V. The Act of Knowing the World

An essential question for an adherent of transcendental realism must be: How does the I bring about, out of itself, the world of representations? Insofar as it would be a means of investigating indirectly the world of the I-in-itself, an earnest striving for knowledge could still be kindled by a world of representations that was given us, even if this disappeared as soon as we shut our senses to the external world. If the things we experience were representations, then everyday life would be like a dream, and recognition of the true situation would be like an awakening. Our dream pictures also interest us as long as we are dreaming and, consequently, do not recognize them as dreams. The moment we awaken we no longer look for inner connections between our dream-pictures, but for the physical, physiological and psychological processes which caused them. In the same way a philosopher who considers the world to be his representation cannot be interested in the inner connection of the details within it. If he allows for the existence of an I at all, then he will not ask how his representations are connected with one another, but what takes place in the soul that exists independently of him while his consciousness contains a certain content of representations. If I dream that I am drinking wine which makes my throat burn, and I wake up coughing,[^3] then the moment I awaken I cease to be interested in what the dream was about; now my attention is concerned only with the physiological and psychological processes by means of which the irritation which caused me to cough comes to be symbolically expressed in the dream picture. Similarly the philosopher, as soon as he is convinced that the given world consists of nothing but representations, would at once turn from them to the real soul behind them. Things become worse when illusionism completely denies the existence of the I-in-itself behind representations, or at least holds it to be unknowable. One may easily arrive at such a view through the observation that in contrast to dreaming there exists the waking state, in which we have the opportunity to see through the dream and to refer it to the real connections of things, but that we have no condition which is related similarly to our waking conscious life. To adopt this view is to fail to see that in fact there is something which is related to mere perceiving as waking experience is related to dreams. This something is thinking.