Franks_Transcendental Arguments Reason and Scepticism

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7Transcendental Arguments, Reason, and

Scepticism: Contemporary Debates and theOrigins of Post-Kantianism

PAUL FRANKS

Why have transcendental arguments attracted so much interest? One reason,I believe, is the fact that they combine present philosophical fruitfulnesswith the promise to revitalize the philosophical past. For many, the com-bination is exemplified by the intimate connection between Strawson'sdescriptive metaphysics and his powerful rereading of Kant. I For manyreaders of Strawson, this combination suggested a way of vindicating the


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112 Paul Franksrevitalize the past without running the risk of anachronism. And thedanger of anachronistic history of philosophy is not solely the danger ofinaccurate history, for philosophy's interest in its history is not solelyhistorical. In the attempt to understand an alien past by overcoming thepresent, we can discover not only new answers to familiar questions, butalso new possibilities for philosophical questioning. Anachronism pre-cludes such discoveries.

Although current usage of the term 'transcendental arguments' appears tobe recent," there is no need to use it anachronistically. Ifwielded with care, itcan both shed light on the origins of post-Kantian Idealism and open newcontemporary prospects. But this will require an investigation of how thepost-Kantians themselves conceived of their philosophical methods andhopes. It will also require a frank confrontation with precisely those aspectsof their thinking that seem unpalatable to contemporary sensibilities.

The well-known, if not therefore well-understood, post-Kantian projectsof Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel originated in a series of subsequentlyforgotten controversies about the nature and relation to scepticism ofKant's transcendental method. During the 1790S, Kantians were lessconcerned with rationalist opponents, than with those who thought thatKant had failed to refute, or had even succeeded in radicalizing andvindicating, Hume's scepticism. Here I propose to examine one strand ofthese controversies: Reinhold's attempt to systematize Kant's philosophyby transforming it into a single transcendental argument; the scepticalcriticism of Reinhold's project by Schulze; and some ways in which Fichte'sproject was shaped by his understanding of the vulnerability to scepticismof transcendental argument as conceived by Reinhold. Among the pointsemerging from this examination are the following. First, Schulze's criti-cisms of Reinhold anticipate, mutatis mutandis, recent criticisms of trans-cendental argument as conceived by Strawson. Second, some students ofReinhold responded to these criticisms in ways that seem similar to somecontemporary responses. Yet, third, this was notably not the path taken byFichte, and subsequently (although they lie beyond the purview of thispaper) by Schelling and Hegel. It would therefore be anachronistic to readthese post-Kantian Idealists as if they did take a contemporary path, and itis historically and philosophically important to understand why they didnot, what may be learned from this dividing of the ways, and how thesedivided ways are both different and similar.

4 The earliest instance of current usage Ihave found is in Austin (I96I: 3), in a papergiven in I939. Since Austin does not give the impression of introducing a usage, it is likelythat earlier instances are to be found. As David Bellpointed out in discussion, Kant (I998a:A62 7/B6 55) , uses the term, but he uses it to signify an argument that transcends the limitsof the proper employment of the understanding, hence an argument tha t is not a legitimatepart of transcendental philosophy.

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 113I. SOME FEATURES OF TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS

What are transcendental arguments? I can see little point in offering adefinition that, by fiat, legitimizes some contenders while delegitimizingothers. And I say this, not because there are no pretenders who do notdeserve the title, but because it is more illuminating to regard the questionof transcendental arguments as the field for a contest about what isphilosophically essential in Kant's revolution. A definition might suggestthat there is no room for dispute, or might presume to decide issues whosedetailed contestation is philosophically useful, or even unavoidable.If the term 'transcendental arguments' is to be used without prejudgingcontentious issues, then 'argument' will have to be construed generously.Only on a particular interpretation or range of interpretations musttranscendental arguments be inferences of a special form. Not everyphilosophical strategy is perspicuously portrayed as a set of premissesfrom which a conclusion is to follow. Milton was not misusing theEnglish language when he prefaced Paradise Lost with an account ofits argument.If philosophy begins in wonder, transcendental philosophy begins withwonder that takes the form of a characteristic question: 'How is Xpossible?', construed as 'What are the necessary conditions for the possi-bility of X?' Making no claim to exhaustiveness, I will mark some featuresof this question that provide occasion for fateful divisions among thosewho conceive of transcendental arguments in divergent ways. And I willsound some cautionary notes about dark places where anachronisms areapt to lurk.1An internal relation to scepticism. Transcendental philosophy learns

to ask its question from scepticism, but the question is not asked bytranscendental philosophy in the tone of scepticism. Whereas scepticismseems to itself to have discovered that we cannot be certain that X ispossible, transcendental philosophy takes it that X is possible or evenactual, but has learned from scepticism that there is a pressing questionas to how this can be the case, and that an answer to the question wouldprovide philosophical insight. This change of tone implies a complexity ofrelationship. Whereas transcendental philosophy depends upon a certainencounter with scepticism in order to raise its question, it will need tocontest scepticism's understanding of its own significance-to bring outwhat transcendental philosophy regards as the truth of scepticism. Andthis contestation is understood differently by those who regard the point oftranscendental arguments either as the direct refutation of scepticism, oras the indirect undermining of scepticism's claim to be taken at face valueas a challenge to our ordinary commitments. An argument that begins withsome premiss shared by the sceptic is not the only possible response to


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114 Paul Franksscepticism, although there has been a temptation to think so, both inKant's day and in our own.

The relation to scepticism IS a prominent tOpIC both of eighteenth-century debates about Kant and Reinhold, and of twentieth-centurydebates about Strawson and others. As I will argue, there are significantparallels between the debates, but also important differences in theirpresuppositions. Although Fichte's response to sceptical objections totranscendental argument is very different from contemporary responses,his recognition of the linkage between the nature of transcendental philo-sophy and scepticism about other minds may be suggestive for contem-porary philosophy as well.

2. The choice of the conditioned. A site for disagreement, although toorarely for discussion, is marked by the variable in 'How is X possible?' Itmakes an enormous difference whether one is concerned with necessaryconditions for the possibility of experience, or of consciousness, or ofmeaningful discourse, and each of these terms is open to various con-struals. As early as 1785, Johann Schultz pointed out that Kant under-stood experience differently from Hume, so a direct engagement betweenthem was harder to achieve than might be imagined.I Fichte's concern withthe conditions of consciousness, and specifically of its origins, marks afateful turn, and his conception of consciousness must be carefullycompared and contrasted with that of Husserl. Although Strawson,like Kant, speaks of experience, his conception of the task of transcen-dental arguments is coloured by a post-Fregean interest in linguisticintelligibility, and his interpretation of Kant as proposing possible experi-ence as a principle of significance distorts essential features of Kant'sown project.f It is crucial to Kant's philosophy that it is possible to thinkobjects through the categories beyond possible experience (that themetaphysical objects thought through the categories retain logical possi-bility), even though the categories lack the objective reality (what isthought through them lacks the real possibility) secured through theconditions of possible experience; for that leaves open the possibilitythat metaphysical claims will secure reali ty in another way, by means of aturn to the practical. 7 If, as in Strawson's view, the use of categoriesbeyond possible experience lacks significance altogether, then Kant's turnto the practical is ruled out. Of course one might choose to rule it out,

5 See Beiser (I98T 206-7). 6 See Rosen (1988).7 The distinction between logical possibili ty (the non-contradictoriness of a concept) and

real poss ibil ity (the connection of a concept to an intuition, through which connection thepossibility of instantiations of the concept may be demonstrated) is central to Kant'sthought and important for what follows. Recent work on Kant's philosophy of mathematicshas done much to clar ify this distinct ion and has put i t to good use. See 'Kant 's Phi losophyof Arithmetic', in Parsons (I983: IIO-49) and Friedman (I992: chs. I and 2).

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 115but it should be clear that this would be a move against Kant, not aninterpretation of his philosophy.

It seems to me of the utmost importance that a first-personal possessivealways attaches itself, implicitly or explicitly, to that in whose necessaryconditions of possibility transcendental philosophy takes an interest.Transcendental arguments seek to investigate the conditions for the pos-sibility of my or our experience or consciousness or meaningful discourse,and thus to explore my possibilities or the possibilities pertaining tocreatures who are like me in relevant respects. This first-personal character,which pertains not only to the subject matter but, on some conceptions, tothe basis on which transcendental philosophy claims access to its subjectmatter, is the source both of its greatest attraction for its admirers and ofits greatest detriment for its detractors. Detractors regard this fact as thecause of a narrow parochialism: at best, transcendental philosophy canlimn our conception of reality, but not reality itself; at worst, it merelyreflects the limited imagination of a particular philosopher or philosophi-cal generation. In contrast, admirers regard transcendental philosophy asattractive because it is an exploration of the philosopher's own capacities,capacities she is thought to be in a special, if not infallible, position to test.This first-personal character of transcendental argument has beenunderthematized in both the eighteenth- and twentieth-century debates,although I would argue that it underlies many of the central disputes. Sincethis paper is intended only as an initial attempt to link those debates, thecentrality of the first-personal character will emerge only gradually, as itemerges in those debates themselves.

3. The nature of the conditions. The conditions of possibility withwhich transcendental philosophy concerns itself may be variously con-strued as causes, as reasons, or as circumstances without which (in factor in logic) something could not arise, or be, or endure. Each of thesealternatives may in turn be variously interpreted and there is frequently afrustrating lack of clarity on this score in both eighteenth- and twentieth-century debates.

Two dangers of anachronism are worth noting here. First, none of theeighteenth century thinkers with whom I am concerned appears to havedoubted that philosophy was to be measured by its ability to meet thesceptical challenge by grounding ordinary claims. Thus, for them, neces-sary conditions of interest to transcendental philosophy are intended toground that which they condition. Disputes centred, not on the need forgrounding, but on the nature of the grounds adduced and on a giventranscendental philosopher's success in delivering the grounds he hadpromised. These eighteenth-century philosophers saw no need to arguefor the claim that transcendental arguments provide grounds; to them,the claim was a direct implication of the notion that philosophy is the


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116 Paul Franksself-knowledge of reason. The Principle of Sufficient Reason (der Satz desGrundes), which demands both that there be a ground for everything andthat we should seek to make those grounds intelligible to us, remainscentral to their understanding of philosophy, and their main crises andcontroversies can be portrayed as concerning the interpretation of thatprinciple. Yet it can by no means be assumed that twentieth-centurytranscendental arguments are concerned with grounding in the sameway. Strawson (1985) explicitly repudiates any intention of groundingordinary beliefs through transcendental philosophy, whose role isexpressed by the motto 'Only connect'v''

What is more, Kant, Reinhold, and Fichte thought that the Principle ofSufficient Reason demanded, not only a ground for everything, but anabsolute or unconditioned ground for all grounds. Transcendental philo-sophy was supposed to show that human reason could satisfy itself byattaining such an absolute, although there was, of course, much disagree-ment about how this was to be done. Again, this followed immediately forthem from the idea that philosophy is an exercise of reason, and thatgrounding is reason's proper function, coupled with the notion that reasoncould only attain genuine satisfaction by discovering a self-grounding orabsolute ground. Today the idea of the absolute has become unpalatable.But no interpretation of post-Kantian idealism can afford to ignore it.Besides, the reasons for its present unfashionableness are none too clear.Have we lost faith in our ability to attain an absolute that would never-theless be nice to have? Or is the very idea incoherent, based on a falseunderstanding of reason? Even if one is critical of a conception on whichreason satisfies itself by tracing a series of grounds back to an ultimatefoundation, one may think that there is something to the idea that thisconception tries to express: the idea of reason reaching satisfaction, ofpeace from philosophical challenge. Much might be gained from a criticalencounter with some of the last philosophers to take the absolute seriously.

The idea that necessary conditions ground what they condition is essen-tial for understanding a distinction that plays a central role in eighteenth-century debates. This is the distinction between progressive and regressivetranscendental arguments-that is, between arguments that proceed fromground to grounded, and arguments that regress from grounded to ground.?

8 Strawson (I985: 2I-3).9 One might disavow the grounding func tion of transcendenta l arguments and yet find

room for a distinction between progressive and regressive arguments, if one is committed toa hie ra rchy of dependence-re la tions termina ting in founda tions tha t are not conce ived asgrounding the claims or capac ities they support . Thus, de spi te his (I 985) disavowal of thegoal of 'wholesale validation', Strawson sometimes views transcendental arguments ascapable of delineating the 'foundations' of our conceptual capacities, for example in(1985: 15), where he appea rs to endorse Wittgenstein's use of the term 'foundat ions' . Such

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 117This emphasis on the grounding function of transcendental philosophy

affected the post-Kantians' understanding of Transcendental Idealism.Whereas some twentieth-century philosophers have understood Transcen-dental Idealism primarily as a modest claim about the limits of our know-ledge, Reinhold and others understood it primarily as the thesis that ourknowledge is ultimately grounded in necessary features of the mind.Indeed, they were made notoriously uncomfortable by the suggestionthat our knowledge is limited in the sense that there are things in them-selves that forever elude us, partly because that conception of the limits ofknowledge can seem in tension with the claim that our knowledge isadequately grounded. They hoped to remove the tension by construingKant's arguments as showing the incoherence of the very notion of thingsin themselves as wholly mind-independent grounds of knowledge.

4. The necessity of the conditional. Transcendental arguments may beparaphrased as conditionals of the form, 'If (the conditioned) then (theconditions)', whose necessity may be construed in a wide variety of sig-nificantly different ways. I will begin by distinguishing two interpretations,underlying what might be called analytic and synthetic conceptions oftranscendental argument."? (a ) On the analytic conception, the condi-tional is analytic in the sense that the conditions are reached by conceptualan endorsement may appear to be in tension with the Humean naturalist's disavowal ofgrounding. But there may be no tension, iffoundational sta tus isconstituted bythe brute factof indispensabi li ty to humans. To show tha t a capac ity re sts upon such foundat ions wouldnot be to validate the capacity, since the foundations are themselves without ground. On thisview, regressive arguments would trace the links from capacities to their foundations, whileprogressive arguments would trace the implications of the foundations. However, Strawson(1997: 237), seems to reassert a cer ta in grounding role for the foundations, since he criticizesKant for regarding them as 'not capable of further explanat ion'. In appa rent confl ic t wi th hisHumean natural ism once again, Strawson's arguments tha t the forms of judgement may bederived from the concept of a discursive understanding and that the spatio- ternporal forms ofintui tion may be derived from the concept of sensible intuit ion bring him close r to the post-Kant ian thought that our forms of judgement and intuit ion are demonstrably the only suchforms possible for rational beings. Again, there is perhaps no real conflict, if it remainsinexplicable that we humans have a discursive understanding requir ing sensible intuition. Butthe inexplicability remains only if it is possible to be rational beings in some other way,perhaps byhaving what Kant calls intellectual intuition. And Straws on (ibid. 239) seems lesswil ling than Kant to place weight on tha t notion. As Putnam (1998) argues, there are long-standing tensions between Strawson's Humean tendency to criticize sceptic ism as idle and hisKantian tendency to criticize sceptic ism as incoherent. Perhaps there are still further tensionsbe tween Straws on's Humean and Kant ian tendenc ies to cri ticize sceptici sm as idle or inco-herent for us humans, and his post-Kantian tendency to regard our fundamental capacitiesas indispensable-hence, to cri ticize sceptici sm as e ither idle or incohe rent, depending onwhat this indispensability amounts to-not only for us but for all rational beings.W It seems impossible to avoid these terms, although they are used in confusingly

different ways. My usage is connected to Kant's distinction between analytic and syntheticjudgements, not to Kant 's distinction between analytic (regressive) and synthetic (progres-sive ) me thods of proof. See Kant (I997a, IV: 277 n.) . Compare with Bennett (I979).


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118 Paul Franksanalysis and the negation of the resulting conditional is a contradiction.The conclusion of such an argument may nevertheless be expressed as asynthetic claim, provided that the premiss (the conditioned) is syntheticand is taken to be true. A transcendental argument of this sort mightbegin, for example, with the synthetic claim that there is experience, andmight proceed by analysis of the concept of the experience to the syntheticconclusion that the analytically necessary conditions of experience areactually fulfilled. II (b ) On the synthetic conception, transcendental argu-ments are alternatives, or supplements, to conceptual analysis and estab-lish conditionals that are the negations, not of contradictions, but ofputative thoughts that are necessarily ruled out in some other way.

The synthetic conception of transcendental arguments sounds myster-ious, but variants of that conception have played an important role in botheighteenth- and twentieth-century debates. I2It helps to recall that, just asKant distinguishes logical from real possibility, he also distinguishes logi-cal from real necessity, and real necessity cannot be grasped throughconceptual analysis. For example, he thinks that the thought of a figureenclosed by two straight lines is non-contradictory, yet nevertheless neces-sarily ruled out of geometry, because it is incompatible with the non-conceptual or intuitional conditions peculiar to human sensibili ty. Whatiswrong with the thought can therefore be discerned neither by analysis ofthe concept of the figure nor by analysis of the concept of sensibility. Andalthough the thought lacks significance for us, Kant is not committed tothe view that it lacks meaningfulness altogether, for it might have signifi-cance for beings whose sensibility is constituted otherwise than our own,and the possibility of such beings cannot be ruled out a priori. Theinsufficiency of conceptual analysis and general logical analysis for geo-metry is linked to the conceptual or logical possibility of minds radicallydifferent from our own. Thus, our capacity for necessary geometricalknowledge depends not only on our capacity for conceptual analysis andgeneral logical inference, but also on the very capacities that we exercise asagents within our specifically human spatio-temporal world. And ourgrasp of those specifically human capacities is synthetic.

