Some remarks of Fichte's about general logic, with an aside about Schopenhauer and math

From a letter to Reinhard, January 15 1794:
"But isn't it true that philosophy, unlike geometry and mathematics, is quite unable to construct its concepts in intuition? Yes, this is quite true; it would be unfortunate if philosophy were able to do this, for then we would have no philosophy, but only mathematics. But philosophy can and should employ thinking in order to deduce its concepts from one single first principle which has to be granted by everyone. The form of deduction is the same as in mathematics, that is, it is the form prescribed by general logic." (p.793 in Early Philosophical Writings, tr. Dan Breazeale)

From a letter to Reinhold, March 1 1794:
"I have been avidly awaiting the second part of your Contributions. I particularly look forward to the explanation of how you derive the categories. (To derive them from the logical forms of judgement presupposes that logic provides the rules for philosophy, and this I cannot accept.)" (p.376, ibid)


Fichte apparently changed his mind about the relationship of general logic to philosophy during these months, while he was first working on the Wissenschaftslehre, after Schulze's "Aenesidemus" gave him such a shock.

The first quotation surprised me: I am used to Fichte affirming the paradoxical aim of establishing logic through the Wissenschaftslehre, or else of it being its own distinct "science" apart from philosophy. I didn't know he had at one point affirmed that what he was trying to do was find a first principle "which has to be granted by everyone" and then get all of the rest of his philosophy out of it analytically. Though I suppose that's not too big of a surprise, since this was how Reinhold viewed his own philosophy, and Fichte at this point was still self-consciously a Reinholdian. (It's insane to think you can get anything interesting out of a principle like "I=I" analytically, but I think the error is more understandable if you imagine that Fichte's first principle was something longer, and in prose, like Reinhold's "Principle of Consciousness" was.)

The first quotation is also interesting for Fichte's remark that deduction in mathematics proceeds according to "the form prescribed by general logic". This might seem tautological (what other sort of deduction could a proof have?), but it's not obviously a Kantian way to think about mathematical proof. Schopenhauer, for instance, says things like this:

"In mathematics, according to Euclid's treatment, the axioms are the only indemonstrable first principles, and  all demonstrations are in gradation strictly subordinate to them. This method of treatment, however, is not essential to mathematics, and in fact every proposition again begins a new spatial construction. In itself, this is independent of the previous constructions, and can actually be known from itself, quite independently of them, in the pure intuition of space, in which even the most complicated construction is just as directly evident as the axiom is." (WWR I, p.63)

"Now if with our conviction that intuition is the first source of all evidence, that immediate or mediate reference to this alone is absolute truth, and further that the shortest way to this is always the surest, as every mediation through concepts exposes us to many deceptions; if, I say, we now turn with this conviction to mathematics, as it was laid down in the form of a science by Euclid, and has on the whole remained down to  the present day, we cannot help finding the path followed by it strange and even perverted. We demand the reduction of every logical proof to one of perception. Mathematics, on the contrary, is at great pains deliberately to reject the evidence of perception peculiar to it and everywhere at hand, in order to substitute for it logical evidence." (WWR I, p.69)

and my favorite one

"Therefore, I knew of nothing to take away from the theories of the Transcendental Aesthetic, but only of something to add to them. Kant did not pursue his thought to the very end, especially in not rejecting the whole of the Euclidean method of demonstration, even after he had said on p.87(V, 120) that all geometrical knowledge has direct evidence from perception. It is most remarkable that even one of his opponents, in fact the cleverest of them, G. E. Schulze (Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, ii, 241), draws the conclusion that an entirely different treatment of geometry from what is actually in use would result from Kant's teaching. He thus imagines that he is bringing an apagogical argument against Kant, but as a matter of fact, without knowing it, he is beginning a war against the Euclidean method." (WWR I, p.438, my emphasis)

Now, Kant's actual views on geometry and arithmetic are obscure, even by Kant's standards; there is not much in the way of consensus in the secondary literature on any point related to it. But I think Schopenhauer actually latched onto an interesting way to read Kant here: if Kant is really serious about all our synthetic knowledge standing under the principle of the conditions of a synthetic unity of intuition in a possible experience, and if mathematics is synthetic, then it looks like mathematics should depend on a relation to possible experience in a way that it hasn't traditionally. In Euclid, it looks like what we are given is some self-evident axioms, and then logic is supposed to carry us from those to all of the proofs (if this is not true of Euclid himself, then consider how the more geometrico ends up appearing in the hands of a Descartes or Spinoza). Euclid-style mathematics looks an awful lot like rationalist metaphysics, Schopenhauer thinks. Kant himself had drawn the moral that philosophy can't try to imitate mathematics; Schopenhauer draws a further moral that mathematics can't try to imitate mathematics: the procedure the rationalists tried to follow isn't just illegitimately extended by the rationalists, it's rotten in and for itself. Brouwer's intuitionistic mathematics self-consciously follows Schopenhauer on this.

Fichte's view is much less revisionary, in this respect: he seems to think that math relies on intuition somewhere along the line, but that mathematical proofs are just logical ones; the rules for what follows from what in geometry are the same sort of rules that govern syllogistic. FWIW, I think this was Kant's own position; but it is hard to fit to the text of the Critique: there Kant says odd things about mathematics and geometry, and their supposed relation to pure intuitions of time and space. Schopenhauer is able to make those odd things look intelligible, at least, even if the position he endorses looks crazy. (Or maybe it's not! I don't want to pick any fights with intuitionists if I don't have to.)

