The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (37 page)

77
Cf. various currents in Strawson (
1966
), esp. Pt One, §4, and Pt Four.

78
See Strawson (
1966
), p. 12. Cf. Wittgenstein (
1961
), 5.61.

79
The point can also be put this way, in an adaptation of Kant’s globe metaphor. One of the tasks of metaphysics is to map the round surface of metaphysical sense-making in such a way as to indicate not only what lies on the surface, but also, through the determination of the curvature of the surface,
how much
lies on it and what sort of thing lies
beyond
it. But metaphysics cannot indicate what sort of thing lies beyond that surface; precisely not.

80
I have taken the liberty of correcting Paul Guyer’s and Allen W. Wood’s translation here. The word that I have rendered ‘appearances’, which they render ‘intuitions’, is ‘
Erscheinungen
’.

81
Cf. Walsh (
1975
), p. 253. For further very interesting material relating to this problem, see Bird (
2006
), Ch. 29, §2.

82
Cf. how for Descartes intuition, which was a faculty for knowing metaphysical necessities, was also the faculty whereby he knew of his own contingent existence: see
Ch. 1
, n. 24. There is also a connection with the discussion at B157–159.

83
For further discussion, see Beck (
1960
),
Ch. 10
; O’Neill (
1989
), esp. pp. 64–65; and Allison (
1990
),
Ch. 13
.

84
Cf.
Groundwork
, 4:463.

85
Kant himself uses the term ‘empirical idealism’ to designate a more Cartesian position whereby the empirical independence in question is merely called into question (
Prolegomena
, 4: 293, and A490–491/B518–519). He identifies Berkeley as the chief representative of the more extreme position, whereby the empirical independence in question is denied: see B70–71 and B274. Berkeley’s position is encapsulated in Berkeley (
1962a
).

86
Cf. my remarks on Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge in
Ch. 2
, §6.

Chapter 6 Fichte Transcendentalism versus Naturalism

1. German Philosophy in the Immediate Aftermath of Kant

No sooner had Kant presented his critical philosophy
¹
to the world, and the world begun to assimilate it, than there was a proliferation of what looked like transcendent metaphysics of the most egregious kind, far more excessive and far more extravagant than anything that either he or Hume had been trying to combat. Within four years of Kant’s death Hegel had published a book in whose preface he gave the following outline of his conception of what he called ‘the living substance’.

[The] living substance is being which is in truth
subject
, or … is … actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This substance is, as subject, pure,
simple negativity
, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis…. Only this self-
restoring
sameness, or this reflection in otherness within itself … is the true. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. (Hegel (
1979
), ¶18, emphasis in original, capitalization removed
²
)

To an untrained eye this appears to be an unlovely mixture of obscurity, jargon, and barbarism, too far beyond the semantic pale even to admit of epistemic censure, though aspiring (insofar as one can tell) to be pretty far
beyond the normal epistemic pale as well. We can readily imagine the alacrity with which Hume would have committed it to the flames, or the urgency with which Kant would have asked Hegel what he took himself to be doing with this bizarre mishmash of concepts and pseudo-concepts, this unruly concatenation of undistorted and distorted ideas of reason, in which little enough qualifies even for the title of ‘empty’ thought.

The situation would be altogether less remarkable if the philosophers who produced such material did so either in ignorance of Kant’s work or in defiant reaction to it. But they were largely trying to appropriate it, or, if not to appropriate it, to reckon with it. German philosophy around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries issued in a mass of metaphysical writing of the very sort just illustrated, whose authors were utterly self-conscious about their position after Kant in the evolution of modern metaphysics, knew that they had to situate their work in relation to his, and were deeply sensitive to his attack on what he saw as bad, transcendent metaphysics. Often they were trying to develop, apply, reorient, or modify his own system. This is true of Schelling, for example, who tried to salvage Kantian insights about the relation between what we can know through experience and what underlies our knowledge – between nature and freedom – while trying to overcome the Kantian opposition between these.
³
And it is true of Schopenhauer, who adopted a version of transcendental idealism in which the opposition remains but our knowledge extends to the latter, in the form of the will, a variation on Kant’s own view that there is an experience-transcendent fact of pure reason which forces itself upon us, this fact being, more or less, the fact that we have free will.
⁴
But even those who were less beholden to Kant were sufficiently immersed in the philosophical milieu that he had created, and were sufficiently aware of the obstacles that he had placed in the way of non-critical metaphysics, for it to remain a puzzle that they could have produced material that would have been such an anathema to him.

A large part of the explanation lies in the internal tensions in Kant’s own system which we witnessed towards the end of the previous chapter, whereby it is impossible to make sense, of the sort the system requires, about why the system requires sense of that sort. Many of Kant’s successors took themselves to be following the dialectic beyond the point at which it showed the system to be inherently unstable to a point at which the system’s instability was absorbed into some more powerful system. They were therefore neither simply rejecting what Kant had bequeathed to them nor simply accepting it, but rather trying to
work it out
(in several of the many senses of that phrase,
including the sense in which they were trying to
make sense of
what Kant had bequeathed to them). It was not to be expected, then, that they would observe all its precepts.

In this chapter and the next we shall consider what are probably the two most significant examples of what I have in mind.
⁵

2. The Choice Between Transcendentalism and Naturalism

We start with J.G. Fichte (1762–1814). For Fichte the most general attempt to make sense of things begins with an essentially unprincipled choice between two paradigms. This choice is unprincipled in the sense that there is no neutral Archimedean point from which it can be made. Moreover, it is, from the very first, a practical exercise: a decision about how to proceed as much as reflection on what to think. And it remains a practical exercise inasmuch as it requires a sustained commitment to the choice made.

The two paradigms are themselves systems of thought, whose main lineaments can be depicted, as we shall see shortly, in Kantian terms. To be committed to either is to be prepared, among other things, to engage in theoretical reflection of the highly general sort that we have seen exemplified in Kant and in all our other protagonists so far. Even so, there is a subordination of the theoretical to the practical here.
⁶

This subordination is by no means unprecedented. We have glimpsed something of the sort several times already.
⁷
Most significantly, there is in Kant a clear and explicit insistence on the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason (Kant (
1996c
), Pt One, Bk Two,
Ch. II
, §
III
). Kant held that pure reason can be put to practical use. But he also held that, in order for pure reason to be put to practical use
by us
, imperfect as we are, we need to place our trust in certain propositions that outstrip anything that we can establish by a theoretical use of reason (see §7 of the previous chapter). By the primacy of practical reason over theoretical reason Kant meant the
obligation of theoretical reason to sanction our accepting these propositions, even though there is no theoretical rationale for our doing so. Fichte then extends this same principle to the basic metaphysical presuppositions that determine how pure reason is to be put to theoretical use in the first place. Eventually, this will lead to a new conception of how the theoretical and the practical are united.

What is the choice between? Roughly, something broadly Kantian and something which, in the metaphor of the previous chapter, ejects both baby and bathwater, in other words something which eschews substantive
a priori
metaphysics altogether. A little less roughly, we can either accede to some variation on Kant’s system, and acknowledge a knowing willing subject with spectacles that variously structure what it knows and regulate what it wills, or revert to something more akin to what we saw in each of Spinoza and Hume, and deny that there is any such transcendental conditioning of our engagement with the world, a world that we know and manipulate simply by being a part of it. On the first, Kantian alternative, what we are given in experience are appearances of things, and our making maximally general sense of these, which we do by reflecting on our spectacles, is a different kind of exercise from our making the more particular sense of them that is characteristic of the natural sciences, which we do by looking through our spectacles. On the second, non-Kantian alternative, what we are given in experience are things as they are in themselves, and our making maximally general sense of these differs only in degree from our making such more particular scientific sense of them. On the first alternative objectivity is grounded in subjectivity: the knowable world has a transcendental structure determined by the knowing subject, and it (the knowable world) extends no further than what the subject can be given in experience. On the second alternative subjectivity is grounded in objectivity: the knowing subject is itself part of the knowable world. Yet still the knowable world extends no further than what the subject can be given in experience. Precisely what is precluded, on both alternatives, is experience-transcendent knowledge. To think that such a thing is possible is to allow objectivity and subjectivity to be out of joint with each other. It is, in the recurring metaphor, to retain the bathwater. That is an option that Descartes took. But it is an option which, in Fichte’s view, Kant’s critical philosophy has rendered no longer available to us.

Fichte himself presents the choice as follows:

A finite rational being has nothing beyond experience; it is this that comprises the entire staple of his thought. The philosopher is in the same position….
⁸

But he is able to abstract….
The thing
, which must be determined independently of our freedom and to which our knowledge must conform, and
the intelligence
, which must know, are in experience inseparably connected. The philosopher can leave one of the two out of consideration…. If he leaves out the former, he retains an intelligence in itself … as a basis for explaining experience; if he leaves out the latter, he retains a thing-in-itself … as a similar basis of explanation. The first method of procedure is called
idealism
, the second
dogmatism
. (I, 425–426, emphasis in original)

Fichte also sometimes calls the first alternative ‘the critical system’, and the second alternative ‘materialism’. I shall add to the nomenclature by sometimes calling the first alternative ‘transcendentalism’, and the second ‘naturalism’.

I choose the label ‘transcendentalism’ to highlight what Fichte himself highlights with his term ‘critical’, namely that the first alternative is not just
any
idealism, but a specifically Kantian idealism,
⁹
whereby ‘the intelligence’ and ‘the thing’, the knowing willing subject and the object with which it engages, are on two fundamentally different levels: the subject does not and cannot know either itself or its relation to the object in the same way as it can and does know the object.
¹⁰
(This counts as a version of transcendental idealism by the lights of the Appendix to the previous chapter: the object’s dependence on the subject cannot be known in the same way as the object itself is known.)

I choose the label ‘naturalism’ for two reasons. The first is to highlight that ‘the thing’ to which the second alternative reduces all that we can make sense of is that which we make sense of in the natural sciences.
¹¹
The second reason is to highlight connections with views that we shall consider later.
¹²
There is also the point that the original term ‘dogmatism’ is not entirely neutral. It is a term that Fichte borrows from Kant, in however extended a sense,
¹³
and it is arguably an appropriate term to use in this context only from the standpoint of the first alternative.
¹⁴