transcendent subject. Transcendental subject Yaroslav Anatolievich Slinin
In favor of the materialistic hypothesis that the spirit of a person is dependent on the substance of his body in general and his brain in particular, speaks the same number of phenomena as in favor of the opposite, spiritualistic hypothesis, which makes the body of a person dependent on his spirit. It follows from this that there is no causal relationship at all between the phenomena of the bodily and spiritual life of a person (neither the phenomena of the life of his body are determined by the phenomena of the life of his spirit, nor vice versa), that between them there is only a parallel; and since this is possible only when these phenomena are the product of the activity of one common cause, the adherents of dualism would have to adhere to the Leibnizian pre-established harmony.
The dualism of body and spirit is only one of the types of dualism of matter and forces, the resolution of which is primarily the task of the philosophy of natural science, and then of transcendental psychology. If the dualism of matter and force is to be resolved, its cause must lie not in the nature of things, but in the nature of our soul. Matter and force taken separately, the first in the sense of dead matter, and the second in the sense of immaterial force, are empty abstractions of the human mind, which is why they never occur as such in the realm of experience. Their seeming dualism is reduced in the closest way to the dualism of his ability to perceive, generated by the psychophysical threshold of human consciousness, to which of the two sides of the material world, force or material, sides that, taken by themselves, objectively always exist together and which can exist separately only in our thinking, it is perceived by them. From this it follows that each of the forces acting on us must have something corresponding to it on the material side of the world of things, but not perceived by our senses, that is, that not everything that is not perceived by our senses is immaterial. Only beings whose threshold of consciousness is not transgressed by all the forces acting on them, which some of them perceive sensually, while others only intellect, and can produce a mental separation of force from matter, can create abstractions that are impossible for beings (whether they be or not), which they themselves are not separated by the threshold of consciousness, that is, they perceive all the forces acting on them. Before beings of the latter kind, the thoughts directed to them must materialize and appear, even if only in the form of hallucinations, while beings who, like us, have a threshold of consciousness, depending on the intensity of the forces acting on them, either perceive only tangible matter, or do not perceive Nothing.
However, it seems that in the field of the most exact natural science, preparatory work is being done for the appearance of monism in it. Apparently, in the writings of Crookes and Jaeger* there are already the beginnings of such physics and chemistry, in which force and matter will not be enemies doomed for some reason to coexist in the world of things, but only the final steps the same stairs. Once we resolve the dualism of force and matter, any metaphysics, if viewed from the point of view of another, not our, ability of perception, will have to turn into physics, and the question of whether a person can look into the metaphysical essence of things will receive an affirmative answer if it turns out that the threshold of his consciousness is capable of moving. The latter happens when a person is in somnambulism, which is why in this state he perceives sensually what he does not perceive in his other states, for example, the streams of odic light accompanying the magnetic passes. But we cannot determine the limits to which the faculty of human perception can extend; only one thing can be said, namely: if all matter is a visible force, and all force an invisible matter, then the decision of the question of whether a given person can read the thoughts of an outsider (as Cumberland did recently in Vienna, who was looked upon as miracle all, who do not know that the ability he discovers is an almost normal property of all somnambulists) or cannot feel even his strongest blows, is exclusively dependent on the position of the threshold of his consciousness.
* Crookes. Die Strahlende Materie. Leipzig, 1882. - Jaeger. Die Neuralanalysis. (Entdeckung der Seele. II). Leipzig, 1884.
This means that when materialists look at matter from the point of view of human feelings, identifying the real and the sensible, this is pure arbitrariness on their part. With exactly the same right, one could look at it from the point of view of such feelings that one would have to recognize neither gaseous nor liquid matter and assert that only objects that can punch a hole in the head are material.
In order for matter to be perceived by our senses, a very high degree of accumulation of its particles is necessary for this. The more an object reveals its material side to us, like, for example, a piece of granite, the more its power side disappears for us, and then we are talking about dead matter. And vice versa, the more the power side of an object appears before us, as is the case when we perceive a thought, the more its material side disappears for us, and then we are talking about non-material power. But this ideal bifurcation of force and substance, spirit and body, cannot by any means be considered real and one cannot look at the two sides of the one as two independent persons.
The presence of a person in a normal state is determined by the fact that the threshold of his consciousness is in the normal position, which also determines the normal place - the passage of the boundary line between force and matter. And since any movement of this threshold for him is accompanied by a movement for him and this boundary line, then the resolution of the dualism that exists for us between force and matter should be expected from a special section of transcendental psychology about the opposition between spirit and body representing a particular form of this dualism, and it will follow. as soon as it is proved that our transcendental subject can be looked upon as the common cause of the appearance of both our body and our spirit. In the process of my thinking, my self-consciousness perceives its power side; but if this process could be observed by an outsider to me, he would perceive only the molecular changes taking place in my brain, he would see only the material side of this process. Here, despite the objective inseparability of both sides of the process, its internal observer would take the side of spiritualism and the negation of its material side, while the external observer would take the side of materialism and the negation of its power side.
Since the shifting of the threshold of his consciousness that occurs in a person during his stay in somnambulistic states is accompanied not only by new effects of things on him, but also by new reactions to these effects, then in these states his mental subject expands. From this follows the conclusion that our self-consciousness contains not our entire subject, but only ours immersed in the phenomenal world. I; it contains our mental reactions, evoked in us only by the influence of things sensuously perceived by us, while our abilities, corresponding to the influences of other things remaining under the threshold of our consciousness, are usually in a state hidden from us. This means that we must distinguish from the content of our sensuous self-consciousness, from our sensuous I, our transcendental subject. But although by assuming the existence of this subject, which lies at the basis of all our sensuous appearance, we indisputably resolve the dualism that exists between our organism and our organically mediated consciousness, this immediately creates another, even deeper, dualism: a dualism between our transcendental being, with on the one hand, and the organic form of the manifestation of our subject, including our sensory consciousness, on the other. Thus, what is happening here is, as it were, a transformation of a planimetric problem into a stereometric one, and therefore we must first of all clarify this new dualism for ourselves, and then solve it monistically.
