The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Thus, what Kant called transcendent metaphysics—the great past dream of all philosophy to provide an account of the ultimate way things had to be—turned out to be unobtainable (which, as Kant repeatedly noted, did not mean that people would ever cease to want that kind of thing). Instead of “transcendent” metaphysics (the study of the necessary nature of things in themselves apart from—“transcendent” to—our experience), we had to settle for “transcendental” metaphysics (the way things necessarily had to take shape in our experience of the world).

  Kant also claimed to have saved the idea of human freedom by this gambit. On the one hand, if we think about the world in which we live, we note that everything in it is the result of some prior cause, that this necessarily forms a deterministic system, and therefore there can be no human freedom. Yet, from the practical point of view, we must take ourselves to be free when we deliberate about any action. From the first-person standpoint, we cannot see ourselves as just matter in motion, since making a decision to do something would then only amount to watching ourselves from the outside and then trying to predict what our neuromuscular system was going to do. It seems therefore that we must practically presuppose that we are free, but we must also rule out the very possibility of such freedom on theoretical grounds. Kant’s answer to this dilemma lay in his system of transcendental idealism. In transcendental idealism, we fully endorse the idea that there is no reason to think that in the world as we must experience it we could be free, but that itself is no reason to conclude yea or nay that in the world of things in themselves, we are not capable of exercising the kind of self-starting causality on which freedom seemed to depend, and since we had to practically suppose that we were free, we were thus authorized to think of ourselves as self-causing, that is, free. In short, if transcendental idealism is true, then nobody can prove in metaphysics or physics that you are free, but likewise nobody can prove in metaphysics or physics that you are not free. Since you must assume you are free, and metaphysical agnosticism about freedom is the only truthful attitude to take, the practical assurance of freedom is enough.

  Finally, Kant also argued that the nature of this freedom—theoretically incomprehensible but practically necessary—was such that all the laws of morality followed from it. You were indeed responsible for your life, and morality was not equivalent at all to any set of de facto, social rules that governed one’s (often stultifying, eighteenth century Prussian) community. Moreover, the morality that followed from human freedom had as its binding, logical principle the injunction to respect the “dignity” that all people equally possessed. Everybody, each of us, is of unconditional worth, and in Kant’s language, is an “end in itself.” Whereas in the social world of Kant’s time, the various “dignities” of nobles vis-à-vis commoners put them on a higher social scale and therefore as having greater worth, in the moral world dignity was radically and totally equal and possessed a value beyond all price. Freedom and equality of dignity were the commitments of transcendental idealism.

  Kant famously remarked that “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”2 A younger philosopher at the time, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, took this to heart and published a widely read piece that argued that, more or less, Kant had therefore resolved the dispute between religion and science. Science, by which he basically meant post-Newtonian physics, described a world of necessary connections among material things in which God seemed to have little room to breathe. Yet since the world of faith still called on those who believed that there was more to life than just matter in motion, Kant has proven, so Reinhold’s argument went, that the faithful need not fear (natural) science. Natural science is the perfect account of the world as we must necessarily experience it. However, that world as we necessarily experience it is decidedly not the world of things in themselves. If there is no rational ground for faith, there is nonetheless no rational ground for abandoning it. In fact, faith is just that: faith in a world beyond or radically different from the world as we know it. The most rigorous hard-headed materialist thus had reason to believe that his own materialism was not an argument against faith even if it was just as well not an argument for it. Those of faith did not have to worry that their views might fly in the face of empirical reality as science accounted for it.

  12.3 IDEALISM IN REACTION TO KANT

  Kant thus rapidly came to assume a commanding intellectual position in German thought. The great tensions of life in that period—the cult of “the heart” versus the cold machine state, the growing tension between science and religion, and the ossified feel of the public morals of social life versus the demands for more space for individual action—all seemed to find a possible resolution in the Kantian philosophy. During this period, universities were also beginning to rethink themselves and their mission. For many people, they seemed to be only medieval holdovers where tenured professors taught useless out of date orthodoxy to students who were mostly concerned with drinking themselves silly. To many therefore it seemed best to simply abolish such institutions. In light of this, universities began to rethink themselves, and one of the places where this rethinking was going on was in the tiny town of Jena in Saxony, where a benevolent if not really interested Duke was letting a famous poet-turned-government official build the skeleton for what would eventually become the modern collegiate research university.3 One of the things that made the university at Jena take off was that it rapidly became the center where Kant’s philosophy was being discussed and developed. It was also the place therefore where “philosophy” actually took over from theology, law, and medicine as the anchor and the heart of the enterprise.

