The All-Crushing (Part Two)

The Birth of German Idealism out of the Spirit of Skepticism

This second part will cover the end of the Pantheism controversy and the beginning of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. Much of it is based off my reading of Beiser’s Fate of Reason, which catalogues this period. I highly recommend reading it for a more comprehensive account.

Idealism, Skepticism, Nihilism

“How do we explain this Phoenix-like revival of metaphysics, this bewildering reassertion of the claims of reason in the face of its imminent collapse? If the resurrection of metaphysics in the late 1790s seems miraculous, it was also an utter necessity. There was one, and only one, escape from the dangers and difficulties posed by Kant’s philosophy, and that was the reawakening of the slumbering but not comatose spirit of metaphysics. This was already clear in a number of ways by the early 1790s.”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

Once upon a time, on a little island on the sea, a woman lifted up her infant babe from the crib, and discovered a rat had been slumbering beside him. “A rat, a rat!” She shrieked, and all the men came running. As the day continued, everyone began to find rats. Rats in the pantry, rats in bedroom, rats in the bathroom. The rats had always been there, invisible, skittering about, but the old Maid’s scream had shattered the illusion. The men were at a loss of what to do. Who could go on living knowing everything dear to heart had the filth of rats upon it? But one among them, an old snake charmer who spoke in hushed tones, told them he had a solution. There was nothing to fear from the rats. All they had to do was accept his snakes into the town. The snakes would kill some of the precious children, and eat half the food in every pantry, but there would be no more rats. And so they agreed and the snakes were let loose and devoured all the rats, and everyone let out a great sigh of relief. And on the next day, the old maid went to her babe, and found him purple and strangled in the crib; and she shrieked, “A snake, a snake!”

Why was there such an explosion of ambitious philosophy in Germany? What gave birth to Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and ultimately, Nietzsche? It was the problem Jacobi raised in the Pantheism controversy, and the solution Kant introduced. The problem Jacobi raised was the problem of nihilism; philosophy leads us to deny the foundations of morality and meaning. The solution Kant introduced to this challenge was skepticism; a scorched earth policy which promised salvation from Spinoza. Hume’s metaphysical skepticism had awoken Kant from his Dogmatic slumber, and in his attempt to save reason through Critical philosophy, Kant had bred an even more intense, more dangerous skepticism. As the Kantian answer began to falter, the strength of its corrosive all-destroying skepticism remained. The explosion of philosophy in Germany is a result of generations of young intellectuals wrestling with the philosophies of Spinoza and Kant, of a rational nihilism and a monstrous skepticism, and turning to metaphysics for an answer. This post will be the story of how this process began; of the birth of German Idealism out of the Spirit of Skepticism.

The Story so Far

“Jacobi was raising the very disturbing question, Why should we be loyal to reason if it pushes us into the abyss?”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

“Kant did an infinite deal, by writing the Critique of Pure Reason; but the circle is not yet complete.”

Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

“Moreover, they love to see the ‘all-crushing’ Kant sink into oblivion and hasten to make him a dead, historical phenomenon, a corpse, a mummy, whom they can then face without fear. For with the greatest sincerity he has put an end to Jewish theism in philosophy - a fact they like to gloss over, hide, and ignore, since without it they cannot live, meaning, they cannot eat and drink.”

Schopenhauer, Parerga

A review of our story so far is in order. Spinoza reintroduced several ancient metaphysical notions to Western philosophy with the publication of his Ethics; the world was once more an uncreated, eternal unity. He reached these conclusions through a strict adherence to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), a principle widely accepted by enlightenment Rationalists which stipulates that there is a sufficient reason (i.e. cause) for everything. Jacobi ignited the pantheism controversy by revealing to the philosophical public that the logical conclusion of Rationalism was Spinozism, and that Spinozism in its most pure form meant nihilism. This caused an entire generation of German intellectuals to engage with Spinoza, and the question of whether philosophy (i.e. the adherence to reason) itself necessarily leads to an atheistic, fatalistic, and immoral nihilism became a fixation of German intellectual culture all the way up to the 20th century.

Prior to the controversy, Kant had published his first Critique and gained key converts in several universities. But it was only when Karl Leonhard Reinhold wrote an accessible series of philosophical letters presenting Kantian Idealism as the answer to the threat of Spinozism that Kantian philosophy became the dominant philosophical school in Germany. The letters were written in rousing, engrossing language and did not so much discuss Kant’s more startling theoretical claims, but rather his philosophy’s ability to overcome the crisis between faith and reason by accepting both reason and its limitations. But Kant did not simply take up the Rationalist cause and defend the helpless fair lady from Jacobi’s accusations. He did not bring peace, but a hammer, under whose brutal scrutiny all prior philosophy would be shattered. Critical Idealism succeeded in excising Spinozism only by critiquing the possibility of philosophy itself, opening the door to an extreme skepticism in exchange for an empirical realism; a justification of certain a priori concepts’ application to experience, with causality (and hence the PSR) being the most important. We could not know the true world, but we could reason confidently about the world of experience. Kant’s insight and answers would confirm the end of the Aufklarung, who were now to be categorized as Dogmatists alongside Spinoza. The early 19th century would belong to the descendants of Kant and Spinoza; the German Idealists.

Enter Kant

“Given Mendelssohn’s poor showing, it was crucial that someone else enter into the fray to defend the crumbling authority of reason. A new defense was needed that did not repeat Mendelssohn’s mistakes. It would have to separate the case for reason from the claims of metaphysics; it would have to respond to the deeper challenge behind Jacobi’s Spinozism; and it would have to take an unambiguous stand in favor of reason. It was the destiny of Kant to undertake just such a defense. We shall soon see how his defense fared at the hands of Jacobi and his allies.”

Beiser, The Fate of Reason

Kant was late to enter the fray of the Pantheism controversy. A large reason being that he didn’t fit neatly on either side. Like Jacobi, he was a critic of the Rationalist metaphysics of the time who believed they were inconsistent and an insufficient foundation for moral living. He was also, like Mendelssohn, committed to the ideal of reason as the supreme criterion of truth. His specter had already hovered above the conflict long before he explicitly stated his own position. Reinhold had been preaching the Kantian sermon throughout the controversy, and each side had sent entreaties for the old sage of Konigsberg to lend them his aid and enter on behalf of their cause; uncritical acceptance of ‘common sense’ (Mendelssohn) or uncritical faith in faith (Jacobi). By the time Kant entered the conflict, Mendelssohn was already dead and it was Kant’s destiny to replace him as the shield of reason against Jacobi’s accusations of nihilism.

Kant wrote an essay in honor of the recently-deceased Mendelssohn in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in which he criticized both Mendelssohn and Jacobi. Kant rejected the idea that anything other than reason ought to be our criterion of truth. He asserted that Jacobi’s salto mortale, the idea that one could have their reason affirm that something is the case and yet decide to believe it was not, was nothing but an unacceptable irrationalism. Jacobi and Mendelssohn despite their differences shared a premise which Kant disagreed with, and thus in its denial he thought he opened a third path. Both Jacobi and Mendelssohn thought of reason as a faculty capable of knowing things-in-themselves, whether through a nebulous faith in Jacobi’s case or through dogmatic reasoning in Mendelssohn’s. Kant argued that Reason was a prescriptive faculty; it does not give us things, but commands us things. In theoretical cognition, reason prescribes that we seek the unconditioned, that we reason ‘upwards’ towards the ultimate root of things. It sets them as our philosophical ends, though it does not simply give them to us on credit. In practical cognition, reason prescribes that we seek to bring about the unconditioned, that we live according to the categorical imperative and set the highest good as our end. We do not get things-in-themselves as objects of knowledge through reason, but as ideals to strive towards.

Kant had carved a new role for reason which preserved its role as both a criterion of truth and a source of practical faith, distinguishing him from Jacobi’s Fideism and Mendelssohn’s Rationalism. With Mendelssohn dead and Dogmatism discredited, Kant and his philosophy now reigned over Germany. However, this Kantian peace would not last. Jacobi would be unsatisfied with Kant’s defense of reason, and would become one of his early critics, quickly inspiring others. The Pantheism controversy would now transition into the era of post-Kantian philosophy, as philosophers struggled against the all-destroyer’s skeptical consequences. The era would begin with Jacobi unleashing one of the most influential critiques of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism ever published.

“Scholasticism” and Critical philosophy

“Kant has unquestionably done the best service, by drawing the limits beyond which human intellect is not able to penetrate, and leaving at rest the insoluble problems. What a deal have people philosophized about immortality!- and how far have they got?”

Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

“Among the most brilliant and meritorious sides of the Kantian philosophy is indisputably the Transcendental Dialectic, by means of which he undermined speculative theology and psychology to such an extent that since then for the life of us we have not been able to resurrect them. What a blessing for the human spirit! Or do we not see, during the entire period since the revival of the sciences down to Kant, the thoughts of even the greatest men go awry, indeed, of ten become completely distorted, as a result of those two absolutely unassailable presuppositions that paralyze the whole mind and that are first withdrawn from, and afterwards are dead to, all examination.”

Schopenhauer, Parerga

Scholasticism is a term used to refer to the medieval philosophies influenced by a mix of Aristotelianism and church teachings. I do not use the term to mean this. I instead use the term in a more expansive way to refer to a particular type of philosophizing, as Schopenhauer does. Schopenhauer defines scholasticism as the following:

“I want to place the characteristic quality of scholasticism in the fact that its supreme criterion of truth is holy scripture, to which we can consequently appeal from every rational conclusion.”

Parerga

From the beginning of the West as a distinct civilization, all the way up to the publication of the Critique, the vast majority of philosophers fell into this category. Philosophy was not a self-critical means to the truth, even if it postured as one, but a supplement to theology, another means to reach the same ends as scripture. Whether it is Descartes explicitly stating this, despite all the supposed doubt he began from, in his message to the clergy who would censor him regardless, or Spinoza simply taking the identity of substance and God for granted, much of Western philosophy begins from theological presuppositions. Kant forever undermined this kind of philosophy. Although he still had his presuppositions, and he did aim to secure faith in God through his project, he never thought he could simply begin from the existence of God and reason from there. God always remained to him an unknowable object, something beyond the petty reaches of our claws, and the Dialectic despite its faults did an excellent job revealing the fallacious reasoning behind all dogmatic attempts to prove God’s existence.

Unfortunately, this rigorous and honest skepticism towards that which we want to prove above all else would be once more forgotten. As soon as Jacobi and the Idealists had identified the faults of Kantian thought they went back to pulling God out of their asses, this time while wearing a Critical skinsuit. The ontological argument was retooled and trotted out once more, as if everyone had forgotten that such a thing as the Transcendental Dialectic had ever been written. I’m reminded of the post-Kantian philosophy professor Schopenhauer cites as an example of the return of this dogmatic scholasticism after Kant’s death, who declared that “If a philosophy denies the fundamental ideas of Christianity, it is wrong, or, even if true, still useless.” But this era would pass, and Kant’s influence would remain.