II Although analytic arguments of this kind deploy only logical and conceptual orsemantic necessities, they might establish necessities that are irreducible to logical andconceptual or semantic nece ss ity, a s Michael Rosen poin ted ou t in conve rsa tion. For exam-ple, i t might be maintained that 'The re is expe rience' ana lyt ic al ly en ta il s 'The re are nece s-sary causal connect ions among events' , and that causal nece ss ity is i rreduc ible to ana lyt icnecessity. In tha t case, if the re is (in fact) expe rience, then it fol lows wi th analyt ic necessi tytha t the re is (in fact ) causa l nece ss ity tha t i s i rreducib le to analytic necessity.

12 Forster (1989: 9) suggests tha t many contempora ry transcendental a rguments a re infact synthetic , including Strawson's. Wilkerson (1976: ch, 10) t ries to deve lop a synthe ticconcept ion of t ranscendental a rgument , bu t he ul tima te ly admits de feat . Taylor' s (1995)conception appears to be synthetic.

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 119Still, what does Kant's philosophy of geometry have to do with trans-

cendental arguments? There is a connection within Kant's thinking, andsome of his successors have drawn a still closer connection. Like the truthsof geometry, the categorial principles are not analytic, for Kant, butsynthetic a priori. Again this syntheticity is linked to the logical possibilityof minds radically different from our own. The categorial principles arenecessary for beings like us, but we cannot exclude the possibility of beingswith a non-discursive or intuitive understanding, for whom the principleswould not hold and for whom, presumably, the negations of those princi-ples would be meaningful. The categorial principles are not analytic, then,and their negations are not self-contradictory. So their predicate-concepts(for example, the concept of causal determination) cannot be derived fromtheir subject-concepts (for example, the concept of an event) by conceptualanalysis. And so the necessity with which, for example, uncaused eventsare supposed to be excluded from our experience is not analytic necessity.But of course the fact that Kant takes the categorial principles to besynthetic a priori does not by itself imply that a transcendental argumentby which they might be derived is synthetic a priori. One might think thatany such argument will take the form of an analytic conditional, 'If theconditioned is possible, then the categorial principles must apply', such as'If experience is possible, then the causal law must apply', where theconcept of causal determination is derived by conceptual analysis fromthe concept of possible experience. And this may indeed be one way tounderstand Kant's claim that possible experience provides the linkagebetween concepts that enables the principles to be synthetic a priori.'3However, i t is not the only way, and I believe it faces some difficulties. Analternative is to interpret Kant as claiming that it is our first-personalgrasp of our capacities as actual experiencing subjects that enables us tograsp the necessity of the categorial principles, and as being committed tothe view that our grasp of the conditions of the possibility of experiencecannot be expressed as the possession of a concept of possible experience.One reason to think that our grasp of what it is to be an experiencingsubject is not fully discursive may be that Kant appears not to exclude thepossibility of beings who have discursive understandings, like us, but who,unlike us, have non-sensible intellectual intuition. I4To grasp what it is to

'3 See Kant (I998a: A737/B765).'4The thought that Kant does not exclude this possibility is based on a reading that is

likely to be contentious and about which I am myself of two minds. Gram (I98I) arguestha t Kant ( I998a: B308), denies that we humans possess an intellectual intuition thatwould enable the categories to be applied to things in themselves, thus entertaining the(perhaps incomprehensible but not contradic tory) possibili ty that there might be beings withdiscursive understandings and intuitions whose forms, unlike space and time, did notprevent things in themselves from being given and hence conceptualized as such. Such an


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120 Paul Franksbe an experiencing subject would therefore be, not only to possess theconcept of a discursive understanding, but also to be aware that we havesensible intuition, and that our sensibility has the specific non-conceptualform it has. And, as I have argued, our grasp of the form of our sensibilityis, for Kant, the grasp of synthetic necessities. So there is some reason tothink that Kant himself may regard as synthetic, not only the premisses oftranscendental arguments, but also transcendental conditionals of the form'If the conditioned is possible, then the necessary conditions must obtain.'

Even if one agrees that Kant may have thought that transcendentalarguments aspire to synthetic necessity, one may still object that Kantinsisted on the distinction between the nature of those arguments andthe nature of mathematical arguments, which involve construction in pureintuition. At this point, if not before, a parting of the ways becomesunavoidable, for Fichte and Schelling developed the view that transcenden-tal philosophy was far more like mathematics than Kant had allowed. Inparticular, they argued that the right way to think of our first-personal andnot fully discursive grasp of what it is to be actual experiencing subjects isas a kind of intellectual intuition, in which philosophical concepts canindeed be constructed. In this paper I can neither fully motivate this movenor can I explain why they did not take themselves to be in conflict withKant's denial that we humans have intellectual intuition. But I hope tohave shown that synthetic conceptions of transcendental philosophy arenot to be dismissed out of hand as wholly un-Kantian.

The point of the preceding remarks is to prepare the ground for a closeexamination of the species of transcendental argument actually consideredby the first post-Kantians, and to avoid an anachronistic imposition ofcontemporary assumptions. Caution is called for when Taylor begins tointerpret Hegel with the stipulation, 'By "transcendental argument" I meanarguments that start from some putatively undeniable facet of our experi-ence in order to conclude that this experience must have certain featuresor be of a certain type, for otherwise this undeniable facet could not be', r 5or when Neuhouser suggests that 'the proof Fichte proposes [in his 1793int el lectua l intu iti on would be quite d if ferent , as Gram points ou t, f rom the inte llectua lintuit ion denied to us humans elsewhere, e .g. B145, for tha t i s an intuit ion tha t creates i tsobjects by thinking them and therefore has no need for the categories of a discursiveunderstanding at a ll . A lthough Gram's read ing seems to me to f it Kant' s words, it c reatesthe need not only for the distinction of several species of intellectual intuition, as Gramreal izes, but a lso fo r an accoun t, which Gram does not prov ide , of a fo rm of intuit ion tha t is ,a t the same time, an inte llig ibl e yet perhaps non-conceptual form of things in themselves. I tmay ult imate ly be more at trac tive to read B308 dif ferent ly than to a ttempt to develop suchan account . I am gratefu l to Michael Friedman for i lluminat ing discussion of this difficultpassage, during which he impressed upon me the challenges facing anyone who acceptsGram's reading.

I5 Taylor (1972: lSI).

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 121review of Gebhard) is intended as a transcendental argument similar toKant's mode of argumentation in the Critique of Pure Reason'. r6 Thesesuggestions can be fruitful, but only if anachronisms are avoided and ifdistinctions are drawn between competing views of transcendentalmethod. Without such caution, there is little hope of a genuine debateabout the philosophical significance of post-Kantian Idealism.

II. THE GRUNDSATZ OF ALL PHILOSOPHY, OR THE PREMISSOF REINHOLD'S TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

When the great debates about Kant's transcendental method occurred inthe 1790S, Karl Leonhard Reinhold was closely identified with Kant, asperhaps his pre-eminent spokesperson. So close was the identification thatGottlob Ernst Schulze, in Aenesidemus, I7 his sceptical tour de force,seemed to see no fundamental distinction between Kant's method andthat of Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie. Yet the Elementarphilosophie,first proposed in Reinhold (1789), was the first genuinely post-Kantianproject. To be sure, Reinhold (1790-2), first published in instalments inthe Teutsche Merkur from August 1786, had made Kant a householdname, famous far beyond the Critique of Pure Reason's original audience.But Reinhold was no mere popularizer. In 1789 he proposed to system-atize Kant's philosophy by grounding it in a Grundsatz of all philosophy,from which the forms of intuition, the categories, the moral law, and allthe other Kantian notions were to be derived. I8 And it was this proposal,along with the sceptical responses it stimulated, that led to significantrevisions of these Kantian notions, not only by Reinhold himself, but alsoby Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.

So we cannot understand the debates of the 1790S without understand-ing Reinhold's conception of transcendental argument or, rather, Reinhold'sconception of the critical philosophy as a single analytic transcendentalargument that begins with an absolute first principle. If it seems to usbizarre that such a project should have been conflated with Kant's, then weshould recall that Kant calls upon others to help him complete the task ofsetting philosophy on the sure path of a science, that he understandsscience to be systematic knowledge satisfying reason's demand for anunconditioned to complete its chains of conditions or grounds, and that

I6 Neuhouser (1990: 34).I7 Schulze (1792, 1911) . Salomon Mairnon contr ibuted a di stinc t scepti ca l response to

Kant and la ter to Reinhold, wi th which I sha ll not deal here . See Beiser (1987: ch . 10) , andFranks (1998) . The impl ications of Maimon 's scepti cism for Fichte' s methodo logy were a tleast as significant as those of Schulze's scept icism, and they deserve discussion elsewhere.

I8 See Reinho ld (1789) . On Reinhold, see Beiser (1988: ch. 8) .


