A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 2. The General Theory of the Modal Spheres

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Chapter IV
The structural horizon of human experience and of created ‘earthly’ reality

§ 1 - The a priori moments in human experience and the idea of the structural horizon of experience.

Now that we have obtained a more detailed insight into the possibility of the inter-modal synthesis of meaning, it is reasonable to ask what is to be understood by the a priori moments in our experience and what they consist of.

Having given account of the distinction between theoretical and pre-theoretical knowledge, there is no longer any obstacle in our way to a more comprehensive formulation of this problem. Its restriction to the theoretical attitude may therefore be cancelled. For we are now safeguarded against the misconception that all cognitive activity is exclusively based on a theoretical synthesis of inter-modal character.

The meaning of the word ‘a priori’ in immanence-philosophy.

What is to be understood by the a priori? As is generally known, the word a priori, in contradistinction to a posteriori, originally had a metaphysical-ontological sense.

Aristotle considered ‘the universal’ as the metaphysical ‘ground of being’ of individual things. The universal, the metaphysical essential form in this sense is to him the πϱότεϱον φύσει but at the same time the ὕστεϱον πϱὸς ἡμᾶς, that which comes later in cognition. In scholasticism (Albert of Saxony, Suarez) mention is made of an ‘a priori demonstration’, concluding from causes to effects, in contrast with the ‘demonstratio a posteriori’ which proceeds from effect to causes¹.

Here, too, the a priori has a clearly metaphysical sense. Since

1 Cf. Suarez, Disp. met. XXX, 7, 3.

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the rise of Humanistic philosophy the a priori has been preferably taken in an epistemological sense; in recent times also in a phenomenological signification. As such it is contrasted with the ‘empirical’.

In the former sense those cognitive elements are referred to which do not stem from sensible ‘experience’. In pre-Kantian rationalism the a priori in this sense was identical with the universally valid, and with logical necessity in thought. It was identified with that which exclusively derives from ‘pure mathematical (logical) thought’.

In Kant's system the epistemological contrast between a priori and a posteriori or ‘empirical’ coalesces with that between the universally valid transcendental forms (creating the possibility of experience) and the (sensory) matter of our knowledge. A priori in this sense are all synthetical judgments of universal validity which cannot be founded on (sensory) experience.

In Husserl's phenomenology the term a priori acquires an entirely new meaning. In the first Volume of his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913) he avoids the words a priori and aposteriori as much as possible because of their ambiguity and ‘their connection with ill-reputed philosophical doctrines’¹. But in his later work Cartesianische Meditationen (1929) he calls his phenomenology emphatically ‘the total science of the a priori’. By a priori he means the ‘universal Logos of all thinkable being’ which is immanent in the constitutive possibilities of the transcendental phenomenological subject (ego) and the transcendental inter-subjectivity of the egos.

This total science of the a priori is the ultimate foundation of all genuine sciences of facts (Tatsachenwissenschaften) and of a genuine universal philosophy in its Cartesian sense: a universal science of the factual being considered in its absolute foundation. For all rationality of the factual is implied in the phenomenological a priori as the system of all ideal ‘Wesensmöglichkeiten’.

Phenomenology has to construe a priori - but in strict intuitive ‘Wesensnotwendigkeit’ and essential universality - the forms of all thinkable worlds, and the latter in the cadre of all thinkable forms of being as such and their systems of stages

1 1 Op. cit., p. 6.

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(Stufen). It has to do so in correlation with the constitutive a priori, i.e. the subjective a priori of the intentional phenomenological acts by which the transcendental consciousness constitutes these worlds as its ‘Gegenstand’. In this sense phenomenology, as the universal science of the a priori, is the ultimate critique of knowledge founded in a radical and universal self-reflection of the transcendental ego on its constitutive intentional acts and their constitutive essential possibilities. It has to describe these essential possibilities in the logical form of an intuitive eidetic system¹.

So Husserl appears to lay particular stress on the rational character of the phenomenological a priori. The ‘Wesensanschauung’ (intuition of the essence) with him is an intuition of the logical eidos of the noetic and noematical² contents of the intentional acts of consciousness.

The Kantian categories must also be made into the object of this intellectual intuition in order to lay bare the whole of their intentional meaning and ‘intentional horizon’.

Phenomenology does not permit itself to accept any realities and concepts of realities as given beforehand. It has to derive all its concepts from the original subjective phenomenological source and in this sense also to render completely clear and distinct all fundamental concepts of the positive sciences which are handled here in a naïve way without an insight into their real meaning. As a fundamental inquiry into the ‘transcendental constitution of a world’ phenomenology has to make clear in a radical way the meaning and origin of the concepts world, nature, space, time, animal being, man, soul, body, social community, culture etc.³. Husserl calls this universal a priori science a ‘universal concrete ontology’, a concrete ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ or ‘concrete logic of being’ (Konkrete Logik des Seins).

The metaphysical problems which Husserl identifies with the ‘ethical religious’ questions should also be treated in this way, i.e. on the phenomenological basis of an intuitive eidetical in-

1 Cf. Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (ed. and introduced by Prof. Dr S. Shrasser, the Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 178 fl.

2 Translator's note: noetic is related to the subjective components of the mental processes. Noematic refers to the intended objects as intended.

3 Op. cit., p. 180. Cf. also Husserl's last posthumous work Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale Phänomenologie (1936-1937), ed. by Walter Biemel (Haag, 1954), p. 10 ff.

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sight into their transcendental constitution by the transcendental inter-subjectivity of the egos or the phenomenological ‘monads’. For, according to him, this is the absolute primary being which precedes all objectivity of the world and is the origin of its meaning.

A different view of the phenomenological a priori is defended by Scheler. With him the rationalist conception of Husserl is for a great deal replaced by an irrationalist view, viz. with respect to the phenomenology of values. This is due to the influence of Dilthey who attributed to feeling (empathy) a fundamental epistemological function with regard to the so-called ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, and whose irrationalistic historicism left no room for an eidetic logic of values. This is why Scheler sharply distinguishes between the realm of ‘pure logic’ and that of ‘pure axiology’.

As phenomenology of values the latter has to investigate the intentional contents of ‘emotional acts of valuation’ such as feeling, hating, loving etc.

With Scheler a priori means the whole of all ideal ‘Bedeutungseinheiten’¹ and sentences which by means of the content of an immediate intuition of the essence, come to be ‘given in themselves’ (zur Selbstgegebenheit kommen). In this sense the phenomenological a priori encompasses the whole realm of ‘essences’. An ‘essence’ as such is neither universal nor individual. Only from the reference to the things in which the essence makes its appearance, does the difference result between its universal and individual meaning. An essence comes to be universal when it makes its appearance as the identical in a plurality of things which for the rest differ from one another. It may, however, also be the essence of an individual which is not to be found in other individuals².

Just like the whole of phenomenology, Scheler emphatically rejects the Kantian identification of the a priori with the formal, as well as that of the material with the sensory-empirical. But he also rejects Husserl's identification of the a priori with the logical eidos or the rational.

According to him also feeling, preferring, loving and hating have their own a priori content, just as independent of ‘inductive

1 units of signification.

2 Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (3rd edition), p. 43.

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experience’ as the ‘pure laws of thought’. And this a priori can be grasped - without the intermediary of the logical function - in a ‘pure intuition of the essence’, applied to the ‘acts and their matter, their foundation and their coherence’¹.

In the last instance he considers the a priori in love and hatred as the ultimate common foundation both of the a priori knowledge of ‘being’ and that of ‘a priori volition’.

In the footsteps of Husserl, Scheler no longer opposes the a priori in this wide sense to ‘empirical facts’. The contrast between a priori and a posteriori is rather that between two kinds of experience: viz. pure and immediate experience, related to the pure ‘facts’ of the intuition of the essence, and experience which is dependent on the sensory natural organism of the real ‘Aktträger’ (bearer of the acts)².

1 ‘der Akte und ihrer Materien, ihrer Fundierung und ihrer Zusammenhänge,’ - cf. Op. cit., p. 61.

2 Ibid., p. 47.

Why the contrast between a priori and ‘empirical’ is useless to us.

The contrast between ‘a priori’ and ‘empirical’ is also useless in the light of our cosmonomic Idea. For the conception of the ‘empirical’ in pre-phenomenological immanence-philosophy is tainted with the metaphysical separation between noumena and phenomena. Our conception of human experience is radically different from that of this immanence-philosophy, which absolutizes the theoretical meaning-synthesis and consequently has to conceive of experience in a functionalistic sense. But also the phenomenological conception of pure or immediate experience and factual sensory experience does not agree with our view of the human experiential horizon which will be explained presently. In our opinion there does not exist a pure phenomenological experience of a ‘super-human’ nature. This whole conception is based upon a primary absolutization of the theoretic-phenomenological attitude of thought in an ‘absolute transcendental subject (ego)’.

The reason why Scheler's conception of experience is useless to us.

As to Scheler's conception of experience in particular, we admit that in it, just as in Husserl's, there is a break with the identification of the empirical with the functional-sensory. But

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we have to raise the same fundamental objections to it - and, for that matter, also to Husserl's more intellectualistic conception, - that we have alleged against the phenomenological standpoint as such.

Another objection is concerned with the misinterpretation of the theoretical-analytical character of the οχή in its phenomenological sense, giving rise to the error that in this ‘epochè’ nothing of the true datum of experience gets lost.

It is supposed then that this datum can be grasped adequately in the ‘intuition of the essence’, an opinion which has been criticized already earlier¹. In Scheler the ‘cosmos’ is exhausted in its pre-logical aspects. And in this abstraction he conceives of it as of a ‘natural world of things’ related to our cognitive activity. In perfect agreement with the metaphysical-dualistic conception he thus opposes the ‘cosmos’ to the domain of the absolutized normative ‘mental functions’. For this very reason Scheler's conception of experience is totally different from ours. He cancels the whole of the linguistic aspect of the cosmos in the datum of the meaning-coherence. He even commits the error of presuming that ethics is capable of grasping the originally a priori content of the ‘emotional mental acts’ entirely independent of logic². He maintains ‘pure logic’ as well as ‘pure axiology’, both of which are incompatible with the Idea of the all-sided cosmic meaning-coherence.

1 Cf. Part. II, Ch. II, § 4 of this Volume.

2 Op. cit., p. 59: ‘Auch das Emotionale des Geistes, das Fühlen, Vorziehen, Lieben, Hassen, Wollen, hat einen ursprünglichen apriorischen Gehalt, den es nicht vom “Denken” erborgt, und den die Ethik ganz unabhängig von der Logik aufzuweisen hat. Es gibt eine a priorische “ordre du coeur” oder “logique du coeur”, wie Blaise Pascal treffend sagt.’

The structural and the subjective a priori in human experience.

Yet there must be some truth in the old ontological view as well as in the modern epistemological conception of the a priori, in spite of the fact that both of them are inacceptable to Christian philosophy, both as regards their exclusiveness of each other and their own foundation and elaboration. To account for this element of truth, we shall have to introduce a distinction in our epistemology which will prove to be of essential importance, but which in this sense is unknown in immanence-philosophy.

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There is an a priori complex in the cosmological sense of the structural horizon of human experience. This a priori as such has the character of a law. And there is also a merely subjective a priori complex in the epistemological sense of the subjective a priori insight into that horizon. We can distinguish the two a priori complexes simply as the structural and the subjective a priori. Only the subjective a priori can be true or false in an epistemological sense. As it is subjective insight expressing itself in judgments, it necessarily remains enclosed within the cosmological a priori horizon of human experience. In other words, the subjective a priori always remains determined and delimitated by the a priori structure of all human experience. It can never be the self-sufficient foundation of truth which critical epistemology considers it to be. The structural and the subjective a priori principles are related as the law-side and the subject-side of a priori human knowledge.

The horizon of human experience.

In the light of our cosmonomic Idea there can be no doubt that all human experience is bound to some horizon which makes this experience possible. We repeatedly mentioned the transcendent and the transcendental conditions of our knowledge.

This horizon of experience is not a subjective cadre within which reality appears to us only in a phenomenal shape (determined by a supposedly creative synthesis) and behind which the fundamentally inexperienceable dimensions of some ‘thing in itself’ (‘Ding an sich’) are situated.

It is rather the a priori meaning-structure of our cosmos itself in its dependence on the central religious sphere of the creation, and in subjection to the Divine Origin of all things. The horizon of human experience is that of our ‘earthly’ cosmos as it is given in the Divine order of the creation.

This is a truly super-individual and law-conformable cadre which is constant, in contrast with all change in actual subjective experience.

The identity of the horizon of human experience and that of our ‘earthly’ cosmos is not to be interpreted in the sense of a transcendental idealism.

We must emphatically warn against every transcendental idealistic interpretation of our thesis concerning the identity of the horizon of human experience and that of our ‘earthly’

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cosmos¹. Transcendental idealism stands and falls with the acceptance of a transcendental-theoretical consciousness which ‘constitutes’ the world as its ‘Gegenstand’, and eventually constitutes itself.

This is why it is bound to the immanence-standpoint with its primary absolutization of the theoretical synthesis. Our thesis, on the contrary, is founded in the Divine Revelation concerning the creation of man in the image of God. Since God has created the ‘earthly’ world in a concentric relation to the religious root of human existence, there cannot exist an ‘earthly’ ‘world in itself’ apart from the structural horizon of human experience. But it is excluded on this standpoint to accept the Husserlian opinion that the ‘world’ is the result of a constitutive process of synthesis originating in the transcendental ego and the transcendental inter-subjectivity of the egos, conceived of as mental monads. Nor is it possible to accept Husserl's (Fichtean) conception of the self-constitution of the transcendental ego. It is this idealistic opinion which lacks a radical critical self-reflection; and so does Husserl's opinion that the phenomenological reduction and the eidetical intuition guarantee an absolute freedom from prejudices.

