[p. 443]
|443| totality as a totality of the manifold or as completeness, but before formalism proper as consistency. The former can raise its experiences into universality at will and continue the consistency with its thought determinacies as far as it goes, until other empirical material, which contradicts that, but has just as much its right to be thought and pronounced as a fundamental principle, no longer permits the consistency of the preceding determinacy but compels it to be abandoned. Formalism can extend its consistency as far as the emptiness of its principle in general permits, or a content it has obtained by stealth; in return, however, it is also entitled proudly to exclude from its apriority and science, under the disgusting name of the empirical, whatever is lacking in completeness, for it asserts its formal principles as the a priori and absolute and therefore that of which it cannot make itself master through them as non-absolute and contingent, unless it knows how to help itself otherwise by finding, to the empirical in general and from one determinacy again to the other, the formal transition of progress from the conditioned to the condition and, since this is again a conditioned, so on to infinity, – whereby however it not only gives up every advantage over what it calls the empirical but, since in the connection of the conditioned with the condition these opposites are posited as subsisting absolutely, itself sinks wholly into empirical necessity and lends to this, through the formal identity or the negatively absolute with which it holds it together, the semblance of true absoluteness.
This combination of consistency with the completeness of the image – be it of the latter, more complete formal and empty consistency, or of that former one which, with determinate concepts as fundamental principles, from one of which it passes to others, is consistent only in inconsistency – however immediately displaces the position of the manifold,
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.