methodological ideal of the mos geometricus
in chapter 2 i argued that hegel follows Kant in denying that the unconditioned can be known by subsuming it under the categories or finite thought-determinations, and that insofar as pre-critical meta- physics is characterized by the attempt to do just that, hegel also fol- lows Kant in his rejection of that tradition. in the Logic, hegel puts this by saying that “as for the content of [pre-critical] metaphysics, Kant has in his own fashion shown that it leads by strict demonstration to anti- nomies” (gW 12:229; first emphasis added). Kant’s discovery was that certain contents (notably the world-whole, but also the soul and a neces- sary being) are beyond the limits of discursive thought, and that their necessary unknowability can be demonstrated using only the means available to discursive thought itself. By the same token, however, Kant may be said to accept uncritically that discursive thought and its method of demonstration possess exclusive cognitive legitimacy; his exclusion of certain contents (the unconditional) from the sphere of determinate cognition serves on hegel’s view to insulate discursive rea- son against inconsistencies that could call it into question. hence in the passage just quoted hegel goes on to say that Kant “did not reflect on the nature of such demonstration itself, which is bound up with finite content; but the one must fall with the other” (gW 12:229).
as framed by hegel, Jacobi’s importance lies in his critique of the finite, discursive rationality for which, within the scope of the sens- ible world, Kant seeks to guarantee empirical substance and objective content. according to Jacobi, discursive form tends inevitably toward formalism. demonstration or deduction, he argues with some plausi- bility, is a procedure based on the construction of tautologies, prop- ositions that are true necessarily, but also merely in virtue of their form. The systematic elaboration of human knowledge requires that the intrinsic qualities of the content given in experience be succes- sively reformulated as relations, a process that (in the words of Jacobi’s “open letter” to fichte) transforms “content into form” (die Sache in bloße Gestalt), and makes “form into content, content into nothing” (fJhW ii, 1:201).
now Jacobi believes that, as a matter of fact, truly radical formal- ism is a conceptual impossibility. This view is especially evident in the second edition of the Spinoza Letters, where he argues that we can have no conception of an absolutely dependent entity:
Such an entity would have to be utterly passive, and yet it could not be passive; for whatever is not already something, cannot be made into something through mere determination; no properties can be produced, by virtue of relations, in something that has none in itself, indeed not even any relation would be possible with respect to such a thing. (fhJW i, 1:163)
however, despite its ultimate incoherence, Jacobi thinks that the encroachment of formalism on human life is itself the result of existen- tial pressures on human survival. rationality, he argues in Supplement vii to the Spinoza Letters,
is a property of humans … an instrument they use … Since our condi- tional existence rests on an infinity of mediations, an immeasurable field is opened to inquiry which we are forced to deal with for the very sake of our physical preservation. The objective of all these inquiries is to discover what mediates the existence of things. The things whose medi- ation we comprehend, that is, whose mechanism we have discovered, are those which we can ourselves produce when the means are in our hands. (fhJW i, 1:260)
instrumental rationality, that is, the investigation of mechanisms, of means and ends, of inputs and outputs, is directed toward the for- mulation and subsequent exploitation of functional relations. Putting the matter this way helps to see why “mechanistic” explanation as Jacobi understands it has an inherent tendency toward formalism. mechanistic explanation (as opposed to physically realized mecha- nisms) focuses on the causal roles played by the relevant components in a system, tending to identify them with those roles. causal roles, however, are essentially relational, and their specification consists in an enumeration of the possible states of the entity, the states of that or other entities upon which these states regularly follow, and the states of that or other relevant entities to which they give rise.
The formalized procedure for characterizing causal roles is the ramsey–lewis method for defining theoretical terms: the theory is rewritten as an existentially quantified sentence in which all the the- oretical terms are quantified out and then defined in terms of their causal or functional relations to each other.4 it is generally agreed that theoretical terms, so defined, are multi-realizable; which is to
4 for a classic presentation of the procedure see david lewis, “how to define Theoretical Terms,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. i (oxford University Press 1983), 78–96.
say that the intrinsic properties (qualities) of any system instantiating the theory are defined purely in terms of extrinsic properties (rela- tions), so that any object(s) that fulfill the causal role(s) thus speci- fied fall under the definition, regardless of the qualities they might be thought of possessing absolutely, that is, outside of any relations. To put it in terms somewhat closer to those Jacobi would have used, objects come to be defined in terms of form, not in terms of their experiential qualities or content: We cannot comprehend, he writes, “what we are unable to construct … When we say that we have scien- tifically investigated a quality, what we in fact mean is that we have reduced it to figure, number, position, and motion and dissolved it therein; which is to say: we have objectively annihilated the quality” (fhJW i, 1:258, n. 1).
