The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Bernard Bolzano, who developed a first idea of general truth under arbitrary formal interpretation, was also dissatisfied with the logic of Kant and Hegel. His considerations have been very insightful from the point of view of mathematical model theory, but otherwise they do not tell us much about empirical reference to the actual word and about the correct understanding of material concepts.

  As we can see now, quite a bit of ‘criticism’ of other authors just means that interests have shifted to other matters and new topics. Gottlob Frege, for example, was much less concerned with the logical status of empirical information and its a priori conceptual conditions than Kant and Hegel. Instead, he analysed the forms of defining complex predicates in pre-given sortal domains. This is not the place to evaluate how far Frege has sufficiently succeeded in overcoming transcendent Platonism in the philosophy of mathematics by a transcendental analysis of the abstractive and idealizing constitution of mathematical entities and truths in whole domains of pure objects.

  9. It was obviously Hegel who aroused the interest of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in the work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, even though Marx criticized Hegel’s position as that of classical political economy. However, Hegel did not agree at all with the transcendent claims of a natural right to property or with Smith’s idea of an invisible hand that wonderfully turns the private vice of greed into public goods. We see here a shift from traditional themes of metaphysics to a critique of ideology and, as such, to the foundational question of a new social science, of sociology, so to speak, as it is also typical for the young Marx. It is directed against natural law as well as against Hobbes and against Bernard Mandeville’s sweeping praise of early capitalism for its beneficial ‘investments’. Hegel sees that the system of economy rests on the ground of institutions of a state, its positive rule of law and other steering devices. And he warns of the dangers that will result from the exclusion of a whole class of people from the property needed to make their own living. Therefore, Hegel opts for some social policies not only as a means to organize charity, but also as a precondition of a free society and its liberal economy altogether.

  Marx’s central further contribution to the foundation of classical economic theory and sociology goes beyond this in his insight that the only possible explanation of interest and rent is the appropriation of surplus value in capitalist production. This is made possible by the distinction between the actual or average price of the commodity ‘wage labour’ (in the salaries paid) and the actual or average value or price of the produced goods.

  Even though after Feuerbach and Marx almost the whole philosophical world attributes to Hegel a mystical and incomprehensible belief in some absolute spirit, for him, the word ‘spirit’ is just a label for the collective subject of human culture. Hegel also does not overlook the body.21 There is no ontic god or higher spirit that interferes in natural and human affairs. But Hegel disagrees with methodological individualism, which wants to reduce cultural and social development to a merely supervening effect of collective individual behaviour. Even Marx himself ‘applies’ Hegel’s dialectical method of looking for the best available rational reconstructions of generic reasons and causes in historical developments, but without being conscious enough of this very method and without understanding Hegel’s analysis of its problems.

  10. Especially with respect to the principles of the social sciences in empirical research and theoretical articulation it is high time to understand the philosophical debate between Marx, Hegel, and the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Jean-Baptist Say. The sweeping metaphysical labels of (dialectical, i.e. Hegelian) materialism and (absolute, i.e. not subjective) idealism just hide the real point, the need for generic explications of jointly acknowledged reasons in social change beyond the merely causally explained behaviour of a collection of individuals. The heritage of nineteenth-century philosophy is therefore to better understand the importance and the difficulty of a social ontology of institutions and forms of social practices. They are in a sense, as social systems, ‘spiritual subjects’ that define possible roles and functional statuses for the individuals and make certain cooperative actions possible which would not exist without them. This holds good for laws and moral norms.

  Hegel’s difficult label ‘Idea’ then stands as a singulare tantum for a whole system of general forms of joint practice and institutions. These allow a wide range of functional equivalents. If we take this seriously, we can overcome the prejudice of methodological individualism as it leads from Hobbes to Marx and from Marx and Nietzsche to Max Weber: It is true that no joint action takes place if the individuals do not act. But most joint actions consist in applying pre-existent cooperative forms. They do not emerge by chance.

  We should now distinguish between individual rationalities of singular persons and collective reasons of whole groups of people, whole nations, and, in the end, mankind (i.e. of the ‘world spirit’). The principle behind this acknowledgement of a special mode of being of institutions over and above the singular actions of individual actors is this: the idea or form of the institution is a result of a historical development and works in a certain way as a driving force in our collective and individual actions. In contrast to Marx and Weber, but in accord with Ferdinand Tönnies and Talcott Parsons and some other major writers in sociology, Hegel’s so-called holism is critical of metaphysical atomism or methodological individualism in explanations of social and political developments.