Thus, transcendental psychology needs to direct its research mainly to our transcendental consciousness, which lies outside our normal consciousness, which can be observed due to the ability of our threshold of consciousness to change its position in certain exceptional states. Since the phenomenon of the latter kind usually sets in with the weakening of our sensory consciousness, which occurs during our stay in sleep and in other states related to it, our sleep, or, rather, the dream that takes place in us in it, represents the gates of that dark kingdom, in which we will acquire our metaphysical root.
We have already noticed before that one of the most ordinary phenomena of our life in a dream leads to these gates of every researcher. Namely. Since every dialogue we have in a dream is obviously a monologue dramatized as a result of the bifurcation of our dreaming subject, it is logically conceivable and psychologically possible that our subject breaks up into two faces, of which only one is actually accessible to our self-consciousness. Thus, it is enough to refer to this everyday phenomenon of human life in order to immediately prove that the bifurcation of its subject into faces can serve as a metaphysical formula for its solution.
If we make a cursory review of the previous one (these are the chapters of our study: "The Metaphysical Meaning of Dreams", "The Transcendental Measure of Time", "The Dream is a Doctor", "Memory", etc.), then it is found with sufficient clarity that it is nothing more than as proof of the existence of our transcendental subject. And the results obtained by us are enough to lay the foundation of the system, the construction of which is the goal of our present work.
If in reality there is no dualism between force and matter, then our transcendental subject cannot be a purely spiritual being, and the transcendental world a purely immaterial world. This means that between this being and this world there can be no purely spiritual relationship; between them there exists a physical-psychic relation that is transcendental for us.
Just as our sensual organism corresponds to the laws of physics known to us, our transcendental subject corresponds to those law-like properties of things that are transcendental for us and which can be perceived by us only by expanding the boundaries of our sensibility by moving the threshold of our consciousness, whether it is done thanks to somnambulism or thanks to the process of biological development, which contributes to the fact that our supersensible sooner or later acquires sensual evidence for us, and our transcendental abilities sooner or later become our normal property.
Only in Lately, which must be attributed to the fact that we have natural scientists who consider it superfluous to study Kant, natural scientists, at the initiative of one famous colleague of theirs, began to talk about the limits of natural science. Kant proved that there are no limits, but limits of natural science, and that the difference between these two concepts is essential and very important. He says: “As long as the cognition of the mind remains homogeneous, which in modern language means: as long as the threshold of our consciousness remains in a normal position, it is impossible to imagine definite boundaries for it. And indeed, in mathematics and natural science, the human mind recognizes limits, but not boundaries. , that is, he only recognizes that here, outside of him, there is something that he can never achieve, and not that he himself, in his internal process, ends somewhere.Although the expansion of mathematical knowledge and the possibility of new discoveries in mathematics are endless, just as the process of discovery and unification by our minds of the new properties of nature, its new forces and laws is endless, but it is impossible not to see the limits here, since mathematics deals only with phenomena, and what , like the concepts of metaphysics and ethics, cannot be an object of sensory perception, is completely outside its field and can never be reached by it" .*
*Kant. Prolegomena. §57.
Thus, the limits of natural science are set for us by the very nature of our cognitive organ, by the nature of our feelings and brain, and are transgressed only to the extent that the threshold of our consciousness is mobile. The boundaries of natural science are transgressed by us as the historical development of the sciences, in which the knowledge of nature remains homogeneous: they are transgressed by us historically; its limits, if we do not take into account our somnambulistic states, can be transgressed by us only by a corresponding shifting of the threshold of our consciousness, which can be produced only in us by our biological development: they are transgressed by us only biologically. Through somnambulism the limits are transgressed by the human individual, through biological development by humanity; but at the basis of both processes lies the displacement of the threshold of our consciousness. In somnambulism, there is an individual immersion of a person into that very transcendental world, which should be revealed to all mankind after its consciousness has completed everything necessary for that path of biological development. Our biological development consists in our gradual adaptation to the world of things, which is now still transcendental for us; in the process of this adaptation, there is an approximation of our consciousness to the consciousness of beings belonging to this world. But man, as a subject, is in him even now, and therefore the biological development of his consciousness can be accomplished only by borrowing consciousness from his transcendental subject. The sixth sense that is able to appear in a person will be only that sense that he, as a transcendental being, already possesses; future man will be adapted to the very world in which modern man lives only with the transcendental part of his being. Both our somnambulism and our biological development bring over the threshold of our consciousness our irritations that were previously below it. Therefore, the abilities of somnambulists are secret allusions not only to the nature of our subject and the nature of the future form of organic life on earth, but also, insofar as this form can already be realized somewhere not on earth, to the nature of the inhabitants of the worlds.
If man biologically adapts himself to that same transcendental world to which he, as a subject, already belongs even now, and if the identity of these two worlds already follows from the fact that this subject represents the core and bearer of the form of his earthly existence, then this core, being a monistic producer and his bodily discovery and his earthly consciousness, should determine both organically and spiritually the nature of the future existence of man, constantly leading him into the depths of the transcendental. However, on the way to the acceptance of such a view by people there is an obstacle, consisting in their tendency to look at every supersensible existence as immaterial, and at every material existence as grossly material; but this obstacle will immediately disappear as soon as we recognize that the dualism of force and matter does not exist in itself, but only for our perception. If force and matter are only two undivided sides of the one, then we cannot consider our transcendental subject to be completely non-material, but we must attribute to it some materiality, either understanding by matter, for example, the fourth state of bodies, or imagining an organism at the extreme rung of the biological ladder of the future , whose mode of existence will be similar to the current mode of existence of our transcendental subject. If, having taken this point of view, we look at the process of the successive development of the kingdoms of nature, we will see that in it, from stone to man, there is a gradual refinement of matter, from which the conclusion follows logically that our posthumous existence, similar to the present existence of our transcendental subject, cannot be diametrically opposed to our earthly existence. We must consider the difference between our states in life and after death as insignificant as possible, since a logically permissible existence differs little from the present. In addition, about the pure spirit, as Kant already developed at the beginning of his work "Dreams of the Spiritualist", we cannot form any concept for ourselves: immortality becomes understandable only after rejecting any thought about the dualism of force and matter, spirit and body.