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122 Paul Frankshe regards rootedness in a single principle as the mark of systematiccompleteness. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant both divides philoso-phy and demands its ultimate reunification:Now the legislation of human reason (philosophy) has two objects, nature andfreedom, and thus contains the natural law aswell as the moral law, init ial ly in twoseparate systems, but ult imately in a single philosophical system. I9In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, he explicitly makes theprovision of a single principle of philosophy into a desideratum of philo-sophy's completeness:I require that the critique of a pure practical reason, if it is to be carried throughcompletely, be able at the same time to present the unity of practical with specu-lative reason in a common principle, since there can, in the end, be only one andthe same reason which must be dist inguished merely in i ts application.?"And, in the Critique of Pract ical Reason, he announces that, although hehas not yet found that one principle, its discovery may be not only hopedfor but expected:For someone who has been able to convince himself of the proposit ions presentedin the Analyt ic such comparisons wil l be grati fying; for they right ly occasion theexpectation of perhaps being able some day to attain insight into the unity of thewhole pure rational faculty (theoretical as well as practical) and to derive e:rery-thing from one principle-the undeniable need of human reason, which findscomplete satisfaction only in a complete systematic unity of its cognitions.t 'Small wonder, then, that Reinhold proposed to carry out that derivationfrom one principle, as the next great task of philosophy.

However, Reinhold differs fatefully from Kant on at least two counts.First , Reinhold thinks that the discovery of the Grundsatz will allow himto justify some of the aspects of Kant's philosophy against its opponents,such as the table of the categories (which he agrees is, at present, unjus-tified by its association with the logical table of judgements) and theconcept of possible experience (which he agrees is, at present, a petitioprincipii against Hume's scepticism, assuming as Kant does that experi-ence is law-governed). Kant does not think that these aspects of hisphilosophy stand in need of justification and therefore does not look forsuch justification from the discovery of the Grundsatz.. Second, Kant seemsto suggest in the passages cited above that the looked-for Grundsatz will'9 Kant (I998a: A840/B868). 20 Kant (I997b, IV: 39I) .2I Kant (I998b, V: 90-I). Read within the context of Kant's thought, not within the

context of post -Kant ian deve lopments, the se passages should lead one to conside r the role ofthe highest good within Kant's philosophy. Such considerations might also lead one tosuspect that Kant's conception of systematicity is quite different from the conceptions ofhis successors, a suspicion that deserves development elsewhere .

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 123itself be practical in nature, for that Grundsatz must articulate the ulti-mate end, which is 'nothing other than the entire vocation of humanbeings, and the philosophy of it is called moral philosophy. ,22 ButReinhold's Grundsatz is rooted in Kant's theoretical philosophy, moreparticularly in the principle of the unity of apperception, perhaps follow-ing Kant's declaration that:The synthetic proposi tion, that every different empirical consciousness must becombined into a single self-consciousness, is the absolutely first and syntheticpr inciple of our thinking in general. 23

Fichte, however, will return to Kant's hint that the Grundsatz has somespecial connection with practical philosophy. For him, the first principle ofour thought in general must itself be grounded in a higher principle ofspontaneity-most familiar in its derivative form as the moral law-if theunification of theoretical and practical philosophy is to be possible with-out the obliteration of freedom.t"

Reinhold insists that, in order to end the series of conditions known tophilosophy, the Grundsatz cannot merely fail to have any condition orground outside itself, for then it and philosophy as a whole would be merelyarbitrary or groundless; rather, the Grundsatz must be self-grounding.Although he is not always careful to distinguish them, Reinhold seemsto have three different sorts of self-grounding in mind. First, the Grundsatzmust be 'self-explanatory': it (or rather its subject matter) must provideitself with its own antic ground, the reason why it is the way it is. Second,the Grundsatz must be self-evident: it must provide itself with its ownepistemic ground or reason for being believed, without relying inferentiallyon the evidence of some other truth. Third, the Grundsatz must be 'self-determining': it must provide its own semantic ground or introduce itsown terms clearly and unequivocally, without relying on prior definitions.

It is important to note that Reinhold conceives of the point of groundingall philosophy in the Grundsatz as the securing of universal validity(Allgemeingultigkeit) for philosophy. Thus the special character of the truthof transcendental philosophy's theses lies not solely in their being univer-sally and necessarily true of the objects they characterize, but rather intheir being a priori valid for all finite rational beings like us. Furthermore,no thesis can be universally valid if it is not universally acknowledged asH Kant (T998a: A840/B868). ~3 Ibid. ATT7 n.2.4 Fich te gradua lly freed himse lf from Reinhold' s picture of tr anscendental a rgument ,

whose t race s can s til l be seen inConcerning the Concept of the Wissenschafts lehre, in Fichte(I988), and inFoundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, in Fichte (I982). Both the initialdivision of theore tical and prac tica l phi losophy, and the idea of the fi rs t princ iple a s a kind ofpremiss are explicitly rejected in Fichte (I992) and in the various works associated withFichte's second Jena ve rsion of his sys tem. I discuss Fichte' s development in Franks (I997).


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124 Paul Franksvalid (allgemeingeltend). So 'the author must try to guarantee the universalvalidity of his theory by presupposing nothing at all to be universally validwhich is not actually universally acknowledged.Y? Reinhold's shift ofemphasis, from philosophy's relation to its subject matter, to philosophy'srelation to its audience, is of great importance, and that importance willonly begin to emerge when Fichte and others are pressed to separate theclaim to universal validity from the claim to universal acknowledgement.

Although he has set himself a daunting task, Reinhold insists that theGrundsatz expresses 'an actual fact [Tatsache],26-a fact, in short, that isself-explanatory, self-evident, and unequivocally determines its own pro-positional expression. Since the Grundsatz is objectively real, we mayargue regressively to the reality of what it entails, of all of the conditionsthat are the objects of philosophical knowledge.

The Grundsatz is nothing other, Reinhold claims, than the highestPrinciple of Consciousness itself: 'that in consciousness representation isdistinguished through the subject from both object and subject and isre ferred to bothJ'" And the fact that the Principle of Consciousnessexpresses is the fact of consciousness . However, we encounter seriousdifficulties when we try to explain what this fact is.

'Fact(s) of consciousness' (Tatsache(n) des Bewusstseins) was one of thecatchphrases of the 1780s and 1790S. The phrase has led to much con-fusion and deserves full investigation elsewhere,28 but it suffices to notehere that Johann Joachim Spalding, the Berlin Enlightenment theologian,coined the term Tatsache in 1756, for his translation of Butler (1740), inwhich the term 'matter of fact' is frequently employed. There Butlerappears to be invoking the legal notion of that which is accepted on thebasis of testimony in order to validate miracles as witnessed by theapostles. It may also be relevant that Boyle had invoked the same notionto validate the reported results of experiments performed in the labora-tory.29 In any event, thanks to Spalding's translation of Butler, Tatsachenwere frequently invoked in the theological controversies of the 1760sabout the relevance of history to faith. By the 1790S, philosophers werealso appealing to Tatsachen, not of history but rather of consciousness, asthe bearers of a kind of evidence that was neither deductive nor inductivebut nevertheless valid, and that could perhaps playa role in responding toscepticism. These appeals take various forms. Sometimes the Tatsachendes Bewusstseins just are the claims doubted by scepticism, and thedogmatic insistence upon those claims against scepticism owes more toScottish Common Sense philosophy than to Kant. For Reinhold, however,

25 Reinhold (1789: 66). 26 Reinhold (1791: 77; 1985: 70).27 Reinhold (1985: 70). 28 See Franks (1997) for some further details.29 See Shapin and Schaffer (1985: ch. 2, esp. 55-60).

The Origins of Post-Kant ianism 125what is important is the fact of consciousness itself, which is supposed tobe the one fact no sceptic can deny and which will turn out, in the courseof an extended transcendental argument, to have necessary conditionsincompatible with the sceptic's doubts.

However, Reinhold's project is riddled with ambiguities that alreadyinfect his use of the phrase 'fact of consciousness'. First, 'fact' isambiguous. In the eighteenth century, both 'Tatsache' and 'matter offact' still retained the sense of an act ('Tat', 'fact') whose performancecould be relevantly demonstrated; a Tatsache had not yet hardened intoa proposition's being true or into the obtaining of a state of affairs.Nowadays it can be hard to hear the sense of activity in these familiarterms. But Tat is still visible in Tatsache and, although we are apt toforget that 'fact' is derived from the Latin 'facere' ('to do'), we stillspeak, for example, of accomplices before or after the fact, where wemean by 'fact' the criminal deed. When Reinhold spoke of the fact ofconsciousness, this process of reification was already underway. Theresult is that in his usage 'fact' is ambiguous because it refers both toan act of determining and to the determination produced by that act.The ambiguity is compounded because the genitive 'of ' can be construedeither as an objective genitive ( 'the fact belonging to consciousness', thatis, 'the fact appearing in consciousness') or as an explicative genitive ('thefact of there being consciousness', that is, 'the fact constitutive of con-sciousness') .

Consequently, ' the fact of consciousness' can be construed in four ways:(a ) 'the determining act belonging to consciousness'; (b ) 'the determiningact constitutive of consciousness'; (c ) 'the determination appearing inconsciousness'; and (d ) 'the determination constitutive of consciousness'.