1 According to Husserl (Cartesianische Meditationen, p. 118), phenomenology is eo ipso transcendental idealism. Not in the sense of the Kantian idealism, which at least as a limiting concept leaves room for a world of ‘things in themselves’. But in the sense of an idealism that is nothing but the ‘self-interpretation of my ego as the subject of every possible knowledge with respect to every possible meaning of being.’ This categorical statement should be a warning against any neo-scholastic attempt to accommodate Husserl's phenomenological method to the Christian standpoint in philosophy. For Husserl emphatically establishes that this transcendental idealism also should control the ultimate questions of religion. This is to say that it is incompatible with the Christian transcendence-standpoint and with the Christian basic motive of philosophical thought.

The obfuscation of the horizon of human experience by sin. The necessity of the light of Divine Revelation.

The fall into sin has obfuscated our experiential horizon by closing it to the light of Divine Truth. In the light of Divine Revelation the horizon of human experience is opened again and extricated from the prejudices of our obfuscated understanding. The depth of its religious dimension becomes transparent. This horizon is not a priori in the Kantian sense of non-empirical.

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It belongs implicitly to human experience in so far as it constitutes its a priori determining element. This implicit experience is only made explicit in the transcendental and in the radical religious self-reflection, of which the former is based upon the intuitive insight into the cosmic order of time.

If we had no experience of this horizon, how should we ever be able to know of it, and how could we give account of it philosophically? It can only be called an a priori structure insofar as it is the constant meaning-structure of all human experience and of all temporal reality.

Kant's so-called categories of modality.

In this connection we must return to the Kantian ‘categories of modality’: possibility, actuality, and necessity. These categories are supposed to have the peculiarity of not adding anything whatever to the concept (whose ‘predicate’ they are), as ‘determination’ of the object. They only express the relation of the object (intended by the concept) to our cognitive faculty. Kant formulates their function as follows: ‘If my concept of a thing is complete, I can still ask whether this object is merely possible or also actual; or, if the latter, whether it is not also necessary. By this the object itself is not more definitely determined in thought. The only question is in what relation this thing (together with all its determinations) stands to the understanding and its use in experience, to empirical judgment, and to reason (in its application to experience)’¹.

If we compare these so-called ‘categories’ with each other, we are struck by the fact that ‘possibility’ and ‘necessity’ in their very application to ‘Gegenstdände’ (i.e. in theoretical, synthetical usage) can be conceived of in every abstracted meaning-modus. On the other hand actual (cosmic) reality can never be enclosed in an abstract modal meaning.

A state of affairs may be possible and even necessary in a

1 Kr. d.r. V. (WW. Grossherzog Wilh. Ernst ed., Vol. III, p. 213/4: ‘Wenn der Begriff eines Dinges schon ganz vollständig ist, so kann ich doch noch von diesem Gegenstande fragen, ob er bloss möglich oder auch wirklich, oder, wenn er das letztere ist, ob er gar auch notwendig sei? Hierdurch werden keine Bestimmungen mehr im Objekte selbst gedacht, sondern es fragt sich nur, wie es sich (samt allen seinen Bestimmungen) zum Verstande und dessen empirischen Gebrauche, zur empirischen Urteilskraft und zur Vernunft (in ihrer Anwendung auf Erfahrung) verhalte?’

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mathematical, a psychological, a physical, a biological, a linguistic, an aesthetic, a juridical sense. But it can never be actual in its theoretical abstraction. There is a logical, a psychical, a biotic, a juridical, etc., possibility and necessity; there is no abstract logical, psychical, biotic, juridical, etc., actual reality. Functionally speaking, the aspects here intended are only meaning-modi of the full temporal reality. Every law-sphere has its modal horizon, its necessary law-conformable structure, constituting the boundaries of possibility within the aspect of reality concerned.

The truly transcendental Idea of possibility and necessity is related to the horizon of the full actual reality.

The horizon of the full actual reality overarches every modal horizon. For this very reason actual reality cannot be a synthetical category. It cannot be grasped in a concept at all, it can only be approached in an Idea. The horizon of human experience and of empirical reality contains the entire constant structural law-conformity given in the Divine order of the creation of our ‘earthly’ cosmos.

Naturally, possibility and necessity can also be conceived in the transcendental meaning of the horizon of reality. Then they are conceived in the cosmonomic Idea, and not in the modal speciality of an abstract aspect. Insofar as possibility and necessity are used as theoretical-synthetical categories, they must be delimitated in their specific ‘gegenstandliche’ modal meaning. But insofar as in epistemology they are related to the horizon of the fulness of reality and experience, they can only function as limiting concepts, i.e. as transcendental Ideas.

These Ideas become speculative-metaphysical as soon as they absolutize the horizon of human experience into an eternal rational order founded in the Divine Essence, and to which the sovereign God is supposed to be bound.

As transcendental Ideas, possibility and necessity are related to the horizon of the fulness of human experience, and as such they belong to the creaturely meaning, and not to the Divine Being. Necessity then is related to the horizon of both reality and experience according to its structural law-conformity. Possibility refers to the free scope left to concrete, subjective individuality in its structural determination by this horizon.

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§ 2 - The structure of the horizon of human experience and the levels of the a priori.

The transcendent dimension of the horizon of experience. The religious a priori.

In a transcendent sense the horizon enclosing all human experience is formed by the communal structure of the religious root of human existence. Our selfhood which experiences, is under the law, is a subject, limited and determined by the law in its central religious sense. This very creaturely character of our selfhood makes it impossible for human experience to be detached from the religious attitude of the I-ness.

According to the cosmic order of the creation all human experience is at bottom religiously determined, either in its direction to God or in an apostate direction. In this sense we can speak of the necessary religious a priori of all human experience both in its structural and its subjective sense. This transcendent dimension of the horizon of experience is of course not recognized on the immanence-standpoint: it does not play a recognized rôle here as a necessary pre-supposition of cosmology and epistemology.

The transcendental dimensions of the horizon of experience. The a priori of the temporal meaning-coherence.

When descending to the transcendental dimensions of the horizon of human experience, we first come upon cosmic time. According to the Divine order of the creation all our experience of reality in its modal and typical diversity is cosmically bound to time. Not to time in a specific (theoretically isolated) aspect, but to time in its cosmic all-sidedness: to the time which is the foundation of all the modal law-spheres, and which maintains them in their continuous meaning-coherence.

Time in this cosmological sense is the absolutely transcendental a priori of all human experience.

It stands to reason that also this dimension of the horizon of human experience cannot be recognized on the immanence-standpoint, because on this standpoint the universal temporal meaning-coherence of the cosmos is bound to be misinterpreted.

Consequently we have to descend to a lower level of the structure of human experience if, at least to a certain extent, we want to establish contact with that which is called the a priori by immanence-philosophy. In the first place we shall then have to consider the functional structure of the modal aspects. For it may

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be that on the immanence-standpoint it is not possible to understand the modal meaning-structures as such in their unbreakable coherence founded in the cosmic order of time; but it has appeared that the functionalistic view of empirical reality and the absolutization of the experiential aspects pre-suppose the structures concerned which are only misinterpreted in this view.

The horizon of the a priori modal structures of human experience.

The meaning-modalities guaranteeing the specific sovereignty of the law-spheres within their own limits, actually determine all individuality of meaning within the law-spheres.

An original individual spatial figure is only possible within the structural horizon of the spatial modality. An objective individual sensible picture of perception, e.g., that of an apple-tree in blossom in my garden here, is only possible within the structural horizon of the psychical meaning-modus. A servitude of prospect vested in an individual building can only exist within the structural horizon of the juridical aspect, etc.

The modal aspects in their functional structure are consequently the determining, necessary conditions of all modal individuality in which temporal reality reveals itself within the law-spheres concerned.

For this reason they can be called the modal a priori conditions of all individuality of meaning. This cosmic state of affairs is founded in the temporal world-order, which also determines the possibility of our experience.

We can experience the modal aspects both in the pre-theoretical and in the theoretical attitude only in their temporal coherence, according to the foundational and the transcendental direction of time. But within this cosmic coherence the modal aspects (according to their structure) are the a priori conditions of all experience of individual reality. And this is true independently of the question whether we have become distinctly aware of these aspects in the transcendental reflection on the intuitive theoretical synthesis of meaning, or whether they are experienced indistinctly in the pre-theoretical consciousness. The cosmological a priori character of the modal aspects, in contradistinction to all modal individuality of meaning, is manifest in its structural stability in contrast with all that is variable in temporal reality. As these aspects, in their temporal meaning-coherence, constitute

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the functional structure of our cosmos, they cannot be transitory in time.

The individual sensory impression of a sunset that I experience at this moment, may pass away in time, but the psychical modus in which this impression is objectified cannot be transitory in this sense.

For this modality belongs to the functional structure of reality, and, as such, also to the a priori horizon of all human experience. When we discussed the problem of the modal meaning-disclosure we have shown that the stability of the modal horizon is not identical with rigidity. It is, however, a fundamental error to restrict the modal a priori in human experience to the psychical and the logical aspects. The modal horizon is founded in the horizon of cosmic time, which embraces all the law-spheres without any exception.

The synthetical a priori of theoretical experience.

The structure of the inter-modal meaning-synthesis is the cosmological a priori of theoretical knowledge as to its law-side. This structure forms the horizon of all true theoretical knowledge. It remains enclosed by the cosmic horizon of time and by the religious horizon of the self-hood. We only gain access to it in a subjective-theoretical way in the actual transcendental self-reflection.

The insight into this horizon is the subjective-fallible apriori of all episteinology. Again there is no reason to reserve the subjective a priori character for some specific theoretical meaning-syntheses and to deny the a priori character of all other possible syntheses.

And the subjective synthetical a priori in our theoretical knowledge, as far as the law-spheres are concerned, does not reach further than the theoretical insight into the structure of the modal aspects according to their law- and their subject-side under the hypothesis of the cosmonomic Idea. In this Idea theoretical thought is directed both to the religious dimension and the temporal dimension of human knowledge. Of course the insight into the law-conformable coherence of all types of individuality within each separate theoretically embraced law-sphere, is also of a subjective a priori character. The reader was already confronted with this state of affairs in the third part of Vol. I.

Thus e.g., physics tries to reduce all individual functional effects within the physical field to one and the same modal deno-

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minator (viz. energy) in order to find the functional coherence between these effects.

In the same way legal theory investigates the functional juridical coherence between the typical legal spheres of constitutional law, civil law, non-civil industrial law, ecclesiastical law, international law, etc., which differ so widely from each other in their typical structures of individuality. In both cases this systematic tendency can find its epistemological justification only in the a priori insight into the modal structure of the law-sphere concerned, which keeps all the types of individuality presenting themselves within its cadre, in the functional coherence of the modal aspect.

Usually mathematics and so-called formal logic are mentioned as entirely a priori sciences. The latter has been sufficiently discussed by us, and we have seen that it always pre-supposes the theoretical synthesis of meaning. Its a priori character only concerns the modal horizon of the logical law-sphere in its synthetical coherence with the modal horizon of the other law-spheres. The mathematical sciences can be of a subjective a priori character only in the theoretical embracement of the modal horizon of the numerical, the spatial and the kinematical law-spheres with the functional law-conformities founded in them.

As soon as the determination of the typical functions of number, or those of the spatial or kinematical relations of reality (say e.g., Planck's quantum h) is involved, we find ourselves in the domain of the structures of individuality of natural things and events. The former can never be established in a subjective a priori way only oriented to the functional structures of the aspects concerned. They can only be discovered by means of a factual research of empirical reality in its typical structural functions, within the specific scientific field of investigation.

The synthetic a priori, too, is not to be understood as a constructive creation of the human mind.

The word a priori stands in bad repute in special science (with the exception of logic and mathematics). And rightly so. For the word is badly tainted with the rationalistic prejudices of the Humanistic science-ideal, which ascribed a creative logical function to human consciousness. It was supposed that the structure of given reality should be first methodically eliminated, after which the a priori constructive order of ‘creative’ thought had to be imposed on it.

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Even Kant's so-called formal ‘Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes’ (the principles of the pure understanding) had been inspired by this science-ideal. They proved incapable of standing the test of the progressive development of natural-scientific thought. The constructive view of the subjective a priori elements of our knowledge, based as it is on the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea, is in reality a consequence of the ὕβϱις, of the pride of man, who in his supposed self-sufficiency of thought refuses to submit to the Divine world-order. From the outset we have rejected this view, as we have broken with the cosmonomic Idea in which it is founded. The cognitive subject does not create the horizon of his experience himself. The law-conformable structure of his experience does not originate from a sovereign ‘transcendental subject’. The modal structure of the law-spheres abstracted in the theoretical synthesis of meaning must be carefully read from the horizon of the full temporal reality created by God. And in the carrying out of this task of the modal analysis of meaning a philosophy which orients itself to the Christian cosmonomic Idea, is by no means infallible.

The system of the law-spheres is an open one.

In fact the system of the law-spheres designed by us can never lay claim to material completion. A more penetrating examination may at any time bring new modal aspects of reality to the light not yet perceived before. And the discovery of new law-spheres will always require a revision and further development of our modal analyses. Theoretical thought has never finished its task. Any one who thinks he has devised a philosophical system that can be adopted unchanged by all later generations, shows his absolute lack of insight into the dependence of all theoretical thought on historical development. All this, however, does not detract anything from the truth that theoretical thought remains bound to a modal horizon which has a constant determining character as to all the changing concrete facts. Nor does it derogate anything from the necessity of a subjective a priori insight into this horizon as a pre-supposition of special science.

If an arbitrary construction is to be avoided, the function-concept of special science must be oriented to this modal horizon, which is necessarily a priori, for the very reason that it determines the functional structure of all individuality of meaning within the law-spheres. The analysis of the modal meaning

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being a philosophical task that cannot be accomplished without the hypothesis of a cosmonomic Idea, all special scientific thought necessarily has a philosophical foundation, even though the special science-theorist does not take account of this fact.

The horizon of the structural principles of individuality.

