Читать книгу Lectures on the true, the beautiful and the good - Victor Cousin - Страница 11

Examination and refutation of Kant's skepticism.—Recurrence to the theory of spontaneity and reflection.

After having recognized the existence of universal and necessary principles, their actual characters, and their primitive characters, we have to examine their value, and the legitimacy of the conclusions which may be drawn from them—we pass from psychology to logic.

We have defended against Locke and his school the necessity and universality of certain principles. We now come to Kant, who recognizes with us these principles, but confines their power within the limits of the subject that conceives them, and, so far as subjective, declares them to be without legitimate application to any object, that is to say, without objectivity, to use the language of the philosopher of Kœnigsberg, which, right or wrong, begins to pass into the philosophic language of Europe.

Let us comprehend well the import of this new discussion. The principles that govern our judgments, that preside over most sciences, that rule our actions—have they in themselves an absolute truth, or are they only regulating laws of our thought? The question is, to know whether it is true in itself, that every phenomenon has a cause, and every quality a subject, whether every thing extended is really in space, and every succession in time, etc. If it is not absolutely true that every quality has its subject of inherence, it is not, then, certain, that we have a soul, a real substance of all the qualities which consciousness attests. If the principle of causality is only a law of our mind, the external world, which this principle discovers to us, loses its reality, it is only a succession of phenomena, without any effective action over each other, as Hume would have it, and even the impressions of our senses are destitute of causes. Matter exists no more than the soul. Nothing exists; every thing is reduced to mobile appearances, given up to a perpetual becoming, which again is accomplished we know not where, since in reality there is neither time nor space. Since the principle of sufficient reason only serves to put in motion human curiosity, once in possession of the fatal secret that it can attain nothing real, this curiosity would be very good to weary itself in searching for reasons which inevitably escape it, and in discovering relations which correspond only to the wants of our mind, and do not in the least correspond to the nature of things. In fine, if the principle of causality, of substances, of final causes, of sufficient reason, are only our modes of conception, God, whom all these principles reveal to us, will no more be any thing but the last of chimeras, which vanishes with all the others in the breath of the Critique.

Kant has established, as well as Reid and ourself, the existence of universal and necessary principles; but an involuntary disciple of his century, an unconscious servant of the empirical school, to which he places himself in the attitude of an adversary, he makes to it the immense concession that these principles are applied only to the impressions of sensibility, that their part is to put these impressions in a certain order, but that beyond these impressions, beyond experience, their power expires. This concession has ruined the whole enterprise of the German philosopher.

This enterprise was at once honest and great. Kant, grieved at the skepticism of his times, proposed to arrest it by fairly meeting it. He thought to disarm Hume by conceding to him that our highest conceptions do not extend themselves beyond the inclosure of the human mind; and at the same time, he supposed that he had sufficiently vindicated the human mind by restoring to it the universal and necessary principles which direct it. But, according to the strong expression of M. Royer-Collard, "one does not encounter skepticism—as soon as he has penetrated into the human understanding he has completely taken it by storm." A severe circumspection is one thing, skepticism is another. Doubt is not only permitted, it is commanded by reason itself in the employment and legitimate applications of our different faculties; but when it is applied to the legitimacy itself of our faculties, it no longer elucidates reason, it overwhelms it. In fact, with what would you have reason defend herself, when she has called herself in question? Kant himself, then, overturned the dogmatism which he proposed at once to restrain and save, at least in morals, and he put German philosophy upon a route, at the end of which was an abyss. In vain has this great man—for his intentions and his character, without speaking of his genius, merit for him this name—undertaken with Hume an ingenious and learned controversy; he has been vanquished in this controversy, and Hume remains master of the field of battle.

What matters it, in fact, whether there may or may not be in the human mind universal and necessary principles, if these principles only serve to classify our sensations, and to make us ascend, step by step, to ideas that are most sublime, but have for ourselves no reality? The human mind is, then, as Kant himself well expressed it, like a banker who should take bills ranged in order on his desk for real values;—he possesses nothing but papers. We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself, at once triumphant and impotent, since it produces every thing, and produces only chimeras.[37]

The reproach which a sound philosophy will content itself with making to Kant, is, that his system is not in accordance with facts. Philosophy can and must separate itself from the crowd for the explanation of facts; but, it cannot be too often repeated, it must not in the explanation destroy what it pretends to explain; otherwise it does not explain, it imagines. Here, the important fact which it is the question to explain is the belief of the human mind, and the system of Kant annihilates it.

In fact, when we are speaking of the truth of universal and necessary principles, we do not believe they are true only for us:—we believe them to be true in themselves, and still true, were there no minds of ours to conceive them. We regard them as independent of us; they seem to us to impose themselves upon our intelligence by the force of the truth that is in them. So, in order to express faithfully what passes within us, it would be necessary to reverse the proposition of Kant, and instead of saying with him, that these principles are the necessary laws of our mind, therefore they have no absolute value out of mind; we should much rather say, that these principles have an absolute value in themselves, therefore we cannot but believe them.

And even this necessity of belief with which the new skepticism arms itself, is not the indispensable condition of the application of principles. We have established[38] that the necessity of believing supposes reflection, examination, an effort to deny and the want of power to do it; but before all reflection, intelligence spontaneously seizes the truth, and, in the spontaneous apperception, is not the sentiment of necessity, nor consequently that character of subjectivity of which the German school speaks so much.

Let us, then, here recur to that spontaneous intuition of truth, which Kant knew not, in the circle where his profoundly reflective and somewhat scholastic habits held him captive.

Is it true that there is no judgment, even affirmative in form, which is not mixed with negation?

It seems indeed that every affirmative judgment is at the same time negative; in fact, to affirm that a thing exists, is to deny its non-existence; as every negative judgment is at the same time affirmative; for to deny the existence of a thing, is to affirm its non-existence. If it is so, then every judgment, whatever may be its form, affirmative or negative, since these two forms come back to each other, supposes a pre-established doubt in regard to the existence of the thing in question, supposes some exercise of reflection, in the course of which the mind feels itself constrained to bear such or such a judgment, so that at this point of view the foundation of the judgment seems to be in its necessity; and then recurs the celebrated objection:—if you judge thus only because it is impossible for you not to do it, you have for a guaranty of the truth nothing but yourself and your own ways of conceiving; it is the human mind that transports its laws out of itself; it is the subject that makes the object out of its own image, without ever going beyond the inclosure of subjectivity.

We respond, going directly to the root of the difficulty:—it is not true that all our judgments are negative. We admit that in the reflective state every affirmative judgment supposes a negative judgment, and reciprocally. But is reason exercised only on the condition of reflection? Is there not a primitive affirmation which implies no negation? As we often act without deliberating on our action, without premeditating it, and as we manifest in this case an activity that is free still, but free with a liberty that is not reflective; so reason often perceives the truth without traversing doubt or error. Reflection is a return to consciousness, or to an operation wholly different from it. We do not find, then, in any primitive fact, that every judgment which contains it presupposes another in which it is not. We thus arrive at a judgment free from all reflection, to an affirmation without any mixture of negation, to an immediate intuition, the legitimate child of the natural energy of thought, like the inspiration of the poet, the instinct of the hero, the enthusiasm of the prophet. Such is the first act of the faculty of knowing. If one contradicts this primitive affirmation, the faculty of knowing falls back up upon itself, examines itself, attempts to call in doubt the truth it has perceived; it cannot; it affirms anew what it had affirmed at first; it adheres to the truth already recognized, but with a new sentiment, the sentiment that it is not in its power to divest itself of the evidence of this same truth; then, but only then, appears that character of necessity and subjectivity that some would turn against the truth, as though truth could lose its own value, while penetrating deeper into the mind and there triumphing over doubt; as though reflective evidence of it were the less evidence; as though, moreover, the necessary conception of it were the only form, the primary form of the perception of truth. The skepticism of Kant, to which good sense so easily does justice, is driven to the extreme and forced within its intrenchment by the distinction between spontaneous reason and reflective reason. Reflection is the theatre of the combats which reason engages in with itself, with doubt, sophism, and error. But above reflection is a sphere of light and peace, where reason perceives truth without returning on itself, for the sole reason that truth is truth, and because God has made the reason to perceive it, as he has made the eye to see and the ear to hear.

Analyze, in fact, with impartiality, the fact of spontaneous apperception, and you will be sure that it has nothing subjective in it except what it is impossible it should not have, to wit, the me which is mingled with the fact without constituting it. The me inevitably enters into all knowledge, since it is the subject of it. Reason directly perceives truth; but it is in some sort augmented, in consciousness, and then we have knowledge. Consciousness is there its witness, and not its judge; its only judge is reason, a faculty subjective and objective together, according to the language of Germany, which immediately attains absolute truth, almost without personal intervention on our part, although it might not enter into exercise if personality did not precede or were not added to it.[39]

Spontaneous apperception constitutes natural logic. Reflective conception is the foundation of logic properly so called. One is based upon itself, verum index sui; the other is based upon the impossibility of the reason, in spite of all its efforts, not betaking itself to truth and believing in it. The form of the first is an affirmation accompanied with an absolute security, and without the least suspicion of a possible negation; the form of the second is reflective affirmation, that is to say, the impossibility of denying and the necessity of affirming. The idea of negation governs ordinary logic, whose affirmations are only the laborious product of two negations. Natural logic proceeds by affirmations stamped with a simple faith, which instinct alone produces and sustains.

