tical approach, according to which the epistemological question is never asked, and substituted for: How is the object (which the subject believes himself to have knowledge about) constituted?177 The similarities between this line of critical analysis and those, for example of Selbstdarstellungen some twenty-five years later, are obvious: epistemology first, ontology and the formation of concepts later, as is the character of the intended target - legal science under the influence of metaphysics. In Stat och rätt Hägerström’s epistemological premisses are those that he elaborated by him in Kants Ethik imVerhältnis zu seinen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundgedanken (1902), according to which Kant’s epistemology ought not to be analyzed in a psychological direction, because any such interpretation of Kant invariably leads to contradictions and inconsistencies.178The basic question asked is related to that regarding the validity of empirical knowledge. To start with, one must ask: Is empirical knowledge problematic? If the answer is in the affirmative, then one must investigate in what manner empirical knowledge poses a problem, namely: How can the cognitive powers of the subject be applied to an external world without losing their validity? How can the factual character of empirical knowledge be argued? And so forth.179 From a Kantian, or Neo-Kantian point of view, the epistemological validity of the internal experience cannot be denied, for regardless of whether or not the cognitive medium constitutes an immediate self-observation, knowledge by definition will involve the subject’s conception transcending the idea, the representation, itself. Consequently, the subject’s knowledge transcends from the immediately perceived, the representation, to the thing itself, or at least transcends to an assumption, based upon the representation, of how the thing itself in all probability ought to a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 435 177 Ibid., p. 67. 178 Hägerström, Kants Ethik, pp. 1-2 and pp. 14-19. 179 Hägerström, Stat och rätt, pp. iii-iv.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=