Now, it's possible that Fichte's views on mathematics changed after 1793; I have read literally nothing on Fichte's philosophy of mathematics. But I think he probably had to change them, given that he certainly changed his views on general logic. In the letter to Reinhold above, he's already refusing to put logic before philosophy; later on, he gets even harsher. So far in my Fichte studies, I've ignored anything that happened after 1800, just because the Jena-period work is what influenced Hegel & co. But I recently read the short article "Nothing More or Less than Logic: General Logic, Transcendental Logic, and Kant's Repudiation of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre" by Wayne Martin, and it has this startling bit:

In his earlier discussions of the relationship of logic and philosophy, Fichte had been concerned only to mark the difference between the two disciplines, content to leave the doctrines of general logic well enough alone. But he now calls for a thorough-going critique of logic itself. He explicitly marks this as a shortcoming of Kant’s philosophy, complaining that Kant “was not so disinclined as he ought to have been [toward general logic]”; that he “had not recognized that his own philosophy requires that general logic be destroyed to its very foundation” – a destruction Fichte now vows to undertake “in Kant’s name” (SW IX, 111–112). As the lecture course unfolds we find that the scorn previously reserved for the so-called “dogmatists” is now directed against “die Logiker” instead. Their account of concept-formation is said to be “durchaus falsch” (SW IX, 317); their accounts of judgment and of the syllogism are said to be in need of “total reform” (SW IX, 367); and the “spirit” of their enquiry is said to be “the same as that of all untrue philosophy – that is, of all philosophy that is not idealistic (SW IX, 407)" (p.35-36)

Martin's article ends shortly after this; if anyone can point me towards discussions of Fichte's later views on general logic, I'd appreciate it.

But there are a few things Martin does note about Fichte's critique here. One is that Kant's discussion of concept-formation in the Jasche logic looks like it's literally the same as Locke's account of how we get general ideas: it's an unreconstructed abstractionism. But if Kant endorses Locke here, it can only be out of mental inertia; Kant simply can't have taken on such a central part of empiricist epistemology, given how much of it he (rightly) rejected entirely.

There are more than a few reasons Kant couldn't have consistently been a Lockean abstractionist about concepts, but Fichte latches onto an interesting one: "If the logicians had indeed realized all this they would have realized that the concept, in this case, of a horse, only occurs in the grasping of something as a horse – that is, in the judgment that something is a horse. (SW IX, 331)" (quoted on p.37 of Martin's article).

As Kant had already said, the understanding can make no use of concepts except to judge by means of them; Fichte puts this even more forcefully, and has concepts simply being nothing but capacities to make certain sorts of judgements. So one reason abstractionism is false is because it tries to explain how we first derive concepts from our experience, and then combine them in judgements -- but there can be no gap here, for deriving concepts is nothing but coming to be able to make certain sorts of judgements: Fichte thus prefigures Geach's main objection to abstractionism in "Mental Acts": Possession of a concept is the capacity to make certain sorts of judgements; it is not primarily a recognitional capacity. But abstractionism tries to explain how we acquire certain recognitional capacities, not the capacity to make certain sorts of judgements. Hence abstractionism does not explain how any of our concepts are acquired.

Fichte is then already seeing what's wrong with much work that is done even today on concepts: read a random article on "Whether animals have concepts?" and you are almost certain to be told that they do, because e.g. a dog can recognize when his name is called, or a dolphin can recognize its image in a mirror. It will often then swiftly be granted that we have more concepts than dolphins and dogs, for e.g. they do not have a concept of a logical copula (or at least this is rarely claimed), and that sort of thing is supposed to explain the difference between the minds of brutes and the minds of rational beings. But it's just Kant's insight that the concepts which are employed in the logical forms of judgements are needed to bring objects under concepts at all: no logical form, no judgement; no judgement, no relation of intuition and concept; no relation of intuition and concept, no representation with objective purport, and hence no concept.

Fichte's complaint about Kant here can then be put thus: Kant knows that abstractionism is deeply wrong, and that we can't form judgements by putting together logical forms which we "already have" with concepts which we "get via abstraction"; the concepts and the logical forms are nothing outside our capacity to judge, which requires both to be the capacity it is. But it looks like his procedure regarding general logic, for instance in the "Metaphysical Deduction" in the first Critique, is just the abstractionist one: he regards the logical forms as being something over against the concepts which are supplied to them ab extra for combination, in Lockean fashion. Kant seems to introduce judgement by first having in view the table of logical forms of judgement; what is needed is to arrive at the logical forms of judgement (the topic of general logic) only by first having judgement itself in view. And if it is transcendental logic that shows us what our capacity for judgement is in its full actuality, then general logic will need to be preceded by transcendental logic, and not be followed by it.

Something I find exciting here: Fichte is here presenting the problem of the Metaphysical Deduction and the question of general logic in Kant as tied to (what is later called) the problem of the unity of the proposition. Fichte's objections to Kant's views on general logic thus look similar to the author of the Tractatus's objections to Russell: Kant/Russell take logical forms as "given" in some peculiar way (Kant is silent about it, but implies the understanding simply has them; Russell appeals to "acquaintance" with these strange "objects"); nothing "given" in this way can do the work of a logical form (Fichte's objection about the primacy of judgement; Wittgenstein's objection about it being impossible to judge a nonsense); hence "general logic" is in need of rethinking from the ground up, and any attempt to establish a substantial truth on a logical basis (such as deriving Kant's categories from general logical forms) or to make a logical proposition itself appear substantial (as Russell and Frege did) must be shown to be confused.

But if that is the point I reach, then I now can say to myself: "Well! Then I will have the problematic status of general logic in Kant cleared up as soon as I clear up what's right and wrong about the role of logic in the Tractatus." I am reminded of something Locke says somewhere (I cannot locate the passage) about being able to move around piles of dirt, but never being able to actually clean the room.

Geach's "Mental Acts" and the dualism of the conceptual and the sensible

I have been reading through "Mental Acts" over the past few days. It's long been on my short list of things to read, but I'd never picked the book up until this week. (Literally: if I had seen for myself how short it was, I would've gotten it read years ago.)

It's mainly good, in the way that everything I've read by Geach has been mainly good.

I am making a post about it largely as a reminder to myself: Chapter 15, "Judgements About Sensible Particulars [Reference to Particulars]" is striking, from a Kantian perspective. But spelling out what I find so striking about it is probably of more general interest.

Geach's puzzle is about how we can judge about particulars, given that judgements are acts of our conceptual capacities, and our conceptual capacities are always universal (as they are capable of repeated use independently of what might be presently sensed).

