The Death of Philosophy

by Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle; Lynch, Richard;

  That said, before I can systematically reconstruct the “scientific real,” I must discuss an additional stage of encryption between sensations and thought. This intermediate step completes the theory of perception and shows us how Helmholtz interprets, in the final analysis, the difficult Kantian distinction between a “thing in itself” and a “phenomenon.”

  The necessary intermediary is what Helmholtz calls “unconscious thought,” which is exerted, despite ourselves, on the information delivered by the nerves.9 Between what the nerves give us and what we perceive, an unconscious processing takes place. This is particularly obvious for binocular vision: each of the optic nerves gives a different image of the thing we see, but we see only one image (except in the case of excessive—reprehensible—drunkenness). For Helmholtz, the explanation of this well-known physiological phenomenon is found in “unconscious inferences,” a doctrine that furnishes the basis for his theory of perception. With this doctrine, Helmholtz physiologically reinterprets the famous chapter of the Critique on “Anticipations of Perception.” Despite appearances, he remains Kantian here, for in upholding this theory of “unconscious inference,” he disagrees with a much more deterministic vision of humanity, known in his era as “nativism.” Nativism, in physiology, claimed that we are born with a given psychophysiological structure; this constitution was the absolute framework in which the real is given. Thus nativism maintained that the structure of our impressions (for example, spatial) is directly ordered by our physiological organization. In this sense, because he is unilaterally determinist, the nativist is the diametrical opposite of critique. In contrast, Helmholtz’s theory of perception could seem to him to be a kind of Kantianism. To give a precise example, for the nativists, our visual image’s uniqueness results from the connection of each of the two nerves corresponding to the same location on the retina. The exact physiological conjunction of these nerves results in the construction of a unique image. The definitive structure of spatial intuition would be innate, that is, organic. But Helmholtz argued at length against this theory (which was supported by Ewald Hering10)and stigmatized it as “explain[ing] nothing,” “rash and questionable,” and “unnecessary.”11 He observes that animals, and in particular humans, need a long apprenticeship to be able to use their faculties or to adapt them to new conditions. Far from being innate, the spatial structure of perception (for example, the correspondence between different senses) is acquired through experience, throughout one’s existence, by means of unconscious inferences. These inferences are not inferences in the strict sense (in the sense of reasoning of the sort “if … then”) but are unconscious mental processes with which we structure the information transmitted by the nerves. These processes, from the viewpoint of their results, coincide with the processes of conscious thought. If the existence of these inferences makes it possible to oppose the nativist and “innate” conceptions, it also provides a very precise reformulation and reinterpretation of the “Anticipations of Perception,” unconscious anticipations by which, in Kant, our relation to the real is forged prior to conscious thought. Here again, this is an extremely significant expression of the naturalization of critique, because the chapter in which Kant goes furthest into the question of the origins of sensation is formulated here in psychophysiological terms, in terms of unconscious inferences and processes of encryption of various sensations.

  These three aspects of the reinterpretation of Kant show the extent to which the question of knowledge as a relation to the real is taken up and accentuated. This orientation is adopted to the detriment of self-reflection and the type of argumentation connected with it, namely, transcendental arguments. Helmholtz abandons the question, “How do we know that we know?”—the question of one part of German idealism. In doing so, he naturalizes Kantianism and, paradoxically, makes empiricism and Kantianism into two doctrines that are no longer antithetical but relatively close, because Kant’s discoveries or conclusions are experimentally verifiable (through psychophysiology), and, reciprocally, the experimental results are corroborated by the Kantian deduction.

  Conclusions: A Single Orientation, the Origin of Two Paradigms

  In conclusion, it is clear that Helmholtz quite well embodies a positivist reading of critique, which he specifies as a naturalization of critique (psychophysiology). Nevertheless (and this is the interesting point for my inquiry into the “race to reference” in the twentieth century), this authentically positivist conception is broad enough to be claimed by both the classical neo-Kantians, like Ernst Cassirer, and by the Vienna Circle. In this respect, we can read in “The Vienna Circle Manifesto” that “Epistemological analysis of the leading concepts of natural science has freed them more and more from metaphysical admixtures which had clung to them from ancient time. In particular, Helmholtz, Mach, Einstein, and others have cleansed the concepts of space, time, substance, causality, and probability.”12 In the same way, Cassirer salutes “Helmholtz, who quite fiercely asserts a theory of knowledge proper to physics … and who, in order to accomplish this task must return to Kant.”

  To be sure, Hermann Cohen severely criticized what he called Helmholtz’s psychologism, rejected his concept of “representation” as vacuous, and meant to give back to the term “transcendental” its methodological, not physiological, significance. However, Cohen’s reading was nonetheless marked by this positivism. Two essential traits of positivism can indeed be noted in his doctrine. On the one hand, as Cassirer himself noted, “Cohen thought that the transcendental method’s essential point is that it begins with a fact in order to investigate what makes the fact possible … But he limited this general definition by only offering the mathematical natural sciences as really worthy of this investigation.” And in fact Cohen, disputing the idea that philosophy is the analysis of representations (a term that is so vague, in his eyes, as to mean nothing) or even the analysis of consciousness,13 defined philosophy as the clarification of knowledge, whose only model is furnished by the mathematical and physical sciences. On the other hand, stigmatizing the conception of a Cogito as a mental event, Cohen makes the “I think” into a simple methodical principle. This second trait is undeniably true to Kant but at the same time entails the risk of a simply logical, even superfluous, subject. This second interpretation of the subject in Kant has been, by far, the most historically common, for, beyond the Marburg school, its traces can be found in the philosophy of the subject. Frédéric de Buzon, in an important article, “L’individu et le sujet,” shows how positivism, in almost all its forms, follows this Kantian line, “Philosophies of the concept are not philosophies of the absence of the subject, … these philosophies only assert a subjective lack of differentiation.”14 This influence can be detected even in the early Wittgenstein. Indeed, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he still maintains a “sort” of transcendental subject, an empty form, the other name for the structure—in other words, a subject that is the world’s horizon, about which nothing can be said. Be that as it may, with this dual choice, Cohen follows Helmholtz’s positivist reading, even if for Cohen positivism takes on a different coloration, which we will examine in the next chapter.

  In summary, Helmholtz’s Kantianism has chosen a particular orientation, investigation of the relation of our knowledge to things (the problem of reference). This orientation can either take the form of naturalization or Cohen’s more methodological form. But be that as it may, this orientation interprets critique as a form of positivism. And yet the beginning of the twentieth century will witness another reading of Kant, and from that, an apparent “bifurcation” in its interpretation through an overcoming of the positivist temptation. Nevertheless, this bifurcation takes place, in my view, within a single orientation, namely orientation toward the object. If Heidegger and neo-Kantianism certainly embody two different ways of reading Kant, these two ways nevertheless have a point in common: they reconstruct the entirety of critique exclusively from the problematic of the Critique of Pure Reason, and consequently do not
plow the second path, of metacognitive justification. I will try to explain this proposition by reconstructing the Heideggerian reading of Kant and comparing it with Cohen’s.

  12

  Critique: A Positivist Theory of Knowledge or Existential Ontology?

  In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,1 Martin Heidegger’s principal concern is to distance Kantianism from the neo-Kantian epistemological interpretation in order to make the Critique of Pure Reason the harbinger of the phenomenological revolution. It is not unreasonable to assert, in this respect, that Heidegger’s reading is the systematic counterpoint to Cohen’s. The opposition can be read (1) in their understandings of Kant’s problematic, (2) in their explanations of knowledge, (3) in the importance they accord to one or the other of the Critique of Pure Reason’s two editions, and (4) in the meaning that each thinks should be given to the term “object.” I shall analyze these four oppositions in order to better tease out (5) the general lessons to be drawn from Heidegger’s reading of Kant.

  The Kantian Problematic in Heidegger and Cohen

  The Marburg school’s epistemological interpretation can be summarized, in Heidegger’s eyes, in several theses: The transcendental method is the analysis of the conditions of possibility for a fact. The only universal fact is positive science (mathematics, physics). Transcendental investigation is thus exhausted in an examination of the judgments at work in the sciences. Consequently, philosophy’s object is scientific judgment, its guiding problematic is that of objective validity. Against this reduction of the Critique to a simple theory of knowledge, Heidegger’s argument consists in showing that judgments’ truth presupposes the prior constitution of regions of meaning. The ontic objectivity of the judgment “7 + 5 = 12” presupposes a more basic ontological objectivity. In this sense, Kant becomes the precursor to Husserl’s assertion that before any act of judging there is a universal ground of experience, a ground that is postulated as the harmonic unity of possible experience. “Hence, what makes the comporting to beings (ontic knowledge) possible is the preliminary understanding of the constitution of Being, ontological knowledge.”2 To put it differently, Kant—in Heidegger’s eyes—starts from the problem of a Metaphysica Specialis (beings in the most eminent sense—God) that, in order to be resolved, presupposes the problem of a Metaphysica Generalis (beings in general, beings qua beings). This dual problem is clearly not at all new, because it is a problem, in its very duality, throughout the entire history of philosophy. For Kant, inquiry into beings in general does not call for a determination of their relation to the most eminent being (God) but rather an interrogation of the Being of beings—on this point if Kant is not an innovator, he at least revives one possibility in Aristotle’s metaphysics.3 Knowledge of beings is possible only on the basis of knowledge of beings’ ontological structure; that is, in order to understand a given object, it is first necessary to inquire about what gives it being as an object. Kant’s problematic is thus an ontological problematic in the sense that he does not investigate judgments as such (as Hermann Cohen does) but uncovers the Sachverhalt [facts] that makes these judgments possible. Far from being exhausted in an epistemology of the exact sciences, the Critique of Pure Reason is consecrated to establishing the foundations of metaphysics.4 But if any vision of ordinary reality presupposes an implicit grasp, or understanding, of the structure of the Being of beings, if—to use Husserl’s simpler terms—every object presupposes an “original ground” upon which it manifests, then what in the Critique will be this ground upon which any understanding of the object depends? The “Aesthetic,” or as Heidegger prefers to call it, temporality.5 This is the second point of Heidegger’s disagreement with Cohen.

