History of Modern Philosophy · Chapter 36%part II. From Kant to the Present Time.% (15)
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Of the five constructive forms of the soul, which result from the varying relation between stimulus and faculty, four are emotional products or products of moods. If the stimulus is too small pain (dissatisfaction, longing) arises, while pleasure springs from a marked, but not too great, fullness of stimulus. If the stimulus gradually increases to the point of excess, blunted appetite and satiety come in; when the excess is sudden it results in pain. A clear representation, a sensation arises when the stimulus is exactly proportioned to the faculty; it is in this case only that the soul assumes a theoretical attitude, that it merely perceives without any admixture of agreeable or disagreeable feelings. Desire is pleasure remembered, the ego the complex of all the representations which have ever arisen in the soul, the totality of the manifold given within me. For the immortality of the immaterial soul Beneke advances an original and attractive argument based on the principle that, in consequence of the constantly increasing traces, through which the substance of the soul is continually growing, consciousness turns more and more from the outer to the inner, until finally perception dies entirely away. At death the connection with the outer world ceases, it is true, but not the inner being of the soul, for which that which has hitherto been highest now becomes the foundation for new and still higher developments.
Like Herbart, on whom he was in many ways dependent, Beneke discussed psychology and pedagogics with greater success than logic, metaphysics, practical philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He combats the apriorism of Kant in ethics as elsewhere. The moral law does not arise until the end of a long development. First in order are the immediately felt values of things, which we estimate according to the degree of enhancement or depression in the psychical state which they call forth. From the feelings are formed concepts, from concepts judgments; and the abstraction of the categorical imperative is a highly derivative phenomenon and a very late result, although the feeling of oughtness or of moral obligation, which accompanies the correct estimation of values and bids us prefer spiritual to sensuous delights and the general good to our own welfare, grows necessarily out of the inner nature of the human soul. There are two sources of religion: one theoretical, for the idea of God; the other practical, for the worship of God. We are impelled to the assumption of a suprasensible, an unconditioned, a providence, on the one hand, by the desire for a unitary conclusion for our fragmentary knowledge of the world; and, on the other, by moral need, by our unsatisfied longing after the good. The attributes which we ascribe to God are taken from experience, the abstract attributes from being in general, the naturalistic from the world, the spiritual from man. As an inevitable outcome of the transformation of religious feelings into representations, and one which is harmless because of the unmistakableness of their symbolic character, the anthropomorphic predicates, through which we think the Deity as personal, themselves establish the superiority of theism over pantheism. The object of religion, moreover, is accessible only to the subjective certitude of feeling which is given by faith, and not to scientific knowledge.
Feuerbach's anthropological standpoint will be discussed below. Like Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-71; professor in Königsberg; System of Logic, 1857, 5th ed., edited by J.B. Meyer, 1882—English translation, 1871), Karl Fortlage was strongly influenced in his psychological views by Beneke. Born in 1806 at Osnabrück, and at his death in 1881 a professor in Jena, Fortlage shared with Beneke an impersonality of character, as well as the fate of meeting with less esteem from his contemporaries than he merited by the seriousness and originality of his thinking. To his System of Psychology, 1855, in two volumes, he added, as it were, a third volume, his Contributions to Psychology, 1875, besides psychological lectures of a more popular cast (Eight Lectures, 1869, 2d ed., 1872; Four Lectures, 1874).[1] Fortlage characterizes his psychological method—in the criticism of which F.A. Lange fails to show the justice for which he is elsewhere to be commended—as observation by the inner sense. In the first place, consciousness, as the active form of representation, must be separated from that of which we are conscious, from the "content of representation," which is in itself unconscious, but capable of coming into consciousness. Next Fortlage seeks to determine the laws of these two factors. In regard to the content of representation he distinguishes more sharply than Herbart between the fusibility of the homogeneous and the capacity for complex combination possessed by the heterogeneous (the fusion of similars goes on even without aid from consciousness, while the connection of dissimilars is brought about only through the help of the latter), and adds to these two general properties of the content of representation two further ones, its revivability (its persistence in unconsciousness), and its dissolubility in the scale of size, color, etc. Consciousness, on the other hand, which for Fortlage coincides with the ego or self, is treated as the presupposition of all representations, not as their result—it is underived activity. He explains the nature of consciousness by the concept of attention, characterizes them both as "questioning activity" (Fragethätigkeit), and follows them out in their various degrees from expectation through observation up to reflection. The listening and watching of the hunter when waiting for the game is only a prolongation of the same consciousness which accompanies all less exciting representations. The essential element in conscious or questioning activity is the oscillation between yes and no.
