Knowing the World 77These two views agree with naive realism in that they
seek to gain a footing in the world by an investigation of
percepts. But nowhere in this realm can they find a firm
base.
One of the main questions for proponents of transcen-
dental realism must be: “How does the I bring the world
of mental pictures out of itself?” A world given to us as
mental pictures, which disappears as soon as we close our
senses to the external world, can still be of interest in the
serious search for knowledge, insofar as it is a means for
indirectly investigating the world of the self-existent I. If
the things we experience were mental pictures, then ev-
eryday life would be like a dream, and knowledge of the
true state of affairs would be like waking up. Our dream
images, too, interest us only as long as we dream and so
do not see through their dream nature. The moment we
awaken, we no longer ask about the inner connection of
our dream images, but about the physical, physiological,
and psychological processes that underlie them. In the
same way, philosophers who hold the world to be their
mental picture cannot interest themselves in the inner
connection of its details. If they admit an existent I at all,
they will not ask how one of their mental pictures con-
nects with another. Rather, they will ask what is going on
- On this view, the thing-in-itself is beyond the realm of the world
immediatelyknowable to us, i.e., it is transcendent. Our world, how-
ever, can be related to the transcendent transcendentally. Hartmann’s
view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the
ideal, to the transcendent, the real. (Author’s note)