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A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 3. The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality (1969)

A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 3. The Structures of Individuality of Temporal Reality

(1969)–H. Dooyeweerd–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Part I
The structures of individuality of temporal things

Chapter I
The misinterpretation of naïve experience by immanence-philosophy

§ 1 - The metaphysical concept of substance as a speculative exaggeration of a datum of naïve experience.

It is undoubtedly true that in the pre-theoretical attitude we continue to experience the identity of a thing, while observing it to be susceptible to change. The tree in front of my house may change and vary in its visible form in the process of growing and with the various seasons; nevertheless, we are sure that it persists in being the same tree. The book in my hand is no longer new. Its cover is loose and its margins are filled with notes, yet in my experience, it is the same book I originally purchased.

Chemistry and biology give us theoretical understanding of the continual changes occurring in the molecular combinations of matter and in the cells and tissues of a living organism, but our knowledge of the things mentioned above is supplied by our naïve experience, before we acquire theoretical insight into physico-chemical or bio-chemical changes. Naïve experience may be deepened through this natural scientific knowledge, but cannot be destroyed by it.

There is, however, a limit to the amount of change that is compatible with our experience of the identity of a thing. When I throw a book into a fire and it is consumed, the thing itself is consumed. Chemistry cannot teach anything concerning the annihilation of this thing, as such. For, as a special science, it must eliminate the things of naïve experience from its theoretical field of vision, at least insofar as they are not qualified by a physical-chemical structure. Otherwise, it could not give theoretical insight into the functional coherence of events, presenting themselves in the modal aspect of reality which it examines.

The naïve perceiver, bound to what we have previously called the plastic horizon of experience, cannot account for the latter.

His pre-theoretical concept of a thing is bound to sensory perception. He experiences things without being able to gain a theoretical insight into their typical structures of individuality.

When asked why the tree planted in his garden a few years ago is still the same tree, a man capable only of naïve experience will soon appeal to sense perception, if he is at all willing to consider such a difficult question. And so he will necessarily get muddled in a problem which cannot be solved by the test of the senses.

When forced to explain what he experiences, the naïve perceiver thus seemingly corroborates the philosophical theory which interprets the essential data of naïve experience as mere sense phenomena.

Since philosophy was convinced that nothing permanent may be found in ‘sense phenomena’, it began to pose the problem of identity and change on a metaphysical basis. Because the things of naïve experience are transient, and every process of change must nevertheless be related to an identical subject, metaphysics began to seek a supra-temporal substance, possessing a permanence unaffected by the process of becoming and decay.

Without first obtaining a correct insight into what is actually given in naïve experience, as the identical whole in the changing things, metaphysical immanence-philosophy thus began to search for the οὐσία, the imperishable substance which alone can truly be called ‘being.’

This metaphysical problem of the οὐσία originated in a speculative exaggeration of a datum of naïve experience. What is strictly given in our experience of the identity of temporal things, does not provide a sufficient reason to seek supra-temporal substances behind the latter. Our experience of the identity of a thing is always temporal.

A speculative exaggeration and misconception of this datum was already implied in the metaphysical type of cosmonomic Idea lying at the foundation of this philosophical search for the true being.

In the final hypostasis of its deification, philosophical thought itself appears to be the ἀϱχή of the idea of supra-temporal substance.

Metaphysical thought theoretically separated the structure of reality into the real metaphysical noumenon and the deceptive phenomenon. Thus, it turned away from what is strictly given in naïve experience.

By seeking true reality in eternal, unchangeable, unmoved being, Parmenides, the Eleatic, declared all becoming and change to be a sensory phenomenon, which does not correspond to true Being. But the real origin of this Being is theoretical thought which identifies itself with its product: Τὸ γὰϱ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε ϰαὶ εἶναι· (For thinking and being is one and the same).

Substance as the personal point of reference of temporal being in August Brunner.

Since the idea of a metaphysical substance in the sense explained above has, as such, nothing to do with the things of naïve experience, it might have another origin. The question may be raised as to whether metaphysics, in seeking the supra-temporal point of reference of all changeable things, is perhaps primarily concerned with the transcendental basic problem of the radical identity of the I-ness, as the concentration-point of human existence and human experience. The neo-scholastic philosopher, August Brunner1, who is strongly under the influence of existentialism and modern phenomenology, has to some degree interpreted the idea of substance in this sense. According to him this idea should in the first place be related to the personal centre of experience, since only the human person as subject corresponds in an adequate sense to the definition of substance as ‘ens in sē stans’. The concrete unity of the selfhood is always the same notwithstanding the change of its ontical relations. The accentuation of the selfhood is thus supposed to be responsible for the philosophy of substance in Greek and medieval thought. From this central viewpoint Brunner also tries to explain the concept of substance in its reference to the ‘lower levels of being’. Availing himself of Heidegger's existentialistic conception of ‘concern’ (Sorge), he supposes that in the material levels of being the selfhood, in its concerned struggle for possession, seeks permanent things on which it can rely: ‘So the concept of substance reveals its true meaning: a fixed thing with a certain permanency’. This permanency is of primordial importance in cultural objects, since the latter are only serviceable in a steady and durable state. From the cultural objects the property of permanency and unchangeableness was transferred to the

‘forms’. So the οὐσία is a permanent kernel, which is the essence of cultural things and Brunner thinks that this is the origin of the conception of unchangeable essence, in respect to which changes are only accidental. Accidental in this sense are also the relations which, in their typical realization on infra-personal levels, are opposed to the selfhood. One should, however, avoid any absolutization of the ‘essence’ and take the latter, with the accidental relations, as a structural whole, especially in the case of the selfhood.

Brunner's view is doubtless interesting, but it cannot be accepted as a serious interpretation of the metaphysical concept of substance in its classical and medieval sense, nor in that of modern Humanistic metaphysics. Boethius1 has indeed defined personality with the aid of the classical concept of substance as ‘naturae rationalis individua substantia’, and this definition has had a great influence in scholastic theology2. But the origin of this metaphysical concept has nothing to do with the modern personalistic view of being, and a fortiori it cannot be related to the Christian view of the I-ness as the individual religious centre of human existence and experience. The idea of an ‘ens in sē stans’ is, on the contrary, entirely incompatible with the Christian conception of the human selfhood as a spiritual centre, which is nothing in itself, but whose nature is a ‘stare extra sē’, a self-surrender to its true or its fancied Origin.

As long as the human person in its central kernel is conceived as a ‘substance’, it is impossible to understand the profound Biblical meaning of the creation of man after the image of God. Brunner himself contradicts the conception of the selfhood as a ‘substance’ when he remarks: ‘It is the mode of being of the selfhood to transcend itself and in this very transcending to be a self and with itself’.3 His distortion of the real metaphysical concept of οὐσία clearly appears from his view that in the material sphere the cultural object is the original proto-type of a ‘substance’. For cultural objects have never been conceived as real ‘substances’ in a metaphysical sense. This very fact proves

that the identification of this metaphysical concept with the naïve notion of a ‘thing’ must rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of the latter.

The concept of substance in Greek metaphysics.

Metaphysical immanence-philosophy has turned away from the transcendent religious horizon of human experience. Its concept of substance is rooted in an absolutization of the theoretical antithesis implied in the theoretical attitude of thought. It rests upon the antithesis between a noumenal being, as a true reality in itself, and a merely phenomenal world. Metaphysical substance is conceived of as a ‘thing in itself’ and this ‘noumenal thing’ is opposed to ‘sensible things’. Under the influence of Parmenides' idea of the true ‘being’, enclosed in a spherical form, pre-Aristotelian metaphysics conceived of substance1 as a supra-temporal and unchangeable entity. As long as this view was maintained a confusion with the things of naïve experience was impossible. Substance was conceived exclusively as a supra-sensible ‘form’ of being in its opposition to ‘matter’ as the principle of becoming and decay.

As far as we are informed by authentic fragments, we may establish that the Ionian philosophy of nature, which before Anaxagoras held to the religious primacy of the matter-motive, never called the eternally flowing Stream of life the true οὐσία. Anaximander opposed the ἄπειϱον, as the divine origin, to τὰ ὄντα (the existing things). Although this form-less origin was conceived as the ever-lasting principle of all perishable things, it lacked the very character of a ‘substance’. For, as remarked above, in pre-Aristotelian metaphysics the idea of οὐσία was exclusively oriented to the supra-sensible form of being2.

This was even the case in pre-Socratic atomism, which was certainly no materialism in the pre-Socratic Greek sense1, nor in the modern sense of the word. The ‘atoms’ are nothing but minimal geometric forms of ‘elements’. Democritus called them ἰδέαι. They are not sensible but intelligible. In Plato's Timaeus they belong to the intelligible world of the οὐσίαι and are opposed to the chaotic material of the χωϱά, in which the ‘elements’ still lack these limiting forms of being and consequently may not be properly called fire, air, water, and earth. The Platonic eidè are also οὐσίαι in the sense of imperishable ideal forms of being which, however, belong to a different area of the noumena.

It was in fact Aristotle who in his concept of natural substance made the first attempt to synthesize the principles of form and matter to an ultimate substantial unity. But at the same time he paved the way for a fundamental confusion of the concept of substance and that of the thing of naïve experience, by conceiving the former in two different senses.

After his abandonment of the Platonic χωϱισμός (separation) between the noumenal world of the οὐσίαι and the sensible world of becoming and decay, Aristotle's primary concern was to conceive of substance as the immanent point of reference in the process of change itself. Only individual things are liable

to becoming and decay. So the individual natural entity (τόδε τι) as the individual unity of matter and essential form, is conceived as πϱώτη οὐσία (primary substance). But, in addition, the term οὐσία (substance) is applied to the intelligible specific εἶδος of a natural thing which comprehends its ‘essence’ (τὸ τὶ ἦν εἶναι). This general essence of the existing individual thing is called οὐσία δεύτεϱα (substance in a secondary sense). It is also called ἡ ϰατὰ τὸν λόγον (or ϰατὰ τὸ εἶδος) οὐσία (noumenal substance) in contradistinction to the οὐσία αἰσϑητή or the individual sensible thing as an actual concrete substance. The latter is liable to ‘substantial change’, as such it is capable of generation and destruction. But the general εῖδος as the pure intelligible ‘essence’ of a thing, in its specific characteristics, is not capable of temporal change, since it has only an abstract mode of being in the intellect1. In the individual substance the essential form is always materialized and individualized. The specific essence of a natural substance doubtless comprehends the components of matter and form, but only in a generic and specific sense, not in their actual individuality2.

