The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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The philosophy of organism continued to occupy Germans throughout the decades around the middle of the century. Various modifications of Kant’s assertion that the original purposive organization of living things must simply be assumed as given arose over the course of the century. In the so-called teleomechanical viewpoint that made its appearance in the wake of Kant, various individuals argued that Kant had erred in attributing the notion of special organic forces to regulative judgment alone. In their view such forces resulted from constitutive judgment and therefore we can know that such forces do exist.
All agreed that vital forces, whatever their role, could not be explained using the laws of simple mechanism. Human reason must take the fact of purposive organization as an unexplained starting point. The question was whether or not vital forces possessed any directive agency or whether they simply indicated that there were aspects of organism that remained beyond scientific explanation. Characteristic of this German philosophy of biology, especially as manifested in embryology and developmental morphology, was the conviction that good science must not only be thoroughly empirical, it also had to be philosophically justifiable.
On these issues opinions varied among some of the leading German natural philosophers of the day. Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) asserted that vital forces emerged from the arrangement of material constituents. Once present as separate forces they then exerted a directive influence to produce what we recognize as the phenomena of life. Theodor Schwann (1810–82) argued that life is the order of the parts and that it does not result from that order. There may be different forces at work in organic activity, but there are no special directive forces.
Others such as the anatomist and physiologist Carl Bergmann (1814–65) and the zoologist Rudolf Leuckart (1822–98) dissented from the teleomechanical approach by arguing that the order of biological systems could be interpreted in a completely nonvitalistic fashion where there were no so-called organic forces. They agreed with the philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–81), who suggested that vital force was neither an object of experience nor a cause and therefore could neither provide an explanation of organic process nor be a directive agency of it. They did not go so far as the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), whose demonstration of the preservation of force in 1847 (later known as the conservation of energy) convinced him that it was in principle possible to show mechanically how organized matter first arose.
17.8 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ
Helmholtz studied anatomy and physiology in Berlin with Johannes Müller, completing a dissertation on the origin of nerve fibers in 1842.18 This work involved close microscopic research that much impressed Müller. It also signaled Helmholtz’s interest in the physical basis of sensation, a subject that would occupy him throughout his career. Having become convinced that physical laws explained physiological phenomena, Helmholtz took his investigations in a direction different from that of his mentor. For example, he was unimpressed by the apparent teleological function of muscles, preferring to look for the mechanism underlying their action. As a result he soon investigated the chemical reactions that occurred in muscles and the relationship between mechanical motion and heat. This in turn led to an inquiry about the general principles of physics that might be involved.
Helmholtz’s approach took him into an area that represented the intersection between natural science and philosophy. He began by asking about the nature of force in general, concluding that there were two fundamental kinds of force in nature—motive force, or the force exerted by matter in motion, and tensive force, or the force exerted by matter under tension but not moving. In a carefully reasoned article he argued that while there were conversions between these kinds of force, their sum total always remained the same. Although Helmholtz believed that his conclusions were based directly on the experimental work he had conducted, when he submitted his work for publication in the Annalen der Physik it was rejected because it was deemed to be philosophy rather than natural science.
Helmholtz was not the only one thinking about such general results. Another German, the physician Robert Mayer (1814–78), came to the conclusion prior to Helmholtz’s paper of 1847 that “force” could not be destroyed for philosophical reasons. Due to his opposition to materialism, Mayer preferred to think of force as a cause as opposed to a property of matter. As the effect of the cause appears, the cause itself disappears; hence, in the case of mechanical motion and heat, one disappears as the other appears. When he submitted his results for publication, it too was rejected as too philosophical to count as natural science.
Part of the difficulty natural philosophers at the time had in appreciating the importance of these conclusions was that no clear distinction had yet been made between force and energy. As the distinction slowly became clearer, and as the categories of available and unavailable energy emerged in discussions of the role of heat in energy transformations, the formation of new laws of thermodynamics proclaimed that natural processes possessed an irreversibility that was unavoidable, even in principle. This eventually contributed to a growing awareness much later in the century that the commonly assumed simplistic mechanical depiction of nature, which was theoretically reversible, was in need of modification. It also contributed to a growing suspicion that the embrace by many of philosophical realism, seemingly supported by the amazing achievements made in natural science during the century, was premature.
Because Helmholtz provided a bridge between the biological and physical sciences in Germany at mid-century, his philosophical ideas ranged widely. Although he had played a major role in introducing the new conception of energy, he himself remained firmly convinced that the role of the scientist was to discover the mechanism that was the cause of natural phenomena. To do this required that investigators have what he called in an 1862 essay an “absolute, unconditional reverence for the facts,” that in all cases they make an effort to detect relations of cause and effect.19 His heroes were Newton and Kant, the latter of whom he corrected only to the extent that he rejected an invariant relationship between the sensations we experience and the things-in-themselves. This was based on Müller’s law of specific energies, discussed in section 17.7, and was confirmed by much of Helmholtz’s own original research in the physiology of sensation.