in a posthumous paper, lewis himself shows how causal role ana- lysis, in its ramsified form, gives rise to a variety of mitigated skepti- cism he calls “ramseyan humility.”5 Though he presents a couple of different arguments for the position, the crux of it seems to be this: all that we can capture in our theory, once it has been appropriately ramsified, are the relational properties any occupants of the causal roles have to instantiate, and indeed we know those properties only by observation, that is, by the effects they have on us. however, there are, as lewis argues, independent grounds for believing that those roles at least could have been occupied by altogether different intrinsic proper- ties. There remains, therefore, an ineliminable contingency in the fact that just these observable properties are the ones that occupy the causal roles identified by our theory; and hence absolute limits are placed on the extent of our insight into why these properties (and not others) play the role that they do. one can bypass this skeptical implication only by asserting either (a) that the causal roles a property fulfills are essential to it, so that any property that plays that role is identical to the intrinsic property in question; or (b) that properties just are causal roles, that is, relations, and that there is nothing above and beyond those roles to worry about.
rae langton has argued that ramseyan humility is very close to, and can indeed serve as an interpretation of, Kant’s transcenden- tal skepticism regarding “things in themselves” and his limitation of
5 david lewis, “ramseyan humility,” in d. Braddon-mitchell and r. nolan (eds.), Conceptual
knowledge to the relational properties exhibited in the phenomena.6 Broadly speaking, langton’s position is an epistemic version of struc- tural realism, the view that all we can know of nature are the struc- tural relations between phenomena, but that we can know these with perfect objectivity.7 other contemporary philosophers of science and mathematics, however, have embraced an ontic or metaphysical inter- pretation of structural realism according to which objects themselves, along with their properties and causal powers, are constituted solely by their position as nodes in a structure. Philosophers of this persua- sion argue against their critics that structures can do all the metaphys- ical work traditionally reserved for substantival individuals, including individuation.8 now, in regard to scientific knowledge, Jacobi clearly subscribes to a form of epistemic structuralism avant la lettre. however, he sees its ontic counterpart as leading to a state of worldlessness (what hegel will call “acosmism,” e.g. enc §50) in which neither qualities nor individual bearers of properties are acknowledged as irreducibly real and in which, consequently, the experiential content that consti- tutes the substance of our lived existence is nihilistically denied as illusionary. rationality, made absolute, leads to formalism and thence to nihilism.
Therefore, Jacobi is best characterized as the critic of a certain strand of scientific realism that arose in the period of the scientific revolution, one chief proponent of which is of course Spinoza.9 This is
6 See rae langton, “elusive Knowledge of Things in Themselves,” Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 82 (2004): 129–36. for a more detailed presentation of her view see Kantian
Humility. lewis’s essay is a response to langton’s ideas.
7 on the Kantian overtones of structuralist realism in the early twentieth century, see Barry gower, “cassirer, Schlick and ‘Structural’ realism: The Philosophy of the exact Sciences in the Background to early logical empiricism,” British Journal for the History
of Philosophy 8:1 (2000): 71–106. ramsey-sentences play a recurrent, central, and con- troversial role throughout the contemporary discussions of structural realism, both in its epistemic and ontic varieties. for an example, see the overview article by James ladyman, “What is Structural realism?,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 29:3 (1997): 409–24, esp. 411–13. Structural realism in the physical sciences initially arose as a response to the anti-realist contentions of those who saw either historical theory-change or the empirical underdetermination of physical theories as undermin- ing traditional realist commitments.
8 Prominent representatives are James ladyman (e.g. “on the identity and diversity of individuals,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 81 [2007]: 23–43) and Steven french, “Structure as a Weapon of the realist,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 106 (2006): 1–19.