The judgement he considers is "That flash was before this bang", uttered on different occasions and referring to different flashes and bangs. Of this he says "there is no difference to be found on the side of the judgement itself [on these two occasions]. What we may call the intelligible content of the judgement is the same in all judgements expressible as "that flash was before this bang", regardless of which flash and bang are in question." (ps.63-64) So, given that judgements are always capable of being formed regardless of occasion, how can any judgement have reference to an occasion?

Geach's answer: "How could the utterance "flash before bang" be taken to refer to a particular flash and bang? The answer is obvious[!]; the utterance can be, and probably will be, so understood in a sensory context in which the hearer notices a flash and a bang. Similarly, the utterance "some cats, white" could be taken to refer to particular cats if its hearer was looking attentively in the right direction. The content of the judgement is always intelligible and conceptual -- acquaintance with a particular sensible thing is no part of the judgement itself -- but an act of judgement performed in a particular sensory context may thereby be referred to particular sensible things." (p.64)

The most striking fact about this answer is that Geach tries to answer the question of how judgement can have reference to particulars by referring to what a hearer would take an utterance to refer to, in a given context. He seems to want to answer the question of how thought can be about the world by noting that others take it to be so: but this is patently Munchhausenianism, with empirical content being pulled up by its own bootstraps. Unless the hearer can already judge concerning particulars, then she can't take an utterance to refer to particulars: so it does no good for Geach to appeal to her judgements on the matter.

But this may be unfair: he seems to not notice what he has said, and thinks of all the work in his picture as being done by "the context" of a judgement. How to spell this out, he is unsure of: "It is clear, indeed, that the act of judgement must bear a closer relation than mere simultaneity to the context of sense-perception that gives it its special reference to these particular sensible things; I am not prepared to characterize this special relation it must bear to its context.... But I do not think this throws any doubt on what I have said; although more remains to be said." (p.64)

It is "clear" to Geach that context must be able to do this work, for we do in fact judge about particulars, and he doesn't see anything else that can make inherently-universal judgements latch onto sensible things. He is aware that "mere" simultaneity between an act of judgement and a thing will not suffice, but I hear in this the suggestion that something more than "mere" simultaneity will do the work: Judgement + Thing + Simultaneity + Y = Judgement is about Thing; future philosophy can solve for Y.

I begin here a long aside:

I find this sort of buck-passing in philosophy disagreeable, setting aside the particular problem Geach lays out for working on: it is too easy for everyone to only think through a problem so far, because "others" can always do the rest of the work. I encountered a particular egregious version of this in a seminar recently: several rival positions on a topic in the metaphysics of social groups were compared, and a criticism against one of them (I believe it was Searle's) was rejected on the grounds that if it worked, it would work for all of the positions on offer: "And if it's everybody's problem, then it's also nobody's problem", it was said with a grin. This sort of "metaphysics" struck me as nothing but intellectual masturbation: it was an intentionally restricted way of thinking, and could never bear fruit. The sort of thing people made fun of scholasticism for.

Immediately after the last Geach quote, he continues: "The problem I have just been discussing -- how we judge about sensible particulars -- was much agitated in the Middle Ages; and in my solution of it I believe I am following Aquinas. Aquinas's expression for the relation of the 'intellectual' act of judgement to the context of sense-perception that gives it a particular reference was "conversio ad phantasmata", "turning round towards the sense-appearances". [I don't know why Geach gives a gloss on this; the book is peppered with untranslated Latin phrases.] This metaphorical term is obviously a mere label, with negligible explanatory value;  but it does not pretend to be more than a label. Aquinas has, in my opinion, at least rightly located the problem; the problem is not how we advance from judgements like this is before that to more general judgements, but contrariwise how a judgement inherently general can be tied down to referring to particular things (Ia q. 86 art. 1)" (p.65)

What do we find, if we follow Geach's pointer to Thomas? Here we read that "Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily.... But indirectly, and as it were by a kind of reflection, it can know the singular, because, as we have said above (Question 85, Article 7), even after abstracting the intelligible species, the intellect, in order to understand, needs to turn to the phantasms in which it understands the species, as is said De Anima iii, 7. Therefore it understands the universal directly through the intelligible species, and indirectly the singular represented by the phantasm."

So in the passage Geach cites, Thomas points a few pages earlier in his book. I believe there is an error in the online edition here; Question 85, Article 7 seems irrelevant, but Question 84, Article 7 is about precisely this question: "Whether the intellect can actually understand through the intelligible species of which it is possessed, without turning to the phantasms?" Thomas's sed contra is that "The Philosopher says (De Anima iii, 7) that "the soul understands nothing without a phantasm."" -- so even in following Geach's pointer to Aquinas through Aquina's pointer to Aquinas through an incorrect citation to Aquinas we find: a pointer to Aristotle. (In fairness to Aquinas, he had given the same reference in the first place Geach pointed to.)

But Thomas does add some argumentation in support of Aristotle's view, in his replies in the same article. He states the view he is defending thusly: "In the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passible body, it is impossible for our intellect to understand anything actually, except by turning to the phantasms." -- But now it emerges that Thomism cannot help Geach here, for Thomas is concerned with a narrower problem than the one Geach has. Geach needs an answer for how judgement can be about particulars, but Thomas is concerned only with how our, human, intellect has need of "turning to the phantasms". So in his replies, he appeals to psychological facts about our minds (even appealing that "anyone can experience this of himself") to ground the need for "turning to the phantasms". But Geach's problem is a logical one: how can it be so much as possible that "inherently general" judgements can be "tied down to referring to particular things?" It is no help to note that, in fact, our judgements are so tied down, and human minds cannot but be so tied down: Thomas's investigations enter too late to be of use.


(I won't trouble with looking at De Anima III 7; I remember the passage in question, and looking at it will not help make Geach's puzzle clearer. From what I could see, Aristotle was merely marking a psychological fact with his "no thought without an image" remark: there are always things fluttering about "before the eye of the mind" while we think. But merely noting this does not make thinking less mysterious.)

