At one stage in history the study of metaphysics enjoyed such high esteem that it seemed a symbol of wisdom. Later, it became so disparaged as to be treated synonymously with unscientific thought. Even now, scholars are divided in their assessments. What is more, some are still arguing over whether such a subject has actually been established and whether it is necessary. The controversy has lasted for hundreds of years and will very probably last for hundreds of years more. This is bizarre because since the beginning of human civilization no other subject has encountered such problematic treatment.
What is the reason for this and what lesson can be drawn?
THE SEARCH TO ESTABLISH METAPHYSICS
The term metaphysics did not appear until the post-Aristotelian period, but the real inauguration of the subject came with Aristotle's statement that there is a subject which studies being as being.
Greek philosophy had made inquiries into essentially metaphysical problems before Aristotle and this pre-Aristotelian philosophy was the embryo of metaphysics. The earliest Greek philosophers focused their discussion mainly upon principles. As Aristotle explained, a principle is something out of which everything takes its origin and into which it finally returns. This problem, in effect, proved to be the same as the subsequent problem of substance. Questions of principle or basic stuff are attempts to arrive at a unity or basic principle underlying the surface of directly perceivable and ever-changing phenomena. Such attempts gave rise to Aristotle's question: What is being? This is what is meant by the question of being as being.
There was historical necessity to the raising of this question. The difference between man and animals lies in man's ability to alter nature consciously. To do this it is, of course, necessary to know why nature is the way it is. If every individual thing, changeable as it is, has its own origin, what of the whole world? This is an inevitable question for experiential perception. However, at that time people were not yet capable of offering a correct answer. Directly perceived experience tells people that as you sow, so will you reap. As such, the whole world must have a principle or essence. Thales believed it was water, Anaximenes that it was gas, etc. A great advance was achieved in the history of human knowledge when people came to explain the unity of the cosmos by a perceptual entity. The effort to elucidate the existence and development of nature by drawing on causes within nature proper shows that the human view of the world had broken away from the worldview of legend and religion and embarked on an independent road, thereby signifying the birth of philosophy.
Of all the philosophers of this time, the most noteworthy was Heraclitus. Like thinkers of the Milesian school, he ascribed the principle or essence of the world to another perceptual entity--fire. For him, as Diogenes Laertius relates, fire produces everything and everything returns to fire, everything obeys fate and is subject to its opposite process, and everything is filled with spirit and soul. He not only questioned the principle of the world, but also tried to reach the way and method of knowing about the principle. Unlike Anaximander, he did not comprehend production as the separation of opposites, but as their collaboration. This was a quite provocative conjecture.
At least one thing is clear. It is impossible to go deeply into knowledge of an object if people confine their cognition within the scope of a directly qualitative approach. John is a man; Morris is man. . . . Such knowledge is too sweeping. Clear knowledge of an object required not only consideration of its qualitative, but also of its quantitative determinations. Generally speaking, people begin their understanding of an object with qualitative determination; inevitably they will come to quantitative determination as their cognition deepens. This is also the view of Pythagoras and his school.
When the Pythagoreans took numbers as a basic principle, they did not actually liken numbers to substances such as water, gas or fire, for they defined number as a determining principle inherent in any entity. Aristotle says of the Pythagoreans in Metaphysics I, 5 that they thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being--more than fire and earth and water (such and such a modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason, another being opportunity--and similarly almost all other things being numerically expressible).1
But a one-sided view pertaining to quantity is no more satisfactory than that pertaining to quality, for it cannot explain movement, as Aristotle observed, nor how a perceivable substance comes into being.
Of course, in that era it was still too early to understand the relationship between direct and indirect means of knowledge, for the scope of knowledge was placed almost wholly within the scope of direct experience, and indirect knowledge was accepted as direct. Thus thinkers of that time usually started with the question of the relationship between one and many. No way, however, could be found to unite one and many within the scope of direct perception, though practice required it.
This problem led to the first examination of the notion of "being" by the Eleatics. Since everything has being, they posed the question of what "being" itself is. In my opinion, a great step was made with this question in the development of a philosophical view of the world, because with it the philosophical view of the world, which had freed itself from the mythic worldview, began to gain further independence from natural philosophy.
The following was the Eleatics' understanding of "being."
1. Thought is identical with being, which means, according to Parmenides, that what can be thought and what can be are identical. Their interpretation is trustworthy because Parmenides once commented: "thinking and the thing for the sake of which we think are the same; for without that which is, in regard to which it is uttered, you will not find yourself able to think."2 This judgment tells us that entities exist, while non-existence does not.
2. Being cannot possibly be produced and therefore cannot be eliminated: it must be eternal and infinite. Parmenides agreed to this, but he also stated that it is not infinite, for if it were, it would become imperfect. "It is finite on all sides, like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, equally balanced from the center in every direction."3
3. For existence, "destruction is inconceivable. Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike."4 Besides, "it is all inviolate."5
4. "Being the same and remaining in the same place, it likewise lies within itself and so remains locked in the same position,"6--i.e., it is static and motionless.
These were Parmenides' fundamental views of "being." From these we can come to the rough conclusion that for Parmenides, "being" and existence were more or less the same thing. He discovered "being" in the place of existence, and all his judgments were based on directly perceivable experience.
If Parmenides is considered to be like the natural philosophers who preceded him in discussing "being" by way of the relationship of one and many--i.e., if his thinking did not go beyond the scope of direct experience--Gorgias achieved a breakthrough in this respect. He is known for his three propositions: first, nothing exists; second, assuming that a thing were to exist, it could not be known; and third, were it to exist and be knowable, no communication of what is known would be possible.
