A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (24 page)

is conscious of his own existence as a thing-in-itself, [and] views his existence so far as it does not stand under temporal conditions, and... himself as determinable only by laws which he gives to himself through reason. In this existence nothing is antecedent to the determination of his will.

The immortality of the soul is supposed to be a necessary consequence of the thought (in some way derivable from the categorical imperative) that human beings are indefinitely perfectible, and therefore able to endure for as long as infinite perfection requires. The existence of God is vouchsafed in turn by the same categorical imperative, as a kind of guarantee without which the necessary idea of a Kingdom of Ends would be logically inconceivable.

Nobody, I think, has’ been able to give a satisfactory account of this aspect of Kant’s philosophy, and the reason is not hard to find. Having separated theoretical and practical reason, in such a way that the province of the former is judgement and the latter action, it seems inevitable that claims to truth belong to the first, whereas the second must deal with claims to right, obligation and duty alone. Practical reason cannot therefore postulate the existence of God or the immortality of the soul, as theoretical conclusions. It cannot lead us to say that this is how things
are.
The best it can say (and this, of course, is not enough) is that this is how things
ought
to be.

One way to make Kant’s thought accessible, however, is this: the existence of God and the immortality of the soul cannot be proved as theoretical judgements, since it lies beyond the power of the human understanding to conceive or conjecture them. Nevertheless, when acting in obedience to the moral law we know these things not as truths, but in some other way. We ‘know God’ as a noumenal presence; we possess an intimation (in Wordsworth’s sense) of our immortality. But these feelings of familiarity, forced on us by the very perception of the moral order, cannot be translated into the language of scientific judgement, and so can be assigned no value as literal truths.

Aesthetics

No philosopher has argued more firmly than Kant for the view that moral judgements are objective, rational and universally binding, and his exposition of morality is the starting-point from which all subsequent scepticism began. But even Kant, for whom the objectivity of rational enquiry constituted the fundamental philosophical problem in all realms of human thought, felt that he must, in treating of aesthetics, make some concessions to subjectivism.

Aesthetic judgement, Kant argued, concerns itself with particular objects, and is both ‘disinterested’ (outside the demands of practical reasoning) and ‘free of concepts’ (outside the rules of the understanding).

Its aim is neither scientific knowledge nor right action, but rather the contemplation of the individual object for its own sake, as it is in itself, and in the light of the particular sensuous experience that it generates. Nevertheless, aesthetic contemplation is not the same as animal enjoyment. It is a rational pursuit, and issues in judgements which, while they can never be supported by objective or universal principles, do lay claim to objectivity. This claim is unavoidable. For to the extent that our enjoyment of something stems from our rational nature, so do we feel that beings similarly constituted ought to share in it, and so do we look in the object for the grounds that will persuade them to enjoy it too. This pursuit of objectivity, while hopeless, is inevitable. It is indispensable to aesthetic enjoyment, which is founded in critical understanding and never reducible to mere sensuous indulgence.

Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgement was complex, and obscurely worked out. While the third
Critique
is undeniably the most important work of aesthetics to have been produced since Aristotle, it was the product of a mind exhausted by its labours, still pregnant with unformed thoughts, but unable to give to them their full elaboration. For example, Kant suggests, in a famous phrase, that the aesthetic judgement seeks in nature and in art for ‘purposiveness without purpose’. Here he gestures not only towards a theory of aesthetics, but also towards a larger vision, which shows the role of aesthetic judgement in intellectual enquiry as a whole. Aesthetic judgement is given an indispensable place in forming a picture of the relation of the human mind to the world of experience. It was left to other thinkers, notably to Schiller, to give elaboration to this thought, and in doing so to lay the foundations of a philosophy of art that has been the most influential in intellectual history.

Transcendental idealism

The
Critique of Judgement
argues, then, not for the objective validity of aesthetic values, but for the fact that we must
think
of them as objectively valid. This immediately leads us to ask how Kant can distinguish in general between the actual objectivity of a mode of thought and the innate need that we feel to construe it as though it
were
objective. Consider moral judgements (understood in the Kantian way, so that the intimation of God and immortality is an immovable part of moral understanding). Is it the case that Kant has argued for their objectivity?

Or has he merely argued that we must
treat
moral judgements as though they were objective? Many philosophers who accept the second thesis (believing, indeed, that this ‘pressure of reason’ is what is distinctive of the moral point of view) nevertheless reject the first: the thesis of the objectivity of morals.

As I have already suggested, this doubt as to the nature and scope of Kant’s enterprise can be extended even into the first
Critique.
Has he argued for the actual objectivity of science, and for the existence of objects that may be other than they seem? Or has he merely advanced a thesis concerning human mental capacities, the thesis that we are constrained to think as though this were true? To put it in more idealistic terms: has he argued simply that we impose (through the organising principles of the understanding) an order on our experience which we then interpret in the familiar terms of object, cause, space and time? Modern philosophers have tended to interpret Kant as arguing for the actual objectivity of science. The world is as science describes it to be. We ourselves are no more than observers of it, whose peculiarities are not to be discovered by introspection, but rather by adopting the point of view of the objective world of which we form a part. Kant’s immediate successors, however, interpreted him differently. To them he had not so much laid the foundations of a true objectivity as explored the reaches of subjectivity. Far from demoting the first person from the privileged place which it had, until then, assumed in epistemology, he had elevated it to the single principle not only of epistemology but of metaphysics itself.