I end here my long aside.


--So, Geach thinks he can tell that there must be a Y such that Judgement + Thing + Simultaneity + Y = Judgement is about Thing.

Geach faces the same problem in his next chapter, "Judgements Involving Identifications [Judgements of Identification]", which involves judgements that contain proper names. It appeared that perhaps "This flash" could be made to pick out the right flash by demonstrative ostension; proper names do not appear handleable this way, as "Smith" can be Smith's name even if Smith is not within my ostensible reach. Geach closes out his discussion of this problem with a simile: "The problem how you call Smith, the right Smith, to mind is like the problem how you call him ([Philosophical Investigations], Part I, ss691). Although lots of people are called "Smith", the summons "Smith!" may be quite effective to fetch the Smith I want if he is the only man of that name within earshot; and similarly, a judgement that might in principle relate to many men may yet in a particular real-life context be relatable to just one." (p. 73)

Here again we see the pattern of
1. There is a problem for my view of judgement.
2. In "real-life" this problem does not arise.
.'. 3. Context must supply what is lacking in my view.

At no point does Geach consider that our conceptual capacities might inherently refer to particulars, just as he knows they are inherently general. He sees that empiricism asks a bad question when it tries to solve hour we can judge of general matters, given that we can judge of particular ones; but he thinks their error was that the real question is how we can judge of particular matters, given that we can judge of general ones. There is a dualism of the conceptual and the sensible in Geach, just as there is in the empiricists he spends so much time attacking. And if he is right about the medievals, Thomas errs on his side while many Thomists and other scholastics err with the empiricists, with Aristotle claimed by all parties. If nothing else, reading Geach has been good for helping me see that Kant's problems are not new -- or at least they can be seen to have caused trouble, beneath the surface, further back than Kant traces his histories.

On a final note (and this was actually what I originally found interesting enough to post on, before I got caught up in providing context for it), Geach notes that "Quite similar considerations apply to judgements involving tense. The difference between judgements to the effect that a hydrogen bomb will be exploded and that a hydrogen bomb has been exploded is an intelligible or conceptual difference -- a specifically different exercise of concepts is involved. But there is no conceptual difference between judgements formed in different years to the effect that a hydrogen bomb has been exploded, although such a judgement formed in 1940 would have been false and one formed in 1956 would be true." (p.65) When I first read it, I was surprised by how closely connected Geach's claim about tense was to his claims about judgements of particulars: they are treated of in the same section, are said to have "similar considerations" applying to them, and I thought that perhaps the same Kantian solution was what he had overlooked. I had hopes that perhaps here I could finally find a compelling argument for why time is the form of all intuition, what the connection is between reference to particulars and reference to temporal entities. But thinking on it more, I think Geach is just mistaken about how tenses work in language (in thought): it is the same conceptual capacity at work when I judged yesterday that I would be up all night and when I judge today that I was up all night; what has changed is not the judgement, but the context in which it is considered. There is an indexical element to judgements involving tense, just as with judgements involving the concept "now", and changes of index are not changes of indexical. (Ironically, I take this to be something I learned from reading Anscombe on the first person.)

But if this is where Geach went wrong, then the connection between reference to particulars and time boils down to the connection between reference to particulars and the indexicals "here" and "now". And it strikes me as hopeless to try to establish why space and time must be forms of intuition from the fact that (as it happens) we have spatial and temporal indexicals in our language; for if there are other possible forms of intuition, presumably the minds which intuit by them have their own indexicals. So again Kant is proving damnably right: I cannot show why space and time are (our, the) forms of intuition, though it seems clear that they are. So for now I am no better than Geach; I daydream about "others" solving that problem, and think it must have a solution!

A Link Post

Robert Stern was interviewed in 3:AM magazine; it is a good read.

In the wake of Förster's book, I have been reading more about Schelling and Goethe. Robert Richards's work has been very helpful here; "Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution?" (PDF) was particularly stimulating.

Richards gave a seminar on "The Origin of Species" while I was at Chicago; I only sat in on the first couple of classes at the time, since I was busy and it was being recorded for posting online. Sadly, the video and podcast links are dead now, but I had most of the podcasts downloaded. (For some reason I didn't download week 2's podcast; ironically, that is the one class I am sure I was present at. The slides for that week of the course are still posted (PDF), and are worth looking at just for the cartoon of Professor Icthyosaurus on page 13. (The context for that cartoon was a cyclical theory of evolution, where extinct species were supposed to arise again once catastrophic floods had changed the character of the Earth so that humans were no longer viable, but e.g. ichthyosaurs were again. I just really like the design on the whole thing.)

Edit: This is a great sentence: "This kind of metaphysics enticed Goethe the way several of his women friends did at this time: with great allure and seduction, with the poet giving way even while recognizing the impropriety of his indulgence." (Source, PDF)

Förster's "Twenty Five Years": an overview.

It seems worthwhile to outline the story of German Idealism, as Förster presents it in "The Twenty Five Years of Philosophy". I suspect my previous post on Förster's book is unreadable, and so unread.

Kant begins with the realization that philosophy before him has taken for granted that our thoughts can get things right or wrong -- that they have "objective validity", in his later terminology, or objective purport as McDowell says it -- and that metaphysics is building on sand so long as it is unsettled whether metaphysical thinking can so much as get things wrong. So in the first Critique, Kant tries to settle the question of how and when thinking can have objective purport. The answer he arrives at is that thinking has objective purport by standing in a relation to sensibility: the receptive aspect of our cognition provides us with a kind of cognition which is dependent on the objects it purports to be about, and so the question of objective purport does not arise for it; the other aspects of our cognition (the categories and the ideas) are explicated as structuring and guiding this receptive aspect of our cognition. As time and space are the forms of our sensibility, this means that thinking has objective purport only in relation to objects in time and space: as the traditional objects of metaphysics are extraspatiotemporal, traditional metaphysics thus shows itself as confused.