As soon as the disjunction is decided by a yes, the desire which lies at its basis, and which in the condition of consciousness is arrested, passes over into activity. All consciousness is based on interest, and in its origin is "arrested impulse" (Triebhemmung). "The direction of impulse to an intuition to be expected only in the future is called consciousness." The rank of a being depends on its capacity for reflection: the greater the extent of its attention and the smaller the stimuli which suffice to rouse this to action, the higher it stands. Impulse—this is the fundamental idea of Fortlage's psychology, like will with Fichte, and representation with Herbart—consists of an element of representation and an element of feeling.
Pleasure + effort-image = impulse.
[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's other works we may mention his valuable History of Poetry, 1839; the Genetic History of Philosophy since Kant, 1852; and the attractive Six Philosophical Lectures, 1869, 2d ed., 1872.]
In his metaphysical convictions, to which he gave expression in his Exposition and Criticism of the Arguments for the Existence of God, 1840, among other works, Fortlage belongs to the philosophers of identity. Originally sailing in Hegel's wake, he soon recognizes that the roots of the theory of identity go back to the Kantio-Fichtean philosophy, with which the system of absolute truth, as he holds, has come into being. He thus becomes an adherent of the Science of Knowledge, whose deductive results he finds inductively confirmed by psychological experience. Psychology is the empirical test for the metaphysical calculus of the Science of Knowledge. In regard to the absolute Fortlage is in agreement with Krause, the younger Fichte, Ulrici, etc., and calls his standpoint transcendent pantheism. According to this all that is good, exalted, and valuable in the world is divine in its nature; the human reason is of the same essence as the divine reason (there can be nothing higher than reason); the Godhead is the absolute ego of Fichte, which employs the empirical egos as organs, which thinks and wills in individuals, in so far as they think the truth and will the good, but at the same time as universal subject goes beyond them. If, after the example of Hegel, we give up transcendent pantheism in favor of immanence, two unphilosophical modes of representing the absolute at once result—on the one hand, materialism; on the other, popular, unphilosophical theism. If the Fichtean Science of Knowledge could be separated from its difficult method, which it is impossible ever to make comprehensible to the unphilosophical mind, it would be called to take the place of religion.[1]
[Footnote 1: Among Fortlage's posthumous manuscripts was one on the Philosophy of Religion, on which Eucken published an essay in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. lxxxii. 1883, p. 180 seq. after Lipsius had given a single chapter from it—"The Ideal of Morality according to Christianity"—in his Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie (vol. ix. pp. 1-45). The journals Im Neuen Reich, 1881, No. 24, and Die Gegenwart, 1882, No. 34, contained warmly written notices of Fortlage by J. Volkelt. Leopold Schmid (in Giessen, died 1869) gives a favorable and skillfully composed outline of Fortlage's system in his Grundzüge der Einleitung in die Philosophie mit einer Beleuchtung der von K. Ph. Fischer, Sengler, und Fortlage ermöglichten Philosophie der That, 1860, pp. 226-357. Cf. also Moritz Brasch, K. Fortlage, Ein philosophisches Charakterbild, in Unsere Zeit, 1883, Heft II, pp. 730-756, incorporated in the same author's Philosophie der Gegenwart, 1888.]
