A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 1. The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy

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Chapter I
The transcendental criticism of theoretical thought and the central significance of the transcendental ground-idea for philosophy

§ 1 - The problem of time

In our ‘Introduction’ we argued that no philosophical thought is possible without a transcendent starting-point. We contended that even the philosopher who believes, that he can find such a point in theoretical thought itself, despite all his protestations to the contrary, must exceed the limits of theoretical thought in order to discover its true Archimedean point¹.

1 Rickert (System der Philosophie, p. 241) observes: ‘Gewisz zeigt das heterologische Princip’ (in our train of thought, the requirement that the modal diversity of meaning be distinguished theoretically) ‘bei der Frage nach der letzten Welteinheit die Grenze unseres Denkens, aber gerade dadurch eröffnet es uns zugleich die Möglichkeit, uns von seinen Fesseln zu befreien. Sind wir imstande, durch Denken die Grenze des Denkens fest zu stellen, so müssen wir auch imstande sein, diese Grenze zu überschreiten.’ [It is certain, that the heterological principle marks the limits to our thought in the problem of the ultimate unity of the world. But in this way it creates the possibility of liberating ourselves at the same time from its fetters. If we are able to determine the boundaries of thought through thinking, we must be able, too, to exceed these limits].
On the immanence standpoint, this conclusion contains an overt contradiction: Thought determines its own boundaries and is thereby able to exceed these limits! Can it under these conditions continue to be pure transcendental thought? It is here unavailing to distinguish with Rickert between a merely ‘heterological’ and a ‘heterological-monological’ thought, in which the latter would exceed the limits of the former alone. Where this sort of monological thinking autonomously attempts to conceive of the unity of the cosmos in the subjective meaning connecting ‘reality’ and ‘value’, it exceeds the immanent limits of the activity of thought qua talis. And it involves itself in the antinomy which Rickert himself honestly lays bare in his pronouncement (op. cit. p. 260): ‘So bringen wir das in einem Begriff, was wir streng genommen in einem Begriff nicht fassen können.’ [Thus we form a concept of that which, strictly speaking, cannot be contained in a concept.]

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This apriori transcends the immanent limits of philosophic thought.

Rickert's conception of the self-limitation of thought.

Rickert, one of the leading thinkers of the South-West German school of neo-Kantians, holds, that we can never become conscious of the limits of thought by taking a stand beyond the latter and, looking down from that point upon thought, learn to know it in its limitedness: ‘As soon as we are beyond thought, we do not know anything’¹. Indubitably correct. We can even go further and say: it is entirely impossible for us, in the actuality of our self-consciousness, to stand beyond our thought; for, apart from thought, our human selfhood cannot disclose itself in the temporal coherence of our world. But Rickert on the immanence-standpoint lacks an appreciation of the transcendence of our selfhood. And our selfhood, as we have seen, is never to be eliminated from the act of thinking².

To be sure - if we want to learn the limits of our thought - we must, while thinking, come to a transcendental theoretic

1 System der Phil., p. 247: ‘Sobald wir auszerhalb des Denkens sind, erkennen wir nichts.’

2 See also his essay: Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung in Logos, Bnd. XXII, Heft I (1933), pp. 56f: ‘Wer das, was er als theoretische Erkenntnis der Welt in ihrer Ganzheit nicht nur logisch zwingend zu begründen vermag, sondern es zugleich abzugrenzen gelernt hat gegen die Lebensüberzeugungen, die seine auszerwissenschaftliche Weltanschauung formen, der wird auf Grund seiner universalen Erkenntnis, die als Philosophie notwendig auch den ganzen Menschen mit zum “Gegenstande” macht, indem sie sich über ihn stellt zugleich am besten einsehen, weshalb die auszerwissenschaftliche Stellungnahme zur Welt, so lange sie nicht, wie die theoretische Wahrheit, den Anspruch auf Geltung für alle erhebt, neben der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie unangefochten bestehen bleiben kan.’ [Anyone who is able not only to establish stringently on a logical foundation that which he has learnt as theoretical knowledge of the world in its totality, but also to delimit it at the same time from those views of life that form his non-scientific view of the world, will be best in a position to understand, why the non-scientific attitude towards the world, so long as it does not claim universal validity for all, like theoretical truth, can hold its own by the side of scientific philosophy. For his universal knowledge which as philosophy necessarily makes the entire man also its object, transcends man himself.].

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Idea of the limits. But on this account, it is not to be supposed, as Rickert does, that these limits are set by thought. Nor can they be known by a thought which would be abstracted from its religious root and from the inter-modal coherence of meaning.

After we have recognized the necessity of transcending, we may advance another step.

The intent of philosophy is to give us a theoretical insight into the coherence of our temporal world as an inter-modal coherence of meaning. Philosophic thought is bound to this coherence, within which alone it has meaning.

It is a temporal coherence. Man transcends it in his selfhood, it is true, - but within this coherence he exists in a status of being-universally-bound-to-time. Man is bound to time together with all creatures that are fitted with him in the same temporal order.

The immanence of all modal aspects of meaning in time.

As we observed in the Introduction, within this temporal coherence reality displays a great diversity of modal aspects which are essentially modalities of cosmic meaning. We mentioned the aspects of number, space, motion, energy, organic life, feeling and sensory perception, the logical analytical and historical aspects, the aspect of symbolic signification, that of social intercourse (ruled by norms of fashion, courtesy, ceremony etc.) the economic, aesthetic, jural, moral, and faith aspects.

This is a very rough preliminary schema of the fundamental modalities of meaning, not yet investigated in the refined theoretical analysis of their modal structures. But it may serve as a provisional orientation into the modal diversity of our temporal cosmos.

All these modal aspects are interwoven with one another in a cosmic order of time which guarantees their coherence of meaning. As we shall see below, time-order is necessarily related to factual time-duration. And only this indissoluble correlation of order and duration can be called cosmic time, in distinction from all its special modal aspects. Nowhere else do we actually transcend this cosmic time, except in the religious centre of our existence. Neither in the concept as to its intentional meaning, nor even in the transcendental Idea as a limiting concept qua talis.

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In the first orientation into the modal diversity of our cosmos, we see ourselves compelled to set this conception in contrast to that of immanence-philosophy. For, in consequence of its starting-point, the latter has lost the insight into the universal inter-modal character of time and into the coherence of meaning among its different modal aspects.

I have treated the problem of time in detail in a separate work¹. In the present connection some introductory remarks may suffice to prepare our further investigations.

1 Het tijdsprobleem in de Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (The problem of time in the philosophy of the cosmonomic idea). This treatise is also published in the review Philosophia Reformata (publisher J.H. Kok, Kampen), 5th year 1940, pp. 160ff. and pp. 193ff.).

The influence of the dialectical ground-motives upon the philosophical conceptions of time.

Here I am obliged to anticipate for a moment the results of later critical investigations in order to make clear the influence of the dialectical ground-motives upon the philosophical view of time from the immanence-standpoint.

Even in classical Greek thought this view was entangled in a falsely posed dilemma, i.e. whether time has a subjective mental or rather an objective physical character. In the brief treatise that Aristotle devotes to this question in his Physics IV 10, 217 b. 29ff, he develops the conception that time is the measure (the number or rather the numerability) of motion according to the ὕστεϱον ϰαὶ πϱότεϱον; the problem is posed here in the framework of the Greek form-matter motive, the dialectical religious character of which will be explained presently. According to Aristotle, motion (which is treated here exclusively in the sense of change of place) is a striving of matter after form and from potentiality to actuality. As long as it has not attained its form, it is a flowing plurality of earlier and later. It is without unity and consequently without actual being, because being implies unity. The psychè, however, can give unity to this plurality in the subjective synthesis of the act of counting. Therefore, time cannot actually exist outside the soul. Does it then, in the local movement of things, have only a potential existence in the plurality of phases of the earlier and later? Aristotle's exposition fails to provide a clear answer to this question.

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A quite different view from the Aristotelian was found in the old Ionian nature-philosophers. Whereas Aristotle deified the form-motive in identifying deity with pure Form, the latter, on the contrary, deified the matter-motive of the ever flowing Stream of life which cannot fix itself in any form. Time is viewed here, especially in Anaximander, as a divine order of dikè avenging the injustice of things which have originated in an individual form, by dissolving this latter in pure matter and carrying back all things to their form-less Origin.

The dilemma posed by Aristotle could not arise here, since the Ionian thinkers made no difference between the physical and the mental spheres. According to them ‘matter’ was animated. Aristotle, on the contrary, held that the psychè is the form of the material body and that ‘matter’ is only a potentiality. It cannot have actual being without a form which guarantees the unity of being.

In consequence of the inner dialectic of the form-matter-motive, medieval Aristotelian scholasticism was also broken up into diametrically opposed trends with respect to its view of time. Albert the Great, in his commentary on the Physics, defended an objective physical conception and ascribed to the movement of things, independently of the soul, a form and structure of its own, in the so-called numerus formalis¹. Thomas Aquinas veers toward the opposite subjectivistic psychological position. In this he follows Augustine². Time as the numerical measure of motion can have real existence only in the soul, although Thomas concedes, that it has a fundamentum in re in the motion of matter³.

1 Albertus Magnus, Physicorum L. IV tr. 3 c. 16: ‘Ad numerare tria exiguntur, scilicet materia numerata, et numerus formalis, et anima efficienter et formaliter numerans: ergo si non est anima adhuc numerus est secundum esse formale et secundum numerum numeratum; ergo, quo numeratur est duplex, scilicet quo numeratur efficienter, et quo numeratur formaliter.’ Time is such a numerus formalis.
In modern times the same conception is found again in the neo-Thomist P. Hoenen S.J., in his Philosophie der anorganische natuur [Philosophy of inorganic nature] (Antwerpen-Nijmegen) 1940, p. 284.

2 Augustinus, Confessiones L. XI, 33: ‘Inde mihi visum est nihil alium esse tempus quam distentionem: sed cuius rei nescio, et mirum, si non ipsius animae.’

3 Thomas, De Instantibus, Cap. I. Opusc. XXXVI. Cf. on this point my treatise: De idee der individualiteits-structuur en het Thomistisch substantie-begrip, II [The idea of the individuality-structure and the Thomistic concept of substance] (Philosophia Reformata 9th and 10th years. 1944/5), pp. 1f.

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In modern Humanistic philosophy, the problem of time is posed in the framework of the Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom. The latter is to be subjected to a detailed investigation in the second part of this volume.

The inner dialectic of this basic motive drives philosophical thought at the outset toward a conception of time orientated rationalistically toward mechanical motion as it was conceived of by classical physics. And subsequently it drives it toward an irrationalistic vitalistic, psychological or historical view (dominated by the freedom-motive). Here too, one comes across the opposition of objectivistic and subjectivistic views.

In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, time is viewed as a transcendental form of intuition of sense experience, in which the objective-physical as well as the subjective-psychical impressions of consciousness are ordered in succession. Time is coordinated here with space as the other form of intuition.

In the twentieth century, the philosophical discussion is set in motion once more by the development of Einstein's relativity-theory, which views time as a fourth dimension of the physical world-space (the ordering system x, y, z, t).

Bergson alleges against Einstein that in the theory of relativity time is denatured to a spatial line. ‘True time’, according to him, is the psychical duration of feeling, in which we immediately enjoy a living experience of the creative freedom of the ‘élan vital’ (inaccessible to natural-scientific thought). This actual ‘durée’ is of inner psychical character and lacks mathematical uniformity of successive parts. All moments here penetrate one another qualitatively.

Psychical ‘durée’, according to Bergson, is the absolute time.

Modern phenomenology also speaks of ‘true time’ as an ‘Erlebnisstrom’, in opposition to the objectivistic conception of time in modern mathematical natural science. Dilthey and Heidegger conceive of time in an irrationalistic historical sense, but in Heidegger historical time has a dialectical existential meaning.

In all these philosophical discussions of the subject, it strikes us again and again that time is unwittingly identified with one

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of its modal aspects or modalities of meaning. As long as philosophical thought proceeds from a dialectical ground-motive and is caught in a religious dualism, an integral conception of time is excluded.

The integral character of cosmic time. The correlation of temporal order and duration, and the subject-object relation in the latter.

The idea of cosmic time¹ constitutes the basis of the philosophical theory of reality in this book. By virtue of its integral character it may be called new.

According to this conception, time in its cosmic sense has a cosmonomic and a factual side. Its cosmonomic side is the temporal order of succession or simultaneity. The factual side is the factual duration, which differs with various individualities.

But the duration remains constantly subjected to the order. Thus, for example, in the aspect of organic life, the temporal order of birth, maturing, adulthood, aging and dying holds good for the more highly developed organisms.

The duration of human life may differ considerably in different individuals. But it always remains subject to this biotic order of time. No man can come into this world as an adult. Temporal order and duration are each other's correlata and so they may not be dissociated. Consequently, the opposition between rationalistic and irrationalistic conceptions has lost its foundation for us. For the former absolutizes the cosmonomic side and the latter the factual-subjective side of time.

The duration discloses itself further in a subject-object relation, which will be subjected to a detailed analysis in volumes II and III, and to which we shall return presently in a provisional way.

For the moment, we must be satisfied with the observation that the objective duration can never actually exist independently of the subjective in the subject-object-relation. This is of essential importance for the problem of the ‘measurement of time’. Consequently, the polar opposition between subjectivistic and objectivistic conceptions is also meaningless from our standpoint.

1 The term ‘cosmic’ may not of course be understood in a natural-scientific sense.

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All structures of temporal reality are structures of cosmic time.

We must further observe, that all the basic structures which we shall discover in temporal reality in the course of our inquiry (in vol. II and III), the modal structures of the various aspects as well as the typical totality-structures of individuality, are grounded in the order of cosmic time. They are all specific structures of time and as such necessarily related to the factual duration of transitory beings, events, processes, acts, social relationships and so on.

The entire empirical reality in its overrich diversity of structures is enclosed and determined by universal cosmic time. In each of its modal aspects, the latter expresses itself in a specific modality of meaning with respect to temporal order as well as duration.

But its cosmic character discloses itself precisely in the indissoluble inter-modal coherence of meaning into which it fits the modal aspects.

As a matter of fact we shall see, in the second volume of this work, that the modal aspects are bound by cosmic time in an order of before and after, which is expressed in their very internal modal structure.

This order discloses its temporal character, namely, in the empirical opening-process of the modal aspects of reality (to be investigated more closely in vol. II). In this process, anticipatory structural moments come to be developed; and these moments disclose their inner coherence of meaning with the modal aspects that are later in order. The complex of anticipatory structural moments is, for example, lacking in the as yet closed structure of the logical aspect as we discover it in the pre-theoretical attitude of thought. Anticipatory structural moments find expression within this aspect only in the theoretical attitude of thought. Only in the latter is disclosed the inner connection with the historical, linguistic, economic and later aspects. Thus - to give another instance - in a closed primitive jural order, the anticipating connection with morality - as expressed in the principles of equity, good faith, good morals, punishment according to guilt etc. - is absent.

The opening-process, intended here, has temporal duration and comes about according to the inter-modal temporal order of the aspects. We shall go into all these points in detail in vol. II.

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The transcendental Idea and the modal concepts of time. The logical aspect of temporal order and duration.

We can form a theoretical concept of the separate modal aspects of time. But time itself, in its all-embracing cosmic meaning can never be comprehended in a concept, because the former alone makes the concept possible. It can only be approximated in a theoretical limiting-concept in critical self-reflection as to the necessary pre-supposita of the theoretical attitude of thought. We then get a transcendental idea of cosmic time-order in the theoretical discontinuity of its different modal aspects. This discontinuity is caused by logical analysis.

In the logical or analytical aspect, itself, cosmic time discloses a modal-analytical sense.

The logical order of simultaneity and of prius and posterius is as much a modal aspect of the integral order of time as the physical. It has meaning only within the cosmic time-order in the coherence of all its modal aspects. Therefore, it is meaningless to set the logical prius and posterius in opposition to the temporal before and after, as if the former had no authentic meaning as time-aspect.

The theoretical concept joins in logical simultaneity the analyzed characteristics of that which is defined in it. It is thereby subjected to the logical principles of identity and contradiction, which give expression to the analytical (normative) temporal order of simultaneity in the sense of logical implication and exclusion. Likewise the theoretical logical movement of thought follows the analytical temporal order of prius and posterius (the premises are logically prior to the conclusion), as being subjected to the principle of the sufficient ground¹.

1 The logical movement of thought has subjective duration in the real act of thought and is subjected to the logical order of prius et posterius with respect to the logical aspect of this act. From the side of psychologists it is objected that actually the process of logical concluding does not follow explicitly the logical order of prius et posterius. However, it is at least not to be doubted that it does so, when we draw a syllogistic inference in theoretic logical form. This is only possible in a real act of theoretical thought, which does disclose explicitly the logical aspect of time which is present only implicitly in pre-theoretic logical conclusions and which has also a logical aspect of duration. It must be observed, that the logical order of succession differs fundamentally from that of mathematical movement in its original modal sense. For in the analytical succession of thought the former stages do not disappear, because the inference implies its premises. Besides, the analytical order of prius, et posterius is a normative one, which ought to be followed in a theoretical logical syllogism if the inference is to be correct.

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Nowhere, hence not in the logical aspect either, does cosmic time in itself offer a concentration-point that could serve as a point of departure for philosophic thought.

In time, meaning is broken into an incalculable diversity, which can come to a radical unity only in the religious centre of human existence. For this is the only sphere of our consciousness in which we can transcend time¹.

1 It has become apparent to me that some adherents of my philosophy are unable to follow me in this integral conception of cosmic time and its relationship to the concentration-point of philosophic thought.
Some seek the concentration-point of human existence in time and suppose, that this religious centre must certainly be pre-functional but not supra-temporal.
But, at least within the horizon of cosmic time we have no single experience of something ‘pre-functional’, i.e. of anything that would transcend the modal diversity of the aspects. We gain this experience only in the religious concentration of the radix of our existence upon the absolute Origin. In this concentration we transcend cosmic time. How could man direct himself toward eternal things, if eternity were not ‘set in his heart’? Even the idolatrous absolutizing of the temporal cannot be explained from the temporal horizon of human existence. For the latter nowhere provides a point of contact for an idea of the absolute, unless it be related apriori to the supra-temporal. This act of concentration presupposes a supra-temporal starting-point in our consciousness.
This, however, is not to say that the religious centre of human existence is found in a rigid and static immobility. That is a metaphysical-Greek idea of supra-temporality. It found, for example, sharp expression in Parmenides' conception of the eternal divine form of being and in Plato's original conception of the transcendental world of the εἰδή and of the immortal soul, enclosed entirely in the pure form of theoretical thought (cf. Plato's Phaedo).
In the case of the founder of the Eleatic school, this conception originated from an absolutizing of the modal spatial aspect, an aspect bound to the horizon of time. The eternal being, which has no coming into being nor passing away is in his view enclosed in the ideal static-spatial form of the sphere. In his dialectical dialogue Parmenides, Plato himself has laid bare the inner antinomies involved in this absolutization.
The spatial is not in the least supra-temporal since it implies simultaneity in the modal meaning of continuous dimensional extension, and the spatial relations in temporal reality have subjective-objective duration of time. So far as the spatial relationships in abstract geometry are viewed apart from transitory things and events, i.e. according to their modal structure alone, they, nevertheless, always continue to express the spatial temporal order of greater and less in simultaneity. A spatial order of time, can exist only in the coherence of meaning with all other aspects. The same holds good for the + and - order of numbers, which is no less a modal aspect of the order of time and is in temporal reality continually related to factual duration, because the numerical relations as well as the spatial ones are, in reality, constantly subjected to change. The + and the - directions in the order of numbers, however, maintain themselves in every factual temporal duration of numerical relationships, because they express an arithmetical order of time, which determines the place and value of each of the numbers.
This must be my answer, if other adherents of my philosophy are of the opinion that cosmic time does not find expression in the numerical and spatial aspects as such. This would even spell a regress in face of the view of Kant, who made number originate from a schematizing of the logical category of quantity in time; also in face of the insight of Hamilton who defined arithmetic as the science of pure time or order in progression. (Cf. J. Alexander Gunn, The Problem of time (London, 1939), p. 92); also in face of the intuitionalistic school in mathematics, which makes all natural numbers originate from a synthesis of the original intuition of time and the original ideas of one and addition.

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Only from this supra-temporal concentration-point are we in a position to gain a veritable notion of time. Beings that are entirely lost in time lack that notion.

No static conception of the supra-temporal. Is the acceptance of a central trans-cosmic time desirable?

If we say, that we transcend cosmic time in the root of our existence, we must guard against metaphysical Greek or Humanistic conceptions of the ‘supra-temporal’. We shall later on see, that the central sphere of human existence is in the full sense of the word a dynamic one. Out of it the dramatic conflict between the civitas Dei (city of God) and the civitas terrena (earthly city) takes its issue in the history of the world. We can even call it the central sphere of occurrence, for that which occurs cannot be distinguished too sharply from the historical aspect of cosmic time, which is only one of its temporal modalities of meaning.

I have considered whether - in order to cut off all misunderstanding respecting the term ‘supra-temporal’ - it would be recommendable to introduce the expression ‘central transcosmic’ time.

But this would lead to a duplication of the temporal horizon,

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in connection with which it would become necessary to use the word in two fundamentally different senses. Furthermore, the general explanation ‘duration determined by the order of succession or simultaneity’ would no longer prove serviceable to cover both meanings. I would not know what criterion would have to be accepted for a ‘trans-cosmic’ time. Consequently, the meaning of this term would remain entirely in the dark. For these reasons, I still prefer to reserve the term ‘time’ for the cosmic one and its different modal aspects.