Three features of Kant’s philosophy give grounds for this interpretation. First, there is his own description of the philosophy of the first
Critique
as ‘transcendental idealism’. Secondly, Kant, in referring to the capacities of the human mind, speaks always of ‘our’ experience, ‘our’ understanding, ‘our’ concepts, ‘our’ will, etc., leaving open the crucial question whether this ‘our’ is to be taken in a general sense. Does it mean all human beings conceived impartially? Or is it to be interpreted in the specific sense of idealism, in which it refers to the abstract subject, the ‘I’ that is engaged in the intellectual construction of a ‘world’? This ambiguity is crucial, since, depending on its interpretation, we seem drawn either towards an impersonal metaphysics, or towards a highly solipsistic epistemology. Finally there is the confusion introduced by the second
Critique,
which seems to reject the view that the world of ‘phenomena’ is the actual world, within which the distinction between appearance and reality must be drawn, and asserts in its place the view that all ‘phenomena’ are mere appearance, with the reality consisting in the thing-in-itself that lies behind it. At the same time it is argued that the thing-in-itself is knowable after all, through the postulates of practical reason.

Fichte, Schiller and Schelling

Kant’s immediate followers adopted the framework and the language of transcendental idealism, the principal achievement of which, they believed, was to have demoted the thing-in-itself from its metaphysical eminence, and elevated the self and its mental faculties in place of it. Henceforth the first study of philosophy was to be the ‘faculties’—known by their Kantian names as intuition, understanding, reason, judgement, and so on—through which the self orders the world of appearance, and knows self and world together. The ground of all that exists is the subject of consciousness—unknowable to the understanding, but revealed to practical reason as freedom and will.

But if the self is the source of knowledge, something has been left unexplained. How can a merely subjective entity, beyond the reach of concepts, construct an objective world and endow it with the order of space, time and causality? This is the question that motivated the tradition known on the Continent as ‘classical German philosophy’, but which could be more accurately described as ‘romantic German philosophy’, not only for its association with romantic literature, but also on account of its manifest preference for lofty visions over valid arguments. The tradition was founded by Fichte and Schelling, and I shall conclude this chapter with a brief summary of their leading ideas, in order to show the profound impact on German philosophy of the Kantian agenda.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) was appointed (thanks to the influence of Goethe and Schiller) to the chair of philosophy in Jena at the age of 32. His lectures were immensely popular, and he published them in 1794. Known as the
Wissenschaftslehre
(Science of Knowledge), they were reworked in later editions, and were prefaced by Fichte with the claim that ‘my system is nothing other than the Kantian’. According to Fichte, Kant had shown that there are but two possible philosophies: idealism and dogmatism. The idealist looks for the explanation of experience in intelligence, the dogmatist in the ‘thing-in-itself’. Kant had shown that idealism can explain everything that dogmatism explains, while making no assumptions beyond the reach of observation. The dispute between the two concerns whether ‘the independence of the thing should be sacrificed to that of the self, or, conversely, the independence of the self to that of the thing’. The starting-point of idealist philosophy is therefore the self
(das Ich).

The task of such a philosophy is to discover the ‘absolutely unconditioned first principle of human knowledge’. Logicians offer an instance of necessary and indisputable truth in the law of identity:
A = A.
But even in that law something is presupposed that we have yet to justify, namely the existence of
A.
I can advance to the truth of
A = A,
once
A
has been ‘posited’ as an object of thought. But what justifies me in positing A? There is no answer. Only if we can find something that is posited in the act of thinking itself will we arrive at a self-justifying basis for our claims to knowledge. This thing that is posited absolutely is the I; for when the self is the object of thought, that which is ‘posited’ is identical with that which ‘posits’. In the statement that I = I we have therefore reached bedrock. Here is a necessary truth that presupposes nothing. The self-positing of the self is the true ground of the law of identity, and hence of logic itself.

To this first principle of knowledge, which he calls the principle of identity, Fichte adds a second. The positing of the self is also a positing of the not-self. For what I posit is always an
object
of knowledge, and an object is not a subject. That which comes before my intuition in the act of self-knowledge is intuited as not-self. This is the principle of counter-positing (or opposition). From which, in conjunction with the first principle, a third can be derived, namely, that the not-self is divisible in thought and opposed to a ‘divisible self. This third principle (the ‘grounding principle’) is supposedly derived by a ‘synthesis’ of the other two. It is the ground of transcendental philosophy, which explores the ‘division’ of the self by concepts, whereby the world is constituted as an object of knowledge.

The self is ‘determined’ or ‘limited’ by the not-self, which in turn is limited by the self. It is as though self-consciousness were traversed by a movable barrier: whatever lies in the not-self has been transferred there from the self. But since the origin of both self and not-self is the act of self-positing, nothing on either side of the barrier is anything, in the last analysis, but self. In the not-self, however, the self is passive. There is no contradiction in bringing this passive object under such concepts as space, time and causality, so situating it in the natural order. As subject, on the other hand, the self is active, spontaneously positing the objects of knowledge. The self is therefore free, since the concepts of the natural world (including causality) apply only to that which is posited as object, and not to the positing subject.

All activity in the not-self (including that which we should describe as causation) is transferred there from the self. But transference of activity is also an ‘alienation’
(Entfremdung)
of the self in the not-self, and a determination of the self
by
the not-self. This self-determination
(Selbstbestimmung)
is the realisation of freedom, since the not-self that determines me is only the self made objective in the act of self-awareness.

Fichte’s philosophy rests not so much in argument as in impetuous explosions of jargon, in which that fabricated verb ‘to posit’
(setzen)
kaleidoscopes into a thousand self-reflecting images. Schopenhauer described Fichte as ‘the father of
sham philosophy,
of the
underhand
method that by ambiguity in the use of words, incomprehensible talk and sophisms, tries to...befool those eager to learn’. This harsh judgement (characteristic of its author) may be deserved; but it does nothing to deny Fichte’s enormous influence: an influence that can be seen in the writings of Schopenhauer himself. For what Fichte bequeathed to his successors was not an argument at all, but a drama, the outlines of which may be summarised thus: