The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  First, Kant distinguishes between Erkenntnis and Wissen. The different use of these words loses its prominence throughout the development of nineteenth-century German thought. In the twentieth century, dictionaries of contemporary German usually translate both as “knowledge.” For Kant, Erkenntnisse are merely a part of his theory of mental representations: in the so-called step-ladder of representations in the Critique of Pure Reason (B376/A320),1 Kant calls those conscious mental representations which refer to objects Erkenntnisse—in contrast to sensations which refer to the subject only. According to the Kantian terminology, Erkenntnisse can be false. This, of course, sounds odd to contemporary readers, since we are used to assuming that both German terms, Erkenntnis and Wissen, imply actual truth. For Kant, Erkenntnis is the translation of the basic Latin term cognitio. The philosophical question related to Erkenntnisse is not whether they are valid. It is the question: what is the ground for the possibility of their being valid? As is well known, this question is the topic of major parts of the first Critique. In contrast, Kant deals with Wissen (knowledge properly speaking) only in a brief chapter in the final part of the Critique of Pure Reason, “The Doctrine of Method” (see B848/A820ff).

  Wissen figures among the attitudes of taking-as-true. These attitudes accompany implicitly or explicitly our judgmental inner states. Kant distinguishes between knowledge, opinion, and belief according to the type of reasons in favor of the judgment. If the reasons are both from the point of view of the cognizing subject and objectively sufficient for taking a judgment as true, then we are dealing with knowledge. Since knowledge includes the element of being subjectively sufficient as one of its components, it also belongs to the class of what Kant calls convictions. Convictions are contrasted with mere persuasion where a moment of illusion is present: reasons which pertain merely to a particular subject are treated as if they were objective. The test to find out whether the reasons are actually objective (and thus fulfill the second component of knowledge) is the communicability of the corresponding attitude of taking-as-true. Thereby, Kant does not mean that the person in question can convey to others the fact that he has this attitude; nor does he mean that the subject is entitled to expect (in the normative sense of the word) that other persons ought to share his attitude. It can only serve as a criterion if Kant means that others will share the attitude, insofar as they are rational. Knowledge, as discussed in the chapter on method, comes close to the topics we today consider as part of epistemology.

  However, the distinction between Erkenntnis and Wissen (knowledge properly speaking) is not always as clear cut. One example for the complex interrelation of these distinct areas is the following: in the context of his theory of Erkenntnis, Kant discusses the correspondence theory of truth (B82/A57ff.).2 When he concedes the theory, but criticizes that we lack an accurate criterion for applying it, he has actually already moved on to the topic of knowledge in the modern sense, since he asks the question: on what grounds can we acquire true beliefs? But his criticism also shows that for him such a direct move towards the area of knowledge without properly exploring the possibility of cognition in the first place cannot be successful. In order to show why this move is unsuccessful he takes up a skeptical reasoning. If we want to find out whether reality corresponds to our judgment, we cannot help relying on other representations of this reality—we cannot step outside of ourselves and our representing. Since the accuracy of these representations would have to be presupposed, the reasoning falls prey of what ancient skepticism has called a diallel.

  Overall, Kant’s reception of skepticism is characteristically broad; it includes Humean, Cartesian, and Pyrrhonian skepticism. All these different versions of skepticism are discussed in the core part of the first Critique, that is, in his chapters on Erkenntnis. The prominent role Humean skepticism plays in Kant’s presentation of the Critique of Pure Reason was recognized early on. Whether Hume was indeed the crucial influence at the stage of conceiving and writing the book and in what respect he was the crucial influence has recently been the subject of dispute in the literature.3 Kant’s response to Cartesian skepticism continues to change even in the transition from the first to the second edition of the Critique. In the first edition, it is located in the chapter called the fourth paralogism (A366ff.). Kant’s discussion is informed by his distinction between two senses—inner sense and outer sense—and his claim that these two senses are on a par. Both reveal only how things appear. Thus the situation is from the very beginning not such that we have a direct and unchallenged access to ourselves and our own states whereas it is merely doubtful whether something actually corresponds to them. Kant also criticizes the procedure underlying Cartesian skepticism. This procedure starts with the presence of our own perceptions; it then relies on an inference to the best explanation in order to conclude that the corresponding independent objects must have been there. Since such an inference is always doubtful, the procedure can’t help inviting skepticism. Instead, Kant assumes that outer sense provides a direct, though not in every case infallible, access to the sphere of objects. This suggests that what is present for us first is not a content insofar as it is a feature of our mental state. We are rather directed outwards by means of our mental states.

