The World Is My Representation (Book 1, §§1–7)

Preface

I propose to state here how this book is to be read in order to be understood. What is to be imparted by it is a single thought. Yet in spite of all my efforts I could find no shorter way of imparting it than this whole book. Therefore the first rule is that the book be read twice, and the first time with a great deal of patience. The reader should also be acquainted with the principal works of Kant, for what I offer presupposes his philosophy throughout. And if he has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be all the better prepared; and if he has received the benefit of the Upanishads, he is best of all prepared to hear what I have to say.

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First Book. The World as Representation, First Aspect: The representation subject to the principle of sufficient reason.

§ 1. "The world is my representation." This is a truth valid for every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.

No truth is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this: that everything that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation. Whatever belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably conditioned by the subject, and exists only for the subject.

§ 2. That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. It is the bearer of the world. Object and subject are inseparable, even for thought: each has meaning and existence only through and for the other; each appears with the other and vanishes with it. They limit each other immediately: where the object begins, the subject ends.

§ 3. The forms of every object — time, space and causality — can be found and fully known from the subject itself, even without knowledge of the object. In Kant's language, they lie a priori in our consciousness. To have discovered this is one of Kant's chief merits. I go further. I maintain that the principle of sufficient reason, the principle that nothing is without a ground why it is rather than is not, is the common expression of all these forms of the object of which we are a priori conscious. I have shown in my essay on that principle that it appears in four forms, according to the four classes of objects: as the law of cause and effect for material things; as the law of knowing for judgments; as the law of being for the positions in space and the moments in time, on which geometry and arithmetic rest; and as the law of motivation for actions.

Whoever has recognized the form of the principle of sufficient reason that appears in pure time, has thereby recognized the whole nature of time. Time is nothing but that form. Every moment exists only insofar as it has wiped out the preceding one, its father, in order to be itself wiped out just as quickly. Past and future are as empty and unreal as any dream; the present is only the boundary between the two, without extension or duration.

§ 4. Matter is through and through nothing but causality. Its being is its acting; it is impossible even to conceive any other being for it. Only as something acting does it fill space and time. The subjective correlative of matter, or of causality, is the understanding, and it is nothing more than this. To know causality is its sole function and its only power.

§ 6. All animals have understanding, even the most imperfect; for they all know objects, and this knowledge determines their movements as motive. The dog sees the raised stick and knows what follows. Understanding is the same in all animals and in all men. It has everywhere the same simple form: knowledge of causality, transition from effect to cause and from cause to effect. And it is through this, and nothing else, that the raw sensations of the senses become a world of perceived objects. The world as representation exists only through the understanding.

§ 7. Our method is entirely different from the two opposite errors of all previous systems. We start neither from the object nor from the subject, but from the representation, which contains and presupposes them both.

Materialism starts from the object, from matter, and tries to explain everything else from it, finally even the knowing subject. It overlooks that with the first step it has already assumed what it wants to explain: for matter is given only in representation, through the understanding. It is like Baron Munchausen, who, while swimming on horseback in the water, drew the horse up by his legs, and himself by his own pigtail. The opposite error, that of Fichte, starts from the subject and tries to spin the object out of it. Both are equally mistaken.

From all this it follows that life and dreams are pages of one and the same book. To read them in order, page after page, is what we call real life. But when the hour of reading is over and we rest, we often leaf idly through the book, opening it here and there without order or connection; and that is dreaming. I know of no sure test that distinguishes the one from the other.

The ancient wisdom of India says the same thing: "It is Maya, the veil of deception, which covers the eyes of mortals, and makes them see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not; for it is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveler from afar takes for water."

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: Reason and Its Limits)