Der deutsche Idealismus und die Rationalisten / German Idealism and the Rationalists

Dina Emundts, Sally Sedgwick

• Verlag: De Gruyter
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110648287
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophy
• Thema: Idealism in Philosophy

Der Band 14 des Internationalen Jahrbuchs des Deutschen Idealismus ist dem Thema der Auseinandersetzung von Kant und den Vertretern des Deutschen Idealismus mit den Rationalisten gewidmet. Beleuchtet werden in den Beiträgen die Beziehungen von Kant zu Wolff und Leibniz; von Fichte zu Spinoza und Leibniz, von Hegel zu Descartes und Spinoza, von Schelling zu Spinoza sowie von Novalis zu Spinoza. Die Auseinandersetzung mit diesen Bezügen bietet die Möglichkeit, Transformation und Kontinuität konkreter metaphysischer Themen der Frühen Neuzeit zu diskutieren. In vielen Beiträgen wird darüber hinaus auch zum Thema gemacht, inwiefern und in welchem Sinne Kant und die deutschen Idealisten selbst eine 'rationalistische' Philosophie vertreten.
Autori*innen des Bandes sind: Brady Bowman, Daniel Breazeale, Karin de Boer, Willem de Vries, Johannes Haag, Dietmar Heidemann, Thomas Hilgers, Marco Ivaldo, Anja Jauernig, Franz Knappik, Jane Kneller, Brandon C. Look, John McCumber, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Oliver Sensen, Paul Ziche.
Der Band bietet Einzelstudien herausragender Wissenschaftler*innen zum Verhältnis zweier wichtiger Traditionen in der Geschichte der Philosophie.

I.Beiträge/Essays

Karin de Boer

Staking Out the Terrain of Pure Reason: Kant’s Critique of Wolffian Metaphysics in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer

Abstract. While Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766) is generally considered to stem from an empiricist phase of Kant’s development, this article contends that Kant in this text elaborates a critique of Wolffian metaphysics not because of its rationalism, but because of its assumption that the sensible and the intellectual constitute a continuum. After presenting Wolff’s continuist account of empirical and rational psychology and metaphysical cognition as such, I focus on Kant’s implicit and explicit engagement with Wolff in Dreams with the aim of arguing that the text testifies to his sustained effort to identify and set free the rational core of Wolffian metaphysics.

Während die Schrift Träume eines Geistersehers (1766) allgemein so angesehen wird, als entspreche sie einer empiristischen Phase in Kants Entwicklung, wird in diesem Aufsatz die These entwickelt, dass Kant in diesem Text Wolffs Metaphysik nicht mit Blick auf dessen Rationalismus kritisiert, sondern hinsichtlich der Behauptung, dass Sinnlichkeit und Intellekt ein Kontinuum bilden. Nachdem zunächst Wolffs These der Kontinuität von empirischer und rationaler Psychologie und von metaphysischer Erkenntnis als solcher dargestellt wird, wird dann die implizite und explizite Auseinandersetzung von Kant mit Wolff in den Träumen behandelt. Ziel hierbei ist, dafür zu argumentieren, dass der Text darauf abzielt, den rationalen Kern von Wolffs Metaphysik zu identifizieren und freizulegen.

1Introduction

There is no doubt that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason constitutes a crucial hinge between Wolffianism on the one hand and German idealism on the other.1 Since both Wolff and Hegel – to mention the most prominent representatives of both movements – prioritized reason over the senses, the main contribution of Kant’s work to the history of German philosophy might seem to consist in a brief interruption of a rationalism that harks back to Wolff, Leibniz, and scholasticism and did not run out of steam until Hegel’s death.

