His position, however, was already set out in its basic formby with the publication of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and, in his other writings, he tended to repeat himself quite a bi
Trang 1
–: the other post-Kantian:
Jacob Friedrich Fries and non-Romantic Sentimentalism
Although Romanticism dominated the development of immediate post-Kantian thought (after Reinhold), there were other, equally im-portant interpretations afoot of where to take Kant By the turn of the century (), Jacobi’s influence, always large in this period, had al-ready led to another, very different, appropriation of Kant in the per-son of Jacob Friedrich Fries (–) About the same age as the other post-Kantians at Jena (Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and H¨olderlin), Fries only managed to formulate his own views about
a decade later than those working in the aftermath of the initial tumult surrounding Fichte and the early Romantics Like many of them (for ex-ample, Niethammer, H¨olderlin, Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher),
he too had first studied theology before moving to philosophy Having been raised and educated in a famous Pietist community of the Herrnhut (Moravian) Brethren, he was sent to a Pietist boarding school in Niesky for his adolescent years In, he went to Leipzig to study philosophy, where he apparently came under the influence of Jacobi’s work; in,
he studied for a year in Jena, leaving for while to be a private tutor, only
to return to Jena at the end of (around the same time Hegel arrived
in Jena) After, he and Jacobi became friends, and Jacobi remained
an admirer of Fries’s work
Fries’s own career was rather checkered, and he and Hegel developed
a distaste for each other at Jena that spanned the lifetimes of both men, leading both to denounce each other in private and public in a variety
of ways for their entire lives Fries nonetheless established his views as one of the major options in the post-Kantian debate, and, in many ways, Fries, Schelling, and Hegel contended for preeminence in the German philosophical scene during the lives of all three men Like many other men of his generation, Fries found his academic job prospects rather paltry (although he was far more successful at first than Hegel), and
he bitterly resented others attaining any of the few positions available
Trang 2 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians
( just as Hegel, and others, bitterly resented Fries’s own acquisition of any
of the few positions that were available)
Fries was quite industrious and, starting around, published vol-ume after volvol-ume laying out his own system of post-Kantian thought His own entry into the scene came in with the publication of Reinhold,
Fichte, Schelling, which sharply criticized all three thinkers and established
his own views as being markedly different from all the other versions of
“idealism” being touted around Jena at the time (In some ways, that book can be seen as his own riposte to Hegel’s first book in , The
Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy.) In the same
year, he published his Philosophical Doctrine of Right and Critique of All Positive
Legislation, in his first presentation of his complete system as
Knowledge, Faith, and Portent, and in his multi-volume NewCritique of
Reason, which he then revised and republished later in– as the
Newor Anthropological Critique of Reason His position, however, was already
set out in its basic formby with the publication of Reinhold, Fichte,
Schelling, and, in his other writings, he tended to repeat himself quite a
bit. Fries nonetheless achieved a lasting influence by his rewriting of the Kantian system in terms of his peculiar combination of religious piety, defense of Newtonian mathematical science, and political views that were at once republican, liberal, and anti-Semitic To many, Fries was the ideal counterweight to those who could not abide the influence of the post-Kantian idealists but who did not want to return to pre-Kantian metaphysics
Like many in the debate at the time, Fries was concerned to see what could be salvaged fromKant’s achievement if one were to drop the notion
of the unknowable thing-in-itself; and, taking over Jacobi’s main point,
he was convinced that the “foundation” of the Kantian enterprise had
to rest on some kind of immediate, non-inferentially known “faith” that itself could only be disclosed in “feeling” and not by reason alone In
Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, he made those views explicit and used them to
declare the whole post-Kantian idealist movement to be a failure Fries accused all three of the post-Kantian system builders of committing various elementary logical blunders in the way they tried to “improve” Kant (and in his later writings even going so far as to admit that some
of those blunders were due to Kant himself )
See J F Fries, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling (Leipzig: August Lebrecht Reinicke, ); Philosophische
Rechtslehre und Kritik aller positiven Gesetzgebung mit Beleuchtung der gew¨ohnlichen Fehler in der Bearbeitung des Naturrechts ( Jena: Mauke, ; photoreprint Leipzig: Felix Meiner, ); Wissen, Glaube, und
Ahnung (translated as Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense (ed Frederick Gregory, trans Kent Richter)
(Cologne: J ¨urgen Dinter, ).
Trang 3–: Jacob Friedrich Fries Fries’s own solution is easily confused with Kant’s, since his writ-ings in his Jena period tended to be more or less just restatements of Kant’s views purged of much of Kant’s argumentation However, he was never a pure Kantian, and he blended into his reception of Kant
a mixture of empirical realism, a “phenomenological” investigation of consciousness (not in Hegel’s sense of “phenomenology” but something somewhat closer to that advocated by Edmund Husserl in the twenti-eth century), and a Jacobi-inspired appeal to immediacy and feeling to provide foundations for religious faith Fries was convinced that Kant’s
doctrine of the antinomies was perhaps the crucial error in Kantian
doc-trine, which, in turn, partially accounted for the fatally mistaken path
on which Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling (and later Hegel) found them-selves Kant had simply not shown, so Fries insisted, that the application
of reason to things-in-themselves resulted in irresolvable contradictions Fries was thus among the first to advise dropping the largest part of Kant’s
monumental Critique of Pure Reason, focusing instead on combining the arguments in the Critique found in the section labeled “transcendental analytic” with those in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.
On Fries’s view, Fichte had only made matters worse by appropriating Kant’s doctrines of the antinomies into a so-called method for showing how the “I” both posits the “Not-I” and then supposedly resolves the con-tradiction that it put there In Fichte’s thought, “an error was introduced into his argumentation through the confounding of the concept of differ-ence with that of contradiction each synthesis is supposed to consist in
the dissolving of a contradiction and in that way [it] leads to a naive
play of words,” not a real argument. It is indeed, “laughable,” so Fries claimed, “how these concepts [used by Fichte] are, through the words analytic and synthetic, here equated with the Kantian concepts.” For
Fries, Fichte’s so-called Wissenschaftslehre pretended to end the possible
regress of reason-giving by appealing to a principle that was supposed to
be “certain” but which was actually nothing of the sort; it was thus only
a ludicrous attempt to pull the wool over people’s eyes by pretending
to “deduce” everything when in fact nothing was being deduced at all To Fries, Schelling’s only contribution was to compound Fichte’s errors
Nonetheless, so Fries argued, although neither Fichte nor Schelling was the answer, the problemthat Jacobi had uncovered – that our jus-tifications have to come to an end somewhere – was genuine For Fries, what was wrong with Jacobi’s solution was that he thought that only his
Fries, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, p. Ibid., p..
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“mortal somersault,” the salto mortale – a “leap of faith” – could possibly
suffice to provide the required stopping point, and thus he arrived at his supposed stopping point far too quickly Jacobi quite unwittingly had
only described the structure of subjective knowledge: a series of “mediate”
(inferentially based) cognitions that are all ultimately based on some
“immediate” cognition, which, as Kant saw, had to be “intuitions.” The real issue, though, was whether our systemof knowledge (as we might
de-scribe that structure within consciousness) has any “truth” to it, whether it
corresponds to things-in-themselves, or whether the ultimate “intuitions”
on which knowledge rests are only “appearances” (in the sense of illusions) So Fries concluded, this description of the structure of empirical knowledge is equivalent to what Kant must have meant (or at least should have meant) when he characterized himself as an “empirical realist” with regard to empirical knowledge Within the realm of appearance
(Erscheinung), we have genuine knowledge of empirical objects as based
on immediate intuitions We cannot, however, conclude from that that the systemof this empirical knowledge has any “transcendental truth” (as Fries puts it), that is, that it matches up to things-in-themselves as they exist apart fromthe conditions under which they can be experienced The answer to that question, of course, is that they cannot We can only know things-in-themselves under the conditions that govern our ex-perience of them, and those conditions are irrevocably subjective, bound
up with the structure of the human mind The solution to the dilemma lies in working out further Kantian distinctions, particularly in Kant’s
striking claimthat he (Kant) “found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.” Fries finesses that distinction by limiting
knowledge (Wissen, in his sense) to appearances of objects in space and time and claiming that it is only belief, faith (Glauben) that connects us to
the realmof things-in-themselves, which, as he puts it, must be identified with the “eternal,” to distinguish themfromthe things of the temporal, finite world we necessarily experience (As standing completely outside
of time, which is only a subjective condition of knowledge, things-in-themselves are “eternal.”) To “save freedomapart fromnature,” Fries claimed, requires us to conceive of freedom as “an exemption from the laws of this quantitative context, [to be] a law of existence that is not the law of nature This will alone be demonstrated in nature’s being only the formof appearance, the formof the finite, in a finite in which, how-ever, the eternal appears whose original being is a free being.”(He even notes that “in the philosophical application of this distinction we could
Critique of Pure Reason,xxx Fries, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, p..
Trang 5–: Jacob Friedrich Fries have spared ourselves much contention if we had started with the dif-ferentiation between appearance and being-in-itself as it commonly ap-pears among the people, for example in the catechism, or at least in most prayer books.”) For Fries, the “Kantian paradox” is thus not really an issue on his horizon; for him, the issues about freedom have to do with the worry about freedomand nature, not about self-legislation
Relying on Kant’s claimabout the practical need to presuppose free-dom (as opposed to the theoretical impossibility of ever demonstrating it), Fries concludes that such “belief (faith) in the eternal, and at the same time in the reality of the highest good, is the primary presupposition of every finite reason.”We must believe (or have “faith,” Glauben) in the
re-ality of the “eternal” (of things-in-themselves), even though we cannot be
said to “know” (Wissen) it; “belief ” in things-in-themselves (the eternal)
is thus something like a presupposition of practical reason However, he gives that conclusion a twist that Kant would never have given it: there
is no logical contradiction between the unconditional demands of duty
and the conditional, sensible facts of our desires, there is only a “conflict
of ends,” which is resolved by assuming God and immortality on the basis of the “purposefulness of nature.”These are “Ideas” in an attenu-ated Kantian sense, since they are views of the “whole” of being-in-itself that cannot be given in intuition; instead, they are given to us by our
“concepts,” and they are related to the limited world of nature through
a kind of Ahnung, a vague “supposition,” a “portent” of the way the
total-ity of things-in-themselves are, which is itself not a cognitive operation –
indeed, it is, according to Fries, a “feeling devoid of intuition or concept.”
Fries identifies nature more or less with the Kantian description of it
as matter in motion, as something to be explained mathematically Any
true Naturphilosophie is therefore to be identified more or less with the one advocated by Kant (at least in the first Critique and the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science – Fries also himself developed a speculative
philosophy of nature that went far beyond what Kant said, which we cannot go into here.)Fries reserved a particular dislike for Schelling’s
Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, p. To this end, Fries offers what can only be described
as an unconvincing mixture of Kant’s and Jacobi’s arguments for this conclusion, having to do with how the “unconditioned” nature of the totality of things-in-themselves is incompatible with the conditions under which they might be given; the world of things-in-themselves is unlimited, whereas our own experience is of bounded, limited things in space and time.
Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, p. Ibid., pp.–.
Ibid., p. (italics added by me).
The details of Fries’s philosophy of nature are admirably laid out in Bonsiepen, Die Begr¨undung ,
pp – Bonsiepen’s study is also the most thorough and certainly the best overall account
of Fries’s epistemology to date.
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influential Naturphilosophie (and extended that later to Hegel’s version of it,
always seeing Hegel as an even more degenerate version of Schellingian thought) Schelling, and those who followed him, wrongly made the image of the “organism” central to their conception of nature, argu-ing that merely mechanical processes could never produce “life” (as
a self-producing, self-sustaining, self-directing process); Fries argued on the contrary that our only possible understanding of nature had to be mathematical and mechanical, and that reflection on nature shows that
“all material forces have to be traced back to two fundamental forces, one a force of attraction and the other of repulsion.”The kind of self-sustaining that occurs in organisms can be (or eventually will be, so Fries predicted) explained as nothing more than an “equilibrium” between such fundamental forces At best, Schelling confused the ways in which
we must subjectively apprehend nature (which may involve attributing
“purposes” to it) with the ways in which we must conceive of nature’s reality, which has a much more Kantian shape to it.
Mind, however, is something else There cannot be a mathematics of the mind (as there can be a mathematics of the body considered as a part
of nature) The qualitative elements of consciousness defy mathematiza-tion: “We cannot,” Fries claims, “extend this [mathematical] explanation
to a single quality of sensibility.” Perceptions of qualitative matters – for example, the sensation of red – simply cannot be quantitatively ren-dered This “inner world” of consciousness is, for an individual, his “own
closed world,” and it can only be described in terms of its necessary
struc-tures, not “deduced” fromanything else, just as our “belief ” or “faith”
(Glauben) in the “eternal” can only be “shown” or “exhibited,” and never
“demonstrated” from premises themselves provably true.To get at the necessary structures of our apprehension and conception of the world, we
must therefore look to a descriptive account of consciousness that
nonethe-less lays out, or “exhibits” the necessary structures of consciousness as
they really, essentially are, not as some other presuppositions we might have about mentality claim they have to be.
Such a descriptive account of consciousness “exhibits” to us that the world is “given” to us in sensory intuitions; nothing deeper or more cer-tain than that basic conviction could be found that could undermine that belief, and all knowledge and natural science simply have to presuppose
Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, p..