Helmholtz was particularly critical of the speculative school of philosophy represented by Hegel and Schelling; in fact, he drew on the misleading but stereotypical mid-century depiction of Schelling’s philosophy of identity as uninterested in empirical observation. It was, he said, based on the claim that nature and man were the result of an active thought on the part of a creative mind. As a result “it seemed competent for the human mind, even without the guidance of external experience, to think over again the thoughts of the Creator, and to rediscover them by its own inner activity.”20
17.9 ERNST APELT AND THE THEORY OF INDUCTION
Standing directly in the tradition of Jakob Fries, Ernst Apelt (1812–59) took up Fries’s concern with the question of induction.21 Apelt’s analysis of induction and its role in natural science appeared in 1854 in a work entitled The Theory of Induction. Formal consideration of induction had originated in the seventeenth century in the work of Francis Bacon, whose “new method” celebrated the gathering of empirical data from which generalizations could be made. Bacon himself and others who considered questions of scientific method in his wake were attempting to demonstrate why the results of inductive inference, which lay at the heart of the new science, were true. In the century that followed that goal was dealt a devastating critique at the hands of David Hume, who, in conjunction with his critique of causality in general, argued that induction could never yield sure results.
As a follower of Kant and Fries, Apelt could never be content with results that were dependent on experience alone which, he agreed, could never give certainty. His analysis of induction would be based on the critique of reason. He began by noting that the theory of induction was the nodal point of the relation betwe
en empiricism and metaphysics, but that, as the British historian and philosopher of induction William Whewell had declared, its logic had to this point remained nothing but a pious wish.22 In hoping that his book would contribute to the fulfillment of this wish Apelt was determined to investigate how scientific research related to the ultimate foundations of explanation itself.23
The first step toward a more satisfying understanding of philosophy of natural science was taken, according to Apelt, by Isaac Newton. In the main this was because Newton had produced a mathematical philosophy of nature and, by linking his explanations of matter and its motion to fundamental parameters of space and time, opened up the possibility of a critique of reason at the highest level. But Apelt noted that Newton himself did not remain true to his own mathematical philosophy in his rules of reasoning, for (in rule 3)24 he relied solely on experience to determine the universal qualities of bodies. This reliance on experience was formally extended by John Locke and then consummated in David Hume.
Apelt related how for Hume our belief in the succession of cause and effect was due merely to our habit of associating in our minds what we often see associated in experience. But we cannot infer a necessary connection between two events from the real conjunction we observe in experience. Hume did not distinguish between the subjective laws of memory, on which rests the linking of two ideas in the knowing subject, and the objective laws of knowledge, on which rests the linking of two ideas that is determined by the nature of the object.25 While Hume dispensed with all a priori knowledge, Apelt asserted “that every suitable induction in the natural sciences must be rational and that as such it is governed not by the expectation of similar cases, but by the a priori knowable laws of geometry and philosophy of nature.”26
Apelt noted that it was of course Kant who was able to move beyond Hume’s doubt by establishing the metaphysical foundations that arise from the mathematical schema of the categories as the principles of the possibility of experience.27 He agreed with Hume that our experience gives no identifying feature of cause other than that its effect consistently follows. But, he added, it is hopeless to try to convince someone that he does not have the idea of cause or to shake the belief in him of a fundamental cause of all things. This is because we cannot imagine that events could be thought without the connection of cause and effect.
This connection is according to Kant’s more proper designation a condition of the possibility of experience. All natural scientists agree with the claim not only that every change of motion has a cause, but also that every change of motion must have a cause. Without this necessary basis of our knowledge of this subject there could be no natural philosophical foundations concerning the productions of motion.28
The pre-existence of causal law was very important to Apelt since he believed that when seeking a law by induction one must know in advance that there is a law and not accident. Proper induction ultimately depended on the pre-existence of law and not on previously observed uniform results. If, Apelt argued, a traveler often came upon a man with a boat to take him across a river, he could not infer that the man would always be there. If he knew, however, that the man was required to be there, then the traveler could infer it more reliably. Even then the traveler could be deceived because this “law” of regularity was of human origin. But he could not de deceived at all if a natural law were the guiding rule. “For a natural law tolerates no exceptions.”29
In the end Apelt held that induction, while it was not the path to necessary truths, could join necessary truths to accidental truths. Since he also believed that natural scientists could find true causes, his hopes were indicative of those at mid-century who wanted to show the conclusions of proper inductive arguments to be true. With the emergence of “philosophy of science” at the end of the century the goal for induction was to produce probability, not certainty.