  Explaining Knowledge:Valorization of the “Aesthetic” or the “Analytic”?

  Hermann Cohen’s epistemological bias entails, in Heidegger’s eyes, the marginalization of the transcendental aesthetic—intuition appears as a simple auxiliary faculty that all genuine knowledge must reduce. This is attested by the (entirely Leibnizian) importance that Cohen places on the principle of intensive magnitudes,6 which allows him to effect a reduction of intuition to passivity. But Heidegger criticizes this view, seeing in it a return to a pre-Kantian problematic. With this reduction, Cohen would define sensibility’s passivity as a lesser being compared with an absolute—active and creative—knowledge of its object.7 Consequently (and in conformity with the metaphysical tradition), finitude is still understood as an accidental negativity, as an extrinsic limitation that knowledge must work to reduce. Against this bias, Heidegger’s entire interpretation rests upon the “Transcendental Aesthetic.” The transcendental aesthetic is the original ground upon which objects appear. Thus, the intuition—far from being what must be overcome to achieve genuine knowledge—becomes what makes knowledge possible. This is why, going directly against the Marburg school’s orientation, Heidegger writes, “In order to understand the Critique of Pure Reason this point must be hammered in, so to speak: knowing is primarily intuiting.”8 All knowledge is irremediably and structurally receptive, always already tied to a preexisting object, forever dependent upon an original gift. Truth is constituted by, in, and through temporality. Contrary to the idealist interpretation that emphasizes activity, Heidegger accentuates passivity and posits the idea of a positive finitude—positive in that finitude, far from being the sign of an imperfect being in contrast to an absolute of knowledge, becomes the very thing that makes knowledge and truth possible.

  This promotion of the aesthetic, this reading of finitude from temporality, dominates the whole of the interpretation, because Heidegger tips the entire system in the direction of the “Aesthetic.” Indeed, spontaneity is to be understood from this ground, this intuition. The categories, as products of spontaneity, do not externally come about on top of passivity but must be attached to the synthesis of temporality (rather than to the table of judgments). In this respect, the categories and the intuition have a common source—the imagination. Here again this movement betrays the guiding thread of Heidegger’s interpretation: reading the critical project from an affirmation of finitude and connecting it to the valorization of passivity in humanity. In the same way, the essential place accorded to activity in Cohen’s interpretation and to passivity in Heidegger’s can be seen in Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer, at Davos, about the Critique of Practical Reason.9 To Cassirer, who claimed that Kant transcended human passivity with his statement of the moral law as pure form, Heidegger replied that only the feeling of respect makes it possible to understand practical reason. Here again it is passivity—that is, a certain form of gift (feeling)—that shows the Kantian truth. This desire to give feeling the same role that intuition plays in pure reason most fully embodies the Heideggerian concern to make finitude—understood as an irreducible passivity—the alpha and omega of the Kantian message. In summary, if finitude is absolute in Heidegger, this is principally because the absolute is finitude. These two antithetical interpretations clearly do not emphasize the same passages in the Kantian oeuvre, nor do they situate it in the history of philosophy in the same way.

  Which Edition?

  The controversy about the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason seems to have lost its intensity today: even though Kant’s immediate successors made it a subject of dispute (Karl Leonhard Reinhold championed the second, the orthodox Kantians the first), even though the German commentators at the beginning of the twentieth century made it one of the crucial points for an understanding of Kantianism, contemporary interpreters no longer see anything conclusive at stake.10 However, the meaning of this revision is not unimportant, because with the second edition (and in particular the rewriting of the transcendental deduction), Kant seems to orient critique toward an epistemological problematic—that is, he seems to regard the Critique’s contribution to philosophy to be a demonstration of judgments’ objective validity. It follows that choosing to emphasize the first edition (Heidegger) or the second (Cohen) is opting either for the ontological
problematic or the epistemological problematic. If we analyze the most important revision, namely the total replacement of the transcendental deduction in the second edition, various signs give evidence of this epistemological reorientation: