Chapter 3 - Some thoughts concerning the intellect in general and in every respect

Summary

§27

In philosophy every method that is allegedly without assumption is hot air, since something must always be regarded as given in order to proceed from it. This in fact is stated in the Archimedean ‘Give me a foothold!’, which is the ineluctable condition of all human activity, even of philosophizing, because we can float about in the ether neither physically nor mentally. But such a point of departure in philosophizing, such a thing taken as given for the moment, must subsequently be compensated and justified. This then will be either something subjective, such as perhaps self-consciousness, representation, the subject, the will; or something objective, such as that which manifests itself in the consciousness of other things, perhaps the real world, external objects, nature, material, atoms, even a god, even a merely arbitrarily concocted concept such as substance, the Absolute, or whatever it might be. Thus in order to reconcile the arbitrariness committed here and to rectify the assumptions, one must subsequently change the standpoint and switch over to the opposite one, from which one now deduces what was originally taken as given in a supplemental philosophical argument. ‘Thus one thing sheds light on another.’

If for example one proceeds from the subjective, as did Berkeley, Locke and Kant, in whom this way of looking at things reached its peak, then, even though this way has the greatest advantage due to the actual immediacy of the subjective, one will nevertheless obtain a partly one-sided, partly not quite justified philosophy. This will result unless one supplements the philosophy by in turn taking as the point of departure what is deduced in it as given and hence, from the opposite standpoint, deduces the subjective from the objective, as previously the objective from the subjective. I believe I provided this supplement to Kantian philosophy, in the main, in chapter 22 of the second volume of my major work and in On Will in Nature under the heading ‘Physiology of Plants’; where proceeding from external nature I deduce the intellect.

If on the other hand one proceeds from the objective and at the same time takes quite a bit as given, such as matter along with the forces manifesting in it, then soon one has the whole of nature, insofar as such a way of looking at things yields pure naturalism, which I have more accurately called absolute physics.