So, if we renounce the dualism of force and matter, then our posthumous existence will cease to be completely incomprehensible to us, since it will be similar to our present transcendental existence and will come even closer to our earthly existence, if we take into account the fact that those taking place in it it is not for the first time that our faculties are acquired by us after our death, that we possess them unconsciously even now, and that our somnambulistic state represents a foretaste of our posthumous existence. Our death cannot produce a fundamental change in our psychic being, since this would be contrary to the gradualness we observe in all nature; it can only by removing the obstacle to the flowering of our abilities that are in us and now in a latent state, cause them to flourish in us. But our bodily organism, its consciousness, serves as such an obstacle: our body does not favor, but hinders the manifestation of our somnambulistic abilities, since their activity in us can manifest itself only if our sensuality is weakened. Our body is an unnecessary ballast both for the bearer of our transcendental abilities and for our future form of life. Both this carrier and this form we can attribute only such materiality that in this case the matter turns for our gross feelings into pure force. Of course, it is impossible to give grounds for the unconditional necessity of such an idea of the future man. If we assume that the process of biological development on earth must end with a process of historical development, for example, the process of the unceasing development of the human brain, then in this case it is possible to combine transcendental psychology and Darwinism in Schelling's doctrine of immortality, a doctrine based on the idea that that in the life of mankind, taken in its entirety, there is a successive change of three states, namely: the first stage human life there is a real, one-sided, bodily life of a person; the second is also a one-sided, spiritual way of its existence; the third life, which combines both previous ones.* Thus, according to Schelling's teaching, with the onset of the last period of human life, our transcendental abilities should become the normal property of the inhabitants of the whole world.
*Beckers. Die Unsterblichkeitslehre Schellings. 56-58.
Passing from our transcendental subject to our transcendental world, we must also here assume the smallest possible difference between this world of ours and our sensible world; our transcendental world cannot differ from our sensible world toto genere, and it must be material in its own way. So, if we want to be real monists and renounce the dualism of force and matter, we must certainly agree with the following words of Schelling: "Not ours, the spiritual world must be as material in its own way as our material world is spiritual in its own way." ** But a clearer conception of this world is impossible for us, since for such a conception of it we would need to have the corresponding senses. We cannot in any way abandon the traditional idea of our transcendental world as a realm of spirits, spatially separated from our sensory world, therefore, as soon as the failure of this idea has been proven with our own eyes modern science, we, together with water, threw out the child from the overnight stays and became materialists. But just as our transcendental subject resides in ourselves and governs the unconscious life of our soul, so our transcendental world resides in our sensible world. Our other world represents a continuation of our world of this world, but a continuation lying beyond the threshold of our consciousness. Man, as a biological form, is adapted only to his this-worldly world; his other world is hidden from his cognitive organ, just as the experimentally proven extensions of the solar spectrum are hidden from his eye, whose adaptation has not extended beyond the colors of the rainbow. We must transfer our existing concept of the threshold of our consciousness from our individual senses to our entire organism and look at the latter as the limit of our entire knowledge. Just as, for example, in an oyster its organism serves as a threshold separating it from the greater part of the sensuously perceived world, in man the organism serves as a threshold separating him from the world transcendent to him. The following can be said about the spatial otherworldliness of our transcendental world: since, taking into account the teachings of Kant and Darwin, we must look at changes in space as forms of our knowledge acquired by us through our biological development, it can be assumed that our transcendental world can extend and into the fourth dimension. If our organism represents a barrier between us and reality, then eo ipso this barrier is not only our individual feelings, but also their place of concentration - our brain together with its forms of cognition: space and time. As for the hypothesis of the fourth dimension itself, various grounds are given in favor of it: Kant - philosophical, Gauss and Riemann - mathematical, Zellner - cosmological; being under such patronage, it does not need the approval of "enlightened" people.
* Schellings. Werke. A.IX. 94.
The question of how far the threshold of our consciousness hides reality from us should apply not only to the external world, but also to the internal one. At the same time, it turns out that this threshold separates us both from our world, which is transcendental for us, and from our subject, which is transcendental for us. Kant is quite clear about this. As for the content of our self-consciousness, as we shall see later, he suggested a sharp difference between our subject and our face. Concerning the content of our consciousness, he says the following: “Since it cannot be said that something is part of a whole, with the remaining parts of which it is not in any connection (for otherwise there would be no difference between the real unity and the imaginary unity), the world is really one whole, then a being that is not connected with any thing in the whole world cannot belong to this world except in our thought, that is, it cannot be a part of it. and if they are in mutual relation to each other, a completely special whole, a completely separate world is formed from them.Therefore, people are wrong who preach from philosophical pulpits that from a metaphysical point of view, only one world can exist ... The reason for such a delusion , undoubtedly, lies in the fact that, reasoning in this way, they do not pay strict attention to the definition of the world.For according to the definition of the world, only that belongs to it it is in real connection with the rest of its parts, while proving that it is one, they forget about it and rank everything that exists in general as one and the same world. ”* With these words of Kant, the need to admit the extension of our transcendental subject is eliminated.
*Kant. Von der wahren Schatzung der Lebendigen Krafte §8.
Since now this other world, to which man as a sensible being has nothing to do, but to which he belongs as a subject, must also be conceivable material in its own way, and since the same applies to the human subject, transcendental-psychological Man's faculties are stripped of their cloak of miraculousness and become the same lawful faculties as are his other faculties. The lawful forces that rule over our supersensible world serve at the same time as the forces with the help of which our subject orients himself and acts in it. This means that this world and the relation that exists between it and our subject must also be subject to the rule of the law of causality, if we do not limit the concept of cause to the causes operating in our sensible world. On the application of the scale of natural laws known to us to the transcendental world for us, the stereotypical phrase of the so-called enlightened people is based that the phenomena of somnambulism contradict the laws of nature. They contradict only the laws of our sensual half of the world; taken by themselves, they are as regular as the fall of a stone. What is miraculous for a half-hearted worldview can be lawful for a whole worldview, which is why it is not surprising that the clairvoyance of somnambulists seems to "enlightened" journalists the same miracle as, for example, telegraphy seems to a savage. Already the father of the Church, Augustine, defined the miracle with the words that “the miracle is not in conflict with nature, but with what we know about nature.”*
*Augustinus. Decivitate Dei. XXI. 8.