It is not necessary here to go over his over-elaborate dialectic, since we are all familiar with it. But it should be stressed that he was able to advance these propositions because he had arrived at the fundamental contradiction for knowledge--that between the general and the individual--but did not know how to resolve it. In other words, he discussed "being" by way of the relationship of the general and the individual, which means that "being" in general for him is not confused with the existence of individual objects.
Socrates' dialogues made the general-individual relationship even more explicit. On beauty, for instance, what Socrates was after was not which things are beautiful, but what beauty is; not manifold examples of beauty, but their universal character: that is, beauty in general or beauty itself.
Thus, the discussion of the world's principle or basic stuff, following an initial examination of the idea of being, became a problem of substance. This is the view which Plato takes of this change. He says in his Cratylus that all things "have their own proper and permanent essence; they are not in relation to us or influenced by us, fluctuating according to our fancy, but are independent, and maintain in their own essence in accordance with the relation prescribed by nature."7
Plato absolutized the universal essence into an ultimate actuality or idea. Idea is a truly independent substance, whereas the changeable perceptual world is relative and not actual. An object in the perceivable world is an object because it partakes in (or initiates) idea. This is Plato's idealism.
Idealism, however, is theoretically self-contradictory. Even Plato himself was unable to tell how many ideas there are, how the perceivable object partakes in ideas or how ideas are known. Thus, in his later period, he was obliged to posit the "theory of types."
Aristotle's criticism of Plato's idealism was quite to the point, though not acute. He pointed out that whenever Plato tried to probe the causes of matters around us, he always resorted to adding on a number of ideas equal in number to the names of perceptual objects. But this leads us nowhere; still worse, it increases our difficulty. Aristotle was quite clear that Plato's error lay in the separation of the general and the individual, and the isolation of the general. He argued that a doctor may see a patient named Garcia or Socrates, but he cannot see "man" in general. "Man" cannot exist independently of Garcia, Socrates and so on. Plato erroneously isolated idea as a result of his lack of understanding of the general-individual relationship.
In Aristotle's opinion, a new overall study needed to be made of this relationship. He was also explicitly conscious that science always aims at the general, despite the fact that different sciences belong to different realms. He reasoned that since medicine as an exclusive science is devoted to studying health and the like, there ought to be an independent science dealing with all being--being as being. It should be on the very top of the pyramid of science: "first philosophy" as he called it. This branch of learning inquires about what "being" is and how it is to be known (Metaphysics IV, 1 and 2).
In fact, Aristotle did not come up with a definite answer to his own question. The root cause again goes back to the general-individual relationship, regarding which his knowledge was very limited. He was clear-minded when criticizing Plato's idealism, pointing out definitely that general categories (whether species or genus) is unable to exist independently. Thus he felt that the basic feature of essence (or substance) is that it neither accounts for subjective entities nor exists in them. But obviously such an interpretation is unable to elaborate what "being" is.
In Metaphysics VI, 1 Aristotle, restating his opinion from Book IV, says that although all subjects of science require principles and causes of being,
all these sciences mark off some particular being--some genus--and inquire into this, but not into being simply nor qua being, nor do they offer any discussion of the essence of the things of which they treat; but starting from the essence--some making it plain to the senses, others assuming it as an hypothesis--they then demonstrate, more or less cogently, the essential attributes of the genus with which they deal. It is obvious, therefore, that such an induction yields no demonstration of substance or of the essence, but some other way of exhibiting it. And similarly the sciences omit the question whether the genus with which they deal exists or does not exist, because it belongs to the same kind of thinking to show what it is and that it is (i.e., philosophical thinking).8
Seemingly, it is made quite clear that each specific scientific discipline proceeds with hypothetical premises or objects except for philosophy, which presses the question of whether its object of inquiry exists because it studies being as being. He continues, however, to say that the paramount object which philosophy studies, the highest "type," is eternal, static and independent of all else, though it is "general" and not "particular." This is to say that, like the "particular," the "general" can have independent existence. "A man as entity" or "man as entity," he goes on, "a man" and "man," are the same thing.
In the third century A.D., the neoplatonist Porphyry (233-304) worked through the philosophical confusions of Aristotle and came up with the following questions: a. whether "species" and "genus" are "independent or reside only in pure reason; b. supposing they are, whether they take form or are formless; whether they are separate entities and are in unity with them. This conception facilitated the argument between nominalism and realism, thus promoting the rapid development of metaphysics. On the other hand, it was this argument and its development that pushed metaphysics onto a road of self-negation.
THE CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICS AND ANTI-METAPHYSICS
What conclusion was reached after almost a thousand years of controversy, from Boethius' (480-525) Porphyry's "Isagoge" to William of Ockham (1300-1350), regarding the existence of "species" and "genus"? During that protracted debate, a remarkable change took place on the part both of the nominalists and of the realists, though it would be hasty to judge who won: both sides changed their positions from extreme to moderate.
Thomas Aquinas, for example, the most important realist thinker and the official philosopher of the Church in the Middle Ages, was a moderate realist. He claimed that the "general" has three forms of being: a. as the prototype of everything that God creates, which exists in advance of anything created; b. as the form of the individual, residing in the latter; and c. as concept, existing in human reason. But the medieval realists no longer insisted that only the general is real.
Another example is William of Ockham, a known nominalist of the fourteenth century who claimed that it is wasteful to accomplish with much what could be done with little and that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. This is because it only makes the problem more complicated to explain matters with "secret substance" and "objectified form." He therefore held that they should all be shaved away--the so-called "principle of economy" or the well-known "Occam's Razor." He could not deny that universals are objects of thought when placed in an appropriate context (ie., appropriate to an object of rational thought); but they are not primary objects at the source of cognition. That is to say, the universal or the general is of objective significance in cognition.
