Paul Natorp’s General Psychology and Its Limits

According to Natorp, “consciousness” is characterised by the immediate knowledge of having ideas that can become knowledge. “Consciousness” is the epitome of this knowledge. Natorp confronts it with the idea of a possible consciousness at all as the general expression of appearance. It represents the lawfulness of appearance, the determination of which demands of every empirical consciousness that determines itself to think cognition the differentiation of its “self” from the continuous flow of its states. Accordingly, “consciousness” means the crisis as the zero point of all determination, which of course does not itself determine anything, but rather places “determination in general” in the relationship of the ideas of a consciousness to thinking as the predicate of “consciousness in general”, which must be able to accompany all its ideas - thus also those by virtue of which it perceives itself as thinking. The zero point of determination is therefore the synthetic unity of that which is possible to think and that which is necessary for its representation. For Natorp, the problem of a general psychology therefore consists in how the “I think” as the act of determining my existence can be made generally representable and comprehensible. The fundamental significance of her question, however, is represented by ethics, whose fundamental significance, according to Natorp, is the ultimate task of philosophy.