Armed with the results obtained, we can gradually move along the path of understanding the existing relationship between this world and our other worlds and along the path of preparing the ground for unraveling death, this sphinx standing at the boundary of two worlds. However, now it is necessary to make a digression.
The inner self-contemplation of somnambulists could not be critical if a person did not have the scale of comparison, that is, if he did not have an idea of \u200b\u200bthe scheme of the normal structure of his body; their predictions regarding the course of their illnesses would be impossible without their intuitive knowledge of the laws of the inner life; their medical self-prescriptions would have no meaning if they did not come from his subject, who critically contemplates his organism and knows the laws of the development of its diseases. But the last three phenomena would be impossible in turn, if the transcendental subject of man were not in him and the organizing principle. But this by no means replaces the Darwinian factors of development with a metaphysical principle; the importance of these factors and their activities is by no means diminished by the fact that they are means to the achievement of our organizing principle of its goals. This principle must comply with the laws of the matter on which it has to influence, and therefore the discovery itself outside of its activity must also be lawful.
Thus, with the recognition of the existence of a transcendental subject in us, two teachings, banished by modern natural science, are resurrected: the teaching of the goal and the teaching of the vital force; but they are resurrected in a completely new form. I cannot look at a long-term dispute about the one and the other otherwise than as an idle verbiage: it is known that various ideas are combined with any concept; expediency and vitality can be taken in such a sense that they become completely invulnerable to their opponents; therefore it is necessary to agree on what we wish to understand by them.
It is completely illogical to look at the lawfulness of material phenomena as a denial of expediency. The negation of the latter will be chaos, and not lawfulness, which is expediency, and represents it the more perfect, the more perfect the mechanism (the better the clock mechanism, the more expedient and effective it is). The same must be said about the vital force. It does not abolish the laws of organic matter. Materialists think that by decomposing the life force into its factors, they destroy that very force. But the number, for example, 12 continues to exist, despite the existence of evidence that it is obtained by adding the numbers 4, 5 and 3. The organism consists of sensible substances, and its activity is composed of the activities of material forces; but these forces act in the organic realm in such a way that as a result of the combined action of these mechanical forces acting separately, the expedient activity of their product is obtained. If there were no purposively acting principle in organisms, then chaos would reign eternally in them, and even if nature could overcome it by its mechanical activity, then it would inevitably follow the path exactly opposite to the strengthening of organization. Let us first hear what one of the naturalists has to say about this.
Here are the words of Professor Barnar: “If we imagine that all the substances of which the globe is composed are in elemental form, then, although it is possible that during the first action of affinity many weak compounds are formed from them, it is also certain that that these connections will have to be replaced by more and more strong, until everything is combined into such forms that will have an absolute maximum stability, unless this process is stopped by the hardening of the masses, making further movement impossible. If we now turn to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we will see that a process is taking place here, completely opposite indicated, that is, that with an increase in the level of organic development, the more stable compounds formed where the type of life reaches its highest development are generally much less stable than plant compounds. The presence of the vital principle in organic bodies makes it possible for the physical forces that produce changes in them to act in the same way that they cease to act as soon as it leaves them.
* Barnard. Fortschritte der Wissenschaften. Ubersetzung von Kloden.
When we begin to analyze the changes taking place in the organism, we first come across physical and chemical substances and forces. Not only is there no reason to put life force in the place of these forces, but there is even no reason to look at it as a force equal to them, correlating with them in its activity. Here the natural scientists are quite right, and the word itself should not have a place here. life force. We do not find the vital principle where the forces of nature are at work; in order to meet it, one must penetrate deeper, one must penetrate where the activity of these forces fades into the background, obeying the activity of the vital principle and becoming like the action of gravity, which obeys the activity of the architect who draws the vault, and not correlated with it. True, such a vault consists of lime, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, etc., but this does not mean that the vault arises due to their activity.
So, in the inorganic realm, there is a striving for stability, while in the organic, in spite of the presence in it of the same substances and forces, there is a striving for change, differentiation, and strengthening of organization. Therefore, in the organic kingdom there must necessarily exist a principle that binds these forces, uses them and subordinates them to itself, there must exist a vital principle standing behind them, and not a vital force acting in conjunction with them. An indirect proof of the existence of the vital principle lies in the fact that the natural-scientific solution of the problem of life becomes more and more difficult with the passage of time, but the matter is considered completed only by materialists who accept the condition of the possibility of the emergence of life as the cause of this occurrence. The direct proof of the existence of the vital principle lies in the fact that where it departs from substances and forces, organic formations cease. If in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature there were the same substances and forces, but there were not some -plus on the side of the first, then organic parts would not always be formed only in organisms; at least in the form of occasional deformities, finger-like branches might grow on the trees, and eyes and ears would appear on plants in general.
Consequently, the vital principle must be sought not in the processes taking place in nature, but outside of them; it must be sought in our transcendental world. Such a conclusion is inevitable, and here is why. Organisms can be looked at from two points of view: the causal, or the point of view of the natural scientist, and the theological, or the point of view of the philosopher, and from the latter, all the more so since the Darwinian factors of development can bring to the discovery only features that are most suitable for given conditions. That this antinomy of the understanding, this duality in the judgment of organized beings, actually takes place, was proved by Kant,* and his proofs will never lose their force, because they are proofs of logic itself. But the antinomies find their solution only in the region that lies outside the domain containing them (planimetric antinomies are resolved only stereometrically). If now, in the organic realm, the mechanical point of view is as inevitable as the theological one, and, apparently, each of them abolishes the other, then the principle that unites both views must be sought in a region invisible from both points of view, and therefore located outside the nature we imagine, but nevertheless underlying it. This is how it happened that while the search was on for a principle in which both the aforementioned views, which are alien to each other, would flow, Kant, who, instead of preaching subjective logic, delved into the investigation of the nature of reason itself, came to the following conclusion: "The general principle of the mechanical and theological views is supersensible which must be put at the foundation of nature as a phenomenon."**
*Kant. Kritik der Urteilskraft. §§63-65.
