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and from other subjects (II 23). Metaphysics, which studies "reality conceived as meanable" (II 24, cf. 27), is not concerned with the subject.
What is concerned with the subject is transcendental psychology (to be carefully distinguished from metaphysics, mysticism, epistemology, or introspective psychology), which studies knowing and subjective function in general by "the spiritual cultivation of a subjective attitude” (II 28). Consciousness of the subjective is consciousness of the false, rejection of object. This is a gradual process with several steps or modes. “The modes of subjectivity are the modes of freeing oneself from the modes of objectivity" (II 28). But transcendental psychology goes beyond this. It not only analyzes "the positively felt and believed freedom of the subject from objectivity” but also elaborates "modes of freedom that have no reference to object at all” (II 29). For metaphysics (objective attitude) the knownness of the object appears positive and knowing "its problematic negation," and the object appears to exist beyond its relatedness to the subject. For transcendental psychology (subjective attitude), of which Kant's critical philosophy is a disguised form,40 freedom is positively believed, the objectivity of the object appears as not belonging to it (like change) but as the subject's self-negation, the transcendent object is meaningless, and metaphysics is "the quest of a chimera" (II 30).
Spiritual progress, realization of the subject as free, may result unselfconsciously from a good life, but for others theoretical elaboration of stages of freedom may propose a discipline for such realization. "Consciousness of perfection, freedom, or salvation" is a demand for activity which takes the form of dissociation of the subject from the object by theoretical “awareness of the subject as what the object is not" (II 32).41
The relatedness of an object to the subject, its knownness or feltness, studied in transcendental psychology in abstraction from the object itself, is called psychic fact (II 34).42 Psychic fact is not coordinate with objective fact; it "should be more real but is actually less real” (II 47). It is only "in the awareness of the illusory” (II 39) and "as
40 With serious shortcomings: a persisting objective attitude in the first critique, admission of the unknowable reality ("an unwarrantable surrender to realism"), denial of self-knowledge, disbelief in the possibility of a spiritual discipline of the theoretic reason through which self-knowledge may be attainable, confusion of undeniability with truth (II 31).
41 This is the way of knowledge (jnana-marga) of traditional non-dualist Vedanta, opposed to the way of morality (karma-marga) involved in the "good life.”
42 The 32 paragraphs of chapter 2 are devoted to the definition of this concept.
