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

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Chapter II
Philosophy and life- and world-view

§ 1 - The antithetic position of the philosophy of the cosmonomic idea in respect to the immanence-philosophy and the postulate of the historical continuity in philosophical thought contained in the idea of the ‘philosophia perennis’

The philosophy of the cosmonomic idea requires, as we have seen, a radical self-critique on the part of those who engage in philosophic inquiry.

By its transcendental critique of theoretic thought it leads to the discovery of a radical antithesis between the transcendental ground-Idea of a philosophy which is entirely ruled by the central motive of the Christian religion, and that of immanence-philosophy in all its various trends. This antithesis may not be bridged by any compromise and runs along a line of separation entirely different from what has hitherto been supposed.

The necessity of this radical break with the immanence-standpoint could not be understood, before our transcendental critique had laid bare the all-controlling position of the transcendental ground-Idea in respect to the inner development and direction of philosophic thought.

Genuine Christian philosophy requires a radical rejection of the supra-theoretical pre-suppositions and ‘axioms’ of immanence-philosophy in all its forms. It has to seek its own philosophic paths, prescribed by its proper transcendental ground-Idea. It cannot permit itself to accept within its own cadre of thought problems of immanence-philosophy which originate from the dialectic ground-motives of the latter.

The basis of cooperation between Christian thought and the different trends of immanence-philosophy.

Nevertheless, this radical rupture with the starting-points and transcendental ground-Ideas of immanence-philosophy does

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not mean, that an intrinsically re-formed Christian philosophy should intend to break off philosophical contact with Greek, scholastic, and modern Humanistic philosophy. On the contrary, because of its radical-critical standpoint, the Christian philosophy developed in this work is enabled to enter into the most inward contact with immanence-philosophy. It will never break the community of philosophical thought with the other philosophical trends, because it has learned to make a sharp distinction between philosophical judgments and the supra-theoretic prejudices which lay the foundation of every possible philosophy. The danger of breaking this community of thought is, as we saw in an earlier context, always caused by the philosophical dogmatism, which makes its religious pre-suppositions into theoretic ‘axioms’, and makes the acceptance of the latter the necessary condition for philosophical discussion.

Meanwhile, the question remains: On what basis can philosophical trends, differing radically in their religious ground-motive and their transcendental ground-Idea, cooperate within the framework of one and the same philosophical task? What can be the common basis for this cooperation? As regards this point we will in the first place consider a popular argument against the entire Idea of a Christian science and philosophy, an argument which could just as well be raised against the general result of our transcendental critique of theoretical thought focused in the thesis, that theoretical thought is always dependent upon a religious ground-motive.

A popular argument against the possibility of Christian science and philosophy.

The popular argument, referred to here, runs as follows: 2 × 2 = 4, no matter whether a Christian or a heathen passes this judgment.

Doubtless, this argument is a poor affair, if it should be brought up against the results of our transcendental critique of theoretic thought. Nevertheless, at the same time it draws our attention to undeniable states of affairs that must necessarily form the basis for a cooperation of the different philosophical schools and trends in the accomplishment of a common task. Let us for a moment consider these two aspects of the argument more closely.

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Partial truths are not self-sufficient. Every partial truth is dependent upon truth in its totality of meaning.

The propositions: 2 × 2 = 4 is not ‘true in itself’, but only in the context of the laws of number and the logical laws of thought. This context is, as we have seen, possible only in the all-sided coherence of meaning of all modal law-spheres and supposes a totality of meaning of which both the numerical and the logical aspects are special modal refractions in cosmic time. There exists no partial truth which is sufficient to itself. Partial theoretical truth is truth only in the coherence of the theoretical truths, and this coherence in its relativity pre-supposes the fulness or the totality of truth.

Consequently, also the philosophical view of the mutual relation and coherence of the numerical and the logical aspects - and thereby of the modal meaning of number and of logical concepts - is influenced from the start by the transcendental ground-Idea of philosophical thought and by the religious ground-motive which determines its content.

The undeniable states of affairs in the structures of temporal reality.

On the other hand, however, it must of course be granted, that the judgment 2 × 2 = 4 refers to a state of affairs in the numerical relations which is independent of the subjective theoretical view and its supra-theoretical pre-suppositions. Not in the sense, however, that this ‘state of affairs’ is a ‘truth in itself’ and has an ‘absolute validity’. For just like the proposition by which it is established, this ‘state of affairs’ is dependent upon the cosmic order of time and the inter-modal coherence of meaning guaranteed by the latter. It has no meaning outside of this temporal order.

Nevertheless, it is founded in this order, and not in a theoretical view of the numerical aspect and its modal laws. Well then, this cosmic order with all temporal laws and structural states of affairs founded in it, is, indeed, the same for every thinker, no matter whether he is a Christian, a pagan or a Humanist. Structural states of affairs, as soon as they are discovered, force themselves upon everybody, and it does not make sense to deny them. It is the common task of all philosophic schools and trends to account for them in a philosophic way, that is to say in the light of a transcendental ground-Idea. They must learn from one

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another, even from fundamental mistakes made in the theoretical interpretations of the laws and the structural states of affairs founded in the temporal order of our cosmos. Immanence-philosophy can discover many states of affairs which had up to now been neglected in a philosophy directed by an intrinsically Christian transcendental ground-Idea, and vice versa.

In the philosophical effort to account for them in the context of a theoretical view of totality, there may be a noble competition between all philosophical trends without discrimination. We do not claim a privileged position for the Christian philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea in this respect. For even the Christian ground-motive and the content of our transcendental ground-Idea determined by it, do not give security against fundamental mistakes in the accomplishment of our philosophical task. On the contrary, for the very reason that in the Christian ground-motive the fall into sin is an essential factor, the possibility is excluded that a veritable Christian philosophy should lay claim to infallibility in the respect. The danger of ascribing infallibility to results of philosophic investigation is much greater on the immanence-standpoint, especially on the Humanistic, insofar as it seeks the ultimate standard of truth in theoretic thought itself. We shall return to this point presently in the discussion of the problem of truth.

The Idea of the perennial philosophy.

Meanwhile, there remains another objection against our conception concerning the radical antithesis between the Christian and the immanence-standpoint in philosophy, an objection which is not yet entirely refuted by our previous argument. For the question may be raised, what then is left - in the cadre of our philosophy - of the time-honoured Idea concerning the ‘philosophia perennis’ which even modern Thomistic thought, in its relative isolation, zealously maintains?

By adopting an antithetic attitude against the entire immanence-philosophy in its evolution from Greek thought to the latest time, is not, for an authentically Christian philosophy, all connection with the historical development of philosophic thought cut off? That is to say, does not the latter place itself outside this historical development? If this were really so, then at once the sentence of doom would be pronounced over the attempt undertaken in this work at a reformation of philosophic

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thought from the Christian point of view. Reformation is not creation out of nothing.

How is the Idea of the ‘philosophia perennis’ to be understood? Philosophic thought and historical development.

But if an appeal is made to the Idea of the ‘philosophia perennis’, one should know, what is to be understood by it. Philosophic thought as such stands in an inner relationship with historical development, postulated by our very philosophical basic Idea, and no thinker whatever can withdraw himself from this historical evolution. Our transcendental ground-Idea itself requires the recognition of the ‘philosophia perennis’ in this sense and rejects the proud illusion that any thinker whatever, could begin as it were with a clean slate and disassociate himself from the development of an age-old process of philosophical reflection. Only let not the postulate of the ‘philosophia perennis’ be turned against the religious ground-motive of philosophy with the intention of involving it (and not only the variable forms given to it) in historical relativity.

For he who does so, will necessarily fall into a historical relativism with respect to truth, as is encountered in Dilthey's philosophy of the life- and world-views or, in a still more striking manner, in the case of an Oswald Spengler.

Whoever takes the pains to penetrate into the philosophic system developed in this work, will soon discover, how it is wedded to the historical development of philosophic and scientific thought with a thousand ties, so far as its immanent philosophic content is concerned, even though we can nowhere follow the immanence-philosophy.

The philosophical elaboration in this book of the basic principles of sphere-sovereignty for example would not have been possible apart from the entire preceding development of modern philosophy and of the different branches of modern science. Nevertheless, it is just with the philosophic Idea of sphere-sovereignty that we turn on principle against the Humanistic view of science. In like manner it can be said, that our transcendental critique of theoretic thought has an inner historical connection with Kant's critique of pure reason, notwithstanding the fact that our critique was turned to a great extent against the theoretical dogmatism in Kant's epistemology.

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What is permanent, and what is subjected to the historical development of thought. The scholastic standpoint of accommodation forever condemned.

The elaboration of our philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea is thus necessarily bound to historical development. Insight into the wealth of meaning of the cosmic order may grow, even through the work of schools of thought against which our own is set in an irreconcilable antithesis. Nevertheless, the religious starting-point, and consequently the whole direction which philosophic thought acquires thereby by means of its threefold transcendental ground-Idea, remains consistent. This starting-point may no longer be abandoned by any single phase of Christian philosophic thought, if it is not to fall back into a scholastic standpoint of accommodation which has proved to be fatal to the idea of a philosophia christiana reformata.

Every serious philosophic school contributes to the development of human thought to a certain extent, and no single one can credit itself with the monopoly in this respect.

No single serious current of thought, however apostate in its starting-point, makes its appearance in the history of the world without a task of its own, by which, even in spite of itself, it must contribute to the fulfilment of the Divine plan in the unfolding of the faculties which He makes to perform their work even in His fallen creation. In the development of the basic features of our philosophy of history we shall further elaborate this point.

We cannot discuss the immanent historical meaning of God's guidance in history, until we are engaged in the philosophical analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect. Our opinion concerning the historical task of immanence-philosophy pre-supposes indeed the acceptance of this guidance, but this acceptance involves very complicated problems for philosophical thought which we cannot yet solve at this stage of our inquiry.

We can only say, that it implies the biblical-Augustinian idea of the continuous struggle in the religious root of history between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. This Idea shall guide us, when we enter into the confusing labyrinth of the history of philosophic thought. It can indeed guide us, since we have gained insight into the all-controlling influence of the religious starting-points in respect to the inner development of philosophic theories.

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The conception of the antithesis of standpoints in the immanence-philosophy as ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ (theory of life- and world-views).

In itself, the Idea of the antithesis of standpoints is not at all foreign to immanence-philosophy, namely in its modern form of ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ (theory of life- and world-views).

On the contrary, many antitheses are constructed here, of which that between idealism and naturalism belongs to the most ancient. In this matter, curiously enough, idealism, in its Kantian and post-Kantian forms of transcendental ‘critical’ idealism, insists on the opinion that this antithesis may be resolved in its favour by way of pure theory of knowledge. Consequently, no freedom-belief transcending the boundaries of theoretical reason need be called in aid at this point. For one need only reflect on the very operation of thought in order to see immediately, that every effort to reduce theoretical thought to a natural object pre-supposes a ‘transcendental subject of thought’ or a ‘transcendental consciousness’, without which objective experience of natural phenomena would be impossible¹.

Besides, various modern thinkers have tried to neutralize the conflict of the different standpoints within philosophic thought by making philosophy itself into a neutral ‘theory of the life- and world-views’, without allowing it to take sides in the various antitheses.

Thus Dilthey² came to set up three types of ‘philosophic world-views’ which he holds to recur repeatedly in the historical development, viz.: 1. Materialistic positivism (Democritus, Epicurus, Hobbes, the Encyclopaedists, Comte, Avenarius); 2. Objective idealism (Heraclitus, the Stoics, Spinoza, Leibniz, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel); 3. Freedom-idealism (Plato, the Christian philosophy, Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran).

Much more differentiated is Rickert's³ classification of the

1 It must be evident in the light of our transcendental critique of theoretic thought, that this pretended purely epistemological refutation of naturalism is based on supra-theoretic pre-suppositions. We have seen in an earlier context, that the so-called ‘transcendental subject’ is nothing but an absolutization of the logical function of thought, and that this absolutization is inspired by the Humanistic freedom-motive implying the autonomy of human thought.

2 Dilthey: Die Typen der Weltanschauung in ‘Weltansch.’ Berlin 1911.

3 System der Philosophie. In the South-West German school of the Neo-Kantians, even Windelband had proclaimed philosophy to be the science of the life- and world-view (‘Wissenschaft der Weltanschauung’). See his Einleitung in die Phil. (2d Ed. 1920), pp. 19ff.

