Kant's Reception in France: Theories of the Categories in Academic

Kant’s Reception in France: Theories of the Categories in Academic Philosophy, Psychology, and Social Science Warren Schmaus Illinois Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/11/1/3/1789191/106361403322286698.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 It has been said that Kant’s critical philosophy made it impossible to pursue either the Cartesian rationalist or the Lockean empiricist program of providing a foundation for the sciences (e.g., Guyer 1992). This claim does not hold true for much of nineteenth century French philosophy, especially the eclectic spiritualist tradition that begins with Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and continues through Paul Janet (1823–99). This tradition assimilated Kant’s transcendental apperception of the unity of experience to Descartes’s cogito. They then took this to be the method of a philosophical psychology that reveals the active self as substance or cause and thus provides the epistemological grounding for these categories. However, to dismiss these philosophers as simply confused or mistaken would be to overlook the historical role that their interpretations of Kant played in the subsequent development of philosophy and the social sciences in France. Speciªcally, Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) sociological theory of the categories was deeply inºuenced by the eclectic spiritualist tradition and yet at the same time developed in reaction to it, as he thought that its psychological account of the categories failed to bring out their shared or universal character and the extent to which our conceptions of the categories are cultural products. For their comments and criticisms, I would like to thank those who were in the audience when I presented an earlier version of this paper, titled “Did Kant Transform Philosophy? The Case of France” at the fourth biennial meeting of the History of Philosophy of Science Working Group (HOPOS) in Montreal on June 21, 2002, as well as those who were pres- ent when I gave a later version of this paper to the Lewis Department of Humanities Collo- quium series on Sept 20, 2002. Special thanks go to Rebecca Chung, Michael Davis, Rob- ert Ladenson, Alan Richardson, and John Snapper. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the anonymous reviewers for Perspectives on Science as well as a reviewer for Cam- bridge University Press of a book manuscript on a closely related topic. Of course, all er- rors of interpretation and argument are solely my own responsibility. Perspectives on Science 2003, vol. 11, no. 1 ©2003 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology 3 4 Kant’s Reception in France It has been said that subsequent to Kant’s critical philosophy, it was no longer possible to pursue either the Cartesian rationalist or the Lockean empiricist program of providing a foundation for the sciences. Paul Guyer (1992, p. 155), for instance, argues that the critical philosophy under- mines the Cartesian program of providing a foundation for knowledge in our certainty about our internal states. This is because Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories showed that our knowledge of these inter- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/11/1/3/1789191/106361403322286698.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 nal states involves the use of judgment and concepts just as much as our knowledge of external objects does. To be sure, Guyer limits his historical claims about Kant having transformed philosophy to German idealism, logical positivism, and contemporary linguistic philosophy. But regardless whether his claim holds true for German and anglophone philosophy, it does not for much of French philosophy in the nineteenth century. In France, far from the transcendental deduction undermining Des- cartes’ cogito, the part of the argument that appeals to transcendental apperception was at ªrst assimilated to it. Among the eclectic spiritualists in particular, beginning with Victor Cousin (1792–1867) and Pierre Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and continuing through Paul Janet (1823– 99), apperception was equated with introspection or reºection and taken to be the method of a philosophical psychology that provided the foundation for our knowledge. This apperception was supposed to reveal the self as substance or cause and thus provide the source of these categories. In this way these thinkers appear to have assimilated Kant’s transcendental deduction, which purports to show how our knowledge of objects depends on the unity of the consciousness that combines our representations of these objects in accordance with the categories, to what he would have called an “empirical deduction” of these concepts from their origins in self-consciousness. Furthermore, their empirical deduction of the categories was grounded in an empirical apperception of the activity of the mind or will rather than the transcendental apperception of the unity of thought. One might wish to stop me before I launch