The idea of a void in the middle of a dessert has a long history. In Elizabethan England, with the rise of modern subjectivity, a difference emerged between the “substantial” food (meat) eaten in the great banquet hall and the sweet desserts eaten in a separate small room while the tables were cleared (“voided”) in the banquet hall. Eventually, the small room in which these desserts were consumed came to be called “the void.” Consequently, the desserts themselves were referred to as “voids,” and, furthermore, in their form, usually in the shape of an animal and empty on the inside, they came to imitate the void. The emphasis was on the contrast between the substantial meal in the large banquet hall and the insubstantial, ornamental, dessert in the void: the void was a “like-meat,” a fake, a pure appearance. It could be, for example, a sugar peacock that looked like a peacock without being one (the key part of the ritual of consuming it was to violently crack the surface to reveal the void inside). This was the early modern version of today’s decaffeinated coffee or artificial sweeteners, and the first example of food deprived of its substance so that in eating it one was in a way “eating nothing.” The further key feature was that this void also provided the space for deploying private subjectivity as opposed to the public space of the banquet hall. The void was consumed in a place to which one withdrew after the public ceremony of the official meal; in this separate place, one was allowed to drop the official masks and abandon oneself to the relaxed exchange of rumors, impressions, opinions, and confessions, in their entire scope from the trivial to the most intimate. The opposition between the substantial “real thing” and the trifling ornamental appearance that only enveloped a void thus mirrored the opposition between substance and subject. No wonder then that, in the same period, the word void also functioned as an allusion to the subject itself, the Void beneath the deceptive appearance of one’s social masks. This, perhaps, is the first culinary version of Hegel’s famous motto according to which one should conceive the Absolute “not only as Substance, but also as Subject“: You should eat not only meat and bread, but also good desserts.
Should we not link this use of void to the fact that, at exactly the same historic moment, at the dawn of modernity, zero as a number was invented—a fact, as Brian Rotman has pointed out, that was connected to the expansion of commodity exchange and of the production of commodities into the hegemonic form of production, so that the link between the void and the commodity is there from the very beginning.2In Heidegger’s classic analysis of the Greek vase in “Das Ding,” to which Lacan refers in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Heidegger emphasizes how the vase as an emblematic Thing is formed around a central void, i.e., it serves as the container of a void.3 One is thus tempted to read the Greek vase and the Kinder chocolate egg together as designating two moments of the Thing in the history of the West; the sacred Thing at its dawn and the ridiculous merchandise at its end. The Kinder egg is our vase of today. Perhaps, then, the ultimate image condensing the entire “history of the West” would be that of the ancient Greeks offering to the gods a vase containing ... a Kinder egg plastic toy. One should effectively follow here the procedure, practiced by Adorno and Horkheimer in theirDialectics of Enlightenment, of condensing the entire development of the Western civilization into one simple line—from pre-historical magical manipulation to technological manipulation, or from the Greek vase to the Kinder egg. What one must bear in mind is that the dawn of Ancient Greek philosophy took place at the same time (and place) as the rise of commodity production and exchange. One of the stories about Thales, the first philosopher, is that he set out to prove his versatility in “real life” by becoming rich on the market, after which he returned to philosophy. The double meaning of the word speculation (metaphysical and financial) is thus operative from the very beginning. One should perhaps then risk the hypothesis that, historically, the Greek vase to which Heidegger refers was already a commodity, and that it was this fact which accounted for the void in its center, which gave to this void its true resonance. It is as a commodity that a thing is not only itself but also points “beyond itself” to another dimension, which is inscribed into the thing itself as a central void.
No wonder, then, that there is a homology between the Kinder egg, today’s void, and the abundance of commodities which offer us “X without X,” deprived of its substance (coffee without caffeine, sweetener without sugar, beer without alcohol, etc.). In both cases, we are offered the surface form deprived of its core. However, more fundamentally, as the discussion of the Elizabethan void indicates, is there not a clear structural homology between this structure of the commodity and the structure of the bourgeois subject? Do subjects—precisely insofar as they are the subjects of universal human rights—not also function as these Kinder chocolate eggs? In France, it is still possible to buy a dessert with the racist name “la tête du nègre” [“a Negro head”], which is a round chocolate cake that is empty inside (“like the stupid Negro’s head”). The Kinder egg fills in this void, but the lesson here is that we in fact all have “negro heads” with a hole in the centre, that subjectivity is in fact structured around a central void.