Reinhold himself seems to construe the phrase as both (b ) and (c). Heconstrues the phrase as (b ) when he writes:The concept of representation does not merely stand as a simple concept, at theground of the principle of consciousness; it is also determined by what theprinciple expresses, viz., the actual facts of consciousness. And inasmuch as it isso determined, it constitutes (when expressed in words) the defin ition o f repre-sentation. It is the scientific concept of representation, and the task of the theory ofthe faculty of representation is to exhaust its content. The original, unexplainableand simple concept of representation precedes consciousness; it stands at itsground. In contrast, the original but complex and explainable concept of thesame follows from consciousness, and is determined by the facts that make upthe latter , i .e. the distinguishing of the representation which is as such unexplain-able from the object and subject, and its being referred to them, as well as throughthe proposition expressing these facts.I"

30

Reinhold (1791: 77--8; 198s: 70).


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Paul FranksHere 'the actual facts of consciousness' are the acts of distinguishing andreferring that 'make up', that is, constitute consciousness. Those 'facts'or acts determine 'the original, unexplainable and simple concept ofrepresentation' that 'precedes consciousness' and 'stands at its ground. 'In other words, 'the ... facts of consciousness' are acts that determinethe ground of consciousness. Thus Reinhold construes 'fact of conscious-ness' as 'act determining consciousness' when he is discussing the self-explanatoriness or ontically self-grounding nature of the Principle ofConsciousness.

On the other hand, Reinhold construes 'fact of consciousness' as (c )when he writes:The concept of representat ion, which the science of the faculty of representation isto determine analytically, must have already been synthetically determined to thisend. So determined-independently of al l phi losophizing, for the latter depends onthis original determinateness for its correctness-the concept of representat ioncan only be drawn from the CONSC10USNESS of an actual fact. This fact alone, quafact, must ground the foundation of the Philosophy of the Elements-for other-wise the foundation cannot rest, without circularity, on any philosophicallydemonstrable proposition. It is not through any inference of reason that weknow that in consc iousness representation is distinguished through the subjectfrom both object and subject and is referred to both, but through simple reflectionupon the actual fact of consciousness, that is, by ordering together what is presentin it. ' IHere 'the actual fact of consciousness' is the determination belonging toconsciousness, or the determination of which we are conscious, or thedetermination of consciousness. Of course, there are many determinationsof consciousness, many facts, in this sense, of which we are conscious. But,by referring to the fact of consciousness, Reinhold seems to intend toindicate that determination of consciousness of which we are consciousinsofar as we are conscious of anything, that is, the most general deter-mination of consciousness or the discernible property of any state ofconsciousness whatsoever. He is claiming, then, that what the Principleof Consciousness expresses can be known immediately or non-inferentially-can simply be seen-in any state of consciousness. Thus Reinhold con-strues 'fact of consciousness' as 'determination of consciousness' when heis discussing the self-evidence or epistemically self-grounding nature of thePrinciple of Consciousness.

Given these two features of the Principle of Consciousness, Reinholdappears to have the elements of a transcendental argument that will satisfyreason's demand for systematicity. Because the Principle of Consciousnessis putatively self-explanatory, it is a suitable candidate for the starting

The Origins of Post-Kantianism I27point of the sort of total explanation demanded by reason, an explanationthat may ultimately include the forms of intuition, the pure concepts of theunderstanding, and the various other determinations of consciousnessdiscussed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. And because thePrinciple of Consciousness is putatively self-evident, it follows that ifsuch an explanation were developed, it would be undeniable by even themost recalcitrant opponent of Kant, whether Wolffian rationalist orHumean sceptic.

But the problem is, as we shall see, that the Principle of Consciousnesscannot be both self-explanatory and self-evident in these senses. If thePrinciple of Consciousness expresses the act determining consciousnessand is therefore self-explanatory, then it cannot also express the mostgeneral determination of consciousness and therefore be self-evident,without generating an infinite regress. Furthermore, if the Principle ofConsciousness can be construed in two incompatible ways, then it is notself-determining either. In short, the Principle of Consciousness is not theGrundsatz, The source of the problem, as Fichte intimates in his review ofAenesidemus, is that Reinhold does not distinguish clearly between thetranscendental and the empirical, between the conditions of consciousnessinvestigated by the philosopher and that which is available to the non-philosophizing subject within ordinary acts of consciousness. Instead ofarriving at the Principle during a properly transcendental investigation ofthe conditions of consciousness, Reinhold arrives at it through 'empiricalself-observation'


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128 Paul Franksad infinitum. On this view, subject and object are distinct from each other in everystate of consciousness, and ... this is the reason why ... consciousness cannot beaccounted for in this manner.P:'That is to say, if (as Reinhold thinks) object-awareness is always condi-tioned by self-awareness, and if (as the Principle of Consciousness asserts)every awareness-including self-awareness-involves the distinction of arepresentation from and its relation to a subject, then the self-awarenessconditioning any object-awareness would itself require representation ofanother subject distinguished from and related to the self, and awarenessof that subject would require representation of another subject, and so onad infinitum.34

In the terms I have established, the objection can be formulated asfollows. The Principle of Consciousness is supposed to be ontically self-grounding because it expresses facts or acts-for example the distinguish-ing between representation and subject and the reference of representat ionto subject-that determine consciousness, and because it also expresses afact or universal determination of consciousness that is itself determinedby these acts. And the Principle of Consciousness is supposed to beepistemically self-grounding because the facts or acts it expresses arenon-inferential ly discernible in any particular determination of conscious-ness whatsoever. But if the consciousness-determining acts of dist inguish-ing representation and subject and referring representation to subject arethemselves determinations of consciousness, then they must themselvesexhibit the most universal determination of consciousness, namely thatexpressed by the Principle of Consciousness itself. And then the awarenessof myself involved in the acts of distinguishing representation from myselfand referring representation to myself must itself involve prior acts ofdistinguishing and referring to myself, must involve prior self-awareness.And that self-awareness must once again involve prior acts of distinguish-ing and referring to myself, must involve prior self-awareness-and so onad infinitum. So, if the consciousness-determining acts are themselvesdeterminations of consciousness, then Reinhold's Principle of Conscious-ness generates an infinite regress and, far from explaining consciousness,the Principle of Consciousness seems to make it altogether impossible.But if the consciousness-determining acts are not themselves determina-tions of consciousness, then Reinhold's Principle of Consciousness is notself-explanatory, self-evident, and self-determining. So Reinhold's Principleof Consciousness is not the Grundsatz by the standards he himselfestablished.Here lies an extremely important crossroads. For the ambiguity of the

33 Fichte (1964- : IV, 2, 30; 1992: I l2-I3) . See Neuhouser (1990: 73).34 See ihid. 71--2.

The Origins of Posi-Kantianism 129Principle of Consciousness is also an ambiguity in Reinhold's methodwhich is progressive if one considers the acts as the ground of the deter-minacy of consciousness, and regressive if one considers them to be thedeterminations of consciousness that stand in need of grounding. Eitherone may give up self-explanatoriness and regard the fact of consciousness.as the self-e~ident determination of consciousness, from which one mayargue regressively to necessary conditions that scepticism will no longer beable to doubt. Or one may give up self-evidence and regard the fact ofconsciousI:ess as the self-explanatory act determining consciousness, onwhose baSIS one may seek an absolute grounding of the necessary featuresof the mind's engagement with the world, by progressively deriving them asnecessary conditions of that act.The former path was chosen by some of Reinhold's students and is

notably described by Friedrich Immanuel Niethamrner in 'Of the Claims ofthe Common Understanding on Philosophy', the introductory essay in thefirst volume of the Philosophisches Journal that he founded in Jena in1795.35 Pessimistic, thanks to the objections of scepticism, about theproject of seeking an absolute first principle.I" Niethammer instead pro-poses to return to what he takes to be the method of the Critique of PureReason: not a progressive descent 'from an a priori immediately certainproposition as something in itself unconditioned', but rather a regressiveascent 'from something conditioned in the series of conditions', namelyfrom 'the universal chief Factum that experience is, as a conditioned, forwhich must be presupposed that which is its necessary condition in the

bi '37 Th' Fsu jeer. IS actum or Tatsache is not absolute or self-explanatory. Infact, according to Niethammer, it is given a posteriori! Yet, it 'is present tous at every moment of consciousness and can therefore certainly not bedenied by anyone. As a Tatsache it is not capable of any further proof, butas a Tatsache accompanying all consciousness, it also does not require anyfurther proof .... Here no objection remains for scepticism; what cannotbe p~ilosophically proven also cannot be philosophically doubted, and thesceptic who wants to contest that Fakium can do nothing further thandirectly deny it, and is consequently no dangerous opponent, at least withrespect to this foundation of philosophy." 8 This sort of transcendentalargument should sound familiar, for it is similar to the kind of trans-cendental argument that Taylor and Neuhouser claim to find in post-Kantian Idealism. Yet both Fichte and Schelling, who knew Niethammer

35 Niethammer (1795: 1-45).36 Niethamrner was not alone, as is demonstrated by the correspondence between him,

Baron von Herbert and Johann Benjamin Erhard. See Niethammer (1995: esp. letters II,I2;/nd 18), and Henrich, (1997: esp. 108-14). 37 Niethammer (1795: 23-4).Ibid. 25.


