Epilogue

The twenty-five years of philosophy are the years in which philosophy became a science, thereby also arriving at knowledge of itself. Let us look back over the path that we have traveled. 

Philosophy (metaphysics) claims to be cognition of the world purely on the basis of thought. It thus presupposes non-empirical, but nonetheless veridical reference to objects. In order to investigate whether and in what way such a thing could be possible at all, Kant inaugurates transcendental philosophy, which accordingly abstracts from all given objects in order to consider the human cognitive faculty by itself. Before it had arrived at the results of its investigation, philosophy as a science was not possible (Ch. 1). 

This first characterization of transcendental philosophy proves upon reflection to be insufficient. On the one hand, it is not possible for it to abstract from everything that is given, since the objective reality of the categories cannot be demonstrated without an a priori determination of the empirical concept of matter. On the other hand, it turns out that the conditions under which a metaphysics of morals is possible are no less in need of explanation than are the conditions that make a metaphysics of nature possible, since the highest principle of morality still requires proof (Ch. 2). 

In this way, it becomes necessary to expand transcendental philosophy in two directions. It requires (a) proof of the constructibility of the object of outer sense; (b) the discovery and justification of the highest principle of morality. Since in the case of morality objective reference as such is unproblematic, transcendental philosophy must now be defined more broadly as an investigation into the possibility of synthetic propositions a priori (Ch. 3). 

With Lessing’s assertion that Spinoza’s philosophy is the only possible philosophy, a competing alternative to transcendental philosophy arises. For according to Spinoza, the criterion of scientific knowledge is the ability to derive the properties of an object from its essence or its proximate cause (scientia intuitiva) (Ch. 4). 

In the meantime, the integration of morality into transcendental philosophy entails a twofold problem: Since the moral law is to be realized in the sensible world, and since the sensible world is subject to a causal determinism that rules out the existence of purposes, a conflict arises between the legislation of practical reason and that of theoretical reason, which thus appear as disjoint and indeed as incompatible (Ch. 5). 

Only in the supersensible substrate of appearances is it possible to unify these two legislations with each other and with a nature that agrees with them, which in turn is necessary if reason is to accord with itself. Contrary to its original conception, transcendental philosophy thus comes to have its foundation in the object of outer sense and the condition of its internal unity in a supersensible substrate (Ch. 6). Moreover, precise consideration of the reflective power of judgment also shows that we are compelled to conceive of the supersensible as something unconditional in which thought and being, what is and what ought to be, mechanism and purpose are inseparably one. Although it is a conceptual necessity, Kant continues to insist that the link between the sensible and the supersensible is fundamentally beyond human cognition. In order to prove this, he contrasts the human cognitive faculty with something which, according to him, it is not and cannot be: intellectual intuition and intuitive understanding. In this way, though, he also gives the first precise characterization of these two faculties (Ch. 6). Yet by doing so, Kant also casts doubt on his own assertion that they are inaccessible to the human mind and that the supersensible is therefore necessarily beyond human cognition: 

According to Fichte, we realize an intellectual intuition in every single self-intuition of the I; and Goethe sees that he has already realized Kant’s intuitive understanding by basing his study of the metamorphosis of plants on it (Ch. 7). From this point on, the question of the knowability of the supersensible takes center stage. According to Fichte, the essence of the I is that it (a) is what it is only through itself (self-positing); and that it (b) must be what it is for itself (self-consciousness). This, however, entails further that (a') the I knows its being as its deed, and this consciousness of the unity of thought and being is not a receptive intuition, but a productive, an intellectual intuition. And (b') the determinate actions that the supersensible I must perform in order to posit itself can be brought to consciousness step by step and made into objects of cognition. In this way, what was for Kant an unfathomable root in which the sensible and supersensible worlds are united becomes, in the case of the human I, a legitimate object of investigation (Chs. 8, 9). 

However, if we must conceive of the supersensible as something unconditional, in which thought and being, spirit and nature are inseparably one, then Fichte’s philosophy of freedom is only a first step toward its cognition. Schelling therefore insists on an exposition of nature’s origination from the common root (Ch. 9). 

Schelling’s attempt to base the method of his Naturphilosophie on Fichte’s intellectual intuition inevitably leads to the dissolution of intellectual intuition. For in order to employ it for cognition of nature, it would have to be possible to abstract from the subject of intuition in the act of intuition itself. With this step, intuition ceases to be productive, however, and becomes intuitive understanding (Ch. 10). 

It was Goethe who elaborated a methodology of intuitive understanding based on Spinoza and Kant. It consists in bringing together related phenomena and grasping them in such a way as to form a whole. In a further step, the transitions between the phenomena must be re-created in thought in order to tell whether the whole was already at work in them or whether the parts are only externally connected. If the former is the case, then an idea becomes accessible to experience as the ideal whole to which the sensible parts owe their existence and their specific character (Ch.11). 