This means that our transcendental subject serves as the vital principle in us. Our above-mentioned transcendental abilities are revealed in us not due to our possession of a sensible organism, but in spite of it: from any monistic point of view, they are not generated by this organism, but on the contrary: the latter, together with its sensual apparatus, is the product of the activity of our transcendental subject, which forms according to the laws of matter our body and controlling its functions. Being an organizing principle in us, this subject is a priori, primary in relation to our organism, as a result of which the form of our earthly manifestation must necessarily be only a transient form of its existence.
Only now can we determine the meaning of our death for our transcendental subject; he needs our sensory organism in order to act and know in the phenomenal world in the same way that we act and know, and not in order to act and know in general. Feelings determine the quality of our consciousness in us, and not its very existence in us, just as colored glasses determine the color of objects seen through them, and not their very vision. Since our transcendental faculties do not depend on our sensory apparatus, even presuppose its passivity, in the event of the disintegration of this apparatus that takes place at the time of our death, our very being must remain inviolable. Death will take from us only our sensual consciousness, but on the other hand, due to the fact that the core of our being belongs to the transcendental world of things, it will bring us the full flowering of the buds found in somnambulism, the blooming of which is prevented by our organism, our transcendental abilities. It was these abilities that the Apostle meant when he said about enlightened people that "they have tasted the powers of the world to come."
*Paulus. Ebraer. VI. 5.
These faculties are obscure only to our sensory consciousness, they are in their infancy only in the human form of the existence of our transcendental individuality and will remain so until this form reaches its biological maturity. Just as the bark falls from a ripened fruit, so with the onset of our death, its earthly form falls from the core of our being and, consequently, that which, through biological development, will be achieved by man only in the distant future, immediately takes place. Therefore, we can say with Schelling: “So, the death of a person should be not so much a disintegration as a purification, the elimination of everything accidental from his being and the preservation of everything essential in him.”*
* Schellings Werke. B. IV, 207. Vgl. A.VII, 474-476.
This means that if Plutarch calls ordinary sleep “the little mystery of death,” then somnambulism can still be called so: just as with the onset of sleep our sensual consciousness goes out in us, but, on the other hand, an inner awakening takes place, with the onset of sleep. at death, our sensual consciousness departs from us, along with which the world ceases to exist as our representation, but our transcendental consciousness and our transcendental world continue to exist.
Natural science itself more and more recognizes the impossibility of explaining our consciousness and our self-consciousness by its principles. There is no way to understand how, from the arrangement of the atoms of our brain and the change in their positions, sensations and a single consciousness arise in us. Even less amenable to explanation of physiology are the phenomena of our transcendental consciousness observed in us during our stay in somnambulism. And since there must be a strict correspondence between the phenomenon and its explanation, since when explaining the phenomenon, attention must be paid to the fact that, on the one hand, the explanation completely embraces the phenomenon explained by it, and on the other hand, does not differ in excessive latitude in relation to it. , then we must look for the reasons for our discovery of somnambulistic abilities not in the area belonging to physiology, but in the transcendental area.
When Plotinus says that there are as many archetypes as there are separate beings,* he is saying that the unconscious in man is his transcendental subject; when he says that our self-knowledge is twofold: our knowledge of our soul and our knowledge of our spirit, and that in the latter case we know ourselves in a completely different way,** then this serves as an admission on his part that our self-consciousness does not exhaust our being; when, finally, he says that our connection with the intelligible by us is possible for us by detaching ours from the world external to us, by self-deepening, but that in such a state we can only stay on earth for a short time, that we cannot stay in it for a long time no ecstatic, *** then he means our somnambulism, which shows that although we can provide our transcendental subject with the conditions for discovering his activity, but this activity itself is not subject to our will, which, on the contrary, it presupposes in us passivity of will and consciousness. At the basis of the name of the soul of a person by the Stoics, which is often used by the Stoics, is the idea that the so-called inspiration comes to us from our transcendental subject. At the same time, when Haman says in one place that “man does not have a mind, but a man has a mind”, but the philosopher on the throne of the Caesars, Marcus Aurelius, constantly defines the existence of our soul in itself, as its communication with the demon located in the bowels of it ,**** then both of them express the conjecture that the impulses of our will and the acts of our representation, emanating from our transcendental region, can enter into our sensory consciousness. Will we take archaea paracelsus, Homo internus van Helmont, homo noumenon, the intelligible subject of Kant, finally, first-I Krause - the general meaning of all these expressions is that the essence of a human being should be understood not in a pantheistic, but in an individualistic sense, that is, in the same way as it is understood in the generally accepted doctrine of the soul. But, on the other hand, all the views that gave birth to these expressions contain something that distinguishes them from this teaching: for the latter, our soul and our I, our subject and our face are identical and form the content of our self-consciousness; for the philosophers mentioned above, our self-consciousness contains only our personal I; our subject is outside our self-consciousness, it is in the area of the unconscious, although by no means the unconscious in itself. Obviously, with such a difference in points of view, completely different, although not excluding, beliefs in afterlife man, views on his life and death.
* Plotin. Enneaden. V, 7.
** Idea. v. 4, 8.
*** Idea. IV. 8, 1. VI. 9, 3, 11.
**** M. Aurelius. Selbstgesprache. II. 13, 17; III. 6, 12, 16; V.27.
It is remarkable that all philosophers who recognized the difference between our subject and our person also recognized the possibility of mystical phenomena in our mental life. They are not denied by the generally accepted doctrine of the soul, but it considers our transcendental being to be transcendent and, consequently, is likened to somnambulists, looking at the communication of the faces of their subject as their communication with their leaders and guardian spirits. But the possibility of mystical manifestations of our mental life is denied by psychologists-physiologists; in their system, which recognizes only our empirical face, but does not recognize our subject, and therefore takes half for the whole, there is no place for these phenomena, which is equivalent to them that there is no place for these phenomena in nature either. Such a conviction, as I have already shown by examples, is generally the stronger and more irresistible, the more ignorant of somnambulistic phenomena the people who have it differ.
