Chapter 2

CERTAINTY CAN NEVER BE BLIND

1048. Because certainty depends upon a reason which convinces us and compels us to assent to a proposition, it can never be blind, nor a pure fact, nor a purely instinctive submission.
Reid, the founder of the Scottish school, was the first in modern times to maintain such an absurdity, casting philosophical truth into an abyss from which it could never have extricated itself. Shocked by the universal scepticism caused by the philosophy of Locke, Reid was, I think, the discouraged victim of his own limited reason.

Unable to accept his painful state of doubt, he sought help in others' opinions and clung like a shipwrecked sailor to the plank of common sense. According to him, common beliefs could not be proved or justified; they rested upon an irresistible necessity to assent, that is, upon a law of nature to which human beings were subject. Nature itself comes to the aid of powerless reason and instinctively compels humanity to give credence to first notions which reason is unable to justify. Humanity naturally flees annihilation, which would be its fate if human beings were able to deny faith in the first, essential principles.
In this way Reid believed he had completely eradicated scepticism. In fact he had more firmly strengthened and entrenched it.

Propositions cannot be true if, as he says, a necessity of nature makes me believe them. If I assent to them in order to preserve my existence, which would end without such assent, I am impelled solely by the very strong, irrefutable, but nevertheless blind principle of self-interest. But does it follow that what is useful and necessary for me is also true, or to put it more bluntly, have we not changed truth into utility and necessity? Truth no longer exists; only utility and necessity exert power over me. If this is the case, I am still in darkness, but in a necessary and essential darkness, greater than before.

Furthermore, we are not condemned only to ignorance. Error is prescribed and imposed on us as a condition of our existence, because it is an error to call truth that which is only utility and cruel necessity. We are commanded to commit a crime and forced to the vilest of actions: considering the utility and non-utility as the sole norm of what is true and false is a crime which debases the nobility of my rational nature. How cruel nature is to dictate such a law! What a cruel benefit to be saved from annihilation by the extinction of every spark of human excellence! How foolish and deceitful of nature to cancel the character she herself has impressed on our rational soul, to repent of intelligence, and to abandon the call to virtue she has given us by which we become master of the beings about us! A more ruinous tyranny could not be exercised over the essentially free element of our human spirit. The absurdity contained in such a system would usurp the throne of truth, eliminating truth forever from the universe and from the ranks of what is essential. Our understanding, deprived of the light that forms it, would act aimlessly and instinctively. A dull, pitiless fear would form the foundation of the human being, as he fled unceasingly and blindly the emptiness surrounding him. A strange deity incessantly pursues and torments the human being created by these philosophers. Unknown, fatal, inconceivable — such is the deity to whose care mankind is committed.

This apparently gentle, caring system already produced the evil poison we are speaking about, as it passed from England into Germany and became Kantianism, which is only the Scottish system engendered, enhanced and clothed in more regular and dignified forms.

Reid had said that as a whole we human beings believe in certain first notions by means of a direct movement of our spirit which necessarily gives assent to these notions. He posited this as an inexplicable fact. Kant accepted the fact, adding only that if we could not entirely explain it, we could at least analyse it accurately. According to him, the intimate power of our spirit sends forth of itself, by means of some kind of suggestion, the common principles of reason and our belief in them. (5) This power could be determined and discerned by its effects, which Kant attempted to distinguish.

The result of his work was that this kind of spiritual instinct manifests itself in a certain number of functions. The partial power by which the spirit performs each of these functions he called form of the spirit. Here we find the origin of the forms of transcendental philosophy. Reid thought in good faith that he had defended the possession of objective truth for human beings, but Kant realised that Reid's system did the opposite: it removed objective truth entirely. He analysed the system and declared that theoretical reason had no objective value whatsoever; the truth of all human reasoning could only be subjective, that is, apparent to the subject. He was unaware, however, that speaking about `subjective truth' was in the last analysis a misuse of words. Subjective truth is not truth; the expression contains a profound contradiction.

1049. In Italy, this strange teaching has always been resisted, and never taken root. In France, the Scottish school appeared in 1811. Before this, Condillac reigned absolutely, while a countless number of his followers jealously vaunted their possession of freedom of thought [App., no. 1]. Later, German philosophy found an opening in France, partly disguised as `eclecticism'. The passage from `critical philosophy' to `eclecticism' was easy because a philosophy that questions all systems could easily pick and choose amongst them. But I am not going to object simply about a change of names. (6)

The real nature of this philosophy is not known by everyone in France, because it is still new, and its ultimate consequences have yet to come to light. It is only the past stages of a philosophy which allow final judgment on their progenitor's value, absolving or condemning her forever.

Some strive hard to make such a philosophy serve the interests of religion, but we must not be surprised if there are others who, without any regard for its religious consequences, show themselves ready to accept all its consequences whatever they may be. Such people hasten the development of the system, and its death sentence. Our only preoccupation as we await the execution of the sentence is that judgment is never passed on any defective, philosophical teaching before it has sacrificed many to error.

Notes:

(5) The principles of reason were even confused with the faith or assent given them. One can understand that an internal suggestion moves us to assent to certain known principles. But it is impossible to understand a suggestion which produces the principles themselves. Reid and Kant both confused these two actions of the spirit, intuition and assent, and claimed to explain them by a single hypothesis.

(6) The name critical philosophy, however, does contain something presumptuous and absurd. It implies that one human being passes judgment on everyone else's reasoning, as though he were something other than a human being. `Eclecticism' is free of this defect. But `eclecticism', because it means a choice of teachings, does not express the unity without which only a mass of unconnected opinions, not true philosophy, exists. Eclectics, if they were to be judged according to their self-imposed name, would be considered memorisers, not thinkers.