Chapter 9
Act and Performance of the Act
Since we can no longer proceed without constantly coming into conflict with scholastic opinions, we want to take the conflict itself as a starting point to build our own doctrine by dismantling what denies us space.
Ultimately, there is only one fundamental error: the substitution of life with the mind, to which all variations of false system formations revert. It appears sometimes more veiled, sometimes more openly, and bears either an "idealistic" or "sensualistic" stamp according to the duality of each conceptual world.
It is not real essential difference, but only the supposed one in real essential equality that establishes the most irreconcilable hostilities. Hence, among idealists and sensualists, it has been good form since time immemorial to prepare every imaginable insult for each other.
Since idealists reserved logic for themselves alone, the most peculiar contempt for logic flourishes among sensualists in the name of "empiricism." And since sensualists claim a natural science of the soul for themselves, idealists deride "psychologistics."
Since this distorted word has almost become a catchword, it seems time to remind that the unpleasant psychologistics only signifies a partial manifestation of precisely the logistics in which the idealistic self-deification of understanding, having abandoned life, completes itself.
By refuting the logistic conclusions in which idealism inevitably culminates, we will have proven the untenability of the entire idealism.
To this end, we will first show how our own preliminary findings would present themselves in the light of logistics.
This is what the logistician might reproach us with: anyone who speaks of "reality," "events," "continuity," "experience," and "life" has thereby objectified or conceptualized each of these. Reality, events, and so forth are no different as contents of thought or concepts than "being," "uniformity," "spirit," "act of judgment," "mathematical point."
Since it is true that the act of judgment first brings forth the concept, we would be dealing exclusively and solely with the products of thought in a thinking manner. It would be absurd to speak of the unthinkability of what one has thought, posited, and understood by doing it.
Such objections almost invite the play of a Socratic dialogue, but they do have a more serious background, as will come to light later.
First, we must submit for consideration: it is one thing to think of something, and quite another to grasp it thoughtfully. The former merely "means," while the latter "comprehends" its object.
We can form the concepts of the unknowable, the incomprehensible, the non-objective. But one would not want to claim that therefore the incomprehensible is understood.
There has probably never been a researcher who has not admitted that every impression can never be exhaustively captured with concepts. But isn't it then a dispute about words when one declares this very impression to be a product of the mind, simply because one cannot help but make it the subject of a sentence to express its inexhaustibility?
Panlogism is the worst of all delusions of thought, for it is the most incurable. Whoever has once sworn allegiance to it never escapes the entanglement of considering something already understood just because he can mean it. If he has the logical consistency of a Hegel, then he must consider the history of thought concluded and all mysteries solved.
The logistician might easily believe he can parry our attack by replying: such distinctions as "thinking of something" and "comprehending something" do not matter to him at all. What object one has in mind when thinking and how one feels related to it is completely meaningless. Our example of the unknowable and incomprehensible does not shake the decisive fact that one also possesses the identical concept of them, which alone makes statements possible.
If we did not have the concept of the incomprehensible, we could not have reasoned with it. If the non-objective were not a possible object of thought, we could not elaborate on it in any way. It is self-contradictory to consider something thought as unthought.
As we are thus driven into a corner and must decide to tackle the error at its root, we fortunately take the shortest route to follow up on our own line of thought.
What do we actually mean by a "concept," by "comprehension," by the fully "comprehended"?
Just as surely as the concept is always something that implies a meaning of an object, so surely have we not already comprehended the intended object simply because we are able to conceptualize it.
Through being comprehended, the fully comprehended is possessed, appropriated, "penetrated" by the mind, whereas even what cannot be intellectually penetrated forms an object of thought and a particularly favored one at that.
If we express our intention in the form of a judgment, according to which a conceptual B is stated of an incomprehensible X, then with the said "opinion" we have nonetheless "comprehended" something of that X beyond question. If I were to say that the event is incomprehensible, I thereby "comprehend" a very important "property" of its inaccessibility to the faculty of conception.
The deliberately antinomic sharpening of our sentences aims to lead to the new question of whether perhaps necessarily every concept denotes something grasped as well as something ungrasped.
Regarding the grasped, the answer is readily available from earlier considerations that every concept comprehensively "grasps" the intended object since it posits a singular entity and only that one. Even if the subject of the statement is a matter of immense diversity, like the universe, it is still, as a subject of the statement, just as singular as, for example, the mathematically defined location in the universe.
Only if our concepts of infinity, state, government, migration, tone poetry always signify one and only that one, can we use them, whenever desired, to mean the same intended object again.
The actual divisibility of many thought objects never corresponds to a divisibility of our concepts of them. An army can be divided into three armies, but the intended meaning of the army concept is indivisibly the same in the three smaller armies as in the larger army from which they emerged through division.
The Megarians extended Eleatism dialectically and acquired significant merits in the investigation of concepts despite their world-famous games with "eristic" questions. They demonstrated that the size range of certain determining features of quite a few concepts cannot be determined.
