, as well as appearance and being. The content of this doctrine, when detached from the dialectical method, clearly signifies a complete acknowledgment of empirical reality. Therefore, panlogism indeed represents a direction that is empirically substantive in content yet aprioristically defined in method. However, since the panlogistic aprioristic method ultimately proves to be arbitrary and not immanent to the concepts, the system constructed through it is, in fact, aprioristic: it often provides a clever explanation of empirical facts, yet still subordinates them to an external artificial schematism, detrimental to the free movement of thought— a movement that is genuinely adequate to the object.

Such a failure besetting the panlogistic method is the necessary consequence of its formal character. As a result, the foundational concepts of the system, "I" and "not-I," being, non-being, and emergence, are entirely devoid of content, and therefore, their substance can only be introduced from without. In the self-development of thought, "I" generates all fundamental laws of knowledge and will, while "pure being" produces all possible concrete definitions of being only by successively introducing them into concepts. Naturally, all this content could only be derived externally, from concrete experience. In effect, thus, the panlogistic system is not a self-development of the concept; it forcefully imposes the rich content of experience within the confines of concepts, employing logical categories of antithesis and synthesis, ruthlessly dismantling the genuine connection of facts.

Although the method of panlogism has proven unsuccessful, it remains necessary to examine the content of the system independent of the former. Since, for Hegel, it must represent concrete experiential content in all its fullness, here rationalism, having reached the pinnacle of its development, transitions into empiricism. This necessary outcome serves as a factual testament to the insufficiency of rationalistic directions in general. The principle of pure thought leads either to transcendent being, simply contained within the concept— a being that shares nothing in common with empirical reality; such an absolute concept, founded upon itself, yields ontologism, or it leads to the forced subsumption of empirical reality under an imposed schematism of concepts: this is what panlogism arrives at with its absolute self-developing idea. However, within the objective that panlogism sets for itself, there nevertheless echoes an acknowledgment that the ultimate task of philosophy is to understand reality as given in experience. It attempts merely to fulfill this task through improper means, not determining methods of thought according to facts but rather arranging facts according to the same method that it arbitrarily imposes on entirely different phenomena. Consequently, the panlogistic philosophical direction naturally had to come into conflict with individual scientific disciplines as deeper engagement with the objective relationship of facts revealed the inadequacy of template discussions through dialectical trichotomies. Foremost, the natural sciences declared war on panlogism; gradually, historical sciences too withdrew from it, having absorbed certain fruitful insights from it in specifics.

With the decline of the panlogistic direction, rationalism itself did not wholly vanish. Yet where it originated, it largely manifested in ancient forms of ontologism or apriorism. Thus, Herbart, in his metaphysics, made a decisive attempt to construct an ontological system based on the concept of the absolutely simple, delineating this concept more accurately than Leibniz, while simultaneously replacing the teleological mode of inquiry of the latter with a strictly causal one. On the other hand, Schopenhauer sought to establish a universal idea of unity analogous to Spinoza's, grounded in Kant's concept of the will as the thing-in-itself, while also revealing, relying on the apriorism of Plato’s theory of ideas, the connection between the transcendent concept of will and the world of appearances. These and other similar attempts, however, encountered the same obstacles faced by rationalistic directions in their earlier forms. Herbart had to introduce a series of arbitrary auxiliary assumptions, lacking necessity and, strictly speaking, impervious to empirical substantiation, in order to transition from his pure concept of being to the world of appearances; Schopenhauer, in his fantastical concepts, particularly in his natural philosophy and aesthetics, repeated, if possible, to an even greater extent, the logical arbitrariness of previous apriorism. In contrast to these new restorationist efforts, the third epistemological direction, criticism, has maintained its dominance up to the present day.