Besides those mentioned above, the horizon of human experience has another dimension which is of essential importance. It plays a dominating rôle in naïve, pre-theoretical experience, but it also has an important rôle in theoretical knowledge. We mean the dimension of the structures of individuality. It manifests itself in concrete things and events, and also in the typical structural relations of human society in their inner irreducible nature and their mutual interlacements, as they are created by God and realized in changeable forms by man.

It has appeared that these typical total structures of individuality in principle function at the same time in all the modal law-spheres. And it is really a question of structural principles, not one of the factual individuality of the things that are determined by these principles. We are here confronted with structural types of laws, which, just as the structural modi of laws, are founded in the cosmic temporal order. As such they are not changeable in time, since they determine the inner nature of perishable factual things, events and social relationships functioning within their transcendental cadre. Here we come upon a new level in the structural a priori, which forms a component part of the horizon of human experience. Although the systematical discussion of these structures of individuality is reserved to the third volume, we cannot omit making mention of them in the present context.

In comparison with the levels of the a priori discussed previously this new level shows several peculiarities. In the first place the typical structures of individuality pre-suppose all the dimensions of the horizon of human experience mentioned above except that of theoretical synthesis.

The plastic character of the horizon of the structures of individuality.

In the second place these structural principles are strongly plastic in character because of their more concrete nature. This lends an extremely rich and varied aspect to this dimension of the experiential horizon. The modal dimension encompassed by the cosmic temporal horizon is the same for all things. But the

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plastic horizon of structural individuality is varied according to types which are different for each of the various groups of things, and in which things in turn appear, change their forms, or are changed in form, and vanish.

Ancient and medieval metaphysics tried to approach this plastic dimension of the horizon of experience with the doctrine of the substantial essential forms of things. Aristotle elaborated this theory in great detail and tried to adapt the rigid metaphysical form-matter-schema to the plasticity of the structures of individuality. He conceived of form as a dynamic principle of development which is immanently operative in the ‘matter’ of natural substances. And he conceived of the lower essential forms as ‘matter’ with respect to a possible higher formation.

This plastic motive was again lost in modern times. It was replaced by the rigid-static conception of the ‘world of pure essences’ (die Well der reinen Wesen) in Husserl's eidetic logic, though in his later phenomenology this conception was relativized by the motif of the active and passive constitutive genesis of the intentional contents of the acts. But the Aristotelian theory, rooted in the metaphysical immanence-standpoint, is also unable to do justice to the structural individuality of temporal reality. This level of the horizon of human experience can no more be grasped on the immanence-standpoint than the others can, because it pre-supposes the latter.

The complex interlacements of these typical structural principles.

The plastic character of the structural principles of individuality is especially evident in their typical interlacements and coherences capable of formation. In these they realize themselves in variable, individual things (events and social relationships). Owing to this the dimension of our experiential horizon that is turned to the inexhaustible wealth of individuality does not show a rigid, atomistic character, but presents itself in a continuous dynamic-structural coherence. The plastic dimension of the horizon of experience and of reality is of a very special a priori character.

The fact that the typical structures of individuality can be in no way construed a priori by human thought is nothing specific in comparison with the modal horizon of our experience. But what is indeed remarkable in the plastic horizon is that the structural principles themselves show different types of indivi-

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dual meaning. Moreover, they only reveal themselves to theoretical insight in the structural analysis of the variable reality of things, events and relationships of human society that change their forms continually in time. Without the structural principles of individuality there could not be any real experience of concrete things, facts and social relations. A functionalistic Kantian or neo-Kantian epistemology with its abstract constructive form-matter-schema can never really give account of the possibility of concrete experience, because it must eliminate the structural character of individuality. The latter pre-eminently belongs to our experiential horizon and the horizon of the full ‘earthly’ reality in accordance with the Divine order of the creation. The things of concrete experience are not the products of the synthetic formation of a chaotic sensory matter by means of abstract forms of thought and intuition. The wisdom of God as the Creator has adapted the horizon of human experience to the individuality of things, and this structural plastic side of our experiential horizon belongs to the horizon of ‘earthly’ reality itself. It is a priori in the sense that it determines the experience of the variable individuality of things and alone makes it possible.

Remark on the so-called ‘universalia ante rem’ in God's Mind.

The a priori horizon of human experience is thus the Divine order of the ‘earthly’ creation itself, in which man and all things have been given their structure and order in the cosmos.
Before the foundation of the world this order of the creation was present in God's plan¹. The Christian synthesis-philosophy² in patristic and scholastic thought has adapted this truth of revelation (which is beyond all human understanding) to Greek philosophy and changed it into the speculative ideas of a realistic metaphysics.
This turned the order of the creation into a lex aeterna founded in Divine reason. And the Divine principles of the creation became the universalia ante rem (in Divine reason) and in re (in temporal things). After all that we have had to say about this, it will be clear that we unconditionally reject such a metaphysics, because fundamentally it sets the Divine order of the creation aside to replace it by an absolutized reason.

1 Acts 2:23 according to The Twentieth Century New Testament (published by Horace Marshall & Son, London, and The Fleming H. Revell Company, New York, 1904). The Auth. Version has: determinate counsel.

2 Translator's note: The author applies this term to a philosophy which tries to combine and reconcile non-Christian and Christian motives of thought.

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The perspective structure of the horizon of experience. The dependence of our knowledge about the cosmos on our self-knowledge and on our knowledge of God.

The different levels of the a priori we have discovered in the structure of the horizon of human experience as the horizon of ‘earthly’ reality are not placed side by side in an arbitrary way.

They are integrated into a perspective coherence in accordance with the Divine order of the creation. In the order among them, and in their coherence, they form the perspective in which we experience the cosmos.

All human experience, both in the pre-theoretical and in the theoretical attitudes, is rooted in the structure of the transcendent unity of self-consciousness. The latter partakes in the religious root of the creation directed to God, or, in the case of apostasy, directed away from God. This religious horizon is the transcendent horizon of the selfhood, and encompasses the cosmic temporal horizon in which we experience the insoluble coherence and the modal and typical refraction of meaning. The temporal horizon encompasses and determines the modal horizon both in its theoretical (analytical and synthetical) distinction and in its pre-theoretical systasis.

The temporal horizon encompasses and determines also the plastic horizon of the structures of individuality, which in its turn implies the modal horizon.

From this it follows that all temporal knowledge rests on a religious or pseudo-religious foundation, and is restricted and made relative by the temporal dimensions of the horizon of experience and of reality. For this reason we are the victims of an illusion, if we hypostatize the structure of human knowledge, or proclaim the human cognitive apparatus self-sufficient. For the transcendent horizon of the selfhood, radiating through all human experience perspectively, has no rest in itself, but only exists in the creaturely mode of meaning, which is nothing in itself, i.e. nothing apart from its reference to the Origin.

The religious meaning of the created world binds the true knowledge of the cosmos to true self-knowledge, and the latter to the true knowledge of God¹. This view has been explained in an unsurpassable and pregnant way in the first chapter of the

1 This is the radical difference between the Christian view of self-knowledge as the condition of a radical critical knowledge of the world and Husserl's transcendental phenomenological egology. The latter makes the knowledge of God dependent on the phenomenological self-interprelation of the transcendental ego.

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first book of Calvin's Institutio. It is the only purely Biblical view and the alpha and omega of any truly Christian epistemology. Theoretical truth, limited and relativized by the temporal horizon, is in every respect dependent on the full super-temporal Truth. If we hypostatize theoretical truth, it is turned into a lie. For there does not exist a self-sufficient partial truth. We cannot truthfully know the cosmos outside of the true knowledge of God. But like all human experience in this earthly dispensation, our knowledge of God, although directed to the absolute Truth, is also restricted and relativized by (but not at all to) our temporal cosmic existence.

The restriction of our human experience of the religious fulness of meaning by time is no restriction to time.

This means that in the Christian experience the religious fulness of meaning remains bound up with temporal reality. Every spiritualistic view which wants to separate self-knowledge and the knowledge of God from all that is temporal, runs counter to the Divine order of the creation. Such spiritualism inevitably leads to an internally empty idealism, or to a confused kind of mysticism, in spite of its own will or intentions.

In the order of this life - that of the life beyond is still hidden from us as to its positive nature - all human experience remains bound to a perspective horizon in which the transcendent light of eternity must force its way through time. In this horizon we become aware of the transcendent fulness of the meaning of this life only in the light of the Divine revelation refracted through the prism of time. For this reason Christ, as the fulness of God's Revelation, came into the flesh; and for this reason also the Divine Word-revelation came to us in the temporal garb of human language.

But if our experience were limited to our temporal functions of consciousness, or rather to an abstractum taken from our temporal complex of experiential functions, as is taught by the critical and the positivistic epistemologies, it would be impossible to have true knowledge of God, or of ourselves, or of the cosmos. And in the apostasy in which falsehood (and not truth) rules, we have no such knowledge. This also applies to the πϱῶτον ψεῦδος

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in which the entire epistemology of immanence-philosophy is founded. For it is based on the self-destructive hypostatizing of the theoretical synthesis of meaning, and on a fundamental misconception of the structure of human experience. In the transcendent religious subjective a priori of the cosmic self-consciousness the whole of human cognition is directed either to the absolute Truth, or to the spirit of falsehood. In this cosmic self-consciousness we are aware of temporal cosmic reality being related to the structure of the human selfhood qua talis.

In its universally valid law-conformity this structure is essentially the structure of a religious community into which the individual ego has been integrated. Any theoretical displacement of the human selfhood from this central position in experience is due to the lack of a radical philosophical self-reflexion.

But man cannot attain to true self-knowledge without true knowledge of God, which cannot be gained outside of the Divine Revelation in Christ.

At this point, many a reader who has taken the trouble to follow our argument will perhaps turn away annoyed. He will ask: Must epistemology end in a Christian sermon or in a dogmatic statement? I can only answer by means of the question as to whether the dogmatic statement with which the supposed autonomous epistemology opens, viz. the proclamation of the self-sufficiency of the human cognitive functions, has a better claim to our confidence as far as epistemology is concerned.

Our philosophy makes bold to accept the ‘stumbling block of the cross of Christ’ as the corner stone of epistemology¹. And thus it also accepts the cross of scandal, neglect and dogmatic rejection. In the limitation and weakness of the flesh, we grasp the absolute truth in our knowledge of God derived from His revelation, in prayer and worship. This knowledge in the full sense of the word contains the religious principle and foundation of all true knowledge, and primarily has a religious enstatic character. It no more rests primarily on a theoretical meaning-synthesis than does the cosmic self-consciousness.

The knowledge about God in which religious self-knowledge is implied, is not primarily gained in a so-called theological way. That which is very inadequately called ‘theology’, is a theoretical knowledge obtained in a synthesis of the logical function of thought and the temporal function of faith. It is a knowledge

1 Cf. 1 Corinthians 1-23. The twentieth Century New Test, has: obstacle.

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which itself is entirely dependent on the cosmonomic Idea from which the thinker starts. The true knowledge of God and of ourselves is concerned with the horizon of human experience and therefore also with that of theoretical knowledge. It rests on our trustful acceptance of Divine revelation in the indissoluble unity of both its cosmic-immanent sense and its transcendent-religious meaning; an acceptance with our full personality and with all our heart. It means a turning of the personality, a giving of life in the full sense of the word, a restoring of the subjective perspective of our experience, enabling us to grasp reality again perspectively in the light of Truth. This does not mean a kind of mystical supernatural cognitive function, but it refers to the horizon that God made for human experience in the cosmic order created by Him. The subjective perspective has been obfuscated by sin and distorted and closed to the light of the Divine Revelation.

True self-knowledge opens our eyes to the radical corruption of fallen man, to the radical lie which has caused his spiritual death. It therefore leads to a complete surrender to Him Who is the new root of mankind, and Who overcame death through his sufferings and death on the cross. In Christ's human nature our heavenly Father has revealed the fulness of meaning of all creation¹, and through Him according to His Divine nature, God created all things as through the Word of his power².

The primary he obfuscating the horizon of human experience is the rebellious thought that man could do without this knowledge of God and of himself in any field of knowledge, and could find the ultimate criterion of truth in ‘autonomous’, i.e. absolutized theoretical thought.

1 Ephes. 1:10.

2 Hebr. 1:2, 3.

The law-conformable structure of human experience in the transcendent horizon is originally a law of freedom.

The law-conformity of the structure of the horizon of human experience was maintained after the fall into sin, but the rebellious selfhood can no longer of itself acquire an insight into this structure. It supposes it can create the horizon of its experience from its own resources and has abused its religious freedom and delivered itself up to the bondage of darkness.

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For the law-conformable structure of human experience, according to its transcendent dimension, is a law of freedom, which in its fulness of meaning determines all temporal dimensions of the horizon of experience.

When this fulness of human freedom was lost subjectively, through the fall into sin, the human selfhood fell away into the temporal horizon.

In sofar as it still sought for a fixed point of support, the human selfhood tried to hypostatize an abstract part of the temporal horizon to a transcendence that lacks the character of meaning. This is also the apostasy from the fulness of meaning of the Truth that alone makes all temporal truth possible.

The standing in the Truth as freedom in the transcendent horizon of experience.

Christ as the fulness of God's Revelation is the Truth. Standing in the Truth, as the sharing in the fulness of meaning of the cosmos in Christ, is the indispensable pre-requisite for the insight into the full horizon of our experience.

This means that we have once and for all given up the illusion of possessing the norm of truth in our own fallen selfhood. We have arrived at the self-knowledge that outside of the light of Divine Revelation we stand in falsehood.

Any one who grasps this Divine Revelation with all his heart abides in the Truth. Abiding in the Truth frees our insight into the horizon of human experience from the prejudices of immanence-philosophy, and it also enables theoretical knowledge to be directed to the Truth. At the same time it cuts off at the root the overestimation of synthetic scientific knowledge, which remains bound within the temporal horizon.

The problem concerning the relation between reason and faith.

The knowledge about God, which transcends the temporal horizon in our selfhood, nevertheless remains bound to our temporal function of faith according to the Divine order of the creation.