  In the relevant passages of the paralogism chapter of the first edition, however, Kant surprisingly again calls the objects of our attention representations—the German term Vorstellung seems to entail that we are dealing again with mental representations. Nevertheless, many interpreters try to avoid the resulting phenomenalist reading of Kant by refining Kant’s theoretical apparatus in a way that allows absorbing the term “representation” in Kant’s concept of appearance (understood as an outer object).4 The possibility of such a phenomenalist reading may have been one of the reasons why Kant eliminated the chapter from the second edition, introducing the “refutation of idealism” (B274ff.) as a new anti-skeptical argument. According to this reasoning, the possibility of determining my own existence in time is already a sufficient ground to prove the existence of outer objects. The success of this reasoning has been intensively debated. It has been at the center of the recent revival of transcendental arguments.5

  Pyrrhonian skepticism, as is well known, influences the part of the first Critique called the Dialectic. The Pyrrhonian procedure of opposing two claims and arguing for both corresponds in particular to the antinomies, for example, the antinomy arising from the question whether substances in the world are built up from simple parts. Skepticism in this sense means the exploration of the dialectic that is internal to reason. As such it is an essential part of Kant’s own project to set a boundary to our claims to knowledge.

  28.3 FICHTE

  In Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre (The Doctrine of Knowledge) the term Wissen moves from the margins to the center of philosophy. In order to understand the underlying conception, I want to go back to the starting point of the Wissenschaftslehre (I refer to the 1796–8 version).6 Fichte begins by taking up those mental representations that are accompanied by a feeling of necessity. The necessity in question is neither the necessity of the content (as it is present in everyday life); nor is it a necessity on the level of logical form. What is necessary is the fact that certain types of representations are necessarily related to claims of objectivity. Insofar as Fichte wants to provide a ground for this relation, his project bears a resemblance to Kant’s; the representations in question correspond to Erkenntnissen. Fichte’s methodological procedure is to perform a successive operation of reflection starting from those representations which are accompanied by the feeling of necessity. First, he moves on to the foundation of the possibility that the representations are valid. Secondly, he invites the reader to refer also to the philosophical insight in which the previous step of laying the foundation has been brought about.

  Within this procedure of reflection, Fichte aims at producing actual knowledge (and not merely representations that can be correct—that is, Erkenntnisse). This philosophica
l knowledge is located at a meta-level. In order to understand in what sense we are dealing with knowledge, it is not sufficient to refer only to its content. According to Fichte, the performance by the thinker cannot be bypassed. This is particularly true of the self that is at the heart of Fichte’s foundational enterprise: even though it has the feature of generality (the self is present in all thinkers), each of the thinkers has to perform the thought in which he thinks of himself individually, otherwise the self does not qualify as the starting point of knowledge. In addition, Fichte believes that the procedure involved in achieving philosophical knowledge bears a resemblance to (Euclidean) geometrical construction. In geometrical construction, too, the mathematician has to perform operations such as mirroring or shifting in order to gain insight. The mere presence of the result in his mind is not sufficient. The resulting experience of evidence accompanies the awareness of the relations that have been established in the process of construction.

  Ultimately we are ourselves such a relation: the self has to be conceived of as an activity which includes intelligible and real components. Subject and object are only derivative abstractions from this process.7 In 1804, Fichte even explicitly tries to develop the idea of an evident relation that generates its elements in the first place.8 Therefore, philosophy does not start with a subject in which representations inhere and an object opposed to it in order then to establish their relation. Such an approach would be vulnerable to skepticism. Fichte tries to proceed the other way round—he starts with the relation; thereby undermining the skeptic’s starting point.

  How difficult it is to relate this early idealists’ approach to knowledge with a more traditional notion of the term can be seen even more clearly at the beginning of Friedrich Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism.9 According to Schelling, our claim to knowledge leads us to the idea that at the most basic level the active mind and its content must be united in an undivided way. (This thesis bears similarities to Fichte’s claim just mentioned, but unlike Fichte, Schelling uses a formulation that still begins with a dualistic description.) Schelling seems to suggest that this thesis can already be introduced on the basis of the claim that knowledge implies truth, whereas truth is to be spelled out as correspondence between representation and object. However, there is a gap between the traditional concept of correspondence on the one hand and the demand of a strict unity of the mind itself and its content on the other hand. Both Fichte’s and Schelling’s approaches to knowledge are revisionary: it cannot simply be derived from a more common notion of knowledge such as being a justified true belief.

  28.4 HEGEL

  Georg Wilhelm Hegel follows Fichte in focusing on the relation between philosophy and knowledge: “To help bring philosophy closer (…) to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do.”10 The core term for knowledge is again Wissen, not Erkenntnis. The emphasis on the relational character of knowledge is also present in Hegel, though it has a different form. Hegel argues in favor of a holism grounded in the idea of system. According to this idea, we do not seek for intuitively certain convictions accompanying the relations (as Fichte does), but for an organic interpenetration of all beliefs. Distinguishing the philosophical foundations of the possibility of cognition on the one hand and the content of cognition on the other hand is itself a dualism to be avoided. Within the systematic network, the task of philosophy is to provide the structure of the idea of the unified whole and the basis for its realization in the different applied domains of knowledge.

  This approach, of course, is in need of justification. Skepticism plays an important role in this justification.11 Unlike in Kant and Fichte, skepticism and knowledge (Wissen) are directly related in Hegel. Skepticism is also the “free side” of philosophy.12 However, this is true primarily for ancient skepticism. Hegel distinguishes clearly between a potentially productive ancient skepticism and modern forms of skepticism he is mostly critical of. In the domain of modern skepticism, he deals intensively with the work of his contemporary G. E. Schulze (S, 197ff., 225ff.). However, there is also skepticism of a Cartesian type (broadly speaking) present in Hegel. I will focus on the latter. Like Kant, Hegel first challenges the idea that our consciousness of inner states has a better epistemic status than our consciousness of external objects. In an ironic remark (S, 225), he mocks this conception by suggesting that it conceives of these two forms of consciousness as we would conceive of our shirt and our coat: one is obviously closer to the body than the other.

  Secondly, Hegel attacks the realism underlying a Cartesian type of skepticism, that is, the claim that the object is entirely independent of our cognitive apparatus and, in particular, our conceptualization. Even the status of being an independent object in the sense of being distinct from us is ultimately an attribution by the cognizing subject. To posit something as independent and to deny any involvement with it is at face value an inconsistent strategy. If distinguishing the object from the cognitive apparatus is also establishing a link to it, then the object and the way in which it is given to us cannot come entirely apart either (PG, 59ff.).

  Thirdly, Hegel is critical of Cartesian skepticism, because in the end it re-establishes the body of knowledge as it had been before (PG, 56). Thus it plays no role in actually generating knowledge—a new demand Hegel imposes on skepticism in his own model of relating skepticism and knowledge in his Phenomenology.

