Chapter 15

Preliminary Remarks on the Sense of Reality

We have emphasized the almost hypnotic effect of the doctrine that space belongs to consciousness and have just concluded our counter-discussion with the phrase "sense of reality."

To declare the reality of space a fact of consciousness means to de-realize it—to substitute for living spatial experience the reality of geometric figures that exist only in concepts. We immediately touch upon that supposedly "intelligible" reality of the cause of the space phenomenon with which "transcendental idealism" intends to compensate for the despatialization of the world.

Here, we briefly discuss that it is precisely the same misunderstanding of the question of reality upon which idealism, with its proofs and "positivism" with their refutations, rest.

We could not hope to have disturbed the hypnotic spell even slightly unless we addressed the fallacy beginning with Descartes and culminating in Berkeley or even Schopenhauer, by means of which one sought to appeal to the sense of reality precisely to establish idealism's credibility.

The strategy is cunning: idealism claims to be more realistic than realism by taking seriously what realism supposedly ignores—the undeniable fact that all experience occurs within consciousness.

In the camp of positivism, the attitude we oppose is often mocked as "dream idealism." But no positivist has yet appeared who has refuted the apparent proof that the "dream idealist" draws for his fundamental conviction of the subjectivity of space from the undeniable fact that one can also dream a spatially extended reality and nonetheless, after waking, considers oneself entitled to assume its unreality outside the dreamer.

From the dream phantasm, it emerges clearly that no spatial reality must be given for the appearance of it to arise.

Countless times, the following is added: as the dream phantasm of space is only in the dreaming self, so the "representation" of space is also in the imaginative self—indeed, the perception of space is in the perceiving self. The assumption of an independently existing space thus proves to be superfluous, as it does not prevent space from being transformed into a representation if it is to be known.

We decide here not yet the question of reality, but we show what dreadful sophistry hides in such expressions.

Since the character of person-independent reality is denied to dream images by the waking person but not by the dreaming one, it is obviously not an inherent quality of the images themselves from which the supposed unreality of dream space derives.

Whatever the stage of their appearance may deviate from sensory space, dream space is experienced as real in the dream state, just like sensory space, and therefore cannot serve as a basis for the opposite conclusion.

The secretly involved thought of differences in the dream spaces of different people does just as little harm to the reality tone of dream space as does the reality tone of sensory space, which would be undermined by the less obvious consideration that the sensory spaces of different perceivers are fundamentally different from each other.

The dream argument proves nothing except that idealism has confused the question of what is real with the question of what feels real.

The experience of reality is thus presupposed when someone surprisingly philosophizes about whether sensory space might still take place in his soul.

By exchanging the spatial appearances with a product of mind—namely the space-object—idealism hopes to win us over to the so-called mental nature of these as well when it brings the pseudo-reality of dream space into play.

Instead of asking the natural question of what right the waking person denies dream space an impersonal reality, idealism destroys with its mental construct the impersonal reality of spaces altogether and thus of the world—not considering that no judgment could ever have been passed about space, no speech could have been held, without the independence of their appearance from any viewer being experienced and thus also the independence of the appearance of their locations.

But if today it is difficult to think about something so simple, this is due to the fallacies to which idealism has accustomed us through its centuries-long cultivation of confusion of perception with "imagining."

Only then do we reach the core of the misconception, which Schopenhauer encapsulated in the dazzling and blinding formula: "The world is my representation."

Even a child can understand that never have two people been able to communicate with each other about their spatial experience, and that there would therefore be no concept of space at all, unless at least in this respect those otherwise so different experiences were similar in that each time a compulsion was experienced that did not originate from the soul of the experiencer—a compulsion to assume both the existence and the nature of the spatiality experienced.

Communication about space presupposes that we all encounter something independent of our individual consciousness. Otherwise, we would have no common ground for discourse.

While I can usually "imagine" whatever I want at any time, I am by no means free to perceive something immediately perceptible differently than it presents itself.

The impression-experience underlying the act of perception is something that happens to the perceiver and is received, accepted, and endured as such, whereas the cause of his imaginative activity is never suffered by the imaginer and even in the exceptional case of the so-called compulsive idea does not carry the character of soul-foreignness.

I may well direct my attention arbitrarily to this or that side of the object while perceiving. However, I am completely unable to see blackness instead of the redness of a perceived cloth or an unspatial "thing in itself" instead of the spatially spread reality.

I can "imagine" white, red, or black cloths at will and can even mentally overlook the spatiality of the world. In the state of perception, on the other hand, I am bound from moment to moment in an incomparable way, in accordance with which that which binds is identified as something different from the soul.

In view of the mental disarray evoked by the English concept of representation, it should be stated here that "imagine" is nothing other than "think," namely in the narrower sense of thinking about something and with the secondary meaning of thinking about something visual.

"To imagine something" means to visualize or mentally represent something through thinking. Accordingly, the laws of imagination belong to a subsection of the laws of thinking. Only what can be thought can be imagined, and the "movement" of imagination depends entirely on the voluntary activity of thinking.

This is the crucial distinction idealism obliterates: perception involves compulsion, imagination involves freedom. What I perceive forces itself upon me. What I imagine I freely construct.

From imaginations, we must clearly distinguish spontaneously emerging phantasms that capture consciousness like a reality and disempower the mind's arbitrariness—usually interrupted by episodes of imagination in a waking dream state, but undisputed rulers in a sleep dreaming state.

We can imagine with the clearest consciousness both the real and the unreal, while what is dreamed and fantasized claims full reality as long as we dream.

How dream space relates to perception space will concern us elsewhere. Here, we derive the essential characteristics of what can be imagined.

If I imagine with closed eyes the space of the room where I sit at my desk, the imagined—that is, the thought—does not coincide with my activity of imagining any more than the perceived room space coincides with my activity of perception.

Furthermore, my imagining—that is thinking—differs not only gradually but fundamentally from my perceiving. However, not with regard to the intended object, which is assumed to be merely one.

Rather, if one unanimously laments the paleness and incompleteness of the contents of imagination, it can only mean that the thoughtful representation concerns the visual properties of perceptual things, which naturally only prove themselves to be what they are when perceived.

The talk of the indistinctness of the contents of imagination leaves no doubt that even in the case of representing arbitrary mythical creatures, the imagined is measured against perceptual things. In other words, imaginative thinking derives all its material from occasions of impression.

Imagination is always parasitic on perception. Even the most fantastic mental constructions draw their elements from what has been experienced through the senses.

In contrast, idealism of all shades indulges in the delusional belief in the sameness of imaginative thinking with the process of perception, and it does this with the utmost conviction because it has, due to blindness for it, erased the impression-experience from the process of perception, thus leaving only what resembles mere thinking: the mental act.

However, in doing so, idealism itself has removed the distinction that forms the basis of its considerations—namely the distinction between perception and the perceived, thinking and the thought, consciousness itself and the object of consciousness.

If the world were a representation of the imaginer, then no one would know of the world anymore, and consequently, no one would know of themselves as an entity capable of imagination.

Whoever falsifies reality into a fact of consciousness has thereby immediately destroyed consciousness itself.

This is the devastating consequence: by making everything subjective, idealism makes subjectivity itself impossible. For consciousness is always consciousness of something other than itself. Remove the otherness, and consciousness collapses into nothing.

It would be unnecessary today to refute Kant if even one out of every hundred who study the "Critique of Pure Reason" or learn about philosophical histories from its fundamental ideas would likewise thoroughly study the "Critique of Theoretical Philosophy" published in two volumes in 1801 in Göttingen by the philosopher Gottlob Ernst Schulze.

It certainly represents one of the most remarkable evidences of the interest-dependency of judgment that the complete dismantling of Kant, presented without anger and with the richest expenditure of well-thought-out counterarguments in classical form more than four generations ago, was not able to shake in the slightest the erroneous teachings of the Königsberg thinker for the consciousness of today's educated people.

Gottlob Ernst Schulze's Refutation: The Reality of Perception

Therefore, it seems appropriate to conclude our counter-critique with a series of literal quotations from the second volume of the aforementioned work, which primarily address the fundamental error of confusing perception with representation.