The eschatological aspect of cosmic time in faith.

To be sure, cosmic time has its limiting aspect in faith and there is a temporal order and duration in the special meaning of the latter. The modal meaning of faith, as we shall see in the second volume, is by its nature related to divine revelation. In this eschatological aspect of time faith groups the ‘eschaton’ and, in general, that which is or happens beyond the limits of cosmic time. In this special sense are to be understood the ‘days of creation’, the initial words of the book of Genesis, the order in which regeneration precedes conversion etc.

Theology will always need this limiting aspect of time in which the cosmic temporal order is indissolubly connected with the revealed supra-temporal realm. However, I cannot agree with the tendency of some modern Christian theologians, who identify the eschatological aspect of time with the historical and reject the supra-temporal central sphere of human existence and of divine revelation.

Naïve and theoretical experience of time.

In the naïve pre-theoretical attitude of experience, we have an immediate integral experience of cosmic time in the uninterrupted coherence of all its modal aspects, inclusive of the normative ones, and in concentric relatedness to the selfhood. If I hasten to my work and look at my watch, then time has for me not only an abstract objective aspect of movement, but I experience it in the continuous coherence of its aspects of number, space and movement, with the stream of organic life, duration of feeling and the normative social aspects. When I let a person go first who is ranked higher in the social scale, intuitively, I am aware of the temporal aspect of symbolic significance and of the social intercourse-aspect of temporal order. This holds like-

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wise for the economic and juridical aspects of time, when I spend the scanty time that I have at my disposal in a definite economic manner or guard myself against mora in the performance of my legal obligations. The implicit experience of normative aspects of the temporal order in the notion of being ‘too late’ is one of the most evident indications of the integral character of the naïve consciousness of time.

But it is no less certain, that in naïve experience the different modal aspects do not explicitly come to consciousness, but only implicitly and conjointly. The continuity of cosmic time here completely covers the modal boundaries of its aspects.

In the philosophical-theoretical attitude of thought, on the contrary, we can approximate time - and temporal reality - only in an analytical setting-asunder of its modal aspects, which nevertheless continue to express their coherence of meaning in their very intrinsic structure.

§ 2 - The transcendental criticism of theoretical thought and the dogma concerning the autonomy of the latter. The second way to a transcendental criticism of philosophy

Here a second way is opened to subject philosophic thought to a transcendental criticism. In the ‘Introduction’ we chose the way from above: we started from the position that it is the nature of philosophy to be directed to the totality of meaning of temporal reality and to the selfhood, and we then came immediately to the problem of the Archimedean-point and to that of the ἀϱχή.

But in this line of thought, we had to start from a supposition about the character of philosophy, which is not at all universally accepted in philosophical circles. Besides, it might seem, that a due account of the transition from the theoretical basic problem of philosophy to the central religious sphere was lacking.

Therefore, since the appearance of the first (i.e. the Dutch) edition of this work, I have directed all my attention to a sharpening of the method of transcendental criticism, whereby the objection, mentioned above, might be met. The conceptions of the task of philosophy are extremely divergent and every apriori choice of a position in this matter may be esteemed dogmatic. Consequently, if our transcendental critique is actually to embrace every possible conception of the philosophic task,

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it must necessarily examine the theoretical attitude of thought as such. For no veritable philosophy whatsoever can escape this attitude¹.

1 In a later context we will explain the fact, that so-called existential philosophical thought also retains a theoretical character.

The dogmatic positing of the autonomy of theoretical thought.

Immanence-philosophy in all its nuances stands or falls with the dogma of the autonomy of theoretical thought. However, hitherto it has been simply posited, that this autonomy follows from the nature of such thought, without justifying this assertion by means of a really critical investigation of the inner structure of the theoretical attitude of thinking itself. Not only traditional metaphysics, but also Kantian epistemology, modern phenomenology and phenomenological ontology in the style of Nicolai Hartmann continued in this respect to be involved in a theoretical dogmatism. Essentially supra-theoretical prejudices were thus treated as theoretical axioms, and no account was given of the fundamental significance of these prejudices for the whole theoretical vision of empirical reality.

The different views of the autonomy of theoretical thought and the origin of this difference.

There was, however, actually every reason to make the so-called autonomy of theoretical thought a critical problem. In the first place, it cannot be denied, that in Greek philosophy it had a meaning entirely different from that in Thomistic scholasticism. In both of these, again, it was viewed entirely otherwise than in modern Humanistic thought. As soon as one penetrates to the root of these fundamentally different conceptions, one encounters a difference in religious starting-point, which is at the basis of the pretended autonomy of thought.

When Greek philosophy begins to claim its autonomy over against popular faith, it does so because, in its estimation, theoria is the true way to the knowledge of God. Pistis (faith), which continues to cling to the sensory mythological representations, gives only a doxa, an uncertain opinion. As early as the time of Parmenides' didactic poem, these two ways are set sharply in opposition to one another. Plato said, that it is exclusively destined for philosophers to approach the race of the gods.

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But the whole philosophical theoria of the Greeks, as I have shown in detail from the sources in the first volume of my Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, continues to be dominated by the same religious ground-motive which was also at the bottom of the popular faith and which, since the time of Aristotle, was called the form-matter motive.

On the other hand, the Thomistic vision of the autonomy of the naturalis ratio is unintelligibile, unless its religious background is apprehended, namely, the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace. This motive was entirely foreign to Greek thought. Similarly one cannot approach the modern Humanistic conception of autonomy in its fundamental difference from Thomism, without having understood its religious background in the Humanistic ideal of science and personality. This religious background finds expression in the ground-motive which since Kant has been called that of nature and freedom.

The Thomist claims that, in the proper use of natural reason, philosophy can never come into contradiction with the supernatural truths of grace in the church doctrine. This standpoint implies an accomodation to the ecclesiastical dogma of the Aristotelian metaphysics and view of nature (accepted as a product of natural reason). The Kantian or Hegelian will show as little understanding for this typical scholastic striving after accomodation as would have been the case with Aristotle himself, had he been acquainted with Thomism. Thus the dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretical thought can never account for the fundamentally different conceptions of it. Thereby it loses its right to serve as an unproblematic starting-point of philosophy.

The dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretical thought as an impediment to philosophical discussion among the various schools.

It appears again and again, that this dogma impedes a mutual understanding among philosophic schools that prove to be fundamentally opposed in their true (though hidden) starting-point. This is a second ground for doubting its character as a purely theoretical axiom.

For if all philosophical currents that claim to choose their standpoint in theoretical thought alone, actually had no deeper presuppositions, it would be possible to convince an opponent of his error in a purely theoretical way.

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But, as a matter of fact, a Thomist has never succeeded by purely theoretical arguments in convincing a Kantian or a positivist of the tenability of a theoretical metaphysics. Conversely, the Kantian epistemology has not succeeded in winning over a single believing Thomist to critical idealism.

In the debate among these philosophical schools, one receives the impression that they are reasoning at cross-purposes, because they are not able to find a way to penetrate to each other's true starting-points. The latter are masked by the dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretic thought. The same holds, for example, in the debate conducted by a positivist of the Vienna school with a Hegelian thinker or a Spinozist.

This simple fact of experience, in the nature of the case, does not yet prove the impossibility of autonomous theoretical reflection in philosophy. But it is quite sufficient to show, that it is necessary to make the autonomy of theoretical thought a critical problem and no longer to pass it off as a scientific axiom.

This problem should be posed as a quaestio iuris. It touches the empirical sciences as well as philosophy, since both imply the theoretical attitude of thought.

The necessity of a transcendental criticism of the theoretical attitude of thought as such. The difference in principle between transcendent and transcendental criticism.

The proper answering of the question raised above requires a transcendental criticism of the theoretical attitude of thought as such. By this we understand a critical inquiry (respecting no single so-called theoretical axiom) into the universally valid conditions which alone make theoretical thought possible, and which are required by the immanent structure of this thought itself. In this latter restriction lies the difference in principle between a transcendent and a transcendental criticism of science and philosophy.

The former does not really touch the inner character and the immanent structure of the theoretical attitude of thought, but confronts, for instance Christian faith with the results of modern science and with the various philosophical systems, and thus ascertains, whether or not factual conflicts exist.

It remains dogmatic, however, as long as it fails squarely to face the primary question, whether the theoretical attitude of

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thought itself, with reference to its inner structure, can be independent of supra-theoretical prejudices. With such a dogmatic, merely transcendent criticism, one constantly runs the risk of regarding as the result of unprejudiced science and philosophical reflection, something that appears upon critical inquiry to be the consequence of a masked religious prejudice and an anti-Christian attitude of faith. Besides, there is another ever present danger. What is actually a complex of philosophical ideas dominated by unbiblical motives, may be accepted by dogmatic theology and accomodated to the doctrine of the church. The danger is, that this complex of ideas will be passed off as an article of Christian faith, if it has inspired the terminology of some confessions of faith. Transcendent criticism, in other words, is valueless to science and philosophy, because it confronts with each other two different spheres whose inner point of contact is left completely in the dark. One can then just as well proceed to exercise criticism of science from the standpoint of art or politics!

In order to guarantee from the outset a really critical attitude in philosophy, transcendental criticism of theoretical thought should come at the very beginning of philosophical reflection.

§ 3 - The first transcendental basic problem of theoretic thought. The ‘gegenstand-relation’ versus the subject-object-relation.

How is the theoretical attitude of thought characterized, in contrast with the pre-theoretical attitude of naïve experience?

Our introductory survey of the problem of time has shown us the way which must necessarily lead to the solution of this question.

It became evident, that in the theoretical attitude of thought we analyze empirical reality by separating it into its modal aspects. In the pre-theoretical attitude of naïve experience, on the contrary, empirical reality offers itself in the integral coherence of cosmic time. Here we grasp time and temporal reality in typical total-structure of individuality, and we do not become aware of the modal aspects unless implicitly. The aspects are not set asunder, but rather are conceived of as being together in a continuous uninterrupted coherence.

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The antithetical structure of the theoretical attitude of thought in its purely intentional¹ character and the origin of the theoretical problem.

Theoretical thought has a typically antithetic attitude in all of its positive forms. Here we oppose the logical, i.e. the analytical function of our real act of thought, to the non-logical aspects of our temporal experience. The latter thereby becomes ‘Gegenstand’ in the sense of ‘opposite’ (Widerstand) to our analytical function². These non-logical aspects, as well, belong to our real act of thought in its temporal concreteness and are consequently not to be sought exclusively outside the full temporal structure of the latter. In other words, the antithetic structure of the theoretical attitude of thought can present itself only within the temporal total-structure of the act of thinking.

The first structure is only an intentional one; it does not have an ontical³ character.

The non-logical aspects stand in an intentional antithesis to the logical function of thought. Any attempt to grasp the former in a logical concept is met with resistance on their part. From this resistance the theoretical problem originates.

In logical analysis the aspect which is opposed to the logical is distinguished theoretically from the remaining aspects. Con-

1 Translator's Note: The term ‘intentional’ is used here in the sense of a merely mental directedness towards the ‘Gegenstand’, a sense akin to that of the phenomenological usage (Brentano, Husserl).
W.Y.

2 By the logical aspect of our act of thought, we understand the aspect of analytical distinction; distinction in the sense of setting apart what is given together.
At this juncture I must once more mention, that logical analysis is not the only mode of distinction. Secondly, I must recall, that logical or analytical diversity supposes a cosmic diversity of meaning which is at the basis of all analysis. So far as the first point is concerned, it is sufficient to refer to animals distinguishing their mates, food, etc. The distinction made by animals is certainly not of a logical nature. So far as the second point is concerned, we must observe, that logical analysis would have nothing to distinguish apart from a previously given cosmic diversity of meaning. In other words, logical analysis would in this case become meaningless. For we may not forget, that the logical aspect can reveal its logical sense only in the coherence of meaning with all other aspects.

3 Translator's Note: The term ‘ontical’ is not intended in the sense in which Heidegger employs it, nor in a metaphysical sense in general. It is exclusively related to empirical reality in its integral sense which includes all modal aspects and individuality-structures.
W.Y.

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sequently, if we designate the opposed aspect by the symbol ‘x’ and the remaining aspects by the symbol ‘y’, then ‘x’ will also stand in an antithetic relation to ‘y’.

This theoretical antithesis does not correspond to the structure of empirical reality. It is only a consequence of the necessary theoretical abstraction of the modal aspects from cosmic time. This latter links up the aspects in a continuous coherence of meaning and can never be eliminated from reality.

Now we have seen, that the non-logical aspects of experience offer resistance to a logical analysis of their structure. This resistance arises from the fact that, even when theoretically abstracted, the modal structure of the non-logical aspect x which is made into a ‘Gegenstand’ continues to express its coherence (of meaning) with the modal aspects y which have not been chosen as the field of inquiry.

Theoretical abstraction of the modal aspects from cosmic time is necessary for a theoretical insight into the modal diversity of meaning as such¹.

As soon as we have realized, however, that the theoretical attitude of thought arises only in a theoretical abstraction, we can no longer consider theoretical reason as an unproblematic datum.

1 In this context, I must remark, that the modal structure of the analytical aspect itself is given as a whole and not in analyzed moments. However, in the theoretical attitude of thought we can analyze the structure of the analytical aspect; but only in its theoretical abstraction and opposition to the non-logical aspects. For the analytical aspect, like all others, expresses in its modal structure the temporal order into which the different aspects are fitted. Consequently, this structure is a unity in a multiplicity of analyzable moments. The theoretical act in which we perform this analysis is, of course, not identical with the abstracted modal structure of the logical aspect. The subjective analytical function of this concrete act remains bound to its modal structure in its temporal coherence with the other aspects. In its theoretical abstraction this modal structure has only an intentional existence in our act of thought, and can be made into the ‘Gegenstand’ of our actual logical function. It is, consequently, not the latter which can be made a ‘Gegenstand’, but only the abstracted, purely intentional, modal structure of the logical function. We never arrive at a ‘transcendental logical subject’ which can be detached from all modal structures of time and can be sovereign and ‘absolute’ in this sense.

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The first transcendental basic problem as to the theoretical attitude of thought.

The first transcendental basic problem with which we are confronted is exactly the theoretical ‘gegenstand-relation’.

We can formulate this problem as follows: ‘What do we abstract in the antithetic attitude of theoretic thought from the structures of empirical reality as these structures are given in naïve experience? And how is this abstraction possible?

Those who reject the integral conception of cosmic time developed above must seek another solution to the critical problem we have proposed. But if we seriously confront the theoretical attitude of thought with the pre-theoretical attitude of naïve experience, the problem itself can no longer be brushed aside.

A closer confrontation of the naïve attitude with the theoretical.

The naïve attitude of thought in principle lacks an intentional antithetic structure. Consequently, it knows of no theoretical problems. This subject cannot be treated in its full scope prior to the third volume. Nevertheless, in our Prolegomena, we must elucidate more closely some essential states of affairs with relation to the attitude of naïve experience in so far as this is demanded by our present transcendental criticism of theoretical thought.

We have previously observed, that in the naïve attitude of experience, our logical function of thought, so far as its intentional content is concerned, remains entirely accommodated to the continuous coherence of cosmic time. In this respect, our logical function, like all other functions of consciousness, remains completely within this coherence.

In naïve experience we grasp reality in the typical total structures of individual things and concrete events. All modal aspects are grouped and typicalized¹ in a characteristic manner and in an unbroken coherence of time within an individual totality. This occurs without involving any analytical distinction of the modal aspects. The naïve process of concept-formation is not directed toward the latter, but toward things or concrete events

1 Translator's Note: For the Dutch term ‘getypiseerd’ Prof. Dooyeweerd himself has coined the English term ‘typicalized’, which could be rendered ‘ordered according to types’. It should be noted, that a ‘typical’ structure is never identical with the full ‘individuality’ of reality.
W.Y.

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as individual totalities. It is not concerned with abstract relations of number or space, nor with the effects of energy as such, but with things which are countable, spatial and subjected to physical-chemical changes. In the total structure of naïve experience, the logical aspect is joined with the non-logical aspects in an indissoluble coherence. Consequently, the logical aspect is conceived of as an inherent, but implicit component of concrete reality itself. The same is true of the aspect of sensory perception, the historical culture-aspect, the aesthetic, and so on. But how is this to be understood?

The subject-object relation in naïve experience.

Naïve experience can have this integral character only by virtue of the subject-object relation inherent in it. In this relation, objective functions and qualities are unreflectingly ascribed to things and to so-called natural events within modal aspects in which it is not possible for them to appear as subjects.

Thus, as adult men who have outgrown animistic representations, we know perfectly well, that water itself does not live. Nevertheles, in the aspect of organic life, we ascribe to it the objective function of being a necessary means for life. We know that a bird's nest is not alive, but we can conceive of it meaningfully as a thing only in relation to the subjective life of the bird. Thus we conceive of a bird's nest as a typical object of life. We know, that a rose does not feel or think or engage in aesthetic valuation as a subject. Nevertheless we ascribe to it respectively, objective qualities of sensory colour and odour, objective logical characteristics, objective cultural qualities and objective beauty. Further, this subject-object relation in the attitude of naïve experience and thought is grasped as a structural relation of reality itself. That is to say, the objective functions belong to things themselves in relationship to possible subjective functions which the things do not possess in the aspects of reality involved.

The sensory colour red is ascribed to a rose, not in relation to my, or your, individual sense-perception, but in relation to any possible normal human perception of colour. Similarly water is a means of life for every possible living organism. But then too, when the subject-object relation in the biotic aspect is wholly individualized, as in the case of the bird's nest, naïve experience still ascribes the objective functions in question to the things themselves. It ascribes these objective functions to them in

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structural relation to the subjective life of the animal concerned. The objective qualities which are ascribed to this thing in the logical and post-logical aspects are undoubtedly related to subjective functions of human nature. But they are related in such a manner that, here too, the typical structure of individuality of the thing, which is characterized by a specific relation to animal life, finds expression. The bird's nest remains a bird's nest with respect to its objective logical characteristics. It remains a bird's nest, even though it is a possible object of human culture and has an objective symbolic signification expressed in its name, and objective aesthetic qualities.

The metaphysical substance-concept, the concept of a ‘Ding an sich’ is in principle foreign to naïve experience. So is also the abstract enclosing of the reality of things in those modal aspects which form the field of inquiry of physics, chemistry and biology.

Through the subject-object-relation we consequently experience reality in the total and integral coherence of all its aspects, as this is given within the temporal horizon of human experience. Naïve experience leaves the typical total structures of this reality intact.

The antithetic relation of the theoretical attitude of thought, on the contrary, sets reality apart in the diversity of its modal aspects.

Dogmatic theory of knowledge, which considered the theoretical attitude of thought as an unproblematic datum, consequently eradicated the fundamental difference between the theoretical and the pre-theoretical attitude of thought, and finally identified the subject-object-relation with the antithetic gegenstand-relation.

Thus naïve experience itself was misinterpreted as a theory about reality, and identified with the uncritical theory of ‘naïve realism’ or the ‘copy theory’. Then, in alliance with modern natural science and the physiological theory about the ‘specific energies of the senses’, modern epistemology undertook the task of refuting this ‘naïve realism’! At present, it is not necessary to enter further into this fundamental misconception. We will deal with it more fully in the third volume.

For the moment it is sufficient, that we have made clear the fundamental difference between the naïve and the theoretical attitude of thought, so that we can fully realise the in-escapability of the first transcendental problem with respect to the latter.

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The consequences of ignoring the first transcendental basic problem in the traditional conception as to the relation of body and soul in human nature.

The dogmatic ignoring of this problem has had far-reaching consequences for the entire vision of temporal reality. Even in philosophical and theological anthropology these consequences may be demonstrated. For example, the traditional dichotomistic conception of human nature as a composition of a material body and an immortal rational soul is doubtless connected with the misconception, that the antithetic relation in the theoretical attitude of thought answers to reality itself.

Aristotle, in accord with Plato, tried to prove, that the theoretical activity of thought (the nous poiètikos, i.e. active intellect) in forming logical concepts must be wholly independent of and separated from the organs of the material body. The active intellect must be separate from the body, because it can grasp everything other than itself in logical universality and abstraction. The theoretical activity of thought is here hypostatized in its logical aspect as an immortal ousia or substance.

Thomas Aquinas accepted this Aristotelian argument, but accommodated it in scholastic fashion to the doctrine of the church. Consequently, he held, that the entire rational soul, which was considered to be characterized by the theoretical activity of thought, must be an immortal and purely spiritual substance!

A direct conclusion is here drawn from the purely intentional antithetic structure of the attitude of theoretical thought to a real separateness of the logical function from all pre-logical aspects of the body! This conclusion was directed by the dualistic form-matter motive, which impeded an integral view of empirical reality.

But it is of no avail to ignore the problem implied in the theoretical antithesis. For new transcendental problems arise, as soon as we try to account for the way we follow, in the theoretical attitude of thought, in order to overcome the intended antithesis.

We cannot stop at the theoretical problem, born out of the resistance offered by the non-logical ‘Gegenstand’ to our logical function in its analytical activity. We must proceed from the theoretical antithesis to the theoretical synthesis between the logical and the non-logical aspects, if a logical concept of the non-logical ‘Gegenstand’ is to be possible.

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§ 4 - The second transcendental basic problem: the starting-point of theoretical synthesis

Now, however, a second transcendental problem arises which can be formulated as follows:

From what standpoint can we reunite synthetically the logical and the non-logical aspects of experience which were set apart in opposition to each other in the theoretical antithesis?

This question touches the kernel of our inquiry. By raising this second basic problem, we subject every possible starting-point of theoretical thought to a fundamental criticism. In this way we must finally settle the question whether the dogma of the autonomy of theoretical reason is compatible with the intentional structure of the theoretical attitude of thought.

Now it is evident, that the true starting-point of theoretical synthesis, however it may be chosen, is in no case to be found in one of the two terms of the antithetic relation. It must necessarily transcend the theoretical antithesis, and relate the aspects that theoretically have been set asunder to a deeper radical unity (or in the case of a dualistic standpoint, perhaps to a pair of assumed radical unities). For one thing is certain: the antithetic relation, with which the theoretical attitude of thought stands or falls, offers in itself no bridge between the logical thought-aspect and its non-logical ‘Gegenstand’. We saw earlier, that even cosmic time, which guarantees the indissoluble coherence among the modal aspects, does not present an Archimedean point to theoretical thought.

This seems to imply at the same time, that the latter has in itself no starting-point for the theoretical synthesis.

Even here the dogma as to the autonomy of theoretical reason appears to lead its adherents into an inescapable impasse.

The impasse of the immanence-standpoint and the source of the theoretical antinomies.

In order to maintain the pretended self-sufficiency of theoretical thought, the advocates of this dogma are compelled to seek their starting-point in theoretical reason itself.

But the latter, by virtue of its very antithetic structure, is obliged to proceed in a synthetical way. Now there are as many modalities of theoretical synthesis possible as there are modal aspects of a non-logical character belonging to temporal experience.

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There is a synthetic thought of mathematical, physical, biological, psychological, historical, and other character. In which of these possible special scientific points of view may the theoretical vision of empirical reality seek its starting-point? No matter how the choice is made, it invariably amounts to the absolutizing of a special synthetically grasped modal aspect.

The various -isms in the theoretical vision of reality.

This is the source of all -isms in the theoretical image of reality. The attempt must constantly be made to reduce all other aspects to mere modalities of the absolutized one. These -isms play their confusing rôle in the different branches of science as well as in philosophy.

Now such -isms (as materialism, biologism, psychologism, historicism etc.) are uncritical in a double sense. In the first place they can never be justified theoretically. The antithetic structure of the theoretical attitude of thought offers resolute resistance against every attempt to reduce one of the aspects to another. It avenges the absolutizing by involving theoretical thinking in internal antinomies. In the entire theoretical sphere there is no place for the absolute, because the theoretical attitude of thought is itself grounded in an antithetical relation.

Theoretical synthesis cannot cancel this relation. Such would be tantamount to the cancellation of the theoretical attitude of thought itself. In every theoretical synthesis, logical analysis remains bound to the modal structure of the opposite non-logical aspect. And the synthesis is, consequently, partly of a logical and partly of a non-logical character. The theoretical synthesis is, to be sure, a union, but not the deeper unity of the logical and non-logical.

It pre-supposes a supra-theoretical starting-point which must transcend theoretical diversity.

Consequently, what we have said also holds for every special scientific synthetic point of view. And with this we touch the second ground of the uncritical character of all -isms in the theoretical conception of reality.

In each of them the second transcendental basic problem returns unsolved. The absolutizing itself cannot issue from the theoretical attitude of thought. It points to a supra-theoretical starting-point, from which the theoretical synthesis is performed.

But, the objection will be raised, we sought after a starting-point for the theoretical synthesis.

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Imperceptibly this problem has been identified with that of a starting-point for the theoretical vision of reality. Has not the problem been entirely shifted in this way? Does science indeed require a theoretical vision of reality? Is this, for example, necessary for pure mathematics, for logic, for ethical theory?

The problem of the basic denominator for the theoretical comparison and distinction of the modal aspects.

In order to answer this question, I may first recall, that the theoretical attitude of thought consists in setting apart the modal aspects of temporal reality in opposition to one another. It consists primarily in the opposition of the logical aspect of our act of thinking to all aspects which are of a non-logical character. Every theoretical distinction of the latter aspects supposes an insight into their mutual relationships and coherence. Or, in other words, it supposes a basic denominator, under which the non-logical aspects can be brought in order to be compared with one another. For they could not be distinguished, unless they have something in common. On our own standpoint, the modal aspects have no other common denominator than the cosmic time-order. From our point of view, the latter expresses itself in the modal structure of each of the aspects, and is the guarantee of its coherence of meaning with all the rest. On the immanence-standpoint, another denominator of comparison must be sought, for example, in the way already discussed, by reducing all other aspects to modalities of a special (absolutized) one, or, as was usual in Greek and scholastic metaphysics, by accepting the metaphysical concept of being as a so-called ‘analogical unity’, lying at the basis of the diversity of special aspects. Now, the theoretical vision of the mutual relationships and coherence of the aspects in every case implies a theoretical vision of reality. For the latter is nothing but the vision of the abstracted modal aspects in the totality of their coherence.

The rôle of the -isms in pure mathematics and in logic.

Neither a special science nor philosophy can escape such a theoretical vision of reality.

In pure mathematics, the problem immediately arises: How is one to view the mutual relationship between the aspects of number, space, movement, sensory perception, logical thought

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and symbolical signification? Different schools in pure mathematics such as logicism, symbolistic formalism, empiricism and intuitionism arise in accordance with their respective theoretical visions on this basic problem. These differences are not restricted to the philosophy of mathematics. The famous Dutch mathematician, Brouwer, the chief representative of the intuitionistic school abolished an entire branch of special scientific work which had been built up by the logicist and formalist theories (the theory of the so-called transfinite numbers).

The first three schools, logicism, symbolistic formalism and empiricism, try to reduce the aspects of number and space to the logical, the linguistic and the sensory-perceptual aspects respectively.

Even in logic itself we observe the rise of a great diversity of theoretical schools. Here, too, this difference as to the nature and limits of the field of inquiry is determined by a theoretical vision of reality in its modal aspects. It is determined by a theoretical conception of the place that the logical aspect occupies in the entire order and coherence of the modal aspects (psychologism, mathematicism, symbolistic-conventionalism, dialectical historism, etc.). Invariably the starting-point which is chosen for theoretical synthesis in general, remains decisive for the vision of the mutual relationship and coherence of the modal aspects.

That this is also the case in normative ethics, aesthetics and theology, may be demonstrated convincingly. Yet we would have to anticipate too much of our later inquiries, were we now to elaborate all these points. Especially the current conceptions as to the field of inquiry for ethics are still vague. They are ill-defined to such a degree, that an adequate discussion of ethics would require a detailed exposition, which would exceed the compass of our transcendental criticism of the theoretical attitude of thought.

Provisional delimitation of the moral aspect.

In the present context, therefore, we will only establish the fact that ethics, so far as it lays claim to a field of inquiry distinct from theology and the philosophy of law, can have no other ‘Gegenstand’ than the moral aspect of temporal reality. This aspect is characterized as that of the temporal relationships of love as differentiated more precisely by the typical structures of temporal society as conjugal love, love of parents and children,

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love of country, social love of one's fellow-man, and so on¹. It is again evident, that this aspect has its own modal meaning only in the coherence with all other modal aspects of temporal reality. The theoretical vision of this coherence is then again decisive for the conception which one has of the moral norms, and this vision, in its turn, is dependent upon the starting-point of the theoretical-ethical reflection.

From the above it is quite evident, that each special realm of theoretical inquiry, whether or not it is called ‘empirical’ in the narrower sense, pre-supposes a theoretical vision of temporal reality. And such a theoretical vision of reality must necessarily exceed the boundaries of any special science and exhibit a philosophical character. Consequently it appears at the same time, that no single special science can possess an essential autonomy with respect to philosophy in the sense of a theory of reality. For the rest we shall revert to this subject in he last part of this volume.

But have we at all proved definitely, that theoretic thought itself, with respect to its inner character, is dependent on a supra-theoretical starting-point, by which the autonomy of this thought is excluded? We may not accept this too hastily. For Kant, the father of the so-called critical-transcendental philosophy, supposed that he could lay bare a starting-point in theoretical reason itself, which would rest at the basis of every possible theoretical synthesis, and consequently would not be gained by the absolutizing of a special scientific point of view. Can the autonomy of theoretical thought be actually demonstrated along the way of Kant's critique of knowledge?

1 The ‘disposition of the heart’, which is rationalized by Kant and proclaimed as the criterion of morality in his ‘Gesinnungsethik’, is actually of a central-religious character and so can, as such, never be related exclusively to the moral aspect; Kant's conception in this matter hangs together with his religious absolutizing of morality.

The starting-point of theoretical synthesis in the Kantian critique of knowledge.

This was the question which in our Introduction was raised at the very outset of the first way of our transcendental critique. Here we argued, that philosophical thought, as theoretical thought directed to the totality of meaning of our temporal cosmos, cannot arrive at a transcendental idea of this totality without critical self-reflection. But the very critical problem appeared to be

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the relation between the thinking ego and its theoretical-logical function of thought. At first sight, it might seem, that the problem is here formulated in an unsatisfactory functionalistic manner. Why must we direct our attention solely to the logical function and why not to the integral act of theoretical thinking? To be sure, the latter may be characterized by its theoretical-logical aspect, but it can by no means be identified with the latter. We are now able to reply to this question, since in the second way of our transcendental critique we have engaged in an enquiry with respect to the inner structure of the theoretical attitude of thought. It is precisely the antithetic structure of the latter which obliged Kant and his followers to oppose the logical function to the other modal aspects of the integral act of thought. The only, but fundamental, mistake in their argument was the identification of the real act with a purely psychical temporal event, which in its turn could become a ‘Gegenstand’ of the ultimate transcendental-logical ‘cogito’. For we have seen, that the ‘gegenstand-relation’ can only be an intentional relation within the real act of theoretic thought between its logical and its non-logical aspects. The real act itself can never be made the ‘Gegenstand’ of its logical function, since the latter can be actual only within a real act of our consciousness, and does not have any actuality in a theoretical abstraction. But the identification of this real act with its psychical aspect is not tenable, and is an indicant of a dualistic view of reality. And the latter cannot be explained in terms of a purely theoretical epistemology.

The second way of our transcendental critique of philosophy involves resuming the investigation of Kant's conception concerning the transcendental cogito, notwithstanding the fact that, already in our Introduction, we did lay bare the pitfalls concealed in it.

The second investigation seeks to arrive at a critical formulation of the third transcendental basic problem. This problem is involved in the theoretical attitude of thought with respect to critical self-reflection. In this inquiry we wish to account critically for our transition from the theoretic to the central religious sphere. This involves also a deeper critical inquiry into the transcendental problem of the origin in philosophical thought. For, in our Introduction, it could appear, that this problem was introduced as a ‘deus ex machina’, the necessity of which was unaccounted for in the course of our first critical inquiry. Finally our second investigation seeks to arrive at the

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ultimate stage of our transcendental critique, which was not yet reached by the first way explained in our Introduction.

The problem of the starting-point and the way of critical self-reflection in theoretical thought.

In order to discover the immanent starting-point of all special synthetic acts of thought in which these latter find their deeper unity, we must, according to Kant, look away from the ‘Gegenstände’ of our knowledge and exercise critical self-reflection in theoretical thought. It must be granted, that this hint indeed contains a great promise. For it may not be doubted that, as long as theoretical thought in its logical function continues to be directed merely to the opposed modal aspects of temporal reality which form its ‘Gegenstand’, it remains dispersed in a theoretical diversity. Only when theoretical thought is directed to the thinking ego, does it acquire the concentric direction towards an ultimate unity of consciousness which must lie at the root of all modal diversity of meaning. If you ask the special sciences active in the field of anthropology: What is man? you will obtain a diversity of items from physical-chemical, biological, psychological, cultural-historical, linguistic, ethnological and sociological points of view. These items are valuable. But no special science, nor an encyclopaedic sociology, can answer the question, what man himself is in the unity of his selfhood. Human I-ness functions, to be sure, in all modal aspects of reality. But it is, nevertheless, a central and radical unity, which as such transcends all temporal aspects¹. The way of critical self-reflection is, consequently, the only one that can lead to the discovery of the true starting-point of theoretical thought. Even Socrates realised this, when he gave the Delphic maxim, Γνωϑὶ

1 As soon as this transcendent character of the ego is overlooked, and the ego is conceived of as a merely immanent centre of its acts, its radical unity disappears and the ego is viewed as a merely structural unity in the diversity of its mental acts.
This is clearly seen from Scheler's explanation of human personality in his The place of man in the cosmos (‘Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos’, p. 75) as a ‘monarchical arrangement of acts, one of which at every turn takes the lead’ (‘eine monarchische Anordnung von Akten, unter denen je einer die Führung und Leitung besitzt’). As a matter of fact, the central position of the ego as to its temporal acts is not to be maintained in this way. The selfhood is dissolved in the structure of its acts.

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σέαυτον (know thyself), a new introspective meaning and raised it to a primary requisite of philosophic reflection.

§ 5 - The third transcendental basic problem of the critique of theoretical thought and Kant's transcendental unity of apperception

But here there arises a new transcendental problem, which we can formulate as follows:

How is this critical self-reflection, this concentric direction of theoretical thought to the I-ness, possible, and what is its true character?

It cannot be doubted, that an authentic transcendental problem resides here, if it is borne in mind, that the theoretical attitude of thought, with respect to its internal structure, is bound to the previously investigated antithetic relation.

Neither phenomenology, founded by Edmund Husserl, nor modern existentialism has been able to dissociate its theoretical attitude of thought from this ‘Gegenstand-relation’.

Phenomenology, following in the footsteps of Franz Brentano, has even posited the intentional relatedness of every act of consciousness to a ‘Gegenstand’. However, this view is not our immediate concern now.

For it is evident, that the term ‘Gegenstand’ cannot be meant in our sense, when Brentano and Husserl ascribe also to feeling an intentional relation to a ‘Gegenstand’ (for instance a melody!).

However, the intentional antithetical structure, inherent in all theoretical thought, is doubtless present in the phenomenological attitude itself, which opposes the absolute ‘cogito’ (in the sense of the ‘absolute transcendental consciousness’) to the ‘world’ as its intentional ‘Gegenstand’ which is dependent on the former¹.

Scheler considers the ‘gegenstand-relation’ (by which the human mind can oppose itself not only to the ‘world’, but can even make into ‘Gegenstand’ the physiological and psychical aspects of human existence itself) as the most formal category of the logical aspect of mind (Geist)².

1 Cf. Husserl, Ideen zu einer Phänomenologie and phänomenologischen Philosophie, p. 92.

2 Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, p. 58. ‘Gegenstand-Sein ist also die formalste Kategorie der logischen Seite des Geistes’ [Being a ‘Gegenstand’ is therefore the most formal category of the logical side of the mind].

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Modern Humanistic existentialism, too, can grasp existence as the free historical ex-sistere only in its theoretical antithesis to the ‘given reality of nature’ (for Heidegger, ‘Dasein’ as the ‘ontological’ manner of being against the ‘given world’ as the ‘ontical’; for Sartre, ‘le néant’ as against ‘l'être’). Indeed, Heidegger, too, is a phenomenologist, although his phenomenological method is an irrationalistic one in the hermeneutical sense of Dilthey's historicism; and phenomenology, as we have seen, implies the theoretical antithesis.

In the face of this antithetical attitude of existential thought, it is of no consequence, that the philosophy of existence wishes to create a great distance between existential thinking as authentically philosophical on the one hand, and all scientific thought which is directed to a ‘Gegenstand’ on the other. For the term ‘Gegenstand’ has in our critique another meaning than that here intended, viz. ‘given object’ (‘das Vorhandene’), although naturally science, too, is bound to the ‘gegenstand-relation’.

For the present, then, it is not to be understood, how the concentric direction of theoretical thought to the ego could arise from the theoretical attitude of thought itself.

Kant, however, did not wish to abandon the autonomy of theoretical reason. He supposed, as we have seen, that in the logical function of thinking (the ‘Verstand’) a subjective pole of thought may be demonstrated, which is opposed to all empirical reality, and which, as the transcendental-logical unity of apperception, lies at the basis of all synthetic acts of thought as their starting-point. The ‘I think’, so he says, must be able to accompany all my representations (Kant means here doubtles ‘synthetic concepts of empirical ‘Gegenstände’), if they are to be my representations. This was to be a final transcendental-logical unity of consciousness, which itself can never become a ‘Gegenstand’, because every theoretical act of knowledge must proceed from this ‘I think’. It is the ‘transcendental-logical subject of thought’, which would have to be viewed as the universally valid condition of every scientific synthesis. It is, consequently, in no way identical with our empirical, real act of thought, which, according to him, can be again made a ‘Gegenstand’ of this ‘transcendental subject’. It is only a merely-logical point of unity of the consciousness, which lacks

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all empirical individuality. Kant denies also, that we would possess real self-knowledge in this transcendental-logical concept of the thinking ego. For, according to his epistemological conception, human knowledge can have relation only to impressions, given in sensory perception (‘Empfindung’), which have been received in the transcendental forms of intuition of space and time and are ordered by logical categories to an ‘objective reality of experience’.

Has Kant now succeeded in demonstrating a starting-point, immanent in ‘theoretical reason’ itself, which satisfies the requirements of a genuine transcendental criticism of theoretical thouht? In our Introduction we answered this question negatively.

In the second way of our critical inquiry we can strengthen the grounds for this reply. For we saw, that the true starting-point for the theoretical synthesis is never to be found within the antithetical relation which characterizes the theoretical attitude of thought. Kant's transcendental-logical ego remains caught in the logical pole of this relation, which, according to his own conception, finds its counterpole in the non-logical aspect of sense perception. If, as he himself explains emphatically, the logical aspect of thought and the aspect of sense perception are not reducible to each other, then it follows in a stringent way, that in the former no starting-point can be found for their theoretical union.

As we shall show in still greater detail in the epistemological part of the second volume, Kant, in consequence of his axiom that every synthesis should proceed from the logical function of thought, has abandoned the critical way of inquiry and has eliminated the authentic problem of synthesis by means of a dogmatic statement. The dogma as to the autonomy of ‘theoretical reason’ forced him to do so. But, by reason of this theoretical dogmatism, the true starting-point of his theory of knowledge remained hidden.

The third basic problem formulated by us is, just as the first, ignored by Kant. As a result he was unable to bring the second problem to a critical solution.

If then, in theoretical thought as such, no starting-point for the inter-modal synthesis is to be found, the concentric direction of this thought, necessary for critical self-reflection, cannot have a theoretical origin. It must spring from the ego as the individual centre of human existence.

We have said in our Introduction, that the selfhood cannot

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give this central direction to its theoretical thought without concentrating itself upon the true, or upon a pretended absolute origin of all meaning. That is to say, that self-knowledge in the last analysis appears to be dependent upon knowledge of God, which, however, is quite different from a theoretical theology. Can we account for this statement?

In the first place, we must grant, that both self-knowledge and knowledge of the absolute origin or pseudo-origin, exceed the limits of theoretical thought, and are rooted in the ‘heart’ or the religious centre of our existence.

Nevertheless, this central supra-theoretical knowledge does not remain enclosed in the heart, but must by its very nature penetrate the temporal sphere of our consciousness. Theoretical thought, too, is concerned in this central knowledge, in the transcendental process of self-reflection, in the concentric direction of the theoretically separated aspects of the gegenstand-relation to the thinking self.

For we have seen, that without veritable self-knowledge the true starting-point of theoretical synthesis cannot be discovered, and that theoretic self-reflection in thought presupposes this central knowledge, since the concentric direction of theoretical thought can start only from the ego. Kant as well as modern phenomenology, has overlooked this truth. The empirical fact, that selfknowledge appears to be dependent on knowledge of God is established by Ernst Cassirer in the second volume of his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, on the basis of a wealth of anthropological and ethnological data¹.

But a real account of this fact is rendered only by the Biblical Revelation concerning the creation of man in the image of God. God reveals Himself as the absolute Origin excluding every independent counter-power which may be His opposite. He has expressed His image in man by concentrating its entire temporal existence in the radical religious unity of an ego in which the totality of meaning of the temporal cosmos was to be focused upon its Origin.

The fundamental dependence of human self-knowledge upon the knowledge of God has consequently its inner ground in the essence of religion as the central sphere of our created nature.

1 We shall return to this point in detail in the second volume in the discussion of the problem concerning the relation between faith and history.

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The alleged vicious circle in our transcendental criticism.

The question could now be raised, whether our transcendental criticism in its third stage does not make an unwarranted leap by explaining the concentric direction of theoretical thought as an effect of the central religious sphere of consciousness. Has this in fact been proved stringently, and what then is here understood by religion?

Finally, if our criticism should actually prove something stringently, does it not move in a vicious circle? For does a proof not suppose this very autonomy of theoretical thought, the impossibility of which our criticism tried to demonstrate?

To these questions I must reply as follows:

What is stringently proved, in my opinion, is the thesis, that the concentric direction of thought in its self-reflection cannot originate from the theoretical attitude of thought itself, and that it can issue only from the ego as a supra-theoretic individual centre of human existence.

It would be an uncritical petitio principii to pretend, that our criticism even at this point moves in a vicious circle by abandoning the autonomy of theoretical self-reflection. Up to now it has remained strictly within the theoretical sphere, and has laid bare structural states of affairs which had been ignored under the very influence of the dogma as to the autonomy of theoretical reason. However, these states of affairs, once they have been discovered, may no longer be ignored by anyone who appreciates a veritably critical standpoint in philosophy.