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‘life- and world-views’, oriented to the Neo-Kantian philosophy of values.

He offers us a detailed outline in which the following types are analysed from the philosophic point of view of value: 1. Intellectualism. 2. Aestheticism. 3. Mysticism. 4. Moralism. 5. Eudemonism. 6. Eroticism. 7. Theism, Polytheism.

What is typical of these and similar classifications of the ‘life- and world-views’ is that they, being construed from the immanence-standpoint, obliterate the only really radical antithesis, i.e. that between the immanence- and the Christian transcendence-standpoint, and attempt to subsume the Christian starting-point in philosophy under one of the many -isms of immanence-philosophy. At the same time, so far as the thinker who makes such groupings does not present himself as a complete relativist with respect to a life- and world-view, the relative oppositions on the immanence-standpoint are proclaimed as absolute.

The first insight that the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea gives us with respect to the ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ of the immanence-philosophy is that all ‘weltanschauliche’ oppositions on the immanence-standpoint are completely relative, and that they become irreconcilable only by religious absolutizing, due to a dialectical ground-motive.

We shall learn to recognize idealism and naturalism in modern Humanistic philosophy as a polar opposition which lay hidden from the outset in the basic structure of its common transcendental ground-Idea, and originates from the antithesis in its central religious motive as an inner antinomy between the ideals of science and personality - nature and freedom.

Aestheticism and moralism are not even polar oppositions, but originate simply from the hypostatization of special modal aspects of meaning, which in the Humanistic basic motive are only different manifestations of the free and autonomous human personality.

Even in the so-called ‘theistic’ type, the immanence-standpoint is only apparently abandoned. This appears clearly from the fact that ‘theistic philosophy’ from the start was built upon a metaphysical Idea of God, which found its origin in the hypostatization of the nous. Consider only Aristotle's theistic philo-

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sophy. The divine νοῦς as actus purus, (‘pure actuality’) and ‘pure Form’, first transcendent cause, unmoved mover and final end of the cosmos, is nothing but the hypostatization of theoretical thought, ruled by the Greek form-motive, and concealed behind a theistic disguise. It is the idol-Idea of this immanence-philosopher.

Things are not different in the case of the ‘theistic’ philosophy of Descartes or Leibniz. However, with these thinkers the hypostatization of theoretical thought is ruled by the Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom, which gives an entirely different character to their ‘theism’.

Finally, what has such a philosophic ‘theism’, ruled by the religious ground-motives of ancient Greek or modern Humanistic thought, respectively, in common with the radical Christian attitude with regard to the philosophic questions of life and the world?

The consequence of our transcendental critique for the history of philosophy.

It must be very confusing in the study of the history of philosophic thought to classify ancient Greek, medieval scholastic and modern Humanistic thinkers after the abstract schematisms presented by Dilthey and Rickert without considering the different religious ground-motives of the philosophic systems.

The philosophical meaning of terms as idealism, materialism, intellectualism, mysticism and so on, is entirely dependent upon the different transcendental ground-Ideas of philosophic thought and the religious ground-motives which rule the contents of the latter. Greek idealism for instance, ruled by the primacy of the religious form-motive, is completely different from the mathematical idealism of Leibniz which is ruled by the modern Humanistic science-ideal, implied in the dialectical motive of nature and freedom. The terms ‘matter’ and ‘nature’ have in Greek thought a sense entirely different from that in modern Humanistic philosophy. Anaximander and Anaximenes were materialists in the sense of the Greek matter-motive, not at all in the sense of Hobbes, whose materialistic metaphysics was ruled by the mechanistic science-ideal of pre-Kantian Humanism. Democritus was not at all a materialist in the modern Humanistic sense. His ‘atoms’ were ‘ideal forms’ in the sense of the Greek form-motive which was only conceived here in a mathematical sense. The Greek ideal of the ϰάλοϰἄγαϑον (the beautiful and good)

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cannot be identified with the modern Humanist aestheticism of a Schiller, which is ruled by the religious motive of nature and freedom, as little as the Kantian moralism has a deeper affinity with Socrates' ethical thought.

There is a great danger hidden in a pretended purely theoretical analysis of ancient Greek or medieval philosophical trends after general schemes of classification which are construed apart from the religious ground-motives of Western thought. For, unawares, ancient and medieval thinkers are interpreted in this case after a pattern of thought prescribed by the modern Humanistic ground-motive of nature and freedom. Neither Dilthey nor Rickert have escaped this pitfall.

Thus, our transcendental critique of philosophic thought is of great importance also for the history of philosophy.

The only possible ultimate antithesis in philosophy.

In the light of the transcendental ground-Idea, there exists only one ultimate and radical anti-thesis in philosophy, viz. that between absolutizing, i.e. deifying of meaning, in apostasy from God on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the return of philosophic thought in Christ to God, which leads to the insight into the complete relativity and lack of self-sufficiency of all that exists in the created mode of meaning.

If, however, this antithesis is the ultimate one, there is no further room alongside of it for equivalent antitheses of another kind.

Naturally, it is true, that there is a radical difference between the religious ground-motives of ancient Greek and modern Humanistic thought. However, it can hardly be said, that these motives could have an antithetical relation to one another in the same final and radical sense as that between the Christian and apostatic ground-motives. As to the religious antithesis which we have discovered within each of the dialectical ground-motives themselves, we were able to establish that they had the character of a polar tension between the two components, which is quite different from the relation between the Christian and the apostatic starting-points.

Such polar tensions are radically excluded in the transcendental ground-Idea of every really Christian philosophy. Therefore, in all philosophy that is rooted in the Christian transcendence-standpoint, there can be no question on principle of idealism or naturalism, moralism or aestheticism, rationalism or irrationa-

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lism, theism or mysticism; for all such -isms can be grounded only in the immanence-standpoint.

Consequently, so far as such -isms have actually gained access to Christian philosophic thought, for lack of an integral Christian cosmonomic Idea, they appear as atavisms in the literal sense of the word, rudiments of apostatic thought, which can in no way prove to be compatible with the basic Christian attitude.

§ 2 - The distinction between philosophy and life- and world-view and the criterion

Must then the life- and world-view really be blended with philosophic thought? Is the relation between philosophy and life- and world-view perhaps this, that philosophy is nothing but an elaborate life- and world-view, perhaps an ‘Anweisung zum seligen Leben’ (a guide to the blessed life) under the disguise of philosophic theory? Granted, that for the life- and world-view the absolute antithesis, as above formulated, is really inescapable, must not philosophy, if it is to maintain its theoretical character, for that very reason refrain from a choice of position, lest it should obliterate its boundaries with respect to the former?

In such questions we once again find on our path the dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretic thought. They compel us to form a clearer Idea of the relation between philosophy and a life- and world-view.

The boundaries between philosophy and a life- and world-view as seen from the immanence-standpoint. Disagreement as to the criterion.

Meanwhile, it is very difficult indeed to enter into discussion with the immanence-philosophy on this point. For from its point of view there are strenuous divergences of opinion concerning the question: What exactly do you mean by a life- and world-view, and does it stand in opposition to philosophy? For example, Heinrich Rickert wants to approach the nature of the life- and world-view axiologically from his theoretical philosophy of values, and sees the essential characteristic in the personal a-theoretical commitment with respect to the question: What is for you the highest value? Another defender of the autonomy of theoretic philosophy, Theodor Litt, upbraids Rickert for having transgressed the very limits of philosophy in his theoretical phi-

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losophy of values. According to him, value is ex origine a-theoretical, and consequently all foundation of theoretical truth, as to its absolute validity, in a value (as Rickert does), is to be rejected. Litt seeks the criterion between philosophy and a life- and world-view in this very point, that in philosophic thought no single valuation may be ‘either one of the determining factors or even the decisive factor;’ that valuations put in a word is for him, ‘conclusive evidence for the fact that the subject has not sacrificed its concretely personal relation to the totality of reality to the striving after pure knowledge’¹.

Measured by this criterion, immanence-philosophy in its age-long development was full of life- and world-views, and the process of purification is still scarcely begun in any proper sense. In Nietzsche's philosophy of life, however, just the reverse is the case. To philosophy is ascribed the task of determining the practical ‘ordering of values according to rank’. In his Genealogy of Morals (p. 38) the philosophers are called ‘Befehlende und Gesetzgeber’ (commanders and law-givers). Philosophy thus becomes an ‘art of living’, which merely shares the expression in concepts with theoretical science.

Also the modern so-called ‘existential philosophy’, strongly influenced by Sören Kierkegaard, proceeds along the same line in its conception of the relation between philosophy and a life- and world-view.

According to Karl Jaspers, philosophy was from the start more than a mere ‘universal theory’. ‘It gave impulses, drew up tables of values, made human life meaningful and purposive, it gave him the world in which he felt safe, in a word it gave him: a view of life and the world’². Only ‘prophetic philosophy’ that gives a world-view, in that it constructs tables of value as norms, in his esteem deserves the name of philosophy. But this name, according to him, has at present become customary for that which can better and more clearly be called universal logic, sociology and psychology, which as theory refrain from all

1 Einleitung in die Philosophie (Leipzig und Berlin 1933) p. 261: ‘der bündige Beweis dafür, dasz das Subjekt sein konkret-persönliches Verhältnis zum Ganzen der Wirklichkeit nicht dem Willen zu reiner Erkenntnis aufgeopfert hat.’

2 ‘Sie gab Impulse, stellte Werttafeln auf, gab dem Menschenleben Sinn und Ziel, gab ihm die Welt, in der er sich geborgen fühlte, gab ihm mit einem Wort: Weltanschauung.’

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valuation. For this very reason, Jaspers calls his well-known book that intends to give only a theory of possible life- and world-views, and to understand the meaning of these latter psychologically, not a ‘philosophy’, but a ‘Psychology of the Life- and World-views’¹.

We can thus establish the fact that, on the one hand, philosophy and life- and world-views are distinguished most sharply according to an axiological criterion, while, on the other hand, they are identified with one another. Within the first school of thought, again, there is a dispute over the question, whether philosophy may orient itself at any rate to a theoretical value, or whether every attitude of valuation must be excluded.

However this may be, we continue for the moment to stand somewhat aloof from such an axiological criterion as has been referred to, for, as we shall see, it is heavily burdened with the transcendental basic-idea of the thinkers in question.

A ‘concept of value’, taken in an objective idealistic, or indeed in a subjective-psychologistic sense, betrays its origin in immanence-philosophy. How shall the ‘philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea’, which starts by raising the question as to the possibility of philosophy and thereby urges to critical self-reflection as to the transcendental ground-Idea, accept off-hand a criterion that has originated from a philosophy which is not aware of the importance of its own transcendental ground-Idea?

Litt calls it ‘a lack of logical integrity’, to require for a life- and world-view the ‘universal validity’, which ex origine belongs only to ‘theoretical truth’². But even this ‘argument ad hominem’ is not capable of making an impression, when it appears that Litt's conception of the meaning of theoretical truth bears the stamp of a transcendental basic Idea which is born of a supra-philosophical choice of position, according to his own view, perhaps from a life- and world-view!

1 Psychologie der Weltansch. 3d Ed. 1925, pp. 1-7.

2 The opposition: life- and world-view, on the one hand, and theoretical truth on the other is, in addition, impure and misleading. The true opposition must be: life- and world-view and philosophy, both of which are subjected to a norm of truth.

Life- and world-view as an ‘individual impression of life’, Theodor Litt and Georg Simmel.

Each man, thus says Litt, has his individual ‘life- and world-

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view’. The latter is nothing but an individual impression of life, which arises in closest contact with the conception of experienced reality, formed by the community, in which the man lives. All community-life creates an atmosphere of common convictions which make themselves felt, wherever something of importance is said, thought or done, without such convictions being subjected to any criticism. Such community-conceptions of the problem of world and life display the most varied forms from the image-world of the myths to the dogmas of religion and the profane wisdom of the popular outlook on life. In its origin, philosophy is undoubtedly still interwoven most closely with such life- and world-views. To preserve a pure scientific conscience, however, it must distinguish itself most sharply from them. For it is concerned with the universally valid theoretical truth which finds its place only in the realm of theoretical thought.

Curiously enough, Litt's characterization of the life- and world-view as an ‘individual impression of life’ agrees rather well with Georg Simmel's characterization of philosophy as ‘a temperament, seen through a picture of the world’, and as the revelation of ‘what is deepest and final in a personal attitude toward the world in the language of a picture of the world’¹.

