knowledge of the transcendental consciousness itself. Simultaneously, transcendentalism holds that transcendental consciousness alone has the ability to assimilate physical reality, whereby transcendental consciousness becomes the gateway to empirical knowledge.61 However, if this is the solution to the transcendentalist problem of cognition, then transcendentalism rests on a contradiction, namely that we can only have valid knowledge of the subjective, our own consciousness as an epistemological object, while simultaneously arguing that this consciousness constitutes the sole gateway to object knowledge, external knowledge, which on the other hand is non-subjective, and thus according to transcendentalist doctrine incognizable. The transcendentalist solution to epistemological problems, as it turns out, will rather than save us from further critique, invite more of it. In fact, the transcendentalist solution to epistemological problems lays the inherent instability of the foundations of transcendentalism bare for Hägerström. By then, he realized that the basic principle of Kantian philosophy was false. Hence, he could not continue to pursue an epistemological principle setting consciousness itself as the only immediately given element in knowledge.62 a ca l l f o r s c i e n t i f i c p u r i t y 53 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.
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