What do these changes from extreme to moderate nominalism and from the extreme to moderate realism suggest? The relationship between the general and the individual is not a problem of two kinds of substance, but of the relationship between perception and rationality. That is, both realists and nominalists agreed that perception takes the individual as its object whereas rationality takes the general, and that perception and rationality represent only two stages of one cognitive process. Hence, the relationship between the general and the individual is actually that of perception and rationality.
Changes occurring in social and economic systems of that age accelerated the clarification of this problem. "We come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean," noted Marx.9 The appearance of a capitalist economic system produced two immediate results. First, anti-theological ideas were strengthened, which inevitably promoted the development of anti-metaphysical thought, since Scholastic philosophy had treated being as being as a synonym for God. Second, experimental science developed; this took shape in the trend toward empiricism, holding that nothing is in thought before it has been experienced. As experience grasps the individual entity, the individual alone is real, while concepts and names are only abbreviated forms of experience. This, in turn, intensified anti-metaphysical thought.
For this reason, the task of philosophy was seen to be knowledge of the concrete and of various phenomena of manifold nature, instead of studying the infinite essence or substance behind these natural phenomena or, to be concrete, providing a method for understanding these phenomena. It could also be defined as approaching what experience can grasp, instead of pursuing a sort of transcendental substance. At this point, the inquiry into "existence" takes the place of the inquiry into "being." As Hobbes put it: "whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea, or conception of anything we call infinite."10 Thus philosophy moved from the stage of metaphysics, which has ontology at its center, to an anti-metaphysical period centered upon epistemology.
The beginning of the new stage was marked by the advent of two opposite philosophical trends, empiricism and rationalism, for both empiricism and rationalism study mainly epistemology and cognitive method. When epistemology took the place of ontology as the focus of philosophical study, the controversy over the two types of entities (the general and the individual) shifted to that over the relative dependability of perception and reason. Those who stressed the content of cognition when analyzing its origin, process and truthfulness were empiricists; whereas those who stressed the form of cognition when doing the analysis were rationalists.
However, the two sides took different anti-metaphysical attitudes. Empiricists chose a stand of open opposition, whereas rationalists still allowed a place for metaphysics. The reason is that empiricism developed from nominalism and thus easily came to oppose substance in general; rationalism, initiated by Descartes, was, however, a later development of scepticism. As Descartes intended to find something which was beyond doubt and self-justifying, he preserved an ultimate substance as first principle. At that time, France was backward politically and economically compared with England, and the Roman Catholic Church was much more powerful in France than in England. This also contributed to the difference between the two trends. For instance, Descartes explicitly declared in his Discourse on the Method that he is to abide by the current law and customs and believe in God, and that he tries "always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and alter my desires rather than change the order of the world."11
In spite of all that, the enthusiasm of both empiricists and rationalists centered on understanding the actuality of nature and the methods for understanding it. The two camps' agreement on major issues, e.g., on opposing Scholastic philosophy and demanding direct inquiry into nature, out-weighed their heatedly argued differences. Besides, both sides emphasized the applicability of theory. No remark is more apt than Francis Bacon's "Knowledge is power" as an embodiment of their common spirit.
It seems that mankind has a very rich treasury of knowledge, but Bacon claimed that a close examination exposes its actual poverty, for it is rich merely in controversy and lacks actual content. He even held that the study of metaphysics since Aristotle "has done more to establish and perpetuate error than to open the way to truth."12 Therefore, he advanced an inductive method as opposed to the traditional deduction prevalent since Aristotle, in order to establish a legitimate tie between the perceptual and the rational, and between mind and nature.
Descartes' views were largely similar. He remarked that philosophy as a scientific subject, being the crystalization of the most brilliant thought through hundreds of years, leaves nothing in itself undebated. As a result, "I entirely quitted the study of letters, and resolved to seek no other science than that which could be found in myself, or at least in the great book of the world."13 Like Bacon, he was determined to work out a method independently, unlike all previous ones, so as to assure that the human intellect could attain correct knowledge. His method was deductive in a manner which, he insisted, was different from any in history. The ancients merely concentrated on some very abstract and useless problems which were good for nothing but causing confusion; he, however, aimed at offering reliable help for the intellect, such that our knowledge could be enhanced by way of his method.
An amusing change took place with the argument between empiricism and rationalism in the early eighteenth century. Originally empiricism seemed more reasonable than rationalism in terms of its overall thrust, since empiricists believed that knowledge comes from the experience of natural objects, while rationalists held that such experience is unreliable and that reliable knowledge must be obtained by proceeding from clear-cut concepts extended from the rational faculty proper. But is not knowledge from such origins like water without a source or a tree without roots? So Spinoza, Leibnitz and others successively revised Descartes' principle. Leibnitz, especially, claimed in no uncertain terms that truth can be divided into two kinds: the rational and the factual. The latter was to some extent an acquiescence to the principles of empiricism. But Bacon's successors, such as Thomas Hobbes and Locke, led empiricist principles in a more and more one-sided direction. Especially with Locke experience became the entire scope as well as the sole source of knowledge. As a result, what should have been the more correct theory turned out, in the early eighteenth century, to be even more absurd. This was the stage at which George Berkeley equated being with perception.
In fact, this absurd conclusion was an inevitable result of the anti-metaphysical one-sidedness of empiricism going to extremes. But thinkers of that age had no grasp of this and kept trying to resolve the contradiction within the scope of empiricism; this was distinctly reflected in the theory of French materialists of the eighteenth century. These materialists realized that the philosophical core of Berkeley was subjective idealism and that in this regard he coincided with a number of Locke's principles. Accordingly, Denis Diderot remarked that this absurd system, though a humiliation for mankind, is the most difficult to refute.
This did not, however, lead the French thinkers to realize the need to revise fundamentally the empiricist stand. On the contrary, they still threw in their lot with empiricism, relying only on what could be proven by experience and denying that which transcends experience. In metaphysics, says Claude Adrien Helvetius, the argument over such terms as matter, space and time has been protracted and empty. But substance is not a thing; we have in nature only some individual objects which we call objects with form.
Matter can be defined as only a collection of those characteristics which are common to all objects having form. Metaphysical substance, agrees Paul Henrich Dietrich d'Holbach, is but a bunch of meaningless, confused and conflicting concepts. Even the most striking genius will not be able to comprehend the essence and the real nature of matter; what we do comprehend is merely certain determined characteristics and properties in accord with the modes in which matter acts upon us. Accordingly, matter for us is something that, generally speaking, stimulates our sense organs in any number of ways. Hence, matter should have been regarded as a great number of things. All the different individual objects, in spite of certain characteristics they hold in common, such as extension, divisibility and pattern, should not generally be lined up under one category and named `matter'.
When the French materialists tried to answer Berkeley's challenge in conformity with this view, their efforts proceeded on two fronts: they strove firstly to prove that sensation and thinking are but a capability of a physical body and therefore that the metaphysical problem of the relationship between physical and spiritual substances becomes the relationship between body and mind. Secondly, we obtain our perceptual experience through our sense organs acted on by an external source; these organs are not a "crazy piano," and will not function when left alone.
Despite their great contributions to the development of materialism, these thinkers left the vital point of Berkeley's challenge unimpaired in their criticism, for they failed to disclose the epistemological root cause of Berkeley's subjective idealism. Hume restated this issue in an intensified way. Since all our knowledge comes from experience, says he, the question of whether there is anything independent of experience and existing beyond the scope of experience can be answered only by experience; but experience keeps silent on this score, for it has nothing more to offer. This is Hume's scepticism.
This scepticism shows more than anything else that if man's knowledge cannot transcend experience, empiricism carried to its logical conclusion will run counter to its original intention and reach a dead end. Its original intention was to oppose the metaphysical teaching on "substance" and to stress that the reality of the external world does not lie with a "substance" which lies behind the ever-changing phenomena, but with the phenomena proper. These phenomena are approachable by experience, and what can be experienced directly is real. But how can
we state abruptly that there is something independent of experience if the real is nothing more than what can be experienced? Thus, Hume says of this anti-metaphysical system of empiricism that we shall not be able to explain the action of external objects with this system, but rather, we shall eliminate them.
Though in coming to his conclusion he reflected Berkeley's premise of a radically narrow empiricism, Hume differed greatly from Berkeley, who was satisfied with the conclusion deduced from that premise. Hume attempts to uncover the fact that the premise and conclusion, so consistent in appearance, in effect conceal insurmountable conflicts. In this way, his sceptical conclusion had positive theoretical significance, for the trend toward anti-metaphysical thought and ancient metaphysics were proved to be alike in their one-sidedness. The development of philosophy was once again approaching a pivotal juncture.
It was not by chance that Hume came to make this exposition. It resulted from his summing up both historical and contemporary experience, including that of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics and that of the empiricist-rationalist controversy.
He resented the ancient metaphysics, especially that represented by Scholastic philosophy. He refuted "substance," "substantial form," "contingency," "hidden substance," etc., as fabrications unreasoned and random. This is why he admired Berkeley's anti-abstract thought and hailed it as one of the most outstanding discoveries of that age. He also detected difficulty for the modern anti-metaphysical trend, especially empirical ideology. On the one hand, empiricists declared that the external world is approached through perceptual experience; on the other, they believed that the external world exists independently of perceptual experience. This is a direct and overall antithesis. It is a pity that Hume refused to give up the anti-metaphysical stand in which his narrow empiricism fixed him. Thus he says that when viewing the world from his philosophical system he has to reject materialism which attributes all thoughts to actuality, but he realizes that materialists can refute their opponents for similar reasons after a little reexamination. This means that spiritual entity as well as material entity is groundless. In a word, he is dubious of everything.
METAPHYSICS AND ANTI-METAPHYSICS
The old metaphysics failed, since the search to reveal "substance" behind
various perceivable qualities reached a dead end; anti-metaphysics also failed is as
shown by Hume's scepticism. So where was the open road along which philosophy
could develop?
Kant
The first important philosopher who meditated with some success on this dilemma is Kant. He saw that the old metaphysics could not make a tenable argument in theory, and that the negation of metaphysics would also encounter trouble, so he was determined to initiate a new metaphysics. He refers to this as the question of the future of any metaphysics as a science. To answer this question, he set up the system of transcendental idealism.
Kant said,
. . . since the Essays of Locke and Leibnitz, or rather since the origin of metaphysics so far as we know its history, nothing has ever happened which was more decisive to its fate than the attack made upon it by David Hume. He threw no light on this species of knowledge, but he certainly struck a spark from which light might have been obtained had it caught some inflammable substance and had its smoldering fire been carefully nursed and developed.14
He disagreed with Hume's conclusion, he added, but Hume inspired him to break out of his dogmatic illusion and pointed him in the direction of speculative philosophy.
Two points are clear in the preceding quotation: a. Kant disagreed with the old metaphysics, which he explicitly criticized in the "Transcendental Dialectics" of The Critique of Pure Reason; b. he did not agree completely with Hume's scepticism. Hence, it was necessary for him to inquire into a new metaphysics to relocate the foundation of objective reality and objective necessity.
The new problem was where to discover such a new metaphysics. As recognition of the new orientation was to result from the breaking of the "illusion of dogmatism," a fairly concentrated analysis of the content of the illusion would open the new path. "So far as one keeps to the ordinary concept of our reason with regard to the association between the thinking subject and the things outside us, we are dogmatical," said Kant.15 This is also the point on which Hume focused his scepticism. By declaring an end to dogmatic illusion, Kant meant to do away with objective reality and objective necessity independent of all experience, for such independence is an unproved and unprovable hypothesis. He kept his word and characterized his work as another Copernican Revolution.
