Perhaps someone can help me with S’s speaking of the noumenal world....or anything noumenal....cuz I can’t find it, at least in WWR, or FPSR.
All that aside, S pats Kant on the back, then criticizes his foremost “error”, by committing the exact same kind:
“....That the will which we find within us does not proceed, as philosophy has hitherto assumed, first from knowledge, and indeed is a mere modification of it, thus something secondary, derived, and, like knowledge itself, conditioned by the brain; but that it is the prius of knowledge, the kernel of our nature, and that original force itself which forms and sustains the animal body, in that it carries out both its unconscious and its conscious functions;—this is the first step in the fundamental knowledge of my metaphysics.....
(WW & I, 3, XXIII, 1844, in Haldane/Kemp, 1889)
.....That, further, it is that same will which in the plant forms the bud in order to develop the leaf and the flower out of it; nay, that the regular form of the crystal is only the trace which its momentary effort has left behind, and that in general, as the true and only αυτοματον, in the proper sense of the word, it lies at the foundation of all the forces of unorganised nature, plays, acts, in all their multifarious phenomena, imparts power to their laws, and even in the crudest mass manifests itself as gravity;—this insight is the second step in that fundamental knowledge, and is brought about by further reflection....
(Ibid)
....For it is the tracing back of that which is quite inaccessible to our immediate knowledge, and therefore in its essence foreign and unknown to us, which we denote by the words force of nature, to that which is known to us most accurately and intimately, but which is yet only accessible to us in our own being and directly, and must therefore be carried over from this to other phenomena. It is the insight that what is inward and original in all the changes and movements of bodies, however various they may be, is in its nature identical; that yet we have only one opportunity of getting to know it more closely and directly, and that is in the movements of our own body. In consequence of this knowledge we must call it
will. It is the insight that that which acts and strives in nature, and exhibits itself in ever more perfect phenomena, when it has worked itself up so far that the light of knowledge falls directly upon it, i.e., when it has attained to the state of self-consciousness—exists as that will, which is what is most intimately known to us, and therefore cannot be further explained by anything else, but rather affords the explanation of all other things. It is accordingly the
thing in itself so far as this can ever be reached by knowledge. Consequently it is that which must express itself in some way in everything in the world, for it is the inner nature of the world and the kernel of all phenomena....
(Ibid)
.....The unity of that will, here referred to, which lies beyond the phenomenon, and in which we have recognised the inner nature of the phenomenal world, is a metaphysical unity, and consequently transcends the knowledge of it, i.e., does not depend upon the functions of our intellect, and therefore can not really be comprehended by it. Hence it arises that it opens to the consideration an abyss so profound that it admits of no thoroughly clear and systematically connected insight, but grants us only isolated glances, which enable us to recognise this unity in this and that relation of things, now in the subjective, now in the objective sphere, whereby, however, new problems are again raised, all of which I will not engage to solve, but rather appeal here to the words
est quadam prodire tenus**, more concerned to set up nothing false or arbitrarily invented than to give a thorough account of all;—at the risk of giving here only a fragmentary exposition.
** “it is something to proceed thus far, if it be not permitted to go farther” (Horace)
(ibid XXV)
So....Kant says there is that knowledge unavailable to us simply because our particular intelligence is not equipped for it, to which S says he merely didn’t examine properly why such should be the case. S then goes about substituting “force of nature”, or, “unity of will”, or simply “will”, which is the most known to us of all things, for the
ding an sich. But, alas....even that “unity of will”, which is a facile euphemism for “will-in-itself”, is that of which human knowledge has no immediate access, but at the same time, “will” is that of which each otherwise rational human intellect, has full and complete access, albeit on an individual basis. Just as things are that which are known as opposed to things-in themselves which are not, so too is will that which is accessible, but will as force of nature, is not. All that really happened here is effectively reducible to a “recourse to pitiful sophisms” (CPR, A58).
There may be a force of nature by which “...the plant forms the bud in order to develop the leaf and the flower out of it...”, but by what warrant should that force be derived from the conception....as transcendental as it must be....of the human will?
S comments that K’s thesis is a form of negative knowledge, in that K grounds his theory on what knowledge is not, or, on how knowledge illegitimately acquired is no knowledge at all. S then stipulates that his own metaphysics, taken as an improvement on K’s insofar as the thing-in-itself can be immediately known to us when conceived as “will”....but ultimately declines to forward a positive knowledge with respect to it, by invoking Horace.
Over the years, I’ve come to favor the notion that if S hadn’t begun by heaping praise on Kant by the bucketful, thereby putting himself in the limelight of a paradigm shift, hadn’t deemed himself a proper German transcendental idealist, thereby conforming to the philosophical standard of his time and place, and at the same time hadn’t ridiculed his peers mercilessly....especially Hegel and somewhat less-so Fitche.....his metaphysics wouldn’t have however much traction subsequently attributed to it. It seems rather obvious that if WWR preceded CPR, or, which is the same thing, if proper human intellect had been attributed necessarily to an external ontological domain rather than an internal epistemological one.....it may not have even got off the scholastic ground.
Thus it is, contra
S is not so much a second-rate philosopher as a coattail rider, and, in affirmation with
, a poor critic of Kant.
All that, without ever asking...... how in the HELL is it possible to “trace back” from the unknowable, re: a necessary force of nature, to the most known, re: freedom as ground of the human will? How S accomplished that, is even more suspect than the exchange of the Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself (an altogether empirical something), to a Schopenhauer-ian knowable metaphysical condition (an altogether transcendental something). This isn’t just apples and oranges; it’s more like apples and dump trucks.
Now...back to the noumenal world: what about it?