Transcendental Philosophy
One needs specific initiation into the classics of transcendental philosophy (Kant’s "Criticism,"
Descartes’s "Metaphysics," and Fichte’s "Doctrine of Science") because all say farewell to the common
sense view of things. The three types of transcendental thinking converge in conceiving rational
autonomy as the ultimate ground for justification. Correspondingly, the philosophical pedagogy of all
three thinkers is focused on how to seize and make that very autonomy (or active self-determination)
intellectually and existentially available. In the concrete way of proceeding, however, the three models
diverge. Descartes expects one to become master of oneself and "the world" by methodologically
suspending his judgement on what cannot qualify itself to be undoubtable. Kant leads us to the point
where we can triangulate universal conditions of the possibility of knowledge through individually
acquiring the competence to judge the legitimacy of encountered propositional claims. Finally, Fichte
confronts us with the idea of the identity of self-consciousness and objectivity. (1)
Transcending ordinary life and experience to a somewhat higher being is surely not the scope of
transcendental philosophy. What the revolutionary achievements of Descartes, Kant, and Fichte have
generically in common is to account for the legitimacy of our knowledge claims or, in other words, for
the possibility of autonomy. The business of that kind of philosophy is to rationally reconstruct the
rightness of judging. For that design the architecture of those authors' theorizing is necessarily opposed
to normal experience. (First of all, the common notion of "things affecting us" has to be abandoned.)
Transcendental arguments are therefore all but common sense. They are in no respect "realistic" or
ontologically dependent. (2) Whoever wants to get familiar with transcendentalism — perhaps just in
order to criticize one or several of its representatives — must overcome the threshold of open or covert
realism and ordinary experience. One also has to avoid the common misunderstanding that
transcendental reconstruction represents a form of idealism. So this kind of philosophy seems to be a
fortiori charged to give a good deal of pedagogical help for its own sake. The respective philosophical
educations (paideiai) have to fight against the realist as well as the idealist tendencies of interpretation.
Positively it is not enough for them to represent what is essential to transcendentalism as a genus; they
must particularly transmit what is specific to Kant's "Criticism", to Descartes' "Metaphysics" or to
Fichte's "Doctrine of Science".
I. Rene Descartes was the first one to fully realize that reliable orientation could never passively be
found in "things" or "institutions". Traditions and customs therefore lost — as such and in principle —
every power of obligation. Any content of judgement that was claimed to be true had to prove its
rightness through an analysis of its undispensible conditions. Thus the legitimation of knowledge claims
could only be attained through representing the structure of knowing itself. For that purpose, the
non-formal and non-subjectivistic key to knowlege is, according to Descartes, the cogito, as the action of
reflecting on one's own consciousness. Originally the cogito qualifies itself as awareness of insecurity. In
the very seizing of that, however, one realizes that our internal scope is not the "entertaining" of that
situation of insecurity and scepticism, but absolute certainty. We immediately grasp that such certainty
is at our competence, not as a property at our theoretical disposition, but as a task for our acting.
Certitude and rationality are thus practically anchored. (3)
An immediate consequence of Descartes' redefining the task of philosophy was the fact that the usual
way of presenting problems and of teaching them to students had to be completely reorganized. He
thus fought against the usual manuals of philosophy by pouring his results in the shape of an alternative
handbook: the Principia Philosophiae. (4) This, however, covers only the external and somewhat
strategical (antischolastic) side of his paideia. The inner impact emerges when we take into account that
the quest for truth and certainty is not simply of logical or abstractly intellectual value, but becomes by
itself existential. Through problematizing and doubt — or in another word: cognitively — Descartes
seeks certainty of being. In doing that he addresses inchoatively to everyone in the ordinary world of
irreflexivity and prejudice. Through problematical doubting the cogito reaches as its first certain insight:
"Nos habere liberum arbitrium, ad cohibendum assensum in dubiis, sicque ad errorem vitandum." From
that the main task of Descartes' paideia seems to be particularly to lead the "disciple" — the other I —
to a methodology of human existence that makes liberty available in reflective terms and presents
reflection as free action: "quae nobis consciis in nobis fiunt, quatenus eorum in nobis conscientia est".
(5)
II. The specific character of Kant's approach depends, compared to Descartes and Fichte, on his
exceptional negation of any availability of "intellectual intuition" (ultimate non-sensible evidence) for us
human beings. Thus the empirical consciousness and natural language are supposed to do, step by step,
all the work of justifying reconstruction. This does not imply that the transcendental insight stems from
experience or normal language analysis; it says that they are the only "media" accessible (for us) to
represent philosophical reasoning. Even his highest theorems, Kant's "I" (his famous "Ich denke, das alle
meine Vorstellungen begleiten können muß" or — to put it substantively — "the transcendental
apperception"), his "Practical Law", and his architectonic conception of "system", theorems that can all
be qualified as "spontaneous", have to be handled and symbolized in those thouroughly empirical
terms. Consequently, Kant's pedagogy is first of all supposed to teach the appropriate use of that
seemingly modest condition for overall philosophical justification.
Kant's lectures and his book on Anthropology must therefore be seen as containing the most important
chapter of his paideia. (It would never suffice to refer to Kant's more technical Pädagogik, which
systematically represents a mere derivative of the anthropology.) This is clearly indicated by the
adjective in the title Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. The "pragmatical respect" must not be
misunderstood in the sense of Jewey and Peirce. The expression means: "what a being that can be
regarded as capable of free action can by himself make of him and his surroundings". (6) Autonomy
never shows itself out of the empirical; nevertheless it is thinkable — conceivable through empirical
consciousness — that some part of the empirical, the "maxims" (subjective rules of conduct), can be
spontaneously determined according to the formativity of the "Practical Law", the rule of reflexive and
therefore unconditioned self-determination. This knowledge is, according to Kant, implicitely present in
common consciousness. Therefore it is, in the sign of the formal standard of that common conviction,
generally possible to realize the specific transcendental work on those empirical-pragmatic grounds.
We are then supposed to learn — and nowhere else than here lies Kant's "pragmatism"! — not simply to
behave in a conditioned way, i. e. technically (this competence is rather trivial and can even be
attributed to animals and computers), but to act so that the feasibility of our action agrees structurally
with the possibility of the world. As the words show, this is not reducible to an eclusively ethical
question. We are there with the general task of and for man's education. It is not enough for us as free
beings to cope with intelligent instrumentality, not enough to acquire and perfect some conditioned
skills. Our empirically communicated "sapere aude" leads by itself ultimately to the knowledge of the
unconditioned, and therefore to the Practical Law. On the triangulated higher level this must not be
regarded as an end; it is a new beginning and the true challenge of empirical life: What is opened in
general through the Practical Law and by its standard of insight, appeals to us empirical beings for
concrete responsible exploration. This again needs the support of paideia. (7)
III. For the early Fichte accounting for the legitimacy of knowledge claims meant no more than analyzing
the reflexive (mirrowing in itself) structure of self-consciousness. Later Fichte even stressed the
systematicity of reflexivity, but overcame the narrowness of self-consciousness as such. In both periods
Fichte's "reflexivity" differs from the conceptions of Kant and Descartes who had only met the "I"
reflectively or recursively in the course of philosophical theorizing. For them the cogito or the
transcendental apperception only represented one element of the justification of knowledge, surely the
most important one, but a "factor" that could not do all the job on its own. (8) Fichte conceives the
complex of egoity in so strong a version that the necessary differenciations could be thought
appertaining to the transcendental self. Accordingly his paideia reveals the most demanding one. (9) In
1811, after almost twenty years of teaching "Wissenschaftslehre", Fichte had come to a preliminar
consensus between himself and his audience on this point: "Daß die W.L. Sie nicht zu einer trivialen
Unterhaltung, und zu blosser Wiederholung des Alten[,] längst bekannten eingeladen hat, sondern daß
hier in der That Neues, auf diese Weise vor der W.L. nie gedachtes oder ausgesprochenes gelehrt
werden soll, ist Ihnen sattsam bekannt; Sie erwarten das, u. Sie selbst würden höchst unzufrieden seyn,
wenn Sie in dieser Erwartung getäuscht würden. Daß ein solches neues seine Schwierigkeiten haben
werde, bedürfen werde des strengen Zusammenfassens aller Geistesvermögen, und den Besiz derselben
in nicht gemeinem Maasse, erwarten Sie ebenfalls." (10)
To make himself more directly intelligible Fichte used to begin his lessons with an invitation to fulfil an
action. It should be a mental action, and an action of great simplicity: "Think the wall." Though this is
(what could not adequately be seen at that very moment) ultimately a free action, it is almost
completely tended to an object and seems to depend entirely on that very "thing", the wall. Sentences
of that kind are imperatives of normal pedagogy, and they are still common sense. The philosophical
education commences with the following order: "Now, think that one, who has thought the wall." (11)
At first glance this seems to be another teacher-induced empirical action, belonging to inner observation
instead of outer. But Fichte wants to show something totally different from that, in fact: no-thing at all,
no more "representation", but a special quality of action: the acting of action itself, real spontaneity,
concrete freedom. His verbal sign for it is since 1793/94: "Thathandlung". (12)
For Fichte the reflexivity of the I means nothing else than acting in its spontaneous return in itself. The
action that seizes immediately its own self lits, in doing so, the non-sensible "light" that proves the
certainty of that principle: intellectual intuition. In the same moment it is qualified as founding every
kind of knowledge, as it determines the very structure of knowing as such. Insofar as these theorems
conceptually contain "action" and "spontaneity" they can only be understood through spontaneously
grasping them. Such an act even transcends the cognitive value of any concept of the I. For its
legitimation any conceptualization (and in the narrow sense: any "theory") of the self depends on
fulfilling that supreme act. For Fichte, this is what makes philosophical education so important and so
difficult all the same. In ordinary life we are not familiar with acting but only with its results (products
and institutions) to which belongs also the external, empirical side of acting, i. e.: behaving. Fichte had
that in mind when he wrote to Jacobi: "Wir werden durch unsere natürliche Geburt keineswegs in eine
Welt der Wahrheit, sondern in eine Schatten- und Nebel-Welt hineingeboren." (13) It can even be
expected that — as he put it — "people can more easily be lead to take themselves for a bit of lava on
the moon than an I", because that status would not require the overcoming of the biased ordinary view
of an ontology of persons as outstanding things. (14) The almost superhuman problems paideia has to
cope with are implied in both statements. It also shows the two generally possible values of pedagogy
(whether philosophical or not): to serve as a (manipulating) tool to make people believe conditionedly
"useful" things (here lies the possibilty of perverting philosophy into ideology); or to be an analytical and
therefore rationally free method to guide them to reflexive consciousness of what they fundamentally
are.