It cannot be denied that Aristotle's conception of primary substance has a deceitful resemblance to the naïve conception of things with their relative permanency in their accidental changes. It is, therefore, necessary to subject this idea of primary substance to a closer analysis.

A more detailed critical analysis of Aristotle's concept of primary substance.

Substance (οὐσία) in Aristotelian metaphysics always means the primary category of being, which lies at the foundation of

all accidental categories (such as quantity, quality, place, relation, etc.). As such, this primary metaphysical category has always an exclusively intelligible character. The distinction between sensible and noumenal οὐσίαι can, therefore, never mean that the former as substances are perceptible by the senses.

Primary substance (τόδε τι) is conceived of as a ‘thing in itself’, which as such is not related to the sensory and intellectual functions of human experience. The sensibility of this thing has only an epistemological meaning. It exclusively means a relation of human sensory perception to the ‘things in themselves’, not an intrinsic relation of the latter to the former. Even the qualities of the things to which the subjective sensory perception is related (such as light or heavy, red or blue, cold or warm) are conceived as ‘accidents’ of the substance which are independent of possible perception.

It is clear that such ‘qualitates occultae’ are meaningless not only from the viewpoint of modern natural science, but also from that of naïve experience. This is a strong indication that the Aristotelian idea of primary substance cannot be identical with that of a pre-theoretically conceived thing. For the latter is always bound to the subject-object relation, which has no room for a metaphysical ‘thing in itself’.

What can then be the real meaning of the Aristotelian primary substance? As observed, Aristotle never abandoned the Greek conception of οὐσία as a noumenon. This implies that ‘primary substance’ is nothing but the supposed first temporal ‘Gegenstand’ of the theoretical-logical function of thought. Metaphysics is of the opinion that the antithetical ‘Gegenstand-relation’ corresponds to true reality. Thus the ‘true being’ of a natural thing, as the supposed ‘Gegenstand’ of theoretical thought, is hypostatized to a ‘substance’, as the independent bearer of the changeable and accidental properties of this thing. As long as this primary οὐσία is not affected by change, a natural thing remains the same notwithstanding all accidental alterations.

But how can the primary substance guarantee this identity of a changeable thing? The former is thought of as a whole (σύνολον) combining the form and matter of a thing into an ultimate unity. As such it is called an οὐσία σύνϑετος (a composite substance)1. But this very idea of a substantial unity of form and matter implies the crucial dialectical basic problem of

Greek metaphysics. We have explained in the Prolegomena of the first Volume that the form-matter motive is the real religious starting-point of Greek thought and that as such it contains an insoluble religious antithesis. Plato introduced the dialectical Idea of being which would synthesize the antagonistic principles of form and matter by means of a dialectical logic. Aristotle has taken over this dialectical Idea of being by conceiving matter in its general sense as a pure potentiality of being which can acquire actuality only by assuming a form. But this dialectical synthesis between form and matter lacked a real starting-point in which the two antithetical principles of being could find concentric unity. In Plato the dialectical synthesis remains restricted to the ideal sphere of the transcendent eidè. Even the genus (generic eidos) of the genesis eis ousian (the becoming a being), which is introduced in the dialogue Philebus, belongs to this sphere. Only by means of the mathematical principle of a numerical series (the peras) is it related to the material world of becoming. But the οὐσία as such is never identified with a perishable thing. Aristotle does so in his conception of primary substance. This conception is nothing but the consequence of his abandonment of the Platonic χωϱισμός between the intelligible world of the eidè and the ideal mathematical forms, on the one hand, and the phenomenal world of becoming and decay, on the other. The dialectical eidos of the composite substance is now conceived of as a secondary οὐσία; it is nothing but an ideal abstraction from the primary substance and this latter belongs to the world of becoming and decay. Nevertheless this changeable and material substance continues to be conceived as a noumenon, a purely intelligible ‘thing in itself’. But how can a pure noumenon be an individual perishable entity?

Here the intrinsical antinomy of this substance-concept is clearly shown. The primary οὐσία is charged with a task which could not be fulfilled by the dialectical idea of being in its general metaphysical sense. It is supposed to realize the pseudo-synthesis between the antithetical principles of form and matter in an individual perishable unity. This unity is thought of as an absolute being. It cannot be a mere relation between form and matter since in Aristotelian metaphysics and logic the category of substance functions as the independent point of reference of all ontical relations. The category of relation is an accidental one which pre-supposes substance. It is true that Aristotle has conceived this category in a particular restricted sense. But it is

undeniable that his whole conception of the πϱώτη οὐσία would become meaningless if it did not imply more than a dialectical relation between form and matter1.

The idea of a composite substance contains a contradictio in terminis if this relation is conceived as the ultimate unity of the primary οὐσία itself. For though the synthesis as such is nothing but a relation, the substance in itself must be a unity independent of all relations. Thomas Aquinas was fully aware of this supposed absolute character of the οὐσία when he acknowledged that substance in itself is unknowable since all human knowledge is restricted to relations. So he rightly concluded that it is only knowable from its accidental properties in which it reveals itself2.

But what may be this absolute X which guarantees the ultimate unity of an individual natural composite? In the 17th chapter of Book VII of his Metaphysics Aristotle tries to answer this question. Here he starts from the thesis that the οὐσία is a principle and a cause. His argument proceeds as follows: That which is a composite in such a way that the whole is a unity, not as a disorderly heap but as a syllable, has, as such, an independent being. For a syllable is not the same as its elements, the letters. If the whole were itself an element or a composite of elements, its definition would be involved in a regressus in infinitum. That which makes a natural thing an individual whole distinct from its components, is the first cause of its being. And this is the substance. Many things lack the character of substance. But everything that exists as a substance

according to and through nature, is a natural whole which is different from its elements and is the principle of being of this thing.’

This argument is a typical example of a metaphysical conclusion drawn from logical reasoning. But the latter, as such, can never lead to a metaphysical absolutum.

That in a logical sense the whole is different from its elements, and that every attempt to reduce the former to elements implies a regressus in infinitum, can never lead to the conclusion that there must exist a substance as an absolute point of reference of all of its ontical relations. Logic alone cannot furnish a principle of unity which transcends the dialectical form-matter motive of Greek thought. And Aristotle has not really done so. Apparently the question concerning the primary substance, as a really metaphysical and not merely physical-sensible ‘Gegenstand’1, has troubled him and he was not able to find a univocal solution. The argument summarized above is the continuation of a previous reasoning which led to the conclusion that the question concerning the principle of being of a thing refers to the cause of its matter. And Aristotle says that this cause is the form and that this form is substance. This solution contradicts the immediately following argument that the cause of individual being must be the whole of the composite and that this whole is substance. For it cannot be doubted that the form of a natural composite cannot be the whole of the latter. In addition it cannot be a substance in the metaphysical sense because the form of a composite needs matter for its realization.

Since Jaeger's genetic analysis of the Metaphysics it is not difficult to explain this contradiction. In the Urmetaphysik the οὐσία as a Gegenstand of metaphysical research was still conceived in a transcendent sense. This original conception is most clearly revealed in Book K (1-8), which therefore was erroneously considéred by Natorp as non-authentic. This was also

the conception lying at the foundation of the first five Books, before their partial revision by which they were adapted to the new view developed in the later inserted Books Z, H. and Θ, concerning the primary substance1. The transcendent unchangeable οὐσία was conceived as the Unmoved Mover, not in the sense of the Platonic eidè, and so the original metaphysics was nothing but a philosophical theology. This appears from Book A which in this respect completely reproduces the view of the earlier writing Πεϱὶ Φιλοσοφίας. But the Platonic χωϱισμός between the intelligible οὐσίαι and the sensible and changeable things was still sharply maintained. This implied that the theoretical research of the latter was viewed as the task of physics alone.

But since the introduction of the metaphysical concept of primary (sensible) substance it was necessary to delimit the metaphysical view of the changeable things from the physical field of inquiry. This is done by stating that the task of physics as to the sensible substances is restricted to the investigation of their matter, whereas the consideration of the forms and the actual being is reserved to metaphysics2. Therefore it was necessary to introduce also the forms of the natural composites as οὐσίαι (substances) in addition to the actual whole and the eidos. This was done in Book E, 8. Here Aristotle explains the different meanings of οὐσία: Ὁὐσίαι are called the elementary bodies as earth, fire, water and the like, as well as bodies in general and the living beings consisting of them and the demons inclusive of their parts. All this, however, is called substance, because it is not predicated of a subject but conversely it is the subject of which something is predicated.

‘In a different sense one calls substance that which is inherent in a thing that is not predicated of a subject, and is the cause of its being, such as the soul in an animal.

Furthermore one calls substance the parts of substances which limit the latter and indicate a “this” whose elimination results in the elimination of the whole, such as the planes of a body, as some people say, and the planes with the line. And in general some thinkers suppose the numbers are substances in this sense,

because after their elimination nothing continues to exist and they limit everything.

In addition the essence, whose concept is a definition, is also called the substance of the thing concerned.

So it appears that the term substance is used in two ways: first it is understood as the ultimate subject that is not predicated of an other subject, secondly it is understood as that which is a “this” and separate; such, however, is the shape and form of a thing’.

Thus the qualification of the forms of natural composites, as substances in the sense of the (formal) causes of their being, was introduced in close connection with the new concept of primary substance. But the elevation of these forms to the rank of οὐσίαι contradicted the Aristotelian view that these forms cannot have an independent being. Only the deity and the pure spirits are conceived of as actual forms without any matter. Therefore they satisfy the metaphysical conception of substance.

The introduction of the forms of natural composites as οὐσίαι has caused a general confusion in Aristotle's arguments, especially in the 7th Book of the Metaphysics. In the 11th chapter of this book the soul is even called πϱώτη οὐσία (primary substance). Here (1037 a 8 sqq) we read: ‘One sees, however, also that the soul is a primary substance, the body matter, whereas man is the composite of soul and body, viewed as the general characteristics of its essence’.

From all this it will appear that the definition of a primary substance, as the actual whole of a natural composite different from its matter and form, implied an impasse.

This actual whole is supposed to unite the antagonistic principles of matter and form into a radical and absolute unity. But such a unity was excluded by the very basic motive of Greek thought. Even the general metaphysical basic concept of being was affected by the intrinsic dualism of this religious motive. The new concept of primary substance as an actual whole of form and matter could not appeal to a higher principle transcending the dialectical basic antithesis.

Is the primary substance to be interpreted as a structure of being? The view of Michael Marlet.

In his important book Grundlinien der Kalvinistischen Philosophie des Gesetzidee1 Michael Marlet has suggested that the

Aristotelian-Thomistic substance-concept may be interpreted in the sense of a structure of being. He acknowledges that in Aristotelian metaphysics this concept has been over-estimated and has played the rôle of an absolute centre of individual reality (Wirklichkeitszentrum).1 This was due to the fact that the Greek philosopher lacked the Christian idea of creation. And so the conception of substance as a structure of individuality, as it is understood in the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea, was almost completely lacking in the original Aristotelian view. In the Thomistic version, however, the idea of primary substance should be understood exactly in this structural sense.

Starting from August Brunner's interpretation, mentioned above, Marlet thinks that the only concern of Thomas is to explain that an individual thing presupposes a structure which embraces both substance and accidents as structural principles. In virtue of its substantial principle the individual thing must have a being in itself (esse in se, subsistere). And this principle has also the rôle of substance, in the sense of substratum in virtue of which the individual being is in the condition of potentiality with respect to further accidental determinations.

Granted that this interpretation of the Thomistic conception is correct, I cannot see that it contains a real solution of the crucial problem implied in the metaphysical concept of primary substance. This problem is not the relation between the latter and its accidental properties but rather that concerning the deeper unity of the irreducible ontical principles of form and matter.

As to the essence of primary substance Thomas clearly explains that it is nothing but a composite of matter and form and that only the latter is the cause of its being, whereas the specific matter of the composite (materia signata) is the principle of its individuality2. This view does not add any essential moment to

the Aristotelian conception of primary substance as an individual whole. And it is not able to explain what this ultimate unity of form and matter may be.

That it cannot be a real structure of individuality appears from the fact that the principium individuationis is sought in ‘matter’ alone; in the Thomistic version - according to the most plausible interpretation of Thomas' view - matter is here taken in the sense of ‘materia quantitate signata’. This accentuates the dialectical tension between form and matter in the concept of primary substance to a still higher degree, since the substantial form, as such, lacks any individuality and can receive from matter only a quantitative individualization. We have shown in an earlier context1 that this means a fundamental depreciation of individuality, since in the Aristotelian view matter is the principle of imperfection.

Thomas accepted the Aristotelian view of the principium individuationis. At the same time he accepted the Augustinian conception that in the Divine Logos there are creative Ideas of individual beings as St. Peter, St. John, etc. But this Augustinian view contradicted the Aristotelian conception of individuality and could not be accommodated to the latter. This caused insoluble antinomies in the Thomistic explanation of the individual immortality of the human soul, which I have demonstrated in detail in my treatise on the Idea of the Structure of Individuality and the Thomistic Substance-concept in the Review, Philosophia Reformata2.

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of being the dialectical dualism between the principles of form and matter even penetrates the metaphysical explanation of the categories. The categories of quantity are ascribed exclusively to matter. So the conception of materia quantitate signata as the origin of individuality must result in precluding any real structural and integral view of the temporal individual things. If matter is the principium individuationis, the metaphysical-logical idea of the whole cannot be a real idea of the structure of individuality. And so we can only conclude that the Aristotelian concept of primary substance has nothing to do with the naïve conception of indivi-

dual things notwithstanding its deceitful resemblance to the latter.

From the very beginning of Greek speculative thinking, there existed a fatal tendency to confuse the metaphysical concept of substance with the concept of a thing (Ding-Begriff). But in Aristotle this confusion received its explicit formulation and it has persisted to the present day. The modern conflict between the concept of function and the concept of substance has thus become a meaningless alternative between a theoretical concept of function and the concept of a thing. And this struggle is carried on as if the concept of substance explained the essence of our naïve experience of things!

Bertrand Russell's identification of substance and the thing of naïve experience.

This fundamental confusion may be illustrated by Bertrand Russell's explanation of the concept of substance in his book The Analysis of Matter1.

According to Russell substance is a category which is natural to common sense, although without the attribute of indestructibility added by the metaphysicians. Substance, whether indestructible or not, is of great importance in primitive thought, and dominates syntax, through which it has dominated philosophy down to our own day. At a primitive stage there is no distinction between ‘substance’ and ‘thing’; both express, first in language and then in thought, the emotion of recognition. To an infant, recognition is a very strong emotion, particularly when connected with something agreeable or disagreeable. When the infant begins to use words, it applies the same word to percepts on two occasions, if the second rouses the emotion of recognition associated with the memory of the first, or perhaps merely with the word which was learnt in the presence of the first. Using a given word as a response to stimuli of a certain kind, is a motor habit, like reaching for the bottle. Two percepts to which the same word applies are thought to be identical, unless both can be present at once: this characteristic distinguishes general names from proper names. The basis of this whole process is the emotion of recognition. When the process, as a learning of motor habits, is complete, and reflection upon it begins, identity of name is taken to indicate identity of substance - in one sense in the case of proper names, in another sense in the case of

names applicable to two or more simultaneous percepts - i.e. general names (Platonic ideas, universals). A substance or thing is supposed to be identical at different times, although its properties may change. The conception of substantial identity is embedded in language, in common sense, and in metaphysics.

According to Russell this is useful in practice but harmful in theory. It is harmful if taken as metaphysically ultimate: what appears as one substance with changing states should be conceived as a series of physical occurrences linked together in some important way. This conception is based on the general theory of relativity. This means that in Russell's philosophical view of the world the whole problem concerning the structure of individuality of things and events, as they are experienced in the pre-theoretical attitude of human mind, has been eliminated. The structure of empirical reality is considered from the functional viewpoint of modern physics alone.

But how is it possible that Russell thinks the naïve conception of things has been conquered by the evolution of modern physics? The reason is that to him these things are identical with the metaphysical view of destructible substances as found in Aristotle's conception of the primary οὐσία. Apparently Russell sees no fundamental difference between this conception of substance and that of the persistent material units of classical mechanistic physics founded by Gallileo and Newton.

We shall show presently that there is an essential difference between these two conceptions and that both are fundamentally opposed to the naïve experience of things. But it is doubtless true that the classical mechanistic view considered the supposed persistent material units as substances filling up the absolute three-dimensional space and that these substances were conceived of as the points of reference for all natural events happening in time.

From the above we can understand why in his criticism of this classical-physical view of substance Russell thinks he hits both the metaphysical substance-concept and the naïve concept of a thing. Both may have seemed to be plausible at an earlier stage of physics, when time and space were considered separately. But since the introduction of time as the fourth dimension of world-space they have lost any verifiable meaning: ‘The conception of one unit of matter - say one electron - as a
1

“substance”, i.e. a single simple entity persisting through time, is not one which we are justified in adopting, since we have no evidence whatever as to whether it is true or false. We define a single material unit as a “causal line”, i.e. as a series of events connected with each other by an intrinsic differential causal law which determines first-order changes, leaving second-order changes to be determined by extrinsic causal laws. (In this we are for the moment ignoring quantum phenomena). If there are light-quanta, these will more or less fulfil this definition of matter, and we shall have returned to a corpuscular theory of light; but this is at present an open question. The whole conception of matter is less fundamental to physics than it used to be, since energy has more and more taken its place.’ (Italics are mine.)

In order to link also the curious facts of interval and quantum into this functionalistic total view of empirical reality Russell suggests that the world consists of steady events, accompanied by rhythms, like a long note on the violin while arpeggios are played on the piano, or of rhythms alone. Steady events are of various sorts, and many sorts have their appropriate rhythmic accompaniments. Quantum changes are supposed to consist of ‘transitions’, i.e. of the substitution, suddenly, of one rhythm for another. When two events have a time-like interval, if space-time is discrete, this interval is the greatest number of transitions on any causal route leading from the one event to the other. The definition of space-like intervals is derived from that of time-like intervals. The whole process of nature may, so far as present evidence goes, be conceived as discontinuous; even the periodic rhythms may consist of a finite number of events per period. The periodic rhythms are required in order to give an account of the quantum principle. A percept, at any rate when it is visual, will be a steady event, or system of steady events, following upon a transition.

‘Percepts are the only part of the physical world that we know otherwise than abstractly. As regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything that we know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side, and almost everything that we know of its causal laws is derived from the physical side. But from the standpoint of philosophy the distinction between physical and mental is superficial and unreal’1.

Russell's concept of an event. Russell's debate with Whitehead.

The final statement of this quotation, which I have italicized, is only understandable from Russell's concept of events which is supposed to be ‘metaphysically neutral’, i.e. neutral with reference to the distinction between material and mental occurrences. Both, ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ are conceived of as logical structures of relations between events. Russell's concept of logical structure will be considered presently. Provisionally we shall exclusively pay attention to his view of events.

Whereas Whitehead, his collaborator in the Principia Mathematica, distinguishes between events, as the dynamical elements of the universe, and the permanent ‘objects’ which, in contradistinction to the former, return in the perceptions as identical with themselves1, Russell ignores this distinction. With him the relatively permanent and identical element in the objects of perception is represented by what he calls ‘steady events’. As events in a primary sense are regarded the percepts whose objective contents are completely abstracted from the subject-object relation, and in a secondary sense also what may be logically derived from the latter, viz. the physical, not directly perceptible events.