It is of course impossible, that this transcendental criticism - although up to the question of self-knowledge being of a strictly theoretical character - itself should be unprejudiced. For in this case it would refute its own conclusions. But what shall we say, if the very supra-theoretical presuppositions hold here, which free theoretical thought from dogmatic ‘axioms’ standing in the way of a veritable critical attitude? If, as we have demonstrated, theoretical synthesis is possible only from a supra-theoretical starting-point, then only the contents of the supra-theoretical presuppositions implied thereby, can be questionable, but not the very necessity of them.

Hitherto, however, the demonstrative force of our critique has been negative in character, so far as it, taken strictly, can only demonstrate, that the starting-point of theoretical thought cannot be found in that thought itself, but must be supra-theoreti-

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cal in character. That it is to be found only in the central religious sphere of consciousness, is no longer to be proved theoretically, because this insight belongs to self-knowledge, which as such transcends the theoretical attitude of thought. We can only say, that this self-knowledge is necessary in a critical sense, because without it the true character of the chosen starting-point remains hidden from us. And this would be fatal for the critical insight into its true significance in respect to the inner direction of philosophic thought.

What is religion?

To the question, what is understood here by religion? I reply: the innate impulse of human selfhood to direct itself toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning, which it finds focused concentrically in itself.

This description is indubitably a theoretical and philosophical one, because in philosophical reflection an account is required of the meaning of the word ‘religion’ in our argument. This explains also the formal transcendental character of the description, to which the concrete immediacy of the religious experience remains strange.

If, from out of the central religious sphere, we seek a theoretical approximation of it, we can arrive only at a transcendental idea, a limiting concept, the content of which must remain abstract, as long as it is to comprehend all possible forms in which religion is manifested (even the apostate ones). Such an idea invariably has the function of relating the theoretical diversity of the modal aspects to a central and radical unity and to an Origin.

The impossibility of a phenomenology of religion. The ex-sistent character of the ego as the religious centre of existence.

There is one thing, however, on which we cannot lay too much stress. As the absolutely central sphere of human existence, religion transcends all modal aspects of temporal reality, the aspect of faith included. It is not at all a temporal phenomenon which manifests itself within the temporal structure of human act-life. It can be approximated only in the concentric direction

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of our consciousness, not in the divergent one, not as a ‘Gegenstand’¹.

Therefore, with respect to its inner essence, religion can never be described ‘phenomenologically’. It is no ‘psychological phenomenon’, it is no emotional feeling-perception; it is not to be charactized, as is done by Rudolph Otto, as experience of the ‘tremendum’. It is the ex-sistent condition² in which the ego is bound to its true or pretended firm ground.

Hence, the mode of being of the ego itself is of a religious character and it is nothing in itself.

Veritable religion is absolute self-surrender. The apostate man who supposes, that his selfhood is something in itself, loses himself in the surrender to idols, in the absolutizing of the relative. However, this absolutizing itself is a clear manifestation of the ex-sistent character of the religious centre of our existence, which, to be sure, expresses itself in all modal aspects of time, but never can be exhausted by these³. Even in the religious

1 This does not hold as to belief and its different contents. For we have seen, that the faith-function is bound to cosmic time and to the temporal coherence of meaning with the other modal functions of our existence. It should not be identified with the religious centre of this latter. Nevertheless, the direction and contents of faith are not to be understood apart from the religious ground-motive by which it is directed and from a divine Revelation, no matter whether the latter is understood in its true meaning or is misinterpreted in an apostatic sense.

2 I use here a term well known in modern existence-philosophy. However, it is evident, that it is not meant here in the Humanistic sense.

3 Therefore, modern existence-philosophy, so far as it considers time to be an existential trait of the ‘authentic’ human ego, remains entangled in the diversity of meaning of the terms ‘ego’ and ‘selfhood’ which comes to light, as soon as we lose sight of the religious radix of human existence.
We can project an idol of our ‘true ego’ and elevate this idol to an ‘ideal selfhood’ which is placed over against our ‘empirical’ I-ness, considered as the ‘objectivation’ of our self in the ‘past’ and subjected to the natural law of causality. If in this case our ‘ideal selfhood’ is related to the freedom of the ‘present’ and the ‘future’, there is born a dialectical time-problem in the existential conception of the ego, due to the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom. But the ‘authentic’, the ‘fundamental’ I-ness (or whatever you will name it) will ever recede from our view, as long as this latter is dispersed in time. A truly critical hermeneutic method in philosophical anthropology has the task to lay bare the origin of these dialectical problems as to the ego and true selfhood of man, and to unmask the temporal idols projected about it. A purely temporal ex-sistere may never be identified with the ex-sistent character of the religious centre of human nature which is implied in its tendency towards its divine Origin.

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absolutizing of the historical aspect of our existence in the self-surrender to an aspect of time, we transcend the latter.

Nevertheless, the autonomous ex-sistere of the ego which has lost itself in the surrender to idols, must be broken down by the divine ex-trahere from the state of apostasy, if man is to regain his true ex-sistent position.

After having given an account of what we understand by religion, we can establish the fact that the concentric direction in theoretical thought must be of religious origin. It must be of a religious origin, even though it always remains theoretical in character, because of its being bound to the antithetic gegenstand-relation. It springs from the tendency to the origin in the centre of human existence, which tendency we previously discovered in the Introduction. But now we have made clear the inner point of contact between philosophic thought and religion from the intrinsic structure of the theoretical attitude of thought itself. Critical self-reflection in the concentric direction of theoretical thought to the ego necessarily appeals to self-knowledge (which goes beyond the limits of the theoretical gegenstand-relation). Consequently we may establish the fact, that even the theoretical synthesis supposes a religious starting-point. Furthermore, we have now explained, that it is meaningless to ask for a theoretical proof of its religious character, because such a proof presupposes the central starting-point of theoretical thought.

The supra-individual character of the starting-point.

We must now proceed to the final and decisive stage of our transcendental critique.

We have established the necessary religious nature of the starting-point and have learned of the intrinsically ex-sistent character of the selfhood. Therefore, we can no longer seek the true point of departure of philosophic thought in the individual ego alone. We observed in our Introduction that the I-ness must share in the Archimedean point, but that in this latter must be concentrated the total meaning of the temporal cosmos.

The ego, however, is merely the concentration-point of our individual existence, not of the entire temporal cosmos. Moreover, philosophy is as little as science in the narrower sense

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merely a matter of the individual. It can be cultivated only in a community. This, too, points to the necessity of a supra-individual point of departure.

Critical self-reflection in theoretical thought is, to be sure, the necessary way to the discovery of the starting-point of philosophy. It is indeed the individual ego which gives to its thought the concentric direction. However, true self-knowledge discovers the ex-sistent character of the selfhood also in the fact that the ego is centrally bound with other egos in a religious community. The central and radical unity of our existence is at the same time individual and supra-individual; that is to say, in the individual I-ness it points beyond the individual ego toward that which makes the whole of mankind spiritually one in root in its creation, fall and redemption.

According to our Christian faith, all humanity is spiritually included in Adam. In him the whole human race has fallen, and in mankind also the entire temporal cosmos, which was concentrated in it. In Jesus Christ, the entire new humanity is one in root, as the members of one body.

Our I-ness is, in other words, rooted in the spiritual community of mankind. It is no self-sufficient ‘substance’, no ‘windowless monad’, but it lives in the spiritual community of the we, which is directed to a Divine Thou, according to the original meaning of creation.

The meaning of the central command of love.

This is the deep meaning of the central command of love: Thou shalt love God above all and thy neighbour as thyself. This command in its indivisible unity is of a religious and not of a moral character. For the moral relations of love to our fellowmen are merely a modal aspect of temporal society. In their modal speciality of meaning, they have sense only in the coherence with all other aspects of this society. They are also differentiated necessarily according to the diversity of social relationships in conjugal love, parent- and children-love, social love of the neighbour, love of the fatherland, and so on. But the religious command of love understands the neighbour as a member of the radical religious community of mankind in its central relationship to God, who created man after His image. Therefore, it is in truth the radix of all modal aspects which unfolds the divine law in temporal reality.

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The spirit of community and the religious basic motive.

Now a religious community is maintained by a common spirit, which as a dynamis, as a central motive-power, is active in the concentration-point of human existence.

This spirit of community works through a religious ground-motive, which gives contents to the central mainspring of the entire attitude of life and thought. In the historical development of human society, this motive will, to be sure, receive particular forms which are historically determined. But in its central religious meaning it transcends all historical form-giving. Every attempt at a purely historical explanation of it, therefore, necessarily moves in a vicious circle. For, by virtue of the inner structure of the theoretical attitude of thought, the historical explanation itself supposes a central and supra-theoretical starting-point, which is determined by a religious basic motive or ground-motive.

Since the fall and the promise of the coming Redeemer, there are two central main springs operative in the heart of human existence. The first is the dynamis of the Holy Ghost, which by the moving power of God's Word, incarnated in Jesus Christ, re-directs to its Creator the creation that had apostatized in the fall from its true Origin. This dynamis brings man into the relationship of sonship to the Divine Father. Its religious ground-motive is that of the Divine Word-Revelation, which is the key to the understanding of Holy Scripture: the motive of creation, fall, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Ghost.

The second central main spring is that of the spirit of apostasy from the true God. As religious dynamis (power), it leads the human heart in an apostate direction, and is the source of all deification of the creature. It is the source of all absolutizing of the relative even in the theoretical attitude of thought. By virtue of its idolatrous character, its religious ground-motive can receive very diverse contents.

The Greek form-matter motive and the modern Humanistic motive of nature and freedom.

In Western thought, this apostate spirit has disclosed itself chiefly in two central motives, namely, (1) that which has dominated the classical Greek world of culture and thought, and which has been brought (since the time of Aristotle)

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under the fixed designation of the form-matter motive, and (2) that of the modern Humanistic life- and world-view, which, since the time of Immanuel Kant, has been called the motive of nature and freedom. Since the 18th century, this latter motive came more and more to dominate the world of Western culture and thought.

The former motive originated from the encounter of the older pre-Homeric Greek religion of life (one of the different nature-religions) with the later cultural religion of the Olympic gods. The older religion of life deified the eternally flowing Stream of life, which is unable to fix itself in any single individual form. But out of this stream there proceed periodically the generations of transitory beings, whose existence is limited by an individual form, as a consequence of which they are subjected to the horrible fate of death, the anangkè or the heimarmenè tychè. This motive of the form-less eternally flowing Stream of life is the matter-motive of the Greek world of thought. It found its most pregnant expression in the worship of Dionysus, which had been imported from Thrace.

On the other hand, the form-motive was the main spring of the more recent Olympian religion, the religion of form, measure and harmony, which rested essentially upon the deification of the cultural aspect of Greek society (the Olympian gods were personified cultural powers). It acquired its most pregnant expression in the Delphic Apollo as law-giver.

The Olympian gods leave mother earth with its ever flowing Stream of life and its threatening anangkè. They acquire Olympus for their seat, and have an immortal individual form, which is not perceptible to the eye of sense. But they have no power over the fate of mortals.

The form-matter motive itself was independent of the mythological forms which it received in the old nature-religions and the new Olympian culture-religion. It has dominated Greek thought from the outset.

The autonomy which philosophic theoria demanded, in opposition to popular belief, implied, as we have observed in an earlier context, only an emancipation from the mythological forms which were bound to sensory representation. It did not at all imply a loosening of philosophic thought from the central religious ground-motive which was born out of the encounter of the culture-religion with the older religion of life.

The modern Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom,

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which we shall presently subject to a detailed investigation in the transcendental criticism of Humanistic philosophy, has taken its rise from the religion of the free autonomous human personality and that of modern science evoked by it, and directed to the domination of nature. It is to be understood only against the background of the three ground-motives that formerly gave the central direction to Western thought, namely, the form-matter-motive, the motive of creation, fall and redemption, and the scholastic motive of nature and grace. The last-named motive was introduced by Roman-Catholicism and directed to a religious synthesis between the two former motives.

It is not surprising, that the apostate main spring can manifest itself in divergent religious motives. For it never directs the attitude of life and thought to the true totality of meaning and the true radix of temporal reality, because this is not possible without the concentric direction to the true Origin.

Idolatrous absolutizing is necessarily directed to the speciality of meaning, which is thereby dissociated from its temporal coherence, and consequently becomes meaningless and void. This is the deep truth in the time-honoured conception of the fall as a privatio, a deprivation of meaning, and as a negation, a nothingness.

Sin as privatio and as dynamis. No dialectical relation between creation and fall.

However, the central dynamis of the spirit of apostasy is no ‘nothing’; it springs from the creation, and cannot become operative beyond the limits in which it is bound to the divine order of meaning. Only by virtue of the religious concentration-impulse, which is concreated in the human heart, can the latter direct itself to idols. The dynamis of sin can unfold itself only in subjection to the religious concentration-law of human existence. Therefore, the apostle Paul says, that without the law there is no sin and that there is a law of sin.

Consequently, there can be no inner contradiction between creation and fall as long as they are understood in their Biblical sense. A contradiction would exist, if, and only if, sin were to have not merely an imaginary but a real power in itself, independent of creation.

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The dialectical character of the apostate ground-motives. Religious and theoretic dialectic.

On the contrary, it belongs to the inner nature of the idolatrous ground-motives, that they conceal in themselves a religious antithesis.

For the absolutizing of special modal aspects of meaning, which in the nature of the case are relative, evokes the correlata of these latter. These correlata now in religious consciousness claim an absoluteness opposed to that of the deified aspects.

This brings a religious dialectic into these basic motives, that is to say, they are in fact composed of two religious motives, which, as implacable opposites, drive human action and thought continually in opposite directions, from one pole to the other. I have subjected this religious dialectic to a detailed investigation in the first volume of my new trilogy, Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy. And I demonstrated, that this dialectic is quite different from the theoretical one which is inherent in the intentional antithetical gegenstand-relation of theoretic thought.

For theoretical antithesis is by nature relative and requires a theoretical synthesis to be performed by the thinking ‘self’. On the other hand, an antithesis in the religious starting-point of theoretical thought does not allow of a genuine synthesis. In the central religious sphere the antithesis necessarily assumes an absolute character, because no starting-point beyond the religious one is to be found from which a synthesis could be effectuated.

The uncritical character of the attempts to bridge the religious antithesis in a dialectical starting-point by a theoretic dialectic.

Every philosophical effort to bridge such a religious antithesis in the starting-point by means of a theoretical logical dialectic is fundamentally uncritical. This was the way, however, of all so-called dialectical philosophy, from Heraclitus up to the Hegelian school, in so far as it aimed at an ultimate synthesis of its opposite religious motives.

The theoretical syntheses which pretend to fulfil this task, are merely illusory at the very point here mentioned. They are subjected to the intrinsic law of all religious dialectic, that is to say, as soon as philosophy returns to the path of critical self-reflection, they are necessarily dissolved again into the polar antithesis of their starting-point. Against Hegel's synthetical

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dialectic which attempted to think together the antithetic motives of nature and freedom, Proudhon directs the verdict, earlier pronounced by Kant and later repeated by Kierkegaard: ‘L'antinomie ne se résout pas’ (The antinomy cannot be solved).

Even in Greek antiquity the efforts to reconcile the religious antithesis between the form- and the matter-motive by means of a dialectical logic were dissolved in a later evolution of Greek thought into a polar antithesis¹.

1 See my analysis of the Platonic dialectic in my Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, vol. I.

The religious dialectic in the scholastic motive of nature and grace.

A more complicated religious dialectic is exhibited by the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace, introduced in philosophy and theology by Roman Catholicism, and taken over by Protestant scholasticism.

It originally aimed at a synthesis between the central motive of the Word-revelation and that of the Greek (especially the Aristotelian) view of nature (the form-matter motive). But it lends itself as well to a combination of the former with the Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom. In this attempt at synthesis, the Christian basic motive necessarily loses its radical and integral character.

For nowhere in the scholastic vision of human nature is there a place for the Biblical revelation of the heart as religious centre and radix of temporal existence. Therefore, Thomistic scholasticism could proclaim the autonomy of natural reason in the ‘natural sphere’ of knowledge, without being aware of the fact that in so doing it handed philosophy over to domination by another religious motive. And the latter could not be rendered harmless by a simple accommodation to the doctrine of the church.

The Greek or the Humanistic basic motive, which here dominates the vision of nature, has in its turn undergone a certain scholastic accommodation to the Christian doctrine of creation or to that of creation and fall, respectively. In the dialectical tension between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’ is concealed, as a component, the inner dialectic of the Greek or Humanistic basic motive, respectively.

In scholastic anthropology this component finds a clear expression in the dichotomist conception of the relation of body

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and soul. The latter is dominated either by the motive of ‘matter’ and ‘form’ or by that of ‘nature and freedom’.

The inner dialectic of the ground-motive of nature and grace drove scholastic thought in the 14th century from the Thomistic (pseudo-) synthesis (Natura praeambula gratiae) to the Occamist antithesis (no point of contact between nature and grace according to William of Occam, the leader of the nominalist scholasticism of the 14th century).

In the most recent time it has disclosed its polar tendencies in the ‘dialectical theology’. The conflict between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner was entirely dominated by the question whether in ‘nature’ there may be accepted a ‘point of contact’ for ‘grace’. Against Brunner's ‘yes’, going in the synthetic direction, Barth set his inexorable ‘no’¹.

The development of the religious dialectic of the form-matter motive in Greek philosophy and the dialectic unfolding of the motive of nature and grace in the scholastic Christian philosophy have been investigated in detail in the first and second volumes of my Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy. The second part of book I of the present work will be dedicated completely to a transcendental criticism of modern Humanistic philosophy, in which the dialectical development of the motive of nature and freedom will be traced.

1 This extremely antithetical conception as to the relation of nature and grace is no longer maintained in Barth's Kirchliche Dogmatik.

The ascription of the primacy to one of the antithetic components of the dialectical ground-motive.

In default of a basis for a real synthesis between the antagonistic religious mainsprings which are operative in a dialectical ground-motive, there remains only a single way out, viz. that of ascribing the ‘primacy’ or the religious precedence to one of the two.

In so far as a philosophic current has become conscious of the religious antithesis in its starting-point, such an ascription will increasingly go hand in hand with a depreciation of and withdrawal of divine attributes from the other mainspring. The ancient Ionian natural philosophy held to the primacy of the matter-motive. It originated in the archaic period in which the old nature- and life-religion, which had been pushed back by the public Olympian religion of the polis broke forth again

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openly in religious revivals, in the remarkable Dionysian and Orphic movements.

Consequently, the Ionian thinkers must have been fully aware of the religious conflict in the form-matter motive. The form-principle in this philosophy is entirely deprived of its divine character. According to these thinkers the true God is the form-less, eternally flowing stream of life, generally represented by a ‘moveable element’ (water, fire, air), but in Anaximander conceived of as an invisible ‘apeiron’, flowing in the stream of time and avenging the injustice of the transitory beings which have originated from it in an individual form, by dissolving them in their formless origin. The deepest conviction of these philosophers may perhaps be expressed by quoting in a typical Greek variant the famous words of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust:

‘Denn alles was (in Form) besteht,
Ist wert das es zu Grunde geht.’

With Aristotle, on the contrary, in whose philosophy - in accordance with Socrates and Plato - the primacy has passed over to the form-motive, the deity has become ‘pure Form’, and ‘matter’ is completely deprived of any divine quality by becoming the metaphysical principle of imperfection and ‘potentiality’.

In the late-medieval scholasticism of William of Occam, which had become keenly conscious of the antagonism between the ‘nature’- and the ‘grace-motive’, ‘natural reason’ has become entirely tarnished. There is no longer place here for a metaphysics and a natural theology, although the autonomy of natural reason is maintained to the utmost. The grace-motive retains the primacy, but not in a synthetic hierarchical sense as in Thomism.

In the modern Humanistic philosophy there is originally wanting the clear notion of the religious antithesis between the motive of dominating nature by autonomous science and that of the autonomous freedom of human personality. But scarcely had this notion awakened in Rousseau, when he depreciated the ideal of science and ascribed the primacy to the freedom-motive which is the mainspring of his religion of feeling. Kant, who follows Rousseau in this respect, deprived ‘nature’ (in the natural-scientific sense) of all divine character and even denied its divine origin. God is, according to him, a postulate of practical reason, i.e. a postulate of autonomous morality

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which is completely dominated by the Humanistic freedom-motive.

In modern philosophy of life as well as in the Humanistic existence-philosophy, there is seen a still deeper depreciation of the motive of the autonomous control of nature. The freedom-motive here has the absolute religious primacy, even though in a form which is quite different from what it possessed in Rousseau and Kant.

The meaning of each of the antithetic components of a dialectic ground-motive is dependent upon that of the other.

Finally we must observe, that the meaning of each of the antithetic components of a dialectic ground-motive is dependent upon that of the other.

Consequently, it is not possible to understand the meaning of the Greek matter-motive apart from that of the form-principle, and reverse. In the same way, the signification of the scholastic nature-motive and that of the grace-motive determine one another mutually. And so do the Humanistic nature-motive and the freedom-motive.

It is of great consequence for a critical study of the history of philosophic thought that one does not lose sight of this state of affairs. In Greek thought the term ‘nature’ had a very different sense from that which it has in modern Humanistic philosophy. In a Thomistic discussion of the problem of freedom and causality the term freedom may not be understood in the Humanistic sense; as little as the Thomistic concept of causality may be conceived in the sense of the classical-Humanistic motive of nature-domination.

