The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
examined what in general a conception is. But this very necessary investigation has unfortunately been also neglected, and has contributed much to the irremediable confusion of intuitive and abstract knowledge which I shall soon refer to.
The same want of adequate reflection with which he passed over the questions: what is perception? what is reflection? what is conception? what is reason ? what is understanding ? allowed him to pass over the following investigations, which were just as inevitably necessary : what is it that I call the object, which I distinguish from the idea ? what is existence ? what is object? what is subject? what is truth, illusion, error?
But he follows his logical schema and his symmetry without reflecting or looking about him. The table of judgments ought to, and must, be the key to all wisdom.
I have given it above as the chief merit of Kant that he distinguished the phenomenon from the thing in itself, explained the whole visible world as phenomenon, and therefore denied all validity to its laws beyond the phenomenon.
It is certainly remarkable that he did not deduce this merely relative existence of the phenomenon from the simple undeniable truth which lay so near him, "No object without a subject" in order thus at the very root to show that the object, because it always exists merely in relation to a subject, is dependent upon it, conditioned by it, and therefore conditioned as mere phenomenon, which does not exist in itself nor unconditioned.
Berkeley, to whose merits Kant did not do justice, had already made this important principle the foundation-stone of his philosophy, and thereby established an immortal reputation. Yet he himself did not draw the proper conclusions from this principle, and so he was both misunderstood and insufficiently attended to.
In my first edition I explained Kant's avoidance of this Berkeleian principle as arising from an evident shrinkCRITICISMp. 29 ing from decided idealism ; while, on the other hand, I found idealism distinctly expressed in many passages of the " Critique of Pure Eeason," and accordingly I charged Kant with contradicting himself. And this charge was well founded, if, as was then my case, one only knew the " Critique of Pure Eeason " in the second or any of the five subsequent editions printed from it.
But when later I read Kant's great work in the first edition, which is already so rare, I saw, to my great pleasure, all these contradictions disappear, and found that although Kant does not use the formula, " No object without a subject," he yet explains, with just as much decision as Berkeley and I do, the outer world lying before us in space and time as the mere idea of the .subject that knows it.
Therefore, for example, he says there without reserve (p. 383) : " If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must disappear, for it is nothing but a phenomenon in the sensibility of our subject, and a class of its ideas.
But the whole passage from p. 348-392, in which Kant expounded his pronounced idealism with peculiar beauty and clearness, was suppressed by him in the second edition, and instead of it a number of remarks controverting it were introduced.
In this way then the text of the " Critique of Pure Reason," as it has circulated from the year 1787 to the year 1838, was disfigured and spoilt, and it became a self-contradictory book, the sense of which could not therefore be thoroughly clear and comprehensible to any one.
The particulars about this, and also my conjectures as to the reasons and the weaknesses which may have influenced Kant so to disfigure his immortal work, I have given in a letter to Professor Eosenkranz, and he has quoted the principal passage of it in his preface to the second volume of the edition of Kant's collected works edited by him, to which I therefore refer.
In consequence of my representations, Professor Eosenkranz was induced in the year 1838 to restore the " Critique of Pure Eeason " to its original form, for in the second volume referred to
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