Cause and Effect is not Subject and Object

Perception arises through the knowledge of causality.

This makes us think that the relation of subject and object is that of cause and effect.

Cause and effect subsists only between objects

• It is between the immediate object and the other objects known indirectly.

Subject-object being thought of as cause-effect is the cause of errors on the reality of the outer world.

These errors leads to dogmatism and scepticism which oppose each oher.*

Dogmatism is now realism and idealism.

• Realism treats the object as cause, and the subject as its effect.
• Fichte’s idealism puts the object as the effect, and the subject as its cause.*

According to my principle of sufficient reason [flow of cognition] there is absolutely no relation between subject and object*.

And so none of these views could be proven.

This is why scepticism attacked them both successfully.

Cause and effect precedes perception and experience as their condition.

But Hume thought the opposite – that perception and experience precedes cause and effect.

This is why I assert that cause and effect cannot be derived from experience.

Likewise, object and subject precede:

• all knowledge
• the [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason as its first condition

For this [flow] principle is merely the form of all objects, the whole nature and possibility of their existence as phenomena.

But the object always presupposes the subject.

Therefore, between subject-object there can be no relation of reason and cause-effect.

My [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason explains the content of that [flow] principle is:

• the essential form of every object
• the universal nature of all objective existence
• something which pertains to the object as such

But the object always presupposes the subject.

Therefore, the subject remains always outside the [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason.

The controversy of the reality of the outer world is from this false extension of the [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason to the subject.

This creates the mistake that the subject can never understand itself.

Realistic dogmatism:

• believes that idea is the effect of the object
• wants to separate idea and object
• assumes a cause different from the idea, independent of the subject,
  • This is inconceivable.

for even as object it presupposes subject, and so remains its idea.

Opposed to this doctrine is scepticism.

It wrongly believes that the idea is the effect, never the cause.

Therefore, the idea is never a real being.

We always know merely the action of the object.

But this object might have no resemblance to its effect and can be erroneously thought of as the cause.

This is because cause and effect come from experience.

The reality of experience is then made to rest on cause and effect.

I fix both of these views by stating:

1. Object and idea are the same.

2. The essence and reality of the perceived object is its action

It is contradictory to demand:

• an existence of the object outside the idea of the subject
• for an essence of the actual thing different from its action

The knowledge of the nature of the effect of any perceived object, exhausts such an object itself, so far as it is an object-idea.

This is because beyond the object-idea, there is nothing.

The perceived world in space and time:

• makes itself known via cause and effect.
• is entirely real
• is idea bound together by cause and effect
  • This is its empirical reality.

On the other hand, all causality is in and for the [mind] understanding alone.

The whole actual, active world is determined as such by the [mind] understanding.

Without the [mind] understanding, the world is nothing.

This is why I deny the reality of the outer world.

The dogmatist explains the reality of the outer world from its independence of the subject.

I also deny it because no object apart from a subject can be conceived without contradiction.

The whole world of objects is and remains idea, and therefore wholly and forever determined by the subject.

This gives it a transcendental ideality.

But it is not therefore illusion or mere appearance.

It manifests as a series of ideas bound by the [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason.

Is the outer world real?

This question comes from the false application of the [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason to:

• what is beyond cognition
• a connection with the subject

Physical objects only have [movement in space and time] ground of being.

This wrong use of the abstract [flow of cognition] principle of sufficient reason into physical objects demands the ground of knowing on those physical objects.