  “Idealism” as “transcendental idealism” thereby rapidly assumed an importance it had not had before. “Idealism” in Kantian terms did not amount to the older thesis that only the ideal world (say, that of numbers) was real, nor did it hold that the world was a simple construct out of, or in some way reducible to, the experiences of a conscious subject. “Transcendental idealism” did insist that the world that science described was indeed the world described under the only conditions under which we could experience it and that the world science explained was in that qualified way mind-dependent and thus “ideal.” However, “transcendental idealism” was, as Kant insisted, also an empirical realism. The experienced world was not an illusion, hiding the real world behind itself. The experienced world was the real world, the world of things in themselves but only as they were experienced, even if that experience was not revelatory of what those things in themselves metaphysically, “ultimately” were. That world, or this world represented as existing apart from our experiential conditions, was in principle a mystery to us, and “transcendental idealism” thus retained an opening for faith and for radical human freedom. “Experience” turned out to have its own metaphysics, now taken as the non-empirical conditions of the things that appeared in that experience, not as what those things were in themselves. The metaphysics of experience (the transcendental) did not extend to the metaphysics of things-in-themselves (the transcendent).

  Of course, not everybody jumped onboard. Although the idea was intriguing, many claimed to be deeply puzzled about exactly what the relation was between the experienced world and the world of unknowable things in themselves. Were they two different worlds, or were they one world represented in two different ways? Did it mean that “nature” as we know it was really something constructed by us? And what did it mean to say that our own “self-consciousness” was a condition of all other representations?

  Kant’s first Critique appeared in 1781, the second (altered) edition in 1787, and shortly thereafter, the French Revolution in 1789 shook Europe. Kant’s arguments for the abandonment of the dreams of traditional metaphysics, his defense of freedom as a kind of metaphysical causality, and the supposed a priori nature of the claim to equal dignity (all secured by “transcendental idealism”) looked like they might dovetail rather closely with the explosive fall of the ancient
regime, the slogan of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” and the declaration of human rights. Indeed, they seemed close enough that a German living in France during the period commented in a journal at the time that “Calvin and Luther, Sieyès and Kant, a Frenchman and a German, reform the world.”4 In the public mind, “transcendental idealism” was assuming a rather exalted place alongside the Reformation and the Revolution itself.

  While this was going on, Kant himself began to see some cracks in the architecture. To bring the subject of freedom and morals genuinely into “transcendental idealism,” Kant realized that he had to provide some kind of account of how the transcendentally free will (practically presupposed as a metaphysical condition of our deliberations but theoretically indemonstrable as a feature of agents as things in themselves) actually produced humanly possible moral actions in the deterministic world of nature. Our unconditional moral ends had to be realizable in the natural world, and that meant that it cannot be the case that nature forbids such a realization. To that end, Kant held that we must also “postulate” (in a way we cannot theoretically demonstrate) such matters as an intelligible author of the universe who arranges things so that the nature–freedom dichotomy does not become grounds for despairing about the reality of freedom altogether.

  Likewise, Kant seemed to have had some second thoughts about his idea that one could derive all the moral duties from the very idea of freedom itself (at least in the way he had initially proposed), and in the Critique of Judgment of 1790, he claimed that in the experience of natural beauty, nature calls forth a spontaneous harmony within us between imagination and (discursive) intellect, such that nature seems to exhibit a purposiveness to itself without us being able to state that purpose. The world seems to be so ordered that we indeed have a rightful place in it, even though we cannot theoretically demonstrate such a claim, but we can nonetheless in the experience of natural beauty have a representation of such belonging.

  However, that threw lots of things into play, specifically, that of how the three Critiques (together with the other voluminous amount of material Kant generated between 1781 until his death in 1804) all fit together. Kant insisted that there had to be a unifying principle that held the whole enterprise together, but he did not spell one out.5 Given the immense social and cultural importance that his philosophy had assumed in the wake of the events of the time, it began to seem required by his immediate followers that the system of “transcendental idealism” be completed and that the “single principle” be found. It was no longer “just” an intellectual project. Much more seemed to hang in the balance.

  A good bit of the ferment in German philosophy from the late 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century had to do with the issue of how to come to terms with Kant and then how to come to terms with all the people who had tried to come to terms with Kant. One major stream of the reaction had to do with rejecting anything that explicitly labeled itself “idealism” and opting instead for something that preserved certain key elements of Kant’s philosophy while thoroughly rejecting the “idealism” part. Early Romanticism, particularly the strain invented in Jena around 1795, was a large part of that, and it too had its own long historical tail.6 For others, however, “idealism” remained a live option until the 1840s.

  Post-Kantian “idealism” was kept alive in part by the widespread belief that something crucial for life at large was at stake. Reinhold had already made self-consciousness into the key element of his own attempt at a unification of the Kantian program. For Reinhold, the key element in Kantianism was that of “representation” (Vorstellung), and, so Reinhold had argued, if we got clear on what it was to have a “representation,” we would also get clear on all the other elements of “transcendental idealism.” Unfortunately, Reinhold’s own proposal, articulated in a widely read book, quickly ran into difficulties. Reinhold held that since any system had to begin somewhere, the most plausible beginning was with the fact of consciousness itself, and his version of idealism rested on distinguishing among a representation, an object, and a subject that relates the representation to itself and to the object. In Reinhold’s version, idealism claims that it is the subject that distinguishes itself (the subject) from its representation and distinguishes the object from the representation and then relates all three to each other.

