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6. PERSPECTIVES AND CONCLUSION
6.1 The Awareness of Relativity Presupposes the Intuition of Being
The "awareness of relativity", for Kant, is a clue discovering the limitation of human knowledge. It restricts whatever we know to appearances. He says very well that knowledge must begin with sense-experience, at the same time that sense-experience will not be possible unless it is submitted to the a priori forms of sensibility. Hence these two premises taken jointly make it impossible for man to attain any knowledge beyond the so-called senseintuition. Note that the abandonment of the speculative use of reason is due to the absence of the intellectual intuition on the part of man rather than the objects of this intuition, namely, the transcendental self and the transcendental object.
In my opinion, the objects of this intuition should be not considered things out of which we, as it were, try hard to dig the essence. On the contrary, as Fichte has pointed out, the said object, the transcendental ego, is an act rather than a things(18). According to him, to ascribe the transcendental ego to the ultimate ground of the unity of consciousness implies that the pure ego, namely, the transcendental ego is considered an activity within consciousness. For example, I am now thinking an object A. Then, I can think the "me" that thinks an object A. Obviously I objectify the "me" that thinks an object A, in the sense that I make it object-for-subject. Hence the process can go on infinitely, namely, that I think the "me" that thinks the "me" that thinks¡Kad infinitum. However hard I try, the Ego transcends objectification and is itself the condition of all objectifiability and of the unity of consciousness(19). Fichte, hence, insists that we must have the intellectual intuition of the transcendental ego as an act within consciousness and that this is not a mystic experience for the privileged few. Nevertheless Fichte has taken this primordial intuition as his first principle or truth in philosophy and develops a system of Idealistic Metaphysics.
I am not interested in his idealism but rather in his primordial intellectual intuition. Its central issue is: what is intuited is not an objectified essence but an act. The mentioning of Fichte shows that in spite of Kant's denial of intellectual intuition, a Kantian philosopher could also preserve the validity of the intellectual intuition of the pure ego as an activity within consciousness. This could be a starting point for the possibility of metaphysics.
Some Neo-Thomists actually follow a similiar line of thought regarding the so-called Intuition of Being. They distinguish a simple apprehension of the "essences of things" from an intuition of Being (namely, Actus Essendi or act of existing). The former can be explained in terms of an essential judgment that describes the essence of the object concerned, for example, "This is so-and-so", whereas the latter is to be explained in terms of an existential judgment concerning the act of existing, namely, "This IS". The former judgment presupposes the latter, for the former would be meaningless if we cannot affirm the latter a priori.
Moreover, we need to make another distinction between the concept of existence and the intuition of hems (an immediate affirmation of Actus Essendi ). When we say that ¡§A is being¡¨ in the former sense, we mentally attribute the concept of existence to A; when ¡§A is being¡¨ in the latter sense, we affirm a pure Actus Essendi disregardins what A is, whether it be my mental product or what-not.
In fact, when Kant says that ¡§existence¡¨ is one of the a priori categories, he uses ¡§existence¡¨ as a concept with which we think. Hence in an existential statement like "God, as a necessary being, exists, (ontological argument), we, in Kant, s context, are objectifying the necessary being as object of thought and in the meantime we can¡¦t help but think the necessary being as existing, insofar as a necessary being is conceiveable. In this case, we are just passing from one concept (of existence) to another (of necessary being) or the other way round, but we cannot leap from the conceptual order to existential order. The leap is illicit. Kant, indeed, is right in refuting the ontological argument but is wrong in neglecting that apart from the concept of existence we still have the intuition of being. I do not mean we can intuit directly God¡¦s existence but rather mean that we are able to affirm intuitively the Actus Essendi, no matter what this Actus Essendi may be. That is to say the intuition that ¡§something exists¡¨ is it is primarily given disregarding what this something is. We simply encounter the Actus Essendi which is delivered to us as an absolute datum in the experience.
However Kant was not completely unaware of this. For example, his desperate effort of insisting on the unity of apperception as a fundamental experience is precisely a confirmation of the apprehension of something existent as an unity. Kant¡¦s denial of intellectual intuition does not exclude the intuition of being. Indeed the ¡§awareness of relativity¡¨ presupposes it.
6.2 The Transcendental Method and the Intuition of Being
A thorough and attentive study of Kant¡¦s position shows that his transcendental method is by no means restricted to the concrete conclusion of the Critique.
The interesting study of O. Muck on the transcendental method reveals that "during the last forty years the numbers of neo-scholastics have grown who consider the so-called ¡¥transcendental method¡¦ the way to reach the goal set by contemporary neo-scholasticism, viz., a response of the scholastic tradition to the contemporary philosophical problemtic¡¨,(20). Joseph Marechal for instance, was one of the first pioneers who deliberately adopted the transcendental method as a fruitful tool for the aims of scholastic philosophy(21).
However I would like to have recourse to Emerich Coreth, one of the most prominent contemporary transcendental Thomists, who has succeeded in showing the richness of the intuition of being by means of the transcendental method. His investigation of the condition of possibility of the act of knowledge leads to a dialectical development of philosophy which is in essential agreement with Thomism in terms of its results, but which goes deeper with respect to its foundation(22).
For him the task of metaphysics is provided by the transcendental method, which he defines in the words of Kant, "I call every knowledge transcendental, which occupies itself not so much with objects, but rather with our way of knowing objects, insofar as this is to be possible a priori"(23).
The method refers to inquiries into the a priori conditions under which metaphysical claims may be true. It starts with the inquirer's experience of being conscious (in Coreth's case, it is the questioning itself). Within this horizon, a twofold constant and interactive movement of thought, namely, reduction and deduction, is employed so as to uncover thematically the immediate, unthematized and pre-philosophical data in the initial awareness which furnish the a priori conditions of the total reality of being conscious (as this reality presents itself in the act of knowing) and then "from this previous datum, uncovered reductively, (there is deduced) a priori the empirical act of consciousness, its nature, its possibility and its necessity. Whereas reduction proceeds from a particular experience to the conditions of its possibility, deduction goes from these conditions to the essential structures of the same experience''. This is to mediate the immediate knowledge, from the unthematic to the themtic. Thus it reverses the process of universal doubt by going beyond the merely factual state-of-affairs pointing to the vindication of something unquestionably absolute which is being as the foundation and horizon of metaphysics in germ.(24)
As B. Lonergan remarks, in his critique of Coreth's original German work(25) under the significant title "Metaphysics as Horizon"(26), for Coreth the basis of transcendental method, applied to any judgment, lies not in the content of the judgment but in its possibility and its functions by reductio ad absurdum;
"The main task of the metaphysician is not to reveal or prove what is new and unknown; it is to give scientific expression to what already is implicitly acknowledged without being explicitly recognized"(27).
The trouble with Kant, Coreth says, is that:
"¡Khe did not go far back enough when looking for the conditions of possibility of human knowledge. He stopped at the finite subject, he did not reach an absolute horizon of validity, and thus he eliminated all possibility of metaphysical knowledge. Only if we can, against Kant and proceeding beyond him, show that our a priori knowledge is metaphysical knowledge of being, which opens for us the absolute horizon of being as such, shall we be able to validate metaphysics critically and methodically. This task has been clearly recognized within the neo- Scholastic school, especially since the pioneering work of Joseph Marechal''(28).
His starting point is the conscious, concrete activity of the human mind asking a question. Lonergan remarks that to doubt questioning is to involve oneself in a counterposition, and so questioning is beyond the doubter¡¦s capacity to doubt coherently(29).
"When we question the question, our attention is forced to proceed beyond the explicit knowledge presented by the content into the implicit knowledge contained in the act of questioning itself. Thus when I ask what things I can question, the very act of asking this question supplies an answer to it. For I can ask questions about absolutely everything. Should somebody suggest that there might be limits to my power of questioning, I shall ask questions about these limits, and by this very fact proceed beyond them. The fact that I can question absolutely everything is unthematically contained in the very act of questioning. If I inquire what this "absolutely everything" about which I can ask questions really is, the answer to this question is likewise unthematically or implicitly contained in the question itself. For I always ask what everything IS. Hence I know that everything about which I ask questions IS and that the range of my inquiring is the unlimited horizon of being.
We have here a continual interaction, a dialectic between concept and act, between pensee pensee and pensee pensante, between the conceptualized, explicit, thematic content of our knowledge and the unthematic, pre-reflexive, implicit knowledge that is co-affirmed with the act of knowing itself. The interaction results in what the German language calls Volizugswissen" (30).Therefore the co-affirmation or co-knowledge of being is concomitant to every act of consciousness though in an unthematic way. A rejection of the possibility of metaphysics implies a contradiction between the denial and the act by means of which one denies, between the thematic content of the act and the unthematically co-affirmed and presupposed conditions of its possibility(31).
The very possibility of questioning, as Lonergan remarks, (or of any conscious activity, we may add) is being, and this being is being (Actus Essendi) in its unqualified sense, being-in-itself (An-sich-Sein). The process of bringing out this intuition of being is a process of a mediated immediacy (vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit), through the transcendental method that points to the interaction between "concept" and "act" (Vollzug, or "performance" in Lonergan's translation)., Kant failed to get hold of the intuition of being, because his use of the transcendental method consists in the dialectic between concept and concept (categorized) and not between concept and act. His contradiction, as Lonergan remarks, lies not in the formal entity (Ich denke) that merely thinks thoughts, but in a concrete intelligence that by its performance means and by its uttered contents denies that we know what really and truly is so (32).
