The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Having completed his secondary education in 1858, the same year Büchner’s Force and Matter was published, von Hartmann began developing his views on the unconscious at the height of the Materialismusstreit, and his methodology, he claims, is thoroughly in line with materialistic principles (an indication that in the short run the victors of the Materialismusstreit were at least seen by some as the materialists). As von Hartmann’s book’s subtitle, “Speculative Results According to the Inductive Method of Physical Science,” indicates, he took the proper method for philosophy to be empirical, to observe the world through our senses and to provide the best possible explanation of such data. “[A]‌ scientific hypothesis,” he (1893b, p. 167) tells us, “should never extend farther than the need of explanation requires.” Conclusions, as such, cannot be known with certainty, but, he thought, when reasoned through carefully, the precepts of his book should be held with the same level of credence as any good scientific theory.

  So far so good, however, what many later commentators took to be peculiar about his project is just how far beyond the empirical he ultimately ventured.36 Quoting Arthur Schopenhauer, von Hartmann (1893a, p. 57) says, “the materialists endeavor to show that all, even mental phenomena, are physical: and rightly; only they do not see that, on the other hand, everything physical is at the same time metaphysical.” And go beyond the physical—for this is the intended sense of “metaphysical”—he does.

  Von Hartmann, whose book was published ten years after Darwin’s Origin of the Species, was, like Darwin, concerned with the appearance of teleology in the natural world. How could instinctive behavior, reflex responses, and the body’s ability to repair itself be purposive, yet not consciously so? What explains, von Hartmann (p. 79) wanted to know, “purposive action without consciousness of the purpose”? Von Hartmann thought that Darwin explained the transmission of traits, but not their existence in the first place (a view, as Sebastian Gardner (2010) points out, that seems to imply his rejection of the theory of random mutation), and the best way, he thought, to explain this was to invoke a metaphysical purposive unconscious. Even in explaining intentional action, he thought, we need to posit some type of unconscious purpose, for as he (p. 77) saw it, a decision to lift your finger depends on minute muscular movements about which you are unaware, and in order to explain the purposiveness of the intentional action, these minute muscular movements must be purposive as well: “from the necessity of a voluntary impulse at the point ‘P’ it follows that the conscious will to lift the finger produces an unconscious will to excite point ‘P’.” In this way, conscious intention reduces to mechanical movements, which themselves reduce to something mental; “matter itself” von Hartmann (1893b, p. 86) held, “is in essence nothing else whatever but unconscious mind.” We are already a long way from the materialism of Vogt and Büchner and Moleschott. However, Hartmann takes us even further.

  From the “impossibility of a mechanical, material solution [to the problem of purposiveness in nature] it follows that the intermediate link must be of a spiritual nature,” he (1893a, p. 77) tells us. And the spiritual nature, according to von Hartmann, involves a synthesis of Schopenhauerian blind impulse and Hegelian reason; beyond our world, according to von Hartmann (1893c, p. 145), lies a unity of Will and Idea: “Will and Idea conceived in metaphysical essential unity, actually suffice for the explanation of the phenomena presented to us in the known world, they form the apex of the pyramid of inductive knowledge.”

  And now we take the final plunge, for von Hartmann holds that “the Unconscious Will and the Unconscious Idea coalesced to form the one universal spiritual world-essence,” yet ultimately, because of the preponderance of pain over pleasure in the world, the existence of the world is not a good thing. Making Schopenhauer seem veritably cheerful in comparison, von Hartmann tells us (p. 125), “we have seen that in the existing world everything is arranged in the wisest and best manner, and that it may be looked upon as the best of all possible worlds, but that nevertheless it is thoroughly wretched, and worse than none at all.” Thus, humankind’s ultimate purpose is to come to this realization, which will bring about the end of the world. As Sebastian Gardner puts it, on von Hartmann’s view, “[t]‌he world is thus only a device for cancelling the original synthesis of Will and Idea,” only a device for cancelling itself.

