dimension, even if, as the phrase suggests, it is essentially connected with the old dimensions, is a new and radically new method which is set over against the "natural" method. He who denies this has failed to understand entirely the whole of the level at which the characteristic problem of the critique of cognition lies, and with this he has failed to understand what philosophy really wants to do and should do, and what gives it its own character and authority pis?a-pis the whole of natural cognition and science of the natural sort. 


At the outset of the critique of cognition the entire world of nature, physical and psychological, as well as one's own human self together with all the sciences which have to do with these objective matters, are put in question. Their being, their validity are left up in the air. 

Now the question is: How can the critique of cognition get under way? The critique of cognition is the attempt of cognition to find a scientific understanding of itself and to establish objectively what cognition is in its essence, what is the meaning of the relation to an object which is implicit in the claim to cognition and what its objective validity or the reaching of its object comes to if it is to be cognition in the true sense. Although the Epoche [epoche], which the critique of cognition must employ, begins with the doubt of all cognition, its own included, it cannot remain in such doubt nor can it refuse to take as valid everything given, including that which it brings to light itself. If it must presuppose nothing as already given, then it must begin with some cognition which it does not take unexamined from elsewhere but rather gives to itself, which it itself posits as primal. 

This primal cognition must contain nothing of the unclarity and the doubt which otherwise give to cognition the character of the enigmatic and problematic so that we are finally in the embarrassing position of having to say that cognition as such is a problem, something incomprehensible, in need of elucidation and dubious in its claims. Or, to speak differently: If we are not allowed to take anything as already given because our lack of clarity about cognition implies that we cannot understand what it could mean for something to be known in itself yet in the context of cognition, then it must after all be possible to make evident something which we have to acknowledge as absolutely given and indubitable; insofar, that is, as it is given with such complete clarity that every question about it will and must find an immediate answer. 

And now we recall the Cartesian doubt. Reflecting on