But a new sort of metaphysics stands primed to take its place: in establishing how it is that our (empirical, spatiotemporal) thinking can have objective purport, Kant has also established that certain principles govern such thinking. That they in fact do this is a condition on the possibility of thought, as thought must be (able to be made) self-conscious. It is the task of the new metaphysics to establish these principles, and lay out what follows from them.

Förster notes that Kant subtly changes the question he is answering after the A-edition of the first Critique: where before he was asking "How can thinking have objective purport?", starting with the Prolegomena he is asking "How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?" In the case of theoretical synthetic a priori judgements, this question is what the new metaphysics confronts and answers. This shift in Kant's question is both a narrowing of his original question, as he is no longer questioning how empirical judgements are possible as such (though this will in fact still be a topic he addresses in the B-edition of the first Critique), and a broadening of it: for there are judgements which do not depend on a relation to an object for their validity, but which are connected with synthetic a priori principles. These are practical judgements. In the first Critique, Kant had left moral questions underscrutinized, and he had explicitly denied that practical philosophy was connected with transcendental philosophy. But now practical and theoretical philosophy are both the concerns of the transcendental philosopher.

Förster thinks that Kant's attempt at his project fails at several points. For one, Kant's construction of matter in "Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science" is circular, as Kant and Schelling both notice; Förster notes that Kant was still working on this problem in the Opus Postumum, and that he still did not solve it there. Förster thinks that this is a significant problem, because he thinks the Metaphysical Foundations was trying to complete something the first Critique had accidentally ignored: a spatial schematism of the categories to parallel the temporal one given in the first Critique's Analytic. Whether Kant needed such a thing is controversial in the literature. (My judgement is that Kant didn't think he needed one, and that by his own standards he was right -- but that these standards were too low, and he in fact did need one if he wasn't to take the spatial form of our intuition as simply Given. I'm not sure that his failure to construct the concept of dense matter matters for this, though.)

This is related to a second place where Förster thinks Kant failed: he simply takes the fact that space and time are the forms of our receptivity as given, and he does the same with the table of general logical forms. Förster spends less time on this complaint, but I think it's the most important one he brings up.

Very shortly after the first Critique, Reinhold will try to present Kant's philosophy in a more systematic form than Kant had managed (following up on hints from Kant that such a system should be possible, that the transcendental unity of apperception really is the ground of all synthetic a priori judgements). The form this takes in Reinhold is an attempt to derive all of the Critical Philosophy from what he calls "the principle of consciousness": "In consciousness representation is distinguished though the subject from both object and subject and is related to both". Reinhold held this to be an analytic judgement, and from it tried to prove via a "short argument" that we can never know the thing-in-itself (because we know representations only, which are distinguished from the object) or the subject-in-itself (because we know representations only, which are distinguished from the subject), but that our representations have objective purport (because they are related through the subject to the object). (I know Reinhold only second-hand, through Karl Ameriks's "The Fate of Autonomy", but the prospects for his project strike me as dim.)

In "Aenesidemus" Schulze criticized Reinhold's attempt to found all of the Critical Philosophy on this one analytic principle. He claimed that Reinhold was tacitly appealing to many other principles in his derivations from it, for instance to the logical principle of noncontradiction, and so the appearance of systematicity was merely apparent. It was his reading of "Aenesidemus" that first startled Fichte out of his dogmatic attraction to Reinhold's philosophy; Schulze did not convince him that the whole project was hopeless, but rather spurred Fichte to try to fill the gaps and genuinely establish all of the Critical Philosophy on a single self-evident principle (from which he hoped to derive the "principle of consciousness", and therefrom use Reinhold's efforts to derive the bulk of Kant's philosophy).

Telling this part of the story occupies several chapter of Förster's book, and for my money this is the most interesting and successful part of the work. I found the accounts of how Fichte and (his very Fichtean) Hegel tried to systematize Kant's philosophy intriguing and energizing, even when I did not find them convincing as presented. The general idea is that Kant simply did not go far enough in trying to establish the conditions under which self-consciousness is possible, and that he mischaracterized the nature of self-consciousness. Where Kant still (sometimes) seems to think of self-consciousness as receptive, as relying on an "inner sense" which relates consciousness to a (noumenal) self which is not dependent on the thought of it, Fichte resolutely treats the self as nothing but its apperceptive unity. This residual empiricism in Kant's conception of the self has vanished in Fichte, and the results which are claimed as proved will be considerably more impressive, but the very general argumentative strategy of the Wissenschaftslehre is Kant's: What must be the case, given that I am aware of myself as a self?

There is a third area where Förster thinks Kant failed where I found his criticisms less clear, and the responses on the part of German Idealists seemed less on-point. This is the question of the unity of practical and theoretical reason hinted at in the third Critique, where the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature is used to guide inquiry (as it already was in the appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique), and also to somehow aid moral faith (by suggesting that since both the order demanded by the moral law and the order demanded by the purposiveness of nature are demands put by reason to nature, seeing one fulfilled (in scientific empirical inquiry and in beauty) is an aid to believing that the other is fulfilled, that the world is morally structured).

As I recall, Förster's complaint is largely focused on Kant's skepticism regarding whether we can know there to be purposes in the world. He presents Schelling as presenting as an empirical hypothesis that the world is so structured, and as taking contemporary developments in physics as confirming it. Förster is generally skeptical of Schelling's whole approach here (and he presents Hegel as likewise skeptical of it, after the break with Schelling in his Jena period). Förster's positive remedy to Kant's skepticism here comes from Goethe's botanical and optical writings: Goethe claimed that he could "see ideas", and Förster endorses this, and presents it as the way forward for philosophy.

Now, it is easy to see that Kant's skepticism has to be wrong somehow: we do know that there are purposes in nature, for we know that there are living things in nature, and living things are purposes. A horse does things for the sake of maintaining itself and reproducing its kind; it is not merely mechanically explicable, and in fact cannot be understood as a horse if approached mechanically. Human action is the action of a living being, and so likewise is purposive: so if we are not to be skeptical of whether there is human action in nature, of whether freedom is at work in the world, we must not be skeptical of whether we can know nature to have purposes in it.