The physical object to be inferred from perception is a group of events, rather than a single ‘thing’. Percepts are always events, and common sense is rash when it refers them to ‘things’ with changing states. Russell thinks the connection between physics and perception can throw a surprising light on the notion of substance. According to him, there is, therefore, every reason, from the standpoint of perception, to desire an interpretation of physics which dispenses with permanent substance2.

Whitehead is of the opinion that the different events which constitute a group - whether those which make up a physical object at one time or those which make up the ‘history’ of a physical object - are not logically self-subsistent, but are mere ‘aspects’, implying other ‘aspects’ in some sense which is not merely causal or inductively derived from observed correlations. Russell thinks this view is perhaps nearer to common sense than his own conception. But he considers it impossible on purely logical grounds, and empirically useless. As to the latter

point his argument is as follows: Given a group of events, the evidence that they are ‘aspects’ of one ‘thing’ must be inductive evidence derived from perception, and must be exactly the same as the evidence upon which we have relied in collecting them into causal groups. The supposed logical implications, if they exist, cannot be discovered by logic, but only by observation; no one, by mere reasoning, could avoid being deceived by the three-card trick. Moreover, in calling two events ‘aspects’ of one ‘thing’, we imply that their likeness is more important than their difference; but for science both are facts, and of exactly the same importance. One may say that the theory of relativity has grown up by paying attention to small differences between ‘aspects’. So Russell concludes that the ‘thing’ with ‘aspects’ ‘is as useless as permanent substance, and represents an inference which is as unwarrantable as it is unnecessary’.

Russell's identification of naïve experience with the ontological theory of naïve realism.

We must notice that this Russellean view of substance and thing is dependent on the fundamental misconception already encountered in the first explanation of our transcendental critique of theoretical thought and to be considered in more detail presently. We mean the identification of naïve experience with the ontological theory of naïve realism and the lack of insight into the essential difference between the antithetical ‘Gegenstand-relation’ of theoretical thought and the subject-object relation of the pre-theoretical conception of reality. The real datum of naïve experience is reduced to the theoretical abstraction of objective sense-impressions. So Russell does not observe the pitfall hidden in the supposed epistemological and natural scientific ‘refutation’ of naïve experience. He thinks that for common sense (identified with naïve experience) the percepts are identical when two people see the sun, whereas for the causal theory of perception they are only similar and related by a common causal origin. Starting from this sensualistic theoretical misunderstanding of the pre-theoretical experience of reality he continues: ‘It would be a waste of time to recapitulate the arguments against the common-sense view. They are numerous and obvious, and generally admitted. The laws of perspective may serve as an illustration: where one man sees a circle, another sees an ellipse, and so on. These differences are not due to anything “mental”, since they appear equally in

photographs from different points of view. Common sense thus becomes involved in contradictions. These do not exist for solipsism, but that is a desperate remedy. The alternative is the causal theory of perception’1.

The causal theory of perception seems thus to be clearly opposed to the common-sense view, and the ‘naïve realism’ of the latter should be replaced by the former: ‘it appears that the world of each person is partly private and partly common. In the part which is common, there is found to be not identity, but only a greater or less degree of similarity, between the percepts of different people. It is the absence of identity which makes us reject the naïve realism of common sense; it is the similarity which makes us accept the theory of a common origin for similar simultaneous perceptions’2. But if naïve experience is to be interpreted as a naïve realistic theory, its opposition to a causal theory of perception cannot be fundamental. So we are not surprised by the fact that immediately after the last quoted statement Russell remarks that the inference made in the causal theory from what is experienced to what can never be experienced is made plausible by the strength of ‘the common-sense arguments for an external cause of perception’!’

As to Russell's criticism of the substance-concept of classical mechanistic physics I can completely agree with his argument that this concept has become useless since the older mechanistic conception of matter appeared to be untenable3. The constants of modern physics have indeed nothing to do with the rigid ‘material units’ which in Newton's system were assumed as the ultimate substantial points of reference for all natural events. We may establish that this conception of substance lay at the foundation of the whole mechanistic view of reality, construed according to the classical Humanistic science-ideal. The main point, however, is that, just as the Aristotelian idea of primary οὐσία, it was fundamentally different from the naïve concept of a thing. The same thing may be said with respect to the substance-concept in modern biological theory which has only caused a fundamental confusion in the scientific manner of posing prob-

lems. In the third part of this volume1 I shall show this in detail with regard to Driesch's concepts of entelechy and ‘psychoid’, and Woltereck's hypothesis of a substantial ‘matrix’ of ‘living matter’.

Therefore we may conclude that Russell's confusion between the pre-scientific thing-concept and the essentially metaphysical concept of substance testifies to a fundamental misinterpretation of naïve experience.

Russell's logical mathematical concept of structure.

The idea of a logical structure of relations between events by which Russell wants to replace both the concept of a thing and that of substance is an extremely functionalistic construction. For this idea of structure is no other than that which was laid at the foundation of a general kind of arithmetic in Russell's and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (Vol. II, part IV). It was identified with the notion ‘relation-number’ and defined as ‘the class of all relations similar to the given relation’. When two relations have the same structure (or relation-number), thus Russell argues, all their logical properties are identical. Logical properties include all those which can be expressed in mathematical terms.

The inferences from perception to physics, made in the causal theory, depend mainly upon the assumption of a certain similarity of structure between cause and effect where both are complex. Moreover, they are concerned mainly, if not exclusively, with logical properties. From this point of view Russell thinks psychological time of perception may be identified with physical time. For neither is a datum, but each is derived from data by inferences which allow us to know only the logical or mathematical properties of what we infer. The conclusion is that, wherever we infer from perceptions, it is only structure that we can validly infer; and structure is what can be expressed by mathematical logic, which includes mathematics2. The only restrictions Russell makes with respect to the similarity of structure between percepts and the groups of events constituting physical ‘objects’ is that the relations which are nearer an ‘object’ to those which are further from it are many-one, not one-one.

If we are observing a man half a mile away, his appearance is not changed if he frowns, whereas it is changed for a man observing him from a distance of three feet. It is obvious as a matter of logic that, if our correlating relation S is many-one, not one-one, logical inference in the sense in which S goes is just as feasible as before, but logical inference in the opposite sense is more difficult. That is why we assume that differing percepts need not have exactly similar stimuli. If we have xSx1 and ySy1, where S is many-one, and if y and y1 differ, we can infer that x and x1 differ; but if y and y1 do not differ, we cannot infer that x and x1 do not differ. We find often that indistinguishable percepts are followed by different effects - e.g., one glass of water causes typhoid and another does not. In such cases we assume imperceptible differences - which the microscope may render perceptible. But where there is no discoverable difference in the effects, we can still not be sure there is not a difference in the stimuli which may become relevant at some later stage.

When the relation S is many-one, Russell calls the two systems which it correlates ‘semi-similar’. This consideration makes all physical inference more or less precarious. We can construct theories which fit the known facts, but we can never be sure that other theories would not fit them equally well.

All this may suffice to give a clear idea of Russell's functionalistic view of empirical reality; it has no room for the things of naïve experience because the typical and integral structures of individuality lying at the foundation of this experience have been replaced by mathematical-logical relation-numbers. Whitehead's idea of a thing with different aspects is rejected from the functionalistic viewpoint saying that it lacks the foundation of an inductive evidence derived from perception and which is exactly the same as the evidence upon which we have relied in collecting the given ‘events’ into causal groups.

When, however, the act of perception, as a real event, has itself different modal aspects, this whole argument appears to rest upon a petitio principii. We should not be led astray by the apparent modesty which masks this prejudice. Russell says that there is no theoretical reason why a light-wave should not consist of groups of occurrences, each containing a member more or less analogous to a minute part of a visual percept. ‘We cannot perceive a light-wave, since the interposition of an eye and brain stops it. We know, therefore, only its abstract mathema-

tical properties. To assert that the material must be very different from percepts is to assume that we know a great deal more than we do in fact know of the intrinsic character of physical events... The gulf between percepts and physics is not a gulf as regards intrinsic quality, for we know nothing of the intrinsic quality of the physical world, and therefore do not know whether it is, or is not, very different from that of percepts’.

Real scientific modesty, however, should begin with a clear distinction between theoretical abstractions and the integral structures of human experience. The attempt to reduce the latter to the former is no real scientific modesty. On the contrary, it testifies to a hidden hybris, which replaces the real data by abstract ‘elements’ of a so-called physico-psychical world which may be controlled by mathematical and natural-scientific thought, and identifies this theoretical construction with the whole of empirical reality.

The fundamental difference between the Aristotelian-scholastic and the modern Humanistic concept of substance.

The mathematical-logical concept of function is made serviceable to a methodical obliteration of the modal and the plastic horizon of human experience. We have granted that the modern development of natural science must lead to an abandonment of the substance-concept as it was conceived in classical physics. But this was only possible because this latter notion - in sharp contrast with the things of naïve experience - was itself of a theoretical origin. And we should not forget that since the rise of the classical Humanistic science-ideal the concept of substance had assumed a meaning fundamentally different from that ascribed to it in Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics.

Whereas the Aristotelian idea of primary οὐσία was at least intended to account for the structures of individuality as they are realized in the concrete things of human experience, the modern concept of substance was meant to eliminate them. The Humanistic science-ideal in its classical deterministic sense was inspired by the secularized creation-motive, which was incompatible with the form-matter-motive in its original Greek and scholastic sense. It had the clear intention to destroy the world of naïve experience in order to reconstrue reality after the pattern projected by creative mathematical-mechanical thought.

Since Descartes the metaphysical concept of material substance is nothing but the hypostatization of the general functional coherence between physical phenomena which can be conceived in mathematical equations giving expression to causal laws. The answer to the question whether in addition to a material substance a mental substance should be accepted was in the last instance dependent on the influence of the practical freedom-motive in pre-Kantian Humanistic metaphysics. In the second part of the first volume we have shown that the development of the Humanistic concept of substance gives an exact expression to the development of the dialectical tensions between the motives of personal freedom and domination of nature.

It was this concept of substance which Hume criticized from a sensationalistic psychological viewpoint. This critique, which to a high degree has influenced Russell, tried to explain this concept as a false hypostatization of functional relations of resemblance and contiguity between successive impressions. These natural associations were supposed to explain also the naïve belief in relatively constant things, a belief which lacks this false theoretical hypostatization and thus, according to Hume, is quite legitimate.

