The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Moreover, the relative distinction between knowledge and belief has to be applied in each particular case in an appropriate way just like any other world-related concept. This holds for the distinction between colours as well as for the distinction between mere behaviour and wilful action. In all these cases we ‘first’ have to figure out the relevant contrasts and the relevant fulfilment conditions in the situation in question and ‘then’ assess whether the conditions are sufficiently satisfied: any real knowledge is ‘context-relative’ and ‘finite’. This does not mean that we ‘lower’ the criteria of truth and declare that any actual knowledge is nothing but more or less successful contention, which is often shared with others in some joint consensus. It rather means that we understand the variable, though rigorous, logic of world-related concepts and the stark contrast to the schematic, formally exact, situation-transcendent, ideal logic of pure concepts as they are, for example, represented in mathematical models.

  When applying world-related concepts appropriately, we therefore first have to figure out a relevant ‘measure’ of non-exact satisfaction conditions, as Hegel shows in the chapter on measure in his Logic of Being. This fact must be taken into account in any evaluation of a possible sceptical doubt. Such doubts frequently work with much too idealistic correspondence notions of truth, as Kant, Hegel, and the whole school of philosophical pragmatism see. The expected fulfilment conditions then surpass by far the bounds of immanent sense. Therefore, a formalist sceptic shares with a dogmatic thinker a wrong, metaphysical, notion of absolute truth. Hegel develops this insight in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, which together with the Science of Logic (the last volume appearing 1816) marks a kind of second beginning of modern philosophy.7 Its tasks are to make some positive principles of critical metaphysics explicit in a kind of map for different forms of human knowledge. Some such forms belong to scientific and instrumental, historical and political knowledge, others to ‘speculative’ knowledge about our own position as acting agents not only in the world, but also in our own picture of the world. Hegel calls the latter ‘absolute knowledge’, not because it is perfect or ideal knowledge about things in the world, but because our actual judgements and actions play an absolute role in our attitude to the world: their direction of fit stands in total contrast to object-dependent knowledge, just as practical knowledge of how to do something (in a repeatable way) stands in contrast to theoretical knowledge of what there is.

  Since merely analytically true sentences only express conventional rules of verbal deduction, they provide no object-related ‘knowledge’ at all, as Wittgenstein clearly sees in the Tractatus. But the sentences produced in the natural sciences are, contrary to Wittgenstein, not just empirical statements about some or many states of affairs whose truth is evaluated post hoc. Instead, any such empiricism is totally quiet about the real form of our scientific knowledge, as Kant already saw.

  As we can see now, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel is not only critical epistemology, it is also critical semantics for the basic notions of the natural sciences and the pre-suppositional analysis of the ontological concepts and conceptual default inferences used in our talk about empirical objects and existence in experience. All these things must be tackled at the same time. For this reason, we have to consider at least the possibility that after the re-emergence of Hume’s empiricism in Logical Atomism (Bertrand Russell), Vienna’s Logical Positivism (Carnap), Berlin’s Logical Empiricism (Hans Reichenbach, Carl Gustav Hempel), and thereafter in the main-stream of twentieth-century Analytical Philosophy, most problems of eighteenth-century ‘pre-critical’ enlightenment prevail. They recurrently show up in all forms of revival of transcendent beliefs in a lure into some new metaphysics, on the one side, in ‘anti-metaphysical’ arguments, on the other.

  29.5 ABSTRACT REFLECTION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF PERFORMATIVE FORMS

  As we have seen, the central task of critical metaphysics or ontology is to figure out which entities in the mundus intelligibilis are merely verbal constructions as in fairy tales, and which have a good and true function in making implicit forms of a real practice explicit, as in Kant’s example of pure arithmetic and geometry: he sees, at least vaguely and in general, that geometrical truths are true statements about pure forms of geometry by which we represent generic forms of solid bodies and plane surfaces in some ideal way. But already our joint reference to an object in common intuition has a spatial form, such that our spatial and chronological orderings of perceived things and events in an objective world of not just subjective sensations are also an application of a jointly formed practice, in which the individual person, generically addressed as a transcendental I, takes part with its ‘forms of intuition’. The forms function as norms for proper or correct understanding. We might say that they are empractical8 forms, in contrast to merely enactive behaviour, a new term that Alva Noë has used9 for immediate (animal) reactions on perceptions. Any norm of correctness according to which we (can) act properly corresponds to such a form of action or practice. Thus, forms and norms appear as two sides of one coin. In actual use, pure forms turn into empractical forms. Such an empractical form is a ‘form-in-performance’, as I translate Heidegger’s German expression Vollzugsform. The question is how a certain generic, pure or ideal ‘form-in-reflection’ corresponds to an empractical form. As an ideal object of talk, it is already transposed into a merely ‘intelligible’ entity an sich.

  Hegel disambiguates Kant’s talk about such entities and sees that they play a crucial role either in generic object-level or in speculative or reflective judgements. In the first case they refer to a whole genus—such that, for example, a lion as such eats deer, even though we feed lions in zoos with other meat. When we talk about an individual for itself, we presuppose some identity conditions, which, however, always depend on the relevant genus as such. In an individual, generic and particular properties are ‘grown together’, as the Latin word ‘con-cretum’ says. As a result, a concrete individual always exists as-such-and-for-itself, as I propose to translate Hegel’s expression ‘an-und-für-sich’. We must therefore always distinguish between ‘theoretical’ domains of discourse and their ‘entities’ as such or per se, defined as the generic meanings of formal names (including nominalized predicates and sentences), on one side, the actual world of concrete individuals for itself or pro se, on the other.10

  This much, however, remains a true insight of ‘empiricism’ as a movement of enlightenment: access to reality is always mediated by the senses and by our concepts, that is, by conceptually informed11 perception or apperceptive intuition, as I would like to say. This is especially so if we distinguish with Hegel ‘efficacious reality’ (Wirklichkeit) from ‘phenomenal actuality’ (Realität) and objectivity from subjectivity, thus taking care of the fact that objective things are not just clusters of merely apparent and subjective phenomena, as Hume’s empiricism claims.

  The meaning of Hegel’s ‘as such’ is especially important in order to see that the state as such is what a (good) state (usually) should be. In the same vein, when we talk about an animal per se, let us say a mountain lion as such, we produce generic sentences about the way of life of mountain lions and what a good life of such an animal consists in. In such cases, we do not tell narrative stories about singular mountain lions.12 Sentences about mountain lions as such have a peculiar generic status of (prima facie) generality (Allgemeinheit)—in contradistinction to sentences with the status of singularity (Einzelheit) in which we talk about few, many or all individual elements in a sortal domain. This is not the place to explicate in more detail the application of generic statements to singular cases via filters of particularity (Besonderheit). But any object of objective experience must be conceptually determined as such and, by the same token, with respect to the different presentations and representations of it in its identity or being for itself. Only then can it appear to us. In other words, we cannot understand the reference to a real object independently from ‘its relations to us’ a
nd our access ‘to it’—or else we turn ‘it’ into ‘nothing’ by annihilating the referential content of the corresponding designator.

  Using this terminology (which in most books on Kant and Hegel is systematically misunderstood), we can now see how a priori (in the sense of Kant) and generic (in the sense of Hegel’s word ‘allgemein’) truths are presupposed in world-related empirical sentences: they express transcendental preconditions of conceptually articulated differential and inferential world-related knowledge. They make empractical forms or norms of our joint practice of intuition and of the inferential commitments and entitlements of empirical knowledge explicit.13 Kant’s Transcendental Analytic and Hegel’s Logic thus turn into a structural analysis of meaning and truth in the realm of Erfahrung, that is, of sentences and statements with empirical content.

  29.6 SCIENTISM AND THE TECHNICAL IMAGE OF THE WORLD

  It is a conceptual mistake to interpret the principle of sufficient reason as expressing a property of a world of things an sich in Kant’s (still ambivalent) sense. Instead, it is a principle of a world as such in Hegel’s sense, which means that it is just an abstract model or picture constructed by us in order to represent the generic case of causal explanations. But to say that every event was caused in principle by a preceding history is already a sweeping assumption and remains a subjective and transcendent metaphysical belief if we do not critically reflect on the true and good function of such a ‘principle’.

  Nevertheless, in our representations and explanations of empirical things and events we always already make use of our conceptually formed models. Such a modelled ‘world’ is the ‘overall internal object’ of our explanatory theoretical and generic knowledge which proves true only in our ‘concrete experience’ in which it shows its powers of good orientation. Experience in Kant’s wide, non-empiricist, sense of the word thus surpasses by far merely subjective sensation, perception, and feelings of satisfaction.

  Kant, Fichte, and Hegel show in increasing intensity that in any scientific knowledge claim we always already presuppose, first, the development of general reason or spirit, that is, of cultural forms and norms in view of some successful cooperative judgement and action, and second, the fact of our individual freedom of judgement and action.14 This shows the limits of ‘natural’ causes, that is, of causes that produce their results without further interventions of free human actions in the way machines do after we set them running.

  In the end, Heidegger deconstructs the origin of the ‘mechanistic’ picture of nature as a machine-like being in the Hellenistic, Jewish, and Christian metaphysical image of God: Plato’s idea of God as a world architect and creator is nothing but the idea of an ideal physicist. It has become the background image of far more than 2000 years of Western metaphysics. As a result, the talk about a divine creator and the talk about an ideal natural science that causally explains the whole world are, in the end, only two sides of the same coin.