  Unfortunately, as it was quickly pointed in reviews of Reinhold’s work, that seemed to involve a regress, since it required another subject to relate the subject doing the relating, and it seemed to assume what it was supposed to be proving.7 In any event, Reinhold himself soon abandoned the idea, and left Jena for a position in the university at Kiel.

  12.4 FICHTEAN IDEALISM

  Reinhold’s successor at Jena, J. G. Fichte, brought the issue of idealism to a head. Ascending to the chair in philosophy in Jena in 1794, Fichte had already created a bit of a sensation when he had anonymously published A Critique of All Revelation—the anonymity was the result of a publishing accident—and people had at first thought it was in fact Kant himself who had written it, thus making Fichte into an exalted literary figure almost overnight. In his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre—which might be loosely translated as the “Science of Science”—Fichte promised to rebuild the Kantian system from the ground up on the basis of one principle and thus establish “transcendental idealism” as the great foundational project of modern life upon which so many members of the public had pinned their hopes. To everyone’s shock, however, Fichte began by rejecting the central Kantian doctrine of unknowable things in themselves. We can put Fichte’s point in very general terms in the following way. Kant had divided the human capacities for knowledge into a faculty of receptivity (which received its content from the world via sensibility) and a faculty of spontaneity (namely, the intellect, which produced concepts). Fichte reasoned that the idea of the thing-in-itself as a third something-or-other in addition to the faculties of spontaneity and receptivity (intellect and intuition) could only be a pipe-dream. The concepts of receptivity and that of a thing-in-itself (in Kant’s term, the “noumenon” as the concept of a thing in itself) are really the same thing. If there is no thing-in-itself, there is no receptivity. The two concepts are the same or are at least analytically related.8 Moreover, one should not conflate the receptivity of sensible intuition with its passivity. The active–passive distinction is not the same as the spontaneity–receptivity distinction, even though they are related. Fichte, a close reader of Kant, noted that Kant himself seemed to argue that in fact our spontaneity (our conceptual faculty) goes deeply into our receptivity such that receptivity can receive nothing that does not have something like a conceptual formation already in it, and the resistance to the Kantian system lay in the conflation of receptivity with passivity. It made good sense to see spontaneity as going deeply into receptivity, even though it made little sense to say that activity was passivity or vice versa. If the whole critical system was supposed to be reduced to one principle, as Kant himself had suggested, then one likely way to develop the idea of “transcendental idealism” was to look at the faculty of spontaneity as such a single first principle and to see if the requirement of receptivity could be generated out of it. But was it really the first principle? And why start there?

  Much of Fichte’s work focused on that question, and he was to continually revise it as the years went by. However, his view came down to the idea that since one had to begin somewhere, with a “fact” of some sort, one had to look for a very special fact. He found that in self-consciousness itself, which he simply identified as the “I.” We are aware of ourselves, Fichte argued, in an intellectual intuition. (This runs together several of Fichte’s different discussions of 1794 and 1797, something inexcusable for rigorous Fichte scholarship but necessary for an overview like this one.) Now Kant had explicitly denied that any such intellectual intuition for such finite knowers as ourselves was possible, since an intellectual intuition would be something like a faculty of spontaneity that in thinking of its object created that object. We can ima
gine such a faculty, Kant said, as lying perhaps in God’s nature, but that is impossible for the finite, discursive creatures we are. Fichte’s riposte was that the “I’s” consciousness of itself was exactly such an intellectual intuition. Until the “I” thinks of itself, it does not exist as a subject, that is, as an agent, even though the organism that will embody the “I” would exist. Moreover, the “I’s” awareness of itself cannot be that of a subject’s awareness of an object, even of a special object, since that would set in motion an infinite regress (there would have to be another “I” that was aware of the first “I”, or else the other self-consciousness would self-contradictorily have to be not self-consciousness). Nor can the “I’s” awareness of itself be the result of a self-ascription, since the “I” would have to already be in place for such an ascription to be possible. Indeed, it looks as if self-consciousness (awareness of oneself as the subject of actions and conscious states) is not stateable in any propositional form at all. If nothing else, that itself shows that Reinhold’s proposal that “representation” serve as the key concept in “transcendental idealism” cannot be right. The founding principle is therefore itself a presuppositionless activity which can only be authenticated in the act of actually thinking of itself. Although the necessity of self-consciousness being inexpressible in normal terms may be demonstrated, the intellectual intuition of the “I” cannot. The “I” is what it is in thinking of itself as being a subject, an “I,” and one can grasp that “fact” only by performing the same intellectual intuition. To make his point more forcefully, Fichte revived an older German term, Tathandlung (literally: a deed-action) to indicate the kind of activity in question.9 It is an activity (spontaneity) that generates itself. In the Fichtean sense, I know myself most basically both non-observationally and non-inferentially (to use the formulation put to use in a different context by Elizabeth Anscombe).10