There was indeed a point of agreement between Jacobi and Kant here. Jacobi recognized that philosophy cannot prove the existence of God, and consequently when the philosopher dances for the priest he creates a perversion of faith; Spinoza’s God is conflated with the God of the Gospels. As a result, Jacobi chose to jettison philosophy in favor of faith, and to simply assume what before philosophers had fallaciously claimed to prove. Kant instead believed philosophy could provide a foundation for faith, but only a moral foundation; knowledge of God was simply no longer within the purview of philosophy. Even though German philosophy quickly swung back to the scholastic mindset, a predictable outcome given the incentives for university philosophers to tow the pious line on behalf of the Prussian state, Kant had succeeded in the long term of removing the tumor of dogma from philosophy. The refreshing honesty that we find in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche concerning the state of the world, its ugliness and suffering, was because the philosopher was no longer beholden to a theological duty; he could speak honestly without ever having to attach some sophism about ‘the best of all worlds’. And for that reason I am in agreement with Schopenhauer that we owe Kant an immortal debt.

The Kantian Answer to Spinoza/Nihilism

“Spinozism is the true consequence of dogmatic metaphysics.”

Kant

“Kant, beyond a doubt. He is the one whose doctrines still continue to work, and have penetrated most deeply into our German civilization. He has influenced even you, although you have never read him; now you need him no longer, for what he could give you you possess already.”

Goethe when asked the philosopher he esteemed most

What had convinced Reinhold and others that Kant was the solution to the Pantheism controversy was his philosophy’s ability to reject Spinoza while still adhering to reason, although only a reason whose capacities had been sufficiently critiqued. From the Critical vantage point Spinozism could simply be rejected as not a viable philosophical project, because it was based on the application of the PSR past its empirical boundaries. While Kant would agree with Spinoza that all objects of experience are bound by the law of causality, he would disagree that everything, including the transcendent (i.e. including things-in-themselves, God, etc), is bound by the law of causality/PSR. All the important topics of metaphysics and their important moral conations were removed from reason’s clutches and transported to a state of dogmatic ambivalence, where their existence could neither be theoretically affirmed nor denied. Most importantly, the division between appearance and thing-in-itself meant that our ultimate freedom was possible even if we accept that the world appears to us as determined according to the category of causality, and thus the empirical validity of the PSR did not entail fatalism. In short, Germans could once more have their cake and eat it too. They could have the PSR, and their freedom. They could have faith in both human scientific and philosophical progress, and the moral weight and meaning of their actions.

Kant’s philosophy is “Critical” because it begins from the premise that we must critically engage our cognitive faculties to determine what the horizons of knowledge and philosophy are. Those who fail to perform the requisite critique before engaging in philosophy were labeled by Kant “Dogmatists”. This Critical/Dogmatic dichotomy would be preserved by the later Idealists, and represents the real character of the post-Kantian era; post-Kantian philosophy is distinct in its epistemological anxiety and intimate awareness of the subjective dimension of experience and knowledge. The only things the subject can know with a priori certainty about its objects are what it has put into them. Earlier philosophy is looked on like the follies of youth, as intrinsically discredited because it failed to consider that the world of experience is not the true world, but a world of representation, a world dependent on the subject who represents it. Even as Kant himself began to be seen as antiquated by the followers of Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this idea of a fundamental division between Dogmatism and Critical Idealism, with the introduction of the former as opening a new epoch in human history, persisted. As Goethe said to Eckermann in the above quote, Kant penetrated deeply into German civilization, such that even those who had never read him carried his insights with them. Philosophy would never again be the same.

Critical Errors

“It should now be clear that Jacobi’s theory of the nihilism of reason is not simply an attack on the methods of dogmatic pre-Kantian metaphysics. Jacobi thinks that Spinoza’s philosophy is the paradigm of reason not because of its geometric method or its a priori reasoning, but because of its rigorous use of the principle of sufficient reason. What this means, then, is that Jacobi’s dilemma still retains its force despite the demise of metaphysical rationalism at the hands of Kant. Though Kant eventually argues against Jacobi that Spinozism has gone the way of all dogmatic metaphysics, his argument does not affect Jacobi’s main point. His point is that the radical application of the principle of sufficient reason is incompatible with the beliefs in God and freedom—and Kant himself would fully endorse this.”

Beiser, The Fate of Reason

Let us for a moment consider the Kantian vision of the world which had now come to dominate the German mind. The human being is a subject representing objects. Although the subject represents these objects as external to him in space and time, in truth these representations are ‘internal’ to him, and independent from him have no existence. But these representations are not mere phantasms; they are appearances! Appearances of what? Things-in-themselves, the source of all phenomena. And so beneath this illusory world of appearance is a ‘world’ (what sense the word ‘world’ has without space and time is a real question) of things-in-themselves who are the source of these appearances. How are these things-in-themselves the source of the subject’s representations? Through something called noumenal affection; things-in-themselves (noumena) affect us to produce our representations. Unfortunately, these things-in-themselves always remain for the subject an illusive X, unknowable objects. Yet the subject may comfort himself, for though he cannot be certain that these things-in-themselves include his immortal soul and a benevolent God, he has a rational basis for practical faith that they do, and he can at least reason a priori about the world of appearance. This is the Kantian answer to the specter of Spinozist nihilism. In the words of Nietzsche from Twilight of the Idols:

The real world unattainable, unproveable, unpromisable, but the mere thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.