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13 Paul Frankswell,39 rejected this response to the problems facing Reinhold's project.They chose progression from an absolute or self-explanatory ground overregression from a self-evident feature of consciousness.

There are various reasons for worrying about transcendental argument asconceived by Niethammer. Mairnon, Reinhold, and others had alreadyargued that a Humean sceptic would not and should not accept Kant'sconception of experience, so there was already reason to think that theformulation of the self-evident and universally acknowledged premisswould be considerably more difficult than Niethammer seemed to recog-nize. Niethammer himself was concerned about the nature of the inferencefrom the premiss to its necessary conditions because of other scepticalobjections that had been raised (which will be discussed later). But oneimportant reason for the rejection of this route by Fichte and others was thatNiethammer's strategy abandoned all hope of an absolute grounding forphilosophy in the face of problems encountered by Reinhold's Principle ofConsciousness, together with problems that any other such attempt wouldhave to solve. But Niethammer had not claimed that reason did not demandan absolute grounding, or that philosophy should not seek to meet reason'sdemand. He continued to view philosophy as an exercise in grounding theclaims of the common understanding-those claims that are a priori uni-versally valid for all human beings. To Novalis, Schlegel, and other figuresinfluenced by Nietharnmer, this suggested that philosophy was the neces-sary ascent towards an absolute that could necessarily never be atrained.f"

To Fichte, however, it must have seemed perverse to give up in advancethe hope of satisfying reason. The task was to find an absolute principlefree of the ambiguities afflicting the Principle of Consciousness. If theground of object-awareness is to be understood as self-awareness, thenself-awareness cannot have the same structure as object-awareness-cannot involve the distinction between representation, subject, and objectand the reference of representation to both subject and object that, asFichte thinks Reinhold correctly says, pertains to every object-awareness-on pain of infinite regress. So the infinite regress problem 'can be resolvedonly bydiscovering something in which consciousness is simultaneously bothobject and subject, that is, by exhibiting an immediate consciousness.t+'

39 Niethammer was among the first of the group including Schelling and Hegel who cameto Jena from the Tubingcn theological seminary. However , Fichte arr ived at Jena in 1794and soon became the co-editor and leading light of Nietharnrner's Philosophisches Journal.Thus the Journal became known as the mouthpiece for Fichte's attempt at an absolutegrounding, not for Nietharnmer 's own version of transcendental philosophy.40 See Frank (I995).4T Fichte (I964- : IV, 2, 30) . The immediacy of this consciousness provides one of the

motivations for Fichte's notion of intellectual intuition since, along with singularity, imme-diacy is one of the marks of intuition for Kant. See Kant (I998a: A320/B376-7). To

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 131Avoidance of the regress problem is one motivation for Fichte's controversialclaim that the Grundsatz expresses a self-awareness describable as anintellectual intuition. Furthermore, the regress arises, as we have seen,from the ambiguity of 'fact(s) of consciousness' and from an underlyingfailure to distinguish ordinary or empirical consciousness from its trans-cendental conditions. And Fichte is disambiguating the phrase, hence insist-ing on this distinction, when he writes:

This reviewer anyway is convinced that the Principle of Consciousness is atheorem which is based upon another first principle, from which, however, thePrinciple of Consciousness can be s tr ictly der ived, a priori and independently of allexperience. The initial incorrect presupposition, and the one which caused thePrinciple of Consciousness to be proposed as the first principle of all philosophy,was precisely the presupposition that one must begin with a fact [Tatsache]. Wecertainly do require a first principle which is material and not merely formal. Butsuch a principle does not have to express a fact; it can also express an Act[Tathandlung]-if I may risk asserting something which can be neither explainednor proven here.f''Here Fichte accepts Reinhold's claim that consciousness is determined byan act that distinguishes and refers to the self, a Tathandlung expressed bythe Grundsatz, but rejects Reinhold's claim that this act is also a deter-mination of consciousness (a Tatsache) and that the Grundsatz is thereforeknown by introspection of consciousness. In Fichte's view, the Grundsatzmust express an act that does not have the representational structure ofconsciousness, as characterized by the Principle of Consciousness, an actthat instead consists in an immediate unity between subject and object,without any representation intervening between subject and object. Thisact is a transcendental condition of consciousness that is never given assuch in an ordinary state of consciousness.f '

Much of the difficulty of the various versions of the Jena Wissenschafts-lehre, both for Fichte himself and for his readers, consists in grasping thisnon-representational, pure activity that is supposed to be constitutive ofconsciousness, without being led astray by the unavoidable use of conceptsand terms associated with representational structures. The letter, Fichterepeatedly insists, is both indispensable and inappropriate for the expres-sion of the spirit.t" Strictly speaking, the character of the Tathandlungfully explore Fichte's motivations, as I will elsewhere, one would have to examine not only theimmediacy and singularity of such a consciousness, but also Fichte's understanding of moralconsciousness and his analogy between transcendental method and geometrical method.

42 Fichte (I964- : I, 2, 46; I988: 64).43 I discuss Fichte's account of self-awareness as a transcendental condition of conscious-ness in Franks (forthcoming b).44 See e.g. Fichte's letter to Reinhold, Fichte (I964- : III, 2, No. 294; I988: 398-9).For further discussion, see Franks (I996).


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Paul Frankscannot be conveyed by Fichte to his audience; it must be actively discoveredbyeach individual. The absolute ground, Fichte came rapidly to think, wasso unlike any relative or conditioned ground, that it could not reasonablybe required to be universally acknowledged tallgemeingeltendi+? Unlikeany fact or Tatsache of consciousness, the Tatsache with which philosophywas properly concerned would not be self-evident; or, rather, it would beself-evident only after a transformation of the self, only after a preparationfor philosophy, of which everyone was capable but which few achieved. Theidea that universal validity required universal acknowledgement, whichcontinued to be important to Reinhold long after he had abandoned hisElementarphilosophie, was decisively abandoned by Fichte and the post-Kantians who followed him. Whatever response to scepticism might beoffered by post-Kantian Idealism, it would not take the form of an infer-ence from a premiss that any sceptic would grant.

III. SCEPTICAL OBJECTIONS TO REINHOLD'SMETHOD OF TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

Fichte did not merely reject the premiss of Reinhold's transcendentalargument; he also rejected Reinhold's conception of transcendentalmethod as an analytic derivation of the necessary conditions of the pos-sibility of that premiss.v'' Again, Schulze's objections provide some of thereasons for Fichte's move although, again, Fichre's adoption of a syntheticconception of transcendental argument also depends on aspects of hisunderstanding of the Tathandlung with which I cannot deal here.

Schulze accuses both Kant and Reinhold of employing the same, prob-lematic form of syllogistic argument, which may be presented as follows:

Major Premiss: (shared by Kant and Reinhold): 'Any two things thatcannot be thought apart from one another can also not be apart from oneanother.:""

Minor Premiss: a and b cannot be thought apart;(r) Kant:

'the necessary synthetic judgements present 111 our knowledge can be45 See Fichte (1964- : I, 3, 254; 1988: 324).46 See Reinhold (1791a: 77-8; 1985: 70). In Reinhold (1790-4: i i) , Reinhold himself

revised his conception of transcendental argument, mainly in response to a letter from CarlImmanuel Diez (another migrant to Jena from Tubingen), but he was mainly concerned tomake a clearer distinction between the synthetic (fact-demonstrating) and the analytic partsof his project. He later abandoned the Elementarphilosophie and became a proponent, for awhile, of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. On Diez , see Henrich (1997: 41-54).

47 Schulze (1792: 99; 1988: 108).

The Origins of Post-Kantianismrepresented by us as possible only if we take them to originate in the mind,from its mode of operation as determined a priori;'48

(2) Reinhold:'the being and actuality of representations cannot be thought apart fromthe being and actuality of a faculty of representatiorrt? ... [which is] thecause and ground of the actual presence of representations in US.'50

Conclusion:Therefore, if a exists (which the sceptic does not deny, then b must alsoexist (which the sceptic has denied but must now admit);

(r) Kant:'Therefore, also the necessary synthetic judgements present in our know-ledge can actually have arisen only in the mind, from its mode of operationas determined a priori;' 5I

(2) Reinhold:'hence a faculty of representation must also exist objectively [as the causeand ground of the actual presence of representations in us], just as cer-tainly as representations are present in us.'52

This is a useful syllogistic representation of one conception of trans-cendental argument. Schulze portrays Kant and Reinhold as arguing fromwhat no sceptic denies (that we make synthetic a priori judgements, thatwe possess representations) to precisely the Transcendental Idealist thesisthat the sceptic disputes (that synthetic a priori judgements are groundedin the mind, that representations are grounded in the faculty of representa-tion). And the major premiss attributed to Kant and Reinhold by Schulzemakes essential use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, asserting in effectthat if x can only be thought as grounded in y, then, if x exists, y must alsoexist as its sufficient reason. Schulze's criticisms of the major and minorpremiss can therefore be understood as criticisms of a certain strategy ofgrounding transcendental argument.

