Note 1293 — Chapter III · ON THE GROUND OF THE DISTINCTION OF ALL OBJECTS WHATEVER INTO PHENOMENA AND NOUMENA

In large part it represents the Critical position as understood by Schopenhauer, who never succeeded in acquiring any genuine understanding of Kant’s more mature teaching (cf. above, p. 366 n.). Schopenhauer is correct in maintaining that one chief ground of Kant’s belief in the existence of things in themselves lies in his initial assumption that they must be postulated in order to account for the given manifold. Schopenhauer is also justified in stating that Kant, though starting from the dualistic Cartesian standpoint, so far modified it as to conclude that the origin of this manifold must be “objective, since there is no ground for regarding it as subjective” (Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851 ed., p. 74 ff.). But for two reasons this is a very incomplete, and therefore extremely misleading, account of Kant’s final teaching. In the first place, Schopenhauer fails to take account of Kant’s implied distinction between the sensations of the special senses and the manifold of outer sense. When Kant recognises that the sensations of the special senses are empirically conditioned, he is constrained in consistency to distinguish between them and the manifold which constitutes the matter of all experiences (cf. above, p. 275 ff.). Things in themselves, in accounting for the latter, account also, but in quite indirect fashion, for the former. Though sensations are empirically conditioned, the entire natural world is noumenally grounded. Secondly, Kant’s subjectivism undergoes a similar transformation on its inner or mental side. The analysis of self-consciousness, which is given both in the Deductions and in the Paralogisms, indicates with sufficient clearness Kant’s recognition that the form of experience is as little self-explanatory as its content, and that it must not, without such proof as, owing to the limitations of our experience, we are debarred from giving, be regarded as more ultimate in nature. The realities which constitute and condition our mental processes are not apprehended in any more direct manner than the thing in itself. When, therefore, Schopenhauer asserts in the World as Will and Idea (Werke, Frauenstädt, ii. p. 494, Eng. trans, ii. p. 6) that Kant proves the world to be merely phenomenal by demonstrating that it is conditioned by the intellect, he is emphasising what is least characteristic in Kant’s teaching. Schopenhauer’s occasional identification of the intellect with the brain—the nearest approximation in his writings to what may be described as phenomenalism—itself suffices to show how entirely he is lacking in any firm grasp of Critical principles.