But this whole consoling vision relies on the existence of things-in-themselves. Which should lead us to ask; how do we know things-in-themselves even exist? If we were to return to our copy of the Critique, and try to find where they appear, we would be shocked to find that they simply slip in at some point, without any real deduction of their existence. Their very nature implies that we can have no real knowledge of them. But when we think longer and harder, and remember that the concept of existence belongs to the categories, which are only valid for representations, the situation begins to look even more dire. The entire Kantian antidote to Spinoza depends on this X, this black box of which nothing can be said. But how can we believe in something of which nothing can be said? To answer that we must first consider why Kant believes in them.

Things-in-themselves and Noumenal Affection

“Despite all this Kant, just like Locke, still let the thing in itself persist, that is, something that existed independently of our representations, which provide us with mere appearances, and that lay at the basis of these appearances. Now, as much as here too Kant was basically right, still no justification for it could be derived from the principles that he had put forward. Here therefore was the Achille’s heel of his philosophy; and, because of the proof of this inconsistency, it had to forfeit again the recognition of absolute validity and truth it had achieved.”

Schopenhauer, Parerga

“I must confess that this impasse has hampered me more than a little in my study of the Kantian philosophy, so that for several years running I had to repeatedly start the Critique of Pure Reason from the beginning because I continued to be confused by the fact that without this presupposition [noumenal affection], I could not find my way into the system, whereas with it I could not stay there.”

Jacobi, On Transcendental Idealism'

”If I may, I would like to address a few questions to the previously mentioned interpreters of Kant: How far, according to Kant, does the applicability of the categories, and especially of the category of causality, extend? It extends only to the realm of appearances; i.e., the categories apply only to what already exists for us and within ourselves. How then could anyone ever assume that the foundation or ground of the empirical content of cognition lies in something distinct from the I? I think that one can make such an assumption only by means of an inference from what is grounded to something else that serves as its ground, and thus, only by applying the concept of causality.”

Fichte, Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre

Kant believes in things-in-themselves because he believes in noumenal affection: that our representations are the product of things-in-themselves affecting us. And he in turn believes in noumenal affection because he believes there is a passive component to cognition; sensibility. Why does Kant believe we are the passive recipients of what is sensible in cognition? Because he doesn’t believe the alternative is viable; that we could be the active originators of all of the content of our cognition. We supply the form, but we are given the content. The problem is that Kant doesn’t really have a good argument for this assumption. It is baked into the very opening of the Critique when he declares at the start of the Aesthetic that objects are ‘given’ to us by sensibility. This will be the first point of Jacobi’s attack.

Things-in-themselves are a crucial component of Kantianism. To recognize why we need only consider the Kantian view once we remove things-in-themselves. All that remains are representations which ultimately refer to nothing. The Kantian view with things-in-themselves was already for Jacobi one step from nihilism as it completely barred ourselves from any real knowledge of things independant from the subject. All we could know were the different determinations of the subject, which ultimately in some way referred to something independent to us. But remove the things-in-themselves, remove that X, and now all that remains is an ephemeral subject conjuring empty illusions for itself; once again philosophy lead to nihilism. And so the issue of how things-in-themselves fit into the picture became crucial. Jacobi declares in his essay On Transcendental Idealism that things-in-themselves were something without which he could not enter the Kantian system, as from the very first page of the Critique they are assumed, but also one that he couldn’t remain in the Kantian system with, and so he kept rereading the Critique trying to make sense of it. Jacobi couldn’t remain in Kant’s system with things-in-themselves because the idea of noumenal affectation itself contradicts Kant’s system.

Earlier I defined noumenal affection as the idea that things-in-themselves affect us to produce our representations. But another way this could be put that is more straightforward is that things-in-themselves cause our representations. And this is a very big problem. Remember, causality is a category; a subjective condition of representations. We could infer the existence of things-in-themselves if we assumed that sensibility is passive, and thus that our representations are appearances, and then inferred from appearance to thing-in-itself as from cause to effect. But we aren’t allowed to apply the categories, including causality, to things-in-themselves! And so Kant’s system not only depends on things-in-themselves, it assumes them in precisely the way that seems to render them impossible. And this contradiction gives rise to a terrible thought; what if we just got rid of things-in-themselves? This will be the departing point of the German Idealists with Fichte; a consistent Kantianism which collapses into a world-denying nihilism.

A not-so-secure domicile

Unfortunately things-in-themselves were not the only issue with Kant which people began to notice. Kant had begun the second half of the first Critique with the analogy of the tower of Babel. Dogmatic philosophy had tried to construct a tower all the way to heaven, which was doomed to fall. Critical philosophy was supposed to be the secure domicile built with an awareness of the materials we had available. It had been originally welcomed by many with this great faith in its security; finally an epistemology we could rely on! Sure we had to renounce transcendent claims (i.e. about things-in-themselves), but we could at least be confident in this immanent transcendental philosophy! But people quickly began to realize Kant’s foundation was not as secure as he had imagined. Even if we put aside the issue of things-in-themselves, and simply let Kant assume them as a little treat, significant challenges still remain. Those talented German minds who had recognized the genius in Kant now, as they began to truly pore through his work and tried to make sense of it, started to recognize its faults.

The core idea of Critical philosophy is that before we do philosophy, we must critically analyze the cognitive tools which we have available for the task. One major problem is that Kant does not give a satisfying explanation for how we are entitled to even do critical philosophy in the first place. If we apply the same logic he applied to regular philosophy, critical philosophy itself would require a requisite critique of our transcendental cognition. Ironically, Kant himself was not sufficiently critical! This problem seems to form an endless loop where for any critique, there must be a further critique which justifies why we are entitled to do such a critique. Another related issue is Kant’s bifurcation of cognition, and failure to provide a first principle for his philosophy. Kant divided cognition into intuitions and concepts, active and passive, sensible and conceptual. The problem is that there is no real explanation for why this fundamental division to the human mind exists, and how such heterogenous forms of cognition could combine into the united consciousness we experience. Just as Spinoza took fault with Descartes’ division between the will and the mind, post-Kantian philosophers would take fault with Kant’s inability to reduce cognition to one homogenous species, and his philosophy to one singular first principle.

As these structural issues would emerge, intellectuals would increasingly castigate large portions of Kant’s first two Critiques. The Transcendental Deduction in particular elicited a lot of criticism; Kant’s empirical realism which justified the application of a priori concepts to the world of experience, and most importantly the PSR, depended on his very strange deduction of the categories from the table of judgement and then his justification of them as the conditions of experience in the Transcendental Deduction. If one rejected either deduction, then Kant’s Empirical Realism collapsed while the force of his skeptical arguments remained. The second Critique and Kant’s ethical philosophy would be incredibly influential, and in many ways when the later German Idealists departed radically from his theoretical framework, they still remained within the moral structure established by the second Critique. That said, many like Jacobi found Kant’s practical attempt to salvage faith insufficient. People didn’t care what they were rationally or morally required to believe; belief can’t be forced! If God was renounced as unknowable, all that remained was a corrosive skepticism.

In summary, the Kantian peace was short lived. The energies awakened by the Pantheism controversy which had devoured Mendelssohn and Lessing would now turn on Kant. With this overview of the major flaws in Kant’s solution now complete, I will give a timeline of how these flaws came to be revealed.

The Birth of post-Kantian Thought

Representing Nothing - Jacobi’s Attack

“The supreme importance of Kant, his pivotal position in the history of philosophy, rests upon a single fact, in Jacobi’s view. Namely, Kant is the first thinker to discover the principle of all knowledge, or what Jacobi calls “the principle of subject-object identity.” Although it is not explicit, what Jacobi is referring to is nothing less than the principle behind Kant’s ‘new method of thought’, the foundation stone of his Copernican revolution as explained in the prefaces of the first Kritik. This principle states that reason knows a priori only what it creates according to its own laws. Since it implies that the self knows only the products of its own activity, it makes self-knowledge into the paradigm of all knowledge.”

“In his later writings, however, Jacobi tends to replace the term ‘egoist’ with ‘nihilist’. Like the egoist, the nihilist is someone who denies the existence of everything independent of the immediate contents of his own consciousness, whether external objects, other minds, God, or even his own self. All that exists for the nihilist is therefore his own momentary conscious states, his fleeting impressions or representations; but these representations represent, it is necessary to add, nothing. Hence the nihilist is, true to the Latin root, someone who denies the existence of everything, someone who affirms nothingness. Or, as Jacobi puts it, the nihilist lives in a world “out of nothing, to nothing, for nothing and in nothing.””

Beiser, Fate of Reason

“Hence, what we realists call actual objects, things that are independent of our representations, are only inner beings for the transcendental idealist, they are beings that present nothing of the thing that MAY be outside of us, or which the appearance MAY relate, rather, they are MERELY SUBJECTIVE determinations of the mind, completely void of everything that is ACTUALLY objective. "Representations" - nothing but representations "that is what the objects" are that, whether they are represented as extended beings or series of alterations, do not have an existence in themselves outside of our thoughts". "They" - these objects that are only appearances, that simply do not present anything that is actually objective, that present everywhere only themselves "are the mere play of our representations and in the end reduce to determinations of inner sense.”

Jacobi, On Transcendental Idealism

What is Kant’s philosophy without things-in-themselves? Jacobi had an answer; it is skepticism, it is solipsism, it is nihilism. All that remains is a subject and its representations which ultimately refer to no objects. Everyone had wanted to believe that Jacobi’s attack on philosophy was over with Kant’s arrival. That by vanquishing Spinoza as a dogmatist, Kant had vanquished him as a nihilist. But what Jacobi realized was that Kant had not overcome the problem of philosophy. His method had not escaped the nihilism at the base of Spinozism, it had only shifted it around.

As a reminder, Spinozism is nihilism because Spinoza reduces everything to the one substance God, who is necessarily infinite. But since Spinoza defines determination as negation, and claims an infinite God cannot have any negation, God consequently cannot be determined, he cannot have particular qualities. He is simply everything, and hence, nothing. Finite objects like you or your car are just modifications of an infinite nothingness. Spinoza does not deny God in favor of the cosmos, he collapses the cosmos into God until all that remains is pure Being, pure nothingness. What Kant had done was reduce everything to the subject and things-in-themselves. Remove things-in-themselves, and all that remained was the subject. But since the subject was no longer a thing-in-itself affected by things-in-themselves, all the subject was was a subject of momentary representations. These representations, be they you or your car, once more had no real independant existence. Jacobi had once again shown that philosophy seemed to necessarily lead to an extreme skepticism regarding the existence of all finite things, until nothing was left but the indeterminate origin of all things, be it Spinoza’s God or Kant’s I.

Jacobi would further attack Kant’s attempt to overcome this incredible skepticism with practical faith. Jacobi had two main points. First, Kant’s faith is subjective; it is not a knowing that something exists, but merely a belief that we must postulate this thing and act as if it exists. Jacobi considered this a shallow imitation of natural faith, and incapable of providing a real basis for religion and moral feeling. Second, Kant’s solution relies on the categorical imperative, but as an a priori rule it is empty. The categorical imperative does not tell us to do something specific (i.e. go run a charity), it just says to only do things a certain way (i.e. if you do something, then make sure it is something you would will as a universal law). It is a necessary and not a sufficient condition of morality. The categorical imperative says how things would have to be to be moral, but cannot tell us if any given action ought to be done.

