Introduction III

99For even though there has never been much consensus共识 about the subject matter of metaphysics, at least one point has been taken for granted视为理所当然: that these disciplines—whether you called them metaphysics or philosophy—dealt with matters that were not given to sense-perception and that their understanding transcended超越 common-sense reasoning, which springs from sense experience and can be validated by empirical经验性的、实证的 tests and means.

100From Parmenides till philosophy’s end, all thinkers were agreed that, in order to deal with such matters, man had to detach使脱离 his mind from the senses by detaching it both from the world as given by them and from the sensations—or passions—aroused唤起 by sense-objects.

101The philosopher, to the extent that he is a philosopher and not (what of course he also is) “a man like you and me,” withdraws退离 from the world of appearances, and the region he then moves in has always, since philosophy’s beginning, been described as the world of the few.

102This age-old distinction between the many and the “professional thinkers” specializing in what was supposedly the highest activity human beings could attain to达到—Plato’s philosopher “shall be called the friend of the god, and if it ever is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him”²⁰—has lost its plausibility可信性, and this is the second advantage in our present situation.

103If, as I suggested before, the ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to “demand” its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite博学的 or ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.

104Kant—in this respect almost alone among the philosophers—was much bothered by the common opinion that philosophy is only for the few, precisely because of its moral implications含义、后果, and he once observed that “stupidity is caused by a wicked heart.”²¹

105This is not true: absence of thought is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and a wicked heart is not its cause; it is probably the other way round, that wickedness may be caused by absence of thought.

106In any event, the matter can no longer be left to “specialists” as though thinking, like higher mathematics, were the monopoly垄断、专属领域 of a specialized discipline.

107Crucial for our enterprise is Kant’s distinction between Vernunft and Verstand, “reason” and “intellect” (not “understanding,” which I think is a mistranslation; Kant used the German Verstand to translate the Latin intellectus, and Verstand, though it is the noun of verstehen, hence “understanding” in current translations, has none of the connotations that are inherent in the German das Verstehen).

108Kant drew this distinction between the two mental faculties after he had discovered the “scandal of reason,” that is, the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about, and for him such matters, that is, those with which mere thought is concerned, were restricted to what we now often call the “ultimate questions” of God, freedom, and immortality.

109But quite apart from the existential关乎存在的 interest men once took in these questions, and although Kant still believed that no “honest soul ever lived that could bear to think that everything is ended with death,”²² he was also quite aware that “the urgent need” of reason is both different from and “more than mere quest and desire for knowledge.”²³

110Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing, and two altogether different concerns, meaning, in the first category, and cognition, in the second.

111Kant, though he had insisted on this distinction, was still so strongly bound by the enormous weight of the tradition of metaphysics that he held fast to紧守、坚持 its traditional subject matter, that is, to those topics which could be proved to be unknowable, and while he justified reason’s need to think beyond the limits of what can be known, he remained unaware of the fact that man’s need to reflect encompasses涵盖 nearly everything that happens to him, things he knows as well as things he can never know.

112He remained less than fully aware of the extent to which he had liberated reason, the ability to think, by justifying it in terms of the ultimate questions.

113He stated defensively辩护式地 that he had “found it necessary to deny knowledge . . . to make room for faith,”²⁴ but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not “denied knowledge” but separated knowledge from thinking.

114In the notes to his lectures on metaphysics he wrote: “The aim of metaphysics . . . is to extend, albeit尽管、虽说 only negatively, our use of reason beyond the limitations of the sensorily given感官所给的 world, that is, to eliminate the obstacles by which reason hinders itself” (italics added).²⁵

115The great obstacle that reason (Vernunft) puts in its own way arises from the side of the intellect (Verstand) and the entirely justified criteria it has established for its own purposes, that is, for quenching解除、满足 our thirst, and meeting our need, for knowledge and cognition.

116The 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.

117But 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存在上的重大关切 to man—then the assumption must be that thinking and reason are not concerned with what the intellect is concerned with.

118To 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.

119And truth and meaning are not the same.

120The basic fallacy谬误, taking precedence居先、优先 over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

121The latest and in some respects most striking显著、惊人的 instance of this occurs in Heidegger’s Being and Time, which starts out by raising “anew the question of the meaning of Being.”²⁶

122Heidegger himself, in a later interpretation of his own initial question, says explicitly: “‘Meaning of Being’ and ‘Truth of Being’ say the same.”²⁷

123The temptations to make the equation—which comes down to归结为 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.

124Kant’s insights had an extraordinary liberating effect解放作用 on German philosophy, touching off触发、引起 the rise of German idealism.

125No doubt, they had made room for speculative thought思辨思想; 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

126Liberated by Kant from the old school dogmatism教条主义 and its sterile exercises贫乏无成果的操练, they erected not only new systems but a new “science”—the original title 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.

127Pursuing 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.