  In the domain of ancient skepticism, Hegel distinguishes between an older intellectual tradition and a newer one (S, 214ff.). The former is mostly directed against the common sense trust in the senses. It emphasizes the difference in circumstances, in the persons and their perceptions, and so on. According to Hegel, the newer tradition is mostly directed against the sciences and philosophy. Its real target, however, is a form of dogmatism which attributes an absolutely self-sufficient status to something that is just a limited, finite entity. This skepticism in particular is meant to support Hegel’s own goal, since it undermines the strategy of isolating topics and thereby establishing dualisms. Those critical moves support Hegel’s own idea of holism.

  Finally, Hegel distinguishes between a skepticism that isolates itself and a skepticism that genuinely belongs to philosophy. Since a thoroughgoing skepticism has to apply its maxims to itself, the isolated skepticism withdraws from all claims and must be left alone. Thus, Hegel focuses on the skepticism that relates to philosophy. Even in this case, Hegel has to transform the historical position in order to account for the productive element he is looking for.

  In the Phenomenology, Hegel tries to explain the productive element by combining features of his response to Cartesian skepticism with the claim that even ancient skepticism, systematically conceived, does not end up with no commitment at all. If the object is correlated to our conceptual apparatus, each change in the conceptual scheme will also present the object in a new way. In his re-reading of ancient skepticism, Hegel adds the idea that negation should not be understood in a merely formal way; that is, it does not only relate to the claim it negates, but also establishes a different claim with an opposing content (PG, 56). In relation to ancient skepticism, this applies to the respective claims the Pyrrhonian procedure opposes to each other. The resulting breakdown of this opposition opens up a new domain of reasoning. The reasoning reaches an endpoint once an adequate holistic framework has been found. In an adequate holistic framework, the relevant epistemic relations are internal ones; no challenge forces the cognizing subject to move beyond it.

  The relation between the established knowledge and the path leading towards it is complex. On the one hand, the revised skeptical procedure justifies the framework of knowledge via negation. On the other hand, the resulting knowledge has to explain how the skeptical path and its starting point have been possible. For Hegel, the overall structure of justified knowledge is therefore like a circle. The actual structure, however, is rather like an infinite spiral—a fact which might itself i
nvite skeptical worries.

  28.5 THE DEVELOPMENT AFTER HEGEL

  The subsequent development of post-Hegelian German thought was influenced by two tendencies. (1) During the nineteenth century, the sciences progressed rapidly. Their progress and the corresponding rise of a scientific worldview gradually transformed the intellectual culture. It was no longer uncontroversial to claim that philosophy is primarily to be understood as a presuppositionless endeavor based on a priori principles. Instead, new tasks of philosophy became prominent: one of them was to reflect the general structure of the given sciences. Trendelenburg, for example, conceives of a Logic13 as a new fundamental philosophy which is properly understood as a “theory of science.” (The German phrase “Theorie der Wissenschaften” for philosophy of science was introduced by him.)14 Whereas Hegel had already included content from the sciences in his philosophical theory, in the new period writers at the borders of philosophy and empirical research also endorsed the scientific methodology. This is apparent in the dispute between Weisse and Fechner—both inherit the content from the idealist period of German philosophy. However, Weisse keeps to the Hegelian, speculative way of thinking, whereas Fechner insists on using only those methods that scientists accept.15 As we will see, the concept of knowledge and the role of skepticism change throughout this process, too. In particular, the results of applying scientific methods already from the very beginning have a higher credibility than any anti-skeptical philosophical reasoning can provide.

  (2) Among the rising new academic disciplines, the empirical investigation of cognitive and conscious processes is particularly important for philosophy; first, there is “empirical” psychology, followed by the physiology of the senses (e.g. Johannes Müller).16 Content that has been part of the a priori framework of (transcendental) philosophy is now transferred to the empirical domain. This tendency is already present in the writings of the Kantian Fries.17 In his mixed strategy, he concedes that philosophy deals with a priori principles; but nevertheless he classifies the critique as empirical psychology. Accordingly, the critique cannot prove the principles; it can only “reveal” them.