A. The major premiss and the reality problemSchulze argues, first, that the use of the principle of sufficient reason in themajor premiss amounts to a begging of Hume's question. For the majorpremiss assumes as certain just what the Humean sceptic doubts:(r) that for anything present in our knowledge there is also objectively present areal ground and cause dif fering from it realit er; and, in general, that the principleof sufficient reason is valid not only for representations and their subjective

48 Schulze (1792: 140; 1985: 116).5 Schulze (1792: 97; 1985: 107).52 Schulze (1792: 99; 1985: 108).

49 Schulze (1792: 99; I985: 108).5 Schulze (1792: 140; 1985: 116).


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13 4 Paul Frankscombination, but also for things-in-themselves and in their objective interconnec-tions; (2) that we are justified in inferring from the constitution of something as itis in our representations its objective constitution outside us.53To put the point in Kantian language, the major premiss involves aninference from a merely logical use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason(we have to think of x as grounded in y) to a real use of the principle (ifx exists, it must really exist as grounded in y). But this inference simplybegs the sceptic's question, for the sceptic calls into doubt precisely ourright to make inferences from the way we must think to the way thingsreally are. And the Humean sceptic calls into doubt, more particularly;our right to infer from the premiss that we must think in accordancewith the principle of sufficient reason to the conclusion that every eventor state of affairs really has a necessary connection to an existent groundor cause.

What is more, Schulze argues, the major premiss not only begs the veryHumean question that Kant and Reinhold set out to answer, it also 'clearlycontradicts the whole spirit of critical philosophy'. For:this derivation of the necessary judgements from a thing-in-itself [i .e. the mind orfaculty of representation as ground] .. . presupposes a knowledge which, accord-ing to it [i.e. critical philosophy], should be totally impossible to man. For its mostimportant principle and its most important result is that the categories 'cause' and'actuality' can only be applied to empirical intuition if their application is to haveany sense or reference. Since we cannot intuit, however, the alleged subject ofrepresentations but can only immediately perceive the alterations of the innersense, as the critical philosophy concedes, it follows that this subject cannotbelong to the domain of objects knowable by us. In other words, according tothe critical philosophy's own claims, we cannot attr ibute either knowable and realactuality to it, or knowable and real causaliry!"In other words, the major premiss makes real-not merely logical-use ofthe principle of sufficient reason in order to reach a conclusion that is notonly a priori but also genuinely synthetic. But Kant and Reinhold bothprofess to believe that no synthetic judgement employing the categories ispossible without an intuition, whether pure or empirical. And both claimthat we have no pure intuition of the mind or faculty of representation astranscendental ground determining the forms of judgement; we only haveempirical sensible intuitions of the mind as determined in inner sense. So,by their own lights, neither Kant nor Reinhold is entitled to make asynthetic a priori judgement employing the categories of 'cause' and'actuality' about the mind or faculty of representation as a transcenden-tally determining, actual cause.

54 Schulze (1792: 155; 1985: 122-3)

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 135.An objection parallel to this objection, which I shall henceforth call the

reality problem, has been raised more recently by Barry Stroud:Kant thought that he could argue from the necessary conditions of thought andexperience to the falsity of 'problematic idealism' and so to the actual existence ofthe external world of material objects, and not merely to the fact that we believe

. t here is a world, or that as far as we can tell there is.An examination of some recent attempts to argue in analogous fashion suggests

that, without invoking a verification principle which automatically renders super-fluous any indirect argument, the most that could be proved by a consideration ofthe necessary conditions of language is that, for example, we must believe thatthere are material objects and other minds in order for us to be able to speakmeaningfully at alP5Like Schulze, Stroud argues that transcendental arguments (in this case,those of Strawson and Shoemaker) can prove at best what we must believe,and points out that there is a gap between a conclusion about what we mustbelieve and the thesis that the sceptic doubts, which concerns what actuallyexists. 56 There are, however, two noteworthy differences between Schulzeand Stroud. First, Stroud regards Strawson and Shoemaker as attemptingto bridge the gap between what we must believe and what must really bethe case by invoking a theory of meaning: a verification principle that says,in effect, that if we are to meaningfully engage in the practice of belief-formation and concept-ascription with respect to a kind of object, it mustbe possible to verify that objects of that kind actually exist. Considerationsabout meaningfulness in the contemporary sense are, however, entirelyforeign to Schulze and his contemporaries. Appealing instead to theKantian theory of judgement, 57 the only way to bridge the gap thatSchulze can envisage would be to possess the capacity for intuition-forimmediate reception of the actuality-of the mind as it is in itself, for only

55 Stroud (I968: 256).56 Stroud does not mean to suggest that Kant's transcendental arguments invoke averificat ion principle. The thought is rather that Kant's Transcendental Idealism plays, asit were, the role of the verif ication principle, by bridging the gap between what is necessarilythought and empirical reality, while at the same time (unl ike the veri fication principle)acknowledging and affirming the gap between what is necessarily thought and transcenden-tal reality.

57 See Rosen (I988) for a helpful discussion of the difference between Kant's concernwith the conditions for the possibil ity of making cogni tively significant judgements andStrawsori's concern with the conditions for the possihility of employing concepts intelligibly.The dist inct ion between these condit ions is essent ial to Kant's cri ticism of tradit ionalmetaphysics, which he regards as employing concepts intelligibly but as failing to makecognitively significant judgements, and for which he may therefore seek practical s ignifi-cance. Rosen points out that the bl indness to the distinction in Strawson (I966) reflects theinfluence of verificationism, which denies the very existence of such a distinction. Putnam(1995) develops the charge that Strawson's Kant interpretation is limited by the influence ofverificationism.


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Paul Franksa judgement relating concepts by means of an intuition is genuinelysynthetic. Second, as Stroud argues, acceptance of the verification principlewould render transcendental argument redundant, at least for the refuta-tion of scepticism. 58 If one wished to refute a sceptical doubt about theexistence of, say, other minds, one would need only to show that we doform beliefs about other minds and then to invoke the verification princi-ple. One would not need to show that our forming beliefs about otherminds is a necessary condition for the possibility of the meaningfulness ofour discourse in general. In contrast, it does not seem that possession of apure intuition of the mind as it is in itself would render transcendentalargument redundant. If, as Reinhold and others thought, the point oftranscendental argument is to ground features of the mind's engagementwith the world in the mind, then possession of the requisite intuitionwould only ground the knowledge of the mind's existence in itself, buttranscendental arguments would sti ll be required to trace the connectionsby means of which the relevant features are grounded in the mind.

B. The minor premiss and the uniqueness problemSchulze also at tacks the minor premisses employed by Kant and Reinhold,the premisses asserting that it is impossible to think of synthetic a priorijudgements apart from a transcendentally determining ground in the mindand that it is impossible to think of representations as present in the mindwithout a determining ground in the faculty of representation. The fol low-ing passage refers particularly to Kant's minor premiss, but may easily beapplied to Reinhold's:And just as fallacious as the major of the syllogism by which the Critique ofReason [sic] proves that the necessary synthetic judgements spring from the mindand lie in us a priori, is its minor. It is simply not true that, in order to be thoughtas possible, these judgements have to be thought as present a priori, and asoriginating in the mind. Because the human understanding, at the present levelof its culture, can represent to itself the possibility of something in just one way, itdoes not fol low in principle, nor with any cert itude whatever, that i t will be able tothink it in only that way at all times, even at some future age when it will haveacquired greater maturity. 59

58 Transcendental arguments might still have the function of refuting conventionalism.These two functions-refuting scepticism and refuting conventionalism-are independent,and Strawson appears to haveaccepted, after reading Stroud, that, since he does not wish toinvoke a verification principle, his transcendental arguments refute conventionalism bytracing necessary connections; they do not refute scepticism by showing that, say,otherminds, actually exist, but they do demonstrate the idleness of sceptical doubt by showingthat we necessarily believethat other minds exist, so that we could not abandon the beliefsthat scepticism challenges. 59 Schulze (1792: 142; 1985: 117).