We notice this agreement for the present with special interest, since Simmel is an adherent of the historicistic and relativistic philosophy of life, to which Litt, as we shall see, also exhibits a strong approximation, in spite of the semblance of the contrary.

Litt's vision on life- and world-views, too, does not help us any further, since, as we shall see in the sequel, the same prejudices are again brought into play here as in the case of the criterion of value. In other words, the determination of the relationship between philosophy and a ‘life- and world-view’ is ruled by a transcendental ground-Idea, of whose importance the thinker has not been fully aware in critical self-reflection.

1 Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (Chief Problems of Philosophy), pp. 23, 28.

The relationship as seen from the Christian transcendence-standpoint.

How shall we then from our standpoint, determine the relationship between philosophy and a life- and world-view?

We begin by setting on the foreground that the concept ‘life-

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and world-view’ is raised above the level of vague representations burdened either with resentment or with exaggerated veneration only if it is understood in the sense that is necessarily inherent in it as a view of totality. An individual impression of life, fed from a certain sphere of convictions, is no ‘life- and world-view.’

The genuine life- and world-view has undoubtedly a close affinity with philosophy, because it is essentially directed towards the totality of meaning of our cosmos. A life- and world-view also implies an Archimedean point. Like philosophy, it has its religious ground-motive. It, as well as philosophy, requires the religious commitment of our selfhood. It has its own attitude of thought. However, it is not, as such, of a theoretical character. Its view of totality is not the theoretical, but rather the pre-theoretical. It does not conceive reality in its abstracted modal aspects of meaning, but rather in typical structures of individuality which are not analyzed in a theoretical way. It is not restricted to a special category of ‘philosophic thinkers’, but applies to everybody, the simplest included. Therefore, it is entirely wrong to see in Christian philosophy only a philosophically elaborated life- and world-view. To do so would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the true relationships. The Divine Word-revelation gives the Christian as little a detailed life- and world-view as a Christian philosophy, yet it gives to both simply their direction from the starting-point in their central basic motive. But this direction is really a radical and integral one, determining everything. The same holds for the direction and outlook which the apostate religious motives give to philosophy and a life- and world-view.

Therefore philosophy and a life- and world-view are in the root absolutely united with each other, even though they may not be identified.

Philosophy cannot take the place of a life- and world-view, nor the reverse, for the task of each of the two is different.

They must rather understand each other mutually from their common religious root. Yet, to be sure, philosophy has to give a theoretical account of a life- and world-view, of which something will be said later.

§ 3 - The neutrality-postulate and the ‘theory of life and world-views’

It is intensely interesting to trace in the neutrality-postulate,

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the influence of the personality-ideal, which we shall discuss later on as a basic factor in the transcendental Humanistic ground-Idea. We have repeatedly established the fact that by means of this postulate various modern currents in immanence-philosophy attempt to avoid self-reflection as to the transcendental ground-Idea of their philosophic system. It finds its origin in Kant's sharp separation between theoretical and practical reason and in his attempt at the emancipation of the free and autonomous personality from the tyranny of the Humanistic ideal of science, which was itself evoked by the religious freedom-motive of Humanism. The intended postulate is really not of a theoretical, but of a religious origin.

First of all, the theoretical arguments which have been introduced for the defence of this neutrality-postulate will be faced.

Rickert's defence of the neutrality-postulate.

Rickert has indeed developed them in the greatest detail in his System der Philosophie (‘System of Philosophy’)¹. Accor-

1 From the same author there has appeared: Grundprobleme der Philosophy (Basic Problems of Philosophy, 1934), which to a large extent treats of the same problems.
No new points of view are opened by Rickert's essay Wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Weltanschauung (Scientific Philosophy and World-view) in Logos, Vol. 22 (1933), pp. 37ff., which is aimed against the modern existence-philosophy of Heidegger, Jaspers, etc. Rickert's opponents demand an existential mode of philosophical thinking in opposition to a purely theoretical one.
The essay referred to intends to demonstrate that the totality of the cosmos is accessible only to theoretical thought, while from the total man, seen by Rickert - in the strain of all immanence-philosophy - as an individual complex of functions, this cosmic totality must remain hidden.
This whole argumentation stands or falls with the immanence-standpoint itself and with its transcendental ground-Idea for which Rickert does not account, in consequence of which his standpoint becomes uncritically dogmatic, or rather ‘doctrinaire’.
That the selfhood as totality of human existence cannot be sought in the temporal coherence of its functions remains hidden from him.
‘Individual man in the totality of his existence necessarily restricts his interest to one or more parts of the cosmic totality. Any one who tries to think in a universal way and notwithstanding this wishes at the same time to philosophize as an “existing thinker”, badly understands himself and his own existence. Only after he has detached himself from it, with the aid of philosophy, his view is able to be free and wide enough to comprehend the totality of the cosmos in his vision and in his truthful judgment.’
[‘Der ganze Mensch beschränkt sich mit seinen Interessen notwendig auf einen oder mehrere ihrer Teile. Wer universal zu denken sich bemüht und trotzdem gleichzeitig als ganzer Mensch oder als existierender Denker philosophieren möchte versteht sich selbst und seine eigene Existenz schlecht. Erst wenn er sich von ihr mit Hilfe der Theorie losgemacht hat, kann sein Blick frei und weit genug werden, um das Ganze der Welt überschauend und wahr urteilend zu erfassen.’]

[p. 130]

ding to him, philosophy, so far as its inner nature is concerned, is the theoretical science which has to understand the entire cosmos theoretically as a totality, even though this cosmos is sharply separated by theoretical thought into the two spheres of temporal-spatial (sensibly perceptible) nature-reality and timeless values which have absolute validity.

It has no life- and world-view to preach as ‘persuasion’, or ‘faith’ or ‘imperative’. It must restrict itself scrupulously to a theoretical attitude of knowledge. Imperatives, norms are not the business of theory. The concept of a normative science is internally contradictory.

‘Reality’ (for Rickert exhausted in its psycho-physical aspects) is not considered by philosophy in the objectivizing sense of the special sciences. The special sciences must establish what reality is as ‘mere reality’. Philosophy has nothing to say about that. Reality studied by the special sciences is the immanent, conscious, given reality, the ‘psycho-physical’. No other reality exists (loc. cit. p. 179).

Yet reality to Rickert is more than ‘mere reality’. As theoretical form, in which the understanding conceives an empirical sensory material of consciousness, reality is a category of thought, which is not itself real, but has validity (‘Geltung’) only.

Kant adopted this ‘critical’ standpoint with respect to reality, when he proclaimed the ‘universally-valid’ transcendental subject, stripped of all individuality, in the synthesis of its forms of thought and intuition to be the formal origin of the real ‘Gegenstand’ of knowledge. Only the sort of ‘validity’ or ‘value’, on the basis of which the subject builds up his ‘world’ epistemologically, is decisive for the ‘objectivity’ of reality gained on the basis of critical philosophy (loc. cit. p. 175).

Still more clearly does the theoretical Idea of the totality of

[p. 131]

reality, viewed by Kant essentially as an infinite task for thought, show its value-character. What makes this totality to be ‘absolute totality’ is only the value that holds (p. 175).

For the problem of the ‘totality of reality’ to be susceptible of philosophical solution, it must be understood as an epistemological problem. Philosophy does not deal with reality as ‘mere reality’, but with the problem of the knowledge of reality. It seeks to understand the theoretical values which are not really, but which hold good and which lead the knowledge of reality so that this latter thereby acquires anchorage and coherence. The philosophic problems of reality, in other words, are to be understood only as questions of the theory of knowledge, as theoretical problems of meaning and value. Theoretical philosophy of reality is an epistemology. It wants to interpret the meaning of knowledge and this is possible only on the basis of values.

Meanwhile, it would be altogether inadmissable to restrict the task of philosophy to the investigation of these merely theoretical values. Philosophy, which is essentially a theory of values, must be directed toward the ‘Voll-endung’ (fulfilment), toward the totality, and must thus necessarily include the universe of values in its horizon. It must strive after a philosophic system of values. Consequently, it must also investigate the a-theoretical ones, which, according to the traditional view, are distinguished as morality, beauty, and holiness, in order to be able to interpret the meaning of all of life theoretically.

According to Rickert's view, the system of values with respect to its material content cannot be deduced from general axiological forms. To set up such a system, one needs a material, in terms of which for the first time we have to gain an insight into the multiplicity of the ‘values’. How is philosophy to track down this multiplicity? To this end it must orient itself to the historical life of culture.

To understand this line of thought, we must observe that, according to Rickert, philosophy, as the theory of totality, has the task of re-uniting in thought the ‘worlds’ of ‘natural reality’ and ‘values that hold’, which ‘worlds’ by theoretical thought were absolutely separated at first. When we are not thinking, we immediately experience this unity ‘free from concepts’ and philosophy would not veritably become philosophy of the ‘Vollendung’ (fulfilment), if it stopped with an unreconciled dualism in theoretical thought.

[p. 132]

So there is needed a theoretical connecting-link between values and reality, a third realm, which joins the two into one. This third realm is understood theoretically in the concept of meaning, which to Rickert is ‘logically prior’ to the theoretical separation into reality and value. Meaning is itself neither real nor effective value, but the synthetic union of both, constituted in the valuating act of the subject. Meaning, ‘significance’ (‘Bedeutung’), belongs to all ‘acts’, so far as the subject chooses a position in them with respect to values. In the ‘immanent meaning of the act’, value and reality are synthetically together. The immanent meaning is not itself value, but reality is here related to values by meaning. It is reality to which ‘values cling’ in meaning.

In the concept of meaning, the distinction between values and reality has not been dropped, but they are joined in a higher synthetic unity. ‘Value’, too, for Rickert is meaning, but transcendent, timeless and absolute in character. Meaning as the intermediate link between value and reality is, on the contrary, ‘immanent meaning’. Only in this third realm of immanent meaning does the subject find its place in Rickert's view. ‘Reality’ is merely the object of the transcendental epistemological subject, and in the realm of values there is no subjectivity at all.

Well then, for the discovery of the multiplicity of the values, philosophy must orient itself to the realm of immanent meaning which has precipitated itself solely in the historical life of culture in the cultural goods as ‘the truly objective’ and which is understood by historical science theoretically and objectively.

The science of history has to do with culture as ‘reality to which values cling’ (‘wertbehaftete Wirklichkeit’), although in its procedure, it looks away from the absolute values. Thus it presents philosophy the matter which the latter requires for its systematic value-theory. From the historical cultural ‘goods’, philosophy must abstract the general values, in order to delimit the problems which arise for philosophy as a doctrine of the meaning of life. In so doing, it must necessarily work with an ‘open system’, which leaves room for new values which were not previously discovered.

Now the absolute universal validity of the theoretical value of truth alone can be demonstrated in a manner convincing to all thinking beings. It alone possesses a self-guarantee for this validity. The relativistic view of this value cancels itself theoreti-

[p. 133]

cally, because it must require absolute truth for its own standpoint, if it is to be taken seriously.

On the contrary, the a-theoretical values, such as Rickert conceives them in his open system (beauty, personal holiness, impersonal holiness, morality, and happiness) are not to be proved in their universal validity just because proof resides in the theoretical realm. Philosophy as theoretical science of totality must suffice with providing us with theoretical insight with respect to these values. It can bring them only into a theoretical system, whereby nothing is said as to the practical priority of one of these values, but only a formal order of the ‘stages of value’ is given.

As theoretical science of totality it cannot proclaim a certain value to be the highest. It would thereby fall into a ‘prophetism’ which would be incompatible with its un-prejudiced theoretical starting-point. It would become a life- and world-view, even if it declared the theoretical values which dominate its own field of research to be in this sense the highest, dominating all of life. In this case, instead of thinking philosophically in theoretical style, it would preach an intellectualism, such as was the case in the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, philosophy must really include the life- and world-views in its theoretical inquiry. For the object of philosophy is the totality of the cosmos and to this totality also belongs the subject, i.e. the whole man and his relation to the cosmos, the subject that chooses a position in life with respect to values. Hence philosophy necessarily becomes also a theory of the life- and world-views, ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ or theory of the total meaning of life (‘Theory des vollendeten Lebens’), and in this very capacity is it philosophy of values.

As ‘Weltanschauungslehre’, philosophy has simply to develop theoretically the various possible types of life- and world-views, that is to say, to point out the consequences of elevating one of the various values to the highest rank. It has, in other words, only to furnish us with theoretical clarity as to the meaning of each life- and world-view. ‘For the rest it leaves to the individual man to choose that view of life and the world that suits his personal extra- or super-scientific nature best’¹.

