On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

§ 42 The Subject of Volition

According to what has preceded, the Subject of knowledge can never be known; it can never become Object or representation. Nevertheless, as we have not only an outer self-knowledge (in sensuous perception), but an inner one also; and as, on the other hand, every knowledge, by its very nature, presupposes a knower and a known, what is known within us as such, is not the knower, but the willer, the Subject of Volition: the Will. Starting from knowledge, we may assert that “I know” is an analytical, “I will,” on the contrary, a synthetical, and moreover an à posteriori proposition, that is, it is given by experience—in this case by inner experience (i.e., in Time alone). In so far therefore the Subject of volition would be an Object for us. Introspection always shows us to ourselves as willing. In this willing, however, there are numerous degrees, from the faintest wish to passion, and I have often shown153 that not only all our emotions, but even all those movements of our inner man, which are subsumed under the wide conception of feeling, are states of the will.

Now, the identity of the willing with the knowing Subject, in virtue of which the word “I” includes and designates both, is the nodus154 of the Universe, and therefore inexplicable. For we can only comprehend relations between Objects; but two Objects never can be one, excepting as parts of a whole. Here, where the Subject is in question, the rules by which we know Objects are no longer applicable, and actual identity of the knower with what is known as willing—that is, of Subject and Object—is immediately given. Now, whoever has clearly realized the utter impossibility of explaining this identity, will surely concur with me in calling it the miracle κατ’ ἐξοχήν.

Just as the Understanding is the subjective correlate to our First Class of representations, the Reason to the Second, and pure Sensibility to the Third, so do we find that the correlate to this Fourth Class is the inner sense, or Self-consciousness in general.