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Kantian Psychologism Kantian Psychologism Kantiaans Psychologisme (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de door Peter Sperber Promotor: Prof.dr. P.G. Ziche Copromotor: Dr. D.K.W. van Miert Copyright © 2017 by Peter Sperber All rights reserved Cover art: Rabih Mroué Leap Year´s Diary, 2006-2016 Collage on paper 23 x 16,5 cm, framed Courtesy the artist & Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg / Beirut ISBN 978-94-028-0665-6 Printed by Ipskamp Printing To my parents, for everything Acknowledgments During the four years in which I wrote the present dissertation, I was very fortunate to have many people in my life who, directly or indirectly, contributed to my research in important ways. To begin, I am incredibly grateful to my supervisor, Paul Ziche. Not only did he hire me four years ago, without which there would not have been a dissertation in the first place, but during these years, Paul also turned out to be the most entrusting and supportive supervisor a doctoral candidate could wish for. Though I probably took the research project in a very different direction than he envisioned when he first wrote the funding proposal, he always made me feel like I had complete freedom in following my own research interests, which was incredibly motivating. Perhaps even more importantly, Paul was never narrowly focused on the research alone, but also encouraged me to develop myself more broadly, both as a scholar and as a person, and provided all the support that I could possibly have hoped for. Finally, it has been a pleasure to work with him academically. As everyone who has ever spoken to Paul knows, his historical knowledge is practically without limits, and my research has benefited enormously from his many comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank two of my direct colleagues in the research project, Dirk van Miert and Tom Giesbers. In the past four years they have read and commented on almost every sentence I wrote, and the present dissertation shows more signs of their influence than I have been able to acknowledge in the main text. Aside from my direct colleagues, I owe a huge thanks to the entire department of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Utrecht. Good research is only possible in a good research community, and I was fortunate enough to work in a department where everyone seemed dedicated to maintaining this community. I am very grateful to the professors at the department, many of whom have also been my teachers, for everything I have learned from them. I would also like to thank all the fellow doctoral candidates and post docs with whom I shared an attic during the past four years. Unfortunately I cannot name everyone, and no doubt I missed a few people who KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM really should be in this list, but Albert Gootjes, Albertina Oegema, Caroline Harnacke, Gerhard Bos, Joeri Witteveen, Julia Trompeter, Lieke Schrijvers, Liesbeth Feikema, Lieve Teugels, Morten Byskov, Naomi van Steenbergen, Robert Vinkesteijn, Sem de Maagt, and Steve Riley: you were all great company as well as great colleagues, and I will miss our daily lunches. I also want to thank the support personnel at the department, who have been an enormous support in dealing with all of the practical and administrative tasks and problems that I encountered during my years as a doctoral candidate. Special thanks to Suzanne van Vliet, who, at times, seems to keep the department running almost single- handedly. Several scholars from outside of Utrecht have also contributed to the present dissertation in various ways. I would like to thank Thomas Sturm, Helmut Pulte, and Patricia Kitcher for many helpful suggestions and criticisms. I am also grateful to the former for inviting me for a research stay at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where I benefited greatly from discussing my work with him and the members of his research group. Aside from the audience present when I presented my work in Barcelona, I would also like to thank audiences in Bochum, Oxford, Keele, Turin, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Leiden, and Utrecht for their willingness to discuss my research with me, and for their many helpful questions. I would especially like to thank my "paranymphs," Leon Geerdink and Timmy de Goeij. I met Leon and Timmy very early on in my studies, and they have been important influences on my philosophical development ever since. More importantly, they are also great friends. Above all, I would like to thank Emily, for sharing a life with me during these past four years. I do not know whether your presence has improved the dissertation. I do know that it has improved everything else. viii Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii INTRODUCTION 1 1. KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 1 2. KANT AND PSYCHOLOGY 3 3. WHY STUDY KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM? 8 4. KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM AS A TRADITION 13 5. THREE GENERATIONS OF KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 18 6. PSYCHOLOGY 21 7. THE CORPUS 23 CHAPTER 1: PSYCHOLOGY IN EARLY ORTHODOX KANTIANISM 31 1. ORTHODOXY AND KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 31 2. THE NATURE OF ORTHODOX KANTIANISM 32 3. CARL CHRISTIAN ERHARD SCHMID 35 4. FRIEDRICH GOTTLOB BORN 43 5. SAMUEL HEINICKE 49 6. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ORTHODOX RECEPTION FOR KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 55 CHAPTER 2: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MADE EXPLICIT 59 1. THE END OF THE ORTHODOX PERIOD 59 2. PSYCHOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS? REINHOLD'S THEORY OF REPRESENTATION 62 3. REINHOLD'S PHILOSOPHY AS EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY: THE AENESIDEMUS 71 4. ANTI-PSYCHOLOGICAL KANTIANISM: ORIGINS OF GERMAN IDEALISM 76 CHAPTER 3: KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM: THE FIRST ATTEMPTS 83 1. ANSWERING AENESIDEMUS: PSYCHOLOGICAL PROPAEDEUTICS 83 2. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF J.H.G. HEUSINGER 85 3. C.C.E. SCHMID'S FACTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 92 4. FRIEDRICH BOUTERWEK'S FACULTY PSYCHOLOGY 100 KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 5. BEYOND PROPAEDEUTICS 106 CHAPTER 4: THE GREAT INNOVATOR: JAKOB FRIEDRICH FRIES 109 1. FRIES AS A KANTIAN 109 2. CORRECTING THE KANTIAN PREJUDICE 114 3. TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY AS EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY 119 4. JUSTIFYING THE PRINCIPLES OF METAPHYSICS: DEDUCTION 125 5. THE IMPORTANCE OF FRIES'S RECONSTRUCTION 130 CHAPTER 5: RADICAL PSYCHOLOGISM: FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 137 1. A NEW GENERATION 137 2. BENEKE THE KANTIAN 138 3. BENEKE THE EMPIRICIST 143 4. PHILOSOPHY AS PSYCHOLOGY 150 5. PSYCHOLOGY AS FOUNDATION 164 6. DISAPPOINTED EXPECTATIONS 175 CONCLUSION 177 1. THE END OF A TRADITION 177 2. THE RECEPTION OF KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM 180 3. EPISTEMOLOGICAL VS. PSYCHOLOGICAL KANTIANISM? 191 4. THE FUTURE OF KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM? 196 BIBLIOGRAPHY 201 SAMENVATTING 213 CURRICULUM VITAE 221 Introduction 1. Kantian Psychologism Scholarly works, I have been advised, are best begun with an anecdote of a personal nature. Fortunately, this is easy enough in the present case, for the issues of Kantianism and psychologism have been intertwined for me from the beginning of my Kant-studies, now almost exactly ten years ago. As I worked my way through the Prolegomena and the Critique of Pure Reason as an undergraduate student I found the material difficult, to be sure, but I nevertheless felt that I was acquiring a decent understanding of at least the core ideas and arguments of Kant's theoretical philosophy. Space and time, Kant seemed to me to say, along with causality, substantiality and a number of other concepts, are not objective features of reality that we discover by means of perception, but rather forms that our sensibility and our understanding project on the material provided by our senses. Since our faculties of cognition transform our experience in the very process of trying to apprehend it, there is an unbridgeable gap between the world as we experience it and the world as it really is independent of our experience. In other words, though I would not have phrased it this way at the time, I believed that all of Kant's central doctrines ultimately relied on psychological claims about the human cognitive apparatus. Being a typical undergraduate student, I was naturally very eager (as I am now somewhat embarrassed to admit) for an opportunity to demonstrate my newfound knowledge. This opportunity came in the form of a discussion with one of the professors at my alma mater. To my great surprise (and no small disappointment), however, my conversation partner was far from impressed by what I had taken to be my solid understanding of such difficult material. What I had fallen prey to, he kindly explained to me, was a common, but mistaken, psychologistic interpretation of Kant's critical philosophy. Kant, he continued, had in fact made a point precisely of eliminating all psychology from philosophy. His theory should therefore be interpreted as a purely epistemological account of the nature, extent, and possibility of knowledge, and not at all as a theory about the workings of the human cognitive system. KANTIAN PSYCHOLOGISM This, as one may understand, greatly confused me at the time. Could I really have been this wrong about even the most general ideas of a philosopher expressed in a book that I had studied with serious attention? It seemed so, for I quickly discovered that this was not the unorthodox opinion of a single professor, but that it was presented in much of the secondary literature on Kant as a simple uncontroversial statement of fact. Kant's philosophy, it seemed, had hidden depths that I had so far entirely failed to grasp. Clearly, I concluded, a more thorough study of Kant's philosophy was called for. This study paid off, for I soon managed to convince myself that any psychological reading of Kant was indeed wholly in error and thus joined the ranks of the enlightened Kantians who had overcome the fallacy of psychologism.
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