9 for a critical account of ontic structural realism tracing it back to the scientific revolu- tion, see Bas Van fraassen, “Structure: its Shadow and Substance,” British Journal for the
the meaning of his sibylline question in Beilage vii, “does man have rea- son: or does reason have man?” When the efficacy of reason as a tool or instrument (Werkzeug) in the struggle for survival – the reason we have – seduces us into identifying the form of intelligibility produced by reason with being itself, that is, when the strategies of “mechanis- tic” or functional explanation are hypostatized as the very structures of reality itself, the result is an alienating and potentially oppressive ideology that divides the mind against itself – the reason that has us.10
Specifically, Jacobi sees fatalism, nihilism, and the denial of sub- stantial individuality as implicit in every attempt to erect a metaphys- ical system of reason; in its most fully articulated form, this is supposed to be the rationalist ideology exemplified in Spinoza’s Ethics. i have already indicated one way in which nihilism could arise from such an ideology, namely via the formalism inherent in functional analysis. a closely related source is the holism of functional analysis.11 as i pointed out above, the complete ramsification of a theory entails the interde- finability of its basic terms. Since the meaning of a term is formulable only in terms of its relations to the others, the effect is semantic hol- ism: the meaning of each term consists in its relations to all the others. This holism, which is one of the essential characteristics of functional analyses, is thus a concomitant effect of transforming intrinsic prop- erties into relational ones, and this is the same procedure that we saw to entail formalism.
if we go on to assume, as seems natural, that successful explana- tions of the functional variety also provide insight into what the func- tionally analyzed states and entities actually are, the path is paved to the metaphysical holism Jacobi attributes to Spinoza: “all individual things mutually presuppose and are related one another, so that no single one of them can either exist or be comprehended without all the others; that is to say, they form an inseparable whole, or to speak more correctly and more literally: they exist altogether in a single, abso- lutely indivisible, infinite thing [= Spinoza’s substance], and in no other way” (fhJW i, 1:100).
This result is incompatible with the metaphysical individualism that Jacobi sees as underwriting personal free will; in other words, it entails
10 for discussion see Sandkaulen, “‘oder hat die Vernunft den menschen?’.”
11 See the concise discussion by robert cummins, “functional analysis,” in n. Block (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. i (cambridge, ma: miT Press 1980), 185–90.
fatalism. furthermore, since individuals are grasped not only as not possessing any non-relational, substantial reality of their own, but as being differentially constituted, that is, by negation and limitation within a network of functions, the position entails nihilism: “Determinatio est negatio, seu determinatio ad rem juxta suum esse non pertinet. individual things, insofar as they exist in a determinate manner, are non-entia (fhJW i, 1:100).
Jacobi should therefore be understood as calling for a limitation of the scope of functional explanation – or rather, as insisting on the ineluctable evils that ensue when it is hypostatized as a metaphysical doctrine. formulated thus, Jacobi’s critique of metaphysics sounds very much like Kant’s, and hegel was obviously right to pair them as having together called attention to the untenable implications of pre-critical rationalist metaphysics. yet the valence of Jacobi’s critique differs in important ways from that of Kant. hegel puts it this way:
While Kant attacked the former metaphysics mainly from the side of its matter, Jacobi attacked it especially from the side of its method of
demonstration and, with great clarity and profundity, he put his finger
on precisely the point at issue, namely that such a method of demon- stration is strictly bound to the cycle of rigid necessity of the finite and that freedom, i.e. the Concept and with it everything that truly is, lies beyond it and is unattainable by it. – according to Kant’s result, it is the pecu- liar content of metaphysics that leads it into contradictions; the inad- equacy of cognition is due to its subjectivity. Jacobi’s result is that the inadequacy is due instead to the method and the whole nature of cogni- tion itself, which only grasps a concatenation of conditions and dependency and thereby proves itself inadequate to what exists in and for itself and to what is absolutely true. (gW 12:229)
even though Kant and Jacobi come to results that may be formu- lated identically (by saying, for instance, that discursive reason has by its very nature no theoretical purchase on the unconditioned), they represent two rather different approaches. Kant’s transcendental cri- tique focuses on the conditions of possibility of objective, discursive knowledge and is to that extent a constructive undertaking. central to Jacobi’s critique, by contrast, is the concern that scientific and instru- mental rationality necessarily converge and that each is liable to dis- tort and conceal the structures of lived experience in a practically detrimental way. hegel appropriates both these strains of the critical project. like Kant, he seeks to provide an account of the finite forms
of thought and their role in constituting finite subjectivity. however, in his assertion that the forms of finite, discursive reason, when conceived as the exclusive and irreducible forms of cognition, gravely distort and conceal the true character of “freedom, that is, the concept and hence everything that truly is,” he is much closer to Jacobi. it is the form of finite cognition as such that he seeks to criticize, not merely the illicit extension of that form to a content that necessarily destabilizes it.