The World As Idea
Table of Contents
How is certainty to be attained?
How judgments are to be established?
What constitutes rational knowledge and science, which we rank with language and deliberate action as the third great benefit conferred by reason?
Reason is feminine. It can only give after it has received.
Of itself it has nothing but the empty forms of its operation.
Absolutely pure rational knowledge is the 4 principles to which I have attributed metalogical truth as the principles of:
- identity
- contradiction
- excluded middle
- sufficient reason of knowledge
Even the rest of logic is not absolutely pure rational knowledge.
It presupposes the relations and the combinations of the spheres of concepts.
But concepts in general only exist after experience of ideas of perception, and as their whole nature consists in their relation to these, it is clear that they presuppose them.
No special content, however, is presupposed, but merely the existence of a content generally, and so logic as a whole may fairly pass for pure rational science.
In all other sciences, reason has received its content from ideas of perception.
In mathematics, reason gets its content from the relations of space and time, presented in intuition or perception prior to all experience.
In pure natural science, reason gets its content from pure understanding i.e., from the a priori knowledge of the law of causality and its connection with those pure intuitions or perceptions of space and time.
In all other sciences, everything that is not derived from these sources belongs to experience.
To know rationally means to have the mental power to reproduce at will true judgments.
Thus only abstract cognition is:
- rational knowledge (wissen)
- the result of reason
We cannot accurately say of the lower animals that they rationally know (wissen) anything, although they can perceive, have memory, and consequently imagination.
This is proved by the fact that they dream.
They are conscious.
Thus we attribute life to plants, but not consciousness.
Rational knowledge is therefore abstract consciousness, the permanent possession in concepts of the reason, of what has become known in another way.