Beiser's Neo Kantians (2): Beneke
Friedrich Eduard Beneke sits at the edge of Beiser’s story like a slightly awkward cousin. He is part of the same “lost tradition” as Fries and Herbart, the empiricist, psychological line that Beiser traces back to the 1790s, yet he pushes some of their shared ideas so far that he almost drops out of the neo-Kantian family altogether.
The core picture is straightforward, even if the details get intricate. Beneke thinks that if you want to understand knowledge, ethics, aesthetics or religion, you must start from the human mind as it actually works. Psychology, investigated empirically, is for him the basic science. Every other discipline, including logic and metaphysics, becomes a branch of psychology. At the same time he insists that Kant is his hero, and that he is “completing” Kant’s revolution. He identifies with Kant’s critical spirit and with transcendental idealism in a special anthropological sense, the idea that knowledge always revolves around the human subject.
The tension between these two commitments, radical empiricist psychology and loyalty to Kant, is where a lot of the interest lies. To see what Beneke is doing, it helps to sketch the background that Beiser gives. After Kant, German philosophy splits into two broad lines. One line is speculative and rationalist. Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel try to build vast systems from a single principle, deducing the structure of reality by logic alone. The other line is empirical and psychological. Fries, Herbart and Beneke keep Kant’s insistence on the limits of knowledge and on the gap between appearances and things in themselves, but they also insist that philosophy must learn from psychology and from the natural sciences. Beneke belongs firmly to that second line. He grows up in a Berlin where Hegel is the star professor and speculative idealism has the ear of the authorities. He studies theology, then philosophy, reads Kant, Locke and Hume, and has a kind of conversion experience on a Sunday walk, deciding that the whole direction of philosophy has gone wrong and that he is going to fix it.
Very quickly he becomes a Privatdozent in Berlin, lecturing on logic, metaphysics and even mental illness. His classes are popular, which is awkward since he is openly anti-Hegelian. In 1822 the faculty cancels his lectures and withdraws his right to teach. After a lot of opaque bureaucratic manoeuvring, it becomes clear that his latest book, the Foundations of Physical Ethics, and his insistence that thinking is a natural process grounded in sensibility, have been judged dangerous. The ministry, still under the spell of speculative philosophy and anxious about the Carlsbad Decrees, effectively blacklists him.
He tries Jena, Göttingen, then returns to Berlin. He slowly wins back the right to teach, but never secures a full professorship. His lectures are well attended and his books are noticed, yet he scrapes by on low pay. In 1854 he disappears on the way to a lecture. Two years later his body is found near Charlottenburg, and suicide looks the likeliest explanation.
It is a grim end for someone who had set out to save philosophy from what he saw as its speculative drift. All of that matters because it shapes the tone of his philosophy. Beneke is not trying to build a majestic system. He is trying to cut grand systems down to size and rebuild philosophy on solid, psychological ground.
Kant famously distinguishes between analytic and synthetic judgements, and between a priori and a posteriori. An analytic judgement is one where the predicate is already contained in the subject concept, for example “All bachelors are unmarried men.” You do not have to look at the world to see that it is true. Once you know what “bachelor” means, the rest is included. A synthetic judgement is one where the predicate adds something new that is not simply unpacking the subject, for example “The cat is on the mat.” You need to look.
A priori means knowable independently of particular experiences. A posteriori means knowable only with the help of experience. Kant’s great claim is that there are synthetic a priori judgements, for example in mathematics and in the basic principles of natural science. “Every event has a cause” is not just unpacking the concept of an event, yet Kant thinks we know it with necessity, not just from repeated observation.
Beneke thinks this whole analytic versus synthetic structure has been badly drawn. His first major book, the Doctrine of Cognition of 1820, tries to replace it. He says we must start from a theory of judgement. A judgement, in his view, is not primarily a relation between two concepts on a page. It is a comparison between two mental activities. One activity stands behind the subject term, the other behind the predicate. A judgement is true when those activities are wholly or partly identical, that is, when the intuitive content behind the predicate is contained within the intuitive content behind the subject.
Take the sentence “This lily is white.” Kant would say the subject concept “this lily” does not analytically contain “white,” so if the sentence is true it is synthetic, and it is known from experience. Beneke says, no, think about what sits in your mind when you say “this lily.” You have a concrete perception, a total intuition involving shape, colour, maybe smell, a whole bundle. The whiteness is part of that bundle. When you say “this lily is white” you are simply making explicit something that is already there in the full intuition that stands behind the subject. Your mental activity for “white” is contained in the mental activity for “this lily.”On that picture, any true judgement where we have a sufficiently rich grasp of the subject will turn out to be analytic in Kant’s sense. The predicate will be contained in the subject intuition. Beneke is quite explicit about this. He claims that all true judgements are analytic, once we define the subject properly.
That does not mean he denies that there are synthetic judgements in practice. He admits that often our perception of the subject is incomplete. In everyday life we latch onto thin aspects of things and then discover new features. In those cases the predicate adds something new, so the judgement is synthetic. But he treats that as a matter of our ignorance. If we had a fuller intuition of the subject, we would see that the predicate content was already included. Full identity between the mental activity behind the subject and the activity behind the predicate is an ideal, reached only in well developed sciences, where we have a systematic grasp of the subject matter.
He thinks that the analytic versus synthetic distinction becomes pragmatic and relative. It depends on how we choose and define the subject term. In one science a given statement may be analytic because the subject is defined very tightly. In another it may be synthetic because the subject is framed more loosely for different purposes. He then runs the same line through mathematics. Kant had famously said that mathematical judgements are synthetic a priori, for example that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles. It seems as though something new is added in the predicate that is not contained in the bare concept of a triangle. Beneke replies that if we refine our definition of the subject, we can make the statement analytic. With careful analysis of our geometrical intuition and with sharper definitions, the identity between subject and predicate can be made explicit.
From this he draws a radical conclusion. Mathematics does not need special a priori forms of space and time as foundations. If its truths are, at bottom, analytic identities of this kind, they would hold even if space and time turned out to be empirical features of our experience rather than pre-given forms of intuition. At first glance this may sound like a clever trick. Beneke knows that identity on paper is not yet knowledge about the world. The formula “All dryads live in the forest” is just as strict an identity as “All bodies have weight,” but the first talks about mythical tree spirits, the second about actual objects. In both cases the predicate is contained in the subject idea. The difference is that only one connects to reality. So, he says, for a formula to count as knowledge it must apply to being, and the only way to tell that is by consulting experience. Perception is what separates knowledge from mere play with concepts.
Here his empiricism comes to the surface. He accepts that identity alone is not enough. Experience decides whether our tidy identities latch onto the world.Yet two serious problems appear straight away, and Beiser sets them out very clearly. First, Beneke emphasises that no amount of experience can ever fully verify a universal statement. To be strictly true, a universal has to cover all cases, and we can never survey all. So most of the universal laws of empirical science are not strictly true in themselves. He bites the bullet and says that they only become fully true by a kind of decision. We fix the meaning of the subject term so that the predicate follows from it. In other words, we turn scientific laws into more secure identities by tightening our definitions.That manoeuvre smooths out one problem and opens another. If we are doing that, are we still telling ourselves anything about reality, or are we constructing elegant but empty systems like “All stags live in forests” that happen to be consistent but have lost contact with the world. The danger is that science turns into a game of definition rather than an engagement with nature.
Second, Beneke wants objectivity. He does not want his theory of knowledge to collapse into reports about his own private ideas. Yet he also insists that what we know first and most directly are our own representations, the contents of our consciousness. Objects in space are, for us, ways in which these mental activities are ordered. If that is right, we need some way to sort the representations that genuinely connect to things from those that are mere appearance. Only then do we have objective knowledge, rather than a refined description of our inner life. He flags the need for a criterion, a test that marks out the representations that have objective validity, then he does not actually supply it. Beiser calls the result a hanging bridge.
We seem to be left standing on the side of consciousness, looking across a gap to the world, with no clear route across. Even so, Beneke thinks he has given Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason what it lacked: a concrete test for truth. For a judgement to be true, the subject and predicate activities must be identical, fully or in part. Everything else is degree of approximation. The analytic versus synthetic division has been reinterpreted, the a priori has been stripped away as a special category, and experience has been given the final word about which identities count as knowledge.
That is the epistemological side. Behind it sits a more general programme, and this is where Beneke’s psychology comes in. Very soon after the Doctrine of Cognition he publishes the Doctrine of the Original Soul. The two books are a pair. The first lays out his theory of knowledge. The second offers the psychological foundation for that theory and in fact for all of philosophy. The basic idea is simple. If you want to understand the powers and limits of human knowledge, you are studying the human mind. That is a psychological task. So epistemology, the theory of knowledge, belongs inside psychology. It is a branch of the broader science of the soul.
Beneke is operating in what Beiser calls the anthropological tradition. He inherits from Locke, Hume and a series of German thinkers like Platner and Tetens the conviction that all knowing begins in us and must revolve around us. From that he infers that psychology is the “master science.” It examines the basic activities of the soul, and every other discipline depends on it. Herbart later challenges him to justify this sweeping claim. Beneke always comes back to the same maxim. All knowledge is by human beings, for human beings, through human powers. If you want to know what knowledge can be, you must know what those powers are and how they operate. He also insists that psychology can, in principle, be an empirical science. It can observe, compare, correlate and induce patterns, just as physics or biology do. The raw data are different, they are inner experiences rather than outer observations, but the method is the same. We still examine experience critically and infer unseen causes from what we perceive.
Imagine someone who wants to understand how people learn a language. They could sit in an armchair and speculate about “the faculty of language.” Or they could watch children, listen to adults, collect examples, and gradually notice patterns in how sounds and meanings are connected and how rules are acquired. Beneke wants philosophy to behave like the second kind of investigator. He is also very clear that psychology, as he understands it, is not physiology. The body and the brain are important, but he thinks the science of the body has a different province and does not assist psychology directly. The content of psychology is given by inner sense, by introspection and reflection. That is what makes it part of what he still calls the science of the soul. Compared with Herbart, who tries to make psychology mathematical by treating ideas as quasi-physical forces, Beneke is more cautious.
He doubts that mathematical treatment can do justice to the qualitative richness of mental life. In that respect he is actually less “scientistic” than Herbart. By the 1830s, experimental and physiological psychology in Leipzig is beginning to take shape, with Fechner and Weber devising precise experiments on perception. This is not Beneke’s world. He stays closer to the older anthropological model, using systematic self observation and conceptual analysis rather than experiment. What makes his psychology distinctive is his genetic method. He wants to describe how the mind develops from simple elements to the complex mesh of thoughts, feelings and volitions we find in maturity. He assumes that nothing is built in as fully formed content. There are no innate ideas and, at the start, no fixed faculties. There is instead a rich set of powers or forces that differ in how ready they are to be activated, how strongly they respond and how they can be grouped. As outer stimuli act on these inner powers, more definite sensations and perceptions arise. Over time this yields stable habits, dispositions and more complex mental structures.
You can think of this as a mental version of learning to play an instrument. At first you have an undirected capacity. With repeated stimuli, practising scales and pieces, patterns form, and eventually you have an organised skill. For Beneke the soul is like that, a concrete psychical organism that acquires shape through interaction with the world. All of that feeds back into his epistemology. In the Doctrine of Cognition he had already treated judgement as a comparison of activities. In the Doctrine of the Original Soul he makes the deeper assumption explicit. We identify and name objects through basic mental acts, especially speaking and hearing. Words are products of these acts, so their meaning comes from them. What we know is constructed by activities within us, so the words we use inherit their sense and reference from those activities.
From this Beneke presses toward dissolving any robust separation between mental acts and their intentional objects. The object, as we know it, is the product of our acts, not something that stands over against them as a ready made thing. Treating it as a freestanding entity is, he thinks, turning an abstraction into a thing. From a later neo-Kantian or Husserlian perspective this looks like a relapse into old style empiricism. It seems to erase the distinction between acts of consciousness and what they are about, and to make the object too dependent on the subject. But from Beneke’s point of view he is simply taking seriously the anthropological lesson that all knowing begins in us, and criticising Kant’s transcendental method for not going far enough in that direction.
There is also an ethical side to his project. Already in the Foundations of Physical Ethics, the book that helped get him banned from teaching in Berlin, he tries to derive ethical principles from empirical feeling rather than from a pure will or a priori law. He shares with Herbart a suspicion of single supreme principles and of a purely rational source of obligation. He leans instead toward a situational ethics, where moral judgement depends on the concrete configuration of desires and relations in a particular case, and toward an aesthetic grounding of morality, where a sense of moral form and harmony guides us. Here again, psychology is doing the work. If ethical judgement grows out of patterns of feeling and perception, then the science of those feelings and perceptions underpins ethics. Beneke’s detailed analyses of temperament, character and the ways in which education shapes the young mind were influential among teachers, even when his metaphysical hypotheses were not widely accepted.
So far we have been inside Beneke’s own point of view. How does this all look from the vantage point of neo-Kantianism as a later movement. Beiser’s claim, both in the 3:16 essay and in his book on the genesis of neo-Kantianism, is that Beneke belongs to the founding generation of neo-Kantianism along with Fries and Herbart. Together they form an alternative post-Kantian line that opposes speculative idealism, stays loyal to transcendental idealism and uses psychology to reform theory of knowledge. At the same time Beiser notes that Beneke pushes empiricism and psychologism further than the others. Early on he denies the a priori altogether and says experience alone grounds knowledge. He rejects Kant’s forms of intuition, the synthetic a priori, the transcendental deduction and even the categorical imperative. On a British model, he throws out most of what people normally consider the “rationalist” side of Kant.
That is why he often sits uneasily in histories of neo-Kantianism. He looks more like an empiricist critic of Kant than a continuer. Yet even in 1832 he publishes what Beiser calls one of the first neo-Kantian manifestos, arguing that we must go back to Kant in order to rescue philosophy from speculative excess. How can someone who rejects the a priori and synthetic judgements still call himself Kantian? Beneke’s answer has two parts. First, he takes transcendental idealism not as a subtle doctrine about space, time and categories, but as an anthropological truth: that knowledge centres on the human subject, and that what we can know is shaped by the structure of our minds. He can accept that while still denying that there are special a priori forms of intuition or categories in Kant’s technical sense. Second, he sees Kant as the great critic of rationalism from Descartes to Wolff. For him the heart of Kant’s work is its empirical limit setting, its refusal to let reason claim knowledge beyond experience. On that front, he thinks, Kant did not go far enough, because Kant still relies on opaque deductions. So Beneke wants to keep the limit setting spirit and replace the method with one drawn from empirical psychology.
Later neo-Kantians, particularly from the Marburg and Baden schools, will define themselves partly against this psychological line. They will argue that Kant’s question is about the validity of knowledge, not about the psychological fact of how we happen to think. Logical norms, they insist, must not be reduced to laws of mental association or to the empirical structure of consciousness. It is in these debates that the term “psychologism” becomes a standard accusation, and Fries and Beneke are often cited as prime offenders. Beiser’s reconstruction complicates that picture. He stresses that Fries, Herbart and Beneke distinguished clearly between norms of reasoning and psychological facts. They did not think that logic could be read off directly from statistics about how people think.
What they did say is that psychology matters for understanding what knowledge is like and how the sciences actually function, and that philosophy must give up the fantasy of laying down first principles for the sciences. In other words, they want philosophy to become, in Locke’s phrase, the underlabourer, not the architect. With Beneke this underlabourer role becomes especially clear. He calls psychology the “science of science” because it studies the mind that makes scientific knowledge possible. Philosophers are there to clarify how our representing, judging and inferring actually proceed, and to tidy up the concepts and assumptions that scientists in practice employ. They are not there to declare from the armchair how nature must be.
From a contemporary point of view, one can see both the promise and the difficulties in his project. On the promising side, he anticipates several themes that reappear in later philosophy of mind and language. The idea that the meaning of words is grounded in basic mental acts and in use within a community, the thought that objects, as we know them, are structured by our cognitive activities, and the hope that empirical psychology can illuminate the workings of knowledge, all resonate with later movements.
On the difficult side, his account of objectivity is underdeveloped. If intentional objects are simply products of our acts, it is hard to explain how we can be mistaken about them in a robust sense. The line between genuine knowledge and elaborate fiction becomes blurry. His way of making scientific laws into analytically true identities by definition threatens to drain them of empirical content. And his reliance on inner observation as the basis for psychology looks fragile once experimental and physiological methods show what can be done by measuring behaviour and brain. It is telling that no school formed around him. He had a few students who applied his ideas to pedagogy, and his practical work on education and character was valued, but he did not become a major reference point for later neo-Kantians.
His presence in twentieth century histories is modest, and only recently has he attracted fresh attention as an important link between Kant, empiricist psychology and later debates about psychologism. If we step back and try to hold the whole picture in view, we can see Beneke’s philosophy as an attempt to answer a very simple question in a very ambitious way. The simple question is: How can we make philosophy more like a genuine science without losing sight of the human mind at its centre? His answer is to take psychology as the basic discipline and to rebuild epistemology, ethics and aesthetics upon it. He wants Kant’s critical spirit that limits knowledge to experience, he wants empiricist methods that start from perception and inner observation, and he wants a deductive, systematic ideal where, at the end of inquiry, the truths of science appear as tightly connected identities.
That combination generates tensions that he never fully resolves. But in Beiser’s telling, those tensions are not a reason to dismiss him. They are exactly the tensions that later neo-Kantians, phenomenologists and analytic philosophers will have to work through again, in their own idioms, when they ask how logic, psychology and the human standpoint fit together. Beneke is one of the first in that longer conversation to insist that if we want to understand knowledge, we need to understand the knower, not as an abstract point of reason, but as a living, developing mind.