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Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self Udo Thiel

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Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self Udo Thiel Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self Udo Thiel There can be no doubt that Johann Nikolaus Tetens (–) was one of Kant’s most important German philosophical contemporaries. His main work, the huge and wide-ranging two-volume Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung (Philosophical Essays on Human Nature and its Development)of, comprising a total of more than , pages in the original edition, made a significant impression on the philo- sophical scene in the late eighteenth century. Although the work was criticised in relation to many points of detail and from a variety of perspectives, it was, on the whole, well received and reviewed extensively. Kant, too, was impressed. Kant was critical of the work’s unsystematic nature and style, and of aspects of its general approach; nevertheless, he thought of Tetens as one of the leading philosophers of the day, identifying him as one of the few thinkers of the time whom he could reasonably expect not only to understand but also to be able and willing to pursue the kind of project that he himself had developed in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant does not mention Tetens in any of his published writings, but he does in various letters and notes. There is, for example, a letter to Marcus Herz from , another letter to Herz from and a letter to Garve from , and there are Kant’s marginal notes in his copy of Tetens’sbookand other Reflexionen referring to Tetens. Johann Nikolaus Tetens, Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwickelung, vols, edited with commentary by Udo Roth und Gideon Stiening. This work is cited here according to volume and page number in the original edition of , also given in the Roth and Stiening edition. Eric Watkins has translated selections from Versuche into English. See Watkins (ed. and transl.), Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’: Background Source Materials, pp. –. See Roth and Stiening, ‘Zur Einführung’, in Tetens’s Versuche, pp. xx–xxi. Kant’s letters to Marcus Herz are from April and May (Corr, :, ), and the letter to Garve is from August (Corr, :). Kant made marginal notes on pp. and in vol. of his copy of Tetens’s Versuche (R and R , :). Kant distinguishes his own project from that of Tetens in R and R , :. Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self It is plain that Tetens was of considerable importance to Kant. Manfred Kuehn has argued that Tetens provided a crucial link between earlier German empiricist thought such as Feder’s, on the one hand, and Kant’s, on the other. As Kuehn states, it is Tetens’s philosophy ‘that makes clearer than any other Kant’s connections with his contemporaries’. Indeed, scholarly interest in Tetens seems to be inspired mainly by his obvious relevance to Kant’s thought. There is comparatively little on Tetens’s philosophy in its own right, although recently steps have been taken to rectify this. A somewhat neglected aspect of his relation to Kant is the impact that the early Kant, especially through the Dissertation of , had on the development of Tetens’s own thought. Yet most of the literature on Tetens focuses only on the relevance of his Versuche to Kant’s Critical philosophy. There is a considerable, if not a huge, amount of work on various aspects of this relation, links between Tetens’s and Kant’s teachings being discussed on a number of issues. Indeed, it is not surprising that Kant became interested in Tetens while working on the Critique of Pure Reason in the late s. It seems that Tetens’s general project was very similar to Kant’s, at least in some important respects. Both aimed, in different ways, at overcoming the divide between what later came to be called ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. Much of early scholarship on Tetens did not sufficiently recognise his concern with this kind of project, however, as it saw him as a Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense in Germany, –,p.. Kuehn provides a detailed account of the influence the Scottish Common Sense philosophy had on Tetens. For other literature on Tetens’s philosophy in general, see Sommer, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie, pp. –; Uebele, Johann Nicolaus Tetens nach seiner Gesamtentwicklung betrachtet; Beck, Early German Philosophy, pp. –; Barnouw, ‘The Philosophical Achievement and Historical Significance of Johann Nicolas Tetens’; Rappard, Psychology as Self-knowledge, pp. –; and Hauser, Selbstbewußtsein und personale Identität, pp. –. Kuehn, Scottish Common Sense,p.. Stiening and Thiel (eds.), Johann Nikolaus Tetens (–). Tetens refers to Kant’s Dissertation in several places, for example in Versuche I, pp. –, where he examines the question of how the concepts of space and time are acquired. Corey Dyck has recently dealt with this issue, arguing that Tetens not only identified problems with Kant’s early analyses, but also offered his own solution, which in turn anticipated and might even have influenced Kant’s thinking in the Critique of Pure Reason and after; cf. Dyck, ‘Tetens as a Reader of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation’. For the general relationship between Kant’s and Tetens’s philosophies, see, for example, Sommer, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie, pp. –; Seidel, Tetens’ Einfluß auf die Philosophie Kants; and Carl, Der schweigende Kant,pp.–. For more recent accounts of specific aspects of the relationship, see, for example, Heßbrüggen-Walter, ‘Kant, Tetens und die Grundkraft der Seele’; Krouglov, ‘Der Begriff transzendental bei J. N. Tetens’; Krouglov, ‘Tetens und die Deduktion der Kategorien bei Kant’; Wunderlich, Kant und die Bewußtseinstheorien,pp.–; Stapleford, ‘Reid, Tetens, and Kant on the External World’; and Dyck, Kant and Rational Psychology, pp. –. Udo Thiel straightforward empiricist. And Kant, too, when distinguishing himself from Tetens, singles out the empiricist aspects of Tetens’s philosophy. Thus he says that ‘Tetens examines the concepts of pure reason merely subjectively (human nature), I objectively. The former analysis is empir- ical, the latter transcendental’ (R , :; see also R ). And the label ‘the German Locke’, first used for Tetens by Karl Rosenkranz in , remains popular, even though the appropriateness of this label has been questioned in recent years. It is true, however, that Tetens seems to commit himself to an empiri- cist or observational approach to philosophical problems. In the preface to the Versuche, he presents his work as a ‘psychological analysis of the soul’. Explicitly appealing to Locke, he says that his method is observational. The basis for his ‘psychological analysis’ is the modifications of the soul as they are given through a ‘feeling of the self’ (Selbstgefühl). These are then to be repeated and modified, and attention is to be given to their genesis. The observations are to be compared and analysed so that the most basic faculties and operations and their relations to each other can be dis- covered. It is plain that Tetens was strongly influenced by the Göttingen empiricist philosopher Johann Georg Heinrich Feder, whose very popular textbook, Logik und Metaphysik (Logic and Metaphysics), first published in , Tetens used for his lectures from the winter term of –. Feder, in turn, was strongly influenced by British philosophy and later criticised Kant’s philosophy from an empiricist standpoint. Tetens’s aim is not a mere natural history of the mind, however. He aims at going beyond a collection of observed facts or a mere description of the operations of the soul and their connections, a mere ‘mental geography’,as Hume put it. Rather, the descriptive account is only Tetens’s starting point; his aim is to then discover principles which allow us to infer the causes of mental operations in order ‘to establish something certain ... about the nature of the soul, as the subject of the observed operations’. In short, See, for example, Stiening and Thiel, Johann Nikolaus Tetens,p.. Versuche I, p. iv. ‘Was die Methode betrifft, deren ich mich bedient habe, so halte ichs für nöthig, darüber zum voraus mich zu erklären. Sie ist die beobachtende, die Lock bey dem Verstande, und unsere Psychologen in der Erfahrungs-Seelenlehre befolgt haben. Die Modifikationen der Seele so nehmen, wie sie durch das Selbstgefühl erkannt werden; diese sorgfältig wiederholt, und mit Abänderung der Umstände gewahrnehmen, beobachten, ihre Entstehungsart und die Wirkungsgesetze der Kräfte, die sie hervorbringen, bemerken; alsdenn die Beobachtungen vergleichen, auflösen und daraus die einfachsten Vermögen und Wirkungsarten und deren Beziehungen aufeinander aufsuchen’ (Versuche I, pp. iii–iv). See also ibid., p. See Sellhoff, ‘Einleitung’,inJohann Nikolaus Tetens: Metaphysik, pp. xliv–xlix. As Sellhoff points out, Feder refers to Tetens’s Versuche in later editions of Logik und Metaphysik (e.g., ,§,p.). Versuche, I, p. iv. Kant and Tetens on the Unity of the Self Tetens’s aim is to establish a metaphysics of the soul, but to do so on an empirical basis. In order to achieve this aim, obviously, reasoning (Raison- nement) is required in addition to observation. ‘In the last analysis’, Tetens argues, ‘the reflections and inferences make the simple observations useful, and without them we would touch merely the surface of things’. Tetens would regard a mere mental geography as superficial, as he thinks that philosophy should dig deeper, go beyond the surface of things. Elsewhere, Tetens states explicitly that the observational approach is merely the first step in his investigations and that rational ‘speculation’ (‘Spekulation aus allgemeinen Gründen’) is required for philosophy. Like Leibniz in his Nouveaux essais, he even states that one can learn from the ‘scholastics’ here. This sounds like a far cry from a ‘German Locke’. Clearly, there are significant differences between Locke’s and Tetens’s projects. To be sure, Locke, too, thinks that reason is just as important as experience in formulating hypotheses about the nature of things that are more probably true than other views.
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