Hegel applied this method to philosophy itself in order to achieve philosophical knowledge of the supersensible. Since philosophical consciousness is a consciousness that makes a truth claim, he began by setting up a complete series of such shapes of consciousness in order to make the transitions between them reproducible in thought. (Whether or not the series is in fact complete can be determined only by actually going through and trying to re-produce the transitions one by one.) When the philosophical consciousness of the present now looks back over its past shapes and reproduces the transitions between them in thought, it grasps what it thereby experiences as the knowledge of something that consciousness itself has not produced but merely aided in making visible. This is a self-moving, spiritual content which, although discoverable only in the thinking subject, exists independently of it and is objectively real. In this experience, consciousness apprehends the effects of a supersensible spiritual reality. In this way, it has attained the standpoint of scientia intuitiva (Chs. 12–14). 

And thus these twenty-five years of philosophy come to an end. What remains open, however, is the question of the legitimacy of the assumption with which the last chapter ended: the question whether Hegel’s presentation of the transitions in his ‘science of the experience of consciousness’—and hence also the introduction to the standpoint of science—is correct. The majority of readers have denied that it is. The classical and continually recurring objection is that the steps in Hegel’s argumentation are lacking in necessity; that the historical shapes that he discerns do not exhaust the alternatives; that, on the contrary, many new alternatives have emerged since Hegel’s time in science, art, and so on. 

I cannot subscribe to this objection for the following reasons: 

(1) As we saw at the beginning of Chapter 13, Hegel is not concerned in the Phenomenology with ‘historical shapes’—these are ultimately no more than examples and could be replaced by equally serviceable ‘alternatives’. Rather, Hegel is interested in the ‘method of the passing over of one form into another and the emergence of one form out of the other’. But then the question is not whether there are alternatives to Hegel’s examples, to the historical shapes chosen by him, but whether there are alternatives to the transitions between them. 

(2) And here again, the question is not whether we today, with the conceptual means placed at our disposal by the current level of development, might be able to imagine different transitions, but whether a different transition would be possible for the observed consciousness on its level. What we can imagine is therefore irrelevant to answering this question. 

(3) If this is conceded, then the objection ought rather to be formulated this way: it is not convincing that a specific transition is supposed to be necessary for consciousness at its given level. And such an objection may, in any given case, in fact be justified. Then the question becomes: Is the transition itself not necessary, or has its necessity simply not been convincingly presented? As long as we find that some of the other transitions are necessary, we can always be sure that the problem is one of presentation. That is the crucial point! If a whole makes its parts possible and gives them their shape, then it must be active in all the parts and in all their transitions, not only in some. If that activity (necessity) has been recognized in some of the transitions but not in others, all this implies is that the latter have not yet been adequately grasped and presented. 

(4) Hegel’s project could therefore only be said to have ‘failed’ if no necessity whatsoever was to be found in the ‘science of the experience of consciousness’, and if instead the transitions between shapes were contingent and thus might have happened differently. But that assumption is unwarranted, as I hope to have shown in Chapter 13 despite the undeniable imperfections in my presentation. 

When I say that this is the result of the twenty-five years of philosophy, I do not mean to imply that there had not been philosophical approaches prior to that which exhibited some similarities with what I have described as intuitive thought. Compared with what we have explored here, however, those approaches seem rather more like side paths branching off from the main course of philosophical development. Nor were they demanded by what preceded them, in contrast to the epoch described in this book. 

Nor do I wish to assert that the line of argument presented here robs discursive thought of its legitimacy. On the contrary: it must be mastered before one can move beyond it. It does, however, seem to me that today discursive thought has lost its position of exclusive dominance. In this respect it could perhaps be compared with Euclidean geometry which, too, was long held to be the only possible geometry and hence by default the one that describes reality; today we know that spaces with zero-curvature are merely one possibility, and that the validity of Euclidean geometry is limited to these. 

I think something similar is also true of discursive thought. Consider Kant’s starting point one last time. The existence of an antinomy proved to him that discursive thought, shaped as it is by sensibility and dependent as it is on sensibility, leads to contradictions as soon as it is applied to anything other than sensibility. This led Kant to conclude that the supersensible cannot be known. That, however, is an incomplete disjunction. One can as easily conclude that if supersensible reality is to be known, non-discursive thought is required. What I have tried to show in this book is that between 1781 and 1806 a philosophical justification was worked out, demonstrating that this is not idle speculation but a real possibility—a possibility whose potential has still to be realized. The future of a philosophy ‘that will be able to come forward as a science’ has only just begun.