Beiser's Neo Kantians (3): Herbart
Johann Friedrich Herbart looks, in a standard history of philosophy, like a side character. He is tagged as a minor realist, remembered as an early psychologist and as someone who wrote a lot about education. If he appears in the story of Kant at all, it is usually as an opponent rather than as a follower. Beiser’s reconstruction turns this picture around. Herbart sits alongside Fries and Beneke as one of the original neo Kantians, part of the early movement to rescue philosophy from speculative system building and to root it again in experience and critical method. Beiser is saying - 'get this guy out of the shadows and give him a spotlight.' So here he is. And as someone who once worked in education and still knock around philosophers of education it's good to see a philosopher of education being given a spotlight because sometimes there's a feeling that this type of philosopher works in the Twilight Zone and doesn't always get the recognition they merit. So I think Beiser is doing a great thing in working his way through a whole lot of philosophers who have been largely forgotten or sidelined and saying 'Hey! Let's stop all that forgetting and sidelining!' I kind of like this because it gives us all hope that maybe one day a Beiser like character will come and do the same for us. Because most of us know we'll be forgotten and sidelined. And that's ok. But not being forgotten and sidelined seems better.
OK, so what makes Herbart tricky is that he looks, at first glance, like the least Kantian of the three. He is known for a hard headed metaphysical realism, for a plural world of simple beings, and for a mathematical psychology in which ideas behave like tiny forces struggling for space in the mind. That does not sound much like transcendental idealism. Yet Beiser argues that if you look at what Herbart thinks metaphysics is for, and at how he criticises Fichte and Schelling, you find a deeply Kantian project. The wider background is the same as for Fries and Beneke. After Kant, German philosophy splits. One line is speculative and rationalist. Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel try to derive the whole of reality from a first principle and to solve every contradiction through higher order concepts. These are sensational and bold attempts and that's why they're well known because we all like sensational and bold. They seem to take thought to the edge. There's the thought that they might fall over the edge which makes it all very exciting. Don't fall! we cry. Or in a different mood: go on, jump!
The other line is empirical and critical which doesn't seem sensational and bold but is a little drab compared to the bold sensationalist gang on the edge. But it keeps Kant’s sense of the limits of knowledge, insists on the authority of the natural sciences and is suspicious of huge systems that float free of experience. Herbart belongs firmly to this second line after studying in Jena under Fichte and being initially drawn into that sensational orbit. He then spends several years in Switzerland, working as a private tutor and meeting the educational reformer Pestalozzi. Those Swiss years leave a mark. Pestalozzi stresses careful observation, attention to the senses and learning by experience rather than through abstract lessons. Herbart takes from him the thought that genuine understanding begins with seeing the world as it is, before any attempt at system making and being sensational.
On his return to Germany his relation with Fichte sours. Herbart comes to see the Fichtean talk of the ego creating the world as empty and self defeating. If the very act that constitutes reality cannot itself be thought, he argues, then the theory asks us to think what cannot be thought, which for him is nonsense. For him Fichte hasn't just gone to the edge, he's dived over the cliff. Around the same time he begins to separate morality and religion in a very sharp way. Morality is about action and decision and changing the world. Religion is about feeling a sense of a given world that lies beyond our control. He no longer believes that ethical striving can swallow everything. There has to be room for rest and for appreciation of a world that is not our product. Stop all that striving, Fichte, he said, and let's do more contemplating.
In Bremen and then Göttingen this develops into a strong reaction against ethical idealism. Fichte’s vision of endless striving to bring nature under the rule of reason strikes Herbart as both psychologically unhealthy and philosophically confused. Education and self formation, he thinks, must start from the recognition that nature has its own laws and its own value. Before we dream about transforming the world we have to learn to see it. It's like when MacDuff says he has to feel the murder of his family before taking action in Macbeth.
These early moves already show two traits that will remain constant. First, he resists attempts to swallow nature into the self. Second, he insists that careful perception and experience stand before large scale theory. Both traits echo Kant’s critical stance, even though he criticises Kant on particular points. In 1806 he publishes his Main Points of Metaphysics, and later his General Metaphysics, where the core of his system appears. Beiser says that, for all the technical difficulties, a Kantian frame is visible. Metaphysics is not a science of the absolute, Herbart says. It is the science of the conceivability of experience. Its job is to show how central concepts that we use in everyday and scientific thinking are possible, by working out their relations to other concepts.
Herbart calls his method the method of relations, or sometimes the doctrine of completing concepts. The starting point is quite simple. When philosophers use big general notions such as substance, cause, freedom or the ego, they tend to tear these notions out of the context in which they arise in experience. They then treat them as if they were simple and unconditioned. Once that happens, contradictions spring up. For instance, substance appears both as one and as many, as changeable and yet as persisting through change. Herbart’s thought is that such contradictions are signals that the concept has been mishandled. Instead of throwing out the concept, or proclaiming that reality is contradictory, we should restore the missing context and work out what relations the concept stands in to others. Often the contradiction can be removed by distinguishing levels or aspects. The concept then becomes a structured whole whose parts are the conflicting features, now shown to belong together in a controlled way.
Imagine someone says, in a story, that a character is both brave and afraid. At first this sounds contradictory. On closer inspection you realise that the person feels fear and yet acts bravely, or that they are fearless about one thing and terrified of another. Once you introduce the right distinctions and relations the contradiction disappears. Herbart thinks much of metaphysics should work like that. Philosophers notice tensions in our concepts, but instead of refining the concepts, they leap to dramatic conclusions about reality itself. Stop being so dramatic, says Herbart. Do some refining, he says.
His method of relations is meant to be a disciplined way of doing this refining. He describes it as transcendental, in the Kantian sense. Its task is to show how synthetic unity is possible, that is, how a concept can bring together distinct elements into one whole. Those concepts, he thinks, are the necessary conditions of experience. They shape how we receive and organise the world. The method does not take us beyond experience into a realm of intellectual intuition. It stays within the representations. This is where Herbart starts to look like both an idealist and a realist at once. He insists again and again that we never step outside the circle of our own representations. We do not have a God’s eye view of things in themselves. Everything we say about being is said from within our experience. He even warns that we must treat all talk about being as talk about the way we posit things in thought.
At the same time he invents pluralistic realism, which for him seems a bit like he's trying a bit of sensationalism and boldness. It's a bit like when Mark E Smith started wearing glam clothes and ditched his grey pullovers for a while. Herbart argues that behind the appearances there are many simple, self sufficient beings, which he calls reals. These reals are not directly knowable, but we are pushed to posit them when we try to resolve contradictions in the way we think about ordinary objects. The key problem is the idea of a single thing that has many properties. Take a bar of gold. Common sense says that there is one thing, the bar, which has several properties. It is heavy, yellow, shiny, conductive and so on. But if you think of each of those properties as something simple in your experience, you quickly see that you cannot combine them into one simple sensation. The heaviness and the colour are different in kind. Herbart picks up this gap and generalises it. The form of the thing is unity. The matter of the thing is plurality. Yet we say that the one thing has many different properties. That seems to involve a contradiction. Either the thing is one and cannot really be many, in which case the properties are illusions, or the properties are many and the thing is a fiction.
So he posits a whole swarm of simple reals. Each real is absolutely simple. It has no internal parts and no quantity. It is pure positing, pure being. It cannot change inside itself, since change would imply that it had temporal parts. What we call a thing is a complex of relations among many such reals. The appearance of a unified object with many properties arises from the way these reals affect each other and from the way our representations respond to their mutual influence. Wow! This is a bit wild after all!
A very rough way to picture this is to imagine a dance floor seen from a balcony in a Busby Berkeley film. From a distance it looks as if there are patterns, perhaps shapes that move across the floor. You might even think there are large shapes with many parts. Up close you see that there are only individual dancers. The patterns are formed by the relative positions and movements of those individuals. In Herbart’s theory the reals are like the dancers. The unified thing is like the pattern you see. This is a realist move because it posits a mind independent plurality of basic beings. It is also Kantian in spirit because Herbart insists that the reals, as they are in themselves, are never directly known. What we know are appearances that arise from their relations and from the way our representing activity responds to those relations. Metaphysics does not give us a map of the reals. It gives us an account of how the world of experience is conceivable, given that some such reals must exist.
In this way he holds onto a version of the thing in itself while denying that we can say much about it. The reals must be simple, he argues, because any plurality inside them would already be a relation and so an appearance. They must be positive, not negative, because negation presupposes relation to something else. Beyond that, he keeps them thin. He then connects this to Kant’s split between empiricism and rationalism. Rationalists, he says, are right that experience forces us to posit something beyond sensations, some substrate that holds properties together. Empiricists are right that whatever we say about the properties must be grounded in experience. Critical philosophy, in his sense, is the attempt to combine these insights without claiming to know the inner nature of the substrate. When you think about it, it seems less sensationalist than it first appears, so it's like when Mark E Smith starts wearing grey jumpers again.
From here it is easier to see why Beiser calls him a neo Kantian metaphysician. He keeps Kant’s basic dualism between appearances and things in themselves, his suspicion of intellectual intuition and his sense that metaphysics must be about the conditions of the possibility of experience rather than about a supersensible realm described from the outside. At the same time he rejects specific Kantian doctrines, such as the strong version of transcendental freedom and some of the arguments in the Transcendental Aesthetic. He thinks those parts of Kant go beyond what critical method can support. They go too far, he says.
One of his most original contributions lies not in metaphysics but in psychology. Herbart is often named, along with Fechner and Wundt, as a founder of scientific psychology. Whereas Fries and Beneke also make psychology central, Herbart tries to mathematise it. He thinks the mental items that populate consciousness, which he calls Vorstellungen or presentations, behave like forces. They reinforce or inhibit one another, and they have something like strength. On this basis he sketches a mathematical psychology. Ideas that are strong enough rise above a threshold into clear consciousness. Weaker ones sink below that threshold into a kind of limbo but remain as tendencies. Under favourable conditions they can rise again. When several ideas are active at once they can fuse into a new complex, or they can compete and suppress one another. Herbart uses simple equations to describe these processes and to predict, in principle, which ideas will be conscious at a given time.
Imagine a room full of people talking. If one person speaks very softly, their voice is lost in the background. It is below your hearing threshold. If several people speak at once, some voices drown out others. If two people say similar things, your mind may blend them into one impression. Herbart imagines the mind in a similar way. Consciousness is like the level of sound you can notice. Below it there is still activity, but it does not reach awareness. At the time, this was an adventurous idea. It encouraged later figures, such as Fechner, to try applying mathematics to mental phenomena. Herbart’s specific formulas were quickly seen as crude. He assigned numbers to intensities without measurement and so his numeric laws were largely speculative. Yet the basic thought that mental events have strength, can be inhibited and can linger below the surface fed into later concepts such as the limen and the subconscious, which became central for Freud and others.
Herbart’s psychology is tied tightly to his theory of knowledge. Since we never leave the circle of representations, we need to understand how those representations are formed, combined and stabilised if we want to understand how knowledge is possible. It is not enough to list logical norms. We must understand the traffic of ideas that makes thinking possible at all. That is why Herbart thinks psychology is not an optional extra but an essential partner to critical philosophy. His concern with perception and with the shaping of the mind also colours his ethics.
In his Bremen years he begins to argue that morality has an aesthetic basis. Moral judgement, he says, is fundamentally a matter of perceiving relations correctly and of responding to those relations with a sense of harmony or disharmony. To judge an action as right or wrong is, at bottom, to see it as fitting or unfitting within a web of relations. He calls this a function of reason, yet it is a reason that perceives and judges rather than deduces.
This does not mean that morality becomes a matter of subjective taste. He thinks there are objective patterns of relation that call for certain responses. What is aesthetic in his sense is the mode of access. We do not reach moral insight by plugging facts into a formula. We reach it by refined perception, by the ability to see how elements hang together. Here his early admiration for Pestalozzi surfaces again. Practice in seeing clearly, in attending to what is given, shapes the capacity for sound moral appraisal.
Beiser links this aspect of Herbart to later neo Kantian worries about mixing ethics and aesthetics. If moral judgement has an aesthetic structure, one might fear that art and morality collapse into each other. Herbart tries to avoid that by keeping the objects distinct. A painting may be aesthetically harmonious and yet morally disturbing. Moral perception is focused on relations between wills, actions and persons, not on colour and line. The connection is structural rather than direct.
Herbart’s position on freedom also marks him off from Kant. Kant had argued for a strict notion of transcendental freedom, a capacity of the will that is not determined by natural causes and that lies outside the empirical world. Herbart rejects this. If freedom in that sense existed, he says, it would be beyond our knowledge and beyond the reach of any influence. It would therefore be useless for understanding moral life. For him, actions and character develop within nature, under necessity. That does not abolish responsibility, but it reframes it. Moral development can be studied like other natural processes, and this again fits his project of a scientific ethics grounded in psychology.
All of this places him in a curious relation to later neo Kantian schools. On one side he looks like a forerunner, perhaps the most rigorous of the early figures in his determination to make metaphysics critical and to take science seriously. On another side he seems to violate a central later dogma, namely that logic and epistemology must be kept strictly free from psychology. The Marburg school, in particular, insists that questions about the validity of knowledge are not questions about how the mind happens to work.
Beiser’s story is that these later schools inherit a great deal from Herbart while loudly rejecting his psychologism. His method of relations, developed to dissolve contradictions in our basic concepts, influenced neo Kantian treatments of space, time and objectivity. His insistence that we never step outside representations and that metaphysics should explain the conceivability of experience rather than peer into a realm beyond experience fed into later formulations of the transcendental method. At the same time, his attempt to assign numbers to ideas, and to turn the soul into a system of forces that obey mathematical laws, came to look naive once experimental psychology became more refined.
As a result, his name survives more in histories of education and psychology than in histories of philosophy. If we try to hold his broader project a fairly clear picture emerges. He wants to defend the reality and intelligibility of ordinary experience against two threats. One threat comes from the bold sensationalism of speculative idealism, which risks declaring the finite world a mere show in the face of the absolute. The other comes from scepticism, which uses contradictions in our concepts to argue that knowledge of reality is impossible. Herbart has two main moves. First, he argues that most of the contradictions are not in reality itself but in the way philosophers have handled concepts that properly belong in experience. If we restore the concepts to their network of relations, and refine them using the method of relations, the contradictions can often be dissolved. Second, he reconstructs a lean metaphysics of the reals, a plurality of simple beings that underlie appearances, and combines this with a psychologised account of representation. Together they yield a world that is both mind dependent in how it appears and mind independent in its underlying being.
Seen in that light, his realism is not a flat return to pre critical metaphysics. It is an attempt to go on being a Kantian while answering worries that Kant had not fully defused. His mathematical psychology then provides a sketch of how the flow of ideas within us can be understood in quasi scientific terms, making room for a more exact study of consciousness without giving up the critical restrictions on knowledge. He has three main moves.
First, imagine the method of relations as a habit of thought you might use when you find your own ideas clashing. Instead of concluding that the world is impossible, you ask whether you have left something out, whether there is a way of distinguishing aspects, times or standpoints that lets the pieces fit together. Herbart wants metaphysics to be a disciplined version of that habit.
Second, imagine the reals as the invisible dancers whose movements underlie the patterns on a crowded floor. You never see them one by one in isolation. You only see the patterns they form. Yet you know that unless there were individual dancers, the pattern could not exist. That is how he thinks about things in themselves. Third, imagine your own stream of thoughts as a set of voices that sometimes speak clearly, sometimes murmur in the background and sometimes fall silent for a while yet can be heard again later. That is how he imagines ideas rising above and falling below the threshold of consciousness. The noises can combine into chords, interfere with one another or reinforce one another, and in principle one could write equations for their interactions. This is his picture of psychological dynamics.
If we connect these images, we get something like his overall view. Experience is a pattern of appearances formed by underlying reality, as processed by a mind whose ideas have their own dynamics. Philosophy does not reveal a hidden world behind the pattern. It explains how the pattern is possible, given the nature of our concepts and the limits of our representing powers. In doing that, Herbart believes, philosophy can be both faithful to Kant’s critical insights and responsive to the growing authority of the mathematical natural sciences.