But Schelling seems to want to prove more than this: not merely that there are purposes in the world, or that the world is purposive to the extent that morality requires (that virtue and happiness will coincide), but that nature as such is purposive. Schelling wants to derive the general structure of nature from what he calls an "intellectual intuition", but it is not at all clear how he can have such a thing. Kant used the term "intellectual intuition" to characterize how God knows the world (supposing he does): he knows it by creating it. Fichte follows Kant in this: the I knows itself in its act of self-positing, and in its act of self-positing knows itself. Schelling explicitly does *not* mean this: his "intellectual intuition" is not creating the world, for the world is already there before Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Fichte's intellectual intuition of the I was used to work out the Wissenschaftslehre, and it appears that this is the usage Schelling is following: his "intellectual intuition" is the foundational principle for his Naturphilosophie. It's unclear how he can establish it, and Förster seems to be of the view that he simply can't: Schelling built on sand.

Förster opposes Schelling and Goethe on this score. Where Schelling ultimately appeals to an intellectual intuition (which is hopeless), Goethe appeals to something else: an intuitive intellectual apprehension of an idea, which Förster also refers to by the Spinozan title scientia intuitiva. Goethean scientia intuitiva is supposed to establish what Schelling could not, and what Fichte left only as an incompletable task: that the world and the mind are both structured by the mind, that nature and reason are both rational, that the purposiveness demanded by freedom is the end of the world itself.

I said some things about why I don't think the scientia intuitiva stuff works in my previous post about Förster's book, but I think the real problems show up in his examples (the film, the book, etc.). Looking at those is probably something I need to devote a post to, because this one is already feeling too dense to be read. So I stop here.

tl;dr: Kant is insufficiently systematic; Fichte is sufficiently systematic, but does not establish all that he needs; Goethe establishes limited results about colors and plants; Hegel uses Goethe's methods to establish all that Fichte had not, to supplement what Fichte had genuinely established, and in this way brings Kant's program to a successful close. Schelling was an enthusiastic blind alley.

The future of philosophy, as I see Förster presenting it: Hegel's own post-Phenomenology work is doing a better job presenting what was already contained in nuce in his Jena-period work. Where there are problems in Hegel's system, they are to be resolved by doing Hegel's job better than he managed it himself -- but Hegel has effectively established what it is that should be done. The Absolute Idea was presented in Jena; what is left to us later philosophers is the seeing of subordinate ideas, such as Goethe saw in his optical and botanical works. (Presumably philosophers can also just do something else, not directly related to the history of metaphysics that Kant is working in: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche simply wrote books which are not trying to do what German Idealism is trying to do, and their work neither contributes to nor (directly) challenges what was going on in "the twenty five years of philosophy". But I suspect that people like Russell and Heidegger would figure as mere epigones to Fichte, on Förster's view.)

Zizek googles himself too much, Or: Fess up, who linked Zizek to a post of mine from five years ago?

An edit on a post of Adam Kotsko's has alerted me to the fact that I'm in the index to "Less Than Nothing", Zizek's latest big book. He block-quotes a post of mine from back when I was still in law school, durdling around with a blog to avoid doing my reading for "Contracts". I haven't read one of the pages that's presumably in reply to me because I can't see it via "Search Inside", but I replied to what I could see about myself in the comments on Kotsko's post.

It is at least a little embarrassing to see my old prose in print. But hey, I can go to Barnes & Noble and see my name now!

The elipses in the block-quote of my post in the book omits the fact that I originally had a picture of an anime character (Caster from "Fate/Stay Night") as my "Read More!" link. That used to seem like a reasonable thing to do with my blog. Oh internet, you so crazy.

edit: From page 289: "for me, replying to this critique is almost embarrassing": you and me both, buddy! So why did you feel the need to do it? From what I recall of watching my old blog-traffic, that post was never linked to anywhere online and I only had ~30 regular readers (based on pageviews). Why is it committed to the page, now?

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy": some criticisms

As I mentioned in my previous post, I really like "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy", which I have now finished. It gives the clearest accounts I've seen of big chunks of German Idealism, and I think Förster is especially good at laying out what the post-Kantians took to be the problems Kant had left them with. My high praise of those parts of the book remains. Where I think he's less successful is in showing that those problems do in fact get resolved by the post-Kantians. This post will be about those less successful parts.

To give an example: One of the clear issues in Kant that the post-Kantians tried to get past is Kant's conviction that out finite intellect is a special sort of finite intellect, and that others are possible (or at least thinkable); this aspect of Kant's thought means that when Kant proves that such-and-such is a condition on reality's being an object of cognition for us, we must not infer that such-and-such is a condition on the object's being an object of cognition as such. If our intellect was the only possible sort of intellect, then we could infer from "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable by us" to "Such-and-such must be the case if reality is to be cognizable" -- and then skepticism about such-and-such would refute itself, for it would cognize reality in trying to deny that such-and-such was true of the reality it cognized.

(If skepticism tried to back up and say that it merely wanted to say of reality as such that it might not be such-and-such, abstracting from whether or not we can cognize it that way, then skepticism can state a truth only at the cost of reducing itself to a tautology: apart from the conditions under which we can think of things/know things, we cannot think of things/know things. This is no real limitation on our knowledge, and so no real skepticism; this is the place to bring in Kant's discussion of the "noumenon in the negative sense".)

But, since Kant thinks that our intellect is of a special sort (finite as opposed to infinite, discursive as opposed to intellectual, sensibly intuitive as opposed to intellectually intuitive, spatiotemporal as opposed to having some other forms of intuition), it remains the case that anything Kant can show about the conditions for objects to be cognizable by us will leave open that there might be other sorts of intellects (even finite, discursive, sensible ones) that could cognize the objects which we can cognize only under those conditions outside of them: the objects of our cognition might not in themselves be as we (must) cognize them to be, and our forms of cognition might distort their objects. At this level, as opposed to an empirical level, Kant thinks that skepticism is true: things-in-themselves are not knowable by us, because of the distinctive form of our intellect. (Again, I think Förster is very good at explaining this stuff, though his account in the first two chapters of the book is admittedly compressed.)

