Samayasara

Author(s): Kundkundacharya, Hiralal Jain, A N Upadhye
Publisher: Bharatiya Gyanpith

Page 33

18
SAMAYASĀRA
death and hence the immortality of Self should be accepted if the moral proposition that virtue and happiness coincide somehow is to be accepted. . Thus according to Rant in order to justify moral life of our existence we are bound to accept the reality and immortality of the self which could not be guaranteed according to the pure reason of his first book. Thus in spite of the Agnosticism in his first book he attempts to restore the centre of gravity in the second book, the Practical Reason, where he tries to explain the reality and immortality of the Self and provides rational justification of his moral pursuit in search of happiness. In spite of his service to religion and morality his metaphysical system as a whole remains unbalanced since it rests upon a meaningless dualisın of Noumena, the Unknown Reality and the phenomena, the unimportant illusory experience, which is the only source of knowledge for us.
Kant's philosophy is taken up by his successor Fichte. Fichte directs his attention to the criticism of the Thing-in-itself. The Nourmenal world which was considered to be the Ultimate Reality by Kant which was also said to be unknown and unknowable Fichte considered to be an unnecessary metaphysical encumbrance. Why speak about the thing which is unknown and unknowable ? What is the value of your statement as to the existence of such a reality ? Since nothing is known as to its existence and its nature, Fichte dismisses that as unworthy of metaphysical consideration and confines himself to what Kant called the phenomenal world of appearance. Therefore Fichte recognised the ego and the phenomenal world which it constructs. He does not worry himself as to the source of the sense stimuli. What we are searching about is the world of the objective reality. This world of objective reality is the result of the activity of the ego. Why shonld the ego or the self indulge in creating such a phenomenal world of experience ? According to Fichte this is necessary because of the full moral growth for the self. The self creates the world of experience, a sort of moral arena in which it struggles in order to gain moral strength and to grow to its full stature of moral personality. Thus with Fichte there is nothing more than the self and the phenomenal world of experience which it creates for its own purpose; there is no other reality besides this. Thus Kantian idealism in the hands of Fichte turns out to be merely the self and the phenomenal world of experience which it creates, a result more or less same as the Berkeley's idealisın in English empiricism. This dismissal of the foundation of external reality and converting it into inerely an appearance created by the self was considered to be extremely unsatisfactory and it was rejected by his successor Hegel.
Hegel is one of the great world-thinkers. He saw how a careless analysis led to an unsatisfactory and incomplete system of metaphysics. He