This article is an approach to the epistemological problems from the ontological point of view. One of the reasons why modern philosophers chose the consciousness rather than the being as the main topic of their thinking and thus formed a subjective philosophy is that they confused the consciousness of being, which is intentio prima with the consciousness of consciousness, intentio secunda. They considered the consciousness of consciousness which is a sort of self-consciousness as a requisite for the consciousness of being. But actually the consciousness of being can be realized only with the being of consciousness and even without the consciousness of consciousness. This article explains by a phenomenological analysis how this is possible. Now Scholastics divide the process of cognition into the cognition of concept (cognitio notionis) and the cognition of judgement (cognitio judicii). It is a fact that the aposteriori verification is necessary and is possible especially concerning the cognition of judgement. But as to the cognition of concept no one can directly prove the unity between the being and the concept of being. This is the second reason of modern subjectivism. We give an indirect verification for this unity according to the aposteriori statistics which is based on the fact that the direct verification of the cognition of judgement was effectively achieved. In the cognition of judgemdnt, the consciousness of the grasp of thing-in-itself is necessary as well as the grasp of thing-in-itself, but in the cognition of concept, the grasp of thing-in-itself can exist without any consciousness of the grasp of thing-in-itself. The consciousness of grasp of thing-in-itself requires the self-consciousness while the grasp of thing-in-itself does not necessarily accompany the self-consciousness. This grasp of thing-in-itself is nothing but the consciousness of being, that is, the concept of being, which is indirectly verified in an aposteriori way. Thus the critical epistemology, when it is based upon the ontology, brings about the empirical realism.

I 哲学,慶応義塾創立百年記念論文集