%2. Realism: Herbart.%
Johann Friedrich Herbart was scientifically the most important among the philosophers of the opposition. Herbart was born at Oldenburg in 1776, the son of a councilor of justice, and had already become acquainted with the systems of Wolff and Kant before he entered the University of Jena in 1794. In 1796 he handed in to his instructor Fichte a critique of two of Schelling's treatises, in which the youthful thinker already broke away from idealism. While a private tutor in Switzerland he made the acquaintance of Pestalozzi. In 1802 he habilitated in Göttingen, where, in 1805, he was promoted to a professorship extraordinary; while in 1809 he received the professorship in Königsberg once held by Kant, and later by W. Tr. Krug (died 1842). He died in 1841 at Göttingen, whither he had been recalled in 1833. His Collected Works were published in twelve volumes, 1850-52 (reprinted 1883 seq.), by his pupil Hartenstein, who has also given an excellent exposition of his master's system in his Probleme und Grundlehren der allgemeinen Metaphysik, 1836, and his Grundbegriffe der ethischen Wissenschaften, 1844; a new edition, in chronological order, and under the editorship of K. Kehrbach, began to appear in 1882, or rather 1887, and has now advanced to the fourth volume, 1891. Herbart's chief works were written during his Königsberg residence: the Text-book of Introduction to Philosophy, 1813, 4th ed., 1837 (very valuable as an introduction to Herbartian modes of thought); General Metaphysics, 1829 (preceded in 1806 and 1808 by The Principal Points in Metaphysics, with a supplement, The Principal Points in Logic); Text-book of Psychology,[1] 1816, 2d ed., 1834; On the Possibility and Necessity of applying Mathematics to Psychology, 1822; Psychology as a Science, 1824-25. The two works on ethics, which were widely separated in time, were, on the other hand, written in Göttingen: General Practical Philosophy, 1808; Analytical Examination of Natural Right and of Morals, 1836. To these may be added a Discourse on Evil, 1817; Letters on the Doctrine of the Freedom of the Human Will, 1836; and the Brief Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 1831, 2d ed., 1841. His works on education and instruction, whose influence and value perhaps exceed those of his philosophical achievements (collected editions of the pedagogical works have been prepared by O. Willmann, 1873-75, 2d ed., 1880; and by Bartholomaei), extended through his whole life. Besides pedagogics, psychology was the chief sphere of his services.
[Footnote 1: English translation by M.K. Smith, 1891.]
In antithesis to the philosophy of intuition with its imagined superiority to the standpoint of reflection, Herbart makes philosophy begin with attention to concepts, defining it as the elaboration of concepts. Philosophy, therefore, is not distinguished from other sciences by its object, but by its method, which again must adapt itself to the peculiarity of the object, to the starting point of the investigation in question—there is no universal philosophical method. There are as many divisions of philosophy as there are modes of elaborating concepts. The first requisite is the discrimination of concepts, both the discrimination of concepts from others and of the marks within each concept. This work of making concepts clear and distinct is the business of logic. With this discipline, in which Herbart essentially follows Kant, are associated two other forms of the elaboration of concepts, that of physical and that of aesthetic concepts. Both of these classes require more than a merely logical elucidation. The physical concepts, through which we apprehend the world and ourselves, contain contradictions and must be freed from them; their correction is the business of meta-physics. Metaphysics is the science of the comprehensibility of experience. The aesthetic (including the ethical) concepts are distinguished from the nature-concepts by a peculiar increment which they occasion in our representation, and which consists in a judgment of approval or disapproval. To clear up these concepts and to free them from false allied ideas is the task of aesthetics in its widest sense. This includes all concepts which are accompanied by a judgment of praise or blame; the most important among them are the ethical concepts. Thus, aside from logic, we reach two principal divisions of philosophy, which are elsewhere contrasted as theoretical and practical, but here in Herbart as metaphysics and aesthetics. Herbart maintains that these are entirely independent of each other, so that aesthetics, since it presupposes nothing of metaphysics, may be discussed before metaphysics, while the philosophy of nature and psychology depend throughout on ontological principles. Together with natural theology the two latter sciences constitute "applied" metaphysics. This in turn presupposes "general" metaphysics, which subdivides into four parts: Methodology, Ontology, Synechology, i.e., the theory of the continuous ([Greek: suneches]), which treats of the continua, space, time, and motion, and Eidolology, i.e., the theory of images or representations. The last forms the transition to psychology, while synechology forms the preparation for the philosophy of nature, whose most general problems it solves. Our exposition will not need to observe these divisions closely.