The humanist-universalist reply to this claim would be to deny that we all have “negro heads” by positing precisely something very much like aKinder egg theory of the human subject. As humanist ideologists would argue, we may be infinitely different—some of us are black, others white, some tall, others small, some women, others men, some rich, others poor, and so on—yet, deep inside us, there is a moral equivalent of the plastic toy, the same je ne sais quoi, an elusive X which somehow accounts for the dignity shared by all humans. To quote Francis Fukuyama:
What the demand for equality of recognition implies is that when we strip all of a person’s contingent and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of a certain minimal level of respect—call it Factor X. Skin, color, looks, social class and wealth, gender, cultural background, and even one’s natural talents are all accidents of birth relegated to the class of nonessential characteristics. ... But in the political realm we are required to respect people equally on the basis of their possession of Factor X.4
In contrast to transcendental philosophers who emphasize that this Factor X is a sort of “symbolic fiction” with no counterpart in the reality of an individual, Fukuyama heroically locates it in our “human nature,” in our uniquely human genetic inheritance. And, effectively, is the genome not the ultimate figure of the plastic toy hidden deep within our human chocolate skin, so that we can have exteriors made of white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, with or without nuts or raisins, but inside there is always the same plastic toy? What Fukuyama ultimately fears is that if we mess too much with the production of the chocolate egg, we might generate an egg without the plastic toy inside. How? Fukuyama is quite right to emphasize that it is crucial that we experience our “natural” properties as a matter of contingency and luck: if my neighbor is more beautiful or intelligent than me, it is because he was lucky to be born like that, and even his parents could not have planned it that way. The philosophical paradox is that if we take away this element of lucky chance, if our “natural” properties become controlled and regulated by biogenetic and other scientific manipulations, we lose the Factor X.
Of course, the hidden plastic toy can also be given a specific ideological twist—say, the idea that, after one puts aside the chocolate in all its ethnic variations, one always encounters an American (even if the toy is in all probability made in China). Furthermore, the Factor X does not only guarantee the underlying identity of different subjects, but also the continuing identity of the same subject. Twenty years ago, National Geographic published a famous photograph of a young Afghani woman with fierce bright green-yellow eyes; in 2001, the same woman was identified in Afghanistan. Although her face was changed, worn out from a difficult life and by heavy work, her intense eyes were instantly recognizable as the factor of continuity. However, this thesis of continuity was empirically undermined two decades ago when the German Leftist weekly journal Stern conducted a rather cruel experiment: the magazine paid a homeless man and woman to allow themselves to be thoroughly bathed, shaved, and then delivered to the top designers and hairdressers. The journal then published two large photos side-by-side of each person—in his/her destitute habitat, dirty and with unshaved faces, and then dressed up by a top designer. The result was effectively uncanny: although it was clear that we were dealing with the same person, the effect of the different dress, etc. was that our belief that there is always one and the same person beneath different appearances was shaken. It was not only the participants’ appearances that were different: the deeply disturbing effect of this change of appearances was that we, the spectators, somehow perceived a different personality beneath the appearances. Stern was bombarded by readers’ letters accusing the journal of violating the homeless people’s dignity, of humiliating them, submitting them to a cruel joke. However, what this experiment undermined was precisely the belief in Factor X, the kernel of identity that accounts for our dignity and persists through changes in appearance. In short, this experiment in a way empirically demonstrated that we all have a “negro head,” that the core of our subjectivity is a void filled in by appearances.
So let us return to the scene of a small kid violently tearing apart and discarding the chocolate egg in order to get at the plastic toy. Is he not the emblem of so-called “totalitarianism” which also wants to get rid of the “inessential” historical contingent coating in order to liberate the “essence” of man? Is not the ultimate “totalitarian” vision that of a New Man arising out of the debris of the violent annihilation of the old corrupted humanity? Paradoxically, then, liberalism and “totalitarianism” share this belief in the Factor X, the plastic toy in the midst of the human chocolate coating. The problem with Factor X which makes us equal despite our differences is clear: hidden behind the deep humanist insight that “deep down, we are all equal, the same vulnerable humans,” lies the cynical statement, “Why bother to fight against surface differences when, deep down, we already are equal?” The scenario in fact resembles nothing so much as the proverbial millionaire who pathetically discovers that he shares passions, fears, and loves with a destitute beggar.
Es fühlt sich bei keiner Wissenschaft stärker das Bedürfnis, ohne vorangehende Reflexionen von der Sache selbst anzufangen, als bei der logischen Wissenschaft. In jeder anderen ist der Gegenstand, den sie behandelt, und die wissenschaftliche Methode voneinander unterschieden; so wie auch der Inhalt nicht einen absoluten Anfang macht, sondern von anderen Begriffen abhängt und um sich herum mit anderem Stoffe zusammenhängt. Diesen Wissenschaften wird es daher zugegeben, von ihrem Boden und dessen Zusammenhang sowie von der Methode nur lemmatischer Weise zu sprechen, die als bekannt und angenommen vorausgesetzten Formen von Definitionen und dergleichen ohne weiteres anzuwenden und sich der gewöhnlichen Art des Räsonnements zur Festsetzung ihrer allgemeinen Begriffe und Grundbestimmungen zu bedienen.
Die Logik dagegen kann keine dieser Formen der Reflexion oder Regeln und Gesetze des Denkens voraussetzen, denn sie machen einen Teil ihres Inhalts selbst aus und haben erst innerhalb ihrer begründet zu werden. Nicht nur aber die Angabe der wissenschaft lichen Methode, sondern auch der Begriff selbst der Wissenschaft überhaupt gehört zu ihrem Inhalte, und zwar macht er ihr letztes Resultat aus; was sie ist, kann sie daher nicht voraussagen, sondern ihre ganze Abhandlung bringt dies Wissen von ihr selbst erst als ihr Letztes und als ihre Vollendung hervor. Gleichfalls ihr Gegenstand, das Denken oder bestimmter das begreifende Denken, wird wesentlich innerhalb ihrer abgehandelt; der Begriff desselben erzeugt sich in ihrem Verlaufe und kann somit nicht vorausgeschickt werden. Was daher in dieser Einleitung vorausgeschickt wird, hat nicht den Zweck, den Begriff der Logik etwa zu begründen oder den Inhalt und die Methode derselben zum voraus wissenschaftlich zu rechtfertigen,[35] sondern durch einige Erläuterungen und Reflexionen in räsonierendem und historischem Sinne den Gesichtspunkt, aus welchem diese Wissenschaft zu betrachten ist, der Vorstellung näherzubringen.
Wenn die Logik als die Wissenschaft des Denkens im allgemeinen angenommen wird, so wird dabei verstanden, daß dies Denken die bloße Form einer Erkenntnis ausmache, daß die Logik von allem Inhalte abstrahiere und das sogenannte zweite Bestandstück, das zu einer Erkenntnis gehöre, die Materie, anderswoher gegeben werden müsse, daß somit die Logik, als von welcher diese Materie ganz und gar unabhängig sei, nur die formalen Bedingungen wahrhafter Erkenntnis angeben, nicht aber reale Wahrheit selbst enthalten, noch auch nur der Weg zu realer Wahrheit sein könne, weil gerade das Wesentliche der Wahrheit, der Inhalt, außer ihr liege.
Fürs erste aber ist es schon ungeschickt zu sagen, daß die Logik von allem Inhalte abstrahiere, daß sie nur die Regeln des Denkens lehre, ohne auf das Gedachte sich einzulassen und auf dessen Beschaffenheit Rücksicht nehmen zu können. Denn da das Denken und die Regeln des Denkens ihr Gegenstand sein sollen, so hat sie ja unmittelbar daran ihren eigentümlichen Inhalt; sie hat daran auch jenes zweite Bestandstück der Erkenntnis, eine Materie, um deren Beschaffenheit sie sich bekümmert.
Allein zweitens sind überhaupt die Vorstellungen, auf denen der Begriff der Logik bisher beruhte, teils bereits untergegangen, teils ist es Zeit, daß sie vollends verschwinden, daß der Standpunkt dieser Wissenschaft höher gefaßt werde und daß sie eine völlig veränderte Gestalt gewinne.
Der bisherige Begriff der Logik beruht auf der im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein ein für allemal vorausgesetzten Trennung des Inhalts der Erkenntnis und der Form derselben, oder der Wahrheit und der Gewißheit. Es wird erstens vorausgesetzt, daß der Stoff des Erkennens als eine fertige Welt außerhalb des Denkens an und für sich vorhanden, daß das[36] Denken für sich leer sei, als eine Form äußerlich zu jener Materie hinzutrete, sich damit erfülle, erst daran einen Inhalt gewinne und dadurch ein reales Erkennen werde.
More people have said that and been killed than there are thorium decay products.
Get on Steam, said a zillion Americans who didn't buy Cave games last generation because they thought they weren't worth more than $9.99 minus sale discount.
Comments
The idea of a void in the middle of a dessert has a long history. In Elizabethan England, with the rise of modern subjectivity, a difference emerged between the “substantial” food (meat) eaten in the great banquet hall and the sweet desserts eaten in a separate small room while the tables were cleared (“voided”) in the banquet hall. Eventually, the small room in which these desserts were consumed came to be called “the void.” Consequently, the desserts themselves were referred to as “voids,” and, furthermore, in their form, usually in the shape of an animal and empty on the inside, they came to imitate the void. The emphasis was on the contrast between the substantial meal in the large banquet hall and the insubstantial, ornamental, dessert in the void: the void was a “like-meat,” a fake, a pure appearance. It could be, for example, a sugar peacock that looked like a peacock without being one (the key part of the ritual of consuming it was to violently crack the surface to reveal the void inside). This was the early modern version of today’s decaffeinated coffee or artificial sweeteners, and the first example of food deprived of its substance so that in eating it one was in a way “eating nothing.” The further key feature was that this void also provided the space for deploying private subjectivity as opposed to the public space of the banquet hall. The void was consumed in a place to which one withdrew after the public ceremony of the official meal; in this separate place, one was allowed to drop the official masks and abandon oneself to the relaxed exchange of rumors, impressions, opinions, and confessions, in their entire scope from the trivial to the most intimate. The opposition between the substantial “real thing” and the trifling ornamental appearance that only enveloped a void thus mirrored the opposition between substance and subject. No wonder then that, in the same period, the word void also functioned as an allusion to the subject itself, the Void beneath the deceptive appearance of one’s social masks. This, perhaps, is the first culinary version of Hegel’s famous motto according to which one should conceive the Absolute “not only as Substance, but also as Subject“: You should eat not only meat and bread, but also good desserts.
Should we not link this use of void to the fact that, at exactly the same historic moment, at the dawn of modernity, zero as a number was invented—a fact, as Brian Rotman has pointed out, that was connected to the expansion of commodity exchange and of the production of commodities into the hegemonic form of production, so that the link between the void and the commodity is there from the very beginning.2In Heidegger’s classic analysis of the Greek vase in “Das Ding,” to which Lacan refers in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Heidegger emphasizes how the vase as an emblematic Thing is formed around a central void, i.e., it serves as the container of a void.3 One is thus tempted to read the Greek vase and the Kinder chocolate egg together as designating two moments of the Thing in the history of the West; the sacred Thing at its dawn and the ridiculous merchandise at its end. The Kinder egg is our vase of today. Perhaps, then, the ultimate image condensing the entire “history of the West” would be that of the ancient Greeks offering to the gods a vase containing ... a Kinder egg plastic toy. One should effectively follow here the procedure, practiced by Adorno and Horkheimer in theirDialectics of Enlightenment, of condensing the entire development of the Western civilization into one simple line—from pre-historical magical manipulation to technological manipulation, or from the Greek vase to the Kinder egg. What one must bear in mind is that the dawn of Ancient Greek philosophy took place at the same time (and place) as the rise of commodity production and exchange. One of the stories about Thales, the first philosopher, is that he set out to prove his versatility in “real life” by becoming rich on the market, after which he returned to philosophy. The double meaning of the word speculation (metaphysical and financial) is thus operative from the very beginning. One should perhaps then risk the hypothesis that, historically, the Greek vase to which Heidegger refers was already a commodity, and that it was this fact which accounted for the void in its center, which gave to this void its true resonance. It is as a commodity that a thing is not only itself but also points “beyond itself” to another dimension, which is inscribed into the thing itself as a central void.
No wonder, then, that there is a homology between the Kinder egg, today’s void, and the abundance of commodities which offer us “X without X,” deprived of its substance (coffee without caffeine, sweetener without sugar, beer without alcohol, etc.). In both cases, we are offered the surface form deprived of its core. However, more fundamentally, as the discussion of the Elizabethan void indicates, is there not a clear structural homology between this structure of the commodity and the structure of the bourgeois subject? Do subjects—precisely insofar as they are the subjects of universal human rights—not also function as these Kinder chocolate eggs? In France, it is still possible to buy a dessert with the racist name “la tête du nègre” [“a Negro head”], which is a round chocolate cake that is empty inside (“like the stupid Negro’s head”). The Kinder egg fills in this void, but the lesson here is that we in fact all have “negro heads” with a hole in the centre, that subjectivity is in fact structured around a central void.
The humanist-universalist reply to this claim would be to deny that we all have “negro heads” by positing precisely something very much like aKinder egg theory of the human subject. As humanist ideologists would argue, we may be infinitely different—some of us are black, others white, some tall, others small, some women, others men, some rich, others poor, and so on—yet, deep inside us, there is a moral equivalent of the plastic toy, the same je ne sais quoi, an elusive X which somehow accounts for the dignity shared by all humans. To quote Francis Fukuyama:
In contrast to transcendental philosophers who emphasize that this Factor X is a sort of “symbolic fiction” with no counterpart in the reality of an individual, Fukuyama heroically locates it in our “human nature,” in our uniquely human genetic inheritance. And, effectively, is the genome not the ultimate figure of the plastic toy hidden deep within our human chocolate skin, so that we can have exteriors made of white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, with or without nuts or raisins, but inside there is always the same plastic toy? What Fukuyama ultimately fears is that if we mess too much with the production of the chocolate egg, we might generate an egg without the plastic toy inside. How? Fukuyama is quite right to emphasize that it is crucial that we experience our “natural” properties as a matter of contingency and luck: if my neighbor is more beautiful or intelligent than me, it is because he was lucky to be born like that, and even his parents could not have planned it that way. The philosophical paradox is that if we take away this element of lucky chance, if our “natural” properties become controlled and regulated by biogenetic and other scientific manipulations, we lose the Factor X.
Of course, the hidden plastic toy can also be given a specific ideological twist—say, the idea that, after one puts aside the chocolate in all its ethnic variations, one always encounters an American (even if the toy is in all probability made in China). Furthermore, the Factor X does not only guarantee the underlying identity of different subjects, but also the continuing identity of the same subject. Twenty years ago, National Geographic published a famous photograph of a young Afghani woman with fierce bright green-yellow eyes; in 2001, the same woman was identified in Afghanistan. Although her face was changed, worn out from a difficult life and by heavy work, her intense eyes were instantly recognizable as the factor of continuity. However, this thesis of continuity was empirically undermined two decades ago when the German Leftist weekly journal Stern conducted a rather cruel experiment: the magazine paid a homeless man and woman to allow themselves to be thoroughly bathed, shaved, and then delivered to the top designers and hairdressers. The journal then published two large photos side-by-side of each person—in his/her destitute habitat, dirty and with unshaved faces, and then dressed up by a top designer. The result was effectively uncanny: although it was clear that we were dealing with the same person, the effect of the different dress, etc. was that our belief that there is always one and the same person beneath different appearances was shaken. It was not only the participants’ appearances that were different: the deeply disturbing effect of this change of appearances was that we, the spectators, somehow perceived a different personality beneath the appearances. Stern was bombarded by readers’ letters accusing the journal of violating the homeless people’s dignity, of humiliating them, submitting them to a cruel joke. However, what this experiment undermined was precisely the belief in Factor X, the kernel of identity that accounts for our dignity and persists through changes in appearance. In short, this experiment in a way empirically demonstrated that we all have a “negro head,” that the core of our subjectivity is a void filled in by appearances.
So let us return to the scene of a small kid violently tearing apart and discarding the chocolate egg in order to get at the plastic toy. Is he not the emblem of so-called “totalitarianism” which also wants to get rid of the “inessential” historical contingent coating in order to liberate the “essence” of man? Is not the ultimate “totalitarian” vision that of a New Man arising out of the debris of the violent annihilation of the old corrupted humanity? Paradoxically, then, liberalism and “totalitarianism” share this belief in the Factor X, the plastic toy in the midst of the human chocolate coating. The problem with Factor X which makes us equal despite our differences is clear: hidden behind the deep humanist insight that “deep down, we are all equal, the same vulnerable humans,” lies the cynical statement, “Why bother to fight against surface differences when, deep down, we already are equal?” The scenario in fact resembles nothing so much as the proverbial millionaire who pathetically discovers that he shares passions, fears, and loves with a destitute beggar.
Look at all the delicious shit these guys make
who keeps throwing all these cookies at me
Dang it!
is that a house where they play doom metal?
or Doom?
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Did I get that right?