Although Hume acknowledged that naïve experience cannot be a theory of reality, he reduced in this way the integral structures of individuality realized in the things of naïve experience, to a functional coherence between abstracted elements of sensory perceptions. This testified to a psychologistic turn in the Humanistic science-ideal.

The critical concept of substance as a synthetical a priori concept of function and the misconception of the naïve experience of a thing as experience of a ‘Gegenstand’.

In order to save the belief in ethical freedom of the human personality Kant's Critique of Pure Reason reduced ‘natural substance’ to a transcendental category of experience, limited to sensory phenomena. The practical Idea of substance, on the contrary, became the main-stay of the Humanist ideal of personality: the idea of the autonomous homo noumenon.

Substance, as a category of relation (substantia et accidens), is assumed to be closely connected with both of the other two categories of this class (causality and interaction), and as such, to be the universally valid transcendental prerequisite for the

experience of natural things. But, in this category of substance, Kant functionalistically misinterpreted our naïve experience of a thing's identity. In a temporal scheme, Kant theorized this experience of identity to the functional substance-concept of classical mathematical physics: the concept of the quantitatively constant matter! In this way the ‘things’ of naïve experience were simply identified with the ‘Gegenstände’ of natural scientific thought.

This procedure immediately resulted in the elimination of the datum of naïve experience. In Kant's footsteps the whole critical epistemology considered the transcendental-logical category of substance as the origin of the experience of things.

A quotation from P.H. Ritter's Schets eener critische Geschiedenis van het Substantiebegrip in de nieuwere Wijsbegeerte will suffice to characterize this so called critical view: ‘sensorial impressions are received by us, but a thing is made by us. We experience the qualities of a thing, but the thing itself is not given in experience; it is put there by us. A thing is a hypothesis; through it we try to supplement what is given and make it intelligible1. This hypothetical thing is what is called substance’2.

§ 2 - The naïve attitude to reality and its misconception as an ‘abbild-theorie’ (copy-theory). The untenability of functionalistic interpretations.

So it appears that various philosophical speculations attempt to explain away identical thing-hood as it is experienced in the naïve attitude. One theory interprets it in terms of a transcendental formation of sensory material by means of the concept of substance, as a category of relation; another, relates it to a metaphysical concept of substance; a third, considers identical thing-hood as a product of fantasy, a fictitious union of merely associated sensory impressions; a fourth, views it as a constant system of functional relations. To all of these speculative misunderstandings naïve experience implicity takes exception by persisting in its pre-theoretical conception of things, events and social relationships in their integral structures of individuality. It stands to reason that this protest is not theoretically founded. Naïve experience cannot account for it in a philosophical way. But it intuitively rejects every theoretical interpretation that mis-

understands its data and tries to deprive it of the integral structures of its plastic horizon.

Because it experiences reality in the indivisible meaning-coherence of its modal aspects, common sense intuitively repudiates any attempt to divide its experiential world into theoretically abstracted independent spheres. It takes exception to any idealistic volatilization of essential structural traits of concrete temporal reality, and does not allow the world of things to be reduced to pure sensory phenomena.

In an unsophisticated non-theoretical attitude we experience reality in an indivisible coherence of cosmic time. The functionalistic view offered by scientific thought does not satisfy this integral experience any more than the metaphysical concept of substance of speculative philosophy. Both are equally foreign to the naïve view.

Naïve experience is not neutral with respect to the religious position of the I-ness.

Our present comments are valid for all naïve experience. Nevertheless there is a fundamental difference between the Biblical-Christian attitude and the apostate attitude of this experience. This is due to the religious basic motives which are operative in the centre of human existence and which in the temporal horizon determine the direction of the function of faith.

It may be that naïve experience is not liable to an absolutization of theoretical abstractions; but this does not protect it from mythological aberrations when the transcendent religious dimension of the experiential horizon is shut to the light of Divine Word-revelation. This is the case when the religious attitude of the experiencing I-ness is ruled by an apostate basic motive.

In the Biblical attitude of naïve experience the transcendent, religious dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates perspectively through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world.

In this attitude the experiencing I-ness is necessarily in the I-we relation of the Christian community and in the we-Thou-relation with God, Who has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus. This is why this naïve experiential attitude cannot be uninterested and impersonal.

This should not be misunderstood. It would be an illusion to

suppose that a true Christian always displays this Biblical attitude in his pre-theoretical experience. Far from it. Because he is not exempt from the solidarity of the fall into sin, every Christian knows the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. He knows the impersonal attitude of a ‘Man’1 in the routine of common life and the dread of nothingness, the meaningless, if the tries to find himself again in a so-called existential isolation. He is acquainted with all this from personal experience, though he does not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism.

But the Christian whose heart is opened to the Divine Word-revelation knows that in this apostate experiential attitude he does not experience temporal things and events as they really are, i.e. as meaning pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious centre of meaning and to the true Origin.

And now I must emphatically protest against any attempt to interpret the basic Biblical attitude of experience in the sense of some theological theory, which, as such, is irrelevant to naïve experience. In so doing one would only replace an indisputable datum of Christian naïve experience by a theoretical reflection of the Christian which, as such, may be ignored in a purely ‘objective’ description of what is really experienced in the pre-theoretical attitude. Apart from our selfhood naïve experience is no more possible than theoretical thought. Both proceed from the heart, the religious root of our temporal existence. A purely ‘objective’ experience is a contradictio in terminis. And so we may not eliminate a fundamental difference resulting from the central sphere of human consciousness, if we want to do justice to the real data in discussion here.

Does a person of modern culture still have a really naïve experience?

There is, however, a primordial question which we have to consider in order to cut off a misconception with regard to the true meaning of the naïve atitude.

Can we still legitimately speak of naïve experience in modern culture? Has not education deprived us of a truly naïve attitude? Are we not accustomed to certain scientific concepts? Have we not all of us acquired a more or less theoretical disposition in

our thinking? Is not the naïve attitude of experience a ‘lost paradise’ still inhabited perhaps by children and primitive people, but irrevocably abandoned by civilized adult humanity?

However understandable such questions may be, they betray a lack of insight into the true structural meaning of naïve experience.

It is true that by modern education common thought more or less has been penetrated by concepts which originate from modern science and have found expression in common speech. We have been accustomed to the practical use of elementary arithmetic and geometry, to the use of an abstract chronology; our naïve experience of the starry sky has undergone the historical influence of modern astronomy; we have some idea of natural laws, etc.

In general theoretical education varying from elementary instruction to methodical scientific tuition has influenced our mode of thinking and widened our experiential horizon. Nevertheless naïve experience, as such, does not assume the typical theoretical attitude with its abstract Gegenstand-relation. Even its concepts which originate from modern science have changed their meaning and assumed a concrete and practical sense. The naïve attitude cannot be destroyed by scientific thought. Its plastic horizon can only be opened and enlarged by the practical results of scientific research. It does not cease to be naïve because it undergoes certain historical formation due to the practical influence of science on social life.

One should not forget that such an influence is not possible unless the results of theoretical research are made accessible to naïve experience. This is to say, they must be integrated into the full plastic horizon of the latter.

To mention only some examples: telegraph, telephone, trains, aviation, the technical application of gas, electricity, and, since the last world-war, also the practical application of atomic energy, belong to the opened temporal reality of modern human experience and are not theoretical abstractions. They are now a part of our world's concrete coherence, because they have been realized in integral structures of individuality. As long as we conceive them in these concrete structures without theoretical reflection on this integral experience, our attitude toward such things is naïve. It becomes theoretical only when we seek to give it a theoretical explanation. To become familiar with reality opened by modern culture, our experience must undergo a cer-

tain forming, but this forming does not affect the naïve attitude, as such.

On seeing an airplane for the first time, a savage does not grasp the concrete reality of this object of culture. The plastic horizon of his experience has not yet been sufficiently disclosed and enlarged. Lacking the necessary formation, he fails to understand it and is unable to experience an airplane as we do. To him it will have a magical character.

The savage's experience would be the same as our own if the really mythological conception were right that our experiential horizon is limited to what is perceptible by the senses. The truth is that both the plastic and the theoretical horizon have their historical aspect. The only difference is that the former is integral and presents reality in typical total-structures of individuality, whereas the latter is bound to the theoretical ἐποχή of cosmic time and to the theoretical Gegenstand-relation.

Naïve experience and social praxis. The so-called primitive attitude and the complicated problem of animism.

Naïve experience is doubtless first formed by social praxis. It is, therefore, a fundamental error to seek the pure pattern of this experience in infants who have not yet learned the practical function of things and events in social life. Experience in its proper sense presupposes a sufficient development of the typical act-structure of human existence and a practical acquaintance with the things of common life which is not acquired by animal instinct.

Essential to the pre-theoretical mode of experiencing is the subject-object relation conceived in the integral structures of individuality apart from any theoretical abstraction. This point was already stressed in our first confrontation of the theoretical attitude with the naïve mode of experience.

But is the latter compatible with animistic and magical representations, which are not only met with in primitive cultural areas, but repeatedly reappear in certain popular conceptions among highly cultivated nations? This question is very complicated and cannot be answered so simply as Bertrand Russell does.

According to him, common sense does not initially distinguish as sharply as civilized nations do between persons, animals, and things. Primitive religion affords abundant evidence of this. A

thing, like an animal, has a sort of power residing within it: it may fall on our head, roll over in the wind, and so on. It is only gradually that inanimate objects become sharply separated from people, through the observation that their actions have no purpose. But animals are not separable from people on this ground, and are in fact thought by savages to be much more intelligent than they are1.

If Russell's opinion were right, it would be incomprehensible that animistic conceptions can reappear in highly civilized people and even in prominent systems of metaphysics. The supposition that in primitive experience the animistic view of things is due to a defective observation of their behaviour does not agree with the fact that primitive men are in general excellent observers in a practical sense.

To avoid a fundamental confusion it will be necessary to distinguish different forms of animism.

Animistic representations may belong to an infantile and consequently pre-experiential phase of human development. Such representations are due to a provisional inability to conceive subject-object relations.

This infantile animism should not be confounded with an animistic mythology ruled by the basic motive of a primitive religion of life, nor with an animistic metaphysics oriented to the transcendental problems of the theoretical Gegenstand-relation. The latter has nothing to do with the naïve attitude of experience. The former is indeed related to the aspect of belief in the pre-theoretical attitude. It does not affect the naïve experience in its plastic subject-object relations. It does not prevent a sharp practical distinction between things, plants, animals, and people in the common familiar sphere of social life. In general it does not even imply the ascription of mental and vital qualities to inanimate things2. And where this is done, it is restricted to particular things. If this is due to the influence of mana-belief, it is not certain that the mysterious power ascribed to some things is viewed as vital power. It might be a residue of pre-animistic belief.

The opinion of Levy-Bruhl concerning the primitive mind according to which it has nothing in common with ours, except

the sensible impressions of the outer-world, has appeared to be untenable1.

The truth is that primitive animism, just as the mana-belief, belongs to a mysterious social sphere of experience with which the primitive adolescent is not made acquainted before his initiation as a member of the tribe2. It refers only to the mysterious causes of events which especially influence primitive life and whose supposed deeper sense transcends the common sphere of experience. This confirms our statement that the sacral sphere concerns only the aspect of belief of the experiential world and does not affect the typical structure of the naïve attitude. So it becomes understandable that primitive animistic and magical conceptions may reappear in the naïve experience of modern Western people as a specific form of superstition.

The reason is that in the naïve attitude even of modern people, the functionalistic natural-scientific concept of causality does not play an intrinsic rôle. The causal question implies rather the problem concerning the final meaning of a concrete event that strikes us in an emotional manner, and that we cannot believe to be a mere accident. Whereas the Christian belief relies on Divine Providence, pagan superstition seeks for super-natural causes in the temporal horizon of experience. It is only due to the fact that such superstition has lost the guiding rôle in modern culture that it no longer prevents the opening of our experiential horizon. For the latter has undergone a cultural formation which far exceeds that of primitive people.

Once again the misinterpretation of naïve experience as a copy theory (Abbildtheorie).

If we bear in mind the theoretical interpretations which immanence-philosophy has given to our naïve experience of the identity of a thing, we will not be surprised that from this point of view the typical attitude and structure of this experience have been exposed to the most singular misconceptions. These misconceptions culminate in the opinion that naïve experience is to be considered as a specific theory concerning the relation of our consciousness to reality. This supposed theory is called the ‘Abbild’- or ‘copy’-theorie of ‘naïve realism’. Accor-

ding to it our perception furnishes us with an exact image of reality; perceiving is like taking a photo. We have met with this interpretation already in our Prolegomena. It reappeared in Russell's explanation of the relation between the concept of a thing and that of substance.

A quotation from Windelband may serve to typify this theorization of naïve experience: ‘This most current meaning of truth (i.e. as a correspondence between a representation and reality) has no doubt been derived from naïve empirical thought, in which it is related to the representations of things and their activities. This concept of truth pre-supposes a relation to exist between human representations and reality similar to that between a thing and its copy. The representation is related to reality as its Gegenstand. Here we have perhaps the most complete expression of the naïve picture of the world, which assumes that the representing mind is placed in a surrounding world, which must in some way repeat itself in this mind’1.

Widely propagated by the critical school, this view makes naïve experience something amazingly contradictory. It is called naïve, which should mean non-theoretical, yet it is alleged to be rooted in an epistemological theory, to be refuted by the ‘critical’ analysis of knowledge.

This entire theorization of naïve experience can only result in

a meaningless struggle against something incapable of being combated theoretically.

For the very essence of the naïve attitude appeared to be that in it thinking lacks the theoretical Gegenstand-relation. Consciousness is here directed toward full reality; it is systatic1, and grasps reality as reality offers itself, i.e. in a plastic structure.

No matter how constructed, any establishment of a dualism between our functions of consciousness and reality, has nothing to do with naïve experience, but is rather a specific theory.

The conception that the psychical and logical functions of consciousness are opposed, as a kind of sensitive plate, to a closed and self-contained natural reality is foreign to the data of naïve experience.

§ 3 - The supposed refutation of naïve experience by the results of special sciences. The theory of the specific energies of sense organs.

The opinion that naïve experience, as a primitive form of naïve realism, has been definitively refuted by science, is especially based upon the unreliability of the sensory aspect of perception as to the ‘objective’ states of affairs in reality. ‘Objective’ is meant here in the sense of corresponding to the experimental results of natural science. What appears to lack objectivity in this sense is supposed to be merely subjective sensory appearance.

In earlier epistemological arguments against the ‘naïve realistic’ view an appeal was made especially to the famous distinction between the so-called primary and secondary qualities of things. But even in recent works this appeal can be found. The German philosopher of nature, Bernard Bavink, for instance, observed in the 5th ed. of his work Ergebnisse und Probleme der Naturwissenschaften: ‘The doctrine of the subjectivity of the so-called secondary qualities (sensory qualities such as colours, tones, temperatures, pressure, etc.) is pretty well the only thesis about which all philosophers are agreed. The refutations of naïve realism are too obvious not to convince every one who has given them a moment's thought’2.

How have these convincing refutations of naïve realism been

accomplished? Has modern physics delivered the fatal blow, as Bavink apparently wishes to suggest?1 Such a suggestion is in itself naïve; physics exists as a result of a process of elimination. To be a special science, it must eliminate from its field of research all non-logical modalities of experience except the mathematical-physical aspects. Objective sense-phenomena are here only important as analogical perceptible objectivations of original physical states of affairs. In this sense they are no more to theoretical physics than symbols referring to the pre-sensory aspect of energy. Sensory colours, for instance, refer to electro-magnetic waves, lying at their foundation. It is not the sensory modality, as such, which concerns physics; but it makes no sense to suppose that electro-magnetic waves of a certain wave-length are sensorily perceptible, if they lack an objective sensory aspect. How then can physics refute naïve experience?

Theodor Hearing2 correctly points out that modern physics not only eliminates the secondary qualities of matter, but the so-called primary qualities, as well. And Bavink himself has stressed the undeniable fact that modern physics has in principle abandoned any visible model of its formulae. Physics was obliged to do so since the physical phenomena appeared not to correspond to the classical mechanistic view. It must restrict itself to a mathematical formulation of the physical functions as such, which lack any sensory character.

The opinion, however, that these abstract mathematical-physical formulae, at least in principle, would exhaust the objective contents of human experience, is no better than a pseudo-scientific mythology.

It is simply unscientific to combat the existence of objective sensory qualities in their original modal sense with natural-scientific arguments. This whole criticism of naïve experience lacks a true insight into the modal diversity of subject-object relations. And it misinterprets this experience fundamentally by ignoring the plastic horizon of the structures of individuality. It is doubtless true that in the naïve attitude we accept objective sensory qualities. But we experience them in the concrete context of our plastic horizon. We do not identify them with our subjective sensory impressions; we are always willing to complete or to correct a superficial perception by a more exact observation of the objective sensible image of a thing or an event, if it draws our special attention and if we are not in an emotional condition impeding a quiet verification of our subjective sensations. But the sensory aspect of perceiving does not at all play that preponderant rôle in naïve experience which the current epistemological opinion ascribes to it.

In general naïve human perception shows a strongly anticipating character. Especially the symbolical anticipations are important through which the sensory impressions evoke a name designating a thing or event in its typical structure of individual totality.

It is this structure, expressing itself in the sensory image without being itself of a sensory character, which determines the things and events experienced in the naïve attitude. This structure embraces the whole modal horizon of this experience as an implicit component of the plastic horizon. Within the latter there is a great variety in the degrees of clarity in the individual awareness of the experiential world. The relatively small sphere of full clarity is surrounded by a much larger sphere which forms the background of our experience and whose vagueness increases with its distance from the circle of our special attenttion. In the naïve attitude the latter is in principle determined by practical interests. In this whole plastic horizon the sensory subject-object relation has its proper restricted function.

The denial of the objective sensory functions of empirical reality is tantamount to the denial of empirical reality itself.

As to physics, this would mean the destruction of the basis of its experiments. It is true that the objective sensory phenomena can have no other importance for physics than that they present an analogical sensory objectivation of original physical states of affairs, which, as such, lack a sensory character. But without

their unbreakable coherence with these sensorily perceptible phenomena the energy-functions could not be experienced. It is meaning-less to say that the latter cannot be experienced because we do not know what they are. As modal functions they do not correspond to a what, but to a how, a modus quo. And this modal sense belongs to the horizon of our experience.

The what is always determined by structures of individuality which exceed the boundaries of a single aspect.

The theory of the specific energies of the sense-organs.

The arguments against the existence of objective sensory qualities have acquired a seemingly more solid basis in the physiology of the sense-organs. By his doctrine of the specific sense-energies Johannes Müller transformed Locke's doctrine of the subjectivity of the so-called secondary qualities into a physiological theory. And, not long ago, as Alois Riehl observes1, this theory was fervently believed in physiology.

Müller assumes that the nerves of our sense organs are endowed with innate, inherent energies. The optic nerve, for instance, has within itself the energies of light, darkness, and colour. It does not enable us to see because the retina comes into contact with something physically called ‘light’. Light is not the first and chief impulse that gives birth to sense impressions of light and colour. ‘If set vibrating by sonic waves the retina would only give an impression of light, and the auditory nerve would only produce sound, if it were accessible to physical light’2.

The sensations received from the ‘things of the external world’ do not present the properties of the things themselves. What they show rather are the real qualities of our senses: ‘It is quite immaterial what kind of stimuli affect the sense-organs, their operation is always in conformity with the particular energies of the senses: the nerve-core gives itself light here, causes itself to sound there, here it feels itself, there it smells itself and tastes itself’3.

In short, the ‘law of the specific energies of the sense organs’

affirms that external stimuli do not influence the nature of our sensory impressions. To substantiate this contention Müller appeals to the well-known fact that sensory impressions may originate without an adequate or specific stimulus. And, therefore, he concludes that they do not need an adequate external cause, but can be obtained by having a sensation of the conditions of the nerves of our sense-organs without any external cause.