The function of faith, as the leading terminal function in the entire process of disclosure within the temporal meaning-coherence, leads theoretical thought. For the concrete act of theoretical thinking necessarily includes its faith-aspect. The nominalistic separation between faith and reason is a patent

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impossibility in the light of a Christian cosmonomic Idea, and always testifies to a lack of radical critical self-reflection in philosophic thought. Insofar as it is determined by the immanence-standpoint, it is to be understood as a hidden or an avowed hypostatizing of synthetical thought.

Of course the function of faith can no more than any other non- logical function be substituted for the logical aspect, which gives the act of theoretical thinking its typical qualification.

The modal meaning of the temporal function of faith is different from that of the logical function of thought. For this very reason the former can ‘lead’ theoretical thought, and at the same time leave the sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects intact.

§ 3 - The perspective structure of truth

The decisive battle against the idea of the religious neutrality of philosophy will have to be fought in the field of the problem of truth. This was already made clear in the Prolegomena to the philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea.

The neutrality postulate stands or falls with an Idea of truth which considers theoretical verity to be self-sufficient. But at all times the very problem of truth has proved to be the Achilles' heel of immanence-philosophy. As long as the only issue was the logical aspect of truth, with the formal criterion of the principium contradictionis, it seemed an easy task to refute relativism and scepticism. This logical self-refutation of every denial of an absolute truth has been sufficiently discussed in the Prolegomena.

But it is evident that nothing has been gained by this argument for the idea of a universally valid neutral philosophy. Even the question: ‘What is to be understood by universally valid truth?’ cannot be answered by logic alone. More than that: the logical criterion of truth owes its logical meaning exactly to the structure of the entire horizon of human experience in all its different levels. And this structure cannot possibly be grasped independently of a cosmonomic Idea. Up to now Christian philosophical thought which followed the paths of scholasticism has failed to produce a Christian Idea of truth of its own; - of course, I mean that the philosophical Idea of truth of this Christian thought has not really been fed by its Christian religious root. The synthesis with immanence-philosophy ultimately maintained the deep cleft between the revelation concerning the ‘super-natural truth’, on the one hand, and the theoretical criterion of ‘natural’

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truth, on the other. For scientific thought the latter was simply taken over from immanence-philosophy.

The synthesis in question could consequently not produce a truly Christian Idea of truth. Its highest aim was the accommodation of theoretical thought, as it was rooted in the immanence-standpoint, to the Scriptural revelation. But this accommodation was bound to detract from both. The true relation between Christian religion and Christian philosophy can only be an inner penetration of the latter by the former. The same relation must exist between the revealed fulness of Truth and the theoretical Idea of Truth.

Truth as the agreement between thought and being in realistic metaphysics.

As is generally known, the traditional realistic answer to the question ‘What is truth?’, was: the agreement between thought and being, the ‘adaequatio intellectus et rei’, as Thomas Aquinas formulated it.

In its scholastic formula this view goes back to Aristotle and is based on the confusion of the ‘Gegenstand’ (ἀντιϰείμενον) with a real ‘thing in itself’ (substance). According to it, true knowledge is the pure conceptual form of the material substance which is primarily given to sensory perception and whose essential form is to be abstracted by the intellectus agens; in all true knowledge there exists a relation of adequacy between the conceptual form and the essential form of the οὐσία. True knowledge consists in an assimilation, an ὁμοίωσις, an adaptation of the active intellect to the real being on the basis of the innate faculty of the soul to receive a material image of the material substance through the senses. Actual knowledge is identical with the νοητά². The Aristotelian homoioosis, or the assimilation of realistic Scholastics, is the foundation of the adaequatio, i.e. the agreement between thought and being, as the essence of truth. By means of the vis cognitiva (the cognitive faculty) and the vis appetitiva (the faculty of desiring) the human soul can adapt itself to the ‘essence of things’.

This is why Thomas Aquinas calls the true and the good as transcendentalia: convenientia entis ad animam. He writes:
¹

2 Ibid. III, 430 a 19: Τὸ δ᾽ αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ ϰατ᾽ ἐνέϱγειαν ἐπιστήμη τῷ πϱάγματι.

1 Aristotle: De Anima, 418,3: τὸ δ᾽ αἰσϑητιϰὸν δυνάμει ἐστὶν οἷον τὸ αἰσϑητὸν ἤδη ἐντελείχείᾳ, ϰαϑάπεϱ εἵϱηται. πάσχει μὲν οὖν οὐχ ὅμοιον ὄν, πεπονϑὸς δ᾽ ὡμοίωται ἐϰεῖνο.

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‘Convenientiam vero entis ad intellectum exprimit hoc nomen verum. Omnis autem cognitio perficitur per assimiliationem cognoscentis ad rem cognitam... quae quidem correspondentio adaequatio rei et intellectus dicitur’¹.

It is not difficult to find the reason why Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas accepted a ‘convenientia entis ad intellectum’. That reason lay in their cosmonomic Idea, in their Idea of the world-order as a metaphysical-teleological rational order founded in the divine Nous. In this system truth is one of the primary ‘transcendental determinations’ of that metaphysical being which is assumed to be of a ‘noumenal’ character.

This traditional Idea of truth was called a mere ‘explanation of a name’ by Kant. This is quite understandable. For him, just as for the whole of Humanistic philosophy, the teleological cosmonomic Idea of Aristotelian-Thomistic Scholastics had lost its meaning. That is why he observes:

‘We are not concerned here in the explanation of the word truth according to which it is the agreement between knowledge and its object; this nominal definition is assumed as granted. But we want to know what is the universal and sure criterion of the truth of any and every knowledge’².

Has Kant's criterion of the transcendental truth really been brought to light by a religiously unprejudiced critique of knowledge? We know that it is not so. It is really Kant's typically dualistic-Humanistic cosmonomic Idea which is the basis of his critique of knowledge, and of his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, as well as of his Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft.

1 Quaestiones de Veritate. Qu. 1. art. 1c. [This word true expresses the agreement between the being and the intellect. Now all cognition arises from the assimiliation of that which knows to the thing known... which correspondence is called an adequate correspondence between a thing and the intellect.]

2 Kr. d.r. V. (ed. cit.), p. 89: ‘Die Namenerklärung der Wahrheit, dasz sie nämlich die Übereinstimmung der Erkenntnis mit ihrem Gegenstande sei, wird hier geschenkt und vorausgesetzt; man verlangt aber zu wissen, welches das allgemeine und sichere Kriterium der Wahrheit einer jeden Erkenntnis sei.’

The criterion of truth in Kant.

From his Humanistic cosmonomic Idea Kant puts the question how the adaequatio of thought and reality (as an ‘object’, i.e. in Kant as a ‘Gegenstand’) is possible.

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In a typically nominalistic way he seeks the epistemological criterion of truth in the a priori synthetical activity of the transcendental-logical ego with respect to the sensory matter of experience as it is received in the pure forms of sensibility. Thus he not only restricts the meaning of truth to the a priori theoretical horizon, but also to the sensory phenomena.

What is, according to Kant, the guarantee of the correspondence between a priori human knowledge and ‘Gegenstände überhaupt’? This guarantee consists in the constitutive rôle of the a priori synthetical judgments with respect to objective experience. This a priori knowledge is the very transcendental condition of this experience, since it ‘contains nothing but that which is indispensable to the synthetical unity of experience in general’¹. In this sense the synthetical judgments a priori are true a priori, i.e. strictly universally valid and necessary. Therefore Kant calls them the ‘Quell aller Wahrheit’ (the source of all truth) before experience, although they are not themselves founded in experience.

‘Empirical’ truths, on the other hand, he calls relative. They are always involved in the process of theoretical cognition (i.e. ‘experience’ in Kant) within the horizon of transcendental truth. This ‘experiential process’, however, is directed towards an absolute ideal, an ultimate end which natural science will never attain, it is true, but from which the latter derives its real and final meaning. This ideal is the perfect ‘correspondence between the representations in the object’². Kant has tried to define the horizon of theoretical truth on the basis of his cosmonomic Idea. He rightly rejected the supposedly transcendent, speculative metaphysical Idea of truth. It considered the adaequatio between thought and being as a metaphysical agreement between the conceptions of thought and the ‘things in themselves’. From his critical immanence-standpoint Kant had, however, no insight into the true structure of the horizon of human experience; so the transcendental structure of theoretical truth was bound to remain hidden from him. His constructive nominalist criterion of truth founded in a Humanistic cosmonomic Idea was bound to lead to the denial of the possibility of other theoretical knowledge than that which is the aim of mathe-

1 ‘nichts weiter enthält, als was zur synthetischen Einheit der Erfahrung überhaupt notwendig ist.’

2 ‘Übereinstimmung der Vorstellungen im Gegenstand’.

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matics and mathematical natural science. But especially by hypostatizing that which he called ‘transcendental truth’ he undermined every trans-subjective ground of the validity of theoretical verity.

The phenomenological conception of the transcendental horizon of a priori theoretical truth.

In Kant the ‘transcendental subject’ itself is the indubitable immanent seat of transcendental truth.

But his view of the empirical ‘world’, as the objective correlate of the ‘transcendental-logical ego’, was determined by the classical Humanistic science-ideal, which in its mechanistic determinism doubtless aimed at the elimination of human subjectivity. This caused an inner antinomy in Kant's conception of the horizon of theoretical truth. His epistemology works with unclarified presuppositions which do not agree with his transcendental subjectivism. And the practical metaphysics of his critique of practical reason caused him to restrict the horizon of theoretical truth to an ‘empirical-sensible world’, which in principle was conceived in an objectivistic manner, notwithstanding his conception of its transcendental constitution by the thinking ego.

His faith in the self-sufficiency of a non-intuitive transcendental analysis of the ‘sources of human knowledge’ was the reason why he supposed that the a priori forms of sensibility and understanding, and the original synthesis of the ‘cogito’ were immediately accessible to transcendental thought.

In modern phenomenology the situation is fundamentally different. In his last unfinished work Die Crisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale Phänomenologie, published after his death in 1954, Husserl charges Kant's transcendental subjectivism with a lack of radicalism. According to him genuine transcendentalism is the radical opposite of ‘objectivism’ as the general meaning of the scientific ideal that all pre-phenomenological thinkers strove for¹. Kant failed to make the hidden transcendental dimension of consciousness accessible to immediate experience, to grasp it in the view of eidetic intuition.

This is why Husserl calls the Kantian a priori forms of sensi-

1 Op. cit., p. 103 ff.

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bility and understanding ‘mythical constructions’¹ That which Kant still considered to be unproblematical, viz. the accessibility of transcendental truth to the cognitive selfhood in its transcendental reflection, has become the very basic problem of Husserl's phenomenology.

In radical transcendental subjectivism all constitutive forms of possible being must be made into ‘phenomena’, into the immanent intentional contents of the constitutive acts of the transcendental ego, conceived of in the phenomenological reduction, and made accessible to pure experience through an eidetic intuition. So the transcendental horizon of a priori theoretical verity becomes in truth ‘universal’, encompassing the universe of essential truths valid as to the essential correlation between the transcendental ego and all its possible ‘worlds’. Husserl emphatically remarks that the universal transcendental synthesis of the ego, as a hidden or ‘anonymous’ a priori act of consciousness made immediately visible by phenomenological analysis, also constitutes the whole world of pre-theoretical experience². This is to say that the theoretical phenomenological horizon of a priori truth encompasses all dimensions of human experience. Consequently it also embraces the religious dimension which in this way loses its transcendent character and is denatured into an immanent horizon of intentional phenomena, constituted by a synthesis of the transcendental ego.

Transcendental truth is now conceived as the adaequatio (in the sense of ‘coalescence’) of the intended in the phenomenologically reduced act, with that which has been immediately given in the a priori intuition of the essence³. The hypostatizing of the horizon of the transcendental theoretical truth occurs in even a sharper form in Husserl than in Kant, because of the all-

1 Cf. Die Crisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften, § 30: ‘Der Mangel einer anschaulich-aufweisenden Methode als Grund für die mythischen Konstruktionen Kants.’ [The lack of an intuitively detective method as a foundation for the mythical constructions of Kant.]

2 Op. cit., p. 114 (§ 29): ‘Die Lebenswelt ist erschliessbar als ein Reich “anonym” gebliebener subjektiver Phänomene.’ [The world of daily life can be disclosed as a realm of subjective phenomena that have remained ‘anonym’.]

3 Cf. Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik (3rd edition), p. 46: ‘In der Deckung von “Gemeintem” und “Gegebenem” wird uns der Gehalt der phänomenologischen Erfährung allein kund.’ [Only in the coalescence of the intended and the given, can we become aware of the content of phenomenological experience.]

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embracing character of the phenomenological horizon, according to Husserl's conception.

The perspective structure of truth.

The definition of truth as ‘adaequatio intellectus et rei’ was not taken exception to by Kant. But it was oriented to the hypostasis of theoretical thought, characteristic of all varieties of immanence-philosophy, no matter whether they are of a speculative-metaphysical, a critical, or a phenomenological nature.

In the light of the Christian cosmonomic Idea it is not meaningless to inquire into the a priori structure of truth in connection with the horizon of human experience. But then this structure must be conceived in its full richness, which is only possible theoretically in the Christian Idea of verity. This Idea is directed to the fulness of the meaning of Truth. In the meaning-structure of the horizon of human experience truth will prove to have the same perspective character as this horizon. The a priori structure of truth cannot be understood from the absolutized (and therefore misinterpreted) theoretical-synthetical horizon. It can only be approached from the transcendent horizon made transparent by the religious fulness of meaning of the Divine Revelation.

From this Revelation the light of truth shines forth through the temporal horizon into human experience, and into human theoretical knowledge. The religious fulness of Truth also liberates the horizon of human experience: ‘The truth shall make you free’¹. The transcendent, religious fulness of Truth, which alone makes all truth within the temporal horizon possible, does not concern an abstract theoretical function of thought. It is concerned with our full selfhood, with the heart of the whole of human existence, consequently also the centre of our theoretical thought.

