Читать книгу Fichte's Science of Knowledge - Charles Carroll Everett - Страница 8

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One of the most important things which remained for Fichte to accomplish, in order to give unity to the system, was the deduction of the Categories from some common principle. It has often, from the first, been urged in criticism of Kant, that he accepted the Categories, and used them without establishing them by any a priori reasoning, and thus without making them an organic part of his system. As is well known, he accepted, largely, the arrangement which the science of logic had made of the various forms of judgment, and formed a system of Categories corresponding to these. Whether the system of Categories were or were not complete, whether the analysis were carried as far as analysis is possible; all this was left undetermined, except so far as the accuracy of the science of logic could be trusted. Further, the question whether the table be or be not complete, is not the most important one. Accuracy of result is not sufficient for philosophy. What is demanded is transparency of process and result. The process must be seen in its necessity, and the result must thus carry the evidence of its truth within itself. The squaring of the circle, for instance, by means of tin vessels, square and round, the liquid contents of which may be compared together, carries not one step nearer to the solution of the problem of the mathematician. The table of judgments, which Kant made the basis of his table of Categories, had been reached by a purely a posteriori process. Thus a crude and foreign element was introduced into the very heart of the system of Kant.

I am not sure that criticism of Kant in regard to this matter is wholly just. The fact is, of course, just as it is commonly stated. There is here in Kant’s system important material taken bodily from without, and used as if it had been scientifically deduced. Whether or not, in accepting this material, Kant did not adopt the means best adapted to the end he had in view, is another question. Kant was not so much the builder up of a system, as one who cleared a space upon which a system could be reared. He was a conqueror rather than a founder. He may be regarded as the Julius Caesar, as Hegel was the Augustus, of modern philosophy. His work was thus critical rather than constructive. It was to break up the hard and crude notions that men had of a solid, material world, wholly independent of spiritual presence, and to substitute for this the thought of an ideal world, which is for and of the spirit alone. This he could best do by taking formulas which men had been trained to regard as the most fundamental and certain, analyzing the notions which these involved, and thus showing that they had no meaning or application beyond the mind itself. The science of logic furnished these formulas. By accepting them and analyzing them in the manner that has been indicated, Kant was carrying the war into the enemy’s country, and winning a victory more substantial than could be obtained in any other way.

The criticism that has been made of Kant’s method in regard to this particular should be extended, if it is legitimate, to much of his work. His method, throughout, was to proceed not from above, but from below. He did not, for instance, like Schopenhauer, attempt to deduce the forms of perception—time and space. He accepted these as he found them in the common consciousness, and sought only to show that they have no force or meaning beyond the mind itself. Passing from these to the Categories, his interest was to show that these latter are meaningless without the forms of perception, which he had before proved to be merely phenomenal. The same is true of his treatment of all the spiritual and intellectual functions. He took them as he found them.

This, then, was Kant’s method. For his purposes, I am not sure that it was not the best. When the battle for idealism had been fought and won, then came the time for the deduction and organization which a constructive philosophy demands.

We can thus understand what was one of the most important and fundamental problems which Fichte undertook to solve. The attempt to deduce from the nature of consciousness, the forms of perception, the mental faculties, and the Categories, is what, more than anything else, gives its character to his system—it may even be said to constitute his system, and to mark the philosophical movement to which he gave, to a large degree, the impulse. Hegel is enthusiastic in his praise of the undertaking.^[2] He speaks of the deduction as something that had not occurred to any man, from Aristotle down; and, again, he says that this was the first reasonable attempt in the world to deduce the Categories. Doubtless, in this attempt, Hegel found a challenge and a stimulus to his own great work. If, then, the success of Fichte in this undertaking was not a complete success—and certainly the process is so bound up with his own system as to have little value outside of it—yet the failure involved a triumph more fruitful than most victories. Fichte had pointed out the way which philosophy must take for its next advance. If it was not he who was destined to create the empire which Kant had founded, he was at least one of those who did the most to make the creation possible.