But is the historiographical distinction between rationalism and empiricism useful to portray the developments between Wolff and Hegel and Kant’s role in them? Various reasons plead against this approach. First, as Hans-Jürgen Engfer has pointed out, the dominant usage of this distinction was largely established by Kant and Reinhold and tends to obscure what representatives of the various movements had in common.2 Second, Kant himself never called Wolff a rationalist, but rather referred to him as a dogmatist. Wolff’s philosophical system is dogmatist, according to Kant, because it rests on the unquestioned presupposition that purely intelligible objects such as the soul and God can be known.3 Yet Wolff can hardly be said to have considered the cognitions achieved in metaphysics to stem from reason alone: as we will see, he conceived of experience as both an indispensable starting point and a touchstone of any scientific truth.

For these reasons, clarifying Kant’s evident criticism of Wolffian metaphysics seems to require more fine-grained distinctions than that between empiricism and rationalism. In this article, I argue that Kant takes issue with his German predecessor not because of his rationalism, but rather because of his assumption that the sensible and the intellectual constitute a continuum, more specifically, that philosophical cognition can be achieved by moving from the singular given to the senses, to universal concepts and, by connecting the latter in a rule-bound way, to purely intellectual truths.

Although I hold that the Critique of Pure Reason targets this Wolffian continuism as well, my exposition focuses on Kant’s implicit and explicit attacks on Wolff in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, a highly enigmatic text published in 1766. According to Frederick Beiser, Dreams represents “the height of Kant’s growing disaffection with metaphysics” and uses an “empiricist criterion of knowledge” as the main weapon of his “new skepticism”.4 Likewise adhering to the mainstream view, Karl Ameriks considers the work to result from what he takes to be the skeptical phase of Kant’s thought.5 I will argue, by contrast, that Dreams only targets the dogmatist element of Wolffian metaphysics and, hence, that Kant aimed to purify metaphysics from sensible elements rather than to initiate its wholesale destruction. According to this reading, Dreams represents an important stage in Kant’s efforts to set free what he took to be the purely rational core of what is commonly called Wolffian rationalism – a core that early post-Kantianism could appropriate and modify without regressing into the dogmatism diagnosed by Kant.6

Focusing on Wolff’s account of empirical and rational psychology, section 2 identifies and clarifies the continuist account of metaphysical cognition that I take to be the target of Dreams. The two subsequent sections of the text offer an analysis of Kant’s explicit and implicit engagement with Wolffian metaphysics in Dreams. Whereas section 3 treats the negative aspect of Kant’s criticism, section 4 highlights the elements Kant aimed to preserve. Finally, section 5 turns to Kant’s brief reflections on the critical task of philosophy and indicates how the result achieved in Dreams is related to the Inaugural Dissertation, which was published four years later.

2Wolff

While Kant’s portrayal of Wolff as a dogmatic metaphysician may be warranted, it does not account for Wolff’s extensive engagement with Locke and Newton and his positive assessment of the methodological principles adopted in the empirical sciences.7

Regarding the way we produce concepts,Wolff’s German Logic (1712) stresses that we primarily do so by paying careful attention to that which we perceive by the senses.8 The obscure concepts thus obtained can be clarified by distinguishing the marks they contain (GL 1.13, 1.18; cf. GM 208, 273). By comparing the marks contained in the concepts of singular things and singling out what they have in common, we can further produce general concepts (GL 1.26). Drawing on the model of geometry, Wolff states in this regard that “one can take away from those things that determine the matter at hand as much as one pleases and ascend to ever more general concepts” (GL 1.27). General concepts are said to be very useful because everything that can be derived from them applies to all things contained under them (GL 1.29). Wolff points out that it can be difficult to obtain clear concepts. In metaphysics, for example, the cause, end, or essence of a thing, which distinguishes one thing from another, can be buried under irrelevant circumstances. But he takes himself to have reduced this obscurity, prevailing in the sciences up to his time, and to have “cast bright light even in metaphysics” (GL 1.23).