1 St. John 8, 32.

The meaning of the word truth in Holy Scripture.

My colleague Prof. Vollenhoven has informed me that he has instituted an investigation into the meaning of the word ‘Truth’ in Holy Scripture and has come to the surprising conclusion that, in the majority of cases, it means steadfastness, certainty, reliability.

In my opinion this gives the expression ‘stand in the truth’

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its full, pregnant meaning. The truthful a priori attitude of thought has for its primary pre-requisite the standing of the thinking selfhood in the Truth, because of our heart's accepting Divine Revelation.

The latter enters our temporal horizon only through our function of faith, our full confidence in the reliability of God's Word. God is the origin and source of all truth. Christ, as the perfect Revelation of God, is the fulness of the meaning of Truth. Apart from this transcendent fulness of Truth, the a priori temporal dimensions of truth have no meaning, no validity. Only its transcendent religious dimension, which touches the heart, lends to all temporal truth its stability, and certitude. The ‘standing in the Truth’ directs our subjective insight into the temporal horizon. I do not deny at all that sin again and again obfuscates the Christian's insight. Nor do I deny that many thinkers who start from a non-Christian attitude have discovered relatively true states of affairs within the temporal horizon. But there is one thing that a truly Christian philosophy should never doubt, viz. that all relative truths, within the temporal horizon, are only true in the fulness of Verity, revealed by God in Christ. Any hypostatizing, i.e. any absolutizing of that which is relative, turns truth into falsehood.

Even the judgment: 2 × 2 = 4 becomes an untruth, if the law-conformable state of affairs, expressed in it, is detached from the temporal world-order and from the sovereignty of God as the Creator. It becomes an untruth, if it is absolutized into a ‘truth in itself’ (‘Wahrheit an sich’). Creaturely reality itself has a perspective horizon which mocks at any absolutizing of its temporal structure. A superficial (essentially apostate) resting in a temporal horizon of experience that is supposed to be firm in itself, is contrary to truth, contrary to the structure of our selfhood. Any one in the apostate attitude who clings to the temporal horizon in the supposition that it is self-sufficient, clings to a Fata Morgana.

The whole of my book is intended to illustrate my fundamental thesis that the Christian Idea of truth can and should permeate scientific thought from root to crown. The idea of a Christian pursuit of science is something quite different from an edifying confession of faith which leaves the immanent course of scientific investigation untouched.

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The a priori temporal dimensions of truth.

Descending to the temporal horizon of truth we find its essentially transcendental a priori structural dimension, to which the theoretical Idea of truth also belongs. The question arises: Cannot we at least say that transcendental verity consists in an ‘adaequatio intellectus et rei’? In the light of our cosmonomic Idea we must answer: No, we cannot. For the definition intended by this traditional formula, viz. the accordance of thought with reality, remains founded in a false Idea. It implies that thought, in its transcendental a priori function, transcends the reality enclosed within the temporal horizon. But from the truly transcendent horizon of truth we know that our logical function of thought can only have meaning and existence in the temporal meaning-coherence.

It appears that the logical law-sphere has its a priori modal horizon, just like all other law-spheres: They are all interrelated and interwoven in the temporal horizon. Therefore I will give another description of the transcendental a priori structural level of truth, which is oriented to the Christian cosmonomic Idea:

According to its transcendental a priori dimension truth is: the accordance between the subjective a priori knowledge enclosed by the temporal horizon, as expressed in a priori judgments, and the a priori structural laws of human experience within this temporal horizon. The latter is open (as to its law-and subject-sides) to the light of the transcendent Truth in Christ.

In this description, comprising both the pre-theoretical and the theoretical dimensions of transcendental truth, two things are of primary importance.

In the first place the insight that within the transcendental temporal horizon truth (according to its a priori structure) is always dependent on a normative relation between our subjective cognition and its a priori structural laws. Not a single subjective, transcendental a priori in itself can be a guarantee of truth and universal validity.

In the second place the transcendental structure of truth is not self-sufficient and only finds its pure expression in the openness of the temporal horizon to the transcendent light of the Divine revelation. In contrast to Kant's transcendental-idealist view, we now see that universally-valid, transcendental truth is not guaranteed by subjective synthetical judgments a priori.

The ‘transcendental subject’ is not the ‘law-giver’ of experience, nor the origin of the transcendental dimension of truth.

[p. 574]

It is true that the transcendental structure of human self-consciousness has a super-arbitrary law-conformable character. But within this temporal structure is maintained the transcendental subjective freedom of human self-consciousness. And hence it remains possible for the latter to misinterpret the a priori horizon of experience. In other words, the law-conformable structure is no guarantee for the correctness of our a priori subjective insight. A false a priori insight also remains within the transcendental structure of human experience and is only possible in this structure. The entire Kantian view of transcendental truth as the universally valid, necessary a priori in human experience, labours under a basic epistemological defect. It dogmatically ignores the problem of the subjective access to the transcendental a priori of human experience.

The a priori structure of experience is then confounded with a specific subjective a priori synthesis. No further account is given of the meaning-structure of the latter.

Since the fundamental fallibility of our subjective epistemological insight is not taken into account, the subjective, constructive-idealist insight into the transcendental horizon of experience is forced on us as the universally valid criterion of truth.

But we have shown that philosophical insight into the transcendental, temporal horizon (and therefore into the transcendental a priori dimension of truth) is absolutely dependent on the investigator's Archimedean point. In order to gain a true insight into this horizon, it is necessary for us to give up the apostate immanence-standpoint altogether. A philosopher is unable to relinquish this standpoint, however, so long as his heart has not been conquered by the Divine Truth revealed to us in Christ. Then the transcendental horizon of his experience is opened and liberated from the prejudices of immanence-philosophy. No compromise with this fundamental truth is possible in Christian philosophical thought. Too often such a compromise has been attempted, but this basic truth must be accepted in full. The same thing applies to the immanence-standpoint. This does not bear a compromise either. It must be rejected or accepted in its entirety. Any demand for logical, incontrovertible proof of this thesis would only show that the nature of truth, or the meaning of logical demonstration, is not clear to the questioner.

Immanence-philosophy insofar as it maintained its scientific character has up to now assumed that a philosophical thought which appeals to Revelation, can be safely laid aside as unscien-

[p. 575]

tific. The dogmatic argument was that philosophy is not a question of faith, but a strictly scientific affair.

The philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea, however, makes it impossible to maintain the self-sufficiency of philosophic thought as a scientific postulate. In the future immanence-philosophy will have to become aware of the subjective character of its own cosmonomic Idea. The new problems raised by our philosophy will have to be seriously considered on the immanence-standpoint. If this should be thought unnecessary, there would be no possibility for immanence-philosophy to answer the charge of dogmatism made against it on account of its neutrality-postulate.

It would be a dogmatism in the sense of a philosophical attitude which refuses to reflect on its deepest foundations.

The Idea of transcendental-theoretical truth.

The transcendental structure of truth is not identical with that of theoretical truth. The latter may be defined, in relation to the modal horizon, as: the correspondence of the subjective a priori meaning-synthesis as to its intentional meaning with the modal structure of the ‘Gegenstand’ of theoretical thought. This synthesis is actual in our a priori theoretical insight, and is expressed in theoretical a priori judgments. The modal ‘Gegenstand’ is included in its all-sided inter-modal coherence within the temporal horizon. This coherence exists both in the foundational and in the transcendental direction of time and is dependent on the transcendent fulness of the meaning of Truth.

This somewhat lengthy description is indispensable, if we do not wish to omit a single moment in the transcendental structure of theoretical truth. In our definition the theoretical Idea of truth finds real expression in relation to the modal horizon of our experience.

Kant's ‘Grundsätze des reinen Verstandes’ (principles of pure understanding) cannot hit off the truly transcendental structure of theoretical truth. This is already impossible because they are not oriented to the transcendental direction of time. In a functionalistic way they isolate two aspects of the theoretical horizon of experience in rigid forms which, in their absolutization, have been abstracted from the transcendental meaning-coherence of our temporal horizon.

[p. 576]

The criterion of transcendental theoretical truth in this Idea of verity.

It is now necessary to enter into details about the importance of this transcendental Idea of truth (as related to the modal horizon of our experience), and trace its bearing on scientific thought. This Idea has been made use of in all that has up to now been said in the theory of the modal law-spheres. We have seen that it must result in a fundamentally new method of forming modally defined basic concepts, which has also to lay the foundation for special scientific thought.

We shall now give a special account of the a priori criterion of theoretical truth, indicated by this Idea.

In special science the problem of the criterion of scientific truth has been obscured by the contrast between ‘a priori’ and ‘empirical’ sciences. This makes the impression that the different special sciences handle entirely different criteria of truth. The mathematician supposes he can be an intuitionist, a conventionalist or a logicist as to theoretical truth; the positivist historian, or the empirical psychologist hold to ‘empiricism’; physical scientists put their faith either in a pragmatical or in a ‘realist’ conception of truth; logic may handle a formalistic or an intuitionist view of verity, etc. With regard to aesthetics, ethics and theology (in so far as these are not merged into ‘empirical sciences’ like sociology, psychology or history) the situation is hopeless from a positivist viewpoint, since positivism denies in principle that it is meaningful to speak of truth with respect to ‘normative judgments’, or even denies the possibility of real judgments implying ‘values’. It must be stated that there is a general lack of a transcendental criterion in these conceptions of verity.

We have seen that no single special science is possible without an a priori theoretical synthesis of meaning, in which the modal horizon of the law-sphere forming the ‘Gegenstand’ has been intended theoretically. Even if a special scientist does not critically take account of this subjective a priori synthesis, he must handle it implicitly. Otherwise he is unable to conduct investigations in the domain of his special science. Mathematics in itself cannot fix the modal horizon of the physical law-sphere theoretically. Neither can ethics define the horizon of the juridical aspect, or psychology that of the aesthetic sphere. As to the a priori theoretical foundations of all special sciences whose field of research is delimited by a particular aspect of experience, one and the same criterion of theoretical truth is valid: the accor-

[p. 577]

dance between our subjective a priori meaning-synthesis and the modal structure of the ‘Gegenstand’, in the all-sided coherence of the temporal horizon of our experience, and in relation to the religious fulness of Truth.

The demand that the a priori theoretical insight shall be justifiable in the forum of the Divine world-order.

Any theoretical judgment which ignores the modal horizon of its ‘Gegenstand’ and denies the specific modal sphere-sovereignty of the aspects within the temporal horizon, is false a priori. Any theoretical judgment is false a priori if in principle it denies the all-sided temporal meaning-coherence of the ‘Gegenstand’ in the specific synthesis of meaning. Any theoretical judgment in which a relative a priori theoretical truth is absolutized to ‘Truth in itself’ (‘Wahrheit an sich’), is false. Any theoretical judgment in which the process of disclosure in our modal horizon of experience is implicitly or explicitly denied, and in which theoretical thought is assumed to be independent of the transcendent fulness of Truth, is false.

Not only the so-called a posteriori theoretical insights must be justified, viz. in a process of factual theoretical experience. But the transcendental insights must also vindicate their claim to relative truth, viz. in a process of transcendental experience in the forum of the Divine world-order. For in the latter are founded the structural states of affairs which are undeniable when they have been laid bare to theoretical insight. It may be that no true philosophical insight can be gained into the Divine world-order, if our cognitive self-hood does not abide in the full religious Truth of Divine Word-Revelation. But the structural states of affairs founded in this order urge themselves upon everyone who is seriously confronted with them.

This does not, however, detract from the fact that our theoretical Idea of truth is dependent on our Christian cosmonomic Idea, just as the conception of theoretical truth in immanence-philosophy is based on an other cosmonomic Idea.

Only the acceptance of the perspective structure of truth can break the spell of subjectivism in philosophic insight.

But it will be objected that the structure of theoretical truth cannot be dependent on our subjective insight. My answer is that it is not dependent on this insight in the sense of being deter-

[p. 578]

mined by it or subjected to it. But without my subjective insight into theoretical truth, its structure will remain hidden from my cognitive selfhood. No philosophy can do without a subjective Idea of truth. Our subjective insight itself functions in the full structure of our horizon of experience and theoretical truth is meaningless without its relation to our cosmological self-consciousness. As soon as we touch this very point, the perspective structure of truth shows its full pregnancy. At the same time it becomes clear that the Idea of truth of immanence-philosophy nowhere rises above subjectivism.

It is according to the Divine order of the creation that the structure of verity is of a perspective character. In its transcendent fulness of meaning it seizes our selfhood, or it is rejected by the latter. Only in our religious standing in the Truth is the spell of apostate subjectivism broken. From the transcendent horizon, liberated by Christ, the light of Truth can shine through our temporal horizon, and reveal the transcendental theoretical verity to our subjective insight.

Immanence philosophy, however, remains under the spell cast by apostate theoretical thought. It lacks the firm ground of truth, because it does not come from the Verity, it does not stand in the Truth. Its Idea of truth in its subjectivity is not rooted in the fulness of Verity. Nowhere is immanence-philosophy more subjectivistic than in the hypostatizing of its Idea of verity to the absolute super-temporal Truth. This hypostatization acquires its most fascinating and deceitful form when, as a ‘super-temporal value’ or Idea, it is considered to be even absolutely independent of subjective theoretical thought.

*

In the light of the full revealed Truth the Idea of the transcendental theoretical truth confronts our cognitive process with an enormous task. In the temporal horizon this task can never be completed. It does not permit theoretical thought to become rigid; it does not allow us to rest in temporal meaning, in a supposedly absolute theoretical ‘form of truth’.

The transcendental horizon of theoretical truth itself is by no means rigid, but exists in the restless mode of meaning. This meaning can nowhere be shut off from its Origin and made into something firm and self-sufficient in itself.

The Idea of the modal universality of the aspects of experience

[p. 579]

within their own spheres is conceived in the perspective nature of the transcendental structure of truth.

The accordance with the principium exclusae antinomiae as the primary criterion of transcendental theoretical truth.