  Lest I end on a pessimistic note, let me conclude with a comment from C. K. Ogden’s 1931 preface to von Hartmann’s book (p. xiii). This comment, I think, also sums up what is most valuable about the work of the other philosophers I have addressed herein. If nothing else, Ogden points out, we must admire von Hartmann for “focusing the attention of the world on an idea.”37

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  Fichte, J. G. (1745/1930). Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Schulz, 2nd edition. Leipzig: Haessel.

  Fichte, J. G. (1794/1988). “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. Breazeale. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

  Fischer, K. (1853). Die Unwahrheit des Sensualismus und Materialismus mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Schriften von Feuerbach, Vogt und Moleschott bewiesen. Erlangen: T. Bläsing.

  Forster, M. N. (1998). Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Gardner, S. (2010). “Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious,” in Thinking the Unconscious: Nineteenth-Century German Thought, ed. Nicholls and Liebscher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Goldberg, I. I., Harel, M., and Malach, R. (2006). “When the Brain Loses Its Self: Prefrontal Inactivation during Sensorimotor Processing,” Neuron, Vol. 50 (2), pp. 329–39.

  Gregory, F. (1977). Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.

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  Lange, F. A. (1950). The History of Materialism and Criticism of its Present Importance, trans. Thomas. London: Degan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co. (Originally published in 1866, a revised edition in three volumes in 1873–5.)

  Levine, J. (2006). “Conscious Awareness and (Self-)Representation,” in Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, ed. Kriegel and Williford. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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  Montero, B. (2005). “What is the Physical?” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Beckermann, McLaughlin, and Walter. New York: Oxford University Press.

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  Wagner, R. (1854). Ueber Wissen und Glauben mit besonderer Beziehung zur Zukunft der Seelen. Fortsetzung der Betrachtungen über “Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz.” Göttingen: Wigand. First published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung on January 1, 1852, pp. 18, 14f.

  * * *

  1 Quoted in Breazeale (1981). See also Breazeale (1982). Reinhold’s goal was to systemize Kant and antecedents to his view about consciousness are found in the Critique of Pure Reason.

  2 Quoted in Breazeale (1982).

  3 Breazeale (1982) explains that Fichte, persuaded by Schulze’s criticism, aimed to arrive at an even more basic principle from which the principle of consciousness follows, and what he proceeds to show in his Science of Knowledge is how the representational element of consciousness can be derived from the act of positing a subject and an object.

  4 Quoted in Forster (1998). Even assuming that a distinction between representation and object exists in the concept of object, whether all consciousness involves a distinction between representation and object still depends on whether all consciousness is consciousness of objects (for discussion, see Forster, 1998).

  5 And some see consciousness as not representational at all. Such philosophers instead see consciousness as a relation between the self and objects that does not involve representations, in part, because they think it does not make sense to talk of perception as being either true or false. See Susanna Schellenberg’s (2010) discussion of the view she calls “austere relationalism.”

  6 James Messina (2011) points out that this objection was made by Johann Schwab, who, commenting on Reinhold’s principle of consciousness, asks, “Is there not a consciousness where we do not distinguish ourselves from the object; and is this not the case when we lose ourselves, as one says, in a sensation?”

  7 Or rather, I would argue that when experts perform at their best, in general the self is not lost. See Montero (forthcoming), for discussion of this issue.

  8 For a neuroscientific approach to the question of whether a certain type of self-consciousness is necessarily part of consciousness experience, see Goldberg, Harel, and Malach (2006).

  9 This might not always be a helpful thought since it might be that in some situations, focusing on pain, rather than distracting oneself from it, reduces it. See Johnston, Atlas, and Wager (2012).

  10 Another line of defense might even be that as there is no memory, there was no conscious experience.

  11 Of course, if we take what these individuals say at face value, this would still seem to counter the idea that it is analytic or necessary that conscious experience involves awareness of a subject.