1 ‘Im übrigen wird sie es dann dem einzelnen Individuum überlassen die Weltanschauung zu wählen, die am besten zu seiner persönlichen auszer- oder überwissenschaftlichen Eigenart paszt’ (op. cit., p. 407).

[p. 134]

Criticism of the fundamentals of the ‘Weltanschauungslehre’.

It would lead us too far and would also be superfluous in the present context to pursue the development of the method of Rickert's ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ further.

We are here concerned only with rendering a critical appraisal of its fundamentals and its critical arguments.

These fundamentals seem to be strongly grounded. Rickert appears zealously to defend the boundaries of theoretical philosophy against all attempts at usurpation which wish to make of theory something more than theory. In the rejection of an intellectualistic foundation for philosophy, the separation between philosophy and a life- and world-view appears to be really maintained consistently. Furthermore, Rickert shows himself so little confined by intellectualistic prejudices, that he theoretically recognizes the necessity for religion to penetrate the whole of life and never to allow itself to be satisfied with a coordination of other values and the value that dominates it. He recognizes, too, that the axiological point of view cannot exhaust the essence of religion.

Nevertheless, a pitfall, fatal to Rickert's entire conception of the essence, task and place of philosophy, is concealed in his plea for the theoretical neutrality of philosophy.

The neutrality-postulate would have meaning and in that case also have complete meaning, only if the ‘theoretical truth-value’, which - according to Rickert - solely and exclusively is to dominate philosophy, possessed validity in itself, independent of a cosmic temporal order, independent also of the other values, independent namely of the religious fulness of truth.

Now the pitfall lies concealed in the apriori identification of ‘truth’ with theoretical correctness and in the further apriori pre-supposition that truth thus interpreted rests in itself as an absolute ‘value’: ‘We see in philosophy a theoretical attitude of mind, and seek in it nothing but that which we call truth. We thereby pre-suppose, that truth possesses a value of its own, or that there is a meaning in striving after truth for the sake of truth. In this lies the further pre-supposition, that there is truth that is timelessly valid, and even this pre-supposition will arouse opposition in our times. It includes the conviction that there is truth resting in itself or absolute truth, by which all philosophical views of the universe are to be measured’¹.

1 Rickert, loc. cit., p. 39: ‘Wir sehen in der Philosophie ein theoretisches Verhalten und suchen in ihr nichts anderes als das, was wir Wahrheit nennen. Dabei setzen wir voraus, dasz die Wahrheit einen Eigenwert besitzt, oder dasz es einen Sinn hat, nach Wahrheit um der Wahrheit willen zu streben. Darin steckt die weitere Voraussetzung, dasz es Wahrheit gibt, die zeitlos gilt, und schon diese Voraussetzung wird in unserer Zeit Anstosz erregen. Sie schlieszt die Überzeugung ein, dasz es in sich ruhende, oder absolute Wahrheit gibt, an der alle philosophischen Ansichten vom Weltall zu messen sind.’

[p. 135]

It would be trifling to play off the word ‘conviction’ against the author and to object, that, according to his own conception, ‘convictions’ are not a matter of philosophy but of a life-view. For Rickert is indeed of opinion that the truth-value is the only one in the realm of values, the absolute universally-validity of which may be proved theoretically.

Yet the opinion that the absolute validity of the ‘theoretical truth-value’ can be proved theoretically is hardly to be sustained. For does not every theoretical proof suppose a norm for its correctness? (I would not like to say an absolute truth-value, possessing its validity in itself!).

How can that be proved which is pre-supposed in the proof? To this point, however, I shall devote separate attention below.

Immanent antinomy in Rickert's philosophy of values.

For the present I will only demonstrate, that the absolutizing of theoretical truth to an absolute value, resting in itself, viewed from Rickert's own standpoint, leads to an insoluble antinomy.

Rickert himself desires to relate philosophic thought to the ‘totality of values.’ In contradistinction to this totality, the ‘truth-value’, according to Rickert's own theoretical view, is only a species of transcendent meaning in the (transcendent) diversity of values. That being granted, the theoretical truth-value is in no case to be set by itself. In any case, it supposes the totality of values. The Idea of an absolute theoretical ‘truth-value’ resting entirely in itself is thus internally contradictory and dissolves itself.

Furthermore, the diversity of values supposes a coherence of meaning among them.

For how could they otherwise belong to the same totality of values? That being granted again, what meaning is to be ascribed to the postulate of ‘theoretical purity’ for my philosophic

[p. 136]

thought, if the ‘theoretical truth-value’ which alone could give meaning to this thought, cannot satisfy this postulate without cancelling itself?

For, can a special value, torn out of the coherence of meaning with all the others and set by itself, escape from becoming meaningless?

If not, then the postulate of the self-sufficiency of theoretical thought is also reduced ad absurdum and in this way too, it is demonstrated that in ‘pure’ theoretical thought the true Archimedean point of immanence-philosophy cannot be found.

The test of the transcendental ground-Idea.

If we apply the test of the transcendental ground-Idea, then Rickert's metaphysical concept of value immediately turns out to be ruled by a specific supra-philosophical choice of position with respect to Ἀϱχή and totality of meaning of the different modal laws, especially of the modal norm-spheres. The line of thought is as follows: the norm as lex (imperative) is necessarily related to a subject, is thus relative and consequently cannot be the absolute Ἀϱχή of meaning. Since the referring of the norms to God's sovereignty comes into conflict with the secret religious proclamation of the sovereignty of human personality, an Idea of reason must be hypostatized as a value sufficient to itself. This value now appears to be elevated to the position of Ἀϱχή of the laws. In truth, however, the apostate selfhood in the Idea of value proclaims the so-called ‘practical reason’ to be the souvereign Ἀϱχή.

The absolute ‘value’, sufficient to itself, is, as we saw, nothing but the hypostatization of the norm (in its modal speciality of meaning), which to this end is dissociated from the subject on the one hand and from God as Ἀϱχή on the other hand and now rests in itself as a Platonic Idea. However, this ‘value’ is not conceived of, as by Plato, as a ‘being’, a pattern-form in respect to the perceivable cosmos, but as a ‘holding good’¹

1 August Messer, Deutsche Wertphilosophie der Gegenwart (German Value-Philosophy of the Present), 1926, pp. 2ff., supposes that he can satisfactorily cut off the reproach of hypostatization, directed against the philosophy of values, by pointing to the sharp distinction between value and reality. Only a ‘realism of values’, such as was recognized in Plato's doctrine of Ideas could be said to rest upon hypostatization. But we noticed previously, that the hypostatization is in itself independent of the question, whether it is understood in terms of ‘being’ or rather of ‘holding good’.

[p. 137]

The true root of this metaphysical axiological theory is the Humanistic ideal of personality as a basic factor in the central religious motive of Humanism, which ideal of personality in Kant's ‘primacy of the practical reason’, after a long struggle, gained the ascendency over the Humanistic science-ideal of the intellectualistic ‘Aufklärung’ (Enlightenment), about which our further discussion will follow in the next part. Theoretic philosophy may not dominate the autonomous freedom of human personality in the choice of its life- and world-view.

A religious ground-motive is at the basis of Rickert's postulate of theoretic neutrality, a ground-motive which has expressed itself in a transcendental ground-Idea; the apriori influence of the latter upon Rickert's thought can be demonstrated in his concept of the law and the subject, his view of reality, his metaphysical idea of value, his conception of time, and so on.

The philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea does not judge about matters over which no judgment belongs to man, but leads to fundamental self-criticism of the thinker.

As one sees, the referring of a philosophic system to its transcendental ground-Idea leads to a radical sharpening of the anti-thesis in philosophic thought and to the discovery of really stern truths. But immanence-philosophy may not complain about this, for it, too, requires of philosophic thought to seek the truth and nothing but the truth. On its part, it offers sharp opposition to every attack upon the self-sufficiency of theoretical thought. Moreover, it should be kept in mind, that the radical criticism which the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea exercises may in no part be understood as a judgment as to the personal religious condition of a thinker. Such a judgment does not belong to man and lies entirely outside the intention of our philosophy. We know, after all, that in the heart of the Christian himself the apostate selfhood and the selfhood redirected to God wage a daily warfare.

But this full truth will be impressed by the radical self-criticism which the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea requires of the thinker: The proclamation of the self-sufficiency of philosophic thought signifies the withdrawal of that thought from Christ as the new religious root of our cosmos. This cannot proceed from

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Him, but necessarily issues from the root of existence which has fallen away from God.

§ 4 - Sequel: the pretended self-guarantee of theoretical truth

Litt's argument concerning the self-guarantee of theoretical truth.

We may not stop at Rickert's plea for the neutrality-postulate. Indeed, it has not escaped other defenders of this postulate, that Rickert's very foundation of the notion of neutrality in his philosophy of values exceeds the limits of ‘purely theoretical’ thought. In an earlier context we pointed to Theodor Litt, who reckons the value-Idea as such to the territory of a ‘life- and world-view.’

We must, therefore, try to penetrate to the gist of the argument which is adduced in support of the neutrality-postulate, and which in fact is not necessarily connected with the conception of philosophy as a theory of values. This gist is to be found in the pretended self-guarantee of ‘theoretical truth’ in respect to its absoluteness. We saw, that Rickert, too, pointed his entire demonstration in the direction of this ‘self-guarantee’, but showed his weak side by reason of the axiological turn of his argument. We will therefore pay no further notice to this axiological turn, and devote our attention exclusively to the question, whether in some other manner the ‘self-guarantee of theoretical truth’ is to be maintained as the basis of a ‘purely theoretical’ conception of philosophy.

We previously observed, that this pretended self-guarantee can in no case be proved theoretically. Theodor Litt, too, has discovered the pitfall which is hidden from the defenders of the absoluteness and self-guarantee of ‘theoretical truth’ in the conception, that it should be possible to demonstrate it in a theoretical way.

Nay, he goes so far as to charge those who consider this ‘self-guarantee’ to be demonstrable, with relativism, in as much as they attempt to refer ‘truth’ to something that is not yet itself truth, something other than truth, if possible more than truth.

The only point really capable of theoretical demonstration in his view is the internal contradiction in which every form of a relativistic view of truth must involve itself.

This would really signify not much, or rather nothing, for the defence of the self-sufficiency of theoretical thought, if Litt did

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not also start from an aprioristic identification of the absolute self-guaranteeing truth with theoretical correctness.

For if truth is not regarded as being exhausted in its relation to theoretical thought, but in ‘theoretical verity’ there is seen only a refraction of meaning (not sufficient to itself) of the fulness of all truth, i.e. of its religious fulness, then the demonstration that ‘relativism’ is self-destructive turns immediately against such as deny this fulness of verity.

Litt, however, has armed himself at the very outset against all misunderstanding of his opinion on this point by making self-sufficient truth hold good exclusively in correlation to the ‘cogito’, to the ‘I think (theoretically)’. By this means he intends also expressly to cut off all ‘hypostatization’ of verity as an Idea or ‘value’ which has being or validity apart from all subjectivity.

In other words, the ‘absolute, self-sufficient truth’ holds only in and for theoretical thought! Yet this judgment is ostensibly self-contradiction incarnate! How can a truth be absolute and self-sufficient, the validity of which is relativized to theoretical thought?

The philosophy of values, at any rate, escaped from this contradiction by hypostatizing truth as an absolute value, elevated in itself above all relationship to subjectivity. By restricting the validity of truth from the outset to the theoretical thought-relation, Litt falls here into a fundamental relativism, which he supposed he had just cut off at the root in his absolutizing of theoretical truth.

It is interesting to see how Litt now seeks to justify himself against the reproach of relativism as to verity.

Such a relativism for him is in all its possible forms an internally contradictory scepticism, which in its argumentation must simultaneously pre-suppose and annihilate the authentic concept of truth: ‘Annihilate: for that which they call “truth” in express words is not truth; pre-suppose: for the act of annihilating is a spiritual deed, which is meaningful only if “truth” in the original sense is accepted as possible and attainable’¹.

This antinomy would remain hidden from scepticism, only

1 Einleitung, p. 29: ‘Vernichten: denn das, was sie expressis verbis “Wahrheit” nennen, ist nicht Wahrheit; voraussetzen: denn dieser Akt der Vernichtung ist ein geistiges Tun, das nur dann sinnvoll ist, wenn “Wahrheit” im ursprünglichen Sinne als möglich und erreichbar angenommen wird.’