If we cannot specify with which grain the heap begins, with the loss of which hair baldness begins, or at which reduction in troop strength the remainder of an army ceases to be called an army, this does not change the seamless diversity of the concepts heap and grain, hairiness and baldness, army and troop, and thus nothing about the unchanging unity and identity of what they mean.
Our concepts remain entirely unaffected by the difficulties of their application to real matters, which of course does not preclude discarding any concept as unusable to adopt another one in its place.
The Megarians were well aware of the indivisibility or, as they called it, simplicity of concepts and inferred from this, drawing on the metaphysics of Eleatic being, the unreality of the world of appearances spread in limitless diversity.
In contrast, the same knowledge may lead us to the much more modest insight that the characteristic grasped in the thought object by its concept is the one to which indivisibility pertains. Since only the mathematical point is utterly indivisible, we choose it initially as a symbol for what is grasped in the thought object.
If the action word "grasp" probably precedes the noun "concept" in all languages, it expresses the fact that humanity had always already considered it had grasped something or comprehended something before it noticed that this happened with the help of concepts.
Without delving into the complex investigation of the origin of concepts, we point out that concepts have no existence except in the consciousness of a comprehending self.
The phrase that the concept denotes the object was used only as a substitute for the actual one: it means the object with the help of the concept, a comprehension of the self. If we remove the comprehending self, we have thus removed all concepts, but not even a single experience.
For not from the impression of redness does the judgment "there is something red" occur in the impression receiver. Rather, the impression prompts the judgment-capable self to execute judgment by establishing a relationship between itself and the judgment through the concept of redness. It thus endows it with the unitary character of the object of thought and distinguishes it unmistakably from any other object of thought.
Since, according to our previous investigations, the self must be thought of as the thing-point, comprehension can be symbolized through a schema in which "self" or "subject" can be inserted instead of "self-point," "thing" or "object" instead of "thing-point," and "concept of thing" instead of the arrowed relationship direction.
In the first section, we determined that the time-point and the thing-point are grasped as related to spatial-temporal continuity. Now we have established for each object of thought that its conceptual existence consists in the relation to a comprehending self and thus relies on the separation of the comprehended and the comprehending—which obviously requires a means distinct from points.
If we were to understand the separating means in addition to the related points, everything would become one and the same point, and the enabling ground of comprehension itself would disappear with the separation.
Here one easily recognizes the actual educative impulse of the Fichtean-Hegelian triad: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. One immediately notices why these three would no longer make the slightest sense if we only established what is comprehended with them and not simultaneously presupposed the constant stream of an incomprehensible reality, in relation to which the comprehended and comprehensible only find the possibility of their diverse existence in that they stand out as essentially different from it.
We now direct our attention to that which has just been meant thereby outside of the concept.
Every thing has its place in space at every moment and "exists" through shorter or longer duration in time. Every property of a thing, because it is involved in the thing, has a necessary relationship to space and time. Whether it be a thing, property, or process, every conceptualized thing-point is differently related to the reality of the event and has the character not so much of a point in itself but rather of a point of relation.
The same applies to the self, which we know is even really connected with the special side of all events which we call experiencing life. Thing-point and self-point are only relatable to each other insofar as each of them is the relating center of an event: the thing-point of the so-called external event, the self-point of an internal event.
We need not say any more than this: only by virtue of the relatedness of a meant thing is the to-be-grasped a comprehended one.
We derive from this: the success of comprehension goes beyond the act of comprehension by far.
Whether the act does anything other than to establish the "rational" relationship between the thing-point and the self-point, relatability in general requires the relatedness of each point to "irrational" reality.
Or: the performance of the act reveals two sides that are by no means separable but essentially different: the establishment of the thereby comprehended point and the division of the reality related to it.
Thing-point and self-point are, in terms of possibility, complementary objects of thought, insofar as they are relatable positions. Moreover, they form two unconceived and inconceivable contents of opinion, insofar as they are necessarily at the same time relating centers of two excerpts of reality.
The error of the panlogist is based on the "equivocation" of relationship in general with grasping relationship. He correctly noted that only the mental act forms relationships. However, he overlooked that there are two types of relationships established through grasping: the conceptual from point to point and the non-conceptual from point to event.
By conflating the broader concept of relating with the narrower concept of grasping, or by conflating the performance success of the act with the act itself, he ends up considering not only the grasped as related but also all related things as grasped and completely divides reality into objects of thought.
In other words, he leaves nothing but the grasped identity, without noticing that everything would thereby become identical, both the objects among themselves and each one with the grasper, whereby the grasping itself would be nullified.
Ultimately, his view implies considering finding as producing and reality as a mere noumenon, which reveals the utmost intensification of the Eleatic error and, as will be shown, its deepest reason.
If the Eleatic exchanged reality for being, the logistician goes considerably further by confusing reality with truth. In him, the Parmenidean impulse degenerates into the most arrogant of all heresies, according to which reality is identical with its thinkability.
But there are no "propositions in themselves," as Bolzano wanted, nor "truths in themselves," as his modern proponents desire. Such things exist only in the thinking consciousness of living beings, which themselves are neither truths nor propositions, but transient manifestations of the incomprehensible events.