Chapter 32 Part Three Revisiting the World as Appearance§ 32

According to our previous considerations, although there is an inner agreement between Kant and Plato, although the same goal floats before them, and the same world view arouses them and guides them to philosophy, yet in our view Original ideas and good things are not simply the same thing.In our view, the Idea should rather be said to be only the immediate, and therefore proper objectivity, of the thing-in-itself.But the thing-in-itself is the will, the will, as long as it has not been objectified, has not become a representation.It turns out that Kant said that the thing-in-itself should be independent of all forms attached to "knowledge"; Going in (as suggested in the appendix) is Kant's shortcoming; for this is the first and most general form of all phenomena, that is to say representations.So he should have manifestly deprived the thing-in-itself as an object, and that would have saved him from falling into an obvious inconsistency which had been discovered long ago.The Platonic Idea, on the contrary, is necessarily an object, a known thing, a representation; it is for this, but only for this, that the Idea differs from a thing-in-itself.The Idea has only escaped, or rather has not entered only those secondary forms of appearance, that is to say, those in which we include it all in the principle of sufficient reason; but the first and most general form remains , that is, the fundamental form of representation, retains the form of object for the subject.As for the lower forms (of which the principle of sufficient reason is a common expression), that is, that which reproduces the Idea as many individual, impermanent entities, the number of which is quite indifferent to the Idea. not related.So the principle of sufficient reason is the form that the idea can enter, and when the idea falls into the cognition of the subject as an individual, it enters into this form.The individual, which appears according to the principle of reason, is then only an indirect objectification of the thing-in-itself (that is, the will), between which there is the Idea.The Idea, as the only immediate objectivity of the will, has no other form than that which cognition as cognition has, except the fundamental form of representation, which is the form of object to the subject.The Idea is therefore only the most adequate object of the will or of the thing-in-itself; it may even be the whole of the thing-in-itself, but only under the form of representation.And this is the reason for the great agreement between Plato and Kant, although, in the strictest sense, the two are not saying the same thing.Individual things are not the perfectly proper objectivity of the will, but have been blurred by those forms whose general expression is the principle of sufficient reason.But these forms are conditions of cognition.It is knowledge that is possible for such and such an individual. —If we are allowed to deduce from an impossible premise, if we are not at the same time individuals as subjects of knowledge—that is, if our intuition is not mediated by the body, but this intuition is from the body. The body itself is only a concrete desire, it is only the objectivity of the will, so it is also an object among the objects; [entering into consciousness] in the form of the law is assumed, and thus introduces time and all other forms expressed according to the law;—in fact we would no longer know individual objects at all, nor an event at all. , and will not know transformation and multiplicity, but in a clear and unobscured understanding, only realize the idea, only realize the level of the objectification of the will or the real thing in itself; thus our world will also be " permanent residence now."Time is but the parted, fragmented perception of these Ideas which an individual creature has, which are outside time and therefore eternal.So Plato said "time is the animation of eternity".