The Origins of Post-Kantianism 137In sho~t, Kant ~~d Reinhold claim that it is only possible to explainsynth~tlc a priori l~dge~ents or representations as such in only one way.But WIth what possible fight do they make this claim? Even if it is true thatno human being who, has ever lived can offer an alternative explanation,w~o are Kant and Reinhold to say that no future human being, operatingWIth all the advantages of a future age, will ever arrive at an alternative?. Once again, the problem arises from the use of the Principle of Sufficient~e~son to argue from some given x to its ground or sufficient reason, y. ForIt IS hardly uncommon for an event or state of affairs under somedescriptions, t~ have more than one possible ground. In ~rder to arguefrom t~e actuali ty of x to the actuality of y as x's ground, one has to showthat y IS not only sufficient but also necessary for the actuality of x. Inshort, one has to make the strong claim that y is the uniquely sufficientreason for x.Once again, a parallel to Schulze 's objection-henceforth the unique-

ness problem-has resurfaced in more recent debates about transcendentalarguments, most famously in the writings of Korner, who argues that, inKant's Transcendental Analytic, 'Sufficient conditions are not distin-guished from sufficient and necessary conditions', that Kant fails even toattempt to prove the unique sufficiency of his proposed 'schema', and eventhat no such proof is possible, rendering what Korner calls ' transcendentaldeductions' impossible.f?It is i~portant to note that a significant response to the uniqueness

pro~lem IS available to contemporary proponents of non-grounding syn-thetic transcendental arguments but is not available to TranscendentalIdealist proponents of grounding transcendental arguments. The contem-porary response to Korner's objection is to point out that contemporarytranscendental arguments proceed, not by showing that certain alterna-tives ,to the putatively necessary condition are incoherent, but rather byshowing that the negation of the putatively necessary condition is inco-herent, so that any alternative will be.6r Thus, for example, Strawsonargues f?r his purif ied version of the Transcendental Deduction by bringingout the incoherence of the sense datum hypothesis-the hypothesis that allexperience might be such that its esse is it s percipi, But that hypothesis isthe ne,ga:ion of th~ thesis that at least some experience is objective, has anesse distinct from ItS percipi. So if the sense datum hypothesis is incoher-ent, ~~en the objectivity of some experience is a synthetically necessarycondition for there to be any experience whatsoever. Given this method ofargument by reductio ad absurdum, uniqueness is not a problem.

60 Korner (1967).6, For this point and a more general critical discussion of Korner, see Schaper (19721974) '


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Paul FranksBut this response is not available to those who, like Reinhold and Fichte,

want transcendental arguments to provide grounds. To see this, it is help-ful to consider why Kant refuses to allow the method of reductio adabsurdum-what he calls the ap agogic method-the central place in phil-osophy that it has in mathematics.62 According to Kant, philosophicalproofs must never be apagogical, but must rather be ostensive:The direct or ostensive proof is, in all kinds of cognition, that which is combinedwith the conviction of truth and simultaneously with insight into the sources of itstruth; the apagogical proof, on the contrary, can produce certainty, to be sure, butnever comprehensibility of the truth in regard to its connection with the grounds ofits possibility. Hence the latter are more of an emergency aid than a procedurewhich satisfies all the aims of reason.63An apagogical proof that the negation of p is in some way incoherentcannot show us why P is true-cannot show us the ground of the possi-bility of p. So an apagogical proof cannot satisfy reason's essential demandfor groundedness. In fact, Kant thinks that in philosophy such proofscannot even show us conclusively that something is true:Apagogic proof, however, can be allowed only in those sciences where it isimpossible to substitute that which is subjective in our representations for thatwhich is objective, namely the cognition of what is in the object. Where the latteris the dominant concern, however, then it must frequently transpire that theopposite of a certain proposition either simply contradicts the subjective condi-tions of thought but not the object, or else that both propositions contradict eachother only under a subjective condition that is falsely held to be objective, andthat since the condition is false, both of them can be false, without it beingpossible to infer the truth of one from the falsehood of the other. ... Thetranscendental attempts of pure reason ... are all conducted within the realmedium of dialectical illusion, i.e. the subjective which offers itself to or evenforces itself upon reason as objective in its premisses. Now here it simply cannot beallowed that assertions of synthetic propositions be justified by the refutation oftheir opposites.I'"Philosophical proof is called for precisely within the domain proper todialectical illusion, where the subjective can appear in the guise of theobjective, because experience cannot provide the touchstone of objectivereality as it does for empirical (and even mathematical) cognition. Indeed,it is precisely because there is no such touchstone that we must confrontsceptical challenges to objective reality and groundedness, in the hope ofgaining genuine insight into the ways in which our epistemic and moralprinciples of judgement are grounded. Serious engagement with scepticismwill show that the grounding of those principles is quite unlike the

62 See Forster (I989: 6) and Guyer (I987: 465 n. 6).63 Kant (I998a: A789-90/B8I7-18). 64 Ibid. A791-2/B819-20.

The Origins of Post-Kantianismgrounding of judgements given those principles. Whether and how theprinciples can be demonstrated to have a real ground is a matter of greatdisagreement between Kant and the post-Kantians, as well as among thepost-Kantians. But their shared view that transcendental arguments are toprovide such a demonstration implies that none of them can participate inthe apagogical response to the uniqueness problem that has been recom-mended for contemporary transcendental arguments.

IV . SCHULZE'S EFFECT ON FICHTE'S STRATEGY

The uniqueness and reality problems raised by Schulze were understood tobe serious threats to the project of transcendental argument. Because ofthe uniqueness problem, we may be able only to claim that we can think yas the sufficient reason of x, not that we must think y as the sufficientreason of x, which would amount to the claim that y is x's uniquelysufficient condition. And, because of the reality problem, it seems that,even if we could claim that y is x's uniquely sufficient condition, we couldnot infer from the actuality of x to the actuality of y. Thus, in a marginalnote to his Eigne Meditationen, Fichte summarizes the sceptical chargeagainst Reinhold as the accusation 'that he infers that something must befrom [the premiss] that he can think sornething.Y?

Niethammer's proposed analytic transcendental strategy is supposed tosolve the reality problem by starting with experience: a fact of conscious-ness whose actuality is not in dispute. But, as Maimon had pointed out,philosophers do not universally acknowledge the actuality of experience inKant's epistemically rich sense. Transforming our understanding of experi-ence might be an important part of responding to scepticism. Even if thisproblem could be solved, Niethammer would still face the uniquenessproblem, as he is well aware, and, as we have seen, supplementation byapagogical proof is insufficient to show that one has reached a real ground.Besides, what guarantee is there that a regressive argument will ever reachthat absolute ground whose necessity for reason Niethammer has notrejected?

Unlike Niethammer, Fichte insists that reason demands a progressiveprocedure that would culminate in the description of the universallyacknowledged features of consciousness:Reinhold ... begins with facts in order to ascend to the foundation of these facts.. . Reinhold's procedure would be the reverse of that of the Wissenschaftslehre, ifonly such a reversal were possible, and if only one were able, by ascending fromwhat is founded to its foundation, to arrive at its ultimate foundation. But this


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Paul Franksseries is endless. The Wissenschaftslehre descends from the ultimate foundation,which it possesses, to the things which are based upon this foundation: from theabsolute to the conditioned elements contained within the absolute-that is, to theactual, true facts of consciousness.66

I cannot discuss here the remarkable development of Fichte's conceptionand practice of transcendental argument during his Jena period (1794-9),when he developed a synthetic conception of transcendental argument asconstruction in intellectual intuition. However, what I have said hereshould suffice to show some ways in which Fichte's methodological devel-opments are motivated by the uniqueness and reality problems raised bySchulze for proponents of transcendental arguments. In response to thereality problem, as I will discuss below, Fichte endorses what he takes to bethe first-personal character of transcendental reflection, in accordance withwhich the transcendental conditions of consciousness need to be demon-strated as real grounds for us qua philosophers; in response to the unique-ness problem, Fichte aspires to a progressive development, by necessarysteps, from an absolute principle expressing the absolute and non-repre-sentational condition of our first-person point of view to the necessaryfeatures of ordinary or empirical consciousness. However, as I will indi-cate, although Fichte seeks above all to solve the reality and uniquenessproblems raised by the new scepticism, his responses to those problemsinstead have the effect of transforming a scepticism ostensibly about theexternal world into a scepticism about other minds.

With respect to the reality problem, Fichte argues that Schulze misses acrucial Kantian point by presupposing that truth is correspondence tothings in themselves and specifically that the truth of transcendentalphilosophy is correspondence to the mind's nature as a thing in itself.Whereas pre- Kantian rational psychology sought to understand the mindas a thinking thing, transcendental philosophy substitutes for that goal theunderstanding of the mind as autonomous, law-governed activity, andphilosophical truth must also be conceived differently after this revolution.Fichte seems sometimes to suggest that, in transcendental philosophy,there is no room for a gap between necessary thinking and truth:'Kant says that the mind provides the foundation of certain forms of syntheticjudgement. Here he obviously is presupposing that these forms require a founda-tion and is, therefore, already presupposing that which is supposed to be inquestion, the validity of the causal law. He presupposes that these forms musthave a real ground.' But if one says merely that we are required to seek afoundation for these forms and to place this foundation in our mind (and nothingmore is being said), then the principle of sufficient reason is at first being employedas merely logically valid. But since that which is thereby established exists only as a

The Origins of Post-Kantianismthought, then one might think that the logical foundation of a thought is at thesame time its real or existential foundation.67This is parallel to a tempting contemporary response to Stroud's objection:if we truly can't help but think of p as conditioned by q, then why should weworry that p is not conditioned by q? Even if it is logically possible that pisnot conditioned by q, that is not a real possibility for us. Whatever thecontemporary merits of such a response, Fichte's view that transcendentalargument should demonstrate an absolute makes his formulation of theresponse troubling. Can he really mean that the absolute ground 'therebyestablished exists only as a thought'? Too much pressure in this directionwould suggest that we are dealing at best with a necessary fiction, and notwith a genuine grounding. Besides, once Fichte himself admits that noGrundsatz isreally capable of conveying the significance of the Tatha

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