[p. 140]

because it has not advanced to the last stage of self-reflection on the part of theoretical thought. It asks only reflectively after the claim to validity which is inherent in the judgments of thought directed to ‘Gegenstände’, but forgets that the judgments of this reflective thought also make a claim of absolute validity as to truth! In other words, it has not attained to the reflective introspection of thought, wherein thought is directed exclusively toward itself and not toward its ‘Gegenstände’.

If biology, psychology, and even anthropology investigate the thought-function scientifically, then they can examine it only as a special aspect of reality in full relativity to the other aspects. They remain then in the sphere of ‘objective thought’, for which thought itself signifies a piece of ‘reality’, a ‘Gegenstand’.

But in all biological, psychological and anthropological thought the actual ‘I think’, which can never be made into a ‘Gegenstand’ of thought, remains hidden. It is pre-eminently the task of philosophical thought, as thought directed to self-reflection, to set in the light this subjective antipole of all objective reality; it is its very task to demonstrate how the validity of truth, which the judgments of objectivizing scientific thought claim for themselves, remains dependent upon the absolute validity of truth of the pronouncements of reflective thought.

Well then, if the binding of the absolute validity of truth to the thought-relation really were to signify, that truth was limited to real thinking beings, then, but only then, according tot Litt, would his conception of truth have slipped down into the paths of sceptical relativism. But this is not the case. For by the ‘cogito’ (I think), to which absolute truth in its validity is restricted, there is here to be understood only ‘pure thought’, i.e. ‘that thought of which we said above, that it “springs back” again and again into the counter-position to the “Gegenstand” thought of.’ This ‘thought’ is no longer an aspect of concrete temporal reality. It is the transcendental subject of thought, itself universally valid, the self-consciousness that has arrived at determinateness in reflective thought, which is not inherent in individual reality, but in ‘Denken schlechthin’ (mere thought as such). For all temporal and spatial reality, the full concrete ego (self) as individual experiential reality included, is in the epistemological relation only the ‘objective antipole’ of this transcendental ‘I think’, so that the ‘cogito’ in this transcendental sense can never be subsumed under it.

The introduction of absolute truth into the thought-relation

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thus conceived of should not actually lead to the consequences of relativism, since the attempt is not here made to deduce ‘truth’ from something else. Rather there is accepted, in Litt's view, a strict correlation between truth and (transcendental) ‘cogito’. ‘Here there is consequently a strict balance between the members, which are united by this relation: just as “truth”, is determined in view of the “thinking being”, so the “thinking being” is determined in view of “truth”, and only in view of it’¹. A correlation of this absoluteness should not allow the least scope to ‘relativism’.

1 ‘Hier besteht also ein strenges Gleichgewicht zwischen den Gliedern, die durch die Relation verbunden sind: wie die “Wahrheit” im Hinblick auf das “denkende Wesen”, so ist das “denkende Wesen” im Hinblick auf die “Wahrheit” und nur im Hinblick auf sie bestimmt.’

Critique of Litt's conception.

We have deliberately reproduced Litt's conception of the absoluteness and self-guarantee of theoretical truth in as detailed a fashion as possible, and as far as possible in his own words, in order to do full justice to his argument. Every link in the argument actually counts, if in our criticism we are not to pass our opponent and find merely a fancied refutation.

We again plan to begin with immanent criticism.

Let us hold to the strict correlation in which the author sets theoretical thought and truth. It is clear, that the relativizing of the fulness [of meaning] of verity to a merely theoretical truth, which beyond possible contradiction is involved in the intended correlation, at best could not detract from the absoluteness and pretended self-guarantee of verity only in case the ‘transcendental cogito’ could lay claim to the same absoluteness as truth itself. This would mean, that they are one and the same, identical in a logical sense. Indeed the argument must result into such an identification. After all, the entire demonstration respecting the self-guarantee of ‘theoretical truth’ must serve to save the unconditional, ‘purely theoretical’ character of philosophic thought itself. For what is involved here in the first place, is not the self-sufficiency of ‘truth’, but the self-guarantee, the self-sufficiency of philosophic thought. Litt may emphatically reject the Idea that he would deduce the ‘truth’ from philosophic thought. Yet he will not be able to deny, that the supposed absoluteness and self-sufficiency of theoretical verity stands or falls with that of philosophic thought itself.

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It is entirely in Litt's line, that we seek to approximate the meaning of the correlation intended by him from the subjective philosophic pole of thought. For, according to him, it does not make sense to speak about that which I cannot grasp in a concept when thinking subjectively. Consequently, this holds also with regard to ‘absolute truth’. However, it may not be denied, that in this very way a serious danger has arisen for the absoluteness of verity, and that in the course of further reasoning this absoluteness threatens to be dissolved into the absoluteness of philosophic thought. For now ‘absolute truth’ appears also to require theoretical logical determination by philosophic thought. Otherwise, how could it be ‘purely theoretical’?

In contradistinction to this, the determination which philosophic thought would have to receive from the side of ‘absolute truth’ appears to be logically un-determined to the highest degree.

If ‘absolute verity’ does not appear to be identical with the ‘absolute cogito’ in its dialectical development of thought, it sinks back in Litt's own line of thought to the level of the ‘Gegenstand’ of thought, which must receive all its determination from thought itself.

The first pitfall in Litt's demonstration: the unconditional character of the ‘transcendental cogito’.

However, when we pass on to the subjective pole of thought, to the ‘transcendental cogito’ - which in Litt's Kantian opinion maintains itself in contradistinction to all reality as its absolute opposite - then, in the conception of the ‘unconditional character’ of this pole of thought, the pitfall laid bare in our Introduction reappears.

For the ‘cogito’ is nothing but the selfhood in its logical thought-activity. It is altogether impossible to dissolve this selfhood in the modal meaning of its logical function, unless we have left a bare concept, which is itself merely a product of the thinking ego.

This pitfall was, indeed, observed by Fichte, the father of the entire dialectical-reflective way of thinking, when he spoke of a necessary tension between ‘absolute ego’¹ and ‘thinking ego.’

Litt, on the contrary, who intends to follow in Fichte's foot-

1 This is something entirely different from Litt's ‘full concrete ego’, intended as ‘object’ of thought.

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steps, has not observed the antinomy of ‘unconditioned thought’, for he hypostatizes theoretical thought in the Humanistic sense of value-free reflection. Fichte, in his Kantian phase, refused to do so, because he did not seek the root or the selfhood of human existence in ‘theoretical’, but in the so-called ‘practical reason’, i.e. in Kant's ‘homo noumenon’ as synthetic hypostatization of the ethical function of personality. In other words, to him theoretical thought was ethically determined from the outset. In Litt, the full ego is identical with the concrete, individual complex of its functions in temporal-spatial reality and so can be determined only by the transcendental absolute thought! However, in this so-called ‘full, concrete ego’ the selfhood which transcends all thought is not really to be found.

Thus Litt's conception of the absolute self-guarantee of the ‘merely-theoretical truth’ dissolves itself into a speculative hypostatization of thought; this latter disintegrates into internal contradictions and cannot again be rendered harmless by a dialectical turn of thought by which it recognizes itself in the last analysis as logically identical (in the opposition) with the ‘full ego’. With the acceptance of the unconditioned character, the self-sufficiency of philosophic thought, the actual I-ness falls. This I-ness persists in its religious actuality which determines all thought, in contradistinction to all logical concepts. With the denial of the actual I-ness or self-hood, however, the possibility of knowledge and the possibility of forming concepts must be lost. Litt would actually have to come to these destructive consequences in his system, if in it he had consistently followed the postulate of the purity of philosophic thought. The fact that he has nonetheless developed a philosophical system, proves that he was far from thinking ‘purely theoretically’!

The second pitfall: the opposition of transcendental thought and full reality.

A second pitfall in Litt's conception of the transcendental ‘cogito’, already laid bare in an earlier context of our transcendental critique, is the supposition that, in the antithetic relation of theoretic thought full temporal reality - in opposition to the subjective pole ‘I think’ - would spring back into the antipole of ‘Gegenständlichkeit’ (for Litt, identical with objectivity!).

This supposition is completely incorrect and contradictory, since it neglects the temporal coherence of meaning, to which

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the logical function of thought remains bound even in its ultimate actuality which may not be objectivized.

In our transcendental critique of theoretical thought we have shown, that the antithetical relation from which alone the epistemological problem of the ‘Gegenstand’ can arise does not correspond to reality. Consequently, reality itself, can never be made into a ‘Gegenstand’ of thinking in its actual logical function, but is only a merely intentional abstraction performed within the real theoretical act of our consciousness. In the absolutizing of the ‘transcendental logical subject’ it is entirely overlooked that theoretical thought is possible only in an inter-modal synthesis which pre-supposes the cosmic coherence of meaning in time, and consequently cannot be of a purely logical character.

The second misconception, however, which we must lay bare in Litt's argument, grounded in the first, is, that the selfhood should be determined only by ‘pure’ thought, i.e. by dialectical logic.

The ‘self-refutation of scepticism’ reduced to its true proportion.

So the self-refutation of scepticism, in which Rickert and Litt alike focus the force of their argument, can actually have nothing to do with a pretended self-guarantee of merely theoretical truth.

Let us try to reduce it to its true proportions. Then the state of affairs appears to be that logical thought in its subjectivity is necessarily subjected to the logical laws, in casu - the ‘principium contradictionis’ (principle of contradiction).

If anybody is to think theoretically, he ought to begin by recognizing the validity of this principle, which is in no sense absolute and ‘unconditioned’, but rather of a cosmic-temporal character. Does this mean, that other creatures, or God Himself, could set aside the principle of non-contradiction in their thought? If this question is to have a meaning, one must proceed from the supposition that God Himself, or e.g. the angels, also would have to think in a cosmic temporal fashion. For, as a matter of fact, human thought is able to proceed in setting aside the principle of non-contradiction; e.g. the whole ‘dialectic logic’ does so. But whoever would suppose this ‘thought’ in the case of God and the angels, supposes at the same time, that they are included in the cosmic temporal order and that they are subjected to the laws that rule therein, although they can transgress them in so far as they have a norm-character. Quod

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absurdum! and with respect to the sovereign God: Quod blasphenium!

From the time of Greek Sophism, sceptical relativism has been characterized by its primary denial that thought is subjected to a norm of truth. It is an irrationalism in the epistemological field.

Actually this denial must necessarily lead to antinomy, so far as the judgment: ‘There is no truth’ must itself be tested by the norm of verity. Does, however, this judgment in its claim to truth, imply the validity of an absolute, self-sufficient theoretical verity? In no way! He who says: ‘There is no truth’, intends this statement in the first place against the validity of a norm of verity in the temporal coherence of meaning. Furthermore, he directs it in the most absolute sense also against the supra-temporal totality and Origin of truth. Thereby, he necessarily entangles himself in the antinomy, that his very judgment makes claim to a verity, which must be the full one.

Litt's proclamation of the self-sufficiency of theoretical truth, however, must lead to the same sceptical relativism and consequently to the same antinomy. Consistently thought out, it can recognize no norm which dominates the absolutized ‘transcendental-logical subject’, since it declares the subjective ‘cogito’ to be sovereign and proclaims it to be the ἀϱχή of all meaning and order.

How could subjective theoretical thought still be viewed as self-sufficient, if it were acknowledged, that it is subject to a law, which it has not itself imposed?

In Litt's line of thought, the ‘transcendental cogito’ does not belong to the full temporal reality in its indissoluble correlation of cosmonomic side and subject-side. Reality in the ‘Gegebenheitskorrelation’ [i.e. the datum-correlation] is seen only in the absolutized individuality, which is ascribed to the ‘concrete ego’ itself. It is as little subjected to laws, as the ‘transcendental ego’, but is understood as the absolute irrational which can be objectivized only in the ‘Erkenntniskorrelation’ (correlation of knowledge) and conceived by the ‘transcendental-logical ego’ in universally valid thought forms.

Nowhere in Litt's philosophy does the cosmic law really have a place in its original inseparable correlation to the individual subjectivity that is subjected to it. The ‘pure thinking subject’ with its reflective and objectivizing thought-forms is itself the ‘universally valid’ and the origin of all universal validity.

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The ‘theoretical universal validity’ originating from the ‘autonomous’ selfhood (which identifies itself with its transcendental-logical function in the will to ‘pure thought’) is the substitute for the cosmic order and its different modal law-spheres to which all individual subjectivity is subjected according to God's law of creation.

However, here arises a dialectical tension, a veritable anti-nomic relation between universal validity and individuality; between absolutized theoretical thought with its would-be self-sufficient absolute truth and individual subjectivity in the ‘datum-correlation’ (‘Gegebenheitskorrelation’); between ‘thinking ego’ and ‘living (experiencing) ego’; between philosophy as a universally valid theory, and a life- and world-view as an entirely individual impression of life on the part of the sovereign personality, not subjected to any norm of truth!

In its dialectical thought philosophy has, according to Litt, eventually to establish this lawlessness of individuality. In the irrationality of life, it has to recognize its dialectical other which possesses no universal validity. It has to establish in a ‘universally valid manner’ the individual law-lessness of personality in its life- and world-view, in order eventually to understand its dialectical unity-in-the-opposition with that life- and world-view! For actually, dialectical ‘purely theoretical thought’ and a ‘life- and world-view’ as a norm-less ‘individual impression of life’ are, in the light of Litt's transcendental ground-Idea, two dialectical emanations from the same ego, which lives in a relativistically undermined Humanistic ideal of personality.

The absolutizing of the ‘transcendental cogito’ to a self-sufficient, ‘unconditioned’, ‘sovereign’ instance implies, that ‘pure thought’ is not subjected to a cosmic order, in which the laws of logical thought too, are grounded. Since theoretical reason also tries to create the coherence of meaning between its logical aspect and the other modal aspects of our cosmos, the result is a dialectical mode of thought, which relativizes in an expressly logical way the basic laws of logic as norms and limits of our subjective logical function.

How can such ‘dialectical thought’ subject itself to a veritable norm of truth that stands above it? The absolutizing of theoretical truth, which amounts to the dissolution of its meaning, is the work of the apostate selfhood, that will not subject itself to the laws established by the Ἀϱχή of every creature, and therefore ascribes to its dialectical thought a sovereignty sur-

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mounting all boundaries of laws. To Litt, the criterion of all relativism resides in the denial of the self-sufficiency of ‘purely theoretical’ truth. By this time, we have seen how the proclamation of this self-sufficiency is in truth nothing but the primary absolutizing of theoretical thought itself, which is the fountain of all relativism, since it denies the fulness of meaning of verity and up-roots theoretical thought.

The ‘self-refutation of scepticism’ is at the same time the self-refutation of the neutrality-postulate and of the conception of theoretical thought as self-sufficient!

But that self-refutation may not be overestimated in its proportion. For, in the last analysis, it proves no more than that whoever will think theoretically has to subject himself to a theoretical norm of truth which cannot have originated from that thought itself; for this norm has meaning only in the coherence of meaning and in relation to the totality of truth, to the fulness of verity, which, exactly as fulness, must transcend theoretical thought itself, and thus can never be ‘purely theoretical’.

That self-refutation which manifests itself in the contradiction, in which logical thought turning against its own laws necessarily entangles itself, cannot of itself lead us to the positive knowledge of verity.

It is merely a logical criterion of truth, which is not self-sufficient.

For in the conception of the full material meaning of truth, philosophy exhibits its complete dependence upon its transcendental basic Idea as the ultimate theoretical expression of its religious ground-motive.

The test of the transcendental ground-Idea.

In applying the test of the transcendental ground-idea to Litt's philosophical system, we come to the surprising result, that there is still less question of an authentic rationalistic bent with him than with Rickert. In his dialectical thought, Litt rather inclines to the pole of the irrationalist philosophy of life, which he has simply brought under dialectical thought-forms. The absolutizing of dialectical thought that is considered to be elevated above a ‘borniertes gegenständliches Denken’ (a narrowly restricted kind of objective thought holding itself to the principle of non-contradiction) points, in the light of Litt's conception of individuality, to the opposite of a rationalistic hypostatization of

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universal laws. In this respect Litt actually exhibits a strong kinship with Hegel, whose so-called ‘pan-logism’ is as little to be understood rationalistically, but discloses its true intentions only against the background of the irrationalist turn of the Humanistic ideal of personality in Romanticism! In general, dialectic thought has an anti-rationalist tendency.

Litt's dialectical philosophy, measured by its own criterion, is an ‘irrationalist life- and world-view’ in the would-be universally-valid forms of dialectical thought, an irrationalistic logicism, oriented historically.

But we, who apply another criterion, can recognize no dialectical unity of philosophy and a life- and world-view, but rather find the deeper unity of the two in their religious ground-motive. The content of Litt's transcendental ground-Idea is determined by an irrationalist turn of the Humanistic freedom-motive in its dialectical tension with the motive of scientific domination of nature, which has undergone a fundamental depreciation in his philosophy.

§ 5 - The transcendental ground-idea and the meaning of truth

The impossibility of an authentic religiously neutral theory of the life- and world-views. The concept of truth is never purely theoretical with respect to its meaning.

On account of its immanent theoretical character philosophy has to give a theoretical account of a life- and world-view, with which it is, however, united in its religious root. It cannot accomplish this task, however, until it attains to critical self- reflection with respect to its transcendental ground-Idea.

As little as it can be religiously neutral itself, so little can it give a neutral theory of the life- and world-views.

No single philosophic ‘Weltanschauungslehre’ is neutral, inasmuch as it cannot be neutral with respect to the material meaning of truth, not even in a sceptical relativism that upsets all foundations of philosophic theory.

Litt considers life- and world-views, as bound in ‘a dialectical unity’ with philosophy (loc. cit. pp. 251ff) and interprets them as concrete personal confessions of the individual struggle between person and cosmos. Philosophy, which should remain a science of a universally valid character, must, according to him, surmount the content of these confessions regarded as

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‘something merely concrete, i.e. purely individual and limited’, although the impulse to philosophic thought has originated out of this same concrete ‘view of life’. The irrationalist Humanistic ideal of personality which is the basic factor in the transcendental Idea of Litt's dialectical system at once discloses itself in this secularized irrationalist and personalist outlook on a life- and world-view.

To be sure, Litt may in this manner interpret his own life- and world-view; but if he claims ‘universal validity’ and ‘absolute truth’ for this philosophic outlook on every life- and world-view, then in the nature of the case there is no question of ‘theoretical neutrality’, and there can be no question of it, since otherwise he would have to abandon his own Humanistic vision as to the meaning of truth.

The whole hypostatization of ‘pure’ dialectical thought serves only to release human personality, in its interpretation of life, from every norm of truth, and to loosen its individuality from the bond of a law. Hence the conflict against all ‘universally-valid norms and values’ by which a rationalistic or semi-rationalistic Humanism still wished to bind that individuality in the human person.

We find as little neutrality in Rickert's theory of life- and world-views.

In him, too, there exists a religious unity in the meaning that he ascribes to his theoretical concept of truth, and in his proclamation of the sovereignty of personality loosed from the norm of truth in the choice of its life- and world-view. Only he stops half-way on the road to irrationalism, and still holds fast to formal universally-valid values and norms of reason.

By wresting the life- and world-views into the theoretical scheme of his philosophy of values, in the nature of the case he theoretically falsifies the meaning of every life- and world-view that rejects the religious starting-point of this philosophy.

How can one, for example, interpret the Calvinistic life- and world-view theoretically as a ‘theistic’ one, grounded in the choice of the ‘value of holiness’ as ‘highest value’, to which as subjective commitment (‘Subjectsverhalten’) ‘piety’ answers and as ‘good’ the ‘world of gods’ (thus Rickert's sixth type!)?

It is evident, that here, in a religious aprioristic manner, a Humanistic-idealist meaning is inserted in the transcendental theoretical Idea of truth, which in advance cuts off an unpre-

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judiced understanding of a life- and world-view with a different religious foundation.

The dependence of the meaning which a philosophic system reads into in the theoretical concept of truth, upon the transcendental ground-Idea appears from a confrontation of the various conceptions of verity, which immanence-philosophy has developed. By way of illustration, compare the nominalist view of Hobbes with the realistic and metaphysical conception of Aristotle. In Hobbes truth and falsehood are considered only as attributes of language and not of ‘things’. According to Hobbes the exact truth consists only in the immanent agreement of concepts with each other on the basis of conventional definitions (cf. Leviathan. Part I, 4). In Aristotle truth consists in the agreement of the judgment with the metaphysical essence of the things judged. Also compare Kant's transcendental-logical, idealistic concept of truth with Hume's psychologistic one; or the mathematical concept of truth of a Descartes with the dialectical view of a Hegel or Litt, to say nothing of the pragmatic concept of scientific verity in the modern Humanistic philosophy of life, and in existentialism¹.

The supposition that, if the validity of truth is but restricted to pure theory, the meaning of verity can be determined in a ‘universally-valid fashion’, is based on self-deception.

The consequence of the postulate of neutrality would actually have to be the allocation of the concept of truth to a personal choice of a life- and world-view.

1 He who desires a more complete picture of the confusing diversity in conceptions of the meaning of truth, need only consult Eisler's Wörterbuch der Philos. Begriffe. Vol. III (4th Ed. 1930) Sub voce Wahrheit (pp. 450-471).

Immanence-philosophy recognizes no norm of truth above its transcendental ground-Idea.

Actually, immanence-philosophy recognizes no norm of truth above its transcendental ground-Idea. In fact, the dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretical reason - especially in its Humanistic sense - hands truth over to the subjective commitment of the apostate personality. Therefore it is in vain that transcendental idealism attempts a refutation of the relativistic view of verity by means of logical arguments only.

Truth admits of no restriction to the theoretical-logical sphere

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as regards its fulness and temporal coherence of meaning. The validity of truth necessarily extends as far as the realm of judgments extends.

The distinction between theoretical and a-theoretical judgments. The inner contradiction of a restriction of the validity of truth to the former.

The consequence of Litt's conception (which Rickert also had to take, although he persisted in calling all judgments theoretical¹) is, that a sharp distinction must be made between theoretical judgments on the one hand, and a-theoretical judgments of valuation on the other, and that only the former can lay claim to universal validity of truth. Measured by this criterion, the judgment ‘This rose is beautiful’, for example, or the judgment ‘This action is immoral’ is withdrawn from this universal validity.

This entire distinction, however, (which goes back to Kant's dualistic transcendental ground-Idea with its cleavage between theoretical knowledge and apriori rational faith) is untenable and cancels itself when it is thought out.

For there exists no meaningful judgment of valuation, which does not at once, as a judgment, lay claim to validity of truth. An aesthetic or moral judgment as formulated above, with respect to its full intention must run as follows: ‘This rose is in truth beautiful’ and ‘This action is in truth immoral’, respectively. For these judgments imply the supposition: there exists a universally valid standard of aesthetic and moral valuation and to this rose and this action, respectively, the predicates ‘beautiful’ and ‘immoral’ are truly ascribed in my judgment².

1 Cf. e.g. System der Phil., p. 388. But it may not be denied that, for example the expression: ‘Truth is the highest value’ is a judgment, which, in Rickert's own view, can never be called a theoretical judgment, because it proceeds from a life- and world-view. Besides, as is well known, for Rickert the theoretical judgments too are oriented to a (theoretical) value.

2 Rickert, loc. cit. p. 388 supposes that the explicit assertion that something is beautiful, insofar as we seek to found this judgment theoretically, should be a theoretical judgment about the ‘aesthetic value’, and that in such a judgment the characteristic aesthetic attitude, which according to him lacks a universally valid standard, is in fact abandoned. The art lover, however, who is not at all related theoretically to the work of art, but who, in the full contemplation of the work, asserts the judgment ‘This work of art is beautiful’ wants just as well, and necessarily so, to imply the truth of his assertion in this non-theoretical judgment. To claim, with Rickert, that such a non-theoretical aesthetic judgment is impossible, is simply untenable. Besides, if aesthetic valuation were to know no tension between norm and aesthetic object, as Rickert pretends, why then do I distinguish beautiful and ugly in my a-theoretical appreciation of art?

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This is the case, even though he who asserts the judgment is incapable of rendering a theoretical account of this supposition.

Whoever denies this state of affairs, which is rooted in the fact, that no single modal aspect of our temporal cosmos is self-sufficient (but rather each refers to the inter-modal coherence of meaning), denies thereby the meaning of aesthetic and moral judgments themselves. He cuts through the coherence of meaning among the logical, the aesthetic and the moral law-spheres and can no longer allow even the principle of contradiction to be valid for the so-called ‘a-theoretical’ judgments.