Whoever becomes familiar with the field of somnambulism will cease to consider mystical phenomena impossible, since he will be led by facts to the conviction that our soul is richer than our consciousness in representations and that the threshold of this consciousness that hides our soul from our consciousness is capable of moving. He will also understand those phenomena of our spiritual life that are as mystical as, for example, clairvoyance, and from the physiological explanation of which there always remains an inexplicable residue: our will to live, the discovery of genius and conscience in us. These precious manifestations of the life of our spirit flow from the same source from which flow all its generally transcendental phenomena, from the unconscious; but they prove in the most obvious way that Schopenhauer and Hartmann solved only part of the philosophical problem, since both the first, who defined the unconscious as a blind expression of will, and the second, who added to this sign another sign, the ability to represent, were mistaken, understanding the unconscious pantheistically. Our will to live is the affirmative attitude of our transcendental subject to our individual existence, often co-existing with the negative attitude of our earthly consciousness towards it. When genius and conscience are discovered in us, we also have a strengthening of our transcendental consciousness and its preponderance over our earthly consciousness, which often takes, under the influence of our sensual desire and our sensual cognition, a direction completely opposite to our transcendental goals.
Even less able to explain these transcendental mysteries of the human spirit is materialism. When we look at all manifestations of our spirit only as a product of the activity of the blind forces of nature in us, we fall into a contradiction. We fall into a logical contradiction when we are surprised at the genius penetrating into the very essence of things, and call the nature that gave birth to genius blind and senseless. The materialists also fall into a logical contradiction when they are more surprised at Kant's mental powers than at the force of gravity found in the table on which he wrote, when they place the poet above the common man, the nurse above the digger, the saint above the criminal. That is why consistent materialists, both teachers and students, both theoreticians and practitioners, deny ethics and aesthetics. Schuricht, who experiences extremely great comfort from murders and theft, but does not wonder about their permissibility, * however, a person worthy of respect for revealing greater frankness than materialists, who are more afraid than the fire of questions about the recognition of morality, is as consistent as consistent those socialists and anarchists who, with dagger and dynamite in hand, produce practical use the teachings contained in "Force and Matter" deny any bridle imposed on the bestial instincts of people, see no other difference than chemical, between holy water and petroleum, and, when the opportunity presents itself, test the effect of the latter primarily on libraries, art galleries and temples .
*Richard Schuricht. Auszung aus dem Tagebuch eines Materialisten. Hamburg, 1860.
Our whole life represents a continuous struggle between the earthly form of our discovery and our content, our transcendental being. What is beautiful from the point of view of our subject is far from being beautiful from the point of view of our face on him, and remains for him for the time being what grapes were for the fox; highly moral from the point of view of our subject, the actions of people have no value for our phenomenal person, mired in selfishness. Yes, and our life itself, representing, not despite, but because it is full of suffering, a gift precious to our transcendental consciousness, seems to be a vale of sorrow to our earthly consciousness. But we, who participate in the transcendental world of things, must not succumb to the seductions of this veil of Maya, our earthly consciousness; we must humble our earthly will by aesthetic contemplation of nature, moral ennoblement of our lives and look at our earthly existence as a transient form of its discovery corresponding to the interests of our transcendental subject.
I. Kant sets the task of establishing the difference between the objective and subjective elements of knowledge, based on the subject itself and its structure. In the subject, he distinguishes 2 levels: empirical and transcendental. The empirical includes the individual psychological characteristics of a person (sensory experience), the transcendental includes the inherent (attributive) properties of a person. These attributive properties associated with the activity of cognition, with cognitive activity, are properties that form the structure of the “transcendental subject”, which is the supra-individual principle in a person. The objectivity (truth) of knowledge is determined precisely by this structure. According to Kant, philosophy should not study “things in themselves”, but explore cognitive activity, thinking and its limits. In this sense, Kant called his philosophy “transcendental”, and his method “critical”. Thus, he brings to its logical conclusion the orientation of the philosophy of modern times to the theory of knowledge, replacing ontology with epistemology.
Ideas:
That all knowledge begins with experience does not mean that all knowledge arises only from experience;
Cognition is possible through the complementary activities of the senses.
Kant believes in his critical philosophy that it is precisely overcoming the extremes of rationalistic and empirical epistemology that makes it possible to develop a correct idea of the process of cognition.
Kant believes that the immediate objects of perception are due in part to external "single things" that give rise to sensory sensations.
A thing that exists objectively (transcendentally) Kant calls the "thing-in-itself". If the “thing-in-itself” exists outside of knowledge, then the “thing-for-us” is the content of consciousness, the subject.
The phenomenon of "things for us" consists of 2 parts.
Phenomenon - this is the phenomenon of a thing through sensory perception, due to the impact of a thing on the senses; it is how the "thing for us" is experienced.
Noumenon - this is that in the phenomenon of a thing that is opposite to the phenomenon; it is an a priori, experience-independent structure (essence) of a thing, a form of a thing comprehended by the mind, existing a priori. The noumenon is not a sensation and does not depend on the transcendent environment, on the randomness of perception. Noumenon is the content of the transcendental subject, common and natural for all empirical subjects, and in this sense, the aprion form of any possible experience.
Name the questions related to the field of epistemology.
TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECT is one of the basic concepts of post-Kantian metaphysical logic. Introduced into philosophical use by Kant, designates in him the "highest principle" of a priori synthetic judgments . When considering the pure "I" as the "highest foundation" of synthetic knowledge, one could assume that T.S. exists before the object, as many interpreters of critical philosophy did later. However, if we follow Kant himself, this turns out to be meaningless, since in this case it would be impossible to judge the application of the certifying "synthetic unity" as the only function of the subject - consequently, we would know nothing not only about the object, but also about the subject. Hence the awareness of the synthesis of representations in an a priori synthetic judgment, or "the unity of reflection on phenomena", is not just a self-sufficing unity, but "an objective unity of self-consciousness". Such a feature of T.S., its purely logical essence and lack of independence are determined by the fact that, according to Kant, it represents a “highest principle”, an operating logical principle and nothing more. From the position of critical philosophy, T.S. precedes the objective world only in epistemological, or rather logical, respect. The mental activity which puts into practice the pure "I" as the principle that certifies the synthesis is called "understanding" by Kant. This activity is carried out by "reason" using "concepts" that constitute the "unity of pure synthesis." In concepts, the understanding expresses, firstly, the synthesis of diversity in pure contemplation, i.e. unity in one contemplation; secondly, the synthesis of this diversity through the faculty of imagination, in other words, unity in one judgment. Hence, the concept fixes the reliability of synthesis both at the level of sensibility and at the level of thinking. So it is precisely in "reason" that, according to Kant, lies the fullness of the a priori synthesis. As a result, "reason", having the ability to think of an object as a transcendental object, i.e. as an object reliable, and not just true, is T.S. In post-Kantian metaphysical logic, T.S. is no longer interpreted as a logical form of a priori synthetic judgments, but as a form of synthetic inferences (they are always a priori). In Hegel, for example, in his dialectical logic, transcendental consciousness, i.e. The “logical” subject is understood as a form of dialectical sorite (a form of a multi-link definitional specification) that determines its orientation, in other words, as a form of any mental mediation. “Essentially, man is not directly as a spirit, but as a return to himself”, “restless is selfhood” - one of the few statements of Hegel on this score. TS, therefore, is "not some kind of abstraction from human nature", but the very movement of definitional specification towards complete and final individuality, singularity, i.e. activity for the logical processing of all meaningful knowledge. So, in the Hegelian metaphysical logic, such an aspect of "consciousness" as its historicity begins to stand out. This is no longer the "transcendental unity of apperception" as the highest logical form of a priori synthetic judgments, but a kind of spirit that determines the general direction of its synthetic conclusions, i.e. having a special logical history. The logical history of T.S. ("absolute spirit") coincides with natural processes up to isomorphism. Therefore, the system of identity assumes the unity of logic and ontology. The concept of "T.S." was widely used in the post-Hegelian transcendental philosophy, while it was understood as an instance that allows for the logical processing of any empirical content to potentially infinite limits. For example, in Windelband's critical philosophy, "normal consciousness" must compare "representations" with "values" (a special form of a priori synthetic knowledge) in such a way that literally all conceivable "representations" can be involved in this process. In Husserl's phenomenology, "transcendental consciousness", "ego" is able to transform absolutely any objectivity into a stream of phenomena and determine the principles of their flow. In Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, "active-historical consciousness", by definition, absorbs all the specifics of hermeneutic experience. In any model of transcendental philosophy and its modifications, one can find their analogues to the concept of "TS". The only current of transcendentalism that does not accept the logical principle of T.S. in any form is transcendental pragmatics. Its representatives (Apel, Habermas) stopped using metaphysical logic as a general metatheory of philosophical discourse, offering modern methods of informal logic instead, so the need for the concept of "TS", from their point of view, disappears by itself.
A.N. Schuman
The latest philosophical dictionary. Comp. Gritsanov A.A. Minsk, 1998.
This is a broader generalization presented in theories of knowledge that developed in line with the tradition of English empiricism (from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn). Going beyond the limits of the subject-individual is assumed here due to the appeal to practice scientific knowledge, first of all, to methodological procedures for obtaining and substantiating knowledge. The right method and the organized cooperation of scientists are seen as the decisive factor in overcoming the limitations of the individual and ensuring universality, at least for scientific knowledge.
Socio-historical subject
Even broader is the concept of the socio-historical subject. Its essence is as follows. The process and result of cognition, as well as its conditions, stem from socio-historical experience, including both theoretical-cognitive and objective-practical activities. The forms of this activity are given to the individual by the objective environment, the totality of knowledge and skills, in short, the cultural heritage. Awareness of oneself as a subject arises as a result of the introduction of each individual "I" to the cultural and historical heritage of society.
From a socio-historical point of view, the subject of knowledge is something more than a concrete individual. He acts as the bearer of sociality, "the totality of social relations" (K. Marx). The social conditionality of the subject means his involvement in a certain socio-historical community (people, class, etc.), therefore his "exit" beyond the limits of individuality always has a certain socio-historical framework. Knowledge of such a subject is not universally impersonal, but retains a certain emotional coloring and value.
Transcendental subject
The most widespread in European philosophy received a version leaning towards an extremely generalized interpretation of the subject as "pure consciousness". The peculiarity of this tradition is that it prefers to deal not so much with a real empirical person, but with his refined, and even sacralized essence, separated from a person in the form of a kind of pure "contemplative mind" (noys theoretikos). This mind "exists separately" from the body, therefore it "is not subject to anything and is not mixed with anything ... only existing separately, it is what it is ..."
universal subject medieval philosophy becomes God as a universal creative principle. He is recognized as the peak and beginning of any rational creation, for God "is that greatest mind ( ratio), from which all reason. "In modern times, the universality of scientific knowledge continues to be associated with the idea of a universal subject.
Rene Descartes. The epistemology of new European rationalism is characterized by the recognition of an unchanging subject of cognition that exists in the form of pure thinking - ego cogito- and defining the main characteristics of the natural world - an extended substance. Owing to the necessity and universality of "innate ideas," Cartesian "thinking substance" (res cogitans) becomes an autonomous subject of all its cognitive and practical projects and enterprises. The supra-personal character of the subject is manifested here through the personal (individual), but the comprehension of this supra-personal by individual consciousness is possible only due to the presence of a universal (impersonal) content in it. The paradox lies in the fact that the possibility of achieving universally valid knowledge, and hence the possibility of interpersonal communication, is provided here by precisely the impersonal components of human consciousness.
We find a detailed concept of the transcendental subject in the philosophy Immanuel Kant, revealing the internal structure of his organization. According to Kant, the transcendental subject is represented by a complex system of universal and necessary a priori forms of categorical synthesis. Thanks to their versatility human experience, no matter how original it may be in content, it is organized in accordance with universal forms.
Georg Hegel. The most characteristic feature of the Hegelian interpretation of the transcendental subject is the rejection of the Cartesian opposition of subject and object as two independent substances. For Hegel, subject and object are identical. The world process is the process of self-development (or, which is exactly the same for Hegel, self-knowledge) of the Absolute Spirit, which, being the only character of this process, acts as absolute subject, which again has itself as its only object.