For these reasons, Jacobi would conclude that Kantianism, rather than overcoming the nihilism produced by dogmatic adherence to reason, had only exacerbated the problem. Indeed as Kant’s all-crushing skepticism began to infect all of German philosophy, Jacobi began to see Kant even more than Spinoza as the paradigm of philosophy, its ultimate ascent into nothingness. The Kantian gamble was to trade transcendent metaphysics for empirical certainty; by abandoning the true world to the land of the unknowable, an empirical realism with grounds for practical faith could at least be salvaged. To Jacobi, Kant had relinquished the true world to the abyss of nihilistic skepticism, without providing any real supplement. Critical Idealism meant the denial of knowledge of the external world, God, and freedom, and therefore Critical Idealism meant nihilism.

The Faithful’s Doubts - Reinhold

“I have read the lovely Letters, excellent and kind sir, with which you have honored my philosophy. Their combination of thoroughness and charm are matchless and they have not failed to make a great impression in this region. I was therefore all the more eager somehow to express my thanks in writing, most likely in the Deutscher Merkur, and at least to indicate briefly that your ideas agree precisely with mine, and that I am grateful for your success in simplifying them.”

Kant to Reinhold

“Maimon’s final word on Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie is to accuse him of ‘dogmatism’, the worst sin for any Kantian. Rather than being true to the spirit of the critical philosophy. Reinhold engages in transcendent speculation, reintroducing a metaphysics that Kant would only condemn. A clear example of this speculation, in Maimon’s view, is Reinhold’s argument that the subject and object are the causes of the form and content of a representation. Since Reinhold himself says that the subject and object themselves cannot be given to any representation, his assumption that they are the causes of representation amounts to a transcendental application of the category of causality.”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

Jacobi’s attack would continue to be influential long afterwards. The first of the great German idealists, Fichte, would go so far as to directly cite the essay in his attack on Kantian idealism in the introduction to his magnum opus, The Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftlehre. But one of the first to begin actually attempting to move past Kant was the same man who had succeeded in popularizing him. I believe a short biography of Karl Leonhard Reinhold is at this point necessary. Reinhold was incredibly important for how poorly known he is now and how thoroughly disparaged he was by those that followed him. He was a young passionate scion of the enlightenment, committed to the vision of an accessible, popular philosophy which enlightened the masses. When the Pantheism controversy seemed to completely undermine the possibility of enlightenment, Reinhold thought he had found a answer in Kant, and immediately went about translating him into a format befitting his popular outlook. Reinhold’s achievement which transformed him into one of the most famous philosophers in Germany was his ability to make Kant’s work, which although available for years had trouble spreading due to Kant’s obtuse presentation, engaging and accessible for non-philosophers, including people such as Goethe. Instead of going through the minutiae of Kant’s system, Reinhold had focused on its practical implications and presented it as a third option between Mendelssohn’s dogmatic error and Jacobi’s fideism. For this achievement, Reinhold would be made the first chair of Kantian philosophy in Jena, which would become the beating heart of German philosophy for years afterwards. He would however realize as he began teaching that Kant’s solution was not as secure as he had initially presented it. And so Reinhold sought to develop his own Kantian philosophy, which he called the elementarphilosophie.

The goal of the elementarphilosophie was to overcome what Reinhold believed was a longstanding issue in philosophy; the inability to establish secure epistemological grounds. Although over 150 years had passed since Descartes published his Meditations and attempted to overcome doubt, every subsequent philosophy seemed to eventually crumble under the pressure of skepticism. Even Kant’s incredibly self-aware attempt to lay a secure foundation had quickly come under heavy assault. What Reinhold believed was needed was to start from a truly indubitable starting point; an immediate first principle. It had to be first because everything else would follow from it and hence be based on its security, and it had to be immediate because it would establish itself and thus rely on nothing else’ security. Reinhold would identify his first principle as ‘the proposition of consciousness’, i.e. the fact that all representations must be both distinguished from and related to the subject. Reinhold’s philosophy would be mildly popular for a short time, before the publication of an anonymous skeptical tract thoroughly discredited it in the eyes of the public. Reinhold was quickly overshadowed by the arrival of the first major figure of German idealism; Fichte, who replaced him at Jena. Reinhold would then spend the rest of his career out of the main spotlight, bouncing around between the various philosophies that arose, often accused of being an imbecile by the Idealists. Despite the condescending way the Idealists would attack Reinhold, his influence remained distinctly present upon them; the idea that indubitable first principles were the necessary beginning of any philosophy was a common feature of the post-Kantian era.

Stirrings of Hume - Schulze

“Aenesidemus was indeed a general declaration of war against the critical philosophy in general, whether in its Kantian or Reinholdian form. It preached the gospel of a new and radical skepticism, which claimed to destroy all the “dogmatic pretensions” of the critical philosophy.”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

“The most acute of Kant’s opponents.”

Schopenhauer on his Professor, Schulze

“(…) that all our beliefs must submit to the free and open examination of reason.”

