meaningful statement about something, not about nothing. We intend something when we distinguish it from something else. So they are something. But is “to-be-something” a form of being? And so we come to the second question: What does it mean to say that sound iswhen no one hears anything, or that blackness is, when no one sees something black? Lotze remarks: “We still suppose we know, dimly enough, what the being of things consists in, even when those things [68] are objects of no one’s knowledge but are purely for themselves” (p. 510). But when it comes to these contents, we can no longer talk about “being.” Yet in another case, when we have heard sounds, we distinguish these contents from others. And so the answer to the first question implies that these contents are in fact something and not nothing. As Lotze puts it, there is “a certain element of affirmation” (ibid.). If I distinguish color in general from sound in general, and if I say that they are different sense qualities, then I affirm something. I have something given, to which I say yes.

A certain element of affirmation belongs to these contents. They are not nothing, and yet they still are not things. In Lotze’s sense of the term, they are not real. So how are we to understand the actuality of these somethings that are not nothing? There must be some kind of information about them. Lotze tried to introduce some clarity and find an answer, by moving into a fundamental consideration whose meaning is crucial for the genesis of the concept of validity, insofar as that concept was achieved within the horizon of this fundamental reflection.

As we saw earlier, Lotze already said that the contents are not nothing, and he formulated that as follows: They have a certain element of affirmation (or “affirmedness,” as he put it more exactly in another passage) (p. 511). By “affirmation,” he does not mean the act of affirming. He means what is affirmed, just as analogously the term “position” does not mean the act of positing but the posited as such, and a calculation is not the act of calculating but what is calculated and written down. Lotze’s use of these general expressions and concepts is in obvious connection with Herbart’s position, with which Lotze carried on a long and searching argument in his first Metaphysik.⁵⁰ Lotze says, “There is, to be sure, a very general concept of affirmedness or position” (ibid.). Our languages have no proper word for this concept of affirmedness, and Lotze says that even in the word “position” there is

50. [Metaphysik; drei Bücher der Ontologie Kosmologie und Psychologie (Leipzig, Hirzel, 1879); translated as Metaphysics, in Three Books: Ontology, Cosmology, and Psychology, ed. and trans. B. Bosanquet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884). With regard to Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), see his Allgemeine Metaphysik nebst den Anfängen der Philosophischen Naturlehre (General Metaphysics, together with the First Principles of a Philosophical Theory of Nature), published in 1828–1829.]