17.10 POPULAR PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AT MID-CENTURY
At the time of the appearance of Apelt’s work on induction a popular scientific movement was underway that was not only critical of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, but also of philosophy itself. Enthusiasts of the position that natural science had exposed the illusory nature of all immaterial categories, replacing them with knowable material laws based on cause and effect, railed against obscurantists who refused to face the uncomfortable but undeniable reality of a cold and impersonal natural world, grinding on impervious to human needs or desires. “An empiricism of science (Wissenschaft),” wrote scientific materialist and socialist Moses Hess to an unnamed correspondent, “which is carried out fundamentally and consistently from our standpoint, makes philosophy superfluous.”30
The movement of popular science known as scientific materialism began in the late 1840s and flourished in the 1850s and after. It was particularly hard on the immaterial entities of religious belief and even on Kant’s philosophy since Kant had erected a category, the thing-in-itself, that was fundamentally unknowable. Scientific materialists resented what they regarded as a denial that the senses were the ultimate source of knowledge and that the truth of nature was not accessible.31
A related popular philosophical movement, monism, arose around the same time as scientific materialism, primarily as the result of the work of the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). While outwardly embracing the deterministic and anti-teleological view of nature of the scientific materialists, Haeckel’s hero was Goethe, whose proximity to pantheism attracted him more than did a strict materialism.32 Monism rejected the separation of reality into mind and matter; rather, monists believed that each of these categories represented properties of a more fundamental substrate. As a result monists urged a view of the natural world that embraced not only material laws, but also aesthetic and even ethical dimensions. In spite of his aggressively anti-religious demeanor, it was the notion of a personal God that Haeckel dismissed. Haeckel’s recent biographer, Robert Richards, cites from Haeckel’s General Morphology of 1866 his belief that “God is the comprehensive causal law,” and that monism was “the purest kind of monotheism.”33
17.11 THE BACK TO KANT MOVEMENT
In response to the critique of philosophy and to what they regarded as the superficial philosophical analysis found in popular philosophical movements a number of thinkers attempted to respond by revisiting the work of Immanuel Kant. Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–75) wrote The History of Materialism in 1866, in which he sharpened the epistemological issues glossed over by scientific materialists like Karl Vogt, Ludwig Büchner, and Jakob Moleschott. Lange’s work is sometimes said to have sparked the so-called “Back to Kant” or Neo-Kantian movement of the second half of the century. An important group of Neo-Kantian philosophers at Marburg in the 1870s emerged as leaders of the movement, dedicated according to the philosopher Alan Richardson to the establishment of epistemology as the central discipline in philosophy and “to establish a scientifically respectable philosophy in an era in which empirical science seemed to be going its own way without need for philosophical guidance.”34
Among those who called to account anyone who glorified natural science as the foundation for philosophy was the Neo-Kantian theologian Wilhelm Herrmann (1846–1922). As a Privatdozent at Halle, Herrmann wrote two works, the second of which landed him a position at Marburg in 1879. It was this second work, Religion in Relation to Knowledge of the World, that most directly challenged those who were basing grandiose philosophical claims on the results of empirical science.
In both books Herrmann, in good Neo-Kantian fashion, attacked the presumption of his age that it was nearing the truth of nature. The enemy, as he saw it, was metaphysics. In the first work, Metaphysics in Theology, he warned theologians not to make their work dependent on the old Platonistic goal of acquiring a unified view of the world since, as Kant had shown, that goal was unattainable. Having banished metaphysics from theology, he next set out to banish it from natural science.
In the second book Herrmann equated natural science with Naturbeherrschung, mastering th
e world. Any attempt to use knowledge gained in natural science to erect a comprehensive system, to “complete” phenomenal objects, was metaphysics and, in spite of what some scientists might believe, could not be seen as a real completion of scientific knowledge of the world. All such attempts imparted a “characteristic coloring” to the conceptual apparatus of natural science—there was no objective comprehensive view of reality.35
Herrmann’s reference to the fundamental hypothesis of the scientific explanation of nature as “the hypothesis of the comprehensibility of the world”36 was regarded as too radical by even some Neo-Kantians. Paul Natorp (1854–1924), soon-to-be-colleague in philosophy at Marburg, complained that the idea of natural law did not arise from experience and yet was essential to the natural scientist. For Natorp, eternal natural law marked the goal “to which our knowledge approaches as it were asymptotically”37 while for Herrmann success in science must in the end, as it is for any anti-realist, simply be a miracle.38