See Wolfgang Bonsiepen’s discussion of Fries’s critique of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, in his Die
Begr¨undung , pp –.
Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, p. Ibid.
Trang 7–: Jacob Friedrich Fries that basic “fact.” The Kantian picture of mind is thus redescribed in more naturalistic terms as a matter of sensory intuitions serving to “excite” the
“self-activity” (Selbstt¨atigkeit) of reason Reason itself is only the neces-sary form under which human minds can be “excited” in general by
the givens of sensibility and by our natural interactions with the world around us: “What we attribute to mere reason independently of sense corresponds to the formof its excitability Knowledge is in general the excitation or life-expression of reason; the formof this life-expression
is generally determined through the essence of reason itself.” What counts as the “essence of reason” is itself determined by a “feeling of
truth” (Wahrheitsgef¨uhl), which itself shows us the unprovable necessity of
certain basic rational truths (Like the Romantics he disliked, Fries also held that even more basic than that activity of “taking up” the “given” excitations of sensibility was the “indeterminate feeling” of one’s own existence, which “accompanies” all the inner intuitions of one’s mental activities and states.)
Fries was adamant in denying that he was explaining the workings of the mind in terms of any kind of “psychologism,” that is, that he was explaining the normative features of mentality in terms of patterns of association of thoughts or sensations or causal processes at work within the mind (However, it was always unclear just what his own alternative was, which has tended to make the charge of “psychologism” stick until today.) He called his method of explaining mentality an “inner physics,”
by which he seemed to be drawing the analogy that just as (on his under-standing) physics as the study of matter in motion (or “mechanics”) was
a mathematical and therefore a-priori discipline, the descriptive study
of the necessary structures of the mind was itself an a-priori discipline (qualitative and descriptive but not mathematical) He also called this an
“anthropological” theory, meaning that this was to be the study of the
a-priori structure of the human mind, not of mentality in general Fries’s
philosophy of mind and knowledge thus were composed out of a mixture
of both a naturalization of Kant’s theory of the spontaneity of reason and
a “phenomenological” account of the necessary structures of conscious-ness (Fries is silent on whether he thinks “mentality” denotes a different kind of substance or “thing” than matter; but his characterizations of mentality and nature suggest that such is his position.)
Fries, Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft, p. , cited by Bonsiepen, Die Begr¨undung ,
p –.
Fries, Neue oder anthropologische Kritik der Vernunft, pp. –, cited by Bonsiepen, Die Begr¨undung ,
p .
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In sharp opposition to many of the early Romantics, Fries did not try to find any reconciliation with nature; instead, he defended the Newtonian/Kantian conception of nature and in one part of his system did not show any particular proclivity to re-enchant nature In a purple-prose passage, Fries effused: “Man does not know by himself whence he comes nor whither he goes He is led along a path by an overpowering nature that he himself does not understand He finds himself a stranger among all the lifeless and animate forms that surround him in the dead world of nature But between the night of two eternities there appears
to himin the dawning light a fleeting glimpse of his finite being, and a bare feeling is left to himin which he recognizes the union of his finite being with his eternal being.”
On the other hand, he shared with the early Romantics a convic-tion that the reconciliaconvic-tion of their shared longing for something more than “all the lifeless and animate forms in the dead world of nature”
could be found not in reason – for Fries just as much as for the early Romantics, Kant had forever destroyed that line of thought – but in some kind of super- or sub- or a-rational emotional state Just as Kant had thought that aesthetic experience discloses the “indeterminate con-cept of the supersensible substrate of appearances” that is neither nature nor freedom, Fries thought that a properly heightened emotional state
disclosed something of the same, and he noted, “in belief (faith, Glauben)
we recognize the eternal order of things as that which established the law of the kingdomof ends Consequently, should we grasp with a
sense of portent (Ahnung) the eternal order of things within the finitude of
nature, there would arise an agreement between nature and the moral order of things in the correlation of nature to the idea of the kingdomof ends.”
The proper appreciation of nature is thus to discard all teleological claims for it but to appreciate in this kind of necessarily vague emotional sense of the “portent” of the whole of nature a kind of beauty and sublimity that engenders a sense of worship and love This sense of
“religiosity,” as Fries describes it, is only engendered when nature is
appreciated aesthetically as a whole such that “the warmth and life of the
eternal permeates our entire finite essence – and that is the atmosphere
of devotion” in which we simply acknowledge the mysteries that reason cannot solve.
Fries, Knowledge, Belief and Aesthetic Sense, p. Ibid., p. Ibid., p..