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie had a very short-lived reign, in large part due to the publication in 1792 of the lengthy titled Aenesidemus or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Professor Reinhold in Jena Together with a Defense of Skepticism against the Pretensions of the Critique of Reason. Aenesidemus was published anonymously and unleashed a scathing attack against Reinhold’s philosophy and Kant, and instead touted a reinvigorated skepticism. Its title is a reference to the ancient Greek philosopher who renewed the skeptical philosophy of Pyrrho in the 1st Century AD against the skeptical pretensions of the ‘skeptics’ of Plato’s academy. For a long time the author of Aenesidemus was unknown and he was simply referred to by that name; but in time he would be revealed as Schopenhauer’s university professor Gottlob Schulze.

Schulze sums up his skeptical attack with two propositions. First, nothing has been established about things-in-themselves, not even their existence, and second, nothing has been established about the origins and conditions of knowledge. The first was hardly a new claim, but the second was distinctly relevant to the new philosophical wave in Germany. The entire Critical project was premised on the idea that philosophy could begin by epistemologically critiquing the elements of our cognition and establishing the general a priori conditions of knowledge. Schulze was in effect denying that the project attempted by Kant and Reinhold had made any secure progress. Schulze also argued that Kant’s arguments against skepticism, and particularly Hume, were unsuccessful, and that the challenges raised by Hume’s empiricism were still a real threat to that precious empirical realism.

But Schulze was not skeptical of reason like Jacobi; his skepticism was premised on reason being the sole criterion of truth. Schulze’s view was not that Critical philosophy was wrong-headed, it just wasn’t critical enough! He accepted Kant as an improvement over Dogmatism, and accepted much of the first Critique. He simply believed the true spirit of Kantian philosophy was to subject all our views to the skeptical examination of reason, and that to fail to do so to Critical Idealism itself would mean a return to Dogmatism. This skepticism was not just for fun; it was a moral imperative to refine our cognitive faculties. And to continue to refine our cognitive faculties meant continued inquiry, which meant denying the dogmatist, who believes we have attained knowledge and our work is done, and the dogmatic skeptic, who believes knowledge is impossible and our work is futile. Schulze’s skepticism was not itself without problems; like all skeptical systems it is a real question whether it is self-refuting. But Aenesidemus nevertheless succeeded in ousting Reinhold, and amplifying the awareness that skepticism seemed to be overtaking Critical philosophy. Schulze would make a great influence upon Schopenhauer, in whom he encouraged an intense study of Plato and Kant, whose impact on Schopenhauer’s own philosophy is immeasurable.

A New Path - Solomon Maimon

“I had half decided to send the manuscript back in its immediately .... But one glance at the work made me realize its excellence and that not only had none of my critics understood me and the main questions as well as Herr Maimon does but also very few men possess so much acumen for such deep investigations as he.”

Kant on Maimon’s commentary on the Critique

“Scholars of Wisdom have no rest in this world or in the world to come.”

Talmudic saying from the end of Maimon’s first work

“According to Maimon, Kant’s understanding-sensibility dualism is analogous to Descartes’s mind-body dualism, and all the problems of the latter hold mutatis mutandis for the former. Although there is no longer a dualism between distinct kinds of being or substance—a thinking mind and an extended body—there is now an equally sharp dualism between faculties within the sphere of consciousness itself. And just as Descartes cannot explain how such independent and heterogeneous substances as the mind and body interact with each other, so Kant cannot account for how such independent and heterogeneous faculties interact with each other.”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

Solomon Maimon is one of the most interesting characters of German philosophical history. On the day before Reinhold published the first of his major works of the Elementarphilosophie in 1789, Kant received a strange commentary on the first Critique from a former student. The commentary had been written by a acquaintance of this student, and was a sprawling text written in crude German. The author was a Polish-Russian Rabbi from Lithuania, who, like one of his idols Spinoza, had been exiled from his Jewish community for heresy. He had left behind a broken marriage and his children (he had been married at 11 in an arranged marriage with his first son at 15) to pursue a life for the sake of philosophy in Berlin, and was originally taken up by Mendelssohn, before he was banished once again from his fellow Jews, this time for his open adherence to Spinoza. Kant had initially intended to return the manuscript, as he was old and in failing health, but when he began reading it he discovered the mark of a great genius behind the crude language. He soon declared that the author of the commentary was the greatest of his critics. And that’s what Maimon truly was.

Maimon better than anyone else identified the internal contradictions of Kantian philosophy, and clearly set them out in a way which greatly influenced the German Idealists. He was like Schulze an admirer of both Kant and Hume, who embraced the skepticism in Kant’s first Critique and believed that Kant himself eventually strayed into dogmatism. Maimon’s greatest insight was that Kant’s system had an insurmountable issue built directly into it; Kant’s bifurcation of cognition into both sensible and conceptual components, the understanding and sensibility. Maimon believed that the failure of the Transcendental Deduction, and consequently the failure to establish an empirical realism which justified the PSR, was because of this bifurcation. The entire challenge of the deduction was to explain how a priori concepts apply to a posteriori sensible intuitions, or in other words, how the laws of the Understanding could apply to the content of Sensibility when the two faculties were as heterogeneous as Descartes’ Thought and Extension. Maimon believed that even if Kant's arguments were solid, even if he could demonstrate that these principles are necessary for possible experience of objects in general, the Humean challenge still remained; nothing in sense perception indicates that it is subject to a priori concepts. He makes a series of skeptical arguments against the claims of the Analytic, each blocking off another escape route from Kant.

