Friedrich Carstanjen

“ Starting from this first natural idea of the universe, Avenarius arrived at the fundamental presupposition, which he has placed at the beginning of his Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, and which runs as follows: “Every human individual originally accepts over against him an environment with manifold parts, other human individuals making manifold statements, and what-is-stated in some way dependent upon the environment” (Kritik d. r. E., vol. i., p. vii.) .
The presupposition of every science is an assumption that cannot be proved. ”

“ The stimuli from the environment, the R-values, are primarily to be regarded as threats, as disturbing influences, as occasions capable of breaking down the maintenance of system C, and thus we find two values: (1) that of a disturbance of the vital maintenance, and (2) that of a re-approach to the (ideal) maintenance-maximum.
The greatest conceivable vital maintenance-value must not be identified with anything like the greatest conceivable pleasure, or the greatest development of power. Its significance is not psychological, but only logical, and as a constant value is unattainable in life. ”

“ All that the merchant thinks and does in the time subsequent to the receipt of the news, all his action and thought, is to be taken as dependent upon the very varied and manifold adjustments of system C, which finally annul the variation which has been introduced—in so far as system C asserts itself under the diminution of its vital maintenance-value (term 4) . In conclusion, however, such a change is brought about in system C as actually annuls the variation of work. Upon this depends the concluding E-value of the individual in question: “Thank God, I am safe from the worst”. ”

“ Here belong even such uniform and familiar work-values as the home as such; the size of the room, the colour of the walls, the ornaments on the wall, domestic arrangements (in space and time) , our parents as the confidential friends with whom we share our experiences, the tacitly assumed understanding with our fellow-men, their estimation of us, in fact all the thousand details of manners and intuitions which we have in common with our surrounding, details which are really active at every moment, but to which—so long as they are active—we do not attend at all. ”

“ Thus the process of change in the nervous central organ begins with the vital-difference; with the annulling of the vital-difference the process of change in each particular case attains its end. All the changes which lie between this beginning and end follow each other immediately; they form a series, which Avenarius calls the vital-series.
We will first consider the case in which a vital-difference arises as follows: A uniform increase of nourishment may take place in some individual, and may then be annulled by an equally uniform increase of work. ”

“ Now this is a very important conception, for by placing our whole life with all its action and thought in relation to the vital maintenance-maximum, we can comprehend this action and thought also in its totality as depending upon such vital-differences and their annulment. “Life” is not inaction and rest, but movement; and movement is here equivalent to continual oscillation about an ideal point of rest. ”

“ It is unnecessary to deal further with the process of nourishment (I may even assume it to take place during the night’s sleep) ; then I have only to explain more in detail in what the work-process for a vital-series of the first order consists.
Since this work-process is taken to be completely uniform, habitual and familiar, its chief characteristic will be that it excites no attention from us, that we are not conscious of it. Such a uniform familiar increase of work is given to us in our daily movements, in the amount of light, sound, touch and other stimuli which are daily necessary to us. ”

“ Knowing how easily our language with its constant anthropomorphism misleads us into errors, Avenarius urges that we should never say that perception, sensation, thought, consciousness, etc., are in us, but merely that change-processes are in the organism, more specifically in the nervous system, in the central organ, in system C, etc. ”

“ Indeed we can never say more than “Every E-value is characterised as that which, at the time of its existence for the individual, attains to being named”.
It is conceivable that organisms of the lowest kind have originally only the primary change-processes, which disappear quickly and completely, without leaving any residual effect. For such beings without any residual effects of change, the environment would be always strange, however often it might be presented to them as stimulus. Each stimulus and each complex of stimuli would be new every time ”

“ This was not the procedure of Avenarius. He will at first say nothing about the nature of man and his “physical” and “psychical” values; beginning without metaphysical factors he will establish no principle, only a method. And that is the great and important difference: For materialism, to begin without a soul is a principle; for empiriocriticism it is a method, a method which is justified by the hypothetical character of these presuppositions. Nothing is affirmed by them, and nothing denied ”

“ The environment, which is primarily hostile, must nevertheless be regarded also as favourable to maintenance, as maintaining, in so far as it is considered as training the individual in habitual modes of behaviour; and this concerns not only the environment in particular factors, not particular R-values, but all together. The same stimuli which condition a vital disturbance, contribute also to maintenance, and vice versâ. Work, for instance, is not an exclusively destructive factor; while, on the other hand, nourishment is not an exclusively maintaining factor. ”

“ When in the course of time a strange land becomes home to the exile, when heathen peoples gradually accustom themselves to the new Christian faith brought to them by missionaries, when the discovery—at first so strange—that the sun stands still and the earth moves round it is at last accepted as natural and certain, in all such cases we have an acquisition of E-values, which depends upon the acquisition of a kind of change which originally signified a variation of work, and now becomes a familiar exercise of work. ”

“ As we say that a sound has content and significance when we think something in connexion with the sound, so also the primary change-process receives meaning and content for an individual from the response of a whole series of secondary processes, which associate themselves to the primary, and this association takes place in a definite order. Thus the E-value is already forthcoming before the sound-complex is there. In the formation of the sound-complex the same process fulfils itself once more ”

“ If we allow in general the unity of the plan of creation, then the pre-eminence of my uniform point of view should also be allowed, even from the standpoint of the biblical history of creation. If God made man first from a part of the environment (the dust of the ground) and then breathed into him the ‘breath of life,’ then the internal arrangement of the parts of the system C thus formed was determined and created before the work of art itself was set in motion. ”

“ The external condition of change is not blue in itself, and the individual has not the perception.
The question as to the object “in-it-self” is absurd, for it means a question as to an object which is not an object for any one. “Apart from the logical contradiction of this question,” says Avenarius, “it is also full of contradiction from the point of view of a general theory of knowledge. We may, indeed, think of an environment into which no human individual has as yet entered ”

“ It is the usual cigar which the merchant smokes, it is the usual newspaper which he reads, familiar in form and type, in its political views, etc.,—and it is also the familiar environment in which he finds himself, so familiar that he no longer notices its arrangement, its component parts and their qualities. ”

“ However differently our views of the universe may shape themselves in detail, they must be based upon this presupposition as their common and most frequently recurring element. And just because it includes only this common element, it will have a universality which differs only from universal validity because, when Psychologies or Philosophies have changed and troubled their view of the universe, individuals no longer recognise the presupposition which is actually a necessary element of their original view of the universe. ”

“ Empiriocriticism, on the other hand, takes up the position that everything is experience when it has been stated as experienced by an individual—though it may be that primarily it is only experience for this one individual in question. (If, e.g., a child states that it has seen angels, then the angels are an experience for the child.) But then we investigate the difference between this concept of experience which is valid for the individual and the concept of experience which is universally valid (interindividuell gültig) . ”

“ The whole modern psychology, psycho-physics and most of philosophical theories contain such opinions, and therefore serve to strengthen the artificial wall between the inner and outer experiences which makes the sciences of the ‘inner world’ always more inaccessible to exact methods of investigation, and consequently more sterile.”
The Philosophy of Avenarius attracts more and more attention from thinkers who are striving for new views, and it gains ground steadily. ”

“ Thus the empiriocritical presupposition is itself a ground for determining the relation of the “I” to the environment in such a way that both are present as common and inseparable elements. Avenarius says: “We find not only our environment but also ourselves. Our ‘I’ is found to be present just as much as the environment.” This interconnexion and inseparability of the “I” and its surrounding, this essential and inseparable association and homogeneity of the two coordinated values, is described by Avenarius as the “empiriokritische Prinzipialkoordination”. ”

“ Only when the residual effects of change have been developed and elaborated, and the secondary processes have arisen through extension to adjacent cells and subordinate organs of the central organ, do we get the important circular process, from any point within which the whole complex of changes may be set in motion. The possibility of changes which are centrally conditioned comes first with the residual effects of change and the secondary processes. ”

“ But just because it cannot be proved, it must, if it is to serve as the presupposition of a scientific system, be privileged as an irrefragable axiom; hence it must not only be as simple and natural as possible, must not only be theoretically correct in itself, it must also agree, both in itself and in the consequences to be deduced from it, with practical life. ”

“ In the first case the E-value is a “sign” for the object, in the second a “sign” for the relation of that object to the subject of the same essential-co-ordination.
Just as the sound-complex “London” is not what is designated, but is used for what is designated, so also the E-value “perception” or “red,” etc., is not a change-process of system C and not a change-process in the surrounding. ”

“ In the first instance then we must confine ourselves to those changes of state in the nervous central organs upon which everything is based, the changes and series of changes in system C. It is from the nature and the states of the central organ alone that the one simple principle must ultimately proceed to which we may refer all the most complicated manifestations of our being, as well as our most simple movements. ”

“ So long as the individual observes and describes naively, he is content merely to describe the object, as in the statement “that is blue”—he does not characterise himself or his specific activity more accurately because he himself, as the relatively constant term of the essential co-ordination, is forgotten or overlooked. ”

“ If it is possible to think of the whole infinite manifold of our action and inaction as taking place without being forced to introduce a soul, a consciousness, etc., in order to explain it, then the assumption of this, as of all other faculties, motive-powers, etc., was a superfluity with which we can dispense. ”

“ What we can do in this respect is either to disregard ourselves, or to think that at one time no living being was to be found in the whole world. But in the first case, when we ignore ourselves, we merely play the part of the unnoticed spectator ”

“ The idea of their essential difference has been derived, according to his opinion, from a kind of false materialism, which believed in the enclosure of the soul in the body or in a part of it, and, later, in the enclosure of the faculties of the soul in the soul’s substance. From this belief sprang the notion that the soul was something enclosed from the ‘outer world,’ into which enclosure every impression from without could come only through a putting-in, or ‘introjection’. ”

“ For the materialist in beginning without consciousness makes the denial of it a principle; he establishes a principle, and thus begins with a dogma concerning the nature of man, which is just as much unproved as if he should begin with its opposite. ”