If a man standing before Rembrandt's ‘Night-Watch’, in opposition to the predominant conception, were to call this masterpiece un-aesthetic, un-lovely and at the same time would claim: ‘There exists no universally valid norm for aesthetic valuation’, he would fall into the same contradiction as the sceptic who denies a universally-valid truth. He can try to defend himself, by making the reservation: I for one think this painting unlovely. But then it has no meaning to set this subjective impression against the generally predominant view. If this critic should also concede this, and so refrains from pressing his opinion upon others, then his judgment becomes meaningless as an aesthetic judgment. In other words, it is then no longer an aesthetic judgment, since it lacks aesthetic qualification and determinateness.

Every subjective valuation receives its determinateness by being subjected to a norm, which determines the subjectivity and defines it in its meaning! There exists no aesthetic subjectivity apart from a universally valid aesthetic norm to which it is subjected.

Let it not be objected here, that the beauty of the ‘Night-Watch’ is so thoroughly individual, that it cannot be exhausted in universally valid aesthetic norms.

For individuality is proper to the subjective as such, and the ‘Night-Watch’, without possible contradiction, is the objective realization of a completely individual, subjective-aesthetic conception. But this is not the point here. The question is only

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whether the judgment: ‘The “Night-Watch” is beautiful’, really has a universally-valid meaning or not. If not, then it does not make sense either to say, that the ‘Night-Watch’ is a great work of art. If so, then the judgment must necessarily make claim to universally-valid truth. Tertium non datur!

Theoretical and non-theoretical judgments. The latter are never a-logical, but merely non-‘gegenständlich’.

As we have shown before in our transcendental criticism of theoretic thought, the matter stands thus: theoretical judgments are abstract, distinguishing and combining modal meanings. They embody theoretical knowledge, which exists in an intermodal synthesis of meaning between the logical aspect of thought and the modal meaning of an a-logical aspect of our experience which has been made into a ‘Gegenstand’.

These judgments are subjected to the norm of theoretical truth, which holds for scientific knowledge.

The non-theoretical, so-called ‘practical’ judgments are not a-logical - no judgment can be a-logical - but merely non-‘gegenständlich’, i.e. not grounded in the theoretical attitude of knowledge, which sets the logical aspect of thought in contrast to the abstracted a-logical aspect of experience.

They are subjected to the norm of pre-theoretical truth, which holds for pre-scientific knowledge but possesses universal validity as well as the norm of theoretical truth¹.

As all temporal truth is based on the temporal coherence of meaning of the logical and the non-logical aspects of reality, it points out beyond itself to the fulness of meaning of verity, which is given only in the religious totality of meaning of our cosmos in its relation to the Origin.

With respect to its meaning every judgment appeals to the fulness of truth, in which no temporal restriction any longer has meaning. For verity does not allow any limitation as to its fulness of meaning.

He who thus relativizes its validity to a would-be ‘pure’ theoretical thought, and at the same time recognizes that the theoretical scientific judgments do not exhaust the realm of judgments, falls into the logical self-refutation of scepticism.

1 In our treatment of the problem of knowledge, we shall show, that theoretical truth cannot stand alongside of the pre-theoretical, but that they make appeal to each other in a deeper sense.

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For, on the one hand, he denies the fulness of truth by relativizing this latter to the special realm of the theoretical, in distinction from the non-theoretical. Yet, on the other hand, he requires for his conception full validity of truth without any restriction¹.

1 This antinomy goes back to a basic antinomy in the transcendental idea of the thinker. For, on the one hand, he cannot locate the totality of meaning in the theoretical, because, in that case, the personality-ideal with its a-theoretical ‘values’ would be relegated to a corner. But, on the other hand, he supposes he can find his Archimedean point in theoretical thought. A merely logical antinomy does not exist, as we shall see later.

Litt's distinction between theoretical and ‘weltanschauliche’ truth and the self-refutation of this distinction in the sense in which Litt intends it.

Litt makes a sharp distinction between truth in its proper sense of theoretical universally valid verity and the ‘so-called’ ‘truth of a life- and world-view’. In itself, this distinction might make good sense, were it not that Litt actually denies all ‘weltanschauliche Wahrheit’.

For, used with the latter signification, the word ‘truth’ in his view would be merely a predicate, applied to assertions of a life- and world-view, in order thereby to express: ‘the unmutilated integrity with which a thinker makes confession of his interpretation of life to himself and to others, the inner consistency with which he develops it, the convincing force, with which he knows how to represent and support it and... the agreement between it and his actual behaviour in life’².

2 loc. cit., p. 255: ‘Die ungeschminkte Aufrichtigkeit, mit der ein Denker sich vor sich selbst und anderen zu seiner Lebensdeutung bekennt, die innere Folgerichtigkeit mit der er sie entwickelt, die überzeugende Kraft, mit der er sie vorzutragen und zu begründen weisz und... die Übereinstimmung zwischen ihr und seiner tätigen Bewährung im Leben.’

The inner contradiction of this dualism. The meaninglessness of judgments, which are alleged not to be subjected to the norm of truth.

However, as soon as we attempt seriously to carry through this conception, it appears to dissolve itself in inner contradiction. For, if the judgments which a life- and world-view provides are not subjected to a universally-valid norm of truth,

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they lose all meaning. They are really no judgments, and so cannot contain an individual ‘interpretation of life’.

For a subjective ‘interpretation of life’ which is expressed in a series of judgments, makes sense only, if our temporal cosmos in which we live, actually exists as a coherence of meaning. If this is the case, the judgments in which that interpretation is given are necessarily subjected to a universally valid norm of truth, in accordance with which my subjective interpretation should agree with the true state of affairs; in other words, the question is whether or not the judgment is true with respect to the meaning of our cosmos. However, if there is no universally-valid truth with respect to the latter, then I can give no subjective ‘interpretation of life’ either. For I can interpret only that of which I can judge truly that it has a meaning, even though I should personally leave undecided the verity of my individual interpretation.

Litt now supposes, that he can escape these destructive consequences of his standpoint by making theoretical truth in its universal validity the judge as to essence, meaning and limits of the so-called ‘weltanschauliche Wahrheit’. Thus the judgments of the life- and world-view again appear to be subjected to the really mysterious ‘universally valid theoretical truth’ - but only in order immediately to release them again from every norm of verity. For, the universally valid truth in this respect turns out to be that the judgments of the life- and world-view, as assertions of a merely individual impression of life, are situated ‘beyond truth and falsity’.

For Litt, by reason of the transcendental basic Idea of his philosophical system, is, as we saw, still more averse to an intellectualistic philosophy than Rickert. ‘Truth’ must be restricted to the theoretical realm, if theoretical thought is not again, in the old intellectualistic way, to dominate the life- and world-view of the sovereign personality.

If, however, he persists in the view that, for example, the judgments: ‘God is the Creator of the world, which He has created to His glory’, and indeed: ‘Religion has to give way to science’, are situated ‘beyond truth and falsity’, because they comprise merely individual interpretations of life, then it is necessary to draw the full consequences of this conception. For in this case there cannot even exist any universally valid truth with respect to the totality of meaning of our temporal world either (which indeed according to Litt's own admission is more

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than merely theoretical) and its relation to the modal diversity of meaning.

If this consequence too is accepted, then the meaning of a life- and world-view as well as that of philosophic theoretical thought must be denied together with the meaning of ‘theoretical truth’. Theoretical thought has then annihilated its own foundations.

For philosophic thought is directed to the totality of meaning. However, if there exists no universally valid truth as to the relationship of totality, particularity and coherence of meaning, then philosophic thought has no norm of truth either, by which it may be tested.

The pole of absolute scepticism is hereby attained, and consequently the pole of complete self-refutation.

The concept of an ‘absolute merely theoretical truth’ dissolves itself in inner contradiction. Our transcendental critique, however, penetrates behind the logical contradictions, in which the doctrine of the self-sufficiency of ‘pure theoretical truth’ is entangled, to the root of this doctrine and exposes the relativistic bottom on which it builds its theoretical system. Only on the basis of its relativistic religious attitude, can the emphasis be explained, with which this school in modern times tries to safeguard at least theoretical truth against the invasion of relativism, which for a long time has undermined its life- and world-views.

An intrinsically Christian philosophy does not need to learn from the Humanistic ideal of personality, that theoretical thought cannot dominate religion and a life- and world-view. But Humanistic philosophy may learn from our transcendental criticism that, on the contrary, philosophic thought is dependent upon the religious ground-motive of the thinking ego.

§ 6 - Closer determination of the relation between philosophy and a life- and world-view

In what sense does philosophy have to give an account of the life- and world-view?

It has to bring the latter to theoretical clarity by rendering a theoretic account of its pre-theoretic picture of the world. So far as it includes in its horizon life- and world-views which possess another religious foundation than that which finds expression in its own transcendental ground-Idea, it must try to approximate this foundation in a transcendental ground-Idea, which is equal to the task of the theoretical illumination of these life- and

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world-views. This is the only way in which it is really possible to do justice to the various types of life- and world-views.

The life- and world-view is no system and cannot be made a system without affecting its essence.

At this juncture, the problem also necessarily emerges, why philosophy will never be in a position to replace the life- and world-view. It cannot do so for the same reason that prevents it from replacing naïve experience by theoretical knowledge. There is left a residue of living immediacy in every life- and world-view, which must necessarily escape theoretical concepts.

An authentic life- and world-view is never a system; not that it should be lost in faith or feeling, but because in it thought must remain focused in the full concrete reality. This is exactly what theoretical, systematic thought as such cannot do.

As soon as a life- and world-view is made into a system, it loses its proper universality, it no longer speaks to us out of the fullness of reality. It now speaks out of the distance which scientific abstraction must preserve in opposition to life, if it is to furnish us with theoretical knowledge.

A life- and world-view has no universality in the sense of a (philosophic) system. It does not bear a ‘closed’ character, as Litt supposes. It must rather remain continuously open to each concrete situation of life, in which it finds itself placed. Its deeper unity lies only in its religious root.

To the Calvinistic life- and world-view, as developed by Dr A. Kuyper in the Netherlands since the last decades of the nineteenth century, belongs undoubtedly also the radical Christian view of science. But how is this view of science born? Not from a philosophical or systematic tendency, but rather in the midst of a concrete situation of life. The pressure of the scholastic notion of science on the one hand, the necessity for defence against the ruling Humanistic view of science on the other, stimulated young neo-Calvinism to a consideration of its religious calling in the realm of science.

While Christianity in the Roman Empire was still being persecuted with fire and sword, its attitude with respect to politics and wordly culture in general was, in the main, a negative one. There could be a positive commitment with respect to the task of the Christian in this territory, only when the possibility of exercising influence in these realms had been created.

Apart from the concrete influence of the rationalistic thought

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of the ‘Enlightenment’ upon all realms of life, the reaction of the ideal of personality would never have disclosed itself in Humanistic circles. This reaction has been an important turning-point in the development of the Humanistic life- and world-view. That is to say, the requirement of the neutrality of science with respect to personal commitment in a life- and world-view would never have been born apart from this concrete situation.

Many more instances may be adduced in favour of our thesis. We constantly find the development of a life- and world-view in immediate contact with concrete situations in the fulness of life. These things will remain so, because this immediate relation to the latter is essential to the life- and world-view.

On this account we must repeat, that it is entirely erroneous to conceive of Christian philosophy as nothing but a theoretical elaboration of a Christian life- and world-view.

A life- and world-view may not be ‘elaborated’ philosophically. It must elaborate itself in the sequence of immediate life- and world-situations.

Is it then peculiar to the concrete individuality and so prevented from laying claim to ‘universal validity’?

What is the meaning of the concept ‘universal-validity’? The Kantian conception is determined by the critical Humanist immanence-standpoint.

For this question to be answered satisfactorily, it is first necessary to render an account of the correct meaning of the concept ‘universal validity’. Up to the present, we came to know this concept only in the dogmatic cadre of a pretended ‘unconditioned pure thought’ in which it really took the place of a standard of truth.

Kant, as is well known, was the first to give to it an apriori epistemological meaning. ‘Universally valid’ means to him: independent of all ‘empirical subjectivity’, valid for the ‘transcendental consciousness’, the ‘transcendental cogito’, which is itself in its apriori syntheses the origin of all universal validity in the field of experience. In this sense, the synthetic apriori, which makes objective experience possible, is universally valid.