  The assumption that understanding and reason only exist in individuals, as Max Weber explicitly presupposes in his Economy and Society, as its introduction shows, overestimates by far the range and impact of individual decisions and underrates implicit or empractical acknowledgements of pre-given forms of co-operation, even in cases in which we see some benefit in this acceptance and thus act in a ‘subjectively rational way’ in Weber’s sense. Enlightenment in the sense of understanding the reasons for cultural traditions is at least as important as developing subjective ideas of how we could improve the social system. It always would be wrong, however, to turn such proposals immediately into practice, even if we subjectively assent to them and are willing to follow them consistently. We still have to wait and see what other persons actually say to our advertisements of the new rules or norms: they may agree and cooperate or rather not, with or without further arguments. Hegel’s insight into the dialectics of reason makes this and the problems that result from it explicit.

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  * * *

  1 Cf. Carnap 1931/32.

  2 There existed a general practice of talking about ‘infinite negation’ in cases of categorically wrong sentences like ‘Caesar is no prime number’. Hegel calls all meta-level words and sentences that reflect on categorical meanings (negated or not) ‘infinite’, a matter which is not yet common knowledge.

  3 Cf., for example, Hörster 1985, ch. 9.

  4 Understanding mythical or mythological language, as was the topic of Hölderlin and Schelling, is a starting point for such a topography of the expressive function especially of the poetic and religious use of language—which Karl Bühler, a student of Edmund Husserl, calls Ausdrucksfunktion in 1934 in his outstanding book Sprachtheorie. There is also an appellative function (Appellfunktion) of language-use in normative admonitions, not only the function of representing particular empirical states of affairs in informative acts (Bühler’s Darstellungsfunktion).

  5 We can neither define causal relations nor dispositions by quantification over ‘all empirical situations’, past, future, and possible, despite the intriguing ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s rationalistic metaphysics of so called possible worlds, which until today (e.g. in the work of David Lewis) looks at these things from the wrong, merely formalist, side. The way we posit and apply a priori probabilities in rational expectations is an example of what we really do when we ‘calculate’ with theories after we have declared them to express the best general knowledge.

  6 Cf. Strawson 1966.

  7 Cf. the ‘opposing’ view of Förster 2011.

  8 The useful term ‘empractical’ goes back to Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie.

  9 Noë 2004, 2, 8, and passim.

  10 The logical principle in the background is expressed today by Quine’s formula ‘there is no entity without identity’. The principle includes the insight that the world as a whole does not present itself without further ado as a sortal domain of distinct objects for which (‘by their natures’, so to speak) identities and differences are defined independently of the criteria we use in our identifications and differentiations of these objects. It is no accident that Aristotelian metaphysics takes the mode of existence of higher animals as a paradigm case for what a substance or ousia is: only higher animals present themselves as individuals through their whole life-span since they cannot be cut into parts that continue to live or ‘exist’ as living beings. Their Fürsichsein or identity as individuals seems to be fairly independent of our criteria for identification. But already for plants we need some conceptual criteria of identity, not to speak of mountains, ships, or states, signs, and other institution-dependent ‘entities’. More precisely, the identity-conditions of all these ‘objects’ are highly dependent on our conceptual framework and practices. Any ‘ontology’ that tries to deny this is in a profound sense pre-critical.

  11 The expression goes back to Terry Pinkard. Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception refers to the possible assessment of conceptual content in any full human pe
rception as a ‘premise’ for possible judgements about what is or was perceived. The ‘I think that it is p’ is an act that is always possible where I can reflect consciously on my perceptions and actions. Such consciousness is much more than vigilance, awareness or attention as forms of proto-consciousness that we share with animals. John McDowell has developed these insights in and after his important Mind and World.

  12 Cf. Thompson 1995 and 2008.

  13 In Brandom 1994 and 2000 some of these thoughts are developed, including the importance of normativity. The analysis here departs in its focus on the trans-subjective, ‘generic’ and ‘historical’, mode of existence of institutions and other forms of cooperative practices as the real ground for all normativity.

  14 The scope of the German word ‘Geist’ (spirit) coincides with human culture, the Greek ethos, but in such a way that its efficacy on the behaviour of the individuals is preserved in its ‘subjective’ connotations.

  15 Cf. Marx 1978 (Deutsche Ideologie), 102–436.

  16 Cf., for example, Riedel 1981, Schnädelbach 1984 or Löwith 1995 (a book written in the 1940s in the USA).

  17 Cf., for example, Hörster 1985, ch. 3.

  18 Hegel’s criticism of positive religion amounts to the same as Heidegger’s criticism of ontic readings of theological terms.

  19 Cf. to this Pepperle and Pepperle 1968.

  20 Abduction is looking for the best generic explanations available, as in the tradition of Charles Sanders Peirce.

  21 Cf. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Miller), p. 195 (§325).

  CHAPTER 30

  METHODOLOGY OF THE SCIENCES

  LYDIA PATTON