Here we are first confronted with the question what is meant by ‘external causes’. If the latter are taken in a physical sense, I can agree with the thesis that such causes can never have sensory effects. It makes no sense to assume that the impression of sensory colours is caused by light-waves in their abstract physical aspect. If light-waves are taken as real events in an empirical sense, they must have an objective sensory modality, and then cause and effect are to be conceived in the sensory subject-object relation.

Müller, however, means the term ‘external causes’ in the sense of biotical stimuli originating from light-waves, sonical waves etc., i.e. as biotical causes which themselves are caused by external events, physically called electro-magnetic waves. Indeed, biotical stimuli excercised on the nerves of the sense-organs can no more be caused by the external events concerned, if the latter lack an objective biotical aspect. And biotical stimuli, as such, cannot cause sensory psychical impressions, if the term ‘biotical’ is taken in a non-psychical sense. This is to say, it is necessary from a scientific point of view to distinguish the different modal aspects of the causal problem if we want to escape a pseudo-scientific mystification.

We do not explain anything when we assume a causal relation between events which are viewed under different modal aspects.

This holds good also with respect to Müller's own theory which considers the specific energy of our sense-organs as the first and chief cause of our sensory impressions. In what sense is the term ‘energy’ meant here? If the latter were to be understood in a functional physical sense, the whole theory would be a mystification.

But in general physiologists are not very exact in their terminology. They speak the language of materialism and often their manner of posing problems betrays indeed a materialistic view of empirical reality. Müller, for instance, says that the optic nerve ‘sees’.

For the present I will not dwell further on this singular terminology. Let us assume that the sense-organs are viewed in their typical structure of an individual whole, in which the different modal functions within the general cadre of their own law-spheres are kept in mutual correspondence by the typical structural principle of totality. Let us leave alone for a moment the fact that these organs can exercise their specific sensory-psychical functions only within the context of the typical structural whole of the body; and also that the latter, if it is human, is extremely complicated and also embraces a typical act-structure referring to a central I-ness.

We may then interpret Müller's theory in this sense that, owing to their typical total structure, the sense-organs answer a biotical stimulus with the production of a typical sensory impression, which is independent of the specific nature of the stimulus and determined by the specific nature of the sense-organ alone. We have to investigate if this view has a sufficient ground in the facts alleged.

The problem of the so-called inadequate stimulus.

Lotze and E.H. Weber have already ascertained that there is no conclusive proof supporting Müller's theory. They have sought an objective explanation of the inadequate stimulus, and, in most instances, they have succeeded in showing that the latter is only seemingly inadequate (e.g., the stimulation of the taste nerves by galvanic stream causes, by an electrolitic process, a simultaneous stimulus which furnishes a stimulus adequate to produce the experienced sensation of taste).

The rareness of the occurrence of really inadequate stimuli in comparison with the normal cases has been pointed out by Weinmann. Unless produced artificially, inadequate stimuli appear to be the result of a chance event, a violent encroachment (e.g., a blow on the eye), disease or disorder and change in the bodily organs, such as a feeling of cold accompanying fever and high skin temperature.

It is an established methodological principle that one should not abandon an established law because of an apparent exception. The presence of an extraordinary and abnormal case is explainable in terms of unusual conditions.

The main point, however, is that the distinction between adequate and inadequate stimuli pre-supposes the existence of objective sensory qualities, whose perception corresponds to

adequate specific stimuli: If Müller's theory were right we would never be able to establish inadequate stimuli. And so his view is refuted by the very empirical facts which are supposed to confirm it.

The occurrence of a really inadequate stimulus proves thus the very contrary of Müller's conclusion that the specific nature of the stimuli is indifferent for the type of sensation experienced.

What follows is rather that a specific sensory activity is so strongly and indissolubly accommodated to its homogeneous stimulus that even abnormal interference cannot change the senses' normal pattern of functioning.

A person who is born blind does not experience a phosphene, and someone who becomes blind at an early age does not have visual phantasies in his dreams. This indicates that an adequate stimulus is necessary and indispensable for the normal activity or our sense organs.

Naïve consciousness views the impressions experienced without adequate stimulation as unnatural; and when in possession of healthy sense organs, it does not allow such impressions to lead to false judgments. Riehl correctly points out that if Müller's theory were true, the bond would be broken between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective world’1.

The conclusion would be inescapable that objective sensory perception is impossible. One should also consider the untenable consequences of this theory with respect to animal life. Smell and taste play an important rôle in an animal's struggle for survival, but if it be true that all sense organs react in their specific way to each arbitrary stimulus, animals would be unable to survive.

Our experiments with inadequate stimuli are to a high degree limited in their scope. Optic sensations, for instance, can be evoked through mechanical and electrical stimuli from the periphery only; but it has not been proven that light sensations can be produced from the root of the optic nerve. These sensations therefore do not arise independently of the locality of action of the stimuli, as was supposed by Müller.

What remains of Müller's evidence?

According to the physiologist Nagel, the experiments to which

Müller can rightly appeal are restricted to those made on the ‘chorda tympani’ in the opened tympanic cavity. And Riehl correctly observes in this connection: ‘It is impossible to base a law on one single, unexplained exception... The view held by Helmholtz that physiological experiences have established Müller's law, as far as experiments were possible, cannot be maintained in the face of recent findings in physiology’1.

The theory of Helmholtz

Helmholtz intended to present a more detailed physiological foundation of Müller's theory, but instead furnished proof that physiology, as such, is not competent to establish the exclusive subjectivity of our sensory impressions of the outer-world. In his famous and much disputed theory of optic and tone sensations, Helmholtz, following Tourtual, made a sharp distinction between two kinds of differences between sensory impressions. The first embraces those originating from the specific nature of our sense-organs (e.g., the specific difference between a sensation of sound and a sensation of colour). They are called differences of modality. The second kind embraces the differences between sensations of the same sense-organ and are called qualitative. There is, e.g., a qualitative difference between the sensations red and blue, high tone and low tone. Modality, or modal difference in sensation is exclusively dependent upon the specific energy of the sense organ in question, while its particular quality is also determined by the kind of stimulus received. Thus each physically simple tone of a certain pitch and frequency of vibration causes a simultaneous vibration in only one section of the ground-membrane, composed of a system of cords. The simultaneous vibration arises only in that part of the ground-membrane which is tuned to receive the tone in question, and the nerves related to the part set in vibration receive this vibration as a stimulus. In the same way the pitch of a tone depends upon the nature of physical sound waves; the quality of a sensation of colour depends upon the nature of the light which stimulates the retina.

It is not necessary to follow Helmholtz's theory in further

detail. The summary given above is sufficient to show that it fundamentally limits the validity of Müller's so-called law of the specific energy of sense-organs. According to Helmholtz, the ‘quality’ of sensations is not affected by Müller's law. But the kernel of Müller's theory lies in its very affirmation that stimuli do not in any way influence the generation of sensations. Riehl correctly goes a step further: if the particular qualities of sensations are co-determined by the nature of the stimulus (as Helmholtz's investigations have demonstrated), then their modality can no more be independent of the latter. We can make a distinction in our thinking between a sensation's modality and its quality, but in reality the modality and quality of a sensation cannot be separated.

Finally, Müller's theory clashes with modern biological conceptions, according to which the sense-organs only gradually become differentiated and adapted to the different stimuli. Especially the anatomical and physiological connections between optic, auditory and tactile organs have been emphasized. Sensations of heat and touch, e.g., are not clearly distinguishable when our perceptive organs are affected by minimal stimuli. In the light of all these modern investigations Riehl concludes: ‘There is a necessary relation between stimulus and sensation. The qualities of sensations are the more fully developed properties of things in the outer world. Consequently common sense is insofar right to follow the compulsory force of the sense-impressions and to have no doubt about their objectivity. Only in this respect is common sense in error that it assumes the exclusive objectivity of sensation. This is inadmissable, because in every product of interaction the nature of the operator as well as that of the reactor makes itself felt’1.

The misunderstanding in Riehl's interpretation of naïve experience.

We disagree with Riehl only on one point. Riehl's ‘critical realism’ prejudices his judgment and causes him to assert that common sense or naïve consciousness sets forth such a ‘theory’ concerning the exclusive objectivity of sensory impressions.

Starting from the metaphysical antithesis between the ‘world in itself’ and the ‘world as it appears to us’, he neglects the pre-theoretical subject-object relation which is essential to naïve

experience. The latter does not confound the subjective sensory impressions with the objective sensory qualities of the things perceived.

It is aware of the possibility of subjective illusions and subjective inexactness in its perceptions. And it does not ascribe its sensations to ‘things in themselves’. This is exactly what Riehl imputes to the naïve attitude. This is to say that the latter is again interpreted in terms of an ‘Abbild-theorie’, though this misinterpretation does not appear at first sight. Riehl has not actually penetrated to the objective sensory functions of things1. This is why in the last instance he gives a nominalistic interpretation of the relation of our sensory percepts to the things perceived. This may appear from the following quotation: ‘Sensations are, of course, signs, if one wants to call them so, and not copies. They are even signs by means of which we express our own bodily nature rather than that of the rest of the physical world, although the latter does not essentially differ from the former. These signs develop with the increasing activity of our senses, and although from the start determined by the viewpoint of our apprehension, they are not arbitrary, but natural signs’2.

We are here confronted with a distinction, already made by Occam, between natural and arbitrary signs. This supposed difference falsifies both the meaning of language and a thing's objective-psychical aspect3. Rooted in a conception which opposes reality and consciousness, this form of nominalism shatters the temporal coherence of reality, thereby involving itself in an irreconcilable conflict with the data of naïve experience.

This conflict does not arise because naïve experience holds to a dogmatic ‘Abbild-theorie’, requiring the correction of critical realism. It arises, rather, because the simple data of selfcon-

sciousness are no longer intelligible to the hypostatizing attitude of critical realism.