  12 I say “explicit” here because although philosophers’ views on the mind-body problem today are often explicitly expressed as being motivated by purely theoretical concerns, grounded in logical argumentation, I think it is a reasonable guess that implicit motivations are at least sometimes at work as well.

  13 See Montero (1999, 2001, and 2005) for further discussion of how to understand the concept of matter in discussions of the mind–body problem.

  14 See Saul (2013) for discussion of implicit bias and women in philosophy.

  15 One might also wonder about the extent to which Mozart himself had “Mozart inside of him,” for it is well known that his father played a large role in guiding his musical development. See Rushton (2006).

  16 Regarding the issue of diet, it was during the Materialismusstreit that, for example, the well-known pun, “Der Mensch ist, was er isst,” originated.

  17 It is unlikely that Vogt had read Feuerbach’s works, for he had a strong aversion to philosophy, yet he was likely exposed to some of Feuerbach’s ideas second hand. See Gregory (1977).

  18 Many of the materialists also saw their opponents’ views as dangerous since they saw them as devaluing existence here on earth.

  19 His scientific approach to materialism is illustrated by the fact that he tried to discredit Vogt’s thesis, unsuccessfully according to Vogt, by weighing brains, claiming that if the mind is purely material, more intelligent people should be endowed with heavier brains. See Vogt (1864).

  20 Wagner, R. (1854), op. cit.

  21 Büchner, L. (1855), Kraft und Stoff. Empirisch-naturphilosophische Studien (Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger).

  22 Quoted in Gregory (1977, p. 38).

  23 Büchner, op. cit. p. iv.

  24 This is similar to how various non-religious philosophers who accept the idea of an ineliminable explanatory gap between mind and brain, such as Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers, and Galen Strawson, respond to such a lacuna today.

  25 Büchner, op. cit. p. 236.

  26 Vogt, op. cit.

  27 See Montero (2006) for discussion. Today we would want to say “in as much as it interacts in a deterministic or probabilistic way” and revise the conclusion accordingly.

  28 Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 193, from the stenographic report by Wilhelm Vogt, Carl Vogt, p. 66, n. 1.

  29 Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 113.

  30 Quoted in Gregory (1977), p. 48.

  31 The
Mathematician David Hilbert later expressed his disagreement: “In opposition to the foolish ignorabimus our slogan shall be: ‘We must know—we will know!’ [Wir müssen wissen—wir werden wissen!]” This was in 1930. In 1931, however, Gödel proved his famous incompleteness theorem, which might be interpreted as showing that Hilbert’s goal is impossible.

  32 Quoted in Nicholls and Liebscher (2010), Thinking the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 1.

  33 Quoted in Nicholls and Liebscher (2010), p. 157.

  34 “Das Unbewusste vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenztheorie,” which along with other work, was added as a third volume to the tenth edition of Philosophie des Unbewussten.

  35 This, however, might not line up with what people were talking about in the cafes, for the book, besides addressing the metaphysical nature of consciousness, has chapters on such things as sexual love, ambition, lust of power, vanity, domestic felicity, dreams, and so forth.

  36 For example, Lange, op. cit. Von Hartmann does draw a line, though, at least here: “The question might here be raised whether the atoms have a consciousness. However, I think that the data are all too lacking for any decision to be come to thereupon.” Vol. 2, p. 183.

  37 In von Hartmann, E. (1972), Philosophy of the Unconscious; Speculative Results according to the Inductive Method of Physical Science, one volume edition (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press Publishers) p. xiii.

  CHAPTER 19

  PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

  HANS-JOHANN GLOCK

  19.1 INTRODUCTION

  ANY subject X can turn into a topic of philosophical reflection and thus precipitate a philosophy of X. But the concern with some topics is central to philosophy. Language is one of them. Its perennial importance has three distinct though related roots. First, there is the role of language in sustaining specifically human forms of communication and interaction. Secondly, there is the vexed relation between thought and language. Thirdly, there is the question of whether philosophical problems, claims and theories, by contrast to those of science, concern or are rooted in language rather than reality.