6.3 An Alternative Approach to Metaphysics: The Intuition of Being
I have reason for the preference of this intution of being as a new approach to metaphysics. I am convinced that a good approach should not be located merely in the epistemological inquiry, as Kant located it. For we will have difficulty In bridging the chasm between the thing-in-itself (the uncategorized stuff) and the mental contents (categorized concepts). This actually re-echoes the difficulty of drawing the distinction between epistemological and metaphysical inquiries mentioned earlier. For they are so interwoven that it is difficult to decide which should take the precedence. The intuition serves precisely as a primordial datum that transcends and precedes both inquiries. In other words, if you do not start with "something exists", then you start with a nought. And nothing comes from nothing!
Coreth would also consider that the intuition of being is something to be presupposed by an inquiry:
"Questioning or inquiring presupposes some knowledge about being. But this knowledge¡Kis not a knowledge which possesses that which is known, but a knowledge which projects that which can be known. This presupposes that we already know about being or about the meaning of being. The origin of this knowledge lies in the act of questioning itself. Whenever we question, we know that we question, that we are the inquirer, that we perform the act of inquiring. In every act of inquiring or knowing, some being is given which coincides immediately with knowing, which knows itself as being. The act knows itself as being. Being knows itself as act. We have an immediate unity of being and knowing in the very act of knowing"(33).
Following the same line of reason, Muck remarks also:
"Since the act of questioning knowledge has shown itself to be finite and conditioned by pointing beyond itself to the absolute, we ask again how the finite act stands with respect to the finite subject and how it is made possible by it. This leads to the development of being and acting, being and essence, and the universal laws of being. However, not every act is a question. This leads us to the conditions of the act of intellection in which being as such is disclosed, and to the immanent exposition of being according to its transcendental determinations (in the classical sense). However, this step does not explain why the intellectual act of man is questioning and not simply the possesion of knowledge. This void leads to the foundation of a metaphysics of the material world and of sense experience, as well as of human being in the world (including interpersonal relationships and the moral order of human activity). It also leads to the determination of the relations of questioning to the absolute as religion, and this absolute as God"(34).
This intuition of being, as many thinkers confirm, is always present in our experience whether it be sensible, intellectual, moral, mystic or religious etc. provided that we make a reflection upon it. I think that Kant also had a similiar intuition in his moral experience. The moral agent is conscious of the "duty", the "ought", the "categorical imperative"! How, Kant asks, is this categorical imperative possible? In reply to this, he finds that its possibility is grounded in the idea of freedom of the will. If freedom were illusory, the entire moral experience would be deceptive. But since moral experience, for Kant, is incontrovertible, "Freedom", though belonging to the noumenal world, is necessarily required as the a priori ultimate ground for the possibility of moral experience and categorical imperative. As a consequence the categorical imperative is not possible, unless the moral agent, man himself, is at once a member both of the phenomenal and noumenal world. This is the theory of Two Standpoints. The empirical self belongs to the former world, hence its action follows the law of causality that governs the phenomena, and it is also liable to deviate from the way in which it would act as a member of the noumenal world. And the moral law is legislated by the free will of the transcendental self upon the empirical self as Imperative.(35) The Two Standpoints theory presupposes the intuition of the moral activity within the consciousness. The moral experience demands or "posits" an Ego as a member of the two worlds. This leads to the bi-polarity of the intuition of being, namely, man (as moral subject) being-in-the-world. This strikes the same tone of the intuition of being.
Hence the intuition is a good starting point for the journey to metaphysics for it opens a new possibility to the thing-in-itself. If this intuition imposes an ineluctable urge on us, an urge that urges for self-openness to the real and absolute, then we must admit that it is an intuitive knowledge. If this is knowledge, it follows that our mind, to a certain extent, has the possibility of attaining to the knowledge of the thing-in-itself. It assures us of the fact that our mind is open to truth.
In conclusion, I admire Kant's effort and seriousness in tackling the possibility of metaphysics but I disagree with his way of adopting the initial assumptions that lead him to an agnostic position (for his inconsistency). His intention of settling the metaphysical disputes is good but leads him to the extreme position of denying every possibility of metaphysics. I am conscious that there are still many difficulties in the attempt to build metaphysical system(s), but Kant's transcendental method is very highlighting in this regard. Finally, if metaphysics has as its object the fundamental explanation of all things, considered in their entirety, such an inquiry must be grounded in the intuition of being as an absolute datum. Hence the reinstatement of the possibility of metaphysics depends on whether or not one has the experience of the Actus Essendi and whether one considers it an intuitive knowledge. This is the initial option we have to decide upon, just as we have to decide whether man is rational, and whether he is able to philosophize with his rationality.
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