In order to clarify what Wolff took to be his achievement in this regard, we can turn to his Latin Preliminary Discourse (1728), which he published by way of introduction to his Latin metaphysical works. The Preliminary Discourse follows the Aristotelian tradition by distinguishing “historical” and “philosophical” cognition: while the former is said to be concerned with facts obtained by experience, the latter is said to deal with their ground or reason (DP 3–4, cf. 7). According to Wolff, any philosophical cognition must rest on historical cognition, that is, on the careful observation of facts (DP 10). This is obviously the case in physics, from which Wolff takes his examples. Yet he asserts that even metaphysics – qua first philosophy – draws its concepts from experience:

Even in abstract disciplines such as first philosophy, the foundational concepts must be derived from experience, which constitutes the ground of historical knowledge. […] Indeed, we should consider the marriage between [historical and philosophical cognition] as something sacred. (DP 12)

These considerations make it clear that Wolff’s account of the production of concepts takes leads from both geometry and physics and that he takes all disciplines to obtain their concepts in a similar way.

Wolff took himself to have shed light on the first general concepts, that is, on the concepts treated in ontology, by either grounding his explanation of them on “clear experiences” or demonstrating them “by means of solid inferences”.9 But what does it actually mean to establish concepts in first philosophy by starting from experience? Wolff suggests that the mind in this case draws on inner rather than outer experience. Echoing Descartes, he notes at the outset of the German Metaphysics that “we experience irrefutably that we are conscious of ourselves and other things”, and he infers from this that we exist (GM 5, cf. 7). In the Discursus Praeliminaris he asserts, moreover, that “when we, prior to thinking philosophically, attend to ourselves”, we obtain cognitions of “God, human souls, and bodies”.10

Wolff’s account of the soul can be used to illustrate his view.11 The German and Latin versions of his metaphysics include an empirical and a rational psychology. Wolff’s innovative distinction between these two disciplines is in line with his requirement that cognition combine experience and the intellect. While empirical psychology might be thought to provide us with mere “historical” cognition of the soul, Wolff asserts that it belongs to philosophical cognition: by means of observation, empirical psychology identifies the features of the soul that serve as the basis for concepts of the various faculties and establishes many of the grounds of the cognitions achieved in rational psychology (DP 111, remark).

In his empirical psychology, Wolff defines the soul as “the thing that is conscious of itself and other things external to it” (GM 192). We can infer from his account of concept acquisition in the German Logic that we obtain this concept of the soul by paying careful attention to our own mental acts and abstracting from any feature that is peculiar to singular acts or to ourselves as individual human beings. We can further clarify the concept of the soul, I take Wolff to hold, by distinguishing and specifying the various ways in which we can represent something – including sensations (GM 220), representations produced by the imagination (GM 235), memories (GM 249), and clear concepts (GM 276– 278) – as well as the faculties that produce them.

Unlike its empirical counterpart, rational psychology abstracts from the acts that we actually perceive when we pay attention to ourselves. It does so in order to investigate their ground, that is, “the essence of the soul and spirit as such” (GM 727). Rational psychology can thus be said to reveal features of the soul that are buried under the variety of acts and representations discussed in empirical psychology. As Wolff puts it, rational psychology treats features of the soul “to which experience does not easily lead us” (GM 727). By treating the mental acts and products discussed in empirical psychology as effects of a single ground, it becomes possible, at least in principle, to derive from the concept of the soul “everything that can be found in it through experience”.12 Wolff seems to proceed – or purports to do so – by deriving from the soul’s capacity to represent things and distinguish them from one another (GM 730) a number of classical features of the soul, such as its immateriality (GM 738) and simplicity (GM 742). Once these ‘buried’ features are identified, features proper to simple things as such – discussed in the ontology – can be attributed to the soul as well, which accordingly is further defined as self-subsisting (GM 743), possessing a single power (GM 744–45), possessing the power to represent the world (GM 753), and finite (GM 784). Among many other things, Wolff does not hesitate to infer from these features, finally, that the human soul is immortal (GM 926).

As seen, Wolff takes his rational psychology to...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Titelseite
• Impressum
• Inhalt
• Vorwort
• Preface
• Einleitung
• Introduction
• I. Beiträge/Essays
• II. Rezensionen/Reviews
• Autoren/Authors
• Hinweis an die Verlage/Letter to Publishers