It may be that from a natural-scientific view-point objective sensory phenomena are only ‘symbols’ referring to imperceptible physical relations. But this does not entitle us to deny the real events an objective sensory aspect and to reduce the sensory subject-object relation to a symbolic reference of sensory impressions to a metaphysical ‘world in itself’.

The interpretation of our naïve experiences of a thing by Riehl, Rickert and Natorp.

Riehl seeks to qualify the ‘realism of common sense’ in this way that it takes the representations of outward things for these things themselves, so that it does not distinguish observation from the object of observation1. Riehl's misinterpretation of the meaning of naïve experience is understandable, if we consider that he unquestioningly accepted the ‘Satz des Bewusztseins’ or ‘Satz der Phänomenalität’, in terms of which he arbitrarily interpreted the attitude of ‘common sense’.

It is, however, this very thesis with its critical realistic counterpart, the assumption of a formally knowable ‘world in itself’, which is irreconcilable with the naïve experiential attitude. This should call a halt to such an epistemology. Naïve experience cannot be rightly understood from the view-point of a representational phenomenalism. Critical realism fails to recognize that synthetical thought pre-supposes enstatic-systatic2 thought, with which it should never come into conflict.

Our naïve experience does not teach us to believe in metaphysical ‘Dinge an sich’3, existing independently of the functions of our consciousness, so that the latter is onesidedly dependent upon them. The basic tenet of Riehl's critical realism is that the transcendental synthetic categories of human understanding (taken in the Kantian sense) are accommodated to the forms of a reality in itself, which is opposed to our consciousness. On such a basis, only an abstract formal knowledge of things can be acquired4. Because of the very nature of naïve

experience, it can never be reconciled with this epistemological view of reality.

The pre-theoretical attitude is incompatible both with critical realism and critical idealism, because both fundamentally curtail the integral structure of reality. On the basis of a critical epistemology, rooted in immanence philosophy, Riehl seeks to arrive at a synthetical construction of the horizon of empirical reality. With him theoretical philosophy1, therefore, exhausts itself in ‘science and in a critique of knowledge’2. In accordance with Kant, he seeks the unity of self-consciousness in a transcendental logical unity of the cogito, which, as the necessary pre-requisite for all synthesis, determines all experience. Thus, Riehl involves himself in the same antinomy with respect to the problem of synthesis as did Kant. He also posits the Kantian thesis: ‘In the narrow sense of the word there are only laws of nature for the understanding that conceives of nature. It is only the understanding that assumes the permanency and uniformity of the phenomena as a universal premise, and consequently as a law of nature. Talking of the laws of nature outside of the understanding means a lapse into logical anthropomorphism, which is as little founded as teleological anthropomorphism’3.

It is apparent that from this epistemological viewpoint naïve experience must be misunderstood.

An important moment in Riehl's conception of the reality of a thing (Ding-wirklichkeit).

Although we must fundamentally reject this critical realism, Riehl is to be credited with a rehabilitation of the sensory aspect of human experience which had been depreciated by Kant. He tries to bridge over the rigid gulf which in the Kantian epistemology separated the world of the ‘things in themselves’ and the world as it appears to us.

According to him, the ‘things in themselves’ undergo an en-

richment by the qualities assumed in their sensory appearance. To quote his own words: ‘The immediate objects of perception are occasionally called by Kant mere phenomena, depreciated as mere appearances, as if things as such must necessarily mean more than their operations on our senses. If in theoretical philosophy evaluating judgements were to the point, the relation between the value of phenomena and things in themselves would have to be reversed. The phenomenal world, pre-supposing conciousness, is not inferior to things as such; it is rather an enriched kind of reality. The world of things and our consciousness to which they appear, form one totality of reality, which is only supplemented and completed by our “consciousness”’1.

Important is also Riehl's view that the attributes of things in the ‘outer’ world and the qualities in our sensations are mutually related as potential to actual reality. Consequently the world of the senses may be said ‘to exist only as a process of becoming’2. It is true that by viewing the sensory qualities of things as nothing but physiological reactions3 and considering only our subjective sensory consciousness of them as psychical, Riehl fails to do justice to the essence of their psychical object-function. Nevertheless, he clearly asserts: ‘Things and consciousness, to which they appear, form one totality of reality, which is not completed and perfected but by consciousness’4.

We may object that even this view is not sufficient to conceive the integral horizon of empirical reality. It maintains the metaphysical opposition between a ‘world in itself’ and a ‘world of phenomena’. It assumes that the first is only knowable in terms of mathematical-physical formulae. And the completion and per-

fection of this metaphysical world of ‘things in themselves’ is supposed to be performed by the sensory function of human consciousness alone. The normative aspects of empirical reality are eliminated in accordance with the Kantian dualism between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’, or theoretical and practical reason.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these serious objections, it should be granted that Riehl has taken a step in the right direction; his view of the relation between the psychical and the pre-psychical functions is doubtless better than that of Kant1.

Rickert's criticism of ‘critical realism’.

Rickert is of the opinion that Riehl's critical realism simply formulates the problem of a transcendent being of the objective thing-world. And he objects to this ‘realism’ that it is not warranted to include a problem in the presuppositions of epistemology2. Insofar as Riehl shares Rickert's epistemological prejudice, this criticism is justified, but when the dogmatism of this prejudice is seen, it loses all of its force. Epistemology is founded in a transcendental Idea of the horizon of human experience and empirical reality. Starting from a functionalistic ‘Satz des Bewusztseins’ (Rickert speaks of a Satz der Immanenz) epistemology cannot comprehend its own basic problem of the inter-modal synthesis of meaning. Rickert's thesis that a problem may never be included in the pre-suppositions of epistemology, is equally applicable to his own transcendental-idealistic epistemology, based on the problematic assumption of a transcendental-logical subject of knowledge. This presupposition conceals the basic problem of theoretical synthesis, insoluble on the immanence standpoint.

Rickert's attitude toward naïve experience.

Rickert's evaluation of naïve experience strengthens our impression that this so-called critical idealism approaches the pre-theoretical attitude with a prejudice which precludes a true understanding. It is true, Rickert agrees with the view that naïve realism is not an ‘Abbildtheorie’ that can be scientifically combated. But the real attitude of ‘critical Idealism’ toward pre-theoretical experience appears from the qualification of the latter as ‘a complex of rash and vague opinions, sufficient

in daily life, and which should be left alone in people who only want to live’1.

This haughty treatment of naïve experience as a ‘quantité négligeable’ for epistemology rests on a basic misinterpretation of its meaning. Rickert thought he did naïve experience justice in his interpretation that ‘the component parts of the spatial-temporal world of the senses, so familiar to us all, form the only reality’2. The epistemology of transcendental idealism is supposed to disagree with ‘naïve realism’ only by adding the thesis: ‘The being of every reality must be viewed as an immanent being, as a being in consciousness, or as an object to which a conscious subject necessarily belongs’3.

But the truth is that Rickert approaches naïve experience with a pre-conceived functionalistic schema of empirical reality. Instead of examining the pre-theoretical horizon of experience as it is given, he attempts to construe it according to his own schema.

He does therefore not notice that, in spite of his acknowledgement that naïve experience is no ‘copy-theory’, he does convert it into a theory which identifies the abstract sensory aspect with the integral whole of empirical reality.

I do not forget that in his System der Philosophie Rickert speaks of a pre-theoretical ‘Erleben’ of the unity of ‘value’ and ‘reality’, which he wishes to approach theoretically in a subjective-idealistic Sinn-Begriff4 (as a synthesis of ‘value’ and ‘reality’). But this does not bring him any closer to a correct interpretation of the actual data of naïve experience. What Rickert calls ‘naïve realism’ is exclusively a view of empirical reality. And this ‘reality’ is understood here as the phenomenal world of nature in the Kantian sense. What Rickert calls ‘Erleben’ is not the same as his Kantian conception of experience. But even if we leave this difference alone for a moment and consider the question as to whether his view of ‘Erleben’ is acceptable as an adequate interpretation of the

pre-theoretical attitude, the answer must be in the negative. The schema, ‘value’ and ‘reality’, rests (as we have seen in Vol. I pp. 127 ff) upon the metaphysical division of the temporal horizon into a ‘noumenon’ and a ‘phenomenon’, thereby theoretically destroying its structural meaning. Naïve experience cannot be approached as a ‘begriffloses, irrationelles, und namenloses Erleben’1 of a unity between two theoretically construed worlds, corresponding to the dialectical basic-motive of nature and freedom. It lacks neither a logical, nor a linguistic aspect. And it is fundamentally foreign both to Rickert's idea of reality and to his world of unreal values.

Natorp's view of the naïve experience of a thing as a logical synthesis lacking ‘Reinheit’ (purity).

The Marburg school among the neo-Kantians has completely caricatured naïve experience, as a quotation from Natorp will illustrate: ‘We hold the conviction so aptly expressed by Kant: Where the understanding has not united anything beforehand, it cannot analyse anything. Consequently, he concludes that in our knowledge synthesis is the first requirement for logical comprehension, and analysis is only significant as its pure reverse. The things given beforehand, insofar as it is in any way meaningful to speak of them, are rather syntheses of a primitive understanding, accomplished beforehand, but far from always in a pure and therefore correct manner’2.

Plato said that philosophy begins with wondering. I would like to add that in taking cognizance of Natorp's view of the pre-theoretical conception of things, wondering changes into understanding when the cosmonomic Idea of his philosophical system is discovered. For, one unacquainted with the logicistic cosmonomic Idea of the Marburg school will indeed be amazed at its distorting interpretation of naïve experience. That in this

respect Natorp's interpretation even exceeds Kant's is obvious when we remember that for the Marburg school, the ‘laws of synthesis’, at the foundation of analysis, have really only a transcendental-logical meaning.

The naïve experience of a thing is thus lodged in the vestibule of mathematical logicism, and is supposed to be only a ‘logical synthesis’ of a primitive understanding, whose constructions are ‘far from always pure and consequently not always exact’.

This brings to an end our discussion of erroneous views of naïve experience. We must now direct our full attention to the ‘plastic horizon’ in which the latter grasps the extremely interlaced structures of things and their relations. Those of social communities and inter-individual social relations will be treated later on.


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