On the other hand, perception has merely ‘subjective validity’, since it is dependent upon sensory impressions, on which no objective, necessary validity can be grounded.

Kant has applied this contrast to judgments, by distinguishing the latter into mere judgments of perception and judgments

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of experience. ‘So far as empirical judgments have objective validity, they are judgments of experience. Those, however, which are only subjectively valid, I call mere judgments of perception. The latter require no pure concept of the understanding, but only the logical connection of perceptions in a thinking subject. The former, however, at all times require, in addition to the representations of the sensory intuition, special concepts originally produced in the understanding, which bring it about, that the judgment of experience is objectively valid’¹.

Kant illustrates this distinction with the following examples: The judgments ‘The room is warm, the sugar is sweet, wormwood is revolting’ and ‘The sun heats the stone’ are merely subjectively valid judgments of perception².

The last-named judgment, however, becomes a judgment of experience, with a genuine claim to universal validity, if I say, ‘The sun causes the heat of the stone’, for here ‘to perception is added the concept of the understanding, i.e. causality, which necessarily connects the concept of the sunshine with that of heat, and the synthetic judgment becomes necessarily universally valid, consequently objective, and is transformed from a perception into experience’³.

This whole view of universal validity stands or falls with the critical Humanist immanence standpoint and with the vision which it determines as to the structure of experience and of temporal reality.

1 Prolegomena zur einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik (Prolegomena to any future metaphysics) W.W. Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst Ausg. IV, S. 422 (Works, Grossherzog Wilhelm Ernst ed. IV, p. 422): ‘Empirische Urteile, so fern sie objektive Gültigkeit haben, sind Erfahrungsurteile; die aber, so nur subjektiv gültig sind, nenne ich blosze Wahrnehmungsurteile: Die letztern bedürfen keines reinen Verstandesbegriffs, sondern nur der logischen Verknüpfung der Wahrnehmungen in einem denkenden Subjekt. Die ersteren aber erfordern jederzeit über die Vorstellungen der sinnlichen Anschauung noch besondere, im Verstande ursprünglich erzeugfe Begriffe, welche es eben machen, dasz das Erfahrungsurteil objektiv gültig ist.’

2 ib. p. 423 j^o note p. 426.

3 note p. 426: ‘kommt über die Wahrnehmung noch der Verstandesbegriff der Ursache hinzu, der mit dem Begriffe des Sonnenscheins den der Wärme notwendig verknüpft, und das synthetische Urteil wird notwendig allgemeingültig, folglich objektiv, und aus einer Wahrnemung in Erfahrung verwandelt.’

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The break with this immanence standpoint makes necessary also a break with this view of the universally valid. In the light of our transcendental basic Idea the universal validity to which a judgment lays claim, can merely be conceived in the sense of the agreement of the judgment with the divine law for the cosmos in its modal diversity, inter-modal coherence and fulness of meaning, apart from the validity of which no judgment would have meaning.

The possibility of universally valid judgments depends on the universal supra-subjective validity of the structural laws of human experience.

The possibility of universally valid judgments rests only and exclusively on the universal validity (raised above all individual subjectivity) of the structural laws of human experience.

‘Universal validity’ is a normative qualification, which supposes, that the judging subject is subjected to laws which can never take their origin from a so-called transcendental-logical subject, and with which the judging subject can come into conflict. As such it is connected very closely with the structure of truth.

Consequently, we can investigate the problem of universal validity in an all-sided manner only in the more particular treatment of the problem of knowledge. In the present connection we must still be content with introductory observations.

In the first place, then, we observe, that universal validity cannot be limited to the judgments of theoretical thought, for the very reason that the laws of theoretical thought do not hold ‘an sich’, but only in the cosmic coherence of meaning and in dependence on the religious root-unity of the divine law.

Universal validity is ascribed to every judgment to which each judging subject ought to assent, so not to a judgment that has meaning only for the individual subject who judges. The judgments, ‘I do not believe in God’ and ‘I do not think the Night Watch of Rembrandt beautiful’, can never have universal validity, because they express only a subjective opinion, which is restricted in the subjective function of the judgment to the individual ego.

On the other hand, it is indifferent for the universal validity of a judgment, whether it makes an assertion about a concrete individual state of affairs beyond the subjective function of the judgment, or indeed about abstract theoretical states of affairs.

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The judgment of naïve experience, ‘This rose which stands on my table is red’, if it is to be taken seriously, at once lays claim to concrete truth and universal validity for every human subject of judgment perceiving at this moment, since it is not restricted in the subjective function of the judgment to the individual ego, but has an objective sense.

Its universal validity depends, however, on the structural laws of pre-theoretical experience, in which thought lacks the intentional ‘gegenstand-relation’.

Undoubtedly, there are structural differences in the universal validity of judgments. In the first place, between theoretical and pre-theoretical ones.

The universal validity of a correct judgment of perception.

The validity of a judgment of perception, as formulated above, does not depend on the concrete hic et nunc (here and now) of the subjective-sensory aspect of perception.

If this were the case, then indeed, as Kant taught, the judgment of perception would be of merely subjective validity, and could not lay claim to universal validity. As we observed previously, however, the structural laws of naïve experience (at the same time structural laws of temporal reality itself, as will appear to us in the discussion of the problem of knowledge) are the laws that guarantee the universal validity of a correct judgment of perception.

These structural laws also regulate the subject-object relations in naïve experience, which we have to investigate more amply in a later context. They guarantee the plastic structure of the experience of things, also with respect to its subjective-objective sensory and logical aspects, and only make the universal validity of a concrete judgment of perception possible.

That Kant can ascribe only subjective validity to these judgments, finds its ground in his construction - which falsifies the entire structure of naïve experience - of the datum of experience as a chaotic sensory material, which must first be formed by a transcendental consciousness to an objective coherent reality, ordered in a universally valid manner. It is further grounded on the old - indeed metaphysical - prejudice that the so-called secondary qualities of things (i.e. the sensory qualities which cannot be measured and weighed) are merely subjective in character and do not belong to the ‘objective’

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reality of things¹. Above all it is rooted in the circumstance that, from his criticistic standpoint, Kant has totally wiped out the structural differences between theoretical knowledge and naïve experience.

In the nature of the case, we cannot elaborate all these points in detail until later.

1 Cf. Prolegomena (Ed. cit.) § 19 Note, where Kant observes with reference to the examples of judgments of perception given by him: ‘I gladly confess, that these examples do not represent such judgments of perception as could ever become judgments of experience, even if a concept of the understanding were to be added, since they are related merely to feeling, which everyone recognizes to be merely subjective and which consequently can never be attributed to the object, and so can never become objective.’ (‘Ich gestehe gern, dass diese Beispiele nicht solche Wahrnehmungsurteile vorstellen, die jemals Erfahrungsurteile werden könnten, wenn man auch einen Verstandesbegriff hinzu täte, weil sie sich bloss auf Gefühl, welches jedermann als bloss subjektiv erkennt und welches also niemals dem Objekt beigelegt werden darf, beziehen und also auch niemals objektiv werden können.’)
This subjectivistic view of the so-called secondary qualities we cannot refute until in the 2d Book we deal more closely with the subject-object relation.

The criterion of universal validity of a judgment concerning supra-theoretical states of affairs and the unconditional validity of the religious law of concentration of human experience.

There is, in the second place, a fundamental difference between a judgment concerning a supra-theoretical religious state of affairs as: ‘God is the Creator of the world’ or ‘All laws are grounded in absolute Reason’, on the one hand, and the judgments which make an assertion about cosmic or cosmological states of affairs within the temporal boundary of the universe, on the other hand.

The universal validity to which the first judgments lay claim, depends on their agreement or disagreement with the central religious unity of the divine law, as it is revealed in the Word of God, and to which the judging self-hood in the heart of its existence is subjected, as to the religious concentration-law of its temporal existence.

All universal-validity to which a judgment lays claim depends, in the final instance, upon the universal, unconditional validity of this religious law of concentration. No single modal law, not

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even the cosmic order of time itself (which maintains the coherence of meaning between the modal law-spheres) is self-sufficient to guarantee the universal validity of any human judgment, since the universal validity of these laws has meaning-character and the law is nothing apart from the bond with its Origin. It must consequently be clear, in the light of the Christian cosmonomic Idea, that the universal validity of a religious judgment of the Christian life- and world-view cannot be dependent upon the greater or smaller circle that assents to it; nor can it be derogated from by the circumstance that through apostasy, human thought is withdrawn subjectively from the fulness of meaning of truth and that man is incapable by himself of directing his thought again toward the absolute verity.

The so-called ‘transcendental consciousness’ as hypostatization of theoretical human thought in its general apostasy from the fulness of meaning of truth.

By the hypostatization of the so-called ‘transcendental consciousness’ as Origin of universal validity, the basis of the validity of truth is really undermined.

For in this hypostatization, truth is made dependent upon the really general apostasy of thought in the immanence-philosophy.

It makes no sense to suppose, that the immanent laws of human knowledge should draw theoretical thought away from the religious fulness of meaning of verity. It is rather the apostate self-hood in the grip of its dialectical religious ground-motive that attempts to dissociate these laws from their coherence of meaning and from their religious root and thereby subjectively falsifies their signification in the judgment. The concept ‘normal consciousness’ is not identical with the ‘norm of consciousness’.

The truth and universal validity of a judgment do not find their criterion in an apo-state ‘normal-consciousness’.

The great diversity and divergence of life- and world-views is, according to Litt, an indication that they are only individual impressions of life, and that they lack a universally valid standard of truth. But any one who sets out in this way renders no service with his arguments to the view, that only judgments of theoretical thought can make claim to universally valid truth. A simple reference to the dividedness of philosophi-

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cal and even of special scientific theories among themselves may be a sufficient stimulus to hastily abandon this by-way.

Impurity of the opposition ‘universal-validity’ and individuality as a contradictory one.

For the rest, in dealing with the problem of knowledge, we shall show, that the opposition: universal-validity in theoretical thought versus concrete individuality in the life- and world-view, is impure, since even in theoretical thought the individuality of the thinker may in no way be eliminated. The view that in theoretical thought there should be no place for the individual is a remnant of the rationalistic view of science of the period of the ‘Enlightenment’.

We pointed out, that a life- and world-view can follow no systematic tendency in its development, but must remain in immediate proximity to the concrete situations of life, even though it rightly gives a general formulation to its judgments. Focused in the full temporal reality, it, or rather its adherent, directs the religious vision of totality toward the reality of life in its concrete structure. Historical evolution, too, the tempo of which it ought to follow in its thought, is not conceived by it in scientific style, but in its continuous involvement in full temporal reality as a not yet theoretically distinguished component of the latter.

In this way, Litt's thesis as to the unscientific individual character of the life- and world-view is reduced to its proper proportions.

But how do matters stand with regard to his view, that a life- and world-view, in distinction from philosophy, lives in a sphere of common convictions?

Neither life- and world-view, nor philosophy is to be understood individualistically.

A life- and world-view is not individualistic, but truly social in origin. It is ex-origine the common conviction, subjected to the norm of the full truth, of a human community bound together by a central religious motive.

We have seen, however, in our transcendental criticism of the theoretical attitude of thought, that philosophy, too, necessarily issues from such a religious ground-motive, which rests at the basis of a particular philosophical community of thought.

In philosophy as well as in a life- and world-view, social

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prejudices of an illegitimate character can show themselves, which hang together with the limitation of vision (view) of the social environment and consequently should be overcome (class- and racial prejudices, prejudices of a limited church group, etc., etc.). Modern sociology of thought (Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Jerusalem and others) has cast a penetrating light on this state of affairs. But since philosophy, by reason of its theoretical attitude of thought in general, comes sooner to a critical standpoint with respect to such illegitimate prejudices, it can at this point exercise a wholesome influence on the pre-theoretical reflection. For it is impossible, that philosophy and a life- and world-view should not influence each other mutually.

Philosophic thought should find in the life- and world-view of the thinker a continuous actual stimulus to religious self-reflection. Conversely, a life- and world-view should come to theoretical clarity in philosophic thought.

But as little as philosophy may fall with impunity into the concrete tone of the life- and world-view, as little may the life- and world-view accept with impunity the distance from the full reality which is suitable to theoretical thought.

One in root, making mutual appeal to each other, and influencing each other, they, nevertheless, should remain sharply distinguished, each according to its own task and essential character.