Kant thinks we can entertain the (merely logical) possibility of other forms of finite discursive sensible intellects than our spatiotemporal one, and so the fact that he (takes himself to have) proved that our synthetic a priori knowledge is limited to spatiotemporal objects gives us transcendental idealism in its familiar form: we can know a priori only objects of possible experience, and this is not to know objects as things-in-themselves. Our understanding is not bound by the forms of our intuition, and so we can think objects in ways that we cannot cognize them; this is what makes transcendental idealism coherently formulatable, and simultaneously what makes transcendent metaphysics possible (it thinks erroneously of objects which are not given in space and time as being cognizable). Kant is explicit that we cannot know why we have the forms of intuition we have: "This peculiarity of our understanding, that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as little capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgement, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition." (B146, section 21 of the B-Deduction). The earlier parts of the paragraph which this sentence closes makes clear that Kant is here calling "incapable of further explanation" the facts that our intellect is discursive, sensible, and has spatiotemporal forms of intuition.

Förster spends a good deal of time on the first two of these qualifications: he thinks that Fichte showed that our intellect is not (solely) sensible, but that the I knows itself via an intellectual intuition (it knows only its own act/product, and that is what the pure I is), and that Goethe showed that our intellect is not solely discursive, but that in scientia intuitiva (such as Förster and Goethe say was behind Goethe's theories of morphology and color) we know objects as a whole prior to knowing their parts. He also spends some time at least sketching how Fichte tried to address the issue of our having "such and so many" categories and "just these and no other functions of judgement", in chapter 8, "Fichte's "Complete Revolution of the Mode of Thought"". I didn't find this account satisfying, but it was clearly not meant to be fully rigorous or complete: Förster doesn't even try to tell us how Fichte derives the categories of Quantity or Modality, nor does he try to tell us how Fichte proceeds from his deductions of the logical laws of identity and non-contradiction to Kant's table of judgements.

But one major issue in Kant, the question of whether our spatiotemporal forms of intuition are the only ones possible (for a finite, discursive, sensitive intellect) is only addressed in a single footnote, number 13 on page 201. Förster partly excuses himself here by noting that Ficthe himself skimmed over this point in Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre: "Kant demonstrates the ideality of objects from the presupposed ideality of space and time: we, on the contrary, shall prove the ideality of space and time from the demonstrated ideality of objects. He required ideal objects to fill up space and time; we require space and time in order to locate the ideal objects." But Förster says that Fichte gives a "deduction of space and time" in Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre, and that "in strict terms such a deduction is indeed required at this point in order to explain how it is possible for the image and the thing to correspond or agree with each other." It would've been nice to see more discussion of this, but then one can only ask so much of a 400 page book.

But another issue in Kant, the discursive nature of our intellect, gets a great deal of treatment by Förster, and he clearly means for the reality of non-discursive knowledge to be one of the main results of his book. To quote the last sentences of the final chapter: "The path of scientia intuitiva [non-discursive knowledge] alone is still open". Chapter 11, "The Methodology of the Intuitive Understanding", is supposed to show how we can achieve scientia intuitiva of natural objects. (As a reminder, Spinoza's examples of scientia intuitiva in the Ethics are always mathematical; it is unclear how much he believed we could really have scientia intuitiva of non-mathematical finite objects, though the general thrust of part five of the Ethics suggests that acquiring this is in fact within our power, and also important for us to achieve.)

I think that a summary version of my complaint about Förster here can be put by looking at a conclusion Förster takes himself to have demonstrated in his methological discussion of Goethe's botanical studies: "In summary, then, we can say that if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then that fact can only be recognized by the method described here. Whether or not an idea in this sense lies at the foundation of a set of phenomena can also only be determined in this way." (p.264) -- By "idea" here Förster means something peculiar, and it's probably best to read the book yourself to get the details. But the gist of what an "idea" is here can, I think, be appreciated by looking at the example that Kant originally uses in section 77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgement, and that inspired Goethe et al: a plant. In thinking of a plant as a plant, we are thinking of it as a certain sort of organism. Thus, following Kant's account of organisms in the third Critique (which, as Förster notes in a footnote on p.138, is similar to Hume's in the Treatise), we are thinking of it as having parts which are both the cause and effect of its whole: a tree has roots and limbs and flowering buds because it is the sort of tree it is, and its having roots and limbs and flowering buds are how it is able to be that sort of tree.

Kant thinks that we are unable to know anything in nature in this way, because of the discursive nature of our intellect: "Our understanding, namely, has the property that in its cognition, e.g., of the cause of a product, it must go from the analytical universal (of concepts) to the particular (of the given empirical intuition), in which it determines nothing with regard to the manifoldness of the latter, but must expect this determination for the power of judgment from the subsumption of the empirical intuition (when the object is a product of nature) under the concept. Now, however, we can also conceive of an understanding which, since it is not discursive like ours but is intuitive, goes from the synthetically universal (of the intuition of a whole as such) to the particular, i.e., from the whole to the parts, in which, therefore, and in whose representation of the whole, there is no contingency in the combination of the parts, in order to make possible a determinate form of the whole, which is needed by our understanding, which must progress from the parts, as universally conceived grounds, to the different possible forms, as consequences, that can be subsumed under it. In accordance with the constitution of our understanding, by contrast, a real whole of nature is to be regarded only as the effect of the concurrent moving forces of the parts." (AK 5:407, section 77 of the third Critique) In other words: to know an organism as a product of nature, we would have to know it as having its parts produced by its whole (and vice-versa, in reciprocal fashion). But we can only know products of nature as having their parts produced by forces, and of all natural "wholes" as aggregates of such parts. For our thought is (thinks Kant) always discursive: we are first given particulars, and then bring those under universals; we are never given particulars as already "under" universals, such as would be the case in an organism whose particular parts are caused by the universal which is its whole.