Now, will Kant reply that this reason, which is much purer than that which he has known and described, which is wholly pure, which is conceived as something disengaged from reflection, from volition, from every thing that constitutes personality, is nevertheless personal, since we have a consciousness of it, and since it is thus marked with subjectivity? To this argument we have nothing to respond, except that it is destroyed in the excess of its pretension. In fact, if, that reason may not be subjective, we must in no way participate in it, and must not have even a consciousness of its exercise, then there is no means of ever escaping this reproach of subjectivity, and the ideal of objectivity which Kant pursued is a chimerical, extravagant ideal, above, or rather beneath, all true intelligence, all reason worthy the name; for it is demanding that this intelligence and this reason should cease to have consciousness of themselves, whilst this is precisely what characterizes intelligence and reason.[40] Does Kant mean, then, that reason, in order to possess a really objective power, cannot make its appearance in a particular subject, that it must be, for example, wholly outside of the subject which I am? Then it is nothing for me; a reason that is not mine, that, under the pretext of being universal, infinite, and absolute in its essence, does not fall under the perception of my consciousness, is for me as if it were not. To wish that reason should wholly cease to be subjective, is to demand something impossible to God himself. No, God himself can understand nothing except in knowing it, with his intelligence and with the consciousness of this intelligence. There is subjectivity, then, in divine knowledge itself; if this subjectivity involves skepticism, God is also condemned to skepticism, and he can no more escape from it than men; or indeed, if this is too ridiculous, if the knowledge which God has of the exercise of his own intelligence does not involve skepticism for him, neither do the knowledge which we have of the exercise of our intelligence, and the subjectivity attached to this knowledge, involve it for us.

In truth, when we see the father of German philosophy thus losing himself in the labyrinth of the problem of the subjectivity and the objectivity of first principles, we are tempted to pardon Reid for having disdained this problem, for limiting himself to repeating that the absolute truth of universal and necessary principles rests upon the veracity of our faculties, and that upon the veracity of our faculties we are compelled to accept their testimony. "To explain," says he, "why we are convinced by our senses, by consciousness, by our faculties, is an impossible thing; we say—this is so, it cannot be otherwise, and we can go no farther. Is not this the expression of an irresistible belief, of a belief which is the voice of nature, and against which we contend in vain? Do we wish to penetrate farther, to demand of our faculties, one by one, what are their titles to our confidence, and to refuse them confidence until they have produced their claims? Then, I fear that this extreme wisdom would conduct us to folly, and that, not having been willing to submit to the common lot of humanity, we should be deprived of the light of common sense."[41]

Let us support ourselves also by the following admirable passage of him who is, for so many reasons, the venerated master of the French philosophy of the nineteenth century. "Intellectual life," says M. Royer-Collard, "is an uninterrupted succession, not only of ideas, but of explicit or implicit beliefs. The beliefs of the mind are the powers of the soul and the motives of the will. That which determines us to belief we call evidence. Reason renders no account of evidence; to condemn reason to account for evidence, is to annihilate it, for it needs itself an evidence which is fitted for it. These are fundamental laws of belief which constitute intelligence, and as they flow from the same source they have the same authority; they judge by the same right; there is no appeal from the tribunal of one to that of another. He who revolts against a single one revolts against all, and abdicates his whole nature."[42]

Let us deduce the consequences of the facts of which we have just given an exposition.

1st. The argument of Kant, which is based upon the character of necessity in principles in order to weaken their objective authority, applies only to the form imposed by reflection on these principles, and does not reach their spontaneous application, wherein the character of necessity no longer appears.

2d. After all, to conclude with the human race from the necessity of believing in the truth of what we believe, is not to conclude badly; for it is reasoning from effect to cause, from the sign to the thing signified.

3d. Moreover, the value of principles is above all demonstration. Psychological analysis seizes, takes, as it were, by surprise, in the fact of intuition, an affirmation that is absolute, that is inaccessible to doubt; it establishes it; and this is equivalent to demonstration. To demand any other demonstration than this, is to demand of reason an impossibility, since absolute principles, being necessary to all demonstration, could only be demonstrated by themselves.[43]