In the preface of the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason Kant says:
Hitherto it has been supposed that all our knowledge must conform to the objects: but, under that supposition, all attempts to establish anything about them a priori, by means of concepts, and thus to enlarge our knowledge, have come to nothing. The experiment therefore ought to be made, whether we should not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our mode of cognition, for this would better agree with the demanded possibility of an a priori knowledge of them, which is to settle something about objects, before they are given us. We have here the same case as with the first thought of Copernicus, who, not being able to get on in the explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies as long as he assumed that all the stars turned round the spectator, tried, whether he could not succeed better, by assuming the spectator to be turning round, and the stars to be at rest.16
Kant was opposed to infinite substance, both spiritual and material, due to the impossibility of its being the object of knowledge, and for this reason was opposed to the old metaphysics. In his own Copernican Revolution, Kant made an important discovery: the object of knowledge--which refers mainly to what is now called the thing--is not pre-determined, but hypothesized during the process of cognitive activities. This discovery brought the development of philosophy to a brand new stage--the convergence of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics and of ontology and epistemology.
Going a little further into the suggestion that the object of cognition is hypothesized, it can be seen that this is no exaggeration. As the object of cognition is not pre-determined a priori, neither is the opposition of subject and object (knower and known). It takes a knower and an object of knowledge independent of the knower to constitute cognition. Without an independent object of knowledge, cognitive activities become a process of self-examination or an interior monologue on the part of the knower. The independent object can only be discovered during cognition. At the same time, the assertion that the object of cognition is independent of cognition is itself part of the cognitive activity. This confirms that it is meaningless to talk about the object of cognition or about the subjective-objective relationship disengaged from cognition.
We still need to realize that although these independent "objects" appear individually as far as their direct mode of being-in-itself is concerned, they may become the object of knowledge only when the individual finds expression in the general. Out-and-out particularity is never an object of cognition, but remains something mysterious like the one and only God. In cognition, man always gets to the general through the particular, and to something infinite through the finite. It is wrong to think, as did the old metaphysicians, that the general and the infinite have independent existence parallel to that of the individual and the finite, or to deny like an anti-metaphysician the objective reality of the general and the infinite. The two sides must be in unity--a unity of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics and of ontology and epistemology. The actual unity is a process in which unlimited incremental advances are achieved through an endless recurrence of subject-object contradictions.
Kant, of course, did not draw this out distinctly, but he did make it clear that the object of cognition cannot be pre-determined. To view the object of knowledge as something determined a priori is to predispose oneself to the inescapable scepticism indicated by Hume. But as Kant remarked, the conditions that bring forth knowledge bring forth its object. Consciously or not, ontology and epistemology are thus brought into unity. In strict terms, this is the new metaphysics that Kant sought.
What then are its conditions? They are not concocted out of the void by the human brain, but condensed from historical and current experience. Regardless of what Kant himself thought, this was in fact the route he followed. Kant's most direct experience of history and reality was of the controversy between empiricism and rationalism, including of course the experience of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. From an epistemological stand, Kant pointed out conclusively that an instance of knowledge always takes the form of judgments which can be divided, according to their content, into the "a priori" and the "a posteriori." The former are statements of all impressions independent of experience and even of sense organs, e.g., 1+1=2. The latter, on the contrary, refers to any statement made on the basis of experience, e.g., "the flower is red."
Statements are divided into the "analytic" and the "synthetic" according to the connection of subject and predicate. A statement in which the concept of the subject term encompasses the concept of the predicate is analytic, e.g., "the blackboard is black." In this example, the subject stands clear of substantial augmentation or extension by the descriptive predicate. In a synthetic statement, also known as an "extensional statement," the predicate cannot be deduced by analysis of the subject and thus enhances and extends our available knowledge. Combination of the two types results in four new types of statements: a posteriori analytic, as Kant believed, is out of question because an analytic statement, with its strict universal necessity, must be independent of experience and therefore is contradictory to "a posteriori." Of the three remaining, only two were involved in the preceding debate between empiricism and rationalism: a priori analytic statements were upheld by rationalists and a posteriori synthetic statements by empiricists. Thus Kant accounted for the one-sidedness of both sides. A priori analytic statements, despite their strict universal necessity, are cut off from the supply of new knowledge; whereas a posteriori synthetic statements, despite all their new knowledge, lack strict universal necessity. Accordingly, he reasoned that real knowledge of science (either mathematics, the natural sciences or metaphysics) should possess both qualities. Hence, the question of a possible scientific metaphysics is replaced by the possibility of the a priori synthetic statements, i.e., the possibility of scientific knowledge (cognition).
How can we expound the possibility of the a priori synthetic statement? "A priori" is held by rationalists and "a posteriori" by the other side. Obviously, the possibility lies in the combination of the a priori universal necessity and the experiential understanding pursued respectively by the two schools, or with the compromise and mediation of both sides. To be brief and descriptive, we need to leave out anything but the pure form of the a priori universal necessity, render all experiential data into pure substance without any determination, and then apply the pure form to the pure substance. As a result, the substance with its new determination becomes the object and the form with new content becomes cognition. In this way, knowledge and its object go through a complete cycle of division and combination.
Though Kant seems to have succeeded in bringing about a unity of ontology and epistemology by his theory on the establishment of knowledge and its object out of identical conditions, actually he failed. In his Critique of Pure Reason he elaborated the possibilities for mathematics and the natural sciences, but he became vague concerning metaphysics. He criticized the old metaphysics but skipped over the possibility of a scientific metaphysics, except for a remark that a scientific metaphysics is necessary and abides necessarily by the principles of the innate comprehensive judgment. His failure was due to an antithesis of subject and object, which was axiomatic to his theory (though his knowledge of subject and object is much more advanced than that of his predecessors).
As mentioned above, both knowledge and its object are constituted of two parts, substance and form. The substance comes through sense organs from an external thing, which is called the "thing-in-itself." The faculty of perception is vested with certain innate (or a priori) and intuitively available forms, i.e., pure direct perceptibility (time and space), so as to be in position to be acted upon by the external object. But mere processing by means of transcendental time and space is not enough to attain its object and knowledge, for we still need to go through the pure a priori category of understanding.
Although pure direct perceptibility and pure category themselves lack the reality of experience (despite the way Descartes and some others understand it), and are only a priori and identical in nature, they are the conditions for the establishment of experience, and from this aspect possess the reality of experience. Both the experiential object and the cognition of the object are subject to subjective transcendental conditions. Consequently, what people understand has hardly anything in common with external matters, which are excluded from, and beyond, cognition. For this reason, he called such an external object the thing-in-itself, which means unknowable. By this he theoretically blocked any connection between the subjective and the objective.
At the starting point of his theory, Kant harbored the ambition to open up a new road for the development of philosophy. In the end, his theoretical conclusion led him away from this. However, an idea with actual significance that is so positive in its insightfulness will arrive at its proper destiny. The idea that Kant misread unfolded its brilliant possibilities in the thought of Hegel.
Hegel
Kant's error lay, as Hegel believed, in his axiomatic opposition of the subjective and the objective, which resulted in a series of difficulties and dilemmas. Axiomatic premises are not acceptable as far as philosophy is concerned, though they have been introduced into all sciences other than philosophy. The reason is that sciences other than philosophy take as the object of their study something finite obtainable from direct perception. Thus the opposition of the subject and the object can be accepted as a reasonable premise for all the other sciences. Philosophy, however, must extend its study into the objective foundation of the opposition. This was also the question of Hume.
Still, Hegel confirmed the explanatory power of Kant's insight into the subjective and objective. The common conception holds that the object is counterposed to the person but perceivable by his sense organs (like an animal or a star); it is being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Moreover, thinking is dependent on this material. Kant, however, held the contrary opinion: what is given by sense-perception is subjective, and what is in conformity with the principles of thought (having both universality and necessity) is objective. Thus, he contradicted the usual sense of the subjective and the objective by reversing their positions. Hegel approved this and said that the stiff antithesis of the subjective and the objective can be smoothed over and the unity of ontology and epistemology realized only if one persists with this idea. It was a pity that Kant gave it up half way, for he considered that, on the one hand, what is in conformity with the principles of thought is objective, and on the other, such principles of thought will remain a subjective form of absolute emptiness until perceptual material coming from the outside is applied.
Kant was caught up in a self-contradiction because he, like all the anti-metaphysical thinkers before him, went on to claim that what comes directly from experience is real, and all that comes directly from experience is finite. Thus only the finite is real, while universal and necessary thought is without reality. As Kant realized the importance of universal necessity, he treated it as a pure form with no content. Its real objectivity emerges when perceptual material comes to its rescue. But if the objective attaches to the quality of universal necessity, which in turn is determined by the subjective, is not objectivity something subjective?
In Hegel's opinion, the infinite is not beyond the finite but lies in it. For this reason, it is not contradictory to grasp infinite thought by grasping finite appearance, for thought infiltrates various appearances. However, appearances may be available to a person without that person being able to understand their significance for thinking, and without being able to understand the thoughts and concepts made explicit to these appearances. The task of philosophical thinking is none other than understanding the object conceptually, and upgrading from appearance to thought--i.e., performing a conceptual examination of the thing. This concept should not be something devoid of content. The content should not be externally given, but extend out of the concept itself. Hegel refuted the claim that this content is a groundless "arbitrary notion" unless it is externally given and feels that Kant's thing-in-itself is nothing but a useless hypothesis without actual content. In accord with Hegel's idealistic views the content of a concept is concept itself, for a concept is determination and the determination is the content. No concept is capable of being thought except for the concept of thought.
Hegel made into one the two starting points (thing-in-itself and pure form) of Kantian philosophy. As there is no longer an independent thing-in-itself, this leaves only conceptual thinking, and as such thinking has content, it is not pure form. Hegel's intention was to restudy the subject-object relationship on the basis of a more thorough-going idealism: to be brief, to solve the objectivity of thought (universal necessity) on the basis of idealistic monism. For this purpose, he summed up four characteristics of philosophical thinking.
1. Thought is universality in itself and for itself. He believed that what sense-perception grasps is mutually exclusive individuality and what thought grasps is universality. This universality refers not only to generality within individuality, but also to internal connection. "I think," for example, is an action in which I take "I" as my object (as if I am speaking soundlessly to myself). Hence thought is a self-realized universality in itself and for itself, and can be simplified as "I."
2. Thought is not satisfied with perceptual phenomena directly perceived and resorts to self-scrutiny of the phenomena through which it peeps to reach the essence. The essence is indirect, intrinsic, universal and directly unperceivable.
3. The essence obtained through self-scrutiny of what has been directly perceived is something real and objective as well as subjective idea.
4. In terms of its content, the essence or universality profoundly reveals the crux of the matter, for in terms of its form it is a product of the person's spirit and liberty.
Here, thinking is not a special state or action privately owned by the subject, but abstract Idea of oneself free of all particularity, character and situation. It keeps in motion only something universal, and during such motion it is in unison with everything individual. The conclusion Hegel reached through this analysis is that logic intermingles with metaphysics. Metaphysics is a science that studies what thought has grasped, and thought is capable of expressing the essence of matters. This amounts to Hegel's declaration that with his speculative logic he has successfully solved the contradictions between phenomenon and essence, the finite and the infinite, and the objective and the subjective, which Kant had left unsolved in his transcendental logic.
Was Hegel right in saying this? In a sense, he was. For he saw that one should not search for substance outside of cognition (for the search itself is a cognitive effort), nor should one try to establish an epistemology without reference to this search for substance (for the basic task of cognition is to press for the universal objective essence). Regarding the "attitude of thought to objectivity," he pointed out that it was the essential error of the old metaphysics to assume as a matter of course the direct determination of the universal objective essence and therefore to take the essence as an independent substance. Modern anti-metaphysical thinkers, to their credit, deny that the universal or substance can be directly determined. But as they still insist that what is dependable is what can be directly determined, eventually they fall into scepticism and deny knowledge as their position on the universal essence. Cognition is actually the contradictory unity of directness and indirectness. It always starts from directness, which by virtue of its task and essence is inevitably transcended. The fundamental contradiction of philosophy is neither the metaphysical problem of two substances nor the anti-metaphysical problem of body-mind relationship. It is the thinking-being relationship, which expresses itself as the question of the objectivity of universal thinking and its unity with objective being. Based on this thought, Hegel developed his theory on the contradictory unity of thinking and being, i.e., dialectics. His dialectics is the theory of the unison of ontology and epistemology. Therefore he brought into unison ontology, epistemology and methodology, which marks his greatest contribution to the development of philosophical thinking.
In effect, Hegel did not really solve the subjective-objective contradiction in his idealistic dialectics, because he mistook contradictions of the subjective and the objective and of essence and phenomenon as being within the scope of thinking. For him, being as being or general being, as that to which philosophy is devoted, is thinking as well. This is because general being without any specific determination is no more than some notion of being. His answer to the question of how this notion of being remains in unity with objective being is that this unity is based not outside the notion of being, but inside. Consequently, the motion of the thinking-being contradiction is mistaken as a motion within the scope of thinking, which is tantamount to nullifying the subjective-objective contradiction.
Feuerbach
Feuerbach was very clear about Hegel's idealistic error on this issue. The being in Hegel's logic, Feuerbach says, is the being of the old metaphysics. It is used to express everything without any differentiation. For the old metaphysics, the common point of all things is being. But this undifferentiated being is an abstract thought, without reality. To prove the being of matters in thinking, he thought, one should not be confined within the notion of being or thought; on the contrary, the reality of thought lies nowhere but in being more than thought and in becoming the perceptual object of non-thought.
Like the empiricists, Feuerbach went on to say that the real is what has been grasped by the experience of sense-perception. This is because sense-perception is a confirmation of the being of something beyond me. The premise of this judgment is that "I" proper is a sense-perception. If the subject is perceptual, so must be the object, and vice versa. Thus he agrees with the idealists that one has to begin cognition from the subject or oneself, because the essence of the world, what it is for man and what impact it has on man are subject only to the essence of the knower himself, his cognitive ability and his general attributes. Since the world is an object for man, it is his objectified self, and this does not undermine his independence. But one's self, he then adds, as the starting point for the idealists and for their negation of the being of perceivable matters, has no being. It is an alleged, rather than a real, self. One's real self is in opposition to "you" and the object of another self; so for another self it is "you." But since the idealists' self has no object at all, for them "you" has no being.
It is clear that Feuerbach agreed with the principle of subject-object and thinking-being unities. He tried, however, to explain this in line with materialism, for as a materialist he emphasized the independence of object or the object of cognition. While criticizing Hegel, he did not set the independence of the object absolutely in opposition to the subject; on the contrary, with Hegel he believed in a subject-object unity. To the same extent, he relates, object is object-subject, just as subject is essentially the inseparable subject-object, i.e., I am you and you are I, and man is man of the world or of nature.
Besides, Feuerbach also realized that the thinking-being relationship cannot be simply reduced to the man-nature relationship, because man needs a perceptual substance to be the subject of cognition. But he will not become a subject of cognition if he is but a perceptual substance (individual). He still needs to be upgraded from being a specific individual to being a universal object. A universal object is an object, perceptual being or individual as a category, the subject of which, however, is not somewhere outside it, but is itself. If the object (the object of cognition) outside the "I" (the subject of cognition) is none other than "I", then "I" is not a finite object but a universal one. Therefore, a universal object refers to an object with thinking capacity.
He explains that man thinks by talking and speaking to himself. Animals cannot perform their species-specific functions without another independent individual; but man does not need another in order to perform such functions as thinking or speech, which are the true functions of his species. Man himself is "I" as well as "thou"; he can imagine himself as somebody else because he takes as the object, not only his individuality, but also his species and his essence. From this Feuerbach defined man the species as an entity.
It is inappropriate, however, to ascribe only to a natural procedure the upgrading of a perceptual individual to a universal object. Although man cannot be isolated from nature, as directly produced from nature he is not yet a "man." For man is a product of man, of culture and of history. That is to say, the human power of thinking comes with intercourse between men. Just as two people give birth to a man physically, in the same way a man is born spiritually through people coming together. Empiricism believes, he commented, that our ideas initially come from sense-perception and that is correct. What it forgets is that the most important and primary perceptual object is man himself and that the brilliance of the human mind and intelligence shows only when his attention is on man. So idealists make sense by searching for the origin of Idea within man, but they miss it when they try to approach it by way of an isolated and pre-determined substance of independent being and of predetermined man as spirit, in other words, by way of the "self" of a "thou" that is not taken as a perceptual object. Idea grows out of communication, out of the conversation of men. That means that it is possible to obtain notions and general understanding, not by oneself, but only by way of mutual action.