Our a priori theoretical insight must be justified in the process of the modal analysis and synthesis of meaning in the forum of the Divine world-order. This order passes judgment on theoretical thought by entangling it in internal antinomies at every infringement on the modal sphere-sovereignty of the aspects within the transcendental temporal horizon. The conformance of the results of our transcendental inquiry to the principium exclusae antinomiae proved to be an eminently suitable criterion of transcendental theoretical truth. The logical test of the principium contradictionis appeared to be only a dependent aspect of the cosmological criterion. The truly synthetical antinomy is always the result of a theoretical misconception of the modal horizon of our experience, and of the misinterpretation of the cosmic coherence of the modal aspects within the temporal horizon. It reveals a deviation from the transcendental truth in our theoretical insight.

Antinomy appeared to vitiate immanence-philosophy to its very root, it vitiates semi-Christian synthesis-philosophy to a still higher degree. This is a criterion of the transcendental untruth of both of them.

The second criterion of transcendental theoretical truth.

The transcendental theoretical dimension of verity has a second criterion: Philosophic theory must enable us to give an account of the structure of temporal reality given in naïve experience. This cannot be done by any philosophy that absolutizes the theoretical meaning-synthesis and functionalistically spirits away the plastic structure of reality in the continuous, uninterrupted meaning-coherence of the temporal horizon. The transcendental theoretical dimension of truth remains bound to its pre-theoretical transcendental dimension in the temporal horizon, and to the modal horizon and the plastic horizon encompassed by the latter.

Theoretical thought should not explain away the pre-theoretical datum in the meaning-systasis of the horizon of expe-

[p. 580]

rience. If it does so, it contradicts transcendental theoretical truth, which, as we know, does not exist in itself (‘an sich’). It is contrary to transcendental theoretical truth, e.g., if the internal individuality-structure of the state, as an organized community of a typical character, is identified with the theoretical functional system of the legal norms (cf. Kelsen's pure theory of law).

The current epistemological conception of naïve experience as a naïve-realist copy-theory is also in conflict with transcendental theoretical verity. Any metaphysical tearing asunder of the temporal horizon of reality into the realm of phenomena and that of noumena, contradicts transcendental theoretical truth. For all these a priori theoretical views start from a fundamental denial of the plastic horizon of human experience without which no human experience of concrete reality is possible. So it appears that every description of the transcendental truth as the universally valid, the necessary, and that which alone makes experience possible, is no better than a nominal definition of this dimension of verity. Critical epistemology lays great emphasis on the words ‘universal a priori validity and necessity’. Thus it wants to bring home to us the absoluteness of its view of theoretical truth. But any one who has assimilated the critical attitude of thought required by the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea, can no longer be blindfolded by these words. The subjectivist a priorism of critical transcendental-idealist and phenomenological immanence-philosophy is based on a primary hypostasis of the subjective theoretical meaning-synthesis. It is incompatible with the truly critical demand to subject the a priori subjective insight into the transcendental theoretical horizon to the process of justification in the court of the Divine world-order. Its self-sufficient ‘transcendental ego’, with its supposed constitutive original a priori synthesis, is nothing but a ‘mythological construction’, a critical disguise of the dogma concerning the autonomy of theoretical reason. It is to be made visible as a disguise by means of a truly radical transcendental critique of its dogmatic presuppositions.

The dynamical character of so-called experimental truth in the theoretical process of the disclosure of temporal reality.

The transcendental structure of truth has a dynamic meaning-character which restlessly refers outside itself to the transcendent dimension of human experience. Its theoretical transcendental

[p. 581]

dimension can only be approached in an Idea, and not in a rigid system of conceptual forms. But the Idea of an absolute theoretical truth has proved to be self-contradictory.

This statement holds for the whole of the transcendental temporal horizon of verity, which encompasses all factual truths as their condition.

Consequently it is a fortiori applicable to the concrete relative truths within the temporal horizon that are determined by the transcendental dimension of verity.

As to so-called a posteriori factual theoretical verity, we should bear in mind that relatively true knowledge is at the same time a theoretical disclosure of temporal reality. In this process of disclosure the pre-logical aspects follow the guidance of the theoretical-logical in its opened dynamical structure. Since the transcendental horizon of our experience is also the transcendental horizon of temporal reality, the same dynamics of meaning is proper to both.

The experiments of natural science should also be looked upon in this light. In the last section of the first Volume we have already made some observations on this subject in an anticipatory manner. In the present context the meaning of these observations may become clearer in the light of our theory of the modal structures of meaning and our epistemological explanations. A natural scientific theory, it is said, must demonstrate its truth by means of experiments. Now it is undeniable that an experiment appeals to the sensory aspect of our experience. Can we therefore say that the experimental criterion of truth, in mathematical-natural science is to be found in the correspondence of our theoretical concepts with some concrete natural reality in itself (‘an sich’), as it is depicted in the sensory impressions? Certainly not. There is no such thing as a ‘natural reality in itself’. And the pre-psychical aspects of reality cannot be depicted in the sensory image of perception. This has been proved in our discussion of the modal subject-object relation. What then? Should one interpret an experiment, in Kant's ‘critical’ way, as a purely sensory datum received in the forms of space and time, and apperceived in the synthetical unity of apperception by means of a schematism of the categories of understanding?

This interpretation of the meaning of an experiment is contrary to transcendental truth, as has been explained in great detail in an earlier context. There is nothing that can be called a

[p. 582]

‘purely sensory’ datum. But what I wish to emphasize is this: the objective sensory aspect of our experience to which an experiment in its theoretical intention makes appeal, must itself first be disclosed by theoretical thought.

Its meaning must be deepened, if it is to be called in as a witness in the process of justification of a scientific hypothesis. In this theoretical disclosure the sensory object-side of empirical reality itself is deepened. Or does not naïve pre-theoretical experience have a sensory object-side? Why then cannot a scientific experiment simply appeal to this sensory object-side of experience which has not been theoretically opened? Because the sensory aspect as long as it has not been disclosed theoretically does not yet have anything to say to theory. We measure temperatures and gas-pressure; we investigate theoretically abstracted physical and biological micro-events¹ with the aid of scientifically constructed instruments. In this way we make objectively visible that which was not yet objectively visible in pre-theoretical experience. Thus we theoretically open the sensory aspect of the full temporal reality by means of its modal deepening of meaning.

And in this process we at the same time open naïve experience theoretically, and we do not demolish it. The theoretical disclosure of the objective sensory aspect of reality pre-supposes the theoretical disclosure of the pre-psychical aspects. The latter objectify themselves in the theoretically deepened perceptive picture (analogically). The process of theoretical disclosure of temporal reality is only possible in the cadre of the Divine world-order. This order mocks at the Humanistic postulate of the self-sufficiency and sovereignty of theoretical thought. An apostate former of history can really form the development of civilization only insofar as in actual practice he capitulates to this world-order, which he does not recognize subjectively. An apostate scientist can only disclose reality theoretically, and discover relative theoretical truths, insofar as he again and again capitulates to the temporal Divine order. This is true, although the apostate scientist supposes he can exclude this Divine order from his vision.

1 I deliberately say: ‘theoretically abstracted physical and biological events’ to express that in this case the theoretically opened physical and biotic aspects of reality are concerned.

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§ 4 - The individuality of human experience in Scheler's phenomenology.

When we examined the perspective structure of the horizon of human experience, we referred to the plastic horizon of structural individuality. The structure of individuality, of course, is not individuality itself. In epistemology it is necessary also to discuss the individuality of human experience. We put in the foreground that Kantian and neo-Kantian epistemology have fundamentally failed in their discussion of this side of the epistemological problem. For they have dogmatically qualified the individuality of experiential activity as a psychological matter which did not concern epistemology as such. This prejudice must be traced to its religious root.

In the first place transcendental theoretical truth was emancipated from the religious horizon of experience. This supposed emancipation resulted in the hypostasis of the so-called transcendental consciousness to the (super-individual) subject proper of theoretical knowledge. Together with the really cosmic self-consciousness, the actual cognitive activity was eliminated from epistemology, and with the actual cognitive activity also the individuality, inherent in the subject-side of all our experience, as well as in the subjectivity of our theoretical knowledge. The factual subjectivity of the actual insight into the transcendental horizon of our experience had to be camouflaged. For it implied fallibility, and was, consequently, an obstacle to transcendental idealism, which proclaimed the ‘universal validity’, necessity and self-sufficiency of its subjectivistic construction of the transcendental horizon of experience. Then psychology was entrusted with the task of examining the subjectivity of actual insight. As an ‘empirical science’ psychology was not able to endanger the ‘a priori epistemology’ of transcendental idealism. Suppose, this psychology should make bold to raise a doubt of the ‘critical’ construction of the ‘transcendental consciousness’! Then it could be put in its place with the ‘critical’ statement that this doubt was a betrayal of its own ‘transcendental foundations’. On the immanence-standpoint the subjectivistic a priorism of the rationalist Kantian epistemology had to be outbid by an irrationalist a priori view of the experiential horizon, if subjective actuality in a priori experience was to be accorded a place worthy of its importance.

Husserl's phenomenology with its ‘adequate intuition of essences’ proclaimed itself the philosophical basic science which

[p. 584]

was also to found epistemology. It placed the ‘acts of consciousness’ (‘Bewusztseinsakte’), with their intentional content, in the centre of investigation. And in advance it guarded itself from every psychologist misinterpretation of its method of inquiry on the part of Kantian epistemology. But, after all, Husserl only substituted the Kantian construction of the ‘transcendental logical ego’ by the phenomenological construction of the ‘pure actual I’ (‘reines aktuelles Ich’) with its intentional acts of consciousness. This ‘pure I’ was a residue of the methodical ‘destruction of the world’ (‘Weltvernichtung’). And in this phenomenologically conceived ‘transcendental consciousness’ there was no room left for true individuality either.

It is true that in his Cartesianische Meditationen Husserl accepts a monadic conception of the transcendental ego which in its pure intentional acts has to constitute the ‘world’ as well as its ‘alter-egos’ and their ‘worlds’. This is to say that he follows Descartes in his initial solipsistic self-reflection. But this by no means implies an abandonment of the rationalist conception of phenomenology, no more than the Cartesian solipsisl self-reflection turns into an irrationalist hypostatizing of subjective individuality. Husserl's monadic conception of the ego and its alter-egos is taken from Leibniz, whose monadology was of a strongly rationalist character. In Cartesianism the solipsist isolation of the monadic ego is broken through by the ‘universally valid’ character of the innate ideas. In an analogous way it is broken through in Husserl's phenomenology by the ‘universally valid’ character of the constitutive syntheses of the transcendental ego which is abstracted from any individuality by means of the phenomenological reductions.

Scheler's theory concerning the individuality of absolute truth as ‘truth of personal validity’ (‘personal-gültige Wahrheit’).

In the phenomenological circle Scheler was the first to break radically with the hypostatizing of the ‘transcendental universally valid consciousness’ to the absolute experiential subject, the ‘unconditional’ (‘unbedingte’) subject of knowledge¹.

1 Oswald Spengler, also influenced by Dilthey, breaks much more radically with the construction of the universally valid epistemological subject from his irrationalistic-historical standpoint. This is nothing remarkable in itself, since Spengler has nothing to do with transcendental philosophy. Cf. his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (15-22 Aufl. 1920) Vol. I, p. 88.
In his philosophy of historical life he lapses into a perfect relativism, and epistemological scepticism. For, unlike Scheler, he does not believe in the constancy of the ‘a priori essential structures adequately given in the intuition of their essence’.
Cf. op. cit., p. 227: ‘Und deshalb gibt es so viele Welte als es Menschen und Kulturen gibt, und im Dasein jedes einzelnen ist die vermeintlich selbständige und ewige Welt - die jeder mit dem andern gemein zu haben glaubt - ein immer neues, einmaliges, wie sich wiederholendes Erlebnis.’ [And, therefore there are as many worlds as there are men and cultures. In the life of each individual the supposedly single, independent and eternal world - which every one of them thinks he shares with the others - is an experience that is always new and unique, as if it were repeating itself for ever.]

[p. 585]

His thesis was that every individual person has his own individual cosmos in which he has conscious experience of himself¹. The absolute truth about the cosmos necessarily bears an individual, personal character, so that it must have a different content to each separate personality. These thoughts made an almost revolutionary impression. Scheler rejected the neo-Kantian criticism beforehand, which objected that with this personalistic view of the actual self-consciousness and of absolute truth, he was moving in subjectivistic and sceptical paths. He reproaches inversely the critical transcendental philosophy with a subjectivistic falsification of truth, reality and the ‘Gegenstand’. For it is bound to sublimate the totality of the cosmos to a subjective Idea of reason², and it denatures the ‘Gegenstand’ to a necessary and universally valid synthesis of representations, whose determining form has been created by the subject itself.

Scheler himself holds to the phenomenological view of a transcendental intentional consciousness, but he is aware that the cognitive personality is not contained in it. This merely intentional transcendental consciousness only gives us the ‘Gegenstand’ as a supposed or intentional one. Here the cosmos itself has not been actually given us. A purely intentional world lacks ‘Selbstgegebenheit’.

The full ‘essence’ of personality, experiencing itself consciously only in ‘spiritual acts’, is sharply to be distinguished from the merely ‘psychical I’. It comprises the full spiritual individuality.

1 Der Formalismus in der Ethik, etc., p. 408 ff.

2 According to Kant the cosmos as ‘universe’ has not been given to the transcendental consciousness; it is only an Idea, a theoretical limiting concept.