This is a jarringly skeptical result: it certainly seems as if we can have knowledge of organisms in nature. So the post-Kantians unite in thinking that Kant has made an error in thinking that our understanding is (always) discursive, for they all agree that Kant has given a correct account of what would have to be the case if we could have knowledge of organisms, but reject his skepticism about knowledge of organisms: so our understanding must also be "intuitive", and sometimes proceed from cognition of wholes to cognition of parts. The sort of cognition of a whole involved here is what Goethe calls knowledge of an "idea", and identifies with scientia intuitiva: we know the "synthetic universal" or "idea" of a particular kind of tree, and so know its parts as being those sorts of parts because it is that sort of tree.

I think there's something to this line of thought, when we are dealing with living things: organisms do have a sort of whole, the knowledge of which is (in a sense) prior to the knowledge of their parts. You need to have some notion of an object in nature as having a whole of that sort to grasp it as an organism, because you need to have some notion of how its parts can be parts of an organic whole. And the account Förster gives of Goethe's methodology seems to me to have a plausible claim to being how we come to know organisms as the organisms they are: we have to recognize the ways in which each part functions to produce and maintain the whole, and the ways in which the whole is nothing but this activity of its parts. Only when we have grasped all of these "transitions" can we fully know an object in nature as an organism. As Förster says, "if an idea lies at the basis of a set of phenomena and is operative in all its parts, then this can only be recognized by the method described here." If this is false, then I think it is at least in the vicinity of the truth. But I'm not sure how to tell whether the antecedent of this conditional is satisfied. It looks like organisms satisfy it, if there are any, as Kant's analysis of what it is to think of something as an organic whole is. Apart from that, I don't see how to tell whether learning about a bunch of connections between natural happenings can constitute coming to know the moments of an idea or not: Förster needs for us to grasp ideas, to come to have scientia intuitiva, by observing transitions, but I don't see how he gets from observing a number of transitions which we take to be the moments of an idea to actually knowing that they are just the moments of an idea. Goethe thought that he had achieved knowledge of the idea of color, but Lichtenberg convinced him he was wrong (as Förster discusses). How are we supposed to tell whether or not we've really grasped an idea, then?

I think Förster's suggestion is that we can know we have an idea on our hands when we have a plurality of moments and all of the transitions between them: the idea is then the totality of those moments/transitions, and is "at the basis of the set of phenomena and operative in all its parts". But how do we know if we have all of the relevant moments? Do ideas have smaller ideas as the parts, which are at the basis of subsets of their moments, so that any plurality which has transitions between its moments will do? Where does Förster get his conviction that ideas are at the basis of all reality, as opposed to being what gives unity to organisms?

If I can find an answer to this, then I will also have an answer to my biggest complaint about the book, which is how Förster shows that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (or something very close to it) in fact brings an end to the twenty-five years of philosophy and resolves all of the problems Kant left for the post-Kantians. On the penultimate page of the epilogue, he considers the following objection to the claim that Hegel really did solve it all: "it is not convincing that a specific transition [between shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology] is supposed to be necessary for consciousness at its given level. And such an objection may, in any given case, be justified. Then the question becomes: Is the transition itself not necessary, or has its necessity simply not been convincingly presented? As long as we find that some of the other transitions are necessary, we can always be sure that the problem is one of presentation. That is the crucial point! If a whole makes its parts possible and gives them their shape, then it must be active in all the parts and in all their transitions, not only in some. If that activity (necessity) has been recognized in some of the transitions but not in others, all this implies is that the latter have not yet been adequately grasped and presented." (p.376, my bolding)

As a matter of fact, I find the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" very convincing, and have ever since reading McDowell's "Towards a Heterodox Reading of Lordship and Bondage". I also find parts of the "Consciousness" chapters more or less clear. (I can see what is wrong with "Sense-Certainty", but what is going on in the "Perception" chapter always fades in and out of view for me, and "Force and the Understanding" is a very hard piece of Hegeling.) And most of the "Reason" chapter is pretty clear, for Hegel (it helps that the phrenology jokes are funny). So, if I know that these transitions are between moments of an idea (the Absolute Idea that Hegel tells us about in the Science of Logic, as it will happen), then I can be sure that Förster is right: the transitions which look to me to fail are just not convincingly presented. As they are parts of the Absolute Idea, there must be transitions between all of its moments which follow simply from the essence of those moments; this is analytic of what being moments of an idea comes to. But, as Förster presented it, the project of "The Science of the Experience of Consciousness" as originally conceived was just to demonstrate that there is in fact an Absolute Idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out the moments of! And as this "Science of the Experience of Consciousness" is what became the Phenomenology of Spirit, I cannot simply grant to Hegel that there is in fact an Absoute Idea: this is what he needed to show me by presenting a total account of the plurality of the forms of knowledge-claims and the transitions between them. So Förster's defense of the result of the Phenomenology begs the question: I can be sure that the transitions between the shapes of "Self-Consciousness" are parts of a totality of transitions between moments of the Absolute Idea only if I already know that they are transitions between moments of an idea, which the Phenomenology was meant to show by exhibiting all of the moments of an idea. Förster has not shown that there are not problems with Hegel's approach in principle: that there might not be any idea for a "Science of Logic" to lay out for us, and that Kant's scattershot approach to our forms of thinking might not be where we have to rest, skeptical results and all.

"The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy"

This book is the best book on German Idealism I've ever read. Engaging, clear, and deep.

I'm usually really bad about starting books and then putting them down, but I haven't been tempted to read any other books since starting "The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy". (Watch "Game of Thrones" instead of read philosophy, yes. Read any other books, no.) I'm in the part about Schelling's Naturphilosophie now, and it's still remarkably clear. I've always wondered how Kantianism somehow lead to that stuff, and Förster is actually making that move seem intelligible. He's already made everything from Kant's first realization that there's a problem about how thought of objects which are not sensibly given can be possible to the Wissenschaftslehre clearer to me than they've ever been, and I am excited to get to the Hegel chapters (and find out what the weird swirly diagram on the cover is about).

I really have nothing to say about this book right now other than that I love it and you should read it immediately. I'm going to go back to reading it now.