§ 6 - The transcendental ground-idea of philosophy

The three transcendental Ideas of theoretical thought, through the medium of which the religious basic motive controls this thought.

With the exposure of the religious ground-motives as the true starting-points of philosophy our general transcendental criticism of the theoretical attitude of thought has completed its chief task.

At present, there remains only the question as to the way in which these religious motives control the immanent course of philosophic thought.

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To this question the answer must be: through the medium of a triad of transcendental Ideas, which correspond to the three transcendental basic problems of the theoretical attitude of thought. Theoretical thought hereby gains successively its concentric direction to the presupposita which alone make it possible, no matter if a thinker has become aware of them in a really critical way of self-reflection.

For while the theoretical concept of a modal aspect is directed to the modal diversity of meaning and separates the aspect concerned from all the others, the transcendental theoretical Idea is directed to the coherence, the totality and the Origin of all meaning, respectively.

This theoretical Idea does not cancel the theoretical separation and antithesis of the modal aspects, and thus it retains a theoretical character. But within the theoretical attitude of thought itself, it relates the analytically separated and opposed aspects concentrically to their mutual relationship and coherence of meaning, to their integral - or else dialectically broken - radical unity and Origin. It relates them in other words to the presupposita which alone make possible the theoretical concept of the modal speciality and diversity of meaning.

The triunity of the transcendental ground-Idea.

The transcendental Ideas, which are related to the three stages of critical self-reflection in theoretical thought described above, form an indissoluble unity.

For the question, how one understands the mutual relation and coherence of meaning of the modal aspects as theoretically set apart and opposed to one another, is dependent on the question whether or not one accepts the integral religious unity in the root of these aspects, which brings their totality of meaning to concentric expression. Furthermore, this last question is dependent upon the following: how the idea of the Origin of all meaning is conceived of, whether this idea has an integral or rather a dialectically broken character, i.e., whether only one Archè is accepted, or whether two principles of origin are opposed to one another.

Therefore, we can view the three transcendental Ideas, which contain the answer to these fundamental problems, as three directions of one and the same transcendental ground-Idea.

This is the basic Idea of philosophy, but indirectly it also lies at the basis of the various special sciences. The latter ever remains

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dependent on philosophy in their theoretical conception of reality, and in their method of forming concepts and problems.

The contents of this Idea, so far as it is directed to the Origin and to the unity (or duality respectively) in the root of the temporal diversity of meaning, is directly determined by the religious basic motive of theoretical thought.

The transcendental critique of theoretical thought and the dogmatic exclusivism of the philosophical schools.

What now is the fruit of this transcendental critique of thought for the discussion among the philosophical schools?

It can pave the way for a real contact of thought among the various philosophical trends. For - paradoxical as it may sound - this contact is basically excluded on the dogmatic standpoint of the autonomy of theoretical reason. Our transcendental critique wages a merciless war against the masking of supra-theoretical prejudices as theoretical axioms which are forced upon the opponent on penalty of his being viewed as an outsider in philosophical matters. In other words, it aims its attack against the dogmatic exclusivism of the schools, all of which fancy themselves to possess the monopoly on philosophical truth.

A sharp distinction between theoretical judgments and the supra-theoretical pre-judgments, which alone make the former possible, is a primary requisite of critical thought.

To this end a painstaking investigation is necessary, as to the transcendental ground-Idea of a philosophical line of thought, with which one intends to enter upon a serious discussion.

An apriori which is binding on all philosophic thought is undoubtedly contained in this basic Idea of philosophy. But what does it avail immanence-philosophy to withdraw from critical self-reflection with respect to this transcendental ground-Idea, if after all this latter manifests its apriori influence in the formulation of every philosophic problem?

Every philosophic thinker must be willing to account critically for the meaning of his formulation of questions. He who really does so, necessarily encounters the transcendental ground-Idea of meaning and of its origin.

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The metaphysical-analogical concept of totality and the transcendental Idea of the totality of meaning. Transcendental critique of the metaphysical conception of the analogia entis.

Thomistic metaphysics will deny the religious foundation of the transcendental Idea of totality and origin of the modal diversity of meaning in its inter-modal coherence. As to the transcendental Idea of totality, it will argue, that our thought does have an immanent and autonomous transcendental concept of totality, as of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Granted, but in what sense is this concept to be understood? Does there not hide in this very concept the whole transcendental problem concerning the relation of modal diversity to the totality and radical unity of meaning? Is not the geometrical concept of totality quite different from the physical-chemical (e.g. that of the atom), from the biological, the psychological, the linguistic, etc.?

The totality in its relation to the modal diversity and inter-modal coherence of meaning cannot be truly approximated by such essentially special scientific concepts which are bound to the modal aspects of meaning, unless I am willing from the outset to steer my philosophic thought into the channels of the different -isms which our transcendental critique has unmasked.

I think, Thomistic metaphysics will agree with this argument. However, it will say, that the transcendental concept of totality is implied in the metaphysical concept of being, which is not of a generic and specific but of an analogical character. Consequently, when we say, that being is a whole in which everything participates, we must conceive of the concept of the whole in this transcendental analogical sense. It is as such a metaphysical pre-supposition of all generic and specific concepts of totality. However, it does not satisfy the requirements of a transcendental Idea in the true critical sense. For, a purely analogical concept of totality lacks as such the concentric direction which is inherent in the transcendental ground-Idea of meaning. It does not direct the modal diversity of meaning in theoretic thought to its unity of root, but remains dispersed by this diversity. For this very reason it cannot replace the transcendental ground-Idea. Moreover, the metaphysical concept of being in its Aristotelian sense is not at all an autonomous concept of theoretical thought, as is pretended here. As soon as we subject it to a radical trans-

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cendental critique, it appears to be ruled by the dialectical form-matter motive, which is of a religious character.

Pure matter and pure Form are the two poles in the first (so-called transcendental) distinction of being. Pure matter is the principle of potentiality and imperfection; pure Form is identified with God as pure actuality and unmoved Mover of material nature. This Aristotelian concept of deity is of course accommodated to the Christian doctrine of creation. Here the metaphysical Idea of being and totality results in a transcendental Idea of the Origin which lies at the foundation of a ‘natural theology’. The existence of God as unmoved Mover is proved in various ways, all of which apparently start from empirical data in nature, but which - besides their logically untenable leap from the relative to the absolute - pre-suppose the very conception of God which should be proved. The Ionian philosophers of nature and Heraclitus, who deified the matter-principle of the eternally flowing stream of life, could never ask for an unmoved Mover as prime cause of empirical movement. This was not a logical mistake on the part of these thinkers, but is to be explained only in terms of their holding to the religious precedence of the matter-motive.

In the Thomistic system autonomous metaphysics should replace the transcendental critique of theoretical thought. However, all its metaphysical axioms and ‘proofs’ are nothing but religious pre-suppositions in a dogmatical theoretical elaboration, masked by the dogma concerning the autonomy of natural reason.

It may be supposed, that Aristotle himself was fully aware of the religious character of his form-matter motive, as can be seen from the truly religious manner in which in his Metaphysics he speaks about the mystical moments of union of human thought with the divine pure Form through theological theoria.

Thomas could not be aware of this, because his view of the autonomy of natural reason (ruled by the scholastic motive of nature and grace) implied a meaning of autonomy quite different from that of the Aristotelian conception.

Our conclusion must be, that the metaphysical concept of the whole and its parts, implied in the analogical concept of being, is a pseudo-concept. It does not explain in what manner the theoretic diversity of meaning can be concentrated on a deeper unity. A purely analogical unity, as implied in the analogical concept of being, is no unity at all, but remains dispersed in the diversity of the modal aspects of meaning.

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It cannot even explain the coherence in this modal diversity, because this coherence is the very pre-supposition of a true analogy¹.

An analogical concept cannot be useful in philosophy, unless it is qualified by a non-analogical moment of meaning which determines its special modal sense. But this state of affairs cannot be explained before the development of our theory of the modal aspects of meaning. And this is reserved for the second volume of this work.

1 I have not discussed here the theological use of the analogia entis. For this subject I may refer to my recent treatise in the quarterly review ‘Philosophia Reformata’, 17th year (1952) entitled: ‘The transcendental critique of theoretical thought and the Thomistic theologia naturalis.
There is no place in our philosophy for an analogical concept of being in its metaphysical-theological sense.
Being is only to be ascribed to God, whereas creation has only meaning, the dependent mode of reality or existence. A true concept of being is impossible. The word being has no unity of meaning. When, in our Introduction, we called meaning the being of all that has been created, the word ‘being’ designed only ‘essence’, which does not transcend the boundaries of meaning. Only the transcendental ground-Idea which is ruled by the central motive of the divine Word-Revelation, can relate the different modal aspects of meaning to the divine Being of the Origin. But this Idea is not an autonomous concept, and it is incompatible with every form of natural theology.

The so-called logical formalizing of the concept of totality and the philosophical Idea of totality.

Now Edmund Husserl has supposed in his Logische Untersuchungen (II, 1 p. 284 fl.) that one could pass beyond the modal diversity [of meaning] of the totality-concept by means of the logical formalizing of the latter.

In this way he arrived at the ‘formal logical’ relation, ‘whole and its parts’, which is to be purified from all non-logical speciality of meaning. And in regard to this formal relation there can, according to him, be formulated different purely logical propositions and definitions by means of the formal concept of ‘logical foundation’ (logische Fundierung). I must reserve basic criticism of these so-called purely analytical definitions and propositions until, in the course of the discussion of the problem of knowledge in vol. II, Kant's distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments is subjected to a critical investigation². I must,

2 That the proposition: ‘the whole is more than its parts’ should be purely analytic, is to be disputed on good grounds. It can even be disputed on the basis that the question whether every whole implies the existence of parts is not to be answered in terms of pure logic. Even the linguistic meaning of the term ‘whole’ is not of purely logical character. The term may in itself very well be used in opposition to ‘existing in parts’. This holds in particular for a concentric whole as the human I-ness, in which the entire temporal human existence is concentrated.
For the rest, it appears from Husserl's explanation that his formalized concept of the whole is conceived in the special sense of pure mathematics and that, according to him, the latter is to be reduced to pure logic. Consequently, his logical formalization of the concept ‘the whole and its parts’ is based upon a transcendental Idea of the relation and coherence of the modal aspects of meaning.

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however, even in the present context observe, that even a logically formalized concept ‘whole’, granted that it has any sense, would remain ultimately enclosed in the modal speciality of signification, namely in that of the modal-analytical aspect, which itself supposes the inter-modal coherence of meaning, especially that between the analytical and the linguistic aspect.

For this very reason, this concept is unfit to occupy the place of the transcendental Idea of totality. On the contrary, it must be dependent on a transcendental Idea of meaning.

Only the latter can, as a limiting concept, point beyond the modal diversity to the temporal coherence and the supra-temporal totality of meaning. Yet, this transcendental Idea is nothing apart from a content which philosophic thought is incapable of deriving from itself.

Every attempt at a sufficient determination of the meaning of philosophical concepts necessarily discloses, in the process of critical self-reflection, the transcendental ground-Idea of the philosophical course of thought.

The principle of the Origin and the continuity-principle in Cohen's philosophy.

Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg neo-Kantian School, for example, starts by interpreting philosophic thought (the ‘Vernunft’) as self-sufficient ‘thinking of being’ and of its origin. To this thought, as thought of the origin (‘Ursprungs-denken’), he sets the task of creating reality from this thought itself, namely, in a transcendental-logical process according to the ‘principle of continuity’. With reference to such a program the following critical problems must be raised: Where do you actually find your Archimedean point in that ‘Vernunft’, which you yourself break up into the modal diversity of logical,

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ethical, and aesthetic reason?¹ What meaning do you ascribe to the principle of the origin and to that of continuity, with which you intend to bridge the modal diversity of meaning referred to?

These questions are not to be evaded in philosophic thought! Cohen's system suggests to us, that the ‘principle of truth’ (‘Grundsatz der Wahrheit’) implies a continuous coherence between logos and ethos. Nonetheless, thought and volition are to have different meanings. Therefore, it is no use transferring the principles of ‘origin’ and ‘continuity’ from the ‘Logic of Pure Knowledge’ to the ‘Ethics of Pure Will’. The coherence in the diversity of meaning may not be sought in the speciality of meaning. To be sure one can strike on the anvil of the ‘unity of reason’². But, as long as this unity is not shown to us in a totality beyond the diversity of meaning, implied in its different functions, the ‘unity of Reason’ remains an asylum ignorantiae³. As soon as Cohen's principle of continuity itself is reduced to its origin, it turns out to be a principle with a

1 Cohen himself recognizes this question as a special problem of philosophy. See his Logic of pure Knowledge (Logik der reinen Erkenntnis), 3rd Ed., p. 17. Actually it is rather the basic problem of his philosophy, with respect to which only critical self-reflection as to his logicistic ground-Idea could bring clarity. For, apart from a transcendental ground-Idea, the unity of consciousness cannot be grasped philosophically.

2 Remarkably we find this sort of mystification in the strongest degree in Kant, who in his criticism has contributed most toward the dissolution of this would-be unity in the dualism of theoretical and practical reason, which in substance (essence) he never bridged. In the Preface of the Kr. der R.V. (1st. Ed.) he writes: ‘In der Tat ist auch reine Vernunft eine so volkommene Einheit, dasz, wenn das Prinzip derselben auch nur zu einer einzigen aller der Fragen, die ihr durch ihre eigene Natur aufgegeben sind, unzureichend wäre, man dieses immerhin nur wegwerfen könnte, weil es alsdann auch keiner der übrigen mit voller Zuverlässigkeit gewachsen sein würde.’ [‘Indeed, pure reason is a perfect unity to such an extent, that, if the principle presented by it should prove to be insufficient for the solution of even a single one of those questions to which the very nature of reason gives birth, we must reject it, as we could not be perfectly certain of its sufficiency in the case of the others’].
In the Preface, p. 19, of his Grundl. zur Metaphysik der Sitten, he speaks of ‘am Ende nur eine und dieselbe Vernunft, die blosz in der Anwendung unterschieden sein mag’ [‘ultimately it is one and the same Reason that may show diversity only in its application’].

3 As in Cohen's expression: ‘Das Denken, das die Bewegung mit sich führt, verwandelt sich selbst in Wollen und Handlung.’ [Ethics of Pure Will; 4th Ed., p. 110: ‘Thinking in which movement is inherent, transforms itself into will and action.’] Ethik des Reinen Wollens, 4th Ed., p. 110. Cohen seeks the deeper unity in the ‘Methode der Reinheit’, but this method can bridge the fundamental diversity of meaning only for a logicistic outlook.

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special mathematical sense¹, which is absolutized to an transcendental Idea of the inter-modal coherence in the modal diversity of meaning! Here a supra-theoretical motive manifests itself and also determines the contents of Cohen's Idea of totality.

Theoretical thought remains imprisoned in the modal diversity of meaning and therefore does not become truly philosophic thought, so long as it not directed by a transcendental Idea of the totality which is dependent on a supra-theoretical basic-motive.

1 In fact derived from the infinitesimal calculus.

Being and Validity and the critical preliminary question as to the meaning of these concepts.

The so-called South West German School in neo-Kantian philosophy proceeds to introduce into philosophic thought the opposition between being and validity, reality and value. Behind this opposition there crops up anew the transcendental problem as to the mutual relations of modal speciality, inter-modal coherence, and totality of meaning. For the question arises: In what sense are being and validity understood here? Are they intended as transcendental logical determinations, originating from thought, as basic categories? If so, can a basic category of ‘being’ in its transcendental-logical sense bridge the modal diversity of the different aspects which, even in an abstract naturalistic conception of empirical reality as defended by Kant, cannot be eliminated? In Kant's epistemology ‘reality’ was only one of the ‘categories of modality’. Is ‘validity’ also to be understood in the sense of such a category? If so, can it bridge in this logical sense the fundamental diversity of meaning in the ‘realm of values’?

It is of no avail for Rickert to reserve the term ‘meaning’ exclusively for ‘culture’, as a subjective relating of ‘reality’ to ‘values’. The fundamental philosophical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘validity’ pretends to have a meaning. The critical question is whether these ‘categories’ embrace the totality of meaning of empirical reality and of the realm of values, respectively, or only their logical aspect.

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Genericity of meaning versus totality of meaning.

If the category does not possess this totality of meaning, what then is its relation to the totality and to the coherence of meaning among the modal aspects? By ascribing a mere generic meaning to the ‘logical categories’, I do not advance a single step.

Levelling of the modal diversity of meaning in the generic concept rests upon an uncritical misjudgment of the special meaning in the logical aspect.

In a special science, to be sure, one may form so-called generic concepts (class-, genus-concepts, etc.) in order to join together the individual phenomena within a special modal aspect of reality. But the irreducible modal meaning of the different aspects themselves does not permit itself to be levelled down logically by any generic concept. This levelling out always implies, that the specific meaning of the logical aspect is ignored. In theoretical thought every attempt by means of a ‘generic concept’ to gloss over the diversity of meaning of the logical aspect of thought and the modal aspects set in opposition to it, betrays the influence of a transcendental ground-Idea. For, in such a generic concept, I ascribe to the special modal meaning of logic the power to bridge the modal diversity of meaning in the theoretical gegenstand-relation. This exceeds the limits of genuine logic and attributes to a pseudo-logical concept the function of a transcendental Idea of totality.

The most seductive way in which the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophy is masked is that of dialectical logic. This may finally be illustrated by the philosophical standpoint of another famous German thinker in respect to the relation of logic and reality.

The masking of the transcendental ground-Idea by the so-called dialectical logic. Theodor Litt.

Theodor Litt, who in this respect intends to continue the tradition of post-Kantian idealism, supposes, that he has found the Archimedean point of his philosophic thought in the ‘pure reflection’ of theoretical thought on its own activity. In the course of his inquiries he proceeds to introduce a dialectical identity of the ‘thinking ego’ (the ‘pure thought in its self-reflection’) and the ‘concrete ego’ (the ego as real individual ‘totality’ of all its physical-psychical functions ‘in space and time’).

However, in the critical consideration of this dialectical con-

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ception, we are obliged to raise the following questions: In what sense do you understand this ‘dialectical identity’ and in what sense the ‘concrete ego’?

Then it appears forthwith, that the ‘dialectical identity’ is intended in a transcendental-logical sense; for Litt teaches us: ‘In the unity of the thinking I and the concrete I, the former gains the mastery’¹.

The ‘thinking ego’ is conceived here in the reflexive-logical sense of Fichte's ‘Wissenschaftslehre’. It is the ‘transcendental-logical subject of Kant's epistemology which has its ‘Gegenstand’ in the ‘empirical ego in time and space’, but, in a second reflexion should overcome this antithesis which in Kant was definitive. Only in ‘pure thought’, according to Litt, does the ‘concrete ego’ come to itself. For the latter does not transcend the former. The relation is just the reverse ‘It’ (i.e. the concrete ego) ‘has the standpoint of possible self-assurance absolutely beyond itself, and is thus absolutely not ‘übergreifend’ (i.e. capable to conceive the transcendental ego)².

The critical question is, however, whether the ‘pure’ (i.e. abstracted) logical function of human thought can transcend the modal limits of its aspect in a dialectical way, and whether the deeper unity beyond the modal diversity of meaning can be of a dialectical-logic character. Here we again touch the transcendental problem of the ‘Archimedean point’, discussed in our Introduction.

In this ‘Archimedean point’ the modal diversity of meaning, which at first sight is confusing, must be overcome. For from this point our selfhood must direct the philosophical view of totality over the modal and typical diversity of meaning in its theoretical distinction.

In Litt, however, the theoretic relating of the modal diversity of meaning to its integral unity of root has become impossible as a result of the hidden dualism in his religious ground-motive. Therefore he introduces a dialectical idea of unity which must relate this modal diversity to the two antithetic motives, each of which for itself pretends to express an ultimate unity of meaning (scl. nature and freedom).

1 ‘In der Einheit von denkendem und konkretem Ich eignet dem ersteren die übergreifende Macht.’

2 Einleitung in die Philosophie (1933), p. 162: ‘Es hat den Standort möglicher Selbstvergewisserung durchaus jenseits seiner selbst, ist also durchaus nicht übergreifend.’

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Modal diversity and radical identity of meaning. Logical identity has only modal meaning, Parmenides.

All diversity of meaning in temporal reality supposes a temporal coherence of meaning and the latter in its turn must again be the expression of a deeper identity. We have seen, that the transcendental Idea of coherence of meaning is the necessary basic denominator, under which I must theoretically bring the modal aspects in order to be able to compare them with one another in their diversity.

For if they were to have nothing in common with each other, they could not even be distinguished from one another. On our own standpoint, as I have previously observed, only the transcendental Idea of time can serve as such a basic denominator. For the cosmic order of time expresses itself alike in the modal structure of all aspects, and brings them into indissoluble coherence of meaning, without derogating from their mutual irreducibility.

But the temporal coherence of meaning of the aspects supposes their deeper identity in a religious unity of root. For we have seen, that without this latter, there would still be lacking the necessary starting-point for the comparison, and consequently for theoretical synthesis. The denominator of comparison cannot itself furnish us with this point of departure.

But the unity-and-identity, taken in its dialectical-logical sense, is not the unity-and-identity to which the transcendental ground-idea of philosophy can be directed.

For, the logical or analytical unity-and-identity, on which Parmenides supposed he could build his entire metaphysical doctrine of being, is not the unity-identity sought for beyond the temporal diversity of meaning.