[p. 586]

I subjoin an extensive quotation from Scheler:

‘As an example I will take only one of any person's concrete acts. In this act are implied all possible act-essentials and in its objective correlate are implied all the essential world-factors. So, e.g.: I-ness, individual I, all the essential constitutive elements of psychical life; equally extra-mental being, spatiality, temporality, the bodily phenomenon, thing-ness, working, etc. All these components together show a law-conformable structure which is valid for all possible persons and all possible acts of every person without any exception, and not only for the actual world but for all possible worlds. In addition, however, the above-mentioned act implies a final peculiarity inconceivable by means of essential concepts referring to universal truths. It is an original essential trait, only characteristic of the ‘world’ of this particular individual, and of no other. But the fact of its existence is not empirically met with. Nor is it this a priori individual essence itself. Rather it is still a universal essential characteristic of all possible worlds. Let us therefore reduce all that a concrete person has been ‘given’ to the essential phenomena that have actually been given him in pure self-evidence, i.e. to facts that are purely what they are. ‘In this reduction all still abstract qualities, forms, intentional directions and all that is in any way separable in the acts enter into the phenomenological datum-sphere in respect to the pure and formless act of the person. Then here alone we retain an absolutely existing world, and we find ourselves in the sphere of the ‘Sache an sich’.
And conversely, so long as there exists one single world for different individual persons which nevertheless is considered to be both actually given in ‘self-evidence’ and ‘absolute’, the uniqueness and sameness of this world is necessarily an illusion.
In fact, only the objective spheres are given whose existence is related to some kind of bearer of a concrete personality (e.g., a living being, a human being, a race).
Or, we had rather say ‘the world’, i.e. the one concrete world, has been given, comprising all concrete worlds - however, it is not given as actual but merely as ‘intended’. This means that in this case ‘the world’ becomes a mere ‘Idea’ in the Kantian sense (but not with his reality sign before it). For Kant supposed he could reduce the essence of ‘the world’ itself to an ‘Idea’. But the world is not an ‘Idea’ at all. It is an absolute being, everywhere concrete and individual. The intention directed to this world becomes an Idea that is in principle incapable of fulfilment, only insofar as we want it to be ‘given’ to any plurality of individual persons and moreover to be given as ‘actual’. It also becomes only an Idea, so long as we suppose we can make the ‘universal validity’ of the establishing and determining of its being and content by means of general concepts and sentences, the pre-requisite of its existence and of that of any kind of existence. For such a determination of the world is essentially never possible¹.

1 Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik, etc., pp. 408/9: ‘Nehme ich von einer beliebigen Person nur einen ihrer konkreten Akte, so enthält dieser Aktus nicht nur alle möglichen Aktwesen in sich, sondern sein gegenständliches Korrelat enthält auch alle wesenhaften Weltfaktoren in sich, z.B. Ichkeit, in dividuelles Ich, alle wesenhaften Konstituenten des Psychischen, desgleichen Auszerweltlichkeit, Räumlichkeit, Zeitlichkeit, Leibphänomen, Dinglichkeit, Wirken usw. usw. Und dies nach einem a priorisch gesetzmäszigen Aufbau, der ohne Ansehung des besonderen Falles für alle möglichen Personen und alle möglichen Akte jeder Person gilt und nicht nur für die wirkliche Welt, sondern für alle möglichen Welten. Auszerdem aber enthält er auch noch ein letztes Eigenartiges, in Wesensbegriffe die auf allgemeine Wahrheiten gehen, nie Faszbares, einen originalen Wesenszug, der nur und nur der ‘Welt’ dieser Person und keiner anderen eignet. Der Tatbestand aber, dass dies sei, ist nicht ein empirisch vorgefundener, und ebensowenig ist er dieses individuelle apriorische Wesen selbst; er ist vielmehr selbst noch ein allgemeiner Wesenszug aller nur möglichen Welten. Reduzieren wir also alles, was einer konkreten Person überhaupt ‘gegeben ist, auf die phänomenalen Wesenheiten, die ihr rein selbst gegeben sind, d.h. auf Tatsachen, die vollkommen sind, was sie sind - so dass alle noch abstrakten Aktqualitäten, Formen, Richtungen und alles nur an Akten Scheidbare in die Gegebenheits sphäre für den reinen und formlosen Akt der Person eingeht - so haben wir hier allein eine daseins - absolute Welt, und wir befinden uns im Reiche der Sache an sich. Und umgekehrt gilt: So lange noch für verschiedene individuelle Personen eine einzige Welt besteht, die gleichwohl als ‘selbstgegeben’ und als ‘absolut’ angesehen wird, ist diese Einzigkeit und Dieselbigkeit jener Welt notwendig Schein und es sind faktisch nur Gegenstandsbereiche, die daseinsrelativ zu irgendeiner Trägerart der konkreten Personalität (z.B. zu Lebewesen, Mensch, Rasse usw.) sind, gegeben; oder es ist zwar ‘die Welt’, d.h. die eine, alle konkreten Welten umfassende, konkrete Welt ‘gegeben’ - aber sie ist nicht ‘selbstgegeben’, sondern nur gemeint: d.h. ‘die Welt wird in diesem Falle zu einer bloszen “Idee” im Sinne (aber nicht mit dem Realitäts-vorzeichen’) Kant's, der ja das Wesen ‘der Welt’ selbst zu einer ‘Idee’ herabsetzen zu dürfen glaubte.
‘Die Welt’ ist aber durchaus keine ‘Idee’, sondern ein absolutseiendes, überall konkretes, individuelles Sein, und die Intention auf sie wird nur zu einer prinzipiell unerfüllbaren Idee, zu einem blosz gemeinten, sofern wir fordern dass sie einer beliebigen Mehrheit von individuellen Personen ‘gegeben’ und dabei ‘selbstgegeben’ sei; oder auch so lange wir eine ‘Allgemeingültigkeit’ der Feststellung und Bestimmung ihres Seins und Inhalts durch allgemeine Begriffe und Sätze zur Bedingung ihrer und jeder Art von Existenz machen zu dürfen meinen. Denn eine solche Bestimmung ist wesenhaft nie über die Welt möglich.’

[p. 587]

In this view of Scheler's we are struck by the remarkable individualization and personalization of the Husserlian transcendental (phenomenological) consciousness¹. Great emphasis is

1 Scheler himself prefers to speak about ‘consciousness’ only in a psychological sense.

[p. 588]

laid on the individual-personal essential character of experiential activity. Truth is held to be of an individual nature. If we speak of concrete thought, or concrete volition, we simply take the whole individual personality (as the ‘totality’ of the mental activity) for granted. Without this individual personal only an abstract essence of the act (Aktwesen) is meant: ‘Concreteness, however, itself belongs to the essence - not only to the positing of reality’¹.

Scheler conceives of cosmic reality in a naturalistic sense, isolating it in its psycho-physical aspects. Consequently he is obliged to hypostatize the theoretical cognitive activity contained in the temporal horizon to a personal ‘mental (spiritual, not psychical) activity’, independent of all cosmic reality. Therefore the actual theoretical meaning-synthesis in the intuition of the essence must be denied its cosmic character.

What place does Scheler assign to individuality in our experience of the cosmos? Every individual person has his absolutely individual cosmos, his ‘personal world’.

This ‘personal world’, as the correlate of the individual personality (only living in mental ‘acts’), is conceived by Scheler as a microcosm. And now he asks whether ‘the idea of a single identical real world - transcending the a priori essential structure which binds “all possible worlds” - has its phenomenal realization, or if there are no other worlds than the plurality of the personal ones’².

If there is such a macrocosm, our microcosm must be a part of it, while retaining its ‘cosmic totality’. One thing is not strange to us in the Idea of a macrocosm, according to Scheler, namely its a priori essential structure which is fixed by phenomenology. For this ‘essential structure’ holds for all possible worlds, because it holds for the ‘universal essence’, world. The personal correlate to this macrocosm would then be the Idea of an infinite and perfect spiritual person whose ‘acts’ are given us according to the ‘law-conformity of its essence’ in the ‘phenomenology of the acts’ which examines the actual structures of all possible persons.

But this personal correlate of the macrocosm would have to

1 p. 412.

2 Op. cit., p. 411: ‘Ob die Idee eines einzigen identischen wirklichen Welt - hinausgehend über das apriorische Wesensgefüge, das “alle mögliche Welten” bindt - noch eine phänomenale Erfüllung hat, oder ob es bei der Vielheit der Personalwelten zu bleiben hat.’

[p. 589]

be concrete in order to answer merely the essential requirement of its reality. Thus the Idea of a God has been given together with the unity, identity, and uniqueness of the cosmos in consequence of a phenomenological coherence of essences.

Scheler's conclusion is: ‘Every unity of the world’ (and so all varieties of monism and pantheism) ‘without an essential regression to a personal God, and also every kind of “substitution” (“Ersatz”) of the personal God (by a “universal World-reason”, by a “transcendental rational I”, by a “moral regulator of the world” (Kant), by an “ordo ordinans” (Fichte in his first period), by an infinite logical “Subject” (Hegel), by an impersonal or a would-be “super-personal unconsciousness”, etc.) - is a contradictory hypothesis, also in a philosophical sense. For they contradict evident essential coherences that can be laid bare’¹.

And from this he infers: ‘All “amare, contemplare, cogitare, velle” is therefore intentionally bound up with the one concrete world, the macrocosm, as primarily an “amare, contemplare, cogitare and velle” in Deo’².

Thus Scheler's Idea of individual-personal consciousness culminates in his Idea of God. He observes, however, that this Idea can only be experienced as real in a concrete revelation of God to a person. From this he finds his way to an inter-individual essential community (Wesensgemeinschaft) among individual persons which is founded in their communion with God as the correlate to the macrocosm. All ‘other communities of a moral or a juridical character’ have this possible communion with the personal God for their foundation.

1 ‘Jede “Einheit der Welt” (und damit alle Spielarten des Monismus und Pantheismus) ohne einen Wesensregresz auf einen persönlichen Gott, desgleichen jede Art von “Ersatz” des persönlichen Gottes, sei es durch eine “allgemeine Weltvernunft”, durch ein “transszendentales Vernunftich”, durch einen “sittlichen Weltordner” (Kant), durch eine “ordo ordinans” (Fichte in seiner ersten Periode), durch ein unendliches logisches “Subjekt” (Hegel), durch ein unpersönliches oder soidisant “überpersönliches Unbewusstes” usw. sind auch philosophisch “widersinnige Annahmen”. Denn sie wiederstreiten evidenten Wesenszusammenhängen, die aufweisbar sind.’

2 ‘Alles amare, contemplare, cogitare, velle is (mithin) mit der einen konkreten Welt, dem Makroskosmos, erst als ein amare, contemplare, cogitare und velle “in Deo” intentional verknüpft.’ This conclusion proves that in this period of his phenomenological philosophy Scheler was strongly influenced by the French thinker Malebranche.

[p. 590]

Scheler's Idea of ‘God’ and that of ‘person’ bear the stamp of a neo-scholastic speculative metaphysics. He combines with them the possibility of a ‘macrocosm’ and that of common human experience.

The speculative character of these ideas is intensified in the thesis that the ‘actual personality of God’, as the ‘Person of all persons’, is subject to the same ‘essential phenomenological law-conformities’ (Wesensgesetzmäszigkeiten) as human personality.

The essential individuality of the latter must be distinguished from the individual -I- so that a moment later the final hypostasis to a divine person may be possible. For the human selfhood as an individual ‘I-ness’, pre-supposes the ‘essential necessity’ of the existence of a ‘thou’, a ‘body’ and an ‘outer world’. ‘They are exactly those things which it is a priori self-contradictory to predicate about God.’ In other words, because the ‘Idea’ of a personal God does not allow of any bond with a cosmic reality and with a community of ‘I's’, human personality must also be hypostatized above its ‘individual -I-ness’. The latter is conceived of as an ‘object of inner perception’, whereas the ‘spiritual person’ and its acts are never to be made into an objecct (Scheler identifies ‘object’ and ‘Gegenstand’).

All these ideas are mere speculations. They are the natural results of theoretical thought trying to overstep the critical boundary-line of the temporal order of the creation, which sets an insurmountable limit between the absolute Being of God and His creation, whose meaning is absolutely dependent on Him.

Criticism of Scheler's conception of the individuality of personal experience and of absolute truth.

What can be said about Scheler's conception of the individuality of personal experience and that of absolute truth? Christian thought should be very much on its guard against such a thinker as Scheler.

At the time when he wrote his principal ethical work his thought was penetrated by the spirit of a new scholasticism which aimed at a synthesis between Augustinism and the recent trends of thought in phenomenology and irrationalist philosophy of life. Insofar he can be compared with the Roman Catholic French philosopher Maurice Blondel. But the method and contents of his philosophy are very different from those of the

[p. 591]

famous thinker of Aix en Provence (who was not a phenomenologist), and the Christian impulse of Blondel's thought was, in my opinion, much stronger than that of Scheler's. In addition, Scheler's indubitable genius and prophetic personality could not fail to make a deep impression upon those who sought for a philosophy combinable with Christian belief.

This is why in the Roman-Catholic period of Scheler's life the pitfalls of his immanence-standpoint in philosophy were easily overlooked. His appeal to a concrete Revelation of the personal God at the critical point of the realization of his Idea of the Origin in human experience seemed to break through this immanence-standpoint¹. This makes a radical transcendental criticism of his course of thought all the more necessary. Such a critique resulting in laying bare the scholastic religious pre-suppositions of Scheler's ethics may be left to the reader who has become familiar with the method explained in the Prolegomena. In the present context we must restrict our criticism to the inner conflict between Scheler's irrationalist personalism and the Husserlian traits in his phenomenology.

If we understand Scheler aright, he conceives of individuality itself as the absolute pre-requisite (Bedingung) in the ‘concrete essential structure’ of human experience, or, to express it in accordance with our own standpoint: in the transcendental horizon of experience, in which Scheler also seeks the transcendent religious horizon in his speculative way. This is characteristic of the irrationalistic standpoint, because in this manner individuality is ultimately elevated above the law. Then, of course, the fulness of the meaning of truth must be also something that is not placed under a law.

Law-conformity becomes some abstract ‘Wesensgesetzmäszigkeit’². The individual person, on the other hand, is isolated in his absolutely individual microcosm and the metaphysical Idea of God must be introduced in order to avoid the consequences of solipsism. In this entire view Scheler's conception of individual personality (first person singular) is the real issue.

The Idea of God depends on the concrete phenomenological insight of the individual mental person, which as such remains

1 In the final stage of his thought, for which his little book Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos is representative, Scheler has abandoned the Christian religion.

2 i.e. essential law-conformity.

[p. 592]

bound to his closed microcosm. But this Idea cannot be resorted to as a ‘deus ex machina’ to pave the way again to a macrocosmic experience. The walls of the absolutization of personal individuality have no windows.

This spiritualist metaphysics sprang from an irrationalistic root. With this metaphysics the Husserlian view of the transcendental possibilities and essential necessities (which Scheler has not abandoned) is in remarkably strained relations. For this view is as rationalistic as possible, and has an inner affinity with Leibniz's Idea of the ‘verités éternelles’ (eternal truths); in fact, it is a phenomenological transformation of the latter.

Speaking of all possible worlds and all possible personalities (outside of human beings) is an indication of the attempt to hypostatize in a speculative metaphysical way the theoretical transcendental horizon of our human experience of reality. This Idea of the possible is meaningless, because we cannot speak of the cosmos except in its temporal horizon, fixed in the Divine order of the creation. And for the same reason there is no sense in speaking of all possible personalities outside of humanity. The personality of God and that of the angels is not a question of ‘transcendental possibility and essential necessity’.

The Christian speaks with awe about the living personal God, Who in His mercy and grace has revealed Himself to fallen man. But also in the communion with this God in Christ, the Christian remains within the human creaturely limits of the possibility of experience. Then every theoretical Idea of a ‘phenomenological possibility of being’ of God as the ‘person of all persons’ becomes a manifestation of human ὕβϱις. This pride wants to bind God to the creaturely boundaries of the human horizon of experience, after having hypostatized the transcendental dimension of the latter.

§ 5 - The individuality of human experience within the structural horizon of experience and the view of man as a microcosm.

The view of man as a microcosm is unserviceable.

The contrast between a microcosm and a macrocosm, handled by Scheler, is in principle unserviceable in Christian philosophy. The origin of this contrast can be traced back to the pre-Socratic philosophy of nature. From Greek philosophy (Plato, the Stoa, Philo, neo-Platonism) it passed into medieval Scholasticism.

Pervaded by the new Humanistic personality-ideal the idea of

[p. 593]

man as a microcosm (monad, mirror of the macrocosm) penetrated into the philosophy of the Renaissance and into the mature philosophy of Humanism. Then it assumed all the nuances of the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea (from Bruno, via Leibniz, to Herder, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schelling and Lotze). The Idea of a cosmos from which immanence-philosophy starts in all its nuances, also in its medieval synthesis with Christian faith, is incompatible with the Biblical revelation concerning creation, and so is its Idea of man as a microcosm.

Man, in his full selfhood, transcends the temporal ‘earthly’ cosmos in all its aspects, and partakes in the transcendent root of this cosmos. He cannot be a self-contained and isolated microcosm, a mirror of a so-called macrocosm. Nor can he be what Scheler calls the ‘personal correlate of an absolutely individual cosmos’. This idea of a microcosm is dominated by the radically irrationalistic personalistic view of the transcendental horizon of human experience. The subjective individuality determines this horizon, making it both individual and cosmic, and ‘essentially and necessarily’ different in each person. Even absolute truth becomes absolutely different for each individual person. Scheler's ‘Idea of God’, is only ‘realisable’ by an individual revelation. This Idea remains a merely intentional, theoretical hypostasis for any one who has not received this individual, most personal revelation. From this hypostasis the possibility of a real experience of the ‘macrocosm’ can never be understood.

Our first objection to this Idea of a microcosm is that subjective individuality can never determine the structural horizon of human experience and of the cosmos.

This horizon is a structural order, the Divine order of the creation itself. It comprises in its determining and limiting structure the individuality of human personality, its religious root as well as its temporal existence. Creaturely subjective individuality cannot determine and limit itself, but is a priori determined and limited by the Divine order.

By this we do not rationalistically proclaim this structure to be a so-called ‘transcendental subject’ of human experience. The subject of the full human experience, i.e. human selfhood, remains individual and this individuality remains inherent in the experiencing subjectivity within the temporal horizon. But the transcendent and transcendental structure of this subjectivity cannot be subjectively individual itself. But for its super-indi-

[p. 594]

vidual law-conformity, individual subjectivity would be an ἄπειϱον, a meaningless indeterminateness.

The possibility of subjective experience would be cancelled, if the horizon of human experience were subjectively individual. The cosmic self-consciousness in which all cosmological knowledge remains founded, is not an experiential entrance into the absolutely individual horizon of some ‘personal world’, of a ‘microcosm’. It enters into the full, unique cosmos created by God within the temporal horizon, in the full meaning-coherence of all its modal and plastic structures. Naïve experience, the great primary datum of all epistemology, does not know anything of a cosmos as a ‘personal world’ supposed to be identical with countless other ‘personal worlds’ in an abstract, universal, merely intended essential structure alone. This is already precluded by the subject-object relation in the modal horizon, and by the same relation in the plastic horizon of human experience. Man experiences his individual existence within the temporal horizon exclusively in the one and only cosmos into which he has been integrated together with all creatures. He also experiences his individuality in the various structures of the temporal societal relationships.

And within the temporal horizon man's self-consciousness does not from the outset have a static individuality. Rather it becomes more and more individual. This takes place in a process of development which is also historically determined. The cosmos itself cannot be called individual. It is not an actual being. Its only temporal meaning-coherence is rather the structural frame-work within which the individuality of temporal things, events and societal relationships are only possible.

The societal structure of human knowledge within the temporal horizon.

The individuality of human experience within the temporal horizon has a societal structure excluding any possibility of a hermetically closed ‘microcosm’. This societal structure is in no way founded in Scheler's speculative Idea of God.

My individual cognitive activity, both in a theoretical and in a pre-theoretical sense, is borne by an immensely more comprehensive and specialized subjective knowledge on the part of human society. This knowledge has been acquired by the successive generations of mankind.

It is in the possession of human society and is not equal to the

[p. 595]

sum of actual knowledge of all individuals together in the present and the past. Nor does it cancel all personal individuality and genius in cognitive activity.

The theoretical knowledge of mankind has for the greater part been objectified in a structure that makes it independent of the momentary actual individual insight of individual human beings.

But it remains fitted into the temporal horizon of human experience, as an objective structure in a necessary relation to a possible subjective cognitive activity. It has received a symbolically determined objective societal structure, which we can only analyze with the aid of the thing-concept in our third volume.

One thing is certain, the knowledge of mankind, objectified in a symbolical structure of individuality, can never be contained in its totality in the actual knowledge of the individual human beings.

Scheler thinks that the ‘intuition of the essence’ gives us the essence in an a-symbolical way. From his standpoint the symbolical structure of the theoretical knowledge of mankind must be a sure sign that it cannot belong to the concrete cosmos of ‘absolute existence’¹. But this view deprives the cosmos of an essential aspect of its full temporal meaning. It is therefore in conflict with transcendental truth, which is bound to the modal horizon of our experience.

Without this symbolical aspect human experience would in principle be impossible. We know that the sphere of social intercourse, the economic, the aesthetic, the jural, the moral spheres, and that of faith, have their symbolical foundation in the Divine world-order. In the transcendental direction of time all the earlier law-spheres have their modal anticipations of the symbolical sphere of language. The inter-individual societal experience of mankind, showing its extremely dynamic, mobile, procedural character, is doubtless not of a microcosmic nature. Within this societal structure of human experience the individual insight of genius plays a leading part in the theoretical opening-process. In the acquisition of theoretical knowledge by far the greater part of scientific workers have to be content with assimilating and elaborating the discoveries made by the leading personalities in the scientific world. Kant could only assign a place to individual genius in the field of artistic creation. But

1 ‘daseins-absoluten Kosmos’.

[p. 596]

we acknowledge God's sovereignty in the distribution of talent and disposition, also in the domain of science.

We do not mean to say that these special gifts are merely functional psychical facts which do not concern epistemology. They are a cosmic datum, founded in the religious individuality of personalities. Epistemology cannot ignore them with impunity. For the subject of human experience, which cannot be made a ‘Gegenstand’, may not be functionalistically sublimated to an abstract form of universal validity. It is, and remains, the full individual selfhood in the societal structure of its cosmic and cosmological self-consciousness.

Again about the criterion of Truth.

An epistemology that empties this full subject rationalistically until it has become a formal ‘transcendental consciousness’ necessarily falls into the trap of overlooking the rôle played by subjective insight into epistemological questions. The lack of critical transcendental self-reflection, revealed by such a ‘critical’ epistemology, leads to the tyrannical elevation of one's private subjective insight to universally valid absolute truth. Such an insight refuses to submit to the test of the Divine world-order. Our transcendental a priori knowledge remains subjective and must always be put to the test of the Truth. Within the transcendent horizon of experience we must trace its deepest root. The philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea demands that the whole of transcendental philosophic thought re-consider the problem of the criterion of truth with respect to subjective transcendental knowledge. This demand is scientifically imperative, no matter from what standpoint the thinker starts. We have clearly shown the subjectivism of the immanence-standpoint. The perspective structure of truth has been revealed. It has appeared that the transcendent, and the transcendental structure of human experience is a law of freedom¹. This law makes subjective error possible (also in a transcendental respect) and even inescapable on the immanence-standpoint. No epistemology is possible without the ὑπόϑεσις of a cosmonomic Idea which attains the full clarity of self-reflection only in the religious horizon of our experience.

But the cosmonomic Idea itself also demands a criterion of

1 Of course not a law of freedom in the sense of the possibility for the cognizing subject to act outside of the structure of its subjectivity.

[p. 597]

its truth. Modern phenomenology has realized the lack of a laying bare, a making visible of transcendental theoretical truth in the so-called critical as well as in the psychological epistemologies. The transcendental a priori structure of the horizon of our experience became the ideal ‘Gegenstand’ of subjective a priori intuiting insight. In this way ‘epistemology’ in its usual Humanistic sense was given a phenomenological foundation. But this view remains caught in subjectivism to such a degree that infallibility is ascribed to the subjective a priori ‘intuition of the essence’ which clearly bears the stamp of the immanence-standpoint.

We are thus left without a genuine criterion of transcendental theoretical truth. The demand for such a criterion is even called un-phenomenological in principle. The ‘intuition of the essence’ implies the absolute evidence of truth. Phenomenology haughtily rejects the action about the justification of its ‘essential insights’ in the forum of the Divine world-order in the light of the fulness of truth¹.

1 Scheler's statement in his Phänomenologie und Erkenntnistheorie (Schriften aus dem Nachlass, Bnd. I, 1933), pp. 268/9 is characteristic: ‘Nur etwas vom gleichen Sinn des Wortes “wahr” gibt es noch, das über den Gegensatz wahr-falsch, der allein der Satzsphäre angehört, noch erhaben ist: das ist die Selbstgegebenheit eines Gemeinten in unmittelbarer Anschauungsevidenz. Das allein ist jene Wahrheit, von der Spinoza das grosse und tiefe Wort spricht: “Die Wahrheit ist Kriterium ihrer selbst und des Falschen, und die er seiner Erkenntnis durch Intuition vorbehalt”... Selbstgegebenheit und Evidenz (Einsicht) sind also Erkenntnisideale, die der Wahrheit und Falschheit vorhergehen. Natürlich fragt der Mensch des Kriteriumstypus wieder: “Welches Kriterium besteht denn für Selbstgegebenheit?”... Aber schon die Idee eines “Kriterium der Selbstgegebenheit” ist widersinnig, da alle Frage nach Kriterien ihren Sinn erst da gewinnt, wo die Sache nicht “selbst”, sondern nur ein “Symbol” für sie gegeben ist.’ [There is still something of the same meaning as the word ‘true’, which is elevated above the contrast true-false which only belongs to the sphere of a (linguistic) sentence. We mean the actual datum of what is intended in the immediate evidence of intuition. This only is the truth to which Spinoza refers in his great and profound utterance. ‘Truth is its own criterion and that of falsehood’, and which he reserves for his cognition by means of intuition... Actual datum and evidence (insight) are thus epistemological ideals which are anterior to truth and falsehood. Of course the man of the criterion-type will ask again: What is then the criterion of the actual datum?... But already the idea of a criterion of the ‘actual datum’ is self-contradictory, because any inquiry after a criterion is only meaningful if the matter has not been given ‘itself’, but only its ‘symbol’.]
This is a very clear statement. The phenomenologist's subjective insight into what is the εἶδος, the essence and its structural coherence, is the end of all dispute.
There is indeed an end of our inquiry concerning the criterion of truth. It is when we are seized hold of in our hearts by Truth itself.
But this end does not lie within the transcendental theoretical horizon of human experience, nor in a subjective theoretical ‘intuition of the essence’, rooted in the immanence-standpoint which has fallen away from the Fulness of Truth.

[p. 598]

For this reason we have laid such a great emphasis on the demand to make the subjectivity of our cognitive insight the centre of the epistemological problems. Never must the (subjectively constructed) law-conformable structure of the cognitive subject itself be made the subject in an epistemological sense. This substitution of their respective rôles is the πϱῶτον ψεῦδος of dogmatic subjectivism in epistemology. It leads to a dogmatic rejection of any criterion of transcendental theoretical truth which really submits subjective insight to the test of verity.

Epistemology should disclose the transcendental temporal horizon of our experience to us theoretically. In this opening process the experiential horizon is deepened from a pre-theoretical to a theoretical horizon (founded in the pre-theoretical one). And we should reflect philosophically on the pre-requisites of this opening-process given in the Divine order of the creation.

Then we shall be freed from the rationalistic illusion that epistemology has been drawn up in a theoretical horizon which is rigid and self-contained. The transcendental horizon is never at rest and irrepressibly points above itself to the transcendent religious horizon of our selfhood, and there is no stability of Truth to be found but in the Divine Revelation.