The second great addition of Maimon was to suggest a possible solution for the dilemmas facing Critical philosophy; a return to the metaphysical tradition Kant had consigned to the Tartarus of ‘Dogmatism’. Maimon was greatly influenced by the Leibnizian-Wolffian philosophy which had previously dominated much of Germany, and still had many adherents in isolated pockets, stranded amidst the Kantian tide. Two of the biggest problems facing Kantian Idealism were the issue of things-in-themselves, and the divide between the Understanding and Sensibility which made justifying a priori concepts, and hence the PSR, difficult. The solution Maimon suggests, and which the later Idealists would adopt, is to simply do away with sensibility and things-in-themselves. Or in other words, to return to the Leibnizian rationalist epistemology where all objects of knowledge are concepts.

Maimon argues that things-in-themselves aren’t actually all that important from an epistemological standpoint. All they do is add an X to which objects of knowledge are referred, and which would hypothetically explain why a particular representation appeared to the subject and not another. But Maimon believed this is a shallow contribution, for the question could still be asked of why a particular thing-in-itself produces a particular representation and not others? A reason for why we experience particular representations is still lacking. And if we get rid of things-in-themselves, we get rid of noumenal affection, and now the whole role of sensibility, as the passive recipient of noumenal affection, is done away with as well! All that remains is to explain why we experience certain representations as voluntary (i.e. imagining a beautiful sunset) and involuntary (i.e. perceiving a beautiful sunset).

But Maimon does not stop here, he doesn’t believe we could stop at rehabilitating just Leibnizian epistemology; we also have to reintroduce an ancient idea from Western metaphysics; that of an infinite Understanding. With Sensibility gone, the Understanding must now supply both the form and content of experience; it must both know its objects and create them. Kant actually himself references this possibility in the Critique when he discusses the passivity of sensibility, and compares it with the possibility of an active sensibility, which he relates to God; something which knows things-in-themselves because its knowing are the things very existence. This idea of an infinite understanding underneath our finite understanding is simply a reintroduction of how Spinoza and Leibniz explain the possibility of knowledge. There would be problems with this answer; why don’t we feel like the originators of our representations? How could the entire content of experience be essentially rational in content? It would fall to the Idealists to try and answer these challenges, beginning with Fichte.

Maimon would die from his alcoholism, leaving behind a life of misery lived entirely in service of wisdom, but his influence was profound. What is Critical philosophy if we add in Maimon’s solutions? Spinoza as Idealism. An immanent philosophy which reduces everything to the activity of an infinite Understanding which is the source of cognition, the return to the analytic a priori and purely conceptual nature of all knowledge and experience, the unlimited application of the PSR upon an infinitely rational world! This is how you go in mere decades from Kant’s first Critique to Hegel’s famous declaration:

The rational is real, and the real is rational

This is the birth of German Idealism from Kantian Skepticism.

The New Dogmatism - The German Idealists

“But it is certain that each and every article of faith brings about decisive ruin for philosophy, be such articles openly and unashamedly introduced into philosophy, as happened with scholasticism, or smuggled in through circular reasoning, false axioms, fabricated inner sources of cognition, consciousnesses of God, pseudo-proofs, high-sounding phrases, and absolute nonsense, as is customary in our time; for they render impossible the clear, impartial, purely objective comprehension of the world and our existence, this first condition of all search for truth.”

“In consequence of Kant’s criticism of all speculative theology, almost all the philosophizers in Germany cast themselves back on to Spinoza, so that the whole series of unsuccessful attempts known by the name of post-Kantian philosophy is simply Spinozism tastelessly got up, veiled in all kinds of unintelligible language, and otherwise twisted and distorted.”

Schopenhauer, Parerga

“Jacobi’s famous argument against the thing-in-itself has to be understood in the light of his general critique of Kant. Jacobi regards the thing-in-itself as Kant’s final, desperate measure to prevent his philosophy from collapsing into nihilism. If this expedient fails—and it does of necessity, Jacobi argues—then Kant has to admit that he reduces all reality to the contents of our consciousness. It was the sad destiny of Fichte, Jacobi says, to develop Kant’s philosophy in just this direction. Fichte rid Kant’s philosophy of the thing-in-itself; but in doing so he revealed its true tendency and inner spirit: nihilism.”

Beiser, Fate of Reason

When Reinhold was ousted, the man who replaced him at Jena was Johann Gottlieb Fichte. A intelligent young Kantian and former Spinozist who had impressed Kant with his work, he would be the first figure of our story since Kant to create a systematic enduring philosophy. This philosophy however would become the greatest proof of Jacobi’s insight; as Fichte’s combination of Kantian skepticism towards everything not determined by the subject with Spinozist uber-rationalism created a philosophy which teetered on the edge of nothingness itself. Fichte’s philosophy set the tone of the Idealist era of post-Kantian philosophy, and his successors Schelling and Hegel were both attempts to continue the path announced by Maimon and attempted by Fichte without slipping into skepticism, acosmism, and nihilism. But that story will be continued later.

Once more I must humbly thank you, dear reader, to have made it this far. I hope that you have found this autistic shit as interesting as I do. Much more could have been said about each of the figures I discussed, but this post is already running somewhat long. What was the culmination of the Pantheism controversy? The Kantian answer to Spinoza took only a decade to become Spinozism itself. Schopenhauer could not be more on the mark when he declared post-Kantian philosophy simply “Spinozism tastelessly got up.” We will be taking a brief break next post to discuss the greatest German of the era, Goethe, but when we return to our storyline, it will be to watch how the Idealists combined Spinoza and Kant to create Rationalist philosophies wearing Critical skinsuits. Against these new dogmatists, Schopenhauer remained the defender and ardent supporter of Sensibility against the logocentric tide. Once again if you wish to learn more about the period covered in this post, I cannot recommend Beiser’s Fate of Reason enough. Until next time!