Es fühlt sich bei keiner Wissenschaft stärker das Bedürfnis, ohne vorangehende Reflexionen von der Sache selbst anzufangen, als bei der logischen Wissenschaft. In jeder anderen ist der Gegenstand, den sie behandelt, und die wissenschaftliche Methode voneinander unterschieden; so wie auch der Inhalt nicht einen absoluten Anfang macht, sondern von anderen Begriffen abhängt und um sich herum mit anderem Stoffe zusammenhängt. Diesen Wissenschaften wird es daher zugegeben, von ihrem Boden und dessen Zusammenhang sowie von der Methode nur lemmatischer Weise zu sprechen, die als bekannt und angenommen vorausgesetzten Formen von Definitionen und dergleichen ohne weiteres anzuwenden und sich der gewöhnlichen Art des Räsonnements zur Festsetzung ihrer allgemeinen Begriffe und Grundbestimmungen zu bedienen.
Die Logik dagegen kann keine dieser Formen der Reflexion oder Regeln und Gesetze des Denkens voraussetzen, denn sie machen einen Teil ihres Inhalts selbst aus und haben erst innerhalb ihrer begründet zu werden. Nicht nur aber die Angabe der wissenschaft lichen Methode, sondern auch der Begriff selbst der Wissenschaft überhaupt gehört zu ihrem Inhalte, und zwar macht er ihr letztes Resultat aus; was sie ist, kann sie daher nicht voraussagen, sondern ihre ganze Abhandlung bringt dies Wissen von ihr selbst erst als ihr Letztes und als ihre Vollendung hervor. Gleichfalls ihr Gegenstand, das Denken oder bestimmter das begreifende Denken, wird wesentlich innerhalb ihrer abgehandelt; der Begriff desselben erzeugt sich in ihrem Verlaufe und kann somit nicht vorausgeschickt werden. Was daher in dieser Einleitung vorausgeschickt wird, hat nicht den Zweck, den Begriff der Logik etwa zu begründen oder den Inhalt und die Methode derselben zum voraus wissenschaftlich zu rechtfertigen,[35] sondern durch einige Erläuterungen und Reflexionen in räsonierendem und historischem Sinne den Gesichtspunkt, aus welchem diese Wissenschaft zu betrachten ist, der Vorstellung näherzubringen.
Wenn die Logik als die Wissenschaft des Denkens im allgemeinen angenommen wird, so wird dabei verstanden, daß dies Denken die bloße Form einer Erkenntnis ausmache, daß die Logik von allem Inhalte abstrahiere und das sogenannte zweite Bestandstück, das zu einer Erkenntnis gehöre, die Materie, anderswoher gegeben werden müsse, daß somit die Logik, als von welcher diese Materie ganz und gar unabhängig sei, nur die formalen Bedingungen wahrhafter Erkenntnis angeben, nicht aber reale Wahrheit selbst enthalten, noch auch nur der Weg zu realer Wahrheit sein könne, weil gerade das Wesentliche der Wahrheit, der Inhalt, außer ihr liege.
Fürs erste aber ist es schon ungeschickt zu sagen, daß die Logik von allem Inhalte abstrahiere, daß sie nur die Regeln des Denkens lehre, ohne auf das Gedachte sich einzulassen und auf dessen Beschaffenheit Rücksicht nehmen zu können. Denn da das Denken und die Regeln des Denkens ihr Gegenstand sein sollen, so hat sie ja unmittelbar daran ihren eigentümlichen Inhalt; sie hat daran auch jenes zweite Bestandstück der Erkenntnis, eine Materie, um deren Beschaffenheit sie sich bekümmert.
Allein zweitens sind überhaupt die Vorstellungen, auf denen der Begriff der Logik bisher beruhte, teils bereits untergegangen, teils ist es Zeit, daß sie vollends verschwinden, daß der Standpunkt dieser Wissenschaft höher gefaßt werde und daß sie eine völlig veränderte Gestalt gewinne.
Der bisherige Begriff der Logik beruht auf der im gewöhnlichen Bewußtsein ein für allemal vorausgesetzten Trennung des Inhalts der Erkenntnis und der Form derselben, oder der Wahrheit und der Gewißheit. Es wird erstens vorausgesetzt, daß der Stoff des Erkennens als eine fertige Welt außerhalb des Denkens an und für sich vorhanden, daß das[36] Denken für sich leer sei, als eine Form äußerlich zu jener Materie hinzutrete, sich damit erfülle, erst daran einen Inhalt gewinne und dadurch ein reales Erkennen werde.
They say everyone was dressed for the caucasian.
Am I doing it right? In german.