throughout the whole range of mental experience. The brain of an individual is, in Avenarius’ technical phraseology, the ‘empiriokritischer Substitutionswert’ of that individual.[1] Since everything which happens to, or is experienced by, the individual is adequately represented by corresponding processes in the brain, the brain can be substituted functionally for the individual. Exhaustive knowledge of the one yields completed knowledge of both. Stated in terms of Avenarius’ monistic view of experience, this amounts to the assertion that experience in all its concreteness, that is, as mental, varies in exact correspondence with this particular part of itself, and can therefore be explained through it. This is the line of argument developed in the Kritik. In the first volume Avenarius analyses the independent vital series, and in the second volume applies his results in explanation of the conscious life.
To revert, now, to Avenarius’ distinction between the absolute and the relative points of view. His position requires to be carefully interpreted, and would seem to be as follows. All complete experience involves the relative point of view. Though the absolute standpoint states nothing which is not true, and though in experience we apprehend objects as independent of the self, we never experience them save in relation to the self. The absolute standpoint is therefore reached only by abstraction from complete experience. Further, Avenarius refuses to recognise any such thing as the perception of an object. The only reality that can exist is experience, and experience has the two inseparable aspects, inner and outer, psychical and physical, perception and object perceived, thought and object thought about. But to avoid the misleading connotation of these familiar terms, he names the two aspects ‘character’ and ‘content’. To the variable aspect of character belong feeling, perceiving, conjecturing, believing, knowing, etc., the form, whatever it may be, in which we experience anything. As content, on the other hand, he classifies everything which is felt, perceived, conjectured, believed, known, etc. In the relation, character-content, each aspect may vary independently of the other. On the one hand, we may perceive, believe, know, one and the same content; on the other hand, we may take up the same mental attitude to very different things at different periods of our lives. Since experience as character may itself, however, become content of experience, the difference between the two aspects is in the end only relative.
- ↑ Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, § 158.