  ‘Scientism’ is the metaphysical belief that our scientific statements exhibit some reality behind the appearances. In a more realistic or, what is the same, ‘phenomenological’ view (in the sense of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) of how our causal explanations are constituted, we see that science is collective hard work on our conceptual system. It is nothing else than Hegel’s Arbeit am Begriff. In it, we develop a certain harmony between the criteria that function as preconditions of default inferences or dispositional expectations that are conceptually attached to the words, such that we expect, for example, of cats that they have four legs or of salt that it dissolves in water. As a result, any concept needs an explicitly formed linguistic expression (Plato’s logos) as a central mediator between the classification (Plato’s horos and meros) and the paradigmatic normalities or norms of rational expectations (as we can read Plato’s eidos, which as a name for species or genus in Aristotle’s writings still silently includes an ‘ethological’ pre-knowledge about what a paradigm being of the genus normally does). In a certain development of Fichte’s talk about the I (or We) positing (‘Setzen’) things as objects, we can say now that we somehow ‘posit’ general harmonies in a general practice of teaching and learning after long scientific debates about competing proposals. Then we ‘use’ the ‘posited’ standing sentences as default rules of admissible inference. We thus also ‘define’ generic ‘truths’ by attributing dispositional (default) properties to objects or their constellations (under certain differential conditions). The very notions of force and cause rest on this practice, as critical metaphysics of causation in the form of its logical analysis shows.

  The method of science is dialectical insofar as we declare in scientific disputes the ‘best’ generic explanations available to be ‘true’—of course in view of their intended ‘empirical’ applications and for the time being. Merely empirical knowledge about past events does not lead ‘schematically’ to generic knowledge. There is no formal logic of induction. Singular counter-examples do not suffice for theory refutation, as Popper’s ‘Critical Rationalism’ suggests. This is so because genericity does not always mean universality. Something can be true in general or hold as such without holding for all cases. But it should hold well enough for paradigm cases. The dialectical method of the sciences means that for refutations of theories we always need something like a constructive vote of distrust, that is, an altogether better theory that can be reasonably accepted by a majority of well-informed users with sufficiently good judgement, which means the ability of dealing properly with possible exceptions or non-standard cases (of Aristotelian steresis). In other words, we must distinguish cases of general theory change and cases of adding conditions for particular applications.

  Writing human history (Geschichte) in contrast to telling historical narratives as in empirical annals or diaries presupposes reconstructions of individual and collective reasons for individual and joint actions. These reasons always rest on practical acceptance of traditions, their norms and institutions. This holds even for all forms of sanctions and the use of force. Even though Karl Marx, Johann Gustav Droysen, or Jacob Christoph Burckhardt make heavy use of this insight, they do not give Hegel the credit for it, just because they mystify, like most other readers, Hegel’s way of using the words ‘spirit’ and ‘reason’ and overlook that his reconstructions of the developments of forms and norms of practices always end in actual presence, which in his case was the world after the French Revolution and Bonaparte. It was not at all claimed to be the end of cultural or political history altogether.

  Our method of reflecting on our human condition in the world—our practice of developing object- and subject-related knowledge—now deserves the label ‘dialectical’ as well. In an everlasting discourse we improve our ways of making explicit differential conditions for default inferences, which are normatively declared to be prima facie admissible expectations if the cases fall under the conditions that define the extension of the genus—which allows, as such, for the default inferences in view of the prototypical paradigm cases. And we debate about the limitations and correct understanding of this practice of establishing canonized standard meanings for words by corresponding ‘material’ but ‘conceptual’ differences and inferences in a ‘synthetic a priori way’.

  In a similar way, we develop our moral or legal system by working on its moral or legal concepts and on the moral or legal practice. Science and knowledge are thus understood as a division of joint investigative labour, with the goal of articulating generic results for (reasonable) empirical application in indefinite situations (by persons who know how to use them properly). In contrast to this, traditional epistemology focuses only on the question how an individual can ‘know’ something ‘for certain’. This ‘Cartesian’ and ‘empiricist’ quest for certainty and subjective foundations stands in the way of a more realistic understanding of knowledge with its leading question: what is it to properly participate in a joint practice of joint knowledge? And how should we understand the tensions and relations between our own id
eals of perfect knowledge and real knowledge?

  Ideals articulate generic orientations. They cannot and must not be used directly as criteria for real truth or as fulfilment conditions of real knowledge. Ideal knowledge, for example, is in one sense utopian, in another non-existent, rather than inaccessible. It exists only in our counterfactual images of totally successful cases. Real knowledge is always finite, limited, fallible, perspectival, and dependent in content on speakers and addressed listeners, hence on time and space, epoch and context. Despite this fact, real knowledge claims must, and frequently can, fulfil the relevant conditions. They must, and can, be good enough for the corresponding individual or joint purposes, just as a real plane or circle must and can be good enough for the relevant purpose: in applications we must filter the relevant measures out of a set of ideal measures, so to speak.

  29.7 SOME HASTY CRITIQUES OF METAPHYSICS

  As we see now, we should not confound attempts to draw our attention to transcendental presuppositions in our forms of practice with allegedly transcendent claims about a world an sich. Because of the importance of meta-level reflections on our conceptual and perceptual access to the real world, a secular society without critical metaphysics is a deplorable state of affairs. By saying this in the introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel does not complain about the fact that in the course of scientific and philosophical enlightenment many people like Kant, he himself, and all his more intelligent students such as David Friedrich Strauß, Bruno Bauer, or Heinrich Heine, have seen that there can be no meaningful belief in an ‘ontic’ god.