Chapter 16

Transition to the Concept of Viewing

We leave the Kantian concept of space with a note on the extremely confusing language use that arises because Kant, according to his interchange of being and reality, calls objects "appearances."

The world of so-called appearances with which he exclusively deals is the world of objects, whose origin in conceptual thinking has been illuminated by us. According to his doctrine, the non-spiritual means of continuity through which it becomes "appearance" belongs itself to the object. There must therefore be another object in relation to which his object first becomes "appearance," from which it follows that reality assumes the form of the object or the "thing-in-itself."

Since the Eleatics, the following has occurred: the incomprehensible event has become a moment of comprehensible being, the phenomenal a property of the noumenal, and reality in general has become the product of an impersonal spirit which, in us as somewhat finite, emerges only relationally and requires a space-time-bound sensibility in which the only truly existing object dissipates into the illusory world of a multiplicity of objects.

The hidden intention of this ideology perhaps becomes nowhere clearer than on the occasion of the remark that our capacity for understanding is thus limited to appearances because sensory intuition naturally depends on something already given, whereas at least the possibility of a "primal being" remains open whose "intellectual intuition" by means of an "intuitus originarius" would simultaneously create the perceived object.

All idealists were fully justified in naming the "thing-in-itself" or the "primal being"—as much as it was wrong to truly consider it the creator of the world—and indeed meant one and the same, and argued far more about words than about the matter itself when one preferred to say: "I," "consciousness in general," "absolute," "spirit," "will," "transcendental reason," or "God."

All reasonably judicious non-ideologists early discovered the astonishing contradiction that lies in making a "thing-in-itself," however it may be more precisely defined, the cause of the world of appearances and, at the same time, ascribing to it with Kant the thought of causality of the same arrangement through which alone appearances exist for the human affected by it.

But it is not enough to deny the "thing-in-itself" the capacity to cause appearances. Rather, one must unreservedly recall that the statement that a "thing-in-itself" could appear is as meaningful as saying nothingness appears.

If the "thing-in-itself"—merely a new name for Parmenidean being or for the deity of negative theology and in fact a reality-analogous reflection of the "spirit-in-itself"—necessarily demands the exclusion of all determinations to which the impetus from the world of appearances would come, then it is a nothingness in relation to it, regarding which its transformability into an "appearance" not only cannot be conceived but must even be thought of as impossible.

Any attempt to stamp it as a bearer of appearance would inevitably chain it to the multiplicity that already characterizes the individual appearance and completely marks their spatial-temporal immensity, and thus, the absolutely qualityless would falsify the naturally determined preconditions of innumerable property differences.

But if, in such distress, one managed to pluralize the "thing-in-itself" and to replace the emphatically abolished multiplicity of appearances with an equally large multiplicity of "intelligible" places and characters, then this expresses a degree of absurdity against which belief in ghosts becomes a very harmless error of understanding.

If idealism wants to avoid this cliff of nonsense, then, when logically thought through to the end, it ultimately leads infallibly to its own absurdity: if space and time were indeed mere forms of intuition, it would nevertheless be certain that their cause or condition or reason for being ought not to be sought in the intelligible "thing-in-itself," whereby not only a metaphysical duality of realities, the phenomenal and the noumenal, would be conceded, but also the irreducibility of those to these.

The thing-in-itself is either nothing—in which case it cannot cause anything—or it is something—in which case it has properties and cannot be the thing-in-itself. The concept collapses under its own weight.

As surely as the Kantian attempt to solve the space-time problem has failed, so surely does its originator deserve credit for having, through the incomparable decisiveness with which he undertakes it, tied every further progress of research to the answering of a question that leads in the most direct way into the world of images.

His effort to base the act of knowing on what he calls "intuition" and to locate the distinctive nature of intuition again in its receptivity to space and time should indeed have led beyond Eleaticism, had not the said intuition already been knowledge and the intuited the objective space.

However, the enabling ground of knowledge cannot again be knowledge, but must lie in experience, and the reality of space and time cannot already possess objectivity, but must belong to the content of what is experienced.

Accordingly, our answer to the question he poses differs from his own as follows: We deny at first that they could be separated from each other—whether the real space from the real time, or from their spatial-temporal characteristic, the data of sensibility.

There are no experienced colors, sounds, smells, temperatures without spatial-temporal characteristics, no experienced space that would not be realized in data of sensibility and with them subject to the flow of time, no experienced time except insofar as it appears in the change of images.

But it is then certain that we must overlook: from space to find time, from time to find space, from both to find the data of sensibility—in short, from the interpenetrating reality of all of them to be able to objectify each one for itself.

We will no longer imagine the primal phenomenon of the temporal stream of images is pieced together from the "matter" of so-called contents of sensation and from the "forms of intuition" of space and time.

If we call the experience, insofar as it gives us the stream of images, from now on a "contemplative experience," let us not be misled by the unfortunately unavoidable similarity in name to "viewing" to overlook the fundamental differences between the two processes.

What Kant called intuition is simply perception—the act based on an alienating experience by which we find things. However, how we ourselves intend to use the word "intuition" will be explained in the next section.

By contemplative experience or, more briefly, contemplation, we mean the internal counterpart of the constantly changing reality of images and thus an intrinsically temporal and completely inactive process which not only cannot find any things but does not possess the ability to find at all.