"In the state of perceiving external things, however, the subject's consciousness is not of any modification present in it, but rather of a completely different and independently existing thing, and indeed with the greatest evidence present."

Representations themselves never tend to become external objects for us. Consequently, if all perceptions were mere representations, one would expect "that we would not be consciously aware of any objectively existing things different from the existence of our subject as present, but would only think of everything external as absent, so that consequently there would be no difference between knowing God and His omnipresence through mere concepts and knowing the surrounding and present world through perceptions."

"By virtue of the alleged identity of external sensations with mere representations, joy and pain, which occur with mere representations, would have to be just as strong as the feelings of the pleasant and unpleasant, which occur simultaneously with sensations within us, and the mere representation of the presence of the smell of a rose would have to affect us just as pleasantly as the sensation of the smell itself, of which the opposite is the case."

"Representations, according to the consciousness of them, are merely modifications of our self. They are not present outside of it any more than they have a separate existence from the self. If the perception and sensation of external objects were originally the consciousness of merely representing these objects, then the self could originally be conscious of what it feels, sees, hears, tastes, and smells only as a particular modification of itself, and the entire external world would first appear to it merely as a variation of its own determination."

Schulze's point is devastating: if perception were really just representation, we could never have developed the concept of an external world in the first place.

"Even if one brings the omnipotence of the deity into play here and derives the origin of the concept of a truly objective existence of things from an immediate influence of the deity on the human mind, one would still not be able to say anything conceivable about the possibility of such an origin. For suppose that an intelligence had in its consciousness only ever a consciousness of its own imagining, then, even if the deity acted upon it, this effect would again only constitute a representation and a consciousness of mere modifications in it. In such a consciousness, nothing would have been given by which the intelligence could arrive at the concept of the objective existence of the deity and other things outside the deity and outside the intelligence."

The common human understanding "relies in its trust in the reality of this insight merely on what is immediately given in the consciousness of external objects, and knows nothing of a conclusion that should be present in the contemplation. This conclusion has only been devised in the schools of philosophers and added to the contemplation of external objects after these contemplations had been turned into mere representations, to explain how it happens that we regard objectively existing things as real, despite our consciousness merely being of representations."

"Only the pretense deriving from Descartes that all knowledge of external objects must be mediated by a representation of these objects has, because it was accepted without precise investigations, caused all attempts since this philosopher to make external experiential knowledge comprehensible to go astray completely."

"By merely subsuming representations under concepts of the understanding, no relation to a real existing thing can ever be produced. Nor can it be assumed that by connecting sensory representations with concepts of the understanding, the consciousness of those representations is transformed into the consciousness of an object different from the states of the subject."

"The most peculiar idea underlying the idealism established in the Critique of Reason is actually that all being available to us arises from thinking, and that what actually is is something for the understanding according to the particular concepts contained in it." However, if one takes this thought seriously, "then no reality remains, not even the reality of thinking, but what we call the inner and outer world is then merely a sum of interconnected representations, whose entire reality again consists only in a concept of it."

Kant's idealism is no better than Berkeley's. For: "Whether the origin of external experience can be more easily made comprehensible from the influence of completely unknown things in themselves on our mind than from the action of God on the same, this hardly requires investigation."

If the Critique of Reason had wanted to proceed consistently, it would have had to let the world arise from pure concepts. Those who have attempted to give the transcendental explanation of the origin of an objective world in this way "have not at all reneged on the ideas about the transcendental that lie in the Critique of Reason, but have only fully utilized these ideas, thus also being able to avoid contradictions, which one inevitably falls into when incorporating elements of metaphysical realism into the transcendental-idealist explanation of the world."

Anyone who sees the complete untenability of the doctrine of the subjectivity of space does not need to prove the subjectivity of time, because a spatial reality that is also timeless is inconceivable.

The Kantian error, like all idealism, rests on the confusion of the experience of reality with the thought-construction of objectivity, on the substitution of spirit for soul, on the denial of life in favor of being. Perception gives us reality—something that forces itself upon us from outside. Thinking constructs being—timeless objects subject to our mental manipulation. Idealism's fatal move is to claim that only the second is real, thereby destroying the very possibility of the first and collapsing consciousness itself into impossibility.