VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

FLORIN LOBONŢ 40
consciousness owns only implicitly—is necessary. Basically, philosophy
does not offer religious consciousness something new, brought from without,
but only reveals, in a Socratic manner, its own content, its own principles.
Therefore, the aims of critical philosophy are rather hermeneutic and
explanatory than dogmatic-prescriptive: it interprets and explains the
implications of human faith, but does not claim to offer grounding or a
behavioral regulator for religious life. Philosophy investigates the possibility
of religious grounds, that is, the a priori conditions they depend upon. To this
extent, despite all particularities mentioned above, when applied to religious
consciousness philosophy preserves its distinctive character, as critical
philosophy. As far as we are concerned, these accounts are—mutatis
mutandis, of course—quite similar to those made by Kant with respect to the
relation between philosophy and morality. In his Essay on Metaphysics,
Collingwood applies these principles to his theory of absolute
presuppositions:
[Metaphysics] arises out of the mere pursuit of
knowledge. That pursuit, which we call science, is an
attempt to think in a systematic and orderly manner. This
involves disentangling the presuppositions which neither
stand in need of justification nor can in fact be justified;
and a person who made this discovery is already a
metaphysician. 25
Apart from his disagreements with Kant, Collingwood interprets him as
an ally in the struggle against what he called “the irrationalist movement of
the present day.” 26 Just as in Kant’s time,
the tendency [of human thought] is grave… [But it is
more serious than the] scepticism of the eighteenth
century. That did not express a revolt against the life of
scientific thought… [but] only a sense of its difficulty…
Metaphysics came under fire in the eighteenth century
because people fancied that in a world without
metaphysics conditions would be more favorable to the
development of science. To-day metaphysics is under
fire because in a world without metaphysics conditions
will be more favourable to the development of
irrationalism. 27
Another profound analysis made by the philosopher from Königsberg is
that which aims at the attainment of the idea of transcendental liberty,
undertaken in the second Critique. The means through which he grounds this
concept is the idea of the autonomy of will. By the analytical-regressive
investigation, which commenced from the common consciousness and from