It is only by a metaphysical identification of ‘pure’ reflexive logical thought and being that Litt assumes a dialectical unity-and-identity of the ‘concrete ego’ and the ‘transcendental logical ego’.

Here Litt disagrees fundamentally with Kant but is in keeping with Fichte and Hegel. By means of a dialectical logic he attempts to overcome the dualism in his hidden starting-point: the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom. The ‘concrete ego’ is conceived here as a ‘physical-psychical individual’ belonging to the realm of nature. The ‘pure thinking ego’, or the ‘reflexive-logical subject’ is nothing but the theoretical expression of the freedom-motive, in the pure reflexive act

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of thought¹. It has the free and autonomous power of opposing itself to the whole ‘concrete ego’ which is dispersed in the diversity of its functions. It has also the sovereign power of transcending the modal limits of the logical aspect and its analytical laws. Consequently, it is identical with the ‘concrete ego’, but identical in a dialectical-logical sense.

However, this dialectical Idea of unity-and-identity is a pseudo-logical one. It is nothing but a masked transcendental ground-Idea, expressing the supra-theoretical presuppositions of Litt's philosophy. It is conceived in an uncritical synthetic form, which in the transcendental process of critical self-reflection must necessarily be redued to an antithetic one. For the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom does not allow of a real synthesis of its antagonistic components. Nevertheless, the freedom-motive has the inner tendency to absorb the opposite one, just as the motive of the domination of nature has the tendency to absorb the freedom-motive. This is also demonstrated

1 See op. cit. p. 74: ‘Das seelische Leben so der umfassenden Kausalität des Naturgeschehens einordnen - das heiszt dieses Seelenleben aufs offenkundigste “vergegenständlichen”. Geht man von diesem Aspekt in die Tiefen der Reflexion zurück, so sieht man die genannte Schwierigkeit alsbald in nichts zergehen. Denn einmal erweist sich hier die Ansicht, die das seelische Leben dem gegenständlichen Denken darbietet, als durchaus bedingt und der Korrektur sowohl fähig als auch bedürftig, womit an Stelle der “Freiheit” die angeblickte “Notwendigkeit” höchst zweifelhaft zu werden beginnt. Diese Anzweiflung aber verwandelt sich in Verneinung, sobald ein Weiteres bedacht wird: das unanfechtbarste Zeugnis dafür, das das seelische Leben der Erhebung über jede Art von “Notwendigkeit” fähig ist, liegt - in eben dem Denken selbst, das sich in der Reflexion seiner bewuszt wird... “Freiheit”, die alle Verkettung von Ursache und Wirkung unter sich läszt, ist überall da verwirklicht, wo gedacht wird, also u.a.auch da, wo “Notwendigkeit”, “Kausalität” gedacht wird.’ [‘The inclusion of psychic life into the comprehensive causality of natural events is most manifestly objectivizing psychic life. If from this aspect we turn back to the depths of reflection, the difficulty just mentioned passes into nothingness. For here it appears, that the aspect that psychic life presents to objectivizing thought, is always and in every respect one of being conditioned and capable of correction as well as needing it, so that instead of “freedom” it is the so-called “necessity” which begins to be most doubtful. This doubt turns into a denial, as soon as a further thought presents itself: The most irrefutable evidence of the fact that psychic life is capable of transcending any kind of “necessity” is to be found in thought itself which becomes conscious of itself in reflection... “Freedom”, leaving all manner of connection between cause and effect behind, is realized wherever there is thought, hence a.o. also there where “necessity”, “causality” is thought.’]

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by Litt's important sociology, in which the pattern of thought of natural-science is completely replaced by a dialectical phenomenological one.

Dialectical logic is an uncritical attempt to solve the transcendental basic-problem of the theoretical synthesis. It intends to overcome the theoretical antithesis by a dialectical-logical Idea of unity, which turns out to be no unity at all. For Litt does not actually solve the transcendental problem concerning the unity in the root of the modal diversity of meaning in its theoretical distinction. He does not and cannot explain how the ‘pure thinking ego’ and the ‘concrete ego’ which is its theoretic opposite (Gegenstand), can be one and the same. This identity cannot be a logical one. For in this case the ‘gegenstand-relation’ would be eliminated, whereas Litt wants to maintain this latter emphatically. Now we saw, that in default of a transcendental idea of the integral unity in the root of human selfhood - which is excluded by Litt's dialectical ground-motive -, dialectical logic furnishes philosophy with an apparently autonomous dialectic Idea of unity. However, the transcendental critique of philosophic thought does not permit itself to be led astray by theoretical dogmatism. Dialectic logic, no more than scholastic metaphysics, can replace it.

Logic itself is to be set by philosophy within the complex of problems involved in the relation between modal speciality, diversity, temporal coherence and totality of meaning.

Whoever does not want to fall into the uncritical error of logicism, should admit, that the logical aspect of thought is itself enclosed within the modal diversity and the inter-modal coherence of meaning and - at least in that respect - has no philosophic advantage above the other aspects. At this very point, the Biblical religious conception of the centre of human existence unfolds its full critical signification for philosophy.

Litt intends not only a logical but a real identity of the pure thinking and the concrete ego, in order to save the real identity of the selfhood in the antithesis of the gegenstand-relation.

However, he cannot accept the religious transcendence of the I-ness in respect to its pure logical thought. He holds to the opinion, that the ego by elevating itself to the abstracted function of ‘pure thought’ has reached the ultimate limit of its inner possibilities¹.

1 Op. cit. p. 162/3: ‘Damit ist schon gesagt, dasz das Ich erst, indem es sich zum Ich des reinen Denkens zuspitzt und emporsteigt, das Äuszerste und Letzte seiner inneren Möglichkeiten erreicht: denn erst als solches wird es Subjekt der Reflexion und damit mächtig der “übergreifenden” Denktat. In seinen Gesichtskreis fällt von nun an grundsätzlich alles, was das konkrete Ich nur immer tun und erleiden mag; es ist im Besitz der Souveränität, die es ihm gestattet, sich dem Ganzen seines konkreten Erlebens, dieses sein denkendes Tun eingeschlossen, gegenüberzustellen.’ [‘This is to say that only in rarefying and elevating itself into the -I- of pure thought can the -I- reach the utmost limits and the last of its inner possibilities - for only as such does it become the subject of reflection and consequently able to “comprehensive” thinking. Everything that the concrete -I- can ever do or suffer, falls within its range of vision; it is in possession of the sovereignty that enables it to oppose to itself the whole of its concrete experience, that of its thinking act included.’]

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Consequently, according to him, the real identity of the ‘concrete’ and the ‘pure thinking’ ego must be a dialectical-logical one, because the concrete ego ‘comes to itself’ only in pure reflexive thought. This is a dialectical-metaphysical logicism, although Litt emphatically rejects the metaphysical Aristotelian conception of pure thought as a substance which is absolutely separate from the ‘concrete ego’.

§ 7 - The transcendental ground-idea as hypothesis of philosophy

The theoretical character of the transcendental ground-Idea and its relation to naïve experience.

The question may now be raised, why I conceived the contents of the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophy only as a fundamental determination of the relation between origin, totality and modal diversity of meaning in the coherence of the different modal aspects. Is this not much too abstract a conception of this basic Idea?

We have seen, that naïve experience has not yet arrived at the level of theoretical analysis of the different modalities of meaning; therefore it does not explicitly conceive the modal aspects of temporal reality. Reality presents itself to the pre-theoretic view exclusively in the typical total-structures of individuality, which encompass all modal aspects together; but the latter are not conceived here in theoretical distinction. Now it appeared, that naïve experience is in no way inconsequential for philosophy. Therefore, it seems insufficient to point the transcendental ground-Idea only toward the theoretical antithesis of the modal aspects of temporal reality.

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Every philosophic view of empirical reality ought to be confronted with the datum of naïve experience in order to test its ability to account for this datum in a satisfying manner. Therefore, is it not also necessary to direct the contents of the transcendental ground-Idea toward the diversity and coherence of meaning in the typical structures of individuality?

The datum of naïve experience as a philosophical problem.

This question I will answer as follows.

Philosophy must convert the datum of naïve experience into a fundamental philosophic problem. For it is evident, that by maintaining the attitude of naïve experience one would never be able to account for that datum philosophically. Consequently, since philosophy is bound to the theoretic attitude of thought, its transcendental ground-Idea is also bound to the theoretical gegenstand-relation in which temporal reality is set asunder in its modal aspects.

Therefore, philosophy cannot examine the typical structures of individual totality without a theoretical analysis of their given unity. These structures, too, must be made a philosophical problem, and this problem can be no other but that of their temporal unity in the modal diversity of meaning, manifesting itself in the different aspects of reality. Their typical character and their relation to concrete individuality does not derogate from this state of affairs.

Besides, the transcendental ground-Idea of meaning implies a relation to the cosmonomic side as well as to the factual subject-side of temporal reality. And the latter is by nature individual. In other words, this transcendental Idea is also a ground-Idea of type and individuality, but it is always bound to the theoretical gegenstand-relation.

The naïve concept of the thing and the special scientific concept of function.

On the level of modern scientific thought the naïve concept of the thing is in the process of being broken up into functional concepts. This is done in order to gain knowledge of the functional coherence of the phenomena within a special modal aspect. Under the influence of the classic Humanistic ideal of science, which we shall examine presently in detail, there was even an evident tendency to eliminate the typical structures of

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individuality and to dissolve the entire empirical reality into a continuous functional system of causal relations. This was, to be sure, an absolutizing of the scientific concept of function and it could only lead philosophical thought astray. However, this consideration does not derogate from the value of the concept of function as such.

The gain accruing from its application in the different branches of science was enormous. One by one, the modal aspects of temporal reality, especially the mathematical and physical ones, opened to penetrating scientific analysis the secret of their immanent functional relations and laws.

But the more deeply special scientific thought penetrated into its ‘Gegenstand’ (i.e. the abstracted special aspect of reality which limits its field of research), the more sharply was revealed the fundamental deficiency of theoretical thought in comparison with naïve experience.

By being bound to a special scientific viewpoint, a special science loses the vision of the whole with respect to empirical reality, and consequently the integral empirical reality itself is lost from its grasp. If special science were to be entirely autonomous, this void could never be filled and special science would be impossible for lack of a veritable view of reality. For temporal reality is not given in abstracted modal aspects; it does not give itself ‘gegenständlich’. Special science is never in a position to account for our naïve experience of things; it cannot even render an account of its own possibility.

Naïve experience has an integral vision of the whole, so far as it conceives of temporal things and events in their typical structures of individual totality. Furthermore, so far as it is rooted in the ground-motive of the Christian religion, naïve experience also has the radical and integral view of temporal reality by which the latter is concentrically conceived in its true religious root and in its relation to its true Origin. But its view of the whole is a naïve one, which for lack of a theoretical insight into the modal diversity of meaning does not satisfy the requirements of the transcendental ground-Idea as hypothesis of philosophic thought. The concrete unity of things is not a problem to naïve experience.

Philosophy, special science, and naïve experience.

Only philosophy has the task of grasping in the view of totality the different modal aspects of meaning as they are set asunder

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by theoretic thought. In this way, philosophy has to account for both naïve experience and special science.

Therefore, even where naïve experience is made into a theoretic problem of philosophy, the transcendental ground-Idea of the latter can have no other contents but that which we have found in our transcendental critique.

Methodically, philosophic inquiry as to the modal structures of the abstracted aspects of temporal reality must necessarily precede the philosophic analysis of the typical structures of individual totality. For the latter imply the theoretical problem of the structural temporal unity in the diversity of its modal aspects. Special science, as such, in its different branches can neither have an autonomous conception of the modal structures of the different aspects nor of the typical structures of individual totality.

For, a theoretical analysis of these temporal structures requires the theoretic view of totality which is in the nature of the case a philosophic one.

The modal structure of a special aspect is a temporal unity in a diversity of modal structural moments, which can display their modal meaning only in their structural coherence and totality. Besides, we have seen, that within the modal structure of a special aspect there is expressed the inter-modal coherence of cosmic time-order, so that the former cannot be conceived of theoretically without a transcendental idea of its coherence with all other modal aspects and of the radical unity of the modal diversity of meaning. Special sciences - with the exception of pure mathematics - are pointed to the examination of the functional coherence as well as the typical character (and in diffferent branches of science also the individuality) of transitory phenomena within a special modal aspect of temporal reality. The very modal structures of temporal reality are not to be conceived theoretically by means of special scientific concepts, which in their turn must be made a philosophic problem. When, for instance, Einstein's theory of relativity handles the concepts of time and space, the special synthetic meaning of these concepts in relation to those of other special sciences as biology, psychology, history, etc. remains hidden.

This meaning can be made clear only in a philosophic inquiry as to the modal structure of the physical aspect, which requires the theoretical view of totality.

Nevertheless, a philosophic conception of this modal structure

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is an implicit hypothesis of physics, because its special branch of inquiry is limited in principle by the structure of the physical aspect of experience and empirical reality.

‘Reflexive’ thought versus ‘objective’ thought in recent philosophy. The confusion of ‘object’ and ‘Gegenstand’ in this opposition.

It is not right, that philosophy must or can abandon the antithetic relation (gegenstand-relation) which we found to be inherent in the theoretic attitude of thought. This is supposed by that current in modern immanence-philosophy which opposes philosophy (as reflexive thought, introverted to the ‘transcendental logical subject of pure thinking’) to all ‘gegenständliches Denken’. This latter should be the ‘naïve’ manner of thought proper to special science, entirely lost in the study of its ‘objects’ without reflecting about the activity of the pure thinking ego, which can never be made into a ‘Gegenstand’. We have met this conception of the difference between philosophical and ‘objective’ scientific thought in the discussion of Theodor Litt's standpoint as to the relation of ‘thinking ego’ and ‘concrete ego’.

It is evident, that it is based upon a fatal confusion of ‘object’ and ‘Gegenstand’ and of the really ‘naïve’ and the theoretical attitudes of thought. In fact, it appeared, that Litt's ‘pure thinking ego’ could not be detached from the gegenstand-relation.

What distinguishes philosophy from special science cannot be the abandoning of the antithetical relation, but rather the focusing (of the former) towards the totality and unity in the root of temporal meaning. We have seen, that this concentric direction of theoretic thought is possible only by means of truly critical self-reflection which must break through the theoretic horizon in order to gain religious self-knowledge.

The transcendental ground-Idea as hypothesis of philosophy.

Consequently, we arrive again and again at the transcendental ground-Idea as the real hypothesis of philosophic thought. The supposition, that philosophy might refrain from giving an account of the conditions of its possibility has appeared to be uncritical in the highest degree.

In the first place, philosophy itself requires its transcendental

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foundation, its ὑπόϑεσις. A vicious circle is involved in making special science a philosophic (epistemological) problem, while withdrawing from a critical consideration of the pre-suppositions of philosophical thought itself. For the main transcendental problem involved in special science, viz. the possibility of an inter-modal synthesis of meaning, is implied a fortiori in philosophic thought. The latter is immediately confronted at every stage of its inquiry with the fundamental problems concerning the relation of origin, totality, modal diversity, and inter-modal coherence of meaning.

Now since philosophic thought cannot become its own ‘Gegenstand’, philosophy, in the basic critical question as to its own possibility, encounters its immanent limits within cosmic time. These limits can be accounted for only in the concentric direction of theoretical thought to its supra-theoretic pre-suppositions.

Truly reflexive thought, therefore, is characterized by the critical self-reflection as to the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophy, in which philosophic thought points beyond and above itself toward its own apriori conditions within and beyond cosmic time.

As soon as reflexive theoretic thought is conceived of as a ‘free’ act which transcends all structural limits, because the latter can belong only to the ‘gegenständliche’ world, we arrive once more at the illusory conception of the sovereignty and autonomy of philosophic reflection.

The pitfall in this conception appeared to be the identification of ‘Gegenstand’ and ‘temporal reality’, due to the lack of insight into the true character of the ‘gegenstand-relation’ and of cosmic time as hypothesis of the latter. The structural limits of philosophic thought transcend the gegenstand-relation, because they are founded in cosmic time, which cannot be determined by thought, since it is the very pre-supposition of the latter.

Only in reflection on its transcendental ground-Idea is philosophy urged on to its insurmountable apriori limits which give philosophic thought its ultimate well-defined character in the universal cosmic coherence of meaning. It is not philosophic thought that determines its apriori conditions in self-sufficiency, but the very reverse: philosophic thought is determined and limited by its transcendental focusing toward its presupposita. It is limited by being bound to its intentional as well as to its ontical structure in cosmic time.

In the basic Idea of philosophy we are engaged in reflection

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while thinking to the limits of philosophic thought. This Idea is therefore in the full sense of the word, a limiting-concept ‘par excellence’, the final transcendental foundation or ὑπόϑεσις of philosophy, in which we retire into ourselves when thinking. We can reflect critically upon the limits of philosophic thought, only because in our selfhood we transcend them as limits of philosophic knowledge. The pre-supposita of philosophy, toward which the basic idea of philosophy points, are themselves infinitely more than Idea. Idealism, which elevates the Idea itself as totality of meaning, is possible only upon the immanence-standpoint. But its transcendental foundation, its philosophic ground-Idea continues to point beyond the Idea to that which exceeds the transcendental limits of philosophy, inasmuch as it alone makes philosophic idealism possible. The immanence-standpoint merely prevents philosophic thought from proceeding to this last stage of critical self-reflection.

The relation of transcendent and transcendental points of view and the original meaning of the transcendental motive.

We can thus provisionally summarize our point of view with reference to the limits of philosophy:

The religious pre-suppositon of philosophy, toward which the ground-Idea as transcendental foundation of philosophy is directed in its contents, toward which as Idea it points, is of a transcendent nature, whereas philosophic thought is itself of a transcendental character. The choice of the Archimedean point necessarily crosses the boundary line of the temporal coherence of our world. Philosophy itself, though directed by its ground-Idea, remains within this boundary line, because it is possible only by virtue of the temporal order of the world.

Transcendent and transcendental, taken in this sense, are thus no ‘either-or’. For the actually transcendental direction of theoretic thought pre-supposes the transcendent and central sphere of our consciousness from which this direction starts, since this starting-point is not be found in theoretic thought itself.

Only in this view as to the relation of transcendent and transcendental conditions of philosophy is the original critical meaning of transcendental thought given its due.

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Kant's opinion concerning the transcendental Ideas. Why did Kant fail to conceive of these Ideas as ὑπόϑεσις, of his critiques.

The real transcendental direction of Kant's epistemology in this original critical sense does not disclose itself until the necessary function of the transcendental Ideas of theoretical reason are discussed in the ‘transcendental dialectic’. Here Kant clearly explains, that these Ideas point to an absolute totality which transcends the immanent limits of ‘objective experience’, and at the same time in their theoretical knowledge remain bound to the immanent limits of theoretical knowledge itself. Here, also emerge the three transcendental Ideas which in their triunity must be considered as the transcendental ground-Idea and the real ὑπόϑεσις of every possible philosophy, namely, the Idea of the universe which - although in Kant restricted to the sphere of ‘nature’ - corresponds to our Idea of the integral coherence of meaning in cosmic time, the Idea of the ultimate unity of human selfhood and that of the absolute Origin (Urwesen).

Nevertheless, Kant does not accept these transcendental Ideas in their triunity as the real hypothesis of his ‘critical’ philosophy. He does not see that, in their very theoretical use, they must have a real content which necessarily depends upon supra-theoretic pre-suppositions differing in accordance with the religious ground-motives of theoretic thought. He restricted their significance theoretically to a purely formal-logical one; they have, according to him, only a regulative, systematic function in respect to the use of the logical concepts (categories) which are related apriori to sensory experience. Why did Kant at this critical point abandon the real transcendental motive?

Naturally one could answer: because he held to the autonomy of theoretic thought, and this would not be incorrect. But the deeper reason is to be found in the fact that he had become aware of the unbridgeable antithesis in the ground-motive of nature and freedom, and now rejected every attempt at dialectical synthesis.

Nevertheless, he did not see, that his theoretical epistemology itself remained bound to a transcendental ground-Idea, whose contents were determined by this very religious basic motive. His conception of the autonomy and spontaneity of the transcendental logical function of thought is doubtless ruled by the Humanistic freedom-motive, whereas the nature-motive finds clear ex-

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pression in his conception of the purely receptive character of the sensory function of experience, and of its subjection to the causal determinations of science. Kant accepted the synthesis between natural necessity and freedom in his epistemological conception concerning the apriori relatedness of the transcendental categories to sensory experience, whereas he rejected this synthesis in his ethics. Nevertheless, we shall see in the more detailed investigation of his theory of knowledge, that he could not account for the possibility of the synthesis between the logical and the sensory function of consciousness, because of his dualistic starting-point. This is consequently not to be explained in terms of a purely theoretical critique of human knowledge. But it is dependent on the fundamental dualism in his religious ground-motive.

It was Fichte who tried to remove the difficulties involved in the Kantian dualistic conception.

In the first edition of his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, Fichte made ‘practical freedom’ the hypothesis of his theoretical epistemology and introduced a dialectical logic for the sake of bridging the Kantian gulf between epistemology and ethics. This, too, is not to be understood from a purely theoretical standpoint, but only from Fichte's new conception of the transcendental ground-Idea of Humanistic thought. In this conception the postulate of continuity, implied in the freedom-motive, broke through the boundaries which in the Kantian conception were accepted with respect to the theoretical use of the transcendental Idea of freedom.

Anyhow, the very transcendental motive implies the focusing of theoretic thought by self-reflection on its transcendental ground-Idea which points beyond and above its own theoretical limits to its transcendent pre-supposita.

In Kant's ‘dialectic of pure reason’ the transcendental Ideas within their theoretical limits do point, indeed, to a transcendent realm of the ‘noumenon’, in which at least the Ideas of free autonomous will and of God have ‘practical reality’. Kant did not accept limits of theoretical thought which are not set by thought itself, except its being bound to sensory perception. The transcendental Idea of freedom in its dialectical relation to the category of causality is, in fact, the hypothesis of his transcendental logic, although he did not acknowledge it as such. This is the same Idea which in Kant's ‘Critique of Practical

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Reason’ obtains ‘practical, reality’ for ‘reasonable belief’.

If this essential function of the transcendental idea as hypothesis in its pointing beyond the limits of theoretical thought is lost sight of, the very transcendental motive hidden in Kant's criticism cannot be understood.

The decline of the transcendental motive in the Marburg methodological logicism, in Litt's conception of reflexive thought, and in Husserl's ‘egology’.

In the (so-called critical) logicistic idealism of the Marburg School this motive fades away into the merely methodological postulate of logical purity and continuity in the system of knowledge.

When Cohen says, that the transcendental Idea is nothing but the ‘self-consciousness of the (logical) concept’, this pronouncement lacks the very transcendental meaning of Kant's conception, because in Cohen, the pointing of this Idea towards a transcendent sphere has disappeared. The tendency toward the origin on the part of philosophic thought, which in his ‘Logik des Ursprungs’ (Logic of Origin) is very evident, here fails to lead to critical self-reflection in the true sense of the word. The same must be said with respect to Litt's conception of the pure self-reflection of theoretical thought and with respect to Edmund Husserl's so-called ‘ego-logy’, both of which exclude the existence of limits for the ‘transcendental cogito’ (‘I think’). No matter how these latter conceptions of the ‘cogito’ may differ from one another, both deny the transcendence of the ego in respect to transcendental thought or transcendental (phenomenologically purified) consciousness, respectively. The very transcendental Idea, pointing beyond and above itself to the pre-suppositions of philosophical thought, has no sense here.

The basic Idea of philosophy remains a subjective ὑπόϑεσις. The criterion of truth and relativism.

In its entire transcendental function the basic Idea of philosophy remains only a subjective - although necessary - ὑπόϑεσις (hypothesis) of philosophy. This hypothesis may not dominate truth in a relativistic fashion. The truth of this hypothesis, on the contrary, is accountable to the forum of an ultimate judge.

In the very inquiry as to the universally-valid criterion of truth, we shall have to fight the decisive battle with those cur-

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rents in immanence-philosophy which suppose, that only the immanence-standpoint guarantees such a criterion.

If we succeed in proving, that it is in fact the immanence-standpoint that leads to a complete relativizing of this standard, then these currents in the immanence-philosophy, by way of immanent criticism, are ejected from their position as guardians of ‘objective truth’.

In the present context, in which we are discussing the necessary apriori function of the basic Idea of philosophy, we intend only by anticipation to cut off the misunderstanding to the effect that our philosophy would turn over the criterion of truth to relativism.

The transcendental limits of philosophy and the criterion of speculative metaphysics.

Philosophic thought, in its transcendental direction toward the totality and Origin of meaning, remains bound to cosmic time. Cosmic time is its pre-supposition, and in this time, philosophy is bound to a cosmic order (to be explained later).

Every philosophy which fails to appreciate this limit, necessarily falls into speculative metaphysics. In all its varieties, the latter characteristically seeks the absolute and supra-temporal within the cosmic time-order through the absolutizing of special modes of meaning.

In the above mentioned sense, every form of absolutizing the theoretical-logical function of thought is speculative-metaphysical. A speculative metaphysical character also belongs to the position that the laws of special modal aspects of our cosmos, (e.g. laws of number, space, logic, morality, aesthetics) possess absolute universal validity, even for God. What we have said applies both to the ancient Platonic doctrine of Ideas and to the modern theory of absolute values, the doctrine of ‘truths in themselves’ and ‘Sätze an sich’, and the ‘absolute consciousness’ in Husserl's phenomenology. It is equally applicable to the traditional metaphysical doctrine of the immortal soul (viz. as complex of truly temporal functions!). The modern hypostatization of the ‘Geist’ in the higher (non-sensory) psychical, logical, and post-logical functions of mental acts is also speculative and metaphysical irrespective as to whether this hypostatization unfolds itself in a rationalist or irrationalist sense.

All such speculative and consequently uncritical theories fail

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to appreciate the immanent limits of philosophic thought. They rest upon an absolutizing of modal aspects abstracted by theoretical thought from the temporal coherence of meaning. They disturb the absolutized realm of meaning by ascribing to it the mode of subsistence of Ἀϱχή, regardless of whether this mode of subsistence is thought of as ‘being’ or as non-substantial actuality, or as ‘validity’ and regardless of whether the absolutizing respects the actual-individual subject-side or indeed the cosmonomic side of the special realm of meaning. When we proceed to examine more closely the inseparable coherence of all special aspects of meaning of our temporal cosmos, the inner hollowness of such metaphysical speculations will become completely clear to us.

Calvin's verdict against this metaphysics.

Calvin's judgment: ‘Deus legibus solutus est, sed non exlex’, (‘God is not subject to the laws, but not arbitrary’) touches the foundations of all speculative philosophy by laying bare the limits of human reason set for it by God in His temporal world-order. This is the alpha and omega of all philosophy that strives to adopt a critical position not in name but in fact.

I have laid all emphasis upon the transcendental character of authentic critical philosophy, because I wish to cut off at the root the interference of speculative metaphysics in the affairs of the Christian religion. An authentic critical philosophy is aware of its being bound to the cosmic time-order. It only points beyond and above this boundary line to its pre-supposita. Its task, worthy of God's human creation, is great; yet it is modest and does not elevate human reason to the throne of God.

§ 8 - The transcendental ground-idea of philosophy as cosmonomic idea (wetsidee)

The Origin of this terminology.

From the start, I have introduced the Dutch term wetsidee (idea legis) for the transcendental ground-Idea or basic Idea of philosophy. The best English term corresponding to it seems to be ‘cosmonomic Idea’, since the word ‘law’ used without further specification would evoke a special juridical sense which, of course, cannot be meant here.

This term was formed by me, when I was particularly struck by the fact that different systems of ancient, medieval and modern philosophy (like that of Leibniz) expressly oriented

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philosophic thought to the Idea of a divine world-order, which was qualified as lex naturalis, lex aeterna, harmonia praestabilita, etc.

In this cosmonomic Idea, which implied a transcendental Idea of subjectivity, an apriori position was actually chosen with respect to the transcendental basic problems of philosophic thought.

In the systems we have in mind this cosmonomic Idea was generally conceived of in a large measure in a rationalistic and metaphysical manner. Hence it became a very attractive task to show, that each authentic system of philosophy is actually grounded in a cosmonomic Idea of this or that type, even when its author does not account for it; and the execution of the task intended here was bound to succeed. For it is not possible, that philosophic thought, which is intrinsically subjected to the temporal world-order, should not be burdened with an apriori view as to the origin and totality of meaning of this cosmic order and its correlative subject. And philosophy must have an apriori view with respect to the mutual relation and coherence of the different aspects of meaning in which the divine order and its subject disclose themselves.

Objections against the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’ and the grounds for maintaining it.

Yet it may not be denied, that the choice of the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’ can lead to misunderstanding.

Thus Dr H.G. Stoker, professor of philosophy at the University of Potchefstroom, in his interesting writings, The New Philosophy at the Free University (1933) and The philosophy of the Idea of Creation (1933), thought he had to contrast the cosmonomic Idea as a narrower basic Idea with the Idea of creation as the all-embracing. Later on the famous Dutch philosopher and scientist Dr Philip Kohnstamm joined this opinion after his transition to the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea.

Nevertheless, there are special reasons for maintaining the first term as a designation for the transcendental basic Idea of philosophy. In the first place, in pointing to the preliminary questions of philosophic thought, the basic Idea of philosophy must be so conceived, that it actually catches the eye as a necessary condition for every philosophic system. This implies, that the universal term by which this basic Idea is designated

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may not include special contents derived from the ground-motive of the Christian religion. The determination of the contents of the transcendental basic Idea is to be a subject of subsequent discussion.

A cosmonomic Idea is actually at the basis of every philosophical system. On the other hand, an Idea of creation will be rejected as a transcendental basic Idea of philosophy by each thinker who denies creation, or in any case supposes, that it must be eliminated from philosophic thought.

Besides, if one wants to determine the contents of the Christian basic Idea for philosophic thought, the term ‘Idea of creation’ is certainly insufficient to this end.

For in the central motive of Christian religion, which dominates these contents, the fall and redemption through Jesus Christ in the community of the Holy Ghost also play an essential rôle.

In the second place the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’ has in its favour the fact, that in its pointing to the origin and meaning of the cosmic nomos or order, and to its relation to subjectivity, it gives expression from the outset to the limiting character of the basic transcendental Idea.

For the nomos is, as even Socrates argued in Plato's famous dialogue Philebus, ex origine, limitation of a subject.

Viewed thus, the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’, because of its critical focusing of the preliminary questions concerning meaning (in its origin, totality, and modal diversity) toward the relation of the cosmic order (nomos) and its subject, really designates the central criterion for the fundamental discrimination of the different starting-points and trends in philosophy. In the transcendental basic Idea of cosmic order there runs the boundary line between the immanence-philosophy in all its nuances and the Christian-transcendence position in philosophy. It is here that the criterion for truly transcendental philosophy resides, which recognizes its immanent cosmonomic boundaries, and speculative metaphysics, which supposes it can transgress the latter. Here, within immanence-philosophy is to be found the criterion of rationalism which absolutizes the natural and ethical laws at the expense of individual subjectivity, and irrationalism which, on the contrary, attempts to reduce the nomos to a dependent function of individual creative subjectivity.

Finally the misunderstanding as to the import of the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’ may easily be cut off by a short explanation of its meaning.

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Considered from the linguistic point of view, it may appear to refer only to the nomos-side of the cosmos. However, it actually occupies a position just as much with reference to the subject-side of reality in all its individuality. For the cosmic ‘nomos’ has meaning only in indissoluble correlation with the subject-side of the cosmos.

In other words, the cosmonomic Idea implies the Idea of the subject, which points toward the factual-side of reality according to the basic relation among totality, diversity and coherence of meaning.

For the rest, I can attach no very great value to a discussion about the name that is to be given to the transcendental basic Idea of philosophy. In the last analysis, what matters is not the term, but that which is signified by it.

Let anyone then who has an objection against the term ‘cosmonomic Idea’ avoid it and use the term ‘transcendental ground-Idea’ or ‘transcendental basic Idea’.

In the Netherlands, however, it has become quite current to indicate this whole philosophic movement by the term ‘Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee’ (Philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea)¹.

As yet the question raised especially by Stoker (who otherwise accepts the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea) remains open as to whether created reality is not more than meaning.

1 Translator's Note. The author is referring to a school of philosophy which has developed in the Netherlands and elsewhere, and which was inspired by the publication of the Dutch edition of this work in 1935-36. This school has already exerted influence in Holland and special chairs devoted to the study of the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea have been established at the Universities of Utrecht, Leiden, Groningen, at the School of Economics in Rotterdam, and the Technical School at Delft.
D.H.F.

Misunderstanding of the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea as meaning-idealism.

Here there is the threat of a possible misunderstanding to the effect that the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea, in its concentration upon the problem of meaning might drift into the water of an ‘idealism of meaning’ (Stoker). In this context, I am not yet able to cut off this serious misunderstanding by the roots. To this end it is first necessary to confront our conception of meaning with that of immanence-philosophy.

From the start, however, our inquiries should make clear the ultimate character of meaning as the mode of reality of the

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whole of creation, which finds no rest in itself. Meaning-idealism, as we are able to note it, for example, in Rickert, issues from a distinction between meaning (Sinn) ascribed to reality subjectively by the absolutized transcendental consciousness by means of reference to values (‘Wertbeziehung’), and reality as such that is meaningless in itself. But Rickert views ‘reality’ only in the abstract sense of its psycho-physical aspects. From our point of view, meaning is universally proper to all created things as their restless mode of existence. As meaning, reality points toward its Origin, the Creator, without Whom the creature sinks into nothingness.

It is objected, that meaning cannot live, act, or move. But is not this life, this action, this movement, with respect to the mode of existence of created reality, itself meaning, pointing beyond itself, not coming to rest in itself? Only God's Being is not meaning, because He alone exists by and through Himself.

Hence, even the totality of meaning, which transcends philosophic thought, necessarily has its correlate in the Being of the Ἀϱχή and in every transcendental basic Idea a position is taken with reference to this Ἀϱχή.

In fact, nobody who speaks about modal aspects of reality, or even about concrete things, can understand them otherwise than in their meaning, that is in their relative mode of reality which points to their temporal coherence, to a totality in the root, and to the Origin of all relative things. If the pre-logical aspects of temporal reality were not aspects of meaning, standing in relation to the logical aspect, then thought could not even form a concept of them.

Such is the preliminary justification of our terminology.

Cosmonomic Idea, modal concept of laws and modal concept of subject and object.

The special modal concepts of laws and of subject and object used in the different branches of science depend upon the cosmonomic Idea in its broad import, including the transcendental Idea of subjectivity and objectivity.

The modal concepts of laws and of subject and object are essentially limited to a special aspect. Unlike the cosmonomic Idea, these modal concepts do not in themselves point beyond the diversity of meaning toward the transcendent origin and totality. But, whatever special meaning these concepts may possess, according to the modal aspects of reality comprehended by

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theoretical thought, they are always dependent upon a cosmonomic Idea.

The dependence of the modal concepts of law, subject and object upon the cosmonomic Idea.

In pure mathematics, for example, the logicistic trend conceives of the numerical and spatial laws as purely analytical, and the series of real numbers is considered to be continuous by reason of the logical continuity of the principle of progression; this concept of mathematical laws is grounded on a cosmonomic Idea of a logicist and rationalist type. The mechanist trend in biology conceives of the special laws of organic life merely as physical-chemical ones; this concept of biotic law is entirely dependent on a cosmonomic Idea founded upon the deterministic Humanist ideal of science in its classical form.

In the so-called ‘reine Rechtslehre’ (pure theory of law) of the neo-Kantian scholar Hans Kelsen, the legal rule is identified with a logical judgment in the form: ‘If a... there ought to be b’ and the juridical subject and its subjective right are dissolved into a logical complex of legal rules; this juridical concept of law is grounded on a cosmonomic Idea of a dualistic Humanistic type: according to this Idea there is an unbridgeable gulf between two ultimate kinds of laws, namely natural laws and norms, originating from fundamentally different logical categories of transcendental thought which ‘create’ the scientific fields of research. This dualistic cosmonomic Idea is ruled by the dialectical ground-motive of nature and freedom in a typical antithetic conception which, however, does not agree with the genuine Kantian view.

Besides, it may be observed, that the three special scientific concepts of laws, mentioned above, are of a rationalistic type: the subject-side of reality within the special modal aspects is reduced to the nomos-side.

The laws of the special aspects concerned in biological and juridical investigation are conceived of in a purely functionalistic sense. There is no room here for typical laws corresponding to the structures of individuality¹. This, too, finds its ground in

1 In pure mathematics the typical structures of individuality are, of course, not yet in order, because typical numerical and spatial relations are to be found only in concrete reality.
Nevertheless, the question concerning the relation between the law-side and the subject-side of the numerical and spatial aspects cannot be eliminated in pure mathematics. Numbers and spatial figures are subject to their proper laws, and they may not be identified with or reduced to the latter. This distinction is the subject of the famous problem concerning the so-called ‘actual infinity’ in pure mathematics. The principle of progression is a mathematical law which holds good for an infinite series of numbers or spatial figures. But the infinite itself cannot be made into an actual number.

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the cosmonomic Idea which lies at the base of these special scientific concepts.

We shall return to this state of affairs in a later context.

§ 9 - The symbol of the refraction of light. The cosmic order of time and the cosmological principle of sovereignty in its proper orbit. The modal aspects of reality as modal law-spheres

Now what positive content does the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophy receive from the central motive of the Christian religion?

The Archimedean point of philosophy is chosen in the new root of mankind in Christ, in which by regeneration we have part in our reborn selfhood.

The lex as boundary between the ‘Being’ of God and the ‘meaning’ of the creation.

The totality of meaning of our whole temporal cosmos is to be found in Christ, with respect to His human nature, as the root of the reborn human race. In Him the heart, out of which are the issues of life, confesses the Sovereignty of God, the Creator, over everything created. In Christ the heart bows under the lex (in its central religious unity and its temporal diversity, which originates in the Creator's holy will), as the universal boundary (which cannot be transgressed) between the Being of God and the meaning of His creation¹. The transcendent

1 From the theological side some have raised an objection against the conception of the lex as the boundary between God and the creation. This objection can arise only from a misunderstanding. The term ‘boundary’ merely intends to indicate an essential distinction between God and the creature with respect to their relation to the lex.
As sovereign Origin, God is not subjected to the law. On the contrary this subjectedness is the very characteristic of all that which has been created, the existence of which is limited and determined by the law. Christ Jesus also, with respect to His human nature, was under the law, but not with respect to His Divine nature.
But if every creature is under the law, then the limit which the latter sets for the creature's existence can never be transgressed.
Calvin has expressed the same conception as to the relationship of God to the law in his earlier quoted statement ‘Deus legibus solutus est, sed non exlex’; in which he intended at the same time to refute any notion that God's sovereignty is despotic arbitrariness.

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totality of meaning of our cosmos exists only in the religious relation of dependence upon the absolute Being of God. It is thus no eidos in the sense of the speculative Platonic metaphysics, no being set by itself, but it remains in the ex-sistential mode of meaning which points beyond itself and is not sufficient to itself.

Sin is the revolt against the Sovereign of our cosmos. It is the apostasy from the fulness of meaning and the deifying, the absolutizing of meaning, to the level of God's Being. Our temporal world, in its temporal diversity and coherence of meaning, is in the order of God's creation bound to the religious root of mankind. Apart from this root it has no meaning and so no reality. Hence the apostasy in the heart, in the religious root of the temporal world signified the apostasy of the entire temporal creation, which was concentrated in mankind.

Thus the disruption of the fall permeated all temporal aspects of meaning of cosmic reality. There is no single one of them that is excepted in this respect, neither the pre-logical aspects of temporal reality, nor the logical, nor the post-logical ones.

This becomes evident, as soon as we have seen, that they are fitted by the cosmic time-order in an indissoluble coherence of meaning which is related to a radical religious unity. The semblance of the contrary can only originate, when we have lost sight of this coherence.

The logical function of thought in apostasy.

In this context the Biblical conception must be especially maintained against every effort to exempt the logical function from the fall. For in every effort in this direction Christian thought leaves open a wide door of entry to the dialectical ground-motives of immanence-philosophy. We shall return to this point in a later context.

By the fall of man, human thought (νοῦς), according to St Paul's word, has become νοῦς τῆς σαϱϰός, the ‘carnal mind’ (Colos. II:18), for it does not exist apart from its apostate religious root. And thought includes its logical function.

Of course the logical laws of thought or the modal structural law of the logical aspect are not affected by sin. The effects of

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apostasy disclose themselves only in the subjective activity of thought, which is subjected to these laws. In the apostate attitude, we are continually inclined to make the logical aspect of meaning independent, and to set it apart from its coherence with all other modal aspects, which implies a lack of appreciation of its modal boundaries.

The re-formation of the cosmonomic Idea by the central motive of the Christian religion.

From the Christian starting-point the cosmonomic Idea of our philosophy obtains the following contents: To the ultimate transcendental question: What is the Ἀϱχή of the totality and the modal diversity of meaning of our cosmos with respect to the cosmonomic side and its correlate, the subject-side? it answers: the sovereign holy will of God the Creator, who has revealed Himself in Christ. To the second transcendental question, with respect to its cosmonomic-side: What is the totality of meaning of all modal aspects of the cosmic order, their supra-temporal unity beyond all modal diversity of meaning? it answers: the requirement grounded in God's sovereignty, of the love and service of God and our fellow-creatures with our whole heart. To the same question, with respect to its subject-side, it answers: the new religious root of the human race in Christ (in which, indeed, nothing of our created universe can be lost) in subjection to the fulness of meaning of the divine law. To the third transcendental question: What is the mutual relation between the modal aspects of reality? it answers: sphere-sovereignty, that is to say: mutual irreducibility, yet in the all-sided cosmic coherence of the different aspects of meaning, as this is regulated in God's temporal order of the world, in a cosmic order of time.

In order to bring this cosmonomic Idea, in its theoretical focusing upon the modal aspects of meaning of our cosmos, nearer to the vision of those not schooled in philosophy, I use a very old symbol, which of course should not be interpreted in a physical sense.

The light of the sun is refracted through a prism, and this refraction is perceived by the eye of sense in the seven well-known colours of the spectrum. In themselves all colours are dependent refractions of the unrefracted light, and none of them can be regarded as an integral of the colour-differentiation. Further, not one of the seven colours is capable of existing in the spectrum apart from the coherence with the rest,

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and by the interception of the unrefracted light the entire play of colours vanishes into nothing.

The unrefracted light is the time-transcending totality of meaning of our cosmos with respect to its cosmonomic side and its subject-side. As this light has its origin in the source of light, so the totality of meaning of our cosmos has its origin in its Ἀϱχή through whom and to whom it has been created.