An important hypothesis is contained in this thought of Feuerbach: the thinking-being relationship goes beyond the thought-matter relationship, i.e., the man-nature relationship, and extends to the relationship between men. Without the intercourse of men, man will not become the universal object or subject of cognition. No previous thinkers in classical philosophy, either materialists or idealists, correctly understood this relationship. Briefly, without exception they understood the activities of man and nature to be in opposition and had never been able to locate any common ground between man and matter and between thinking and being; subject and object had been in absolute opposition. Kant realized that this is a dead end; he did his best to do away with it and was able to present some new explanations. Nevertheless, as the axiomatic premise remained the antithesis of subject and object (thing-in-itself and pure form) in a new version, he had to conclude that the thing cannot be known. Hegel joined nature and history as an integrated process resulting in the conclusion that substance is subject, thus doing away with the axiomatic premise of the subject-object antithesis. But he only changed thinking itself into the domain of the antithesis.
It was Feuerbach who discovered the way in which the subject remains in unity with the object objectively as well as subjectively. This conjecture predicts a brand new orientation for the development of materialism. Once this development is fulfilled, ontology and epistemology would be truly unified on the basis of materialism, and dialectics would be developed and improved in materialist terms.
But Feuerbach was not able to realize this new orientation because he approached the relationship of men only in terms of direct perceptibility. On the one hand, he saw the importance of the thought of subject-object unity; on the other, he thought that it is materialistic (of course, he would not use the term himself) to understand this unity within the scope of direct perceptibility. Perceptual objects include more than "external" matters. Through sense-perception man becomes his own object of cognition as perceptual object. The identity of subject and object is only an abstract thought in self-consciousness; it becomes truth and entity only when it comes to the direct perception of man by man. Perception is the key to the secret of mutual influence and only perceptual substances can exert mutual influence. I am an "I" for me, and a "you" for others because the "I" is a perceptual substance. Here Feuerbach became self-contradictory: on the one hand, he believed that the subject is in unity with the object, a relation which revealed the objective and manifested essence of the subject; on the other, he considered thinking and being to be not interchangeable, but to remain absolutely in antithesis.
The reason for his error is that he did not understand man, though his philosophy placed obvious emphasis upon man. He felt that we can take philosophy from the skies and pull it down to earth, that we can promote materialism while suppressing idealism, as long as man is reduced to perceptual being. This is incorrect because what history records is man's perceptual activities, i.e., his material activities, instead of his perceptual being. Without such activities, man will never evolve from the animal world to become the universal object or the subject of cognition. Certainly, Feuerbach notes that the ability to think does not cover all the differences between man and animals, that the essence of man as a whole is different from that of animals. But is this the perceptual essence? If it is, what is the difference of man from other animals? His answer is that man is not a particular substance like animals, but a universal one, that is, a free substance, not restricted by any specific object. The sense organs of animals, for instance, are subject to the restriction of certain objects, whereas man's sense organs are not, but are free organic functions. If an organic function goes beyond the restriction of particularity and the bond of necessity, it will achieve independence and an overwhelming theoretical significance. A universal organic function is intellect, and universal perceptiveness is spirituality. Feuerbach does not ask himself why this freedom is obtainable for human sense organs, nor can he answer that question.
But here we come to the crux of the issue. Marx answered the question that Feuerbach missed. Perceptual activities (activities of material production) enable human sense organs to be free by exceeding what the physical body needs directly. That is to say, in such perceptual activities the difference can be found between man and animals. Feuerbach's perception, Marx remarked in his critique, is abstract, though he gives much stress to it. But the being of man, including his relationship with nature, must not be separated from his productive activities. This is the discovery of historical materialism. Thereupon the real unity of ontology and epistemology is realized on the solid ground of materialistic theory.
Now, I will not describe Marx's theory on the unity of ontology and epistemology. Instead, I will ask a question: what conclusion shall we come to from the overall history of the development of metaphysics, anti-metaphysics and then the intermingling of the two? History is an endless source of treasures from which man can draw a great deal for his own benefit. I will be bold enough to single out four primary points:
1. The fundamental contradiction of philosophy finds its expression in the relationship of two substances at the metaphysical stage; in the relationship of physical body and spirit or of body and mind at the anti-metaphysical stage; and in the relationship of thinking and being at the stage of the intermingling of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. This is what we usually refer to as the cause of the fundamental issue of philosophy and the theoretical content of its historical development.
2. The thinking-being relationship is a problem concerned not only with man and nature, but also with the relationship between men. Both are abstract, as are the separation of history from nature or of nature from history.
3. The central issue of the thinking-being relationship is the unity of ontology and epistemology. Thinking deals with the general, but the general at issue is not what metaphysicians understand as independent being, nor is it the anti-metaphysical non-being. The general in thought is something grasped during cognition and it is objective. It is a great error to place objectivity in absolute opposition to subjective activity.
4. Dialectics is the theory and method of the unity of thinking and being.
Objectively the individual contains the general; subjectively the general contains the
individual. The two sides achieve a contradictory unity (infinite instead of finite) in
the dynamic historical activities of the subject.
Peking University
Beijing, People's Republic of China
1. Aristotle I (Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 8; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1984), p. 503.
2. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 94.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., p. 93.
5. Ibid., p. 94.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Plato, (Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 7, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1984), p. 86.
8. Ibid., Vol. 8, Aristotle I.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII, ch. XXVI, para. 7.
10. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, chap. 3, last para.
11. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambrdige: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), vol. I, p. 96.
12. The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, Edwin A. Burtt, ed. (New York: The Modern Library, 1939), p. 10.
13. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I, p. 86.
14. Ten Great Works of Philosophy (New York: Mentor, 1969), p. 299.
15. Ibid., p. 273.
16. Ibid., p. XXXIII.