Trang 9–: Jacob Friedrich Fries
: Fries’s moral and political philosophy was comprised of the same mixture
of Kantianism, sentimentalism, and Romanticism As in much of his other work, in his early writings on ethics, he mostly restated Kantian doctrines in Kantian language with few of Kant’s own arguments for that position (Thus there are invocations of the “dignity” of each agent,
of the categorical imperative, of the necessity of republics, and of all the other apparatus of the Kantian philosophy.) However, Fries breaks from Kant in at least three ways, all of which are typical of the reaction to Kant a few years after, after the explosive influence of the early Romantics had been absorbed First, he equates virtue with possession
of a “beautiful soul”: virtue, he says, “is rather inner beauty itself In
the ideals of art the beauty of the soul intertwines the interest of natural beauty with artistic beauty, and so gives artistic beauty religiosity To be beautiful is the highest demand that we make of the appearance of a person’s life – not that one ought to make some beautiful thing or be
an artist, but that one ought to display a character within oneself that
is in accord with inner beauty.”Second, he equates autonomy not so much with self-legislation, with both instituting and subjecting oneself to norms, but with expressing an “inner necessity” about oneself For Fries, the source of the law is what counts; if it comes from “outside” oneself, then one is not autonomous; if the source comes from “within” oneself, then the law counts as self-imposed
Third and most decisively, unlike almost all of the post-Kantians, Fries
actually rejected the primacy of freedom in Kant’s moral and political thought in favor of the primacy of equality As he puts it, “in the doctrine
of right (law, Rechtslehre), assessing what is to be permitted to each agent
can easily lead one to the thought, as it did Kant, to make personal
freedom instead of equality into the primordial human right Freedom
simply is no right but rather a property that must be presupposed in order for somebody to be able first to be made into a subject of right Personal political freedomis on the other hand a mere consequence of equality.”Fries was among the first of many of Kant’s commentators
to have noted that freedomseems to play a triple role for Kant: it is at once a metaphysical principle of transcendental freedom, the capacity
of agents to initiate a causal series without that act being the result of
Ibid., p..
Fries, Philosophische Rechtslehre und Kritik aller positiven Gesetzgebung, p. (italics added by me).
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any antecedent causal series; it is also a moral principle, a demand to respect the autonomy of others; and it is a political principle, the right
to pursue one’s own ends and happiness by one’s own lights.However, Fries accepted the metaphysical status of Kantian freedom (as a separate formof causality) but rejected its status as a normative principle For Fries, the “equal dignity” of each is the basis for claiming a right to political freedom, and political freedom, to whatever extent it is to be actualized,
is only necessary in terms of what else is necessary to maintain respect for human equality Political freedom is not the basic principle of social life itself (The debate about whether “equality” and not “freedom” is the real basis of a “Kantian” theory of justice remains a live option in our own contemporary discussions.)
For Fries, the basic command of “right” is thus: “You should arrange all your social relations in the most rational way, [and] each should re-gard the other as his equal.” The highest “formula of subsumption”
(Fries’s language) of “right” is: “People ought to recognize (anerkennen)
each other as rational [agents] in their interaction with each other” – it
is not Kant’s principle of acting publicly so that one’s free choices can peacefully coexist with the free choices of everyone according to univer-sal law.In fact, precisely because Kant made freedom and not equality into the basic principle of political life, so, Fries argues, he also mis-takenly divorced the bindingness of contracts (as legally binding agree-ments between free individuals) from that of promises Kant thought that, while we have an ethical obligation to keep our promises, with re-gard to contracts we can only speak of legal (that is, publicly enforceable) obligations, since there is no way that one can know whether one is keeping one’s word out of duty or out of fear of punishment; Fries argues for the more rigoristic view that “contract” just is “promise,” and that lying therefore ought to be a legal infraction, not merely a reprehensible
As Kant puts it: “No-one can compel me to be happy in accordance with his conception of the
welfare of others, for each may seek his happiness in whatever way he sees fit, so long as he does not infringe upon the freedomof others to pursue a similar end which can be reconciled with the freedom of everyone else within a workable general law,” Kant, “On the Common Saying:
‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice,’ ” in Kant’s Political Writings,
p .
The most well-known exponent of putting equality first for a Kantian-inspired view is Ronald
Dworkin For a representative statement of his view, see Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ); Dworkin himself combines the emphasis on
Kantian freedomwith keeping his emphasis on equality intact in his aptly titled book, Freedom’s
Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
).
Fries, Philosophische Rechtslehre und Kritik aller positiven Gesetzgebung, p xvii.
Ibid., p. See Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp –.