We've all heard about Kant, Idealists and Romantics and think they're the bold men of philosophy and so we like to think about them because we like the frisson and hope we'll get some. But we don't know the neo-Kantians because Hegel and his fans always talk about how there's really just Kant and then Hegel and then what we have now with nothing else in between. But Hegelians are lying about this because they know that's not true. I guess we think this is ok because we assume they're drunk on all that frisson. But neo-Kantians did exist and were important and they should come out of the Hegelian shadows. This is what Frederick C Beiser thinks. He brings them out and says we should listen to these guys and not just the bold men and all their boldness. Schopenhauer always sneered at philosophers in University departments because he was a kind of inverted snob about that but he was actually more privileged and less troubled by the authorities than the people he sneered at so we really think he's a hypocrite and was unfair. But his view has stuck and everyone likes to think that he and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have real philosophical frisson going on because they worked outside of Universities. And Wittgenstein gets some of this because although he sometimes worked in Universities he kept leaving and sitting near Fiords and beating peasant children and arriving by train so people assume he is really only in University under duress and would rather be in the Gower writing his gnomic sayings. But these 'outsiders' weren't ever being harrassed by the state, university and church authorities and so actually had it easy compared to some of these neo-Kantians fighting for their jobs and ideas in their universities. And these days universities are pretty tough places to work in with all the new philistines running them and a spirit of anti-intellectualism spilling out everywhere saying no to experts and vaccines and yes to tyrants. So the lesson is that there's boldness and frissoning to be had inside university departments as well as outside and we should stop being so influenced by Schopenhauerian stereotyping. Come on you University workers, we say! Huzzah! Anyway, Fries is one of the “founding fathers” of neo Kantianism, along with Herbart and Beneke, and Beiser’s whole point is that if you only look at the later famous schools, Marburg and Baden, you miss the deeper roots of the neo Kantian movement. So I will start by sketching that bigger picture, then explain what Fries is doing with Kant, then show how this leads into neo Kantian debates about psychologism, science and anthropology. Along the way I will unpack the jargon as it comes up. The background is late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany. Kant has just written the three Critiques and completely changed the way people think about knowledge, morality and beauty. Very quickly, though, his picture is taken over and transformed by Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and then Hegel. They want big, systematic, speculative philosophies. Instead of Kant’s modest project of mapping the limits of knowledge, they build grand “systems” that claim to deduce the whole structure of reality from a first principle. This is what Beiser calls the line of “speculative rationalists”. Fries represents another line. He calls himself a Kantian, and he keeps much of Kant’s architecture, however he refuses the speculative turn that builds great systems out of ideas. For him, philosophy should not attempt to build a world system from the armchair. Philosophy should stay close to experience, should pay attention to the way science actually works, and should use psychology and what the Germans called “anthropology” that is, a careful study of human nature to make sense of how knowledge is possible. Imagine two children trying to understand how a bike works. One sits with the bike, turns the pedals, watches the chain, touches the brakes and slowly figures out which bit does what. That is Fries. The other sits in a corner and says “Let us deduce the concept of the bike from the concept of motion and the idea of freedom,” and never actually gets grease on their hands. That is, in Fries’s view, what the speculative idealists are doing. He thinks this second method looks impressive but it is really disconnected from how things actually work. To see what is distinctive in Fries we need to recall a few Kantian basics. Kant says that we must distinguish between what appears to us and things as they are in themselves. The appearing world, the world as we experience it, he calls the “phenomenal” world. “Phenomenal” just means “what shows itself.” The world as it is in itself he calls the “noumenal” world. We never experience that directly. Think of a computer game. What you see on the screen is the phenomenal world. The code and hardware underneath, which you do not see, are the noumenal world. You only ever interact with the game through the screen, yet you know that something must be there making the game possible. Kant also says that our mind does not passively receive the world, like a blank sheet of paper on which reality paints itself. Instead, the mind actively organises what it receives from the senses using basic concepts such as cause and effect, substance, number and so on. He calls these basic organising concepts “categories”. They are “a priori”, which means that they do not come from experience, rather, they are already in place in the mind and make experience of an orderly, law governed world possible in the first place. Before you learn your times tables, you already have a basic sense of “how many” and “more than” and “less than”. You do not get that sense by counting particular piles of sweets, you bring it with you when you count. Or think of it like having pink sunglasses making the world seem pink and they are permanent and without them you can't see anything at all.
The big problem for Kant is to explain how we are justified in using these categories so widely. How do we know that our basic ways of thinking, such as seeing one thing as the cause of another, really apply to everything that can appear to us? It's like asking whether things really are pink behind the pink sunglasses! This is the problem of “justification”. Kant’s central argument about this is called the “transcendental deduction”. A “deduction” here is not just any reasoning, it is a kind of legal style justification, as though you had to show you have the right to use a concept. “Transcendental” means that the argument is about the conditions of the possibility of experience, not about particular facts. So the transcendental deduction is an argument that shows why we must use the categories if experience as we know it is to be possible at all. Which is basically saying the world has to seem pink when you are wearing the pink glasses and you have to wear pink glasses. But it doesn't answer the question about why I have to wear the glasses (I might want the green ones) nor what the world looks like without the pink ones. So many philosophers, including Fries, found this argument both brilliant and puzzling. It feels like Kant is going in circles, saying that we need the categories to have experience and we know they apply because we have experience. Fries thinks Kant has the right idea that we must look at the conditions for the possibility of experience yet that his method is wrong. He also thinks that Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling have made things worse by trying to turn the whole critical project into a series of strict, mathematical style deductions from a single first principle. Beiser says that Fries keeps almost all of Kant’s structure. He accepts the thing in itself, the difference between appearances and things in themselves, the contrast between understanding and sensibility, and the threefold splitting of the mind into cognition, willing and feeling. Fries does not want to abandon Kant’s basic picture. What he wants to change is the method by which we arrive at and justify that picture. Fries’s slogan, so to speak, is that Kant’s philosophy must be rebuilt on a psychological and anthropological foundation. 'Rebuild on psychology and anthropology' would be on his t-shirt. “Psychology” here does not mean Freud or therapy, it means a descriptive science of the mind. It is closer to what we would now call cognitive science or empirical psychology, only without experiments. It studies how our mental powers, such as memory, imagination and understanding, actually function. “Anthropology” in this context means the systematic study of human nature as part of nature, like the Scottish “science of man” that Hume and others had proposed, and that German thinkers had also taken up. Fries reads Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason not as a work that conditions all human minds, but as an analysis of the actual operations of the human mind. He thinks Kant is really doing a careful description of how our mental powers must work if we are to have the kind of experience we obviously do have. In other words, he sees Kant’s project as “anthropological” and “psychological” in nature. Think of someone who wants to understand how children learn to speak. One method is to sit at a desk and try to deduce, from the idea of language alone, how it must be. Another method is to watch and listen to many actual children, maybe record them, notice patterns, see what they can say at what age, and then infer what must be going on in their minds, kind of like Chomsky or Fodor. Fries thinks that Kant is really doing something like this second method, and he wants to push that line further. This leads to Fries’s famous idea that psychology is a “propaedeutic” to critical philosophy. “Propaedeutic” just means a preliminary discipline that prepares the way, a bit like the warm up before a match, or learning arithmetic before algebra. Psychology, for Fries, investigates the actual workings of our minds. It looks, inductively, at our inner experience. From this psychological investigation we can then extract the basic structures that Kant identifies as a priori conditions for experience. The key move is that Fries distinguishes sharply between the way we discover these conditions and the way we justify them. He separates the “context of discovery” from the “context of justification”. In discovery, we use psychological and anthropological methods. We notice, by reflecting on how we actually think, that we always connect events by cause and effect, that we always synthesise the manifold of experience into enduring objects and so on. In justification, however, we step back and show that these structures are necessary if experience is to be intelligible at all. So, for example, once we have found the category of causality by psychological reflection, we then show that any experience of a world where anything happens must involve that category. Imagine you want to know what rules a game is using. One way is to watch people play. You notice that when the ball goes out here, they do a throw in, and when someone is tripped there, they get a free kick. That is the discovery side. Then you might say, more abstractly, that for the game to be football at all, rules like these have to be operating. That is the justification side. Fries thinks philosophers have confused these two levels. The other philosophers at the time accused him of “psychologism,” that is, of reducing questions about the correctness of our thinking to facts about how our minds happen to work. This is a big insult in this philosophical world, perhaps the worst thing you can say to someone. Beiser points out that this is not fair. Fries does not say that logical validity can be read off from psychological causes. He says, rather, that psychology helps us to find the principles that we then justify in another, logical way. In later neo Kantian debates, especially with the Marburg school under Hermann Cohen, this issue becomes a central fault line. Cohen and his followers insist that Kant’s critical philosophy is not about human psychology at all. It is about “pure thought” and the logic of science. For them, talking about the human mind is a distraction. The conditions of possibility of knowledge are not features of our species, they are features of the structure of objective knowledge itself, as it is realised in mathematics and physics. Fries, and those who follow him, hold on to the anthropological side and say that we cannot strip away human finitude like that. Kant is about the limits of our kind of knowers, not about some abstract mind in general. At this point one might worry that if Fries makes philosophy depend on psychology, which is an empirical science, then philosophy will lose its special “a priori” status. It will become just another bit of factual knowledge about human beings, like biology or sociology. Fries is very aware of this worry. He therefore keeps repeating that psychology provides “materials, not proofs” for philosophy. What he means is that we can, through introspection and observation, become aware of certain basic features of our minds. We can then, on that basis, see that certain principles are necessary and universal. The fact that we initially discover them psychologically does not make them merely contingent facts. Imagine a child realises, by counting blocks, that whenever they add one block to a pile, the number goes up by one. At first they discover this by playing with blocks. Later, they come to see that for any whole number n, n plus one will be the next number. The content was discovered practically, however the necessity of it is not tied to those or any particular blocks. Fries thinks something similar happens with the categories and with basic principles of knowledge. Another distinctive Friesian idea, which Beiser notes when he discusses Fries’s philosophy of religion, is what Fries calls “Ahnung,” usually translated as “inkling,” “presentiment” or “feeling of truth.” This is coming back at the moment and is quite fashionable in some philosophy and philosophy of religion departments when they talk about "resonance." And Wittgensteinians in particular like this bit of his philosophy and you can see proof of this if you look at the editors of an english version of 'Dialogues On Morality and Religion' because they are both famous Welsh Wittgensteinians. Wittgensteinians, and not just the Welsh variety, are notorious for wanting to eff a lot about the ineffable and Fries in this bit of his philosophy is very attractive to them I think. The thought here is that we sometimes have a non discursive sense of something being true or real that we cannot spell out fully in concepts. In religion, this might be a feeling of the sublime or a sense of the infinite. Fries sees this as a genuine, though limited, mode of access to something beyond phenomena. It is not knowledge in the strict Kantian sense, because it does not come with clear concepts and arguments, but it is not nothing either. It is a kind of affective resonance that can point beyond the empirical world. Think of the sense you can have that another person is upset or happy before they say anything specific. You cannot quite say what told you, yet you have a strong sense that something is the case. Or think of the feeling that a puzzle solution is right, before you have checked every step. Fries thinks that in matters of morality and religion we have something like that, a “feeling” that there is a deeper truth, which later philosophical reflection can try to articulate. Historically, this idea contributed to debates about whether Kantian philosophy leaves room for religion and for a positive attitude to the thing in itself. Kant is very strict about the limits of knowledge, especially when it comes to God and the immortal soul. Fries does not want to undo those limits, but he does want to allow that, through this non conceptual feeling, we have a connection to something beyond the phenomenal world. This is part of the reason why he was interesting to later theologians and religious thinkers, including Rudolf Otto, who was influenced by the neo Friesian school and wrote about the “numinous” aspect of the holy. It seems a bit of an odd thing to me to be honest, as if the person with the pink sunglasses that she has to wear and without which she can see nothing said "I feel that the world is actually coloured blue". What on earth could she even mean by that? To place Fries more exactly in the neo Kantian story, Beiser suggests that neo Kantianism really begins with Fries, Herbart and Beneke already in the 1790s, before Kant’s prestige dips and speculative idealism takes over. These three share several themes. They stay loyal to “transcendental idealism,” that is, to Kant’s claim that the conditions of experience are supplied by the mind, yet they want to reform the theory of knowledge with the help of psychology. They are suspicious of grand metaphysical constructions and defer instead to the methods of the emerging natural sciences. They also link ethics and aesthetics, and resist the speculative systems of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which is why when Hegel tells us the history of philosophy he misses out these guys. Beiser nicely describes two “post Kantian lines.” One is the speculative, rationalist line, which pushes deductive and dialectical method and aims at an all embracing “absolute idealism.” This is where Hegel and the bold frissoning Idealist Romantic gangs hang out. The other is the empirical psychological line, to which Fries belongs. It insists on experience, on Kant’s dualisms and on the separation between theoretical and practical reason. Each line accuses Kant of having gone too far the other way, and each stretches one side of Kant against the other. In the long run, Beiser argues, the neo Kantians of the later nineteenth century, including the Marburg and Baden schools, stand much closer to the empirical line, even though they distance themselves from psychologism. The psychologism issue is worth dwelling on, because it is a technical term that can be confusing. “Psychologism,” as it is usually understood, is the mistake of confusing the laws of logic with the laws of how human beings in fact think. For example, the law of non contradiction says that it cannot be true that “the cat is on the mat” and “the cat is not on the mat” at the same time and in the same respect. This is not a description of how people happen to think. It is a norm, a rule that tells us how we ought to think if we want to avoid nonsense. If you say that the law of non contradiction is true because most people behave as if it is true, that would be psychologism in the bad sense. Once, when I interviewed the top dialetheist logician Graham Priest, he thought I thought this and was very firm: 'No Richard!' The danger Beiser underlines is that if we ground logic in psychology, then logic becomes about causes rather than justifications. Fries is called a psychologistic thinker because he makes psychology the gateway to critical philosophy. However, Beiser argues that Fries does not say that the validity of logical principles depends on psychological causes, such as habits of association. Instead, he says that through psychology we gain access to necessary features of our mind, and then we justify those features as universal conditions of knowledge. Put bluntly, he is not analysing the psychology of mistakes and biases, he is uncovering the psychological form of correct cognition. Think about how we teach arithmetic to children. We use beans or blocks or fingers, very concrete, empirical things. Yet what we want them to grasp is something general and necessary, for example, that 2 plus 3 is 5, not only for beans or blocks, but for any countable objects. We use psychology as a path to something more abstract. Fries uses psychology in a similar way. Another axis on which Fries is important is his view of the role of philosophy in relation to the sciences. Beiser stresses that Fries was one of the first to argue that philosophy should be the “aide de camp” of science, not its master. He sees the natural sciences, especially mathematics based sciences, as the leading edge of human knowledge. Philosophy, on this view, does not lay down first principles to which physicists and chemists must conform. Rather, it reflects on the methods and assumptions of these sciences. It clarifies the logic of scientific theories, but does not try to derive them. Imagine a football coach and a commentator. The players are like the scientists, they actually do the work on the field. The commentator and the analyst on television rewatch slow motion, point out patterns, explain tactics. Fries wants philosophy to be more like the analyst than like a coach barking orders. Kant had already moved in this direction by treating physics as a successful science to be explained rather than something that needed philosophical permission. Fries goes further, and Beiser identifies him as “the first representative of the scientific wing of neo Kantianism.” Now it is important to see that there were two “Friesian schools.” The first, founded in Jena in 1847 by Ernst Friedrich Apelt, brought together scientists and mathematicians who shared Fries’s belief that philosophy should clarify the logic of science. The second, the “neo Friesian” school at Göttingen under Leonard Nelson from 1903 onwards, developed Fries’s ideas in the twentieth century. Figures like Rudolf Otto, Arthur Kronfeld and even the Nobel laureate biochemist Otto Meyerhof were associated with this tradition. The neo Friesians often found themselves in conflict with the mainstream neo Kantians, especially over psychologism and the status of anthropology. Nelson, for example, argued that the Marburg school had “betrayed” the critical spirit by ignoring the anthropological foundations of knowledge and by turning Kant into a purely logical thinker. The Marburgers replied that any talk of human psychology threatened to reduce philosophy to empirical science and to undermine the objectivity of knowledge. In this sense, every Kant scholar since, as Beiser neatly puts it, has had to navigate between a “Marburg rationalist” pole and a “Friesian anthropological” pole. Think of two ways of teaching grammar. One focuses on the formal rules of the language in the abstract, and hardly ever talks about how kids actually speak. The other starts from the way kids talk and listen and tries to systematise that. The first is Marburg like, the second is Fries like. Both have a point. You need rules that are not tied to any particular child’s habits, yet you also need to ground the rules somewhere human. Philosophers of science and mind today still argue about how much of our theory of knowledge should be “pure” and how much should be grounded in cognitive science and anthropology. That debate is, in part, a re run of the Fries versus Marburg disagreement. There is also a darker side to Fries’s historical role that must be mentioned, even if it is not central to the neo Kantian story. Fries wrote virulently antisemitic texts, including a pamphlet in 1816 that blamed Jews for economic and moral decline and called for special marks on their clothing and for the “extirpation” of Judaism from German life. These views are morally abhorrent, and later Friesian thinkers did not follow him on this point, yet they remind us that being on the “critical” or “scientific” side of a philosophical divide does not protect someone from ugly political ideas. For our purposes, the important thing is not to erase this aspect of his thought, even while we focus mainly on his role in epistemology and the philosophy of science. A final piece of Fries’s philosophical picture concerns the relationship between general principles and particular cases. Beiser reports Fries’s criticism of physicians influenced by Schelling’s “Naturphilosophie.” Fries complains that they rely too much on abstract concepts and metaphysical schemes when they practise medicine, instead of attending carefully to the empirical details of each case. He draws a sharp line between the level at which we speak about very general necessities, using mathematics and philosophy, and the level at which we deal with the messiness of actual phenomena. Imagine you know the general principle that exercise is good for health. That does not tell you, all by itself, whether a particular person with a particular condition should run, swim or rest. The doctor must look at the concrete situation and use experience and judgement. Fries worries that speculative metaphysics encourages people to force reality into neat shapes, instead of letting the particular facts teach us. He praises thinkers like John Brown in physiology for starting from observation and measurement rather than from armchair constructions. This again shows the same basic attitude. Philosophy must respect the autonomy of the empirical sciences. It should not pretend to know, from a few high level principles, how the world must be in detail. It should clarify concepts, analyse methods and keep an eye on the limits of knowledge. It should not wander off into “grand systems” that can neither be checked by experience nor help us to understand it better. If one steps back, Fries’s broader project, as Beiser reconstructs it, is to give Kantian critical philosophy a new foundation that is better suited to a world in which the natural sciences are dominant and speculative metaphysics has lost its shine. He wants to preserve Kant’s insight that we must look at the conditions that make knowledge possible, yet he wants to look for those conditions in human nature as it is studied by psychology and anthropology, not in a mysterious realm of pure reason hovering above us. This is why Beiser emphasises that Fries played three roles in the history of neo Kantianism. He is the founder of the psychological interpretation of Kant. He is the first representative of the scientific, anti speculative wing of the movement. And he is the pioneer of the anthropological reading of transcendental idealism. Later neo Kantians react against his psychologism, yet they continue his insistence that philosophy must take science seriously and must avoid the excesses of systematic metaphysics. Perhaps the best way to remember Fries is to keep three images in mind. First, the child who learns the rules of a game by watching people play. That stands for his idea that we find the conditions of knowledge by looking at how we actually think, then we justify them in a more abstract way. Second, the TV sports analyst who slows down the footage and explains tactics instead of being the team coach coaching players from the sidelines. That stands for his view that philosophy should clarify science, not boss it around. Third, the person who senses that something is true before they can put it into words, the feeling that a solution is right. That stands for his notion of “Ahnung” and his refusal to compress all access to reality into clear, conceptual argument. Around these images sit the technical details, the talk of a priori categories, transcendental deduction, psychologism and anthropology. Stripped of jargon, Fries is trying to answer a simple question that we all could ask. How do we know that our way of thinking fits the world? His answer is that we can see, by reflecting on human nature and on our best sciences, that certain structures of thought are both necessary for experience and in fact present in us. To find an answer ee neither float above humanity in a realm of pure reason, nor sink into purely contingent facts about how we happen to think. We stand in between, using psychological and anthropological investigation to find the structures that make objective knowledge possible, and using transcendental reflection to see why these structures must hold for any experience of a law governed world.