The prism that achieves the refraction of colour is cosmic time, through which the religious fulness of meaning is broken up into its temporal modal aspects of meaning.

As the seven colours do not owe their origin to one another, so the temporal aspects of meaning in face of each other have sphere-sovereignty or modal irreducibility.

In the religious fulness of meaning, there is but one law of God, just as there is but one sin against God, and one mankind which has sinned in Adam.

But under the boundary line of time this fulness of meaning with reference to its cosmonomic-side as well as to its subject-side separates, like the sunlight through the prism, into a rich variation of modal aspects of meaning. Each modal aspect is sovereign in its own sphere, and each aspect in its modal structure reflects the fulness of meaning in its own modality.

The modal spheres of laws and their sphere-sovereignty.

Every modal aspect of temporal reality has its proper sphere of laws, irreducible to those of other modal aspects, and in this sense it is sovereign in its own orbit, because of its irreducible modality of meaning.

The acceptance of the basic philosophic principle of modal sphere-sovereignty consequently has an indissoluble coherence with the Christian transcendence-standpoint ruled by the religious ground-motive of creation, fall into sin, and redemption.

The immanence-standpoint is incompatible with this cosmonomic principle.

This incompatibility is not due to an inability of immanence-philosophy to recognize, that the totality and deeper unity of meaning must transcend its modal diversity, and that the modal aspects which it admits as such cannot originate from one another.

For every scientific thinker must necessarily distinguish diffe-

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rent modal aspects of temporal reality, and guard against jumbling them together.

However, we have seen in our transcendental critique of theoretic thought, that the immanence-standpoint must necessarily lead to an absolutizing of the logical function of thought, or to an absolutizing of a special theoretical synthesis.

The theoretically abstracted modal aspect which is chosen as the basic denominator for all the others or for a part of them, is torn out of the inter-modal coherence of meaning of temporal reality. It is treated as independent and elevated to the status of an ἀϱχή which transcends meaning. This occurs whether or not the thinker realizes it. Over against this unrestricted sovereign authority, the remaining aspects of meaning of our cosmos are unable to validate any sphere-sovereignty. Mathematical logicism will admit only logical realms of thought with relative autonomy. Psychologism allows only psychological realms (whether or not understood transcendentally) which are not reducible to one another¹; historicism accepts only different realms of historical development, etc. etc.². If the thinker has become aware of the implacable antithesis in his hidden religious starting-point, his philosophic system will exhibit an overt dualism. Instead of one single basic denominator there will be chosen two of them, which will be conceived of in an antithetic relation. The transcendental ground-Idea in all its three directions will disclose the dualistic character of the religious basic motive without any attempt to bridge this dualism. But in this case, too, there will be no acceptance of a modal sphere-sovereignty of the different aspects and their proper law-spheres.

Because of the choice of its Archimedean point immanence-philosophy is forced to construct various absolutizations of modal aspects. In our analysis of the modal structures of the different spheres of laws, we shall show why these absolutizations can seemingly be carried out. On the immanence standpoint, now, the Christian starting-point may be reproached conversely with an absolutizing of religious meaning. But this objection, upon somewhat deeper reflection, is not tenable even on the standpoint of immanence-philosophy.

1 See e.g. the typical instance of Heymans' psycho-monism with its elaboration on all realms of meaning of our cosmos. Einführung in die Metaphysik (Introduction into metaphysics), p. 33ff. and pp. 334ff.

2 Cf. Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the Occident).

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Christian religion does not allow of any absolutizing with respect to its fulness of meaning.

In the first place, the Christian religion, by virtue of its fulness of meaning, does not admit of any absolutizing: it is religio, i.e. connection between the meaning of creation and the Being of the Ἀϱχή, the two of which may not be brought on the same level.

He who tries to make the religious totality of meaning independent of its Archè, becomes guilty of a contradiction in terms. But any one who should contend, that at any rate God is absolutized does not know, what he says.

In the second place, there is usually at the basis of the said reproach the confusion between the temporal meaning of the faith-aspect, which is actually contained within a modal sphere, and the fulness of meaning of religion, which transcends the boundary of cosmic time and cannot possibly be enclosed in a modality of meaning.

Let it be borne in mind, finally, that also unsuspected opponents of the Christian transcendence-standpoint in philosophy, such as Heinrich Rickert, admit, that religion within its fulness of sense does not tolerate a coordination with special realms of meaning as law, morality, science and so on. It can hardly be denied, that the view of religion as an ‘autonomous categorial realm of thought’ destroys its meaning. On the other hand, the contention, that a recognition of necessary religious pre-suppositions of philosophical thought would destroy the meaning of this latter, ought to be demonstrated more stringently by immanence philosophers. Their (religious) confession of the self-sufficiency of theoretic reason is not sufficient in this respect.

Sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects in their inter-modal coherence of meaning as a philosophical basic problem.

As a transcendental basic principle the sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects therefore stands in indissoluble connection with our transcendental Ideas of the Origin and of the totality and radical unity of meaning. Moreover, this principle is indissolubly linked up with our transcendental Idea of cosmic time. For this latter implies, as we have seen, a cosmic coherence of meaning among the modal aspects of temporal reality. And this coherence is regulated, not by philosophic thought, but by the divine temporal world-order.

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It is, however, a highly remarkable state of affairs which is disclosed in the sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects of meaning. For it might appear, as if sphere-sovereignty were incompatible with the inter-modal coherence of meaning guaranteed by the cosmic order of time.

In fact there is hidden a philosophic basic problem of the first rank, which cannot be solved, before our general theory of the modal structures in the second volume has been developed.

In the present context we can say only, that the key to this solution is to be found in the modal structure of the different aspects, which is of a cosmonomic character.

The same cosmic time-order which guarantees the modal sphere-sovereignty does in fact also guarantee the inter-modal coherence of meaning between the modal aspects and their spheres of laws.

Potentiality and actuality in cosmic time.

We have said in an earlier context, that all structures of temporal reality are structures of cosmic time. As structural laws they are founded in cosmic time-order and are principles of temporal potentiality or possibility. In their realization in individual things or events they have time-duration and actuality as transitory factual structures.

Everything that has real existence, has many more potentialities than are actualized. Potentiality itself resides in the factual subject-side; its principle, on the contrary, in the cosmonomic-side of time. The factual subject-side is always connected with individuality (actual as well as potential), which can never be reduced to a general rule. But it remains bound to its structural laws, which determine its margin or latitude of possibilities.

Cosmic time and the refraction of meaning. Why can the totality of meaning disclose itself in time only in refraction and coherence of modalities?

Prof. Dr H.G. Stoker, and lately also Prof. Dr Ph. Kohnstamm¹ have raised the question, why it should be precisely

1 Prof. Dr Ph.A. Kohnstamm, in his essay, Pedagogy, Personalism, and Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea (in the anniversary papers in honour of Prof. Dr J. Waterink, Amsterdam 1951), pp. 96f., in which the author, an outstanding Dutch thinker who died shortly thereafter, made known for the first time his adherence to the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea. He had a reservation, however, so far as the conception of time was concerned.
This hangs together with his thought, in itself altogether correct, that the Bible ascribes not even to God any supra-temporality in the Greek metaphysical sense. But the conception of the supra-temporal defended by myself is radically different from the Greek, as I have previously established with emphasis.

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in cosmic time that the totality of meaning is refracted into coherent modal aspects. The reason is, in my opinion, that the fulness of meaning, as totality and radical unity, is not actually given and cannot be actually given in time, though all temporal meaning refers beyond itself to its supra-temporal fulfilment.

It is the very signification of cosmic time in its correlation of order and duration to be successive refraction of meaning into coherent modal aspects.

Sphere-sovereignty of modal aspects and their modal spheres of laws makes no sense in the fulness and radical unity of meaning.

In the religious fulness of meaning love, wisdom, justice, power, beauty, etc. coincide in a radical unity. We begin to understand something of this state of affairs in the concentration of our heart upon the Cross of Christ. But this radical unity of the different modalities is impossible in time considered as successive refraction of meaning.

Hence, every philosophy that tries to dissolve this totality of meaning into Ideas of reason, or absolute values, always ensnares itself in antinomies by which the cosmic order of time avenges itself on theoretic thought which tries to transgress its boundaries.

The logical function is not relative in a logical but in a cosmic sense.

Also the attempt to approximate cosmic time otherwise than in a limiting concept must necessarily lead to antinomies, because cosmic time is the very pre-supposition of the concept. With regard to its fundamental analytic aspect the concept is necessarily discontinuous, and is incapable of comprehending the cosmic continuity of time, which exceeds the modal boundaries of its aspects. The logical function in its modal speciality of meaning is indeed relative, but its relativity is not itself of a logical, but of a cosmonomic temporal character. If philosophy should attempt to interpret the cosmonomic coherence of

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meaning in a dialectical-logical sense, it must begin in each case with a logical relativizing of the fundamental principles of logic, and thereby sanction the antinomy.

The elimination of cosmic time-order in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

By the hypostatization of ‘theoretical reason’ as the self-sufficient Archimedean point of philosophy, the cosmic order of time is eliminated from philosophic thought, particularly from epistemology. In this way the critical basic question of all philosophy, namely: How is it itself possible? is relegated to the background. This elimination was also a source of subjectivism in the development of philosophic thought.

Kant's so-called Copernican revolution in epistemology (or, should one accept Heidegger's interpretation of Kant, which in our opinion is by no means convincing, - in ‘ontology’) is the direct proof of the impossibility of a truly critical critique of theoretic reason apart from a transcendental insight into the cosmic order of time. In his Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik § 4 (W.W. Cass. IV, p. 23) the philosopher of Königsberg writes of The Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Diese Arbeit is schwer und erfordert einen entschlossenen Leser, sich nach und nach in ein System hinein zu denken, das noch nichts als Gegeben zum Grunde legt, auszer die Vernunft selbst’ (I italicize) ‘und also, ohne sich auf irgendein Faktum zu stützen, die Erkenntnis aus ihren ursprünglichen Keimen zu entwickeln sucht’¹.

What the reader is asked to do here is simply an abdication from the preliminary questions of critical thought. ‘Theoretic reason’, according to Kant's transcendental conception a manifest product of theoretical abstraction, should be accepted as given. The question as to how philosophic thought is possible is thereby cut off. For the cosmic order of time, by which the relations of meaning of this thought are guaranteed, is lost sight of.

1 Kant's Prolegomena to every future Metaphysics (Works, Cass. Ed. IV, p. 23).
[‘This work is difficult and requires a resolute reader to think his way gradually into a system, which sets at its foundation nothing as given except reason itself, and thus, without supporting itself upon any fact, seeks to develop knowledge from its original seeds.’]

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§ 10 - The importance of our cosmonomic idea in respect to the modal concepts of laws and their subjects

Modal concepts of the lex and of its subject. The subject as subject to laws.

Through the cosmonomic Idea grounded in the Christian starting-point which we have set at the basis of our philosophic thought, the concepts of laws and their subjects, with which we shall operate further in their modal speciality of meaning, acquire their pregnant content. We have seen, that in this transcendental ground-Idea the lex is recognized as originating from God's holy creative sovereignty, and as the absolute boundary between the Being of the Ἀϱχή and the meaning of everything created as ‘subject’, subjected to a law.

Consequently, this transcendental meaning of the relation between the divine law and its subject will find expression in every concept of a modal aspect with respect to its special cosmonomic- and its special subject-side.

The fundamental importance of this conception will disclose itself in the second and the third volumes of this work.

In the present context I must remind the reader emphatically of my earlier explanation, that the subject-side of cosmic time implies the subject-object relation which we have discussed provisionally in connection with naïve experience.

The question whether this cosmic relation finds expression in all of the modal aspects or in a part of them only, cannot be investigated before the development of our general theory of the modal structures of the aspects and their modal law-spheres.

In every case I must establish the fact that in every modal aspect where this relation is to be found, the subject-side embraces both the subjective and the objective functions, which temporal reality discloses in this aspect.

The disturbance of the meaning of the concepts of the modal laws and their subjects in the Humanistic immanence-philosophy.

In the Humanistic immanence-philosophy, in its rationalistic as well as in its irrationalistic trends, this concept of the modal subject in its relation to the modal laws has been entirely lost and must necessarily be lost - to the incalculable injury of the philosophic analysis of reality.

The subject becomes sovereign - either in the metaphysical

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sense of ‘substance’ (noumenon), or in a transcendental logical or phenomenological sense.

In Kant's ‘theoretical’ philosophy, for example, the subject is only subject in an epistemological sense, and as such ἀϱχή of the form of the theoretical laws of nature; the ‘transcendental subject’ is itself the law-giver of nature in a transcendental-logical sense.

The pre-psychical aspects of reality were, after the destruction of the traditional metaphysics of nature, dissolved into a synthesis of logical and sensory functions of consciousness; their modal structural-laws were replaced by a-priori transcendental forms of theoretical understanding and of subjective sensibility in an apriori synthesis.

That numbers, spatial figures, energy-effects and biotic functions are really modal subjects, subjected to the laws of their own modal spheres, is a conception far removed from modern immanence-philosophy.

In Kant's so-called ‘practical’ philosophy, the subject in the metaphysical sense of homo noumenon (pure will) becomes the autonomous law-giver for moral life. In accordance with the dualistic conception of his transcendental ground-Idea he does not accept a radical unity of the order of creation above the polar opposition between laws of nature and norms.

Two features typify the theoretical concept of the subject in immanence-philosophy, since it gave up the earlier metaphysics of nature.

1 - It is conceived only in the special sense of the epistemological and ethical functions of consciousness. The empirical things and events are taken into consideration only as objects of sensory perception and of theoretical or practical thought. This was the necessary consequence of the resolution of so-called ‘empirical’ reality into the logical and psychical aspects of consciousness abstracted by theoretical thought from the cosmic temporal coherence of meaning. This resolution was attended by the elimination of the cosmic order of time, and by the proclamation of the so-called critical ‘Satz des Bewustseins’, to be discussed later on, according to which the possibility of our knowledge is limited to our subjective and objective contents of consciousness, received merely by sensory perception and formed by logical apperception.

2 - In this view, the subject lacks its original meaning of

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‘sujet’, being subjècted to a law which does not originate from this subject itself. In the last analysis, in its function as a ‘transcendental subject’ or ‘ideal subject’ respectively, it has received the crown of autonomous, self-sufficient law-giver in accordance with the Humanistic ideals of science and of personality (to be discussed later).

In the classical rationalist conception, the empirical subject is reduced to a complex of causal relations by which it should be completely determined.

The ‘laws’ are identified here with the ‘objective’. Consequently the empirical subject is conceived of as an ‘object’, which in its turn is identified with ‘Gegenstand’ of the ultimate ‘transcendental subject of thought’.

Modern so-called ‘realistic’ positivism understands the concept of the lex (in relation to norms as well as to the so-called laws of nature) in the sense of a scientific judgment of probability. Here, too, this concept is completely dissociated from the modal structures of the different spheres of laws and from the typical structures of individuality, which are founded in the cosmic time-order.

This positivism conceives of laws as ‘autonomous’ products of scientific thought, which tries to order by way of a ‘logical economy’ the ‘facts’, understood as merely sensory data.

Quite different from the rationalist concepts of the laws and their subjects are those of the irrationalist trends of Humanistic thought.

Rationalism as absolutizing of the general rule, irrationalism as absolutizing of individual subjectivity.

We have seen in an earlier context, that the rationalist types of immanence-philosophy tend to dissolve the individual subjectivity into a universally valid order of laws, the origin of which is sought in sovereign reason.

The irrationalist Humanistic types did not tamper with the conception of the ‘laws’ as a product of thought or reason, but fell into the opposite extreme of seeing in this ‘theoretical order’ merely a pragmatical falsification of true reality. The latter in its creative subjective individuality, is not bound to universally valid laws and mocks at all ‘concepts of thought’. Thus the absolutizing of the laws in the rationalist types is replaced by the absolutizing of the subjective individuality in

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the irrationalist types of the Humanistic immanence-philosophy. This irrationalism is ruled by an irrationalist turn of the freedom-motive.

The concept of the subject in the irrationalistic phenomenology and philosophy of existence.

As a typical phenomenon in the philosophy of most recent times, we point to the conceptions of subject and selfhood in the modern irrationalist trend in phenomenology (Scheler), and in the philosophy of existence (Heidegger, and a number of others).

Here the reproach is made against Kant, that he still conceived of selfhood or ‘personality’ as law-giving subject in substantial terms and consequently did not yet penetrate to the pure actuality of the selfhood.

As Heidegger expresses it in his Being and Time (1927, a Reprint from Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 8, p. 320): ‘For the ontological concept of the subject does not characterize the selfhood of the Ego qua self, but the sameness and constancy of something already extant. To determine the Ego ontologically as Subject, means to estimate it as something already extant. The being of the Ego is understood as the reality of the res cogitans (thinking substance)’¹.

Scheler also in his standard work, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and the Material Ethics of Value, 3rd Ed., 1927, p. 397ff.), in a manner that leaves nothing to be desired as to clarity, has qualified personality as ‘pure actuality’ which as such is transcendent to the cosmos as ‘world of things’ (resolved into the abstract physical-psychical aspects of temporal reality!).

In discussing ‘the place of man in the cosmos’ we shall find occasion to enter more closely into these conceptions. We shall see that the actuality which is brought again so sharply to the fore by modern phenomenological thought, does not stand in opposition to subjectivity, but rather constitutes its very kernel. In other words, it belongs in all modal aspects of our cosmos

1 Heidegger: Sein und Zeit, p. 320: ‘Denn der ontologische Begriff des Subjects charakterisiert nicht die Selbstheit des Ich qua Selbst, sondern die Selbigkeit und Beständigkeit eines immer schon vorhandenen. Das Ich ontologisch als Subject bestimmen, besagt es als ein immer schon Vorhandenes ansetzen. Das Sein des Ich wird verstanden als Realität der res cogitans.’

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(even the pre-logical) to the subject-functions (functioning in them) with respect to their meaning. For the entire conception to the effect that temporal reality should be something statically given, a fixed ‘Vorhandenes’, rests upon a fundamental failure to appreciate the dynamic character of reality in the whole coherence of its different modal aspects. In our view, this dynamic character is guaranteed by the mode of ex-sistence of all created things as meaning, finding no rest in itself, and by the opening-process of temporal reality which will be explained in vols. II and III.

On the other hand Scheler as well as Heidegger accept the static conception of reality with respect to the ‘given world of things’ and do reject this conception only as to ‘free personality’ or ‘free human existence’ respectively.

From this very view of the concept of the subject and of the ‘Dingwelt’ in general, it appears, that also modern phenomenology and Humanistic existentialism move in the paths of immanence-philosophy. By choosing their Archimedean point in the ‘transcendentally purified actual consciousness’ or in ‘existential thought’, respectively, they make the ‘transcendental ego’ sovereign.

It is the Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom whose dialectical character is responsible for the different conceptions of the laws and their subjects hitherto discussed.

The concept of the lex and the subject in ancient Greek thought and its dependence on the Greek form-matter-motive.

Quite different from the Humanistic conceptions of the lex and the subject were those of ancient Greek thought, dominated by the form-matter-motive in its original religious sense. The modern concept of causal natural law, as well as the modern concept of the autonomous subject, conceived in the Kantian sense of law-giver, are unknown here.

At the outset, under the primacy of the matter-motive, the law of nature has the juridical sense of justice (dikè): every individual form must be dissolved into ‘matter’ according to a standard of proportionality. This dikè is conceived of as an Anangkè, an unescapable fate to which the form-things are subjected.

Under the primacy of the form-motive of the later culture-religion the concept of the law in its general sense of order assumes a teleological sense in respect to all ‘natural subjects’.

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This conception is introduced by Socrates and elaborated in a metaphysical way by Plato and Aristotle. It was opposed to the extreme Sophistic view of the purely conventional character of the nomos in human society and the complete lack of laws in ‘nature’ as a stream of flowing becoming.

In Aristotle's Metaphysics the subject is identified with ‘substance’, composed of form and matter. Natural law rules the striving of every matter to its proper substantial form. In Plato's Philebus, the natural law is conceived of as the peras, setting a limit to the apeiron, the formless stream of becoming, which thereby receives the character of a genesis eis ousian, a becoming to being. This Pythagorean conception is maintained also with respect to ethical law.

Just as the Humanistic motive of nature and freedom, the Greek form-matter-motive, in view of its dialectical character, could never lead philosophic thought to a transcendental cosmonomic Idea in which the divine law was conceived in its radical religious unity. For the same reason there was no room here for a radical unity of the human subject above all of its temporal functions in their modal diversity. The transcendental Idea of the origin, too, remains bound to the polar dualism of matter and form. It lacks the integral character founded in the Biblical creation-motive. Therefore, according to the Greek conception, the subject can never be viewed as ‘sujet’, subjected to divine law in the integral Biblical sense. In Plato and Aristotle the teleological law of the form-principle finds its original opposite in the 'Anangkè of the matter-principle. At the utmost, ‘natural law’ in its Greek sense, is conceived of as a subjective participation of the rational material substances in divine thought, as the origin of all cosmic forms. But this conception is, properly speaking, rather a Thomistic interpretation of the original Aristotelian view.

Finally, the Christian-scholastic concepts of the lex and the subject in the modal diversity of meaning, are dominated by the dialectical ground-motive of nature and grace. They rest upon an accommodation of the Greek or the Humanistic conceptions, respectively, to the Christian ones. We shall return to this scholastic view in the first part of this volume in the explanation of the rise of Humanistic thought.