into my history and protest that I am reading far too much into Guyer’s claim. When he says that Kant transformed philosophy, he is not making a descriptive, historical claim so much as a prescriptive, normative judgment. That is, what he means to say is that, subsequent to Kant’s transcendental deduction, philosophers should have realized that it is not possible to seek a foundation for our knowledge in the certainty of our own existence. Thus, one might object that if the eclectic spiritualists merged the critical philosophy with an introspective philosophical psychology, they were simply mistaken or confused. The obscurity into which philosophers such as Cousin, Biran, and Janet have fallen is then justly deserved and they are not worth our at- tention today. Perspectives on Science 5 However, simply to dismiss these nineteenth century French philosophers as intellectual lightweights would be to overlook the historical role that their interpretations of Kant played in the subsequent development of philosophy and the social sciences in France. In particular, to understand this tradition of psychologizing the categories is to shed some much needed light on Émile Durkheim’s (1858–1917) development of an alter- native, sociological explanation of the categories, which initiated a twenti- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/11/1/3/1789191/106361403322286698.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 eth century tradition in France in which the categories are held to be cultural and historical products. His sociological theory of the categories was at the same time both a reaction to and deeply inºuenced by the eclectic spiritualist tradition. Durkheim appears to have inherited from this tradition an interpretation of the ªrst Critique as a contribution to faculty psychology, a reading that the French appear to have adopted from Kant’s earliest critics in Germany. According to R. Lanier Anderson (2001, p. 297 n. 11), the psychological1 reading of the critical philosophy, according to which Kant grounds his epistemology in a theory of the human mind, was ªrst challenged only in 1871 by Hermann Cohen.2 Many of Kant’s earliest critics, trying to understand a radically new and difªcult philosophy by subsuming it under traditional categories, read the Critique as if it were of- fering up simply a new theory of how the individual mind processes its cognitions. This should hardly come as a surprise, given Kant’s constant references to mental states, faculties, and processes. Subsequent to Cohen’s critique, philosophers in Germany began to give a purely epistemological reading to the Critique, according to which Kant is interested solely in the necessary conditions for objective knowledge, and in which Kant’s mentalistic language is re-interpreted as merely metaphorical or otherwise 1. I deliberately choose to say a “psychological” as opposed to a “psychologistic” reading of the Critique, as the latter term implies the fallacy of attempting to reduce normative rules to the merely descriptive principles of psychology. As Anderson suggests (2001, p. 288), drawing on the work of Hatªeld (1990, 1997), it would be anachronistic to raise the charge of psychologism against Kant’s earliest critics, as it assumes the purely natural- istic concept of mind we hold today. During the early modern period, philosophers held a very different concept of mind as something that held intrinsically normative powers of knowing. Epistemology was not distinguished from the philosophy of mind, since the at- tainment of truth was a question of the right use of these intrinsic powers of the mind. The concept of epistemology as concerned solely with the relations between claims to knowledge and their supporting evidence develops later in the nineteenth century. 2. There was an exchange on the listserv HOPOS-L on just this topic from August 17–19, 2002, initiated by myself. None of the other participants, including Michael Kremer, John Ongley, Richard Smyth, and Peter Apostoli as well as Lanier Anderson, could think of a philosopher prior to Cohen who challenged the psychological reading of Kant. The HOPOS-L listserv is maintained on a server at the University of Notre Dame by Don Howard. I would like to thank the participants in this discussion as well as Don Howard for maintaining this list. 6 Kant’s Reception in France explained away. However, this epistemological reading had not caught on among French academic philosophers by the time Durkheim began his ca- reer. From student notes taken by André Lalande (1867–1962) in Durk- heim’s philosophy course at the Lycée de Sens in 1883–84, we learn that at this late date in France Cousin and Biran were still setting the terms of de- bate regarding the categories (1884a, pp. 138–9).3 Of course, to explain how the French came to their psychological read- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/11/1/3/1789191/106361403322286698.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 ings of Kant is not to justify these readings in all their details.

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