Metaphysics starts with the given, but cannot rest content with it, for it contains contradictions. In resolving these we rise above the given. What is given? Kant has not answered this question with entire correctness. We may, indeed, term the totality of the given "phenomena," but this presupposes something which appears. If nothing existed there would also nothing appear. As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being. So much seeming, so much indication of being. Things in themselves may be known mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of being contained by the given appearance. Further, not merely the unformed matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups, not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience. If the latter were really subjective products, as Kant holds, it would necessarily be possible for us at will to think each perceptive-content either under the category of substance, or property, or cause—possible for us, if we chose, to see a round table quadrilateral. In reality we are bound in the application of these forms; they are given for each object in a definite way. The given forms—Herbart calls them experience-concepts—contain contradictions. How can these contradictions be removed? We may neither simply reject the concepts which are burdened with contradictions, for they are given, nor leave them as they are, for the logical principium contradictionis requires that the contradiction as such be rooted out. The experience-concepts are valid (they find application in experience), but they are not thinkable. Therefore we must so transform and supplement them that they shall become free from contradictions and thinkable. The method which Herbart employs to remove the contradictions is as follows: The contradiction always consists in the fact that an a should be the same as a b, but is not so. The desiderated likeness of the two is impossible so long as we think a as one thing. That which is unsuccessful in this case will succeed, perhaps, if in thought we break up the a into several things—[Greek: a b g]. Then we shall be able to explain through the "together" (Zusammen) of this plurality what we were unable to explain from the undecomposed a, or from the single constituents of it. The "together" is a "relation" established by thought among the elements of the real. For this reason Herbart terms his method of finding out necessary supplements to the given "the method of relations." Another name for the same thing is "the method of contingent aspects." Mechanics operates with contingent aspects when, for the sake of explanation, it resolves a given motion into several components. Such fictions and substitutions—auxiliary concepts, which are not real, but which serve only as paths for thought—may be successfully employed by metaphysics also. The abstract expression of this method runs: The contradiction is to be removed by thinking one of its members as manifold rather than as one. In order to observe the workings of this Herbartian machine we shall go over the four principal contradictions by which his acuteness is put to the test—the problems of inherence, of change, of the continuous, of the ego.
We call the given sensation-complexes "things," and ascribe "properties" to them. How can one and the same thing have different properties—how can the one be at the same time many? To say that the thing "possesses" the properties does not help the matter. The possession of the different properties is itself just as manifold and various as the properties which are possessed. Hence the concept of the thing and its properties must be so transformed that the plurality which seems to be in the thing shall be transferred without it. Instead of one thing let us assume several, each with a single definite property, from whose "together" the appearance of many qualities in one thing now arises. The appearance of manifold properties in the one thing has its ground in the "together" of many things, each of which has one simple quality. Again, it is just as impossible for a thing to have different qualities in succession, or to change, as it is for it to have them at the same time. The popular view of change, which holds that a thing takes on different forms (ice, water, steam) and yet remains the same substance, is untenable. How is it possible to become another, and yet to remain the same? The universal feeling that the concept needs correction betrays itself in the fact that everyone involuntarily adds a cause to the change in thought, and seeks a cause for it, and thus of himself undertakes a transformation of the concept, though, it is true, an inadequate one. If we think this concept through we come upon a trilemma, a threefold impossibility. Whether we endeavor to deduce the change from external or from internal causes, or (with Hegel) to think it as causeless, in each case we involve ourselves in inconceivabilities. All three ideas—change as mechanism, as self-determination or freedom, as absolute becoming—are alike absurd. We can escape these contradictions only by the bold decision to conceive the quality of the existent as unchangeable. For the truly existent there is no change whatever. It remains, however, to explain the appearance of change, in which the wand of decomposition and the "together" again proves its magic power. Supported by the motley manifoldness of phenomena, we posit real beings as qualitatively different, and view this diversity as partial contraposition; we resolve, e.g., the simple quality a into the elements x + z, and a second quality b into y - z. So long as the individual things remain by themselves, the opposition of the qualities will not make itself evident. But as soon as they come together, something takes place—now the opposites (+z and -z) seek to destroy or at least to disturb each other. The reals defend themselves against the disturbance which would follow if the opposites could destroy each other, by each conserving its simple, unchangeable quality, i.e., by simply remaining self-identical. Self-conservation against threatened disturbances from without (it may be compared to resistance against pressure) is the only real change, and apparent change, the empirical changes of things, to be explained from this. That which changes is only the relations between the beings, as a thing maintains itself now against this and now against that other thing; the relations, however, and their change are something entirely contingent and indifferent to the existent. In itself the self-conservation of a real is as uniform as the quality which is conserved, but in virtue of the changing relations (the variety of the disturbing things) it can express itself for the observer in manifold ways as force. The real itself changes as little as a painting changes, for instance, when, seen near at hand, the figures in it are clearly distinguished, while for the distant observer, on the contrary, they run together into an indistinguishable chaos. Change has no meaning in the sphere of the existent.
Anyone who speaks thus has denied change, not deduced it. Among the many objections experienced by Herbart's endeavor to explain the empirical fact of change by his theory of self-conservation against threatened disturbances Lotze's is the most cogent: The unsuccessful attempt to solve the difficulties in the concept of becoming and action is still instructive, for it shows that they cannot be solved in this way—from the concept of inflexible being. If the "together," the threatened disturbance, and the reaction against the latter be taken as realities, then, in the affection by the disturber, the concept of change remains uneliminated and uncorrected; if they be taken as unreal concepts auxiliary to thought, change is relegated from the realm of being to the realm of seeming. Herbart gives to them a kind of semi-reality, less true than the unmoving ground of things (their unchangeable, permanent qualities), and more true than their contradictory exterior (the empirical appearance of change). Between being and seeming he thrusts in, as though between day and night, the twilight region of his "contingent aspects," with their relations, which are nothing to the real, their disturbances, which do not come to pass, and their self-conservations, which are nothing but undisturbed continuance in existence on the part of the real.
Besides the contradictions in the concepts of inherence, of change, and action and passion, it is the concept of being which prevents our philosopher from ascribing a living character to reality. Being, as Kant correctly perceived, contains nothing qualitative; it is absolute position. Whoever affirms that an object is, expresses thereby that the matter is to rest with the simple position; in which is included that it is nothing dependent, relative, or negative. (Every negation is something relative, relates to a precedent position, which is to be annulled by it.) Besides being, the existent contains something more—a quality; it consists of this absolute position and a what. If this what is separated from being we reach an "image"; united with being it yields an essence or a real. This what of things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart from these they would not exist—what is color in the dark? what sound in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without fire?—they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchangeable; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal. The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an advance by assuming a plurality of reals. The truly one never becomes a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be postulated. Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by quantitative relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pantheists make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible (non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality; it does not have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by affirming its what, by continually repeating, as it were, the same note, which gains a varying meaning only in so far as, in accordance with the character of the disturber, it appears now as a third, now as a fifth or seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real manifoldness of the self-conservations.
The infinite divisibility of space and of matter forms the chief difficulty in the problem of the continuous. Herbart endeavors to solve it by the assumption of an intelligible space with "fixed" lines (lines formed by a definite number of points, hence finitely divisible, and not continuous). Metaphysics demands the fixed or discrete line, although common thought is incapable of conceiving it. Space is a mere form of combination in representation or for the observer, and yet it is objective, i.e., it is valid for all intelligences, and not merely for human intelligence. From his complex and unproductive endeavors to derive the appearance of continuity from discontinuous reality we hurry on to the fourth, the psychological problem, which Herbart discusses with great acuteness. He considers it the chief merit of Fichte's Science of Knowledge that it called attention to this problem.
The concept of the ego, of whose reality we have so strong and immediate a conviction that, in the formula of asseveration, "as true as I exist," it is made the criterion of all other certitude, labors under various contradictions. Besides the familiar difficulty, here especially sensible, of one thing with many marks, it contains other absurdities of its own. In the ego or self-consciousness subject and object are to be identical. The identity of the representing and the represented ego is a self-contradictory idea, for the law of contradiction forbids the equation of opposites, while a subject is subject only through the fact that it is not object. But, again, self-consciousness can never be realized, because it involves a regressus in infinitum. The ego is defined as that which represents itself. What is this "self"? It is, in turn, the self-knower. This new explanation contains still a further self; which once more signifies the self-knower and so on to infinity. The ego represents the representation (Vorstellen) of its representation (Vorstellen), etc. The representation (Vorstellung) of the ego, therefore, can never be actually brought to completion. (The assumption of the freedom of the will leads to an analogous regressus in infinitum, in which the question, "Willst thou thy volition?" "Willst thou the willing of this volition"? is repeated to infinity.) The only escape from this tissue of absurdities is to think the ego otherwise than is done by popular consciousness. The knowing and the known ego are by no means the same, but the observing subject in self-consciousness is one group of representations, the observed subject another. Thus, for example, newly formed representations are apperceived by the existing older ones, but the highest apperceiver is not, in turn, itself apperceived. The ego is not a unit being, which represents itself in the literal meaning of the phrase, but that which is represented is a plurality. The ego is the junction of numberless series of representations, and is constantly changing its place; it dwells now in this representation, now in that. But as we distinguish the point of meeting from the series which meet there, and imagine that it is possible simultaneously to abstract from all the represented series (whereas in fact we can only abstract from each one separately), there arises the appearance of a permanent ego as the unit subject of all our representations. In reality the ego is not the source of our representations, but the final result of their combination. The representation, not the ego, is the fundamental concept of psychology, the ego constituting rather its most difficult problem.[1] It is a "result of other representations, which, however, in order to yield this result, must be together in a single substance, and must interpenetrate one another" (Text-book of Introduction, p. 243). In this way Herbart defends the substantiality of the soul against Kant and Fries. The soul's immortality (as also its pre-existence) goes without saying, because of the non-temporal character of the real.