Knowing the World 75gaining information about the material processes standing
behind them. For it, only these truly exist. If philosophers
as critical idealists acknowledge existence at all, then their
search for knowledge, while making use of mental pic-
tures as a means, aims only at this existence. Such philos-
ophers’ interest skips over the subjective world of mental
pictures and directs itself to what produces them.
A critical idealist might go so far as to say: “I am en-
closed within my world of mental pictures, and I cannot
leave it. If I think that there is something behind these
mental pictures, then this thought, too, is nothing more
than a mental picture.” An idealist of this kind will
therefore either deny the thing-in-itself entirely, or at
least explain that it has no significance for human be-
ings; that is, since we can know nothing about it, it is as
good as non-existent.
To a critical idealist of this kind, the whole world ap-
pears like a dream, in the face of which every attempt at
knowledge would be simply meaningless. In this view,
there can be only two kinds of people: biased ones who
take their own dreamy fabrications for real things, and
wise ones who see through the nothingness of this dream
world and gradually lose all desire to bother themselves
further about it. From this vantage point, even one’s own
personality can become a mere dream image. Just as one’s
own dream image appears among other dream images in
sleep, so the mental picture of one’s own I joins the mental
pictures of the external world. Therefore our conscious-
ness does not contain our real I, but only the mental pic-
ture of our I. For those who deny that there are things, or