Key Arguments

• The modern philosopher "no longer turns from the world of deceptive perishability to another world of eternal truth, but turns away from both and withdraws into himself."
• What is found within is not a beholding image but processual flux: "the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind."
• Hence, "since the seventeenth century, philosophy has produced the best and least disputed results when it has investigated ... the processes of the senses and of the mind," so "most of modern philosophy is indeed theory of cognition and psychology."
• In fully realized introspection (Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), "philosophers have experimented with their own selves no less radically and perhaps even more fearlessly than the scientists experimented with nature."

Source Quotes

The conviction that objective truth is not given to man but that he can know only what he makes himself is not the result of skepticism but of a demonstrable discovery, and therefore does not lead to resignation but either to redoubled activity or to despair. The world loss of modern philosophy, whose introspection discovered consciousness as the inner sense with which one senses his senses and found it to be the only guaranty of reality, is different not only in degree from the age-old suspicion of the philosophers toward the world and toward the others with whom they shared the world; the philosopher no longer turns from the world of deceptive perishability to another world of eternal truth, but turns away from both and withdraws into himself. What he discovers in the region of the inner self is, again, not an image whose permanence can be beheld and contemplated, but, on the contrary, the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind.

The world loss of modern philosophy, whose introspection discovered consciousness as the inner sense with which one senses his senses and found it to be the only guaranty of reality, is different not only in degree from the age-old suspicion of the philosophers toward the world and toward the others with whom they shared the world; the philosopher no longer turns from the world of deceptive perishability to another world of eternal truth, but turns away from both and withdraws into himself. What he discovers in the region of the inner self is, again, not an image whose permanence can be beheld and contemplated, but, on the contrary, the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind. Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has produced the best and least disputed results when it has investigated, through a supreme effort of self-inspection, the processes of the senses and of the mind.

Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has produced the best and least disputed results when it has investigated, through a supreme effort of self-inspection, the processes of the senses and of the mind. In this aspect, most of modern philosophy is indeed theory of cognition and psychology, and in the few instances where the potentialities of the Cartesian method of introspection were fully realized by men like Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, one is tempted to say that philosophers have experimented with their own selves no less radically and perhaps even more fearlessly than the scientists experimented with nature. Much as we may admire the courage and respect the extraordinary ingenuity of philosophers throughout the modern age, it can hardly be denied that their influence and importance decreased as never before.

Key Concepts

• withdraws into himself
• the constant movement of sensual perceptions and the no less constantly moving activity of the mind
• most of modern philosophy is indeed theory of cognition and psychology
• philosophers have experimented with their own selves no less radically and perhaps even more fearlessly than the scientists experimented with nature

Context

Section 41; consequences of the elimination of contemplation and action-based epistemology for the orientation and methods of modern philosophy.