An individual person can be a subject only to the extent that he is attached to the absolute subject. In his individual development, he must go through all the stages. education universal spirit. In other words, in order to become a real subject, a person must first educated. He will certainly must master necessary an array of past experience, otherwise he will never become a man in the true sense of the word, because it is precisely "the past existence- the already acquired property of the universal spirit ... constitutes the substance of the individual.
Further development of transcendentalism in the understanding of the subject is associated with phenomenological research Edmund Husserl. In general, sharing the transcendentalist attitudes of Kang, Husserl proposes to radically eliminate all individual psychological, natural-historical and socio-cultural aspects from the concept of the subject. In the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl, subjectivity itself acquires existential significance, therefore it is proposed to consider it as a phenomenon, i.e. scrupulously explore all the variety of ways of its immediate givenness. In the course of such a study, the essence of "pure consciousness" is revealed - transcendental "Ego", underlying all mental acts.
It's transcendental "ego" should not be understood in the sense of some supra-individual essence that precedes any individual consciousness (Nicholas of Cusa) or absorbs it in its absolute universality (Hegel). Thanks to transcendental reflection, it is revealed precisely in individual consciousness as the deep basis of all its intentional acts. transcendental "ego" Husserl's phenomenology is not " pre-I" or "super-I", but rather something "great me", for which there is neither a predetermined world of objects, nor a "Supreme Subject". Husserl's conception of the transcendental "ego" paradoxically opens the way to considering subjectivity as rooted directly in " life world"human existence, centered around the individual empirical "I". In an effort to radically eliminate the last vestiges of psychologism and relativism from the theory of knowledge, Husserl proposes to completely reduce the existence of consciousness to its essence.
Pupil of Husserl Martin Heidegger, on the contrary, focuses attention precisely on existence, being consciousness. He introduces into the center of research such "existential motives" as care, abandonment, death, etc., again reviving the very moments of psychologism and relativism that his teacher sought to get rid of. Heidegger uses Husserl's phenomenological method, not in order to break through to the deepest structures of "pure consciousness", but in order to bring the "living truth" of immediate being (Dasein) out of the hiddenness. His concept of subjectivity does not presuppose either, independently of the consciousness of an existing object, or a priori forms of self-activity of the subject: both are formed directly at the moment of the implementation of an existential act, which is simultaneously cognitive. Consciousness does not coincide with the psyche or with subjective world taken in any positive content. Initially, the subject is given to himself as "pure nothing", different from the world of material objects, and from biological, physiological, psychological and other "objective" processes occurring inside the human being. body, but not "inside" consciousness, which is initially devoid of any mental content.
Being devoid of inner essence and depth, consciousness, taken by itself, is nothing, has no foundation, and therefore cannot serve as a foundation for anything. However, a real empirical person strives to become something definite, to "root" himself in being. This desire is expressed in the attempts of consciousness to either find support in the external world, or create such a support within itself in order to give itself density, substantiality, self-confidence. The idea of the subject expresses the refusal of consciousness from its original uncertainty. The subject is consciousness, which is no longer "nothing", A "something", for it has lost its freedom to become anything and has become something definite. But if in their initial state different consciousnesses differ from each other only potentially, as centers of the realization of freedom, then subjects differ from each other already and actually (at least by the amount of experience). Hence the desire to unify subjectivity arises by excluding all individualizing moments from it and constituting the image of an abstract-impersonal transcendental subject.
The transcendental subject is the concept of the supra-individual principle in man, singled out by Kant. In the subject itself, Kant distinguishes, as it were, 2 layers, two levels - empirical and transcendental. To the empirical he relates the individual psychological characteristics of a person, to the transcendental - universal definitions that make up the belonging of a person as such. The objectivity of knowledge, according to the teachings of Kant, is determined by the structure of the transcendental subject, which is the supra-individual principle in man.
4. Unlike the philosophers of the 17th century, Kant analyzes the structure of the subject not in order to reveal the sources of delusions, but, on the contrary, in order to resolve the question of what is true knowledge. If for Bacon and Descartes the subjective principle was considered as a hindrance, as something that distorts and obscures the actual state of things, then for Kant the task arises to establish the difference between the subjective and objective elements of knowledge, based on the subject itself and its structure.
In the subject itself, Kant distinguishes, as it were, 2 layers, 2 levels - empirical and transcendental. To the empirical he relates the individual psychological characteristics of a person, to the transcendental universal definitions that make up the belonging of a person as such. The objectivity of knowledge, according to the teachings of Kant, is determined by the structure of the transcendental subject, which is the supra-individual principle in man. – Kant thus raised epistemology to the rank of the main and first element of philosophy. The subject of philosophy, according to Kant, should not be the study of things in themselves - nature, the world, man - but the study cognitive activity, establishing the laws of the human mind and its boundaries. It is in this sense that Kant calls his philosophy transcendental. He also calls his method critical, in contrast to the dogmatic method of seventeenth-century rationalism, emphasizing that it is necessary first of all to undertake a critical analysis of our cognitive abilities in order to ascertain their nature and possibilities. Thus, Kant puts epistemology in place of ontology, thereby effecting the transition from the metaphysics of substance to the theory of the subject.
Even Socrates drew attention to the fact that a person has a supra-individual layer - he considered it even deeper (intimate), but nevertheless more universal. Immanuel Kant again spoke of this under the name of the transcendental subject.
Kant carries out a kind of "Ptolemaic revolution" in philosophy, considering knowledge as an activity proceeding according to its own laws. For the first time, not the nature and structure of the cognized substance, but the specificity of the cognizing subject is considered as the main factor that determines the method of cognition and constructs the object of knowledge.
5. An important concept for Kant is the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, thanks to which, on the basis of various sensations, a holistic image of an object arises. “I” forms an object (the concept of “form” comes from Aristotle, but this form does not exist in the things themselves, but in human consciousness). Therefore, the subject of knowledge, according to Kant, is not given, but given by reason.
- The meaning of the all-seeing eye tattoo The symbol of the pyramid with an eye in Orthodoxy
- Dream Interpretation: kissing a man in a dream, why?
- Help of a conspiracy for the growing moon Rite for the growing moon for bread
- Dream Interpretation: A cat is giving birth To dream that a cat has not given birth