The Life of the Mind Read Online Free Page A

itself
(italics added). 25
    The great obstacle that reason
(Vemunft)
puts in its own way arises from the side of the intellect
(Verstand)
and die entirely justified criteria it has established for its own purposes, that is, for quenching our thirst, and meeting our need, for knowledge and cognition. The reason neither Kant nor his successors ever paid much attention to thinking as an activity and even less to the experiences of thinking ego is that, all distinctions notwithstanding, they were demanding the kind of results and applying the kind of criteria for certainty and evidence that are the results and the criteria of cognition. But if it is true that thinking and reason are justified in transcending the limitations of cognition and the intellect—justified by Kant on the ground that the matters they deal with, though unknowable, are of the greatest existential interest to man-then the assumption must be that thinking and reason are not concerned with what the intellect is concerned with. To anticipate, and put it in a nutshell:
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.
The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth. The latest and in some respects most striking instance of this occurs in Heidegger's
Being and Time,
which starts out by raising "anew the question of the meaning of Being." 26 Heidegger himself, in a later interpretation of his own initial question, says explicitly: " 'Meaning of Being" and 'Truth of Being" say the same." 27
    The temptations to make the equation—which comes down to a refusal to accept and think through Kant's distinction between reason and intellect, between the "urgent need" to think and the "desire to know"—are very great, and by no means due only to the weight of tradition. Kant's insights had an extraordinary liberating effect on German philosophy, touching off the rise of German idealism. No doubt, they had made room for speculative thought; but this thought again became a field for a new brand of specialists committed to the notion that philosophy's "subject proper" is "the actual knowledge of what truly is." 28 Liberated by Kant from the old school dogmatism and its sterile exercises, they erected not only new systems but a new "science"—the original tide of the greatest of their works, Hegel's
Phenomenology of Mind,
was "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" 29 —eagerly blurring Kant's distinction between reason's concern with the unknowable and the intellect's concern with cognition. Pursuing the Cartesian ideal of certainty as though Kant had never existed, they believed in all earnest that the results of their speculations possessed the same kind of validity as the results of cognitive processes.

I. Appearance
Does God ever judge us by appearances? I suspect that he does.
W. H. AUDEN
1. The world's phenomenal nature
    The world men are born into contains many things, natural and artificial, living and dead, transient and sempiternal, all of which have in common that they
appear
and hence are meant to be seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled, to be perceived by sentient creatures endowed with the appropriate sense organs. Nothing could appear, the word "appearance" would make no sense, if recipients of appearances did not exist—living creatures able to acknowledge, recognize, and react to—in flight or desire, approval or disapproval, blame or praise—what is not merely there but appears to them and is meant for their perception. In this world which we enter, appearing from a nowhere, and from which we disappear into a nowhere,
Being and Appearing coincide.
Dead matter, natural and artificial